#(i'm really doing my best with trying to cover all my bases with the spoiler tags so please don't kill me)

[saikkunen]

Well hello, Darling...

[brisquad-unit-4402]

Hello it’s me again! It’s been a while, I hope you’ve been doing okay. I recently have been reading through a lot of angst to comfort and I have an idea for a request!

May I request an Ike fic where reader is a liver in NIJISANJI and has a crush on Ike but knows they have no chance with him. Then one day reader accidentally spills their feelings to Ike and Ike comforts them after hearing about readers feelings?

I hope you’re not tired of me requesting Ike fics (ily him to much) and I hope you have a good day/night! <3

-🖋️

stars above your skin

oh 🖋 we're really in it now

how long have i had this request in my inbox? early march? and now exactly one day after blue light dropped, i give you a ~19.5k word ike fic. much love and effort has gone into this one, only seconded by the massive amounts of brainrot.

so yeah, i'm not tired of ike requests. i'm literally a quilldren that writes fanfic. this is the opposite of a problem

in fact this might be one of my favorite things i've written... the second half is such a good bedtime story for me...!

this is going to get NASTY to read on tumblr—as in my site is lagging so hard just typing these a/n notes. so i'm going to remind you all that not only is liking/reblogging recommended to keep track of this fic, but also that i have an ao3 account (same name as url but without dashsince it's much more accessible than tumblr for long fic. i recommend reading on tumblr if you can because of some formatting but to each their own!

here’s a funny story about this fic. i was working on it while a bunch of people sat behind me, you see, and one of my greatest irrational fears is that people sitting behind me will be able to see my laptop screen and laugh at what i’m writing…! and with these requests i usually title them the fandom name and my name, and a short phrase about the request, and this one was “workplace romance”, and i just got so afraid right then and there i changed it to the first thing i could think of, based off a clip i saw of pomu, selen, aia and doppio…!! and that’s why the wip doc is titled “nijisanji 4402 - pliskin”, and why i will always refer to this fic as "pliskin" much more than the actual title

by the way here’s a cover of iris that was pretty fitting for this fic. you’ll know when to play it. enjoy

tags: hurt/comfort, reader is a niji vtuber, gender neutral reader, off-collab, mutual pining, misunderstandings, fluff, angst with a happy ending, friends to lovers, cuddling, everyone in niji is your wingman, implied uki/ren if you squint but it’s mostly because uki will flirt with 80% of the men in this company

cameos: aia amare, alban knox, mika melatika, nina kosaka, ren zotto, uki violeta, vox akuma, fulgur ovid (mentioned)

⚠️ drinking/alcohol (unspecified if reader drinks alcohol)

⚠️ horror/gore mentions (non-detailed), out of context outlast spoilers i guess?

author's commentary here (spoilers) ↣

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

There are dozens of these videos on YouTube, and never have you come across the same one twice. You would know. You have a bad habit of clicking on them. 

After all, they’re labeled with your name on them, and right next to it, Ike Eveland. You are smart enough to recognize it’s not worth your time and just another compilation of the same moments and fans trying to make a mountain out of a molehill, but your heart says otherwise. To be fair, the compilations were a much more recent development than the one you hid under lock and key. 

When you first joined Nijisanji, some of your senpais sent you messages full of greetings and offers to help you get on your feet as a streamer. Ike was one of those senpais, and whenever you popped into voice calls just to hang out, he was easy to talk to, like an old friend. Naturally, a fast friendship formed, and when you debuted, he was one of the first people you collabed with- and the one with the best reception. Your new fans (‘Bookworms,’ they called themselves, after your name Reader) loved how well your humor bounced off each other, and when weeks passed and you announced another collab on your schedule with Ike, your Bookworms rejoiced. 

Even when you weren’t working, you would still talk to him. He told you about his homeland in the past and his novels, both released and unpublished. He was a storyteller even when he was talking about something as minute as making a sandwich, and whenever you brought up your past and interests, he was an excellent listener. You had your differences, but he always knew what questions to ask so he could understand you better, and you loved the opportunity to ramble. 

It had been nearly three months since you debuted, and four if you count the day you were officially hired and began to build yourself as a streamer. Whenever you look at the endlessly long text history between you and Ike, you have to wonder: is it normal to feel so connected to someone you’ve only known for three-maybe-four months? 

You’re not an idiot. You aren’t about to say Ike is the most important thing in the world to you, but he gets pretty damn close. That terrifies you. You shouldn’t be so attached to someone you barely know. 

But then again, you trust Ike. He’s opened up to you about things he would never say to others, and he keeps your secrets buried in the grave. You’ve lost count of how much advice he’s given you, but you’ve never forgotten a single one, and whenever you feel lost about something you know you can count on him to help you out. 

You grimace, sip out of your drinking glass, and press ‘play’ on the next compilation. 

A cute intro plays with the clipper’s name. Above it are the words Pen and Paper, surrounded by puffy pink hearts. 

That was the duo name between you and Ike, but "ship name" was more accurate among fanwork.

You weren’t exactly unaware about it. Weeks ago, you were surfing Twitter and the site’s algorithm granted you your introduction into Pen and Paper. This was shortly after your first collab with Ike, and after you established your shipping rules with your audience (“I’m fine with anything, as long as the other liver is okay with it!”, you proclaimed, totally oblivious to how soon that would blow up in your face). The fanartist posted a messy black-and-white sketch, but you could make out the pattern of Ike’s scarf wrapped around you and him at the same time, forcing your bodies into close proximity with averted eyes and dusty blushes. 

You appreciated the fanartist’s passion and skill, but the thought of you and Ike as an item sunk in your chest like you swallowed a rock. You swiped past. You went back to your scrolling, found some good thumbnails, and retweeted some cute solo fanart, but before the week ended, you made a private account with a fake name and staked out the tags for Pen and Paper to follow that fanartist.

Damn fanartist. You tried to deny it, and told yourself that you followed their art because you liked the style. But their account was full of ship art, and when Twitter gave you similar users that all worked under the hashtag, you had to face facts. If you wanted to look at it optimistically, at least you figured it out early on before anything had the chance to sour while you were still blissfully ignorant of yourself; even then, that doesn’t make it any harder than it already is.

Besides all the texts, the meetings, the schedules and events, and then including the streams and collabs and the art and the fandom… 

“Why?” You ask out loud in the silence of your room. “Why did I have to fall for my coworker?”

And with audiences of over hundreds of people watching you fall for him, nonetheless!

It’s irritating. You have a job that keeps you motivated to work hard. It’s given you a dedicated fanbase, rare opportunities, and coworkers you all recognize as your friends. Really, finding someone to care for because of it should be a blessing, but it’s such a headache. What if your fanbases get jealous, or even worse, outright hate it? Would you be able to keep up a relationship when you and Ike are dedicated to your careers and streams? Why are you even thinking like this? You scold yourself. There’s no way this would ever work out. It’s all fantasy and smoke and mirrors, because fandoms love love. Shipping is never a reflection of the streamers, just the characters you play. You’re delusional if you think your stupid crush could actually go anywhere.

But fandoms love love. The only comfort you have is being able to pretend something could happen. The ship art is a lie, and so are the fanfics, and the clippers that tag their videos as Pen and Paper are just here for a possibility that never could happen.

The compilation is full of little hints and teases, and if you were being honest with yourself, most of it was more like two friends getting along than actual flirting. But you didn’t trust yourself to see your clumsiness for what it is when Ike’s little laughs are like music to your ears. 

Damage control, you tell yourself. It’s like studying how you play your favorite games. You can pinpoint where you stumble and leave yourself open for attack in Apex, Smash, even Crab Game, and then amend those mistakes the next time you pick up the game. Real life should be no different. Just stop acting so dorky all the time by finding moments of dork in your VODs and avoid them next time you talk to Ike.

This clip was from your second collab with Ike. Captions floated along the bottom of the screen. Ike's captions were in his signature blue.

IKE: You know, there’s a lot of content about us two as a duo.

READER: They call us Pen and Paper, right?

IKE: Yeah, my art tag is flooded with art of the both of us. 

READER: Oh my God, look at the chat. Mine’s full of people saying they love us together. 

IKE: Aww, thanks, Quilldren! I’m happy I can play with Reader too. 

READER: Thank you, Bookworms; thank you, Quilldren. Hey, there’s a lot more overlap than I expected.

IKE: They’re like Bookdren.

READER: Or Quillworms.

IKE: Quillworms, that sounds way better. They’re like our children.

READER: www

IKE: www

Never fucking mind about acting so dorky all the time. You kick yourself for bringing up Pen and Paper, and your giggly laugh. You hate it. A neon sign above your head that says “SIMP” would be less obvious than that stupid schoolkid laugh.

But Ike’s laughter is music, back in the moment and now as you revisit it, and his model’s eyes squint with a wide smile.

He really is an amazing man. If you didn’t know him as well as you do, you’d think he’s perfect. But you’ve seen him in moments of vulnerability, the parts of himself that never shows through on stream and even rarer among his friends. Through it all he manages to keep going, and you admire him so much for sticking to his guns even when he’s expressed all his doubts about himself. The fact that he trusts you enough to let his guard down only adds to how honored you are to know him, and at the same time, the fact that there’s so much trust between you two just makes you feel worse for having a crush on him. You hate keeping secrets like this when you let Ike read you like an open book for everything else, and even just wishing you were something more to him feels like a betrayal of all that trust. You wish you could just be satisfied to know him.

The compilation continues. The next clip is a totsu Fall Guys collab hosted by Fulgur Ovid that you and Ike joined in on. Fuuchan got eliminated early in the match, and spectated on you while the other livers ran around Roll On with players tugging them this way and that. 

You moved around the rotating levels at the perfect sweet spot between two rings, and balanced at the top of the roll as the slime level slowly rose.

A longer wall approached, so you shuffled from one level to another, but another player grabbed your bean avatar and dragged you along to the wall even as you yelled out in panic on Discord. You smashed your keys to struggle, but they had an advantage, and it was clear the wall would push you down to the slime for an impending elimination.

That is, until a familiar Miku bean grabbed the other side of your avatar, and pulled the other way towards the ring that would save your life. Resigned, your attacker backed off and barely dodged out of the way while Ike’s Miku bean brought you back to safety.

The other two livers in the game were too noisy to notice you. Fuuchan was commentating every move you made, and when Ike saved you, he said, “Ike coming in clutch, let’s fucking go.”

Your recorded self didn’t hear him at all, though. You swooned, “Ike, my hero!”

Meanwhile in the present, you wanted to puke. You meant for that to sound like an over-the-top joke, but you crush is getting so serious that it sounds less like a bit and more like how you gush about him in private. 

At least Fuuchan’s audio was louder than everyone else, since he was the host, and the other two livers were preoccupied with their own game to notice your lovey-dovey tone and how Ike laughed music at you. It was bad enough clippers transcribed your words in captions, but you weren’t sure how you would handle it if those three picked up on you and your dumb crush. The less that know about your workplace romance, the better.

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

“Reader,” Aia coos. Even with audio only, you could tell her eyes were sparkling. “You didn’t tell me you had a workplace romance!”

Well, so much for that plan. You froze over. “Who told you that?”

Mika answers way too quickly. “It’s Alban’s fault.”

“Fuck off, Mika, you brought it up first!”

“You said it though!”

Man, you were already starting to regret joining VC today. You finished your offline work a lot faster than expected, so when you realized that three of your close friends in the company were all online in VC together while Alban privately streamed a rhythm game, you figured you would join the call while you prepared dinner. 

But if that was your greeting, you needed to mentally prepare for the wild interrogation you were about to experience. At least Aia, despite her love for drama, knew how to navigate these sorts of things delicately. And you don’t mean to call Mika and Alban bad friends—they were the exact opposite, in fact—but they were much nosier than Aia ever came across.

“Okay, but Reader just asked who leaked it, and didn’t deny it,” Aia says. “So that means it must be true!”

Scratch that. Aia is the worst out of all of them.

“I hate you guys. No hello or anything, just gossip about my love life,” you lament.

She gasps, and if her eyes were sparkling before, then roses bloomed around her as she spoke. “It’s love?”

Mika shrieks like a banshee. “Oh hell no, you’re in love and you didn’t tell us?!”

“It’s not love. It’s nothing!”

“Nah-uh, Reader, no running away from it, we know,” Alban says. “Better to just get it all out in the open than pretend like nothing’s up.”

“You’re just saying that because you want to snoop.”

“I’m being serious. Keeping stuff bottled up deteriorates you, especially when love’s involved.” He missed a note. “Shit. And yeah, okay, I want some gossip, but I have a point and you know it.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you, I blew a full combo just to say that!”

“Can I add? In case you forgot, Reader, we’re all in the same company,” Mika says. “Sure, I might be in a different branch, but who knows? Maybe we can help.”

“And fuck you too.” You sigh in defeat. As vitriolic as your shared humor was, these three were still some of your best friends, and you know they don’t mean any harm. “Ugh, I hate this. This is confidential information. Like, CIA levels of confidential. If I tell you guys, you can’t tell a single soul about it. Understand?”

The three all chime in agreement. And unfortunately, you trust them. You take advantage of your coworkers swearing themselves to secrecy to hype yourself up and just rip off the band-aid. “It’s Ike.”

“We know.”

“What the hell do you mean, you know?!”

“It’s obvious,” Aia says. Your heart hammers in your chest. Then she sputters for a moment, like she realized she might’ve hit a soft spot. “Well, you have to focus on it to see it, but once you see it, it’s hard to ignore. You two go well together.”

Alban pitches in. “Agreed. I’m not even gonna be subtle about it, you and Ike have great chemistry. I’m happy for you two.”

“Okay, I guess.” Your eyes drift away from your prepared ingredients to the corner of your kitchen. “But I don’t know. Are you sure? Because I feel like I always act like an idiot whenever I’m around him. And I doubt he’d ever feel the same way.”

“Wait.” Aia pauses. “You’re… not dating?”

“No. Just a crush. Not love, not dating, nothing. And it’s never going to be anything more than that because it’s just a big stupid crush on my coworker, who doesn’t even live close enough to visit, and this is all a recipe for disaster.”

She doesn’t say anything about that. Actually, none of them do. Even Alban pressed pause on his game, and the Discord stream went motionless as your words sunk in. 

Mika is the one to break the silence. “You’re shitting me.”

“That’s the truth. Happy?”

“No, like, you’re shitting me, there’s no way.”

“Mikaaa.” Alban drags out her name as he scolds her. 

“Hey, I’m just saying, that’s crazy, especially since—“

“Don’t tell Reader that!”

“Tell me what?” 

“We thought you were already a thing. You know, dating, in a relationship, whatever,” Mika clarifies. It hits you like a punch to the gut. “Or at least that you had something going on, and kept it secret so it wouldn’t be awkward for everyone else to work with you two. Which, by the way, we’re all chill with, so if, hypothetically, you decided to hypothetically go for it, we would hypothetically cheer you on and set off hypothetical fireworks. I’d rent a food truck.”

Alban resumes his game. “Yeah, what she said. Go get that hypothetical novelist bussy.”

“Don’t hypothetically talk about my brother like that.”

“You’re sure this is okay?” You ask. “Mika, I know you and Ike are close. This isn’t going to make anything weird, is it?”

“You’re fine, Reader. If I had problems, I would’ve cornered you and threatened you over text ages ago when I figured it out.”

“That’s another thing. How did you guys know?”

Aia pipes up first. “I know I said it was obvious, but I think that’s just because we know each other since we’re good friends. You two just go together, you know? It’s hard to explain, but whenever Reader and Ike-senpai are in the same room you think, ‘those two would be cute,’ and then you realize they are cute, right there in the moment. And you talk a lot faster on stream whenever you’re both on the same page. Almost as fast as me.”

 “Plus, it’s really common to see both of you on VC at the same time, and you’re always happy whenever he shows up,” Mika affirms. “Alban says whenever one of you enters the call the other is soon to follow.” 

“It’s true. You talk fast whenever you talk to him on VC too, not just stream. And your laugh kind of changes?”

“Dammit, I knew my laugh was my tell. This sucks. This seriously sucks.”

“It might not be all that bad,” Mika says. “Who knows, maybe things might end up better than you expect. You should tell him.”

“No way,” you fire back. “There no way he’d actually reciprocate. And I know you guys are fine with me asking, but Ike himself is just going to reject me, and it’s going to be awkward, and literally everyone in the company who has ever talked to us will be able to tell something’s up.”

“They won’t be weird,” Aia insists. “We won’t, either, and Ike-senpai is a good guy. Even if it doesn’t work out, he wouldn’t leave you out to dry like that.”

“You don’t know. None of you have ever been in this situation.”

“That’s true, but there’s always a chance.”

“If you ask me, it sounds more like you’re afraid of what you think would happen instead of what rationally would,” Alban says. He’s still laser-focused on his game. “I dunno. If you’re really set on getting over it, then go ahead and ignore it, but that’s just going to eat at you for who knows how long before your crush starts to fade.”

“Well, I didn’t ask.”

“Fine. Forget I said anything.”

You regret the acidic tone in your voice the second you said it, but Alban was off in his own world of music. He’d tell you if he had a problem with how you spoke to him, but you still feel gross about your knee-jerk reaction. 

You’re just… defensive. Yep, that’s the word. Whenever you’re this interested in someone, you put your walls up and protect yourself from letting anyone worm through and hit a weak point. 

Aia hums like an analyst. “Just keep it in mind, Reader. Not everything is out to get you.”

You know your friends just wanted the best for you, but things just aren’t as simple as they’d like to imagine it. It’s none of their business, anyways. It was pure coincidence that they figured out your thoughts on Ike, and that means none of them have any real authority to advise you on your love life.

“I think we’re done talking about this,” you assert.

“Well, you heard ‘em. Pack it up, show’s over.” Mika changed the subject. “Hey, did you guys know if you try to break open a freshly boiled egg, it explodes?”

Alban slams his hands on his keyboard so loudly that you hear the switches over his noise suppression. The stream goes from a string of Awesome! notes to nothing but misses as he abandons the game. “YES. Yes, actually, I DO know.”

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

“MEAT! WANTS MEAT! WANTS MEAT! MEAT!”

“AAAAAAAAHHHH!”

The stream is to the birds. Fuck that noise. Godspeed to the Bookworms, they’ll need it, but not nearly as much as you. 

When you were settling on a schedule, the last undecided spot for the week was Friday’s stream. That simply wouldn’t do. Friday nights kick off the weekend, and the break from school and work is prime time for a wide audience, so pretty much everyone in Nijisanji reserves their juiciest streams for the weekend. You’re no exception.

…Except for the fact that you didn’t have a clue about what to do for Friday’s stream. One Twitter poll and conveniently timed Steam sale later, you published your schedule with a game your fans voted on: Outlast.

You walked in knowing it would be a horror game, and you figured it would be fine. After all, you’ve played games from Chilla’s Art before, and a few quirky indie psychological releases here and there. You wouldn’t call yourself a stone-faced horror lover that can keep a straight face at anything, but aside from a few creepy moments in those game, you’ve kept your cool relatively well. 

Outlast threw all that out the window. You realized almost immediately that you had no idea how to handle the primal fear of the chase. 

Footsteps pound against a metal floor. You plead for help in the emptiness of your home as you smash the controls, as if that would make your character move the cabinet over the door any faster. Screams resonate in tune between you and the chained man in the room with you, and all the while, the howling of your pursuer grows louder and louder as he gets closer.

You finally uncover the door and dash through. Tremors run though all your thoughts while your heart beats overtime. 

You still haven’t gotten used to all the jumpscares, even though you’re at the edge of your seat and ready to start running yourself. A fork in the road approaches, and when you start off one direction, you’re greeted by a bloodied man in the distance. “AAAHH!”

Faster than light, you slam the key to the other hall and book it. You spot a new storage container to shove in front of the door just in time for text to appear on the screen: Look for pushable objects to block doors.

“No shit, why wouldn’t you tell me that before, oh my God, aaaaah!” The screams—from both the voice actors and your own cries—grate against your eardrums while chase music thunders in-between the gasps for air. 

As you grab the container and start to push, you mash the pause button. When the menu appears, you lean back in your chair and run your hands over your face. Your model pouts cutely while the real you whimpers. The mic barely picks it up.

You take a breath before groaning in fear and pain. “Guys. I don’t think I can do this…” Another groan as you trail off. “This game is so much. Give me a second.”

As you raise yourself back from your chair, it’s with a slump forward. Your chat is full of headpat emotes and hearts in your color, along with some quick words of courage. A few are recommending you take a break. “Thanks, Bookworms. I’m so afraid, but I’m committed and I don’t want to just leave it here.”

Your eyes flutter closed as you take a sip of water to clear your head. The cold drink startles you out of the dingy asylum atmosphere, but the screaming still lingers between your ears. “You know what? Who else is online right now? Maybe I need someone in VC to hold me to this.”

The emojis in chat slowly patter out as your viewers go back to text. Looks like most of your Bookworms like the idea of calling someone else while you stream the game. Some of their messages catch your eye. 

gatamiizuus: you can call ike :ReaderHeadpat: 

messXed-up!: ike!!

lunasmortas: what about ike?

A few more chats mention Ike, and while usually you’d be irritated they mentioned another liver out of the blue, your shoulders still relax at the sight of his name. “Wait, Ike? Is Ike here?”

You scroll back in the chat history, and search for any mod messages. Sure enough, barely a minute ago while you were still being chased:

Ike Eveland 【NIJISANJI EN】 ✓ : GANBARE!

You cling onto that message like a lifeline. Ike is familiar. Ike is comforting. And most importantly, Ike would never call you a pussy.

Chat floods over with his name while you check the official Nijisanji Discord server. Almost everyone in Nijisanji sets their status to offline by default, and Ike is one of them, but you still scan through the member list anyways, praying a little green indicator will light up by his icon.

His status doesn’t change, but before you can even click on his profile, your Direct Messages tab gains a notification. He just messaged you.

Ike Eveland: Watching your stream right now

Ike Eveland: Are you okay?

You exhale. Ike is the most dependable guy you know, even when it’s pure coincidence he was watching your stream while you freaked out. 

With your heart still in your throat, you respond.

Me: uuuuuuugh i guess

Me: the game is really scary

Me: i don’t want to cancel the stream but i don’t think i can play it by myself 😭

Ike Eveland: 🫂    | 🫂 1 |

Ike Eveland: Would you feel better if I called you?

Me: i was just about to ask    | 👌 1 |

Me: you don’t have to if you don’t want to tho!! i don’t want to be a nuisance lol

Ike Eveland: Don’t worry I offered to!

Ike Eveland started a voice call.

“Ikeee!” The second the call starts, all your restraint goes forgotten. “Ike, I was so scared!”

You babble on about everything you’ve endured up to this point: the gore, the grime, and the patients in the asylum that hunt you like animals. 

 “I’m here, it’s alright now,” he assures you. “I’m here, okay? Take your time, you’re safe.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m relieved. But it was so scary.” You sink and bury yourself in the collar of your shirt. “You’ve streamed this before, and kept a cool head the entire time, right? How do you do it?”

“Well, it wasn’t my first time playing, for starters. Everyone gets freaked out at first. It’s a horror game, Reader, it’s okay to react to it. I remember the first time I played it, it scared me so bad I had to quit after half an hour.” He giggles a bit at himself. The sound is comforting. “That was a few years ago. I think I had nightmares about it, until I realized I needed to know the rest of the story. ”

Your voice is small. “That was really brave of you.”

“I avoided it for days. I doubt that’s brave.”

“It’s braver than calling someone just to get the guts to play the game.”

“Hey, don’t put my friend Reader down just to bring me up.” He keeps his tone light to let you know you’re allowed to smile. “Being able to face your fears is plenty on its own, and you shouldn’t be devaluing that. How long have you been at it?”

“A little over two hours?” You glance at the stream monitor, and ignore the chat as much as you can. You still register the hearts in your color and his signature blue. “I don’t know. I did a lot of pausing, too, so it’s probably less than that…”

“But you were still able to stream for that long. Remember, I could only play for thirty minutes during my first time! You’re stronger than you think you are.”

You avert your eyes from your stream setup. You feel painfully seen, but the chat is nothing to you. “Doesn’t feel like it.”

“Then I’ll be here to remind you. Is that okay?”

“I’d like that.” You return to the screen, and in the darkness of the blurred labyrinth, you see your reflection stare back. Your hair is disheveled from how you kept thrashing around in reaction to the game and your shoulders are high with tension, but only now did you realize how the corners of your lips rose after the call started. Ike really got to you. “Thank you, Ike, you’re so considerate. I appreciate you a lot. You’re a really good guy.”

He chuckles slowly, soft like a blanket. Your shoulders ease. Ike’s words are just as soft, and if you didn’t know any better, you’d think he’s nervous too. “Haha, um. Yeah. Thank you?” He doesn’t take compliments well, but they’re true, and you hope he knows it as well as you do. He clears his throat. “Ahem. Um, how are you feeling?”

“Not great, but better. I want to try again.”

“You’ve got this, Reader, you can do it.” Ike is still quiet, but enthusiastic. “You can do it!”

You go shaky. “Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.”

But you still press Return To Game.

And when you scream barely five seconds later, Ike is still calm, and you hone in on his voice as you persevere.

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

Just as you go to bed, you realize that you basically just made a fool of yourself in front of your crush by getting scared at a game he’s already conquered. 

You slam a pillow over your face and groan.

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

Ike lands an all-out attack just in time to check the chat and the swarm of viewers that just joined. “Oh, Reader! Thank you for the raid, it’s good to see you! Welcome, everybody.”

Reader 【NIJISANJI EN】 ✓ : take care of my bookworms for me? i’m getting milk

“Of course. They’re our Quillworms, after all.” You go fuzzy. He remembered the fan name! “Have a good break, Reader! Rest well.”

Reader 【NIJISANJI EN】 ✓ : 👍

It was the end of the week, and the stream you just finished was the last on your schedule. You announced a few days ago that you would take a break for a little more than two weeks so you could catch up on offline work as well as rest, and the Bookworms sent you off with a lot of love. It’ll be hard for some of your diehard fans, but you’re sure they’ll manage. You have a feeling it’ll be easier than they expect. 

“Speaking of breaks, I haven’t finished my schedule yet. I think I’ll wait a day or two to post it.” The stream cracks in red and black as Ike’s party in Persona 5 Royal clobbers the enemy Shadows. Monsters bleed out behind the protagonist’s cocky smirk. “I’ll be offline for the next two days, so I’ll have some time to think about it.”

Ike mashes through the battle results, and sets back off into exploring the palace. His stream fades into background noise as you get back to the task at hand. 

You sent a few messages to some of your other coworkers regarding your break. Next was finishing some paperwork for management, and reaching out to others that needed access to the files. Sure, your time off was for offline work, but the work you had to get done would only take an afternoon at most. You wanted to meet even the far-off deadlines as soon as possible so you could be properly free for the rest of your vacation.

By the time you finished your paperwork, your coworkers were able to respond to you. A group chat full of other livers had a new response every minute about the next two weeks, and Aia sent you a QR code that would let you save some time and money on your flight. 

Ike ended yet another super-long P5R stream just a few minutes after you grabbed all your luggage, got to the airport, and made it to your terminal. You had some time to kill, but you were sick of the headphones over your ears.

Not to mention, you were waiting for the fans to catch up on the real reason why you were on break.

Curiously, you log into your private Twitter—you don’t plan to interact with anything but you’re always paranoid about your online presence—and start searching for the code words fans think Vtubers have no idea about. Symbols replace letters and names morph into sounds while emojis speak volumes.  

The Stargazers don’t mention it at all. That’s to be expected, after all. Their oshi goes on break often, so nothing seems too out of the ordinary. Besides, you wouldn’t put it past them to have even more intricate subtweets than what you’re looking for.

Only a few of Nina’s Honeybunnies put the pieces together at first, but then you check Quilldren subtweets. As it turns out, when Ike mentioned he’d be taking a few days off, a few of his fans noticed how Nina was going to be offline at the same time, and a smaller fraction of those compared how Mika had yet to release a schedule. 

Underneath your face mask, you smile. With the career being dependent on both anonymity and your voice, you wore a nondescript black mask through the entire airport in case someone recognized you, just as well as to hide the tiny giggle that always bubbles up whenever you watch your fans scramble around theorizing. They don’t have all the pieces, after all. None of the Aiadmirers nor the Renvaders even considered it.

They’ll figure it out in time nonetheless. Uki and Nina are close to landing, and Aia was the first to disembark her plane. The rest of your friends are set to arrive after you, and besides, Vox should be ending his last stream of the week right now. You’re sure the Kindred will start plotting in the next hour, provided their oshi didn’t give them too big of a hint about his plans for the next week as he’s known to do.

You board your plane and settle into your seat, ready to nap the flight away. You’ll need the rest, after all. It’s about time you join an off-collab.

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

Nina doesn’t even get the chance to look away from her phone before she gets a rush of replies on her first voice tweet.

She doesn’t bother to read them anyways. She’s too busy howling out the lyrics to “Wannabe.”

It’ll be hard to discern all the voices. Ike’s high range is always easy to pick out, but Vox blends in as a bass, and you can always hear Mika’s grin through her singing. Ren and Aia are the furthest from the phone, and as loud as they sing, they’re still drowned out along with you, Uki, and Nina herself.

Mika chooses the wrong time to look around the karaoke booth. While Aia sings passionately about what she wants (what she really, really wants), her body language crumples and rises like an electrocuted high school theater kid. The ghost has a hiccuping, sweeping laugh that overpowers half of the singers, and then Aia snorts at herself when Mika covers her mouth, which gets Vox to snort even louder, and before you know it, it’s just Uki and Nina doing their damndest not to break. Even then, Nina’s voice wavers along to the Spice Girls as she resists a laugh, and Uki’s eyes are squeezed shut smiling.

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

The bar stool slides out from the counter so quietly that you wonder if the Airbnb owner knew just how handy it would be for a house full of streamers on vacation. You lean forward while Mika tells a story about how she, Aia, Ren and you went out for a coffee run, and crossed paths with some teenagers with matching Iluna keychains on their backpacks. 

Speaking of Iluna, their represents sat together on the couch. Aia set her plate and fork on the coffee table, not a single pool of sauce left over from the pasta dinner Vox and Uki prepared together. Somehow Ren made enough room in his luggage to bring along a teal ukulele, and idly strums along. Uki sits between Ren and the armrest, swirling the last of his pasta between his fork.

Across from them, Vox and Nina took ownership of two plush chairs that could only fit one person each. Each chair was next to a corner table, and they stacked their plates on top of one another to make room for a jug of orange juice and two cocktail glasses. Ike took a bottle of rum and poured it into his soda, then slid it back to the corner table before pulling up the bar stool next to you. 

“It was like, one of them had a clear phone case and held it out to show the others a video,” Mika says. She perched on top of the counter itself, next to her travel microphone and the second-nastiest kitchen stream setup you’ve ever seen. She was no Scarle, but so many wires stretched across the island and along the way that it was just easier for her to climb onto the polished granite to keep an eye on the chat. “Smack-dab in the center was a PNG of Vox. And then a bunch of tinier Voxes around it. And here’s how you know it’s bad, you could see the color of the phone itself through the case because it’s clear, right? It was red. Red! That’s commitment!”

“I’m telling you, Mika, there’s no way they got a red phone just because of Vox,” Aia says. “That’s got to be a coincidence.”

Vox hums into his glass. “No, they absolutely did. You mean to tell me your fans don’t spoil you rotten and buy new phones just because they’re your color?”

“My color is white, Vox, like every phone ever is my color!”

“Still, I’ve never seen Aia go so quiet so fast.” Ren’s ukulele twangs as he grins. His fangs were just as prominent in real life. “It was awesome.”

“It was scary, but funny,” you say. “We saw the Vox case and the Iluna keychains, and all of us just went silent. And we all had masks, too, so it was like, one moment you could hear Ren’s fuckboy laugh, and the second we saw the case, we all put up our masks and went quieter than the grave.”

Ren palms the neck of the ukulele and mutes the chord in mock offense. “Hey! I’m not a fuckboy!”

“Didn’t say you were, but if you want to out yourself like that, be my guest. They’d chop off your horns and sell them like Kyo.”

“One of them had an Aster keychain.” Ren bitterly resumes playing. Uki sets his plate on the table and drapes himself over the alien’s shoulder as he opened up his phone to check the off-collab’s live tag. The stream was supposed to be a live Q&A, but was so easy to talk to everyone that the questions often turned into conversation before someone remembered the stream. “If Aia or I said anything, we’d be fucked.”

“Imagine how fucked we would’ve been if Vox woke up in time to go with us,” you say.

Ike snickers. “Is it bad that I would’ve paid money to see that?”

The two Luxiem members get into a playful argument over who would win in a fight: all the effort Nijisanji and its employees put into protecting their privacy, or one silly phone case. Ren’s riffing turns into a simple rendition of “Iris” and Nina hums along from across the living room. The ukulele is slow and unique enough to not be mistaken for the original, but you wonder if those two would be able to avoid copyright entirely.

Nonetheless, the vibe is comfortable. You’re miles away from home, but in a room with some of your closest friends in the world, it’s like you never left. Truthfully, it’s more like you’ve finally found your place. The music just feels right, like it was written for this moment, and Aia leans back into the couch while Nina sways in her seat to the jaunty little ukulele. Ren looks as cheery as his instrument sounds, especially with a peaceful Uki nuzzled up to him. 

While Ike and Vox go at it, Mika props her chin up with both hands and watches them like a reality TV show. There’s a glint in Vox’s eyes as Ike drums up a snide response, the only sane man to the demon’s goofiness. He brings his rum and coke to his lips like punctuation, a silent so, what? hidden in the boozy soda. 

Vox knows how to run his mouth, and he launches into one of his patented anecdotes. While all eyes are on the demon and the chat hones in on his voice, you focus on how Ike tilts his head up to drink. His neck stretches out from the collar of his black band tee, and with each sip, his Adam’s apple bobs. 

You’ve always thought he was good-looking on stream, but he’s gorgeous in person, all long lines and graceful features, and cameras can’t capture the tiny little freckles drizzled down the back of his neck. You didn’t even know he had freckles. It was only after you saw him for the first time that you noticed pale, reddish dots all over his nose and cheeks, fading out by his temples and the arch of his lips. Spending the day walking around in the sun from place to place revealed more whenever the wind flicked his jacket collar out right. They scatter at his nape, right below the blue tips of his hair, and meet one another further down his back, or so you’d presume. Without the jacket, you can catch marks spread out along his arms with distance between one another, and his shirt sleeve starts right where the freckles cluster together. You can only imagine how far down they go.

You avert your eyes. You can’t think about what’s under the shirt when you’re sitting right next to him, and certainly not while on stream, even if chat can’t see you check him out!

Unfortunately, the side opposite of Ike is the one with Ren and Uki. Those two are idyllic. Without a care in the world, it seems. You envy how easily Uki can act on what he wants, even if you know he doesn’t see Ren like how you see Ike. Ren doesn’t mind it at all, either. He literally lives by the rhythm of his own ukulele. 

Ike lowers his drink with his eyes closed, as if it would make the refreshing feeling last longer. His eyelashes are the same ashen color as his hair. Gold gleams between his ears and on the chain of his glasses.

Possessed by the music, and distracted by the rambling, you become one with the background and lean along Ike’s arm.

It’s an indulgent dip into the waters, but shallow compared to all you feel for him. Ever since you met Ike in person it’s been easier to control yourself around him, and if anything, you’re reminded that this is the man you’ve gotten the closest to in both career and friendship. The only barrier between your cheek and his body is his shirt sleeve, but your arm rests against his forearm, right where the freckles taper off. There’s no resistance at all as you make yourself comfortable in the crook of his arm. 

But you hold yourself back. Even though the off-collab made you feel gutsier than before, you think that you’d pass out if you tried anything else. Besides, you feel so at peace against his arm, but too afraid to look up and see his reaction. 

The blend of peace and fear churns in your heart as it dawns on you: you were wrong to call this a crush. It runs far deeper than you could’ve imagined.

Vox says something with finality. His voice snaps you out of your thoughts, but the words go unregistered. As he spoke, his eyes drifted around with his body language, but he snaps to look at Ike expectantly. You swear his smirk gets a little more mischievous as he does. 

The air stills, even though you know eyes aren’t on you, just the man you lean on. It stays frozen as Ike waits to respond. You still don’t have the heart to look up at him and break your selfish, unrequited fantasy.

You just want to stay here, unresisted.

Ike deadpans. “Anyways.”

Just like that, the moment is over, and Mika laughing at Vox striking out clears the air around you. But Vox’s eyes fall to you for just a split second as he moves in his seat. Frost settles down your back at the thought that he knows, but there’s a solid chance he hasn’t connected the dots. You pray he hasn’t.

Then you see Fox Mom herself right behind him, and she shoots you a shit-eating grin with a hand over her heart and a glass in the other. 

No doubt about it. You’re screwed. 

The frost turns to glaciers and burns into hot shame all at once. You love Nina, you really do, and you’d always consider her a good friend before coworker. However, she’s known for fishing around for any crumb of fanservice, and she gets straight to the point whenever she eggs it on, not to mention how she loves to tease her kids on just about anything. You are never going to hear the end of this if she can help it.

You really don’t know what you expected. It feels like everyone’s staring at you, even the chat. You can’t help but feel bitter. How come Uki can flirt with as many guys as he wants, you wonder, but I can’t even touch Ike without getting eyed up? 

You know the answer, but it doesn’t do anything to help the bitterness and the embarrassment, and how much you want to hide. On instinct, you take advantage of the warmth and nestle yourself deeper into Ike to hide your face, just in time as he curls his head above yours.

Nina makes a sound kind of like a fork stuck in the garbage disposal for the briefest of moments before smashing her lips together and bringing her glass to her mouth like a mute button. As if you didn’t feel seen enough. 

“Find any other questions, Uki-senpai?” Aia’s nose is buried in her phone, and God, you could kiss her for changing the subject. As much as she poked fun about you about Ike, she was still a total angel and a ride-or-die all at once. 

“Oh, I have questions,” Uki says. Luckily, he’s graceful enough to leave it at that. “Twitter wants to know first impressions for everyone that hasn’t off-collabed before.”

Ren speaks. “I think the only person I’ve done an off-collab with before is Nina, so is it cool if I go first?”

Aia gestures for him to go on. She’s still stuck on her phone as he continues.

Your phone vibrates in your pocket, but you ignore it. Then again and again and again, and when you finally check it, you understand why. When Aia, Mika and Alban first heard you spill your feelings for Ike, they made a group chat dedicated to wingmanning—or at least, that’s what they pitched it as. They tease you more than anything else, and as irritating as it gets… you have to admit, it’s nice to confide in them, and nice to know they wouldn’t hold it against you.

Anyways, Alban’s going apeshit. 

Group Chat: 💙 PENANDPAPER REAL 2K4EVER 💕 (4 Members)

Aia Amare: image.png    | 📌 2 |

Alban Knox: AKDHSLSJDKSHSA

Alban Knox: AASDFSDF

Alban Knox: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Alban Knox: AAAAAAAAAA

Alban Knox: HAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAA AAAAAAA KYAAAAAAAA

Alban Knox: 💕💕💕💙💕💙💕💙💙💙💕💙💕💕💙

Alban Knox: 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳

Alban Knox: HOW ARE YOU GUYSS NOT LOSING YUOR MINDSA BOUT THIS

Aia Amare: I AM

Me: omfg did you seriously get a picture of us 

Alban Knox: WHAT ARE YOU DOINGGGGGGG DONT CHDCK THIS GC    | 👆 1 |

Me: wtf did you expect you’re spamming 

Alban Knox: YOU AR ELITERALLY CUDDLNG GO FOCUS ON THAY JOT US

Me: we are not cuddling

Alban Knox: YOU ARE

Aia Amare: YOU ARE

Mika Melatika pinned a message.     | 🖕 1 |

Me: mika wth you too? 😭 

Mika Melatika: image.png

Me: did you srsly take a selfie with us in the background

Mika Melatika: YES this needs to be immortalized

Me: you people suck    | 🥰 3 |

Alban Knox: GET THAT NOVELIST BUSSY!!!!

Aia Amare: As if you aren’t about to save that picture yourself~

Alban Knox: NOVELUSSY!!!!!!!!!

Fuck, she got you there. You cast a pointed look at the angelic maiden herself, or at least as pointed as you can be with a man you’re scared to love wrapped around you. She looks as satisfied as a cat pushing a glass off a counter. 

You set your phone on ‘do not disturb’ and placed it behind you on the counter with a huff.

“Reader, honey, how about you?” Nina leans forward, half-lidded and as sultry as ever. She swirled her drink around in its glass. “It’s your first off-collab ever, right? I’d love to hear what you have to say.”

“Oh, well, um.” Your brain struggles to catch up. “First impressions, right…”

Aia slips you a thumbs up. You’re going to rip her a new one after this. Her, and Mika, and definitely Nina; this is the most subtle Nina’s ever been but you can tell she’s fishing for an answer here. You can take your friends figuring it out, embarrassing as it is, but you are not about to expose yourself to thousands of live viewers. 

“It’s kind of crazy actually meeting up with everyone,” you start. “I’ve known them for so long, but all online, and being able to match the voice to the face in real life, I don’t think I can actually describe it. It’s kind of surreal, but it feels so nice to just talk to them in person. Aia, Nina and Uki were the first people I met up with, and man, those three are a sight. I know everyone says it, but Uki is absolutely the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen. Nina and Aia are really pretty, too. Hey, Aiadmirers, did you know when your oshi laughs, she looks just as cute as she sounds?”

Aia yells. “Reader, shut up!”

“Then stop being so cute all the time, you dork!” 

“I’m not a dork! I’m cool!”

You resume, satisfied with your revenge. “Mika and Vox are both really chill. They’re kind of quiet, so if you’re just walking by, you’d think they’re two normal people just going about their days. But whenever we talk it’s always something insane. Vox sounds like a dignified gentleman and Mika is kind of like that cool girl that you want to be friends with, but if you actually pay attention, Mika’s showing Vox a picture of her insides during surgery while he’s reciting something about the Bite of ‘87. And Ren is probably one of the most straightforward people you’ll ever see. He’s so optimistic, and really expressive, too, even though most of the expressions are all different types of smiles.”

“What’s your impression of Ike?” Nina asks.

What does she expect you to say to that one, that screens can’t capture how the sun glitters through his glassy green eyes? Hearing him say your name in-person sends shockwaves through your body? How you want to kiss every little freckle he’s never mentioned before and keeps hidden under long sleeves, even though it’s the beautiful skin he lives in daily?

“Same old Ike. He’s exactly like how I expected,” you say. A total fib. 

She cocks her head. “Really? Even after all the time you’ve spent together?”

“I’m trying to hang out with everyone.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

Cornered. Nina takes a long, slow drink from her glass as you scramble for a quick answer that won’t immediately out you. “Whenever I talk to Ike, he’s really emotive. You can tell what he’s thinking before he says anything. He also has a good sense of style, so he’s fun to go shopping with, and honestly, fun to do anything with. He’s someone you can always have a good time with, and always makes you feel so comfortable around him. Ike’s magnetic.”

Mika muffles a coo behind you. You’re going to kill her if you survive this stream.

“That’s very sweet, Reader,” Nina replies. “Hear that, Ike?”

“Yes, I did.” He sounds strained.

“Got any feelings about it?”

“Yes? I mean—er, thanks?” You feel Ike’s head rustle. “I, umm. What am I supposed to say about that?”

“I don’t know. I just think that about you, that’s all…”

“Aww, cute. I love that you love each other,” Nina muses. 

Ike spits out, “It’s not like that!” Just as you admit, “Yeah, I guess so.”

You process his words too late, though, and even as you sputter the ukulele music cuts out just in time with Nina and Mika’s unfiltered fangirl squeals. Ren’s palms mute the chord as his eyes go wide. Aia is already on her phone with her jaw to the floor and Uki throws a look at Nina while he mouths, did that just happen? 

“I-I mean!” Your throat goes dry and Ike lurches away from you when Vox gleefully shakes Nina like a rag doll. “I—wh—Ike, I mean, of course I love you—“ Mika screams again— “As a friend!”

When you turn to face Ike, he’s curled up into a ball on the barstool with his shirt collar over his face. Even as you feel the blood rush to your face, you keep shouting. That’s all you have left. You’re live. “Like, we’re best friends on and off stream and I love you!”

He mutters something, but you can’t tell what. Only his neck and the tips of his ears poke out from his shirt. Were they always that red?

You repeat yourself. “I said, we’re best friends and I love you, so much!”

“And I said, I know, thank you, I love you too, Reader!” Ike jerks out to face you as he cries. He looks like a tomato. 

Then he buries his face into his hands and squeaks like how he always does when something’s too cute to handle, or he’s got too many emotions he needs to let out. “You can’t see me, I’m too embarrassed. I’m hiding forever and I’m never coming out.”

You hope the ground swallows you up and you never have to confront this moment again. 

Uki hisses under his breath and muffles Ren's ukulele. You don't know what he said, but you realize all too late that the alien prince himself was laying down the first few notes of “Fly Me To The Moon.”

While you slump and fold your arms over your face on the counter in pure embarrassment, Aia stands up and commandeers the mic. She slaps a hand over Mika’s mouth to muffle the scream. “Man, bummer that Ike-senpai is gone from us forever, but you know what else might be gone forever if you don’t get it now? The sponsor for this stream, our current limited-edition Nijisanji voice packs!”

And as much as you could kiss her yet again for changing the subject, you can’t get over how everything blew up in the last five minutes, and groan into your arms instead. 

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

The stream passed, luckily, without a hitch after that. No one asked any questions, but it was pretty damn clear everyone in the room had an idea of what just happened, and the impending shitstorm. In fact, it was so clear that when you stalked off to your room to sulk, no one made a fuss, and when you realized ten minutes into your sulking session that you left your phone on the counter, you figured it wasn’t worth it to show your face again until after you finished your pity party. 

The entire time, you laid in your bed with a pillow over your face so you could pretend like you were being absorbed into the sweet embrace of death. Overdramatic, sure, but you figured you were justified. 

Without your phone, you had no way to check exactly how bad the fallout was on Twitter. The poor Pen and Paper tags were sure to be flooded with fans imagining a happy ending to that stint you’d never be able to experience yourself, like salt in the wound. Not to mention, it was a huge seven-person off-collab! It didn’t just end with the Pen and Paper fans. No, it would extend past the Bookworms and the Quilldren, and certainly to the rest of the fandoms with an oshi in this Airbnb. Maybe even the offshoot viewers who don’t regularly watch your content, but made an exception for the off-collab, or, you know, the ones who have no idea who you or Ike are but can’t get enough of the whole accidental-confession-live-on-stream thing. Forget Nina; the entire Vtuber community is never, ever, ever going to live this down. 

Ike sounded so distraught, too. You wanted to kick yourself for it. Not only did you make a fool of yourself, but he got caught in the crossfire just because you didn’t catch yourself slipping. Not like he’d reciprocate anyways. He’s always been bad at taking compliments, but you keep thinking about how embarrassed he was about you loving him. 

All your frustration and humiliation coursed through the darkness under your pillow, and you stew so bitterly that you don’t even dream when you fall asleep. 

You just wake up groggy and exhausted, but too restless to go back to sleep. You look out the window, and the stars have barely come out to play in the early night sky. 

As much as you’d hate to admit it, that impromptu nap made you tired of brooding. Besides, you can’t hide from your friends forever. Hopelessly in love or not, they’re still your friends, and even if you decided to stream during the trip, this off-collab was always about spending time with them instead of worrying over your online presence. 

It takes you half an hour to hype yourself up, but eventually, you open your door and step out into the hall. 

You can already hear voices further away in the Airbnb. You place one of them as Nina, and after her, a baritone that could only belong to Vox. 

“…Fuck Twitter, they’re going to forget about it in two weeks or less anyways.” You overhear as you walk down the hall of rooms and closer to the living room. You’ve heard Vox passionate before, but never this serious as well. “Besides, what exactly did they say?”

A mumble. You can’t place the words, but you bristle when you recognize the voice. That’s unmistakably Ike. 

“See? Again, I’m so sorry. I was out of line, and I forgot my place. I shouldn’t have interrogated them like that,” Nina says. “But you’re overthinking what they said.”

Another mumble. By now, you’re in the kitchen. You lift your phone from where you left it, and hold your fingers over the half of the screen where your notifications appear as you check the time. It’s barely 11 PM. 

The kitchen and living room are connected, with plenty of seating space all around. That was why Mika’s travel laptop was still on the counter and plugged into the wall from the stream earlier, but on the other side of the wall from the kitchen, you noticed an open window and silhouettes from it. Four people sat on the shallow roof overlooking the uneven ground plenty of feet under the building. A pair of fox ears twitch at the night wind as they watched the stars grow brighter in the sky. 

You look through the fridge. You’re peckish, but if you were to be honest with yourself, you’re trying to stay quiet for a reason. 

There’s a huff. “Oh my god, dude. Just tell Reader already.”

You stand up a little straighter. Mika was with them? Were they talking about you?

“There’s nothing to be said, Mika!” Ike huffs back. “I’m screwed anyways. Just drop it, okay? I don’t need this getting in the way of what was supposed to be just a normal trip.”

“You can’t keep running away forever. Just act like an adult and tell them. It’s going to be fine, I swear.”

“And how exactly do you know that?”

“Well…” Mika trails off. “I can’t say. I just know, okay?”

“Uh-huh. And I know I’m screwed.” The wind rustles outside. You stay motionless. “Just two weeks. Can I please just have two weeks where I don’t have to worry about this until the trip is over.”

It’s a question, but he says it with such exasperation that no one can consider any other answers. 

“Fine.” Nina relinquishes. “Have it your way. I’m just worried for you two.”

“It’s going to work out, Ike. But I’m tired.” Vox stifles a yawn. “Tomorrow is going to be better. Let it go for the night and come back to it once you’re in better shape, and just remember. It’s going to work out.”

“Thanks, Vox.”

“Now get in here.”

You hear shuffling fabric before the two men start yelling. Vox cackles while Ike cries through gritted teeth. “Dang it, Vox, I’m going to shove you off this roof!”

“Get ruffled, idiot! That’s your fault for trusting me!”

“I just wanted a hug!”

You snicker under your breath. Vox loves to ruffle Ike’s hair despite the latter’s protests, though he tends to accept it instead of shove him off like anyone else that would dare. Besides, as dreary as Ike sounded during that conversation, he nearly sounded like his old self as Vox and the others laughed.

“I think I’ll go too. Mommy needs her beauty sleep.”

“Mm, I’m still pretty awake. Wanna keep looking at the sky with me, Ike?”

“Sure. Here, Nina, let me move out of the way…”

Shuffling turns to footsteps, and brings you back to reality. You busy yourself looking through the paltry groceries.

The sound of footsteps gets louder and louder, until they become a hollow click on the hardwood floor. Nina crawls through the window, but stops in her tracks with a startled noise.

You turn around and nod as casually as possible. “Oh, hey, Nina.”

Vox is also halfway through the window, and his eyes go comically wide as he forgets how to move. “Oh. Hey. Reader. Fancy seeing you here.”

“Yeah! Um!” Nina coughs long enough to make you uncomfortable. “What are you doing here?”

“Took a nap. Got hungry.” It’s not a lie. You grope around in the fridge and breathe a sigh of relief when you see a stick of string cheese in your hands. “You guys just hanging out?”

Nina nods. “Yeah, we were on the roof. It’s getting late, though. You should get some rest for tomorrow—“

Vox elbows her. “But not after looking at the sky for a little bit. It’s beautiful. Very clear. Romantic, even. The architects did a wonderful job placing this house right at the perfect angle to watch the stars rise. Did I mention it was romantic?”

You act natural and take a big bite out of the string cheese. “Once or twice. Is it the seniors’ bedtime?”

“You got me,” Vox says. 

“I love going to sleep early and giving my kids private time before bed to reflect and hold deep conversations with one another about their feelings,” Nina says. “And also nighttime face masks.”

“Woo, skincare, what she said.” 

“Hey, by the way, Reader, honey, did you hear anything we talked about?”

“No,” you lie.

“Cool,” Vox says. You eat the rest of the string cheese in one bite. “Good for you. And goodnight, Reader.” He dusts himself off before casting his golden gaze down at you. “Be nice, will you?”

Shivers go down your back. You have a feeling he’s referring to something unspoken. “I will.”

“That’s my sweet thing,” he purrs. “Anyways, I’m going the fuck to beddy bye. Honk shoo, Reader, don’t stay up too late.”

Vox struts off with dark hair flowing behind him and the scent of his aftershave in the air. He leaves you to stand awkwardly next to Nina. 

Suddenly, she takes you by your shoulders and forces you in front of her. You blurt out an unflattering startled noise before she gets right up in your face and stares dead into your eyes.  

“Please be good,” she says darkly. Was that a threat? “Please be so, so good to my baby.”

“I will,” you say, more out of fear than anything else.

She blinks once, then she’s back to the doting mother you know and love. She squeezes your shoulders. “Thank you, honey! Sweet dreams!”

And just like the Voice Demon before her, Nina bounds off to her room. 

Huh. That was weird. Nonetheless, you’re alone in the living room, and you can see the outline of Ike and Mika sitting on the roof in silence. 

You lightly knock on the side of the window. They both perk up at the sound. “Cool if I join you?”

Mika responds quickly. “Sure! Watch your step, Reader. The roof isn’t that steep but it would be awkward if you ate shit.”

“Agreed.” You step onto the tiling, and shift your body to match the angle. You feel like a newborn deer learning to walk. Luckily, Nina and Vox leaving meant that there was more than enough space for you right next to the window. 

Ike sits between you and Mika. “It’s pretty, isn’t it?” 

“Yeah…” 

‘Pretty’ is putting it mildly. The stars are so clear tonight, and scatter across the sky like sequins. The Airbnb was located further away from the heart of the city, so the darkness only amplified how bright the stars shone against the stark night. A breeze drags through the air and fallen leaves rustle between the grass. 

“This is so nice.” Comfort settles into you like the breeze in your hair. “I love it.”

Ike sighs. “Right? It’s so peaceful.”

“And there’s so many more stars out here than there are in the city.”

“It makes you want to just zone out and cool down.”

“Yeah, totally.” Mika coughs. “Huh! Cool! Well, I’m tired now. Just keep staying out here and enjoy the sky, I’m going to bed. Enjoy yourselves.”

Mika inelegantly shuffles around your bodies and slips back inside before either of you can properly tell her goodnight. 

Ike cocks his head as he watches her stumble through the window. “She just said she would stay out…”

“Hm?”

“Ah, nothing. Just thinking to myself.”

With the extra space, Ike leans back and lays along the roof. The stars cast a dreamy glow over his soft smile as he continues. “It really is something that just makes you want to have a deep conversation, or just think, you know?”

You hum in agreement. You get what he means, but there’s only one topic you can imagine having a deep conversation about right now, and it’s the very one you brooded over earlier that day. 

But Ike is Ike. He’s rational and calm and kind, and laughs at your stupid jokes, and texts you first before any of your other mutual friends. The night turns the tips of his hair bluer than usual, and the stars remind you of the freckles hidden along his creamy skin. His glasses reflect the galaxy above.

Even though today’s stream was embarrassing, you know Ike trusts you enough to tell you if you’ve ever crossed a boundary. After all, it’s commonplace to discuss limits on and off stream as soon as possible, and your friendship was so strong that you’ve both opened up to one another. He’d let you know if the whole cuddling thing was too much. Besides, he didn’t resist. He even rested his head on yours. That has to account for something, right?

You snap out of your thoughts when you feel a gentle tug on the sleeve of your hoodie. It’s Ike. He asks, “Lay down with me?”

A wave of fondness washes over you like the tide. He’s cute when he’s earnest like this. You get as comfortable as you can on the tiling, and when you still, you hear something shift before your hand grows warm. Ike scooted closer to you, and placed his pinky finger over yours. 

This is bliss. A beautiful sight with a beautiful boy next to you. Your best friend. 

“I do love you,” you say. 

It just feels right to say. 

Ike is silent. He doesn’t make a single sound as you stare up at the stars and the blackened sky. The breeze rocks a tree, and as the leaves part, you see the moon for the first time: one thin, waning crescent that blends into the darkness. 

Ike’s head is turned away from you. You can’t tell what he’s thinking at all. 

“…I don’t know what you mean,” he admits. “You do? As a friend?”

“We’ve always been friends.”

“Just that?”

“I don’t know what you’re asking me, Ike.”

“N-never mind. I’m sorry, am I making it weird?”

“No, you could never make it weird.” The colors of the view gloss together. You feel like a balloon slowly deflating. “Feels like that’s all I’m doing lately, though.”

Neither of you say anything. 

This was a bad idea. 

You swear the rustling leaves mock you. 

“Wait.” Ike practically snatches your hand up. “Wait, Reader, are you saying you like me?”

“Yeah. I’m saying that I love you.”

Ike stares at you, and if you had to choose just one word to describe his expression, it’s stricken. His mouth is slightly parted, and his shocked eyes drive holes through your skin, leaving you exposed. The brief stutter that escapes him sounds like it was dredged out from frozen, murky waters. “I—”

He drops your hand and turns away. 

“I’m sorry,” he finally says, barely audible. “This is… this is a lot.”

“I’m sorry too, this was a stupid idea. What was I thinking?” You get on your feet, but the slope makes what could’ve been a fluid motion into a stumbling, slow rise, as if your legs weren’t jelly enough already. You inch to the window mortified. “I think I should go. Sorry to bother you.”

You don’t dare to glance at him before you step back inside, not even when he calls your name halfway through the window.

Once you’re back in the living room, you cover your face, then drag your hands through your hair. You can’t even begin to describe how exhausted you feel. This is heartbreak, isn’t it?

You blink furiously, and the outline of a figure by the fridge comes into view. 

“Reader?” Mika asks. She has a stick of string cheese in her hand, but walks to you. “Reader, what happened—”

You take her empty hand and pace to your room. You open the door. “Are you okay?”

The second it shuts, your breath hitches. Mika doesn’t hesitate to take you in her arms. She holds you as the first tear falls, and you begin to cry.

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

You wake up the next day sprawled in your bed, even though the blankets are tucked comfortably around you. On the floor is a pillow and another pile of blankets, and when you recognize the dark hair tied into a loose ponytail, the memories of last night come rushing back.

What an awful night. Awful decisions all day, really, and all of them ones you made. You really don’t know what you were thinking. You groan at the memory.

“Reader?” Mika perks up. Her phone is in her hands, but she sits up level to your face on the floor. “Good morning. How are you feeling?”

Another groan.

“Yeah, I figured,” she says. “Nina, Vox and Ike went out to do their own thing, and I think Ren and Uki are cafe-hopping. It’s just you, me and Aia in the house right now.”

You rub the sleepy out of your eyes. “That’s cool, I guess.” You cast a downward glance to Mika’s makeshift bed on the floor. “Sorry for being a nuisance.”

“You’re not a nuisance, Reader, don’t say that.” She nudges you. “We’re friends. It’s what friends do. Speaking of, do you want Aia to come by? And Alban’s online, so I can call him, too. If you want.”

“It’d be nice…”

Less than ten minutes pass before Aia shows up at your door with breakfast sandwiches and orange juice. All three of you sit on the blanketed floor while Mika voice calls Alban on her phone. A pot of coffee brews over speakerphone as you recount last night. 

“...And to make things worse, we just streamed yesterday,” you explain. “God, I should check Twitter. There’s got to be a million people with eyes on our ship tag, and ugh, I hate thinking about how many weirdos are going to push a ship that can’t work out IRL.”

“I can check it for you,” Aia offers. You hand her your phone. “You remember your Twitter password?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool. Sorry in advance.” She deletes the app off your home screen.

You begin to protest, but she turns off the phone and sets it aside, out of your reach. “You’re off the clock, Reader! Work troubles can wait until you’re back online, and that includes doomscrolling. You can redownload it when you’re in a better headspace.”

“I really hate admitting you’re right.”

“Shit, Reader,” Alban finally says. “He seriously dropped the ball. I’m sorry.”

“I know. I really thought he would get it, but it took him so long to piece it together, like he never thought about us like that before. I should’ve known it was just me. I’m so stupid.”

“You’re not stupid, you’re hurt,” Mika says. “It’s understandable, but that still doesn’t make it hurt any less.”

“Is it wrong that I feel like I deserve it? I mean, I knew day one that this wouldn’t work out. We work together online, and we have fans that ship us with each other and the rest of this company, for fuck’s sake. Getting heartbroken was inevitable and I still went for it. Either I’m a glutton for pain or I’m just plain clueless.”

Alban’s voice is distant from the phone as he messes with his coffee maker. You can’t properly hear him under his breath and over the pot, but if you could, you could’ve heard him mumble, Trust me, you’re not the only clueless one here.

But he returns back at the phone, and you’re totally oblivious. “You can’t choose who you fall for,” he says. “It was really that bad?”

“It took him like a minute to realize I was confessing. And then when he realized it, he apologized to me.”

Aia straightens. “Did he say no?”

“Not really, but why would he apologize if he reciprocated?”

Aia exchanges a look with Mika. Alban grumbles. “No fucking way.”

“Tell me exactly how he reacted,” Aia instructs. She plowed through her sandwich during the conversation, but she left the remaining half on her plate forgotten as she laced her fingers together and leaned forward like a calculated boss. 

“It was like he couldn’t comprehend what I was saying at first. He asked if I meant it as friends, until he asked me if I liked him. And when I told him I loved him in response, he was so shocked that he let go of my hand, so I left.”

“No fucking way,” Alban repeats, and groans as he drawls out his words. You can practically hear him drag his hands over his face. “No fucking way. Ikeeeee. He seriously dropped the ball.”

“I know. I can’t believe it.”

Aia takes both of your hands in her own. “Reader, I’m not even saying this to hurt you, but this is the clumsiest confession I’ve ever heard of.”

You squint. “Right, that makes me feel so much better.”

“I’m really not! You know what this sounds like? Miscommunication,” she declares. “You didn’t get a solid yes or no. So now it’s going to be awkward between you two until you get an actual answer to the confession, or at least some kind of resolution. You wanna know what I think? It sounds like he didn’t even believe what he was hearing before you left. Which, by the way, is a common response to not just confessions but other major news, so chances are you didn’t blow up your friendship as hard as you thought.”

“She has a point,” Alban says. “I believe you, Reader, but Ike isn’t the type of person to just crush other people’s feelings like that. You just woke up, right?”

“I haven’t even left my room yet. Mika says everyone else is out of the house. He’s with Vox and Nina, I think.”

“So then he hasn’t had a chance to talk to you since the confession,” he continues. “And those three are really close. I’m willing to bet they’re helping him manage it, ‘cause it sounds like he’s going through it just as confused as you are.”

You stare at the floor. Hope feels foreign, yet you can’t help but wonder. You struggle to remember the exact way Ike reacted last night, but you really can’t tell what facts were clouded over by the rejection. A rejection that possibly didn’t even happen, mind you. The confusion and regret blurs over everything like water on wet ink.

“You really think so?” You quietly ask.

Aia nods, and Alban agrees over the phone.

Mika pipes up, a glass of juice in her hands. “Here’s my take. We can theorize as much as we want, but none of us really know what Ike’s thinking about, least of all you. Especially since you didn’t actually resolve anything, and that tension is going to eat at you until you get an answer or it actually damages your friendship. You ask me, the next best thing you can do is bring it up.”

She takes a sip of her juice and leaves you to absorb her advice. 

You mull it over along with the memory of last night. “He called my name as I left.”

Alban chokes on his coffee. “He called your name?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t respond.”

“Oh my God. READER!” He shouts so loud that Mika turns the volume down. “I’m going to lose it. I’m actually freaking it right now. Reader!”

“What?”

“Fuck what Mika said earlier, you are stupid!”

“Hey!”

“I’m saying this in the nicest way possible, you are so stupid. He was trying to talk to you!”

Your face goes through a handful of emotions as you sputter. “Are you serious, Alban?”

“Yes! Mika, Aia, back me up.”

Aia crinkles her nose. “I did just say it sounded like a total miscommunication.”

Meanwhile, Mika twirls a lock of red-and-black hair between her finger, distracting herself. She hesitates, trying to figure out exactly how she wants to say her piece, before she simply shakes her head and stills. “Just talk to him.”

“Which is easier said than done.” Your shoulders roll back as you stare up at the ceiling, your hands supporting you as you lean. Even with your friends’ encouragement, the memory of how hard you blew it last night still haunts you. It’s even worse than starting at ground zero; you’ve already tasted failure once, and you’re hesitant to embarrass yourself again. 

That stricken look Ike gave you flashes across your sight every time you blink. What was he thinking when he stared at you like that? You can’t tell if the disgust is true or if your anxieties are getting the best of you.

The best solution to anxieties, however, is looking at the facts—or at least, what isn’t tainted by your bias. Your friends mentioned there was nothing wrong with a workplace romance, and as much as the stream made you want to cringe, no one seemed put off by it. Alban and Aia are set on getting you and Ike to talk, and so is Mika. In fact, Mika spoke with Ike as well as Vox and Nina last night before you entered, and even if you had no idea what those four were talking about, you still picked up your name and that apparently Ike had something to tell you.

Pieces start to fall into place when you consider the three around you, staging an intervention over a late breakfast. Aia always gets you in situations where you can be close to Ike and bails you out when it gets awkward, and as much as he won’t get off your back about it, Alban gave you great advice between all his teasing. Mika was nosy at first when she learned about your feelings, but now that you think about it, she’s been incredibly tactful ever since the off-collab began. 

You can’t help but snicker as you connect the dots. “Is this the first time you guys actually started wingmanning for me?”

Aia purses her lips. “Hey, not the first. Remember when we made that group chat? We’ve always been your wingmen.”

“I know. But you guys are seriously helping,” you say. “Thanks. Though I do wonder, Mika…”

She perks up as you say her name. “Be real with me. Do you know more than you’re letting on?”

She flinches. Alban’s fingers snap over the phone. “Busted.”

Mika holds her hands up like a criminal caught in the act, but there’s a loose, sly smile hanging on her face. “I don’t think it’s my place to say.”

“What do you mean, it’s not your place to say?”

“I’m sorry, Reader, but I made a promise not to spill, and I’ve been doing way too much behind the scenes to break the promise like that. Just do me a favor and talk to the guy, will you? That’s the best I can tell you.” Mika rests her head in a hand, and the smirk looks even more knowing. “And if you can’t figure it out after that, then you’re definitely stupid.”

You bluster. “I’m not stupid!” 

“Still remains to be seen.” Aia gently flicks your forehead. “But you do look a lot better. How are you feeling now?”

Aside from the fading pain on your forehead? You’re surprised at how much lighter you feel now that you unloaded all your worries with your friends. The rejection still stings, and you’re not exactly confident, but, well, you’re smiling. The clean, tangy taste of orange juice lingers between your tongue. Aia and Mika sitting on the pile of blankets reminds you that regardless of your love life, they’d stay by your side until the bitter end, and Alban’s voice keeps you connected with your friends no matter where in the world you are.

You snatch Aia’s half-eaten sandwich off her plate and sink your teeth into the bread. She cries out in protest. “Hey!”

“Better now.” You set the sandwich back where you found it. Even though your future with Ike looks cloudy, the smile doesn’t leave. “Don’t flick me.”

“Speaking of.” Mika picks up the phone and scrolls through her messages. “Nina just texted that she, Vox and Ike will come back in an hour or less. Reader, are you up for this?”

“What do you mean, ‘up for this?’”

“Just seeing Ike again. It was a weird night,” she says. “I stand by what I said, but if it’s going to be too much too soon, then Aia and I can cover for you until you feel better.”

“I don’t know.” That’s what gets your expression to sink from light to thoughtful. “I think I want to take your advice. I just don’t know if I’m ready to talk it out yet.”

“Still wanna hang out with us or take a moment to yourself?”

“I think I’d just go back to moping if I was alone,” you joke.

“Cool. Let me go grab some nail polish Nina gave me yesterday.” Mika rises and strides to the door. “You have a steadier hand than me. And Nina said the color suits me more than her.”

Aia’s face lights up. She happily cries ”Girls’ night!” even though it’s barely noon and Alban is decidedly not a girl, but then he croons something in a valley girl accent so strong you can’t even tell what he’s saying. Scratch that; he’s a girl by association.

When he drawls out one long “Yaaaaaas, bestie!” you can’t help but laugh. Your love life is in shambles, but at least your friendships are solid as hell. You’d give the world for these three.

Mika returns a moment later, travel-sized nail supplies in her arms and a totally unrelated topic on the mind. The sharp scent of the lacquer startles you out of your thoughts as you uncap the bottle and Mika splays her hands out, and Alban and Aia air their opinions on something entertainingly dumb. 

Nina was right: this color is stunning on Mika. You paint Aia’s nails too, and halfway through her second hand, you hear the front door open, the end of an intelligible conversation, and telltale footsteps, each diverting across the house. The girls’ eyes flicker to you. You know they’re trying to read your expression, but you concentrate on how the brushstrokes pool together into one smooth coat. Your thoughts are a storm and you can’t even pick out the emotion commanding it. 

So you keep joking along instead and focus on the nail polish, refusing to give the storm an opportunity to strike. Alban quips off of you, and the moment passes as Mika and Aia return to the conversation. 

That is, until half an hour later when you hear a knock on the door. Mika cocks her head, a silent question, and when you nod she stands. Her nails dried when you finished Aia’s, and dot the doorknob as she cracks it open. A tiny margin of light from the hallway shines into your room, and you realize she positioned herself square in front of the threshold, shielding you from the person on the other side. 

She talks evenly. “Hey, welcome back.”

“Thanks. Is Reader here?”

Your mind thunders as you register the voice. You can only see the leg of his jeans behind Mika, but you recognize Ike’s voice on the other side. 

Aia shuffles by as a second shield. “Need them for something?”

“Kind of,” Ike says. “Do you mind if I talk to them?”

“I don’t know, what’s it about—“

“Aia, you can lay off him.” You call from your corner of the room. “You too, Mika.”

“Whatever you say. Just let me just grab my stuff…”

Mika grabs the nail supplies and deafens on Discord, but doesn’t even think to pick up the blankets along the ground. Instead, she glides to you and whispers under her breath. “We’re rooting for you. Send us a text if you need anything, okay?”

You nod. Aia slips past the threshold, but not without shooting you a thumbs up and mouthing ‘good luck.’ Not even a second later, your phone buzzes, and you catch Alban’s contact sending you an encouraging message in all-caps. 

“See you later!” Aia chirps. “Play nice, you two.”

The scent of the lacquer follows them as they leave, and the sound of their footsteps fade in time. 

Still in the doorway, Ike raises a hand to fidget with the chain along his glasses. “Do you mind if I…?”

“Oh! Come in. Sit anywhere, I don’t mind.”

You stay planted on the floor like how you were with your friends, and Ike sits next to you. You face the wall in front while he gets comfortable.

No words are exchanged as Ike maneuvers around the blankets, and eventually settles down with his back on the floor and head resting on a pillow, staring up at the ceiling. The light is off, but the blinds filter in thin beams of sunlight that cross over the room and the edge of his collar like a grid. 

“Lay with me?” He asks. Then it strikes you like ringing metal; you sit next to each other in the same positions as that night on the roof. 

Suddenly Ike raises his hands like static. “Not that you have to! I just figured it would be good to get comfortable and all, you know?” Ike hastily explains, then clears his throat. “I wanted to talk. About last night, I mean.”

Your chest flutters at the mention of it, but you remember all your friends’ encouragement. Here he is, the novelist of your (heartbroken) dreams, already bringing up the topic you dread to mention. You need to take this chance to face it head-on, now or never. 

You glide down like the ceiling is full of stars. “Okay. What do you want to talk about?”

“A lot, honestly. I don’t know how to go about it, but first of all, I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry.”

You cross your arms. “You said that enough last night.”

“Not like that! I mean I’m sorry I acted the way I did. I think I made every wrong choice once you said that you… that.” He shovels a hand through his hair. “I’m making it weird again. I should apologize for that, too, it’s just kind of embarrassing saying out loud that you, um, you loved me. Not that you should be embarrassed. I mean, I get it if you are, but that took a lot of guts. You should be proud of that. I admire you for that.”

“Slow down. What are you even saying?”

“What I wish I said last night. More than anything else, I’m sorry I got caught off-guard. I must’ve been so standoffish, because my idiot brain just didn’t believe what I was hearing until it was too late and the damage was already done.” Hair the color of ash and ocean falls over his face. “Honestly, I can’t believe it now.”

“I get it. Bad idea from me. Can we move on from that yet?”

“I don’t think it was a bad idea at all. I just had no idea that you liked me.”

“Give me some time and I’ll get over it, eventually. I’m not going to let it get in the way of working with you, if that’s what you’re trying to get at.”

“No, that’s not it either! I—“

Ike’s eyes squeeze shut. His voice is so quiet, you can’t discern what he’s saying. “…Actually, I’m…”

“Repeat that?”

“I’m happy. Really happy,” Ike says. His pitch rises like a balloon floating up into space, struggling to stay composed. “I’m not good at saying it, but I meant it when I said… when I said it during the stream.”

You wave a hand in the air. “It was weird timing, and I know you mean it like a friend,” you reply. “I didn’t mean to pressure you into saying it, and just being friends is fine. Even though I’m a loser that messed up just about everything.”

The hand catches in midair. Doll-like fingers weave through your grasp, and turn your touch warm as Ike turns to look at you. “Not with me. Don’t say that about yourself, okay?” 

You stare at how easily he held your hand, and how his fingers cradle your heart between the palms. The corners of Ike’s eyes are narrowed, two beads of peridot stone that can see through every little line of text between your pages, but there’s gentleness under his glasses. Something uncertain and fluffy. Softened like a lamb even though he leaves you defenseless. 

You don’t know what to say. Ike is beautiful and kind and handsome and thoughtful when he’s earnest like this. He’s got you stupid in the head and wrapped around his pinky finger, and doesn’t have a single clue.

Peridot sparkles. “You’re so much more than that. You don’t mess things up, Reader. I’m in love with you.”

Your mouth goes dry and your tongue is still tied. Forget speechlessness; the man took your own damn thoughts away. Your hand remains frozen in air with Ike’s. If it weren’t for the light drag of one of his fingernails along your skin, then you would have figured he took your senses as well.

But the drag ends, and the fingers unlace themselves, and chilled air fills in the gaps Ike once held close. The tips of his fingers rest at the curve of your palm for just one second more before they drift away.

The glint in his eyes dulls. His hand falls to his chest, over his heart, just as slow as he parted. The uncertainty took over, and now it’s like staring at a cloud that doesn’t know if it should rain. Ike’s gaze lowers to his heart. There’s a stretch of silence and motionlessness as he stares at where your touch once was, and you’re paralyzed where you lay.

Ike's hand curls in on itself, too loose to make a fist, and his lashes sink over his eyes. His mouth is set into a flat line, but the cheeks are dusted in pinks and reds and peppered freckles in-between, demure and shy all the while.

He turns his face away soon after that. Another break of silence, and he shuffles again, with your vision on his back as if it were a hiding place.

It startles you out of your stupor. The gridded sunlight lets you analyze what you missed. After months of thinking your feelings would never be reciprocated, Ike thought of you just the same. He’s always been in your corner, and you would go to the ends of the earth for him, and everything is in its perfect position. But his back is still turned, and the memory of last night—your confession, and his inaction—it rushes to your head.

So you reach out instead.

Maybe it’s a little selfish. You’re tired of bumbling around and concealing your true feelings, and now that everything's out in the open, you aren’t about to let go without resolution.

But Ike is your best friend, and the man you fell in love with. There was no way you’d ever let go in the first place.

You wrap your arms around his back and hug Ike.

“I think I get why you were so taken aback last night,” you whisper. Even though you’re alone with Ike, you still say it like a secret. “I can barely believe it myself.”

Your warmth is inviting, and every second that passes is another defense downed. Your head perches right above his neck and along his shoulder. It’s not your first hug with Ike at all, but there’s only been so many since you first met him in person that it still feels special, and with your bodies flush to the floor, it’s intimate. His eyes are averted and one cheek lays down on the blankets, but the tips of his ears glow scarlet under his jewelry. 

“I’m glad you were patient with me. I really didn’t think I had a chance with you. You know, the long distance and the company, and you know, the standard pining fare. I’m really lucky.” A smile slips through your words. “I’ll stay with you, okay? So take all the time you need.”

Ike chuckles. Even his laughter is blushy-bashful. “I’m just so happy you feel the same, too. I don’t even know what to do with myself.”

His body curls as he lays, and your legs brush along his as you cuddle. Holding him makes it feel like he was made to fit in your arms. You sigh. “I love when you can’t contain it. It’s so cute.” 

Ike squeaks at that, and unwittingly proves your point. “It feels so good to say that out loud. I mean, you’re okay with it, right?” A nod. “And you’re okay with… I don’t know. Are we still friends?”

“Of course we are, no matter what. You said you loved me first, so let me say this one?” 

You have a feeling you know what’s coming next. You hug him even tighter.

“Reader, let’s go out. I don’t want this feeling to end,” he confesses, and your world turns into rose and blush. “Can we?”

Though you expected it, he still takes your breath away—until he taps you on the hand. “Come on, say something before my heart explodes!”

“Mine already did! I can’t even think straight, and—I’d love that. I really want this.”

Another squeal breaks out as Ike buries his head into a blanket, and your heart soars as he melts. He resembles a swaddled-up kitten, and the rays of sunlight line his silhouette. The fluffy blanket reminds you of an angel’s downy wings along his kitten features. You can’t even see his face between the blanket and his hair, but his squeal continues, muted through the blanket as he swoons. 

Somehow that only makes you feel even more flustered. “No, don’t hide! I want to see you!”

Maybe it would’ve been better for your heart if he stayed put, because when Ike rises—with disheveled hair and glitter in his eyes the color of seaglass, and jewelry that frames his red face, and that galaxy of freckles you hold so dear and shine like stars between his blush—you feel your heart stop. Again.

“When did you start having this effect on me?” You ask, mesmerized, and before you know it you thumb over one of his rosy cheeks. “Your freckles are so beautiful.”

He sheepishly grins. “They don’t really show up online. They’re pale.”

“Never noticed them until I met you in person. I love them. I love you.”

The grin gets a little wider. One of his fingers grazes along the corner of your ear. Has his hand always been along your jawline?

Ike’s eyes are shining under the grid of sunlight. The lashes flit just a bit lower from your gaze. “Reader, can we…?”

You close your eyes.

And when Ike’s lips graze your own, you smile on instinct before you remember to kiss back. 

Ike brings you near, searching for the taste of you as he continues. His touch lodges past your jawline and into your hair, and when one of the fingers grazes along your ear you’re reminded just how much you love Ike. All the yearning you hid for so long bleeds through as you sink down to his level with his head in your hand, gentle yet impassioned.

Then your face bumps against Ike’s glasses. The kiss breaks as you back away.

There’s a brief pause in the aftermath. Ike wordlessly adjusts his glasses, now knocked off-center. Despite finally getting on the same page on your relationship with Ike, you’re still as clumsy about your feelings as ever.

But the corners of your lips curve up as he inspects the lens you squished, then a barely-stifled giggle, and next thing you know, Ike’s laughing along with you, still underneath your body and with one hand in your hair while the other holds his glasses in place. He sounds as charming as he looks, and the fact that he joined you even when you chuckled out of the blue means that his mind is just as charming as well.

Not that it was breaking news. You know your best friend well, and now that you don’t need to deny your feelings any longer, you know you’ve got good taste if Ike’s under you with crinkled eyes and hearty laughter.

When you speak next, the giggles patter out between your words but the quiet delight hangs in your teeth. “Can we try that again?”

Then his lips are on yours again, and the laughter twists between the second kiss, and the third, and the fourth, all the way until you collapse on the blankets with arms around each other, staring up at the stars on the bland popcorn ceiling as adoration fills the space between you. 

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

bonus.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

Starting soon…

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

The chat flickers alive as a four-pointed flower, a diamond, and a thorned heart give way to the stream and the novelist behind the stinger. 

Kaidororero: welcome back ike!

Min (Ikey’s Book): 💙 IKEY IS BACK 💙

A normal broom: HI IKE

lunasmortas: 💙💙💙

viperip: ike! :_heart: :_heart: :_heart:

Sun shines through a clear day in Ike’s room onscreen, but in reality, blackout curtains block out the day outside. A sweet smile graces both Ike’s face and his model as the Quilldren welcome him home. 

He greets them, and cracks open a can of soda as he quickly scans through the chat. Obviously, the off-collab is on everyone’s minds. 

juuuuuuuuuus: did you have fun?

Kaidororero: offcollab POOOG

lunasmortas: SO CUTE :_heart: :heart:

Johnclone: Hope you had a good time!

zZirasthingZz: PEN AND PAPER REAL

Hm. A mod will eventually bonk that message. But then again, it’s inevitable that the ship would come up in chat. 

Ike takes it in stride and ignores it like any other shipper, but his heart still skips a beat. Nonetheless, he doesn’t call any attention to it. “How about that off-collab, right? I met up with my friends! Where do I even begin?”

Ike recounts his trip from the beginning, and the Quilldren react to his stories with interest. He was one of the last to arrive, so Nina, Uki and Reader picked him up from the airport, and met up with Aia, Ren, and Mika at the Airbnb. Vox was the only one to arrive after him, hot off the heels of a flight delay, but the demon was a welcome party all his own despite his exhaustion. 

“We went to karaoke once Vox got situated,” Ike explains. “Nina put that song in first so we could all let loose, and so she would have a fun voice tweet for everyone. Might as well confirm everyone that showed up, right?

“But after that, we didn’t want to stress ourselves out to perform for voice tweets instead of just having fun, so that was the only song we recorded. I wish you could’ve heard Uki and Vox’s duet, though. And while we were singing, turns out Ren packed a ukulele with him! Sometimes he would learn how to play along by ear, like a jam session. Mika knows how to play ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ too, so everyone joined in singing that while she played it. It was so much fun.”

Johnclone: Everyone sounded great!

sunblast99: uki’s voice >>>>>> everything else 💜💙

haabinae: :_tskr:

Festersk: WHAT I REALLY REALLY WANT 🗣🗣

A normal broom: what did you sing?

Ike leans back in his chair. He blows a lock of hair out of his sight as he tries to think. “I remember Vox sang something by George Strait, so then we all egged him on to sing ‘Country Roads.’ He only did it once I promised to queue up ‘Toxicity’ by System of a Down afterwards.”

lunasmortas: OMG 💙💙💙

gatamiizuus: ayo?

Y A M: YESSSSSSS :_tskr: :_tskr:

haabinae: I LOVE SOAD :_fanboy:

Thornmy: SO COOL 💙

“Thank you.” He says it out of obligation. If he thinks too hard about the compliments, he’ll get embarrassed. “What else was there? I think there was some Motionless in White, and Spiritbox. Oh, and My First Story. Can’t forget My First Story.”

K. K. Soda: ooooo

Alban Knox 【NIJISANJI EN】 ✓ : what about mcr

asper ch.: METAL SCREAM?

deeboorgur: HI ALBAN

Y A M: MCR YEAAAAA  :_glowstick_1: :_glowstick_2:

“I’m getting there, Alban!” 

Ike takes a sip while the Quilldren greet Alban. He’s not too surprised Alban seems to know more than the other viewers. He’s close with almost everyone that went on the trip, and was super active on Discord during the off-collab. The novelist lowers his soda as the chat floods in orange hearts. He wonders how Alban learned so much as an observer. He should ask. 

But that’s a question for after stream. Ike continues. “Thank Nina for that. She queued up ‘I’m Not Okay’ by My Chemical Romance, and then shoved two mics in my hands and Reader’s.”

And the chat explodes. 

Kaidororero: OMGGGGGG 💙💕

Y A M: PEN AND PAPER SO CUTE :_tskr:

zZirasthingZz: PEN AND PAPER DUET

asper ch.: AYOOOO MCR

gatamiizuus: I LOVE READER

ystariya: PEN AND PAPER MY BELOVED

“It’s a really fun song! It’s almost all clean vocals, but there’s this scream in the middle. Up until then, we sang together, but then I screamed, and Reader picked up the slack and sang the parts of the verse I couldn’t. They’re amazing.”

gatamiizuus: READER SIMPS COME GET Y’ALL’S JUICE

Thornmy: THAT SOUNDS SO GOOD

lunasmortas: 💙💕💙💕

ystariya: READER KARAOKE STREAM WHEN

Kaidororero: AWWWWWWW

The model on the screen doesn’t have the same glint in Ike’s eye when he talks about you. That first day of the trip was all about getting comfortable after long travel hours, and the stories went on as the days went by. Sightseeing with Aia and shopping with Uki by day, and spending the night shooting the shit with Ren until it turns into the littlest hours of the morning.

“Vox wanted to try a bunch of different restaurants with me, but you know me, ya boi is not good with most foods. So Nina usually came along in case I couldn’t finish something. She and Vox would share my leftovers.”

Something fond crosses over Ike’s face. His eyes cloud over in fog descending over a clear-sky day. “We would always talk over food about anything. I appreciate it a lot. They really get me.” The fog stills. “And over breakfast one morning, they gave me some excellent advice over something I’ve been meaning to do.”

ver*batim: ❤️💙❤️

K. K. Soda: MILORDDDDD

nroneo: :_heart:

A normal broom: upcoming project? 👀 

Johnclone: I love Nina Kosaka!

“Not a project, no. It was something I was really worried about, even when I was supposed to be taking a break with my friends,” he says. “But those two seriously helped me clear my head about it. Mika, too. Vox and Nina had a lot of nuanced advice, but Mika told it to me straight, and helped handle what I couldn’t. I’m really thankful to have them.”

His set jaw loosens. “Maybe I’ll talk about it one day.”

The model cocks to the side. Motion blurs the foggy sobriety away. With a lightness to his voice and a knowing gaze, Ike looks straight into the camera and smiles, sentimentality forgotten. The air clears. “But for now, it’s a secret~!

“Ah, now where was I? Spending time with my friends, right? Reader and I hung out often. Sometimes with others, but it ended up being the two of us more than not.”

Birds chirp outside Ike’s window in time with the hum of his PC. The backlit keyboard in front of the monitors glows the same color as the computer, a healthy blue light that tints the tips of his fingers. He usually sets it to a rainbow spectrum in his own time, but static blue is reserved for going live. It gets him in the right mindset for streaming, and makes his little apartment feel fantastical like the noble background that accompanies his model, even if it only reaches his fingertips. 

He’s sure the Ike on the screen has fingertips tinged with blue just like him, an extension of the man outside the screen but without the grittier details. Smooth, pristine hands under gloves where his are callused from guitar playing. Nothing under the model’s eyes but lashes and a line of red that brings out the pink in his eyes, very much unlike the heavy bags and sunken face from an awful delay on his flight back home. No freckles, either, but even cameras rarely pick them up on video call. Nina cooed over them the first time they met, as motherly as ever, but behind closed doors Reader was utterly fascinated with them. They mentioned something about watching blush travel around his face with the smattering of freckles in-between once or twice… maybe more? Doesn’t matter when he’s never heard that before and it repeats in his head when he catches himself daydreaming. It’s one of the best things he’s ever heard.

Vtuber Model Ike’s face doesn’t heat up like how Real Ike’s certainly is now. He clears his throat. “The weather was really nice during the entire trip, so we would always get into good conversations while walking back to where we were staying. And sometimes we didn’t want to end the conversation, so we’d just keep walking past our Airbnb until our feet hurt or it got dark, whichever came first. 

“Oh, here’s something funny. Uki really loves cafes, right? Usually he woke up early with Ren to go check out some cafes in the morning, way before the rest of us would even think of waking up. By the time everyone else woke up, they already finished their breakfast, and Uki would tell Reader about the ones to visit or skip. Whenever Uki recommended one, Reader always wanted to go themselves, so I went along to keep them company.” 

Even as his skin returns to its original shade, the sweetness sticks to his throat like the soda he’s barely touched at all. He’s wistful. He didn’t expect to miss Reader this much; after all, his relationship with them has bloomed so much ever since you first started working together, but two weeks together (including mutual close friends) changes things. It’s only been two days since he returned home, but he feels out of rhythm with them. 

He’s gotten too accustomed to them. Over the last few months, he thought he did a good job putting aside his feelings for Reader, even when Nina would tease him after every Pen and Paper collab and Vox and Mika would be right behind her, hyping him up to make a move. The fear of rejection was what motivated him to keep his close friendship with Reader without ever confessing to them.

“Reader…”

The world around him is nothing. Paused to buffer as he thinks. He can’t remember the last time he felt so happy. Just being in the same room as them makes him feel stupid, and surely he’s been acting like it. Everything he says sounds clumsy when he’s with them. After all, on that day when he owned up to the feelings he repressed for so long that he couldn’t properly react to Reader’s confession, he couldn’t say much more than how happy he was. Words fail to describe what Reader means to him, yet he’s a novelist, for crying out loud! How ironic!

“...Reader is so patient with me,” Ike says. “And they’re so considerate and dedicated. I wish I told them that earlier. It’s hard to say things out loud like this, but you only meet people like Reader once in a lifetime if you’re lucky, and even then, there’s no one quite like Reader.”

ystariya: i love reader

Kaidororero: pen and paper awwww

Y A M: PEN AND PAPER

acklmystafoot: ike is so sweet!!!

Reader 【NIJISANJI EN】 ✓ : 💙

“Aaah!”

Ike recoils like his keyboard is flaming lava. The model on the screen leans back and freezes in place while he nearly throws himself out of his chair. “R-Reader! What are you doing here?!”

Reader 【NIJISANJI EN】 ✓ : FKJLJJSLKFJDKS LMAOOOOOOOO

Johnclone: Hello Reader!

Y A M: OMG

Reader 【NIJISANJI EN】 ✓ : just wanted to say hi

Reader 【NIJISANJI EN】 ✓ : hi!

Festersk: LMAO

Ike sputters out nothing but empty air and nervous laughter. “Haha. Um. Hi! Welcome!”

Stupid! He wants to kick himself. He’s made improvement on verbalizing affection, and he’s comfortable with Reader, especially now that there aren’t any secrets left, but he’s still so unfamiliar with affection being returned that his heart is still doing kickflips in his chest. 

haabinae: :_blush: :_blush: :_blush:

juuuuuuuuuus: most normal pen and paper moment

Thornmy: AWWW

Reader 【NIJISANJI EN】 ✓ : check discord

A normal broom: Oh?

“Ah, okay! Give me a second.” Ike keeps his Discord on mute, and usually disables desktop notifications when he’s live, so he’s not surprised to open the window to unread messages and some non-urgent pings. Sure enough, Reader sent him something.

Reader: because you were talking about cafes

Reader: image.png (3)    | 💙 1 |

Me: Oh I recognize these from our first date!

It’s been over a week now, but just saying he went on a date with Reader has him squeezing his legs together so his feet wouldn’t start kicking in the air. 

Reader: ahh you remembered! 

Me: I should’ve figured you took more pictures than the ones you showed me

Reader: dw i have more i wanted to show you

Reader: image.png (8)    | 💙 1 |

Me: Seriously how are you so good at photography I don’t get it-

Me: You’re really pretty in this one!

Me: UGHHHH WHY DO I LOOK SO WEIRD    | ❌ 1 | 💕 1 |

Me: I DIDN’T EVEN NOTICE YOU TAKE THIS ONE

Reader: WTH YOU’RE NOT WEIRD

Reader: YOU’RE LITERALLY SO HANDSOME WHY DO YOU  T H I N K  I TOOK THAT PIC

Well, great, now he’s actually kicking in his seat. Ike is inclined to disagree, but when Reader says it, it’s a super-effective attack on his poor little novelist heart. 

Me: Akaslwdnja

Me: Thank you 😭

Reader: anyways i gotta go i stream in 20 min and i’ve barely eaten my food

Me: Go eat! Do you have enough water?

Reader: just refilled my bottle

Me: Good then don’t let me keep you! Have a good stream!

And before he can overthink it, in the moment—

Me: I love you!

His sights are set on his second monitor.

Reader is typing…

Reader doesn’t have to respond. Sometimes just saying it is enough. 

Reader: fdsjdfkl.

Ike’s been trying to relearn that lesson ever since he realized everything he repressed was reciprocated.

Reader: i love you too, ike

Words heard across the world, one of the people he holds most dear.

His heart beats loud in his ears, but he can feel it slow, somehow. Reader is exhilarating, but there’s security in them, too. The nerves kick in until he remembers they’re just as exposed as the other, and the vulnerability generate a sense of comfort. Reader makes him feel understood like no one else in the world does, and he trusts them more than anything.

He does. He does, he does, he does, even if he only has the strength to say it one at a time. Ike is in love.

Reader: i’ll let you know when i’m done streaming, we can watch a movie together after

Me: It’s a date!    | 💕 1 |

It takes him a moment to tear his gaze away from your messages. 

His streaming monitor reflects his movements. The chat moves along. Blue light spreads through his fingertips, just like how he imagines Vtuber Model Ike’s hands resting on his own keyboard, an extension of the man outside the screen, proof of the fantastical.

“They sent me something.” Ike’s laughter is gentle. “I really do love them.”

The chat zooms past, as expected. Surely that would get clipped alongside the off-collab Q&A, but he can’t seem to care. He doubts the fandom would really understand how deep the connection goes, and if they do? Some things are just meant to be private.

Besides, on the day Ike and Reader get comfortable enough in their relationship to go public, he knows the Quilldren have his back, just like Reader and their Bookworms. 

“Reader, if you’re still there, we need to meet up again,” Ike says. “I don’t know when, but one day.”

A flurry of messages, but only one truly matters.

Reader 【NIJISANJI EN】 ✓ : i wouldn’t miss it for the world

The model onscreen grins. It pales in comparison to Ike himself.

.　 . • ☆ . ° .• °:. *₊ ° . ☆

✧. ┊commentary ↣

✧. ┊ masterpost ✧. ┊ kofi

[praisethesuuun]

Nsfw alphabet for loki? Perhaps??

hope you like it♡ also english is not my first language so I'm sorry for any mistakes

LOKI: NSFW ALPHABET

A: aftercare <what they're like after sex>

Loki isn't much of an aftercare guy. If you have marks or small cuts on your skin, he will gladly watching them feeling proud, but he will not assist you. The best he can do is getting you some water.

B: body part <their favourite body part on them and you>

He likes his whole body. Loki knows he can look both feminine and masculine in order to satisfy the tastes of his partner. His favourite part of you is your eyes, because he can always see what your feeling just by looking into them. Are you scared? Good, he likes it.

C: cum <anything to do with it, really>

Loki loves to see you covered in his cum, it's like a way of marking you. You have to completely offer your body and soul to him, so there's no problem in covering you with his cum, right?

D: dirty secret <a dirty secret of theirs>

Loki would like to try shibari, but, even if he seems like he doesn't care much about you, he still doesn't know your limits. Plus, if he didn't like you, he wouldn't fuck you.

E: experience <how experienced are they>

A lot. Loki's a little whore, it's not a secret.

F: favourite position <self-explanatory>

I think he likes mating press. Having control over you, pounding mercylessly into you, maybe when you're all tied up begging him to go slower. Spoiler: he will go faster insted.

G: goofy <would they use humor in the moment?>

It depends: Loki's goofy usually, cracking jokes only to tease you and embarassing you, but when he's jealous it's a whole other story. He becomes serious as fuck. Run as fast as you can, honey, he's mad now.

H: hair <how well groomed are they? does the carpet match the courtains?>

He keep up the maintenance, plus he doesn't have any hair. Everything is pretty clean and shaved in general.

I: intimacy <are they romantic in the moment or they do not care?>

Loki's way to show you that he cares is fucking you DUMB. You think he doesn't care about you? Oh dear, he does, but this is the only way he knows to show you how much he loves you.

J: jack off <...self-explanatory part 2>

To your surprise he doesn't do it much. Your relationship's mostly based on sex, when he's horny he doesn't hesitate to come to you for a quickie.

K: kinks <their kinks>

Degrading kink and restraints. He's a sadistic bastard: calling you a slut while using a whip on you it's like a drug.

KNIFE PLAY AND BLOOD PLAY.

L: location <where they usually do the do>

Everywhere, really. Loki doesn't have this kind of problem, if he wants to fuck you in the middle of the arena, he will. It depends entirely on you and where you feel more comfortable (sex isn't funny if he's the only one to enjoy it).

M: motivation <what turns them on>

Blood. When there's the smallest trace of blood on you, Loki's mind stops working and he starts thinking with his dick. Good luck!

N: no <things they refuse to do>

Pissing on you. It stinks, plus he already has you trenched in his cum, why adding the piss? It doesn't makes sense to him.

O: oral <do they like giving or receiving?>

He likes more giving than receiving. Loki loves when he tortures you with his tongue. The little bastard knows he's good at it, so you better prepare to be held still by him while he eats you out. "What? You want more?" he says giving you another long and slow lick.

P: pace <are they slow and sensual or fast and rough>

HE'S ROUGH. I don't even think Loki knows how to go slow, he's not fluffy or vanilla at all! Your legs will feel so sore in the morning and he will enjoy every second of it.

Q: quickie <would they fuck you for five minutes or wait until you wait home?>

Of course he likes them: you never know when he's gonna get horny. He could be at any time and he becomes a whiny bitch when you don't give him what he wants.

R: risk <...DUH>

Loki lives for taking risks, did I already said that? He mostly takes them to study your body and its limits, this way you can fuck more and try more things, aren't you happy?

S: stamina <how long can they last?>

Loki has a lot of stamina, so he can go for a lot of rounds in the same night. He will stop only when you can't take it anymore.

T: toys <do they own any? do they use them?>

Yeah, he has a few, but he usually uses them on you. One of his favourite things to do is tying you up with a vibrator between your legs. Don't be surprised if you find yourself with a vibrator in you while he controls it with a remote, making you scream when you least expect it.

U: unfair <how much they like to tease>

He lives for teasing you. Loki is a brat when he wants, your frustrated face is just too cute.

V: volume <are they asking for a noise complaint, or are they quiet?>

Oh boy, he's loud. Not only he will moan like crazy, but he dirty talk a lot. Everyone in Valhalla knows when you two are fucking and sometimes it can get pretty embarassing.

W: wild card <a random headcanon☆>

He sometimes ask himself if he should organize an orgy with you, then he immediately discard the idea when he realize he won't be the only one to fuck you.

X: x-ray <what to they look like under there?>

Loki's cock isn't the longer you can get, but he knows how to use it. He can make you scream as much as he wants, he's an expert after all. The tip is #fac1aa. It's slightly inclined upwards

Y: yearning <are they in the mood to fuck or are they tame?>

Quite high once he get used to be intimate with you. Damn, you two can barely stay a few days without sex.

Z: zzz <how quickly they fall asleep afterwards>

Out like a light afterwards. He's going to be so blissed out that he falls asleep with an half smile.

[ahgasegotarmy116]

Semantic Error | A Jeon Jungkook Series | Chapter 3

Based off of Semantic Error (bl) by J Soori Summary: y/n meets Jimin and makes Jungkook jealous Pairing: Techie inexperienced fem!reader x Artist fuck boy Jungkook Word count: 2.7k~ Warnings: Explicit language, Idk that's pretty much it for this chapter. A/N: This is heavily based off of the original bl (boy love) Semantic Error and it covers chapters (episodes) 4,5 and 29. I've switched around the timeline quite a bit and got rid of some scenes here and there to make the story progress a bit faster so they're not exactly alike but I would like to stick close to the original story so let me know what you think! P.s. If you don't mind spoilers I would highly suggest reading the original story. I read it on the app Manta with the english adaptation being done by Angy and you can also find the Kdrama on Viki :) Read from the beginning

The next day as I'm walking to the cafeteria I see a guy fall dropping some books and papers all over the floor. I decide to walk past because honestly it's not my problem but unfortunately once I'm in his line of sight he decides to call out to me. "Hey sorry do you think you could help me pick this stuff up? I shouldn't have tried to balance all of it on top of each other" he says clearly regretting his actions. I start picking things up quietly, not making an effort to make conversation and once we're finished I decide to turn and go. 

"Wait! What's your name?" he asks preventing me from leaving. "y/n" I state and wait for him to continue on with whatever he had planned to say. "Well y/n would you mind helping me carry this stuff over to the music building? I'm just worried I might drop it all again" he says taking all of the heavy books and hoping that I'll pick up the folders full of sheet music. I stand there for a second trying to calculate the time it would take me to help him out and if I can fit it into my schedule. 

"If you help me, I'll buy you lunch" he says with a bright almost perfect smile aside from his cooked front tooth. Thinking about it now with that incentive clearly tips the scale, providing him with a favorable result. I wordlessly pick up the things he couldn't manage to carry and wait for him to lead the way. "You don't talk much do you?" he chuckles giving me a sideways glance. "Not unless it's necessary" I say and continue to follow hoping I'll get this over with so I can get back on schedule.

"So...what's your major?" he says obviously trying to maintain a conversation with me. "Computer Engineering" I answer giving his as short of answers as possible. I'm not one for casual conversation, let alone conversation at all. Like I said, only when necessary. "I'm Jimin by the way, and if you couldn't guess already my major is music. Well, music and dance but my course load this semester is very music centric" I nod my head and he decides to keep rambling which seems to be something he's used to doing.

From the casual glances we're getting it seems like he's pretty well known in this department. "Hey Jimin you down to go grab some lunch in a sec?" a guy in a big group of people yells out. "Nah that's okay, I promised to buy y/n lunch for helping me out" he says motioning to me as best as he can with his hands full. "Oh...okay well have fun" the guy says and goes back to one of the many conversations going on over there. 

I turn my head and look back up at Jimin confused, "You could've just given me enough for the cafeteria and have gone with them" I say hoping to brush him off and go back to my solitude. "I'm not gonna buy you food from the cafeteria silly, let's go somewhere! There's a cool pizza place right outside of campus that I've been wanting to check out. You wanna go?" he asks asks and nods towards the classroom that we're meant to leave these things at. "I guess" I shrug not really caring at this point. Since my class doesn't start for another two hours I guess I could afford to go off campus to eat for a change, especially since it's free. 

As we make our way into the pizza place (creatively named Pizza Planet) we're greeted by a pretty big crowd but luckily we're able to find a table near the entrance right away. "Welcome in" someone yells letting us know they saw us come in and they'll be with us in a moment. "This place is pretty cool huh? He says referring to the theme that seems to be trendy these days. "Spaceships, nice" I say barely looking up while scanning the QR code to get the menu.

"Have you never watched the movie Toy Story?" he says, surprised that I don't have a better reaction to it. "No I'm not big on American movies or whatever. My family really only showed us media that was Korean or Japanese" I say hoping to show that I'm not interested on elaborating on the topic any further and luckily before he can say anything again our server comes to our table. 

"Welcome to Pizza Planet guys, what can I get you?" he says with a bright smile until his glance falls on me. For some reason his expression changes to that of annoyance and I'm slightly confused but not enough to comment on it. "Do you know what you want y/n?" Jimin asks me and I take a quick glance over the menu and settle on the most expensive item. It's a free meal so might as well milk it for all it's worth.

Jimin places his order and the server looks back down at me and asks if we wanted anything else to which Jimin denies. "You guys do student discounts though right?" he asks holding out his card and the server takes his eyes off of me to inspect his student ID and confirms his suspicions. 

Once he hands him back his student ID the server's gaze for some reason falls back on me. "Do you need to see my ID too?" I question suddenly weirded out by his glaring. "No" he says full of spite, pushing up the bridge of his glasses. "Okay well then you can go now, don't you have other people to serve?" I say shooing him off, to which he looks down at me with utter confusion and opts to just turn away to go put in our order instead of making an further discussion. 

"Are you okay?" Jimin asks, clearly aware of the weird tension between the server and I. "Yeah I'm fine, he was just acting really weird" I say and shake it off for the time being. "Do you know him?" he asks tilting his head at me. "Why would I know a random guy in a pizza place?" I say confused as to how this all connects in his head. "Well because he goes to school with us, I believe his name is Jungkook, I had a class with him last semester and he seemed like a cool guy or so I thought. Are you guys okay?" he asks clearly concerned, seeing my face contort into an uncomfortable realization when I finally put the pieces together. 

I guess I didn't recognize him because he was dressed so differently while sporting a hat and glasses. Looks like he clearly recognized me though, and he definitely wasn't happy to see me. I watch as Jungkook makes his way out of the shop as another server comes to relieve him. "Would you mind it if I went outside to go talk to him for a second?" I ask already standing up not really caring to wait for his permission. "Oh um yeah okay, I guess I'll just stay here" he says awkwardly while watching me walk out before I'm finally out of his view. 

Looking around I notice that there's a small alleyway between this pizza place and the next building over and I can see a puff of smoke coming out of it as well as hear someone's voice sounding like some sort of argument. I walk over and thankfully it's the exact person I've been looking for. "Hey can you get off the phone?" I say and he looks up glaring at me and he stops leaves a pause in the conversation happening before he tells the person on the phone that he has to go. "What do you want?" he says before taking a drag off of his cigarette. 

"We need to talk" I say seeing if he's open to it. "So talk" he says and purposefully blows smoke in my direction which leaves me having to wave away the smoke and clear my throat before I'm able to start. "I owe you an apology" I start off, "No shit you do" he mumbles under his breath. "Are you gonna let me talk or should I just go back inside?" I say getting short with him. "Yeah go back to your boyfriend, see if I care" he spits out and throws his cigarette on the floor to stomp it out before pushing himself up off the wall and making moves to walk off.

"He's not my boyfriend, in fact not that it's any of your business but we just met today and the only reason I'm here is because he offered me a free meal for helping him carry some stuff across campus" I say in one breath and open my mouth to continue "That doesn't sound like you" he interrupts laughing bitterly at my story. "Well it's the truth and you can ask him yourself if you really don't believe me" I say crossing my arm, becoming aware that this has now become my defensive stance of choice against him.

"No that's fine I believe you, I just find it adorable that you could be so food motivated. Helping out a perfectly good stranger and then making a trip with him off campus. That wasn't very smart of you y/n" he says taunting me. "Just because you're older than me doesn't mean that you get to talk down to me" I say getting even more irritated at this situation. "That's funny that you say that" he says getting closer until he's sure to tower over me, "because it looks like I have to love" he says trying to get some sort of reaction out of me. 

I'm not sure exactly what it could be I decide to take a step back but as I do I find myself slipping on something and I mentally brace for impact but it never comes, now seeming to notice a firm grasp on my waist instead of my back on the cold hard street. "Be careful there y/n, we wouldn't want to have an accident on our hands" he says amused at our forced proximity and my facial expressions because of it. I get back up on my feet and push him away after I've sure I regained my balance. "I apologized okay? Now stop being so hostile, it's annoying" I say while straightening out my clothes. "But I like seeing the faces you make when I'm annoying you" he says with a smirk. 

"What faces? I don't make any faces" I deny. "Why don't you go look in the mirror pretty, I'm sure you'll see why I like it so much" he says before walking past me. "Hey where are you going? Aren't you going to apologize too?" I call after him before he gets too far. "Sorry love, I've gotta go back to work, why don't we pick this up later?" he says sending me a wink before opening the door and walking inside. "But I don't want there to be a later" I say under my breath kicking the rocks that I had no doubt slipped on just moments ago. I shake myself out of whatever headspace he had me in and take a deep breath trying to calm myself down. 

I've never had a rush of so many emotions running through me before, and the only other times it has gotten close to this it seems like Jungkook has been the one to triggered them. I groan and make my way back inside as well and I sit back down at the table not making an effort to say a word to Jimin. "So how did it go? It seemed like he was pretty happy when he walked in" he says intrigued by our polar opposite returns with me being the one who looks upset now. "He's happy because he was able to irritate me and get a reaction out of me. Ugh I should've never went out there" I groan and take a drink of my water.

"Why did you end up going out there?" he questions, clearly interested in the story behind our weird behaviors. "I said some things that were probably interpreted as being mean, I'm not the kind of person who cares much about others but I'm adult enough to admit that what I said was out of line" I say rolling my eye irritated that I let him get the best of me time and time again, but for some reason I end up being the bad guy.

"I swear this man is going to put me in an early grave" I say and then speak of the devil Jungkook shows up with our order. "That's not very nice, are you already trying to be mean to me again" he pouts jokingly. "No but you are being rather rude listening in on people's conversations" I roll my eyes and go back to taking a drink of water. "It's not my fault that you're talking about me right in front of me. Anyways is there anything else I can get you guys?" he asks looking between the two of us.

"No I think we're all set" Jimin responds sending me a smile which I return with a nod. "What about you pretty? Do you need anything else from me?" Jungkook says leaning towards me and tucking my hair behind my ear to see my face better. To which I respond to by choking on my water while also spilling some on the table. "Shit y/n are you okay?" Jimin asks clearly concerned for my welfare. I cough a few times and send him a thumbs up trying to calm my coughs down. "I'll go get you guys some napkins" Jungkook chuckles walking off. 

"Man I swear guys like him think they can get away with anything just because they're more attractive than the average male" he says rolling his eyes at him and handing his napkins over to me. "Thanks" I say and clean up as best as I could while we wait for the rest of the napkins. "It's fine I'm over it" I say clearing my throat hopefully for the last time right as Jungkook returns with more napkins.

"Sorry guys I was just teasing, your meal's on me this time okay?" he says giving us both a charming smile. "You sure?" Jimin asks looking surprised as ever. "Yeah it's the least I could do for interrupting you guys and making y/n upset" he says but I can tell he's still teasing me even though he's behaving in front of Jimin. 

"Thank you so much" Jimin says giving him a thankful shallow bow. "It's fine don't mention it, also you can call me Hyung if you want to, I don't mind" Jungkook offers, clearly trying to get on Jimin's good side. This whole act he's putting on is ridiculous, I haven't known him for long but I can sure as hell tell when people are lying. "Okay, thank you Jungkook hyung" he says and smiles back at me. "You can call me Oppa if you want to y/n" he says offering it to me as well, waiting for me to take the bait. 

"Jungkook is just fine for me, I'll call you JK if you want me to, but that's it" I say not bothering to show any sort of respect and grace to the person who just bought my meal which is probably cold by now. "Aw come on just once?" he says mercilessly taunting me still. "Don't you ever get tired of being a pain in the ass?" I say finally fed up with all of his antics "Nope" he says popping the P at the end before leaning down to whisper in my ear "You look cute when you're feisty" he says making sure to blow on my neck again making me shiver slightly. 

I stand up abruptly and he straightens his posture and takes a step back giving me the tiniest bit of room to pass by. "Jimin I'm leaving if you want I'll wait for you outside so we can take the food back to campus" I say and make moves to leave as quickly as I can, not missing the way Jungkook chuckles at me on the way out. "Um yeah I'll be out in a second. Hyung do you think you could box this up for us?" he asks using the new term he had been encouraged to use. "Sure, see you around y/n" he says making sure I hear it before the door closes behind me.  

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[fantasy-mixtapes]

Gorgug Thistlespring Junior Year Playlist: Side A

Heres Gorgug's playlist! Literally the sweetest ever, deserves the world and more. Spoilers for Episodes 1-10

Genres Include: Alt Rock, Anti-Folk, Punk, Metal

1. Dashboard, Modest Mouse

Well, it would've been, could've been worse than you would ever know Oh, the dashboard melted but we still have the radio Oh, it should've been, could've been worse than you would ever know Well, you told me about nowhere Well, it sounds like someplace I'd like to go

Ok nothing made me laugh harder than the image of the Hangvan beat to shit and Gorgug still having to drive it back for two days straight. TWO DAYS STRAIGHT. Despicable. Deplorable. Hilarious.

2. The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton, Laura Jane Grace

When you punish a person for dreaming their dream Don't expect 'em to thank or forgive you The best ever death metal band out of Denton Will, in time, both outpace and outlive you Hail Satan, Hail Satan, tonight Hail Satan, hail, hail

This song is less of a 1 to 1 representation of Gorgug's situation and more like a song that, if he heard it at this specific time in his life, would utterly destroy him. I am really never gonna forgive Porter for the way he treated Gorgug, and as an educator, I never ever want to make anyone feel the way these fake people felt in their fake game. While this song is originally (and famously) by The Mountain Goats I really like the Laura Jane Grace cover. And I love it for Gorgug as a kind of wink to @rabdoidal 's transfem Gorgug hc, which is another thing I absolutely love.

3. Overbite, Sincere Engineer

Could have been a doctor if I really cared enough But I didn't have it in me I got distracted by a bunch of stuff I'm so stupid and empty My mind just wasn't in it And neither was my heart ... I'm not basing my intelligence on some fucking letters And now that it's over I did what I was told I had to do But I still feel just about as dumb as I used to I still feel just about as dumb as I used to

Gorgug Thistlespring took FOUR YEARS of classes. He did that. He did it and he fucking crit. He fucking got straight As on Artificer and didn't flunk Barbarian, which is basically a genius-level thing to do. Fuck Porter, and honestly? fuck Henry Hopclap for letting a 17-year-old do this to himself when he could have just confronted Porter himself LIKE HE WAS SUPPOSED TO LIKE AN ADULT

4. Dragged Across the Finish Line, Sincere Engineer

I'm not trying to win I'm just trying to finish I don't know when it ends But I'm counting the minutes And I'm counting on you Yeah, I'm counting on you I remember when I knew it 'cause I saw it in your eyes And I did what I had to, I dragged you across the finish line It would be so nice If you could do that for me this time

Is this the second song in a row by Sincere Engineer on this 6 song playlist? Yes, it is, and I am not apologizing for it because it's perfect. Also, Sincere Engineer sounds like a band name that Gorgug would think of because that's what he is. Also I really like the way this kind of makes a parallel to Gorgug helping his friends (it's gorgug keep going) and them helping him do well in his classes with studying and everything.

5. Terrifyer, AJJ

Then it got personal, I saw my rage I just wanted to rage, but all I got was tired I tried to walk to the building, but the beauty it brittled me I tried to talk to the waiter, but the beauty gentled me I ran away from the security guard Because security guards dishearten me I said goodbye to my dignity Said goodbye to my dignity

I know that the structure of an adventuring school is different than something in the real world, and if we were to apply the current utilitarian models of education towards a system that prioritizes people who freak out and fight stuff and not just people who can churn out content and do services, it would make sense that teachers in this system can freak out on students and that's like normal, but I'm gonna say the most lukewarm take ever and say it's fucked up that Porter kept bending the rules for Fig and didn't do fucking anything for Gorgug, just to say that it was to "make him embrace his rage"

Like if we're gonna prioritize class excellence, then Porter should have been more than happy to help Gorgug find a class in which he felt more comfortable, even if, at the end of the day, Porter thought Gorgug should ultimately drop Barbarian.

6. St. Anger, Metallica

And I want my anger to be healthy And I want my anger just for me And I need my anger not to control And I want my anger to be me And I need to set my anger free And I need to set my anger free And I need to set my anger free Set it free

I have mixed feelings about the way Gorgug finally got his MCAT signed, because, like - yes, anger and rage aren't necessarily bad, and while Gorgug initially was repressing his anger in season 1, I really think that isn't the case anymore. And yet we have Porter pushing rage so hard in the "corrupting rage" season.

I truly believe that anger can be a beautiful and natural thing, that it keeps you safe in certain situations, that it shows you when you are being mistreated and lets you advocate for yourself. And I think that that is a lesson that a lot of the bad kids need to learn, specifically Kristin, Riz, and even Adaine (with the transition to using a sword and also the whole deal with Adaine's furious fists). But Gorgug already learned that lesson. Sometimes you don't have to be angry????

[starseneyes]

Chenford - Lucy Chen / Tim Bradford - The Rookie - Season 5 - Ep 19

"A Hole in the World" AKA Clothes Call Back Night

Folks, when that first sneak peek came out, I dissolved into laughter in the dining room, and my husband had to momentarily question my sanity (just like every Sunday afternoon). It hit on practically every discussion point from the Chenford Twitterverse over the past few weeks.

I had to sit here and give the world's smallest round-of-applause-by-one to the team behind The Rookie for putting that out there. Genius way to get a lot covered in a short amount of time.

SPOILER ALERT: If you want a spoiler-free take on what's going on in Chenfordland, I'm sorry, you're in the wrong place. Come back when you're ready to be spoiled. Or don't come back at all! You're welcome to do as you choose.

For those about to rock, I salute you! So, let's dive in.

Lucy studying with note cards, written notes, and likely a practice test is just so on-brand, and I kinda love that we start the scene with her in her element.

The domesticity of Chenford never fails. It's insane to remember that as of their first kisses in the midst of undercover preparation (and under covers, of course) was only Tim's third time in that apartment, and first time there out-of-uniform.

Less than a season later, he's practically living at her place (while I head-canon Kojo is doing a great job helping his nephews with the transition to Los Angeles and playing in their yard).

And is Tim wearing the 4x01 almost-sleepover (heh) hoodie!? It might be the same bottoms, too! If they dug those up (and God bless whoever either saved them or bought duplicates), that's just amazing. I had a mini-geek out, and I bet I'm not the only one!

And for whatever reason, Tim's wearing shoes with this outfit, and I can't tell if that's because he instinctively put them on, or someone thought we wouldn't be seeing his feet in the shot. But, it made me chuckle because I'm hoping it's the former.

And is Lucy's hair being held up by a pen!? Okay, I'm officially jealous. I'm of the "chopsticks in hair" generation, and I always needed two. My friends could stick a good ole Number 2 in their hair and be good for the day. My hair's so fine and straight that I just couldn't do it. Rock it, Lucy Chen!

"Hey." "Hey." "When did you get in?" "Uh, depends. What day is it?" "That bad, huh?"

We're getting the first-blush look at these long hours we heard so much about. Remember, Tim's predecessor was dead on his feet. Yes, he had triplets at home, but that was on top of the brutal Metro hours.

"Look, I'm 80% sure it's, it's Thursday." "It's Tuesday."

Yes, it is! And we're all cozied up to our couches, beds, floors, recliners, and dining room tables to soak up the Chenford goodness. And mmmm, does it go down smooth!

"I stayed up anyways. Thought maybe I'd get lucky and he'd turn himself in."

Girlfriend. Girl. Friend! Did you really just use an undercover Tim/Lucy-ism? Throwing me straight back to 5x01 and Lucy/Juicy wondering if they could get lucky three times in the same day.

Lucy definitely wants to get lucky. But Metro hours aren't the best for getting busy, it seems.

"Oh, babe."

And there we've got the long-awaited pet name!! We still don't know what Tim calls Lucy (could also be Babe), but I saw the Twitterverse start to spin in the opposite direction at this particular name-drop.

Lucy Chen, how can you slay an entire population with a single word? You so don't know your power.

Tim sits next to the love of his life at her dining area smiling. He spent so much time last week trying to prove to the camera crews that he wasn't a softie. But we all know the truth. Tim Bradford is soft for those he loves—especially the love of his life.

His eyes trail to the notes spread atop the counter as his hand trails to her thigh.

Can we completely see it? No. But there's enough anecdotal evidence based on the placement of Tim's arm in the two-shot to conjecture, so I'm rolling with it.

Last time I didn't roll with the evidence, y'all crowded into my comments to remind me I was very wrong. It was a fun time.

"What's all this?" "What?" *arm smack*

Y'all, Lucy is so me in this moment. And I only say that because I'm older and she's fictional. To say I'm Lucy would mean I'm fictional, right? And (as far as I know) I'm real. Unless it's a Deckard in Blade Runner situation... in which case... I'm already Rachel.

But the affectionate arm smack is a total Rachel move (as my husband would confirm).

"I'm studying for the Detective's Exam." "Since when?" "I didn't tell you?"

I've seen folks jumping all over Lucy for "not telling Tim about something life-changing", but it'd be great if that could stop. Have you ever loved someone so much that you shared everything with them? I have. I tell Matthew everything.

And, yet, there are still times I'm convinced I've told him everything only to find I imagined the conversation because our lives are just too busy.

Look, Lucy and Tim already have demanding jobs with demanding hours. Yes, her going Detective would constrict their off-time more, but they're already grappling with the realities of cops-in-love juggling duty to a profession they earnestly adore and investing in a still-fairly-new romance.

It's not a choice of omission on her part. It's the overwhelm of juggling combined with the fact that she does tell him everything, so she assumed he already knew.

Communication issue? Clearly! Completely normal? Absolutely!

For goodness sake, Tim didn't even know what day it was. Living in a constant state of exhaustion and somehow functioning is my normal, so I can tell you that try as you might, something might slip through the cracks.

"If I'm gonna work undercover, the best move is to become a detective in some division like intelligence or narcotics, right?" "Right."

First off, Lucy Chen promotion-time, baby! I know a lot of us have been waiting for the moment when she'd get to move up. Heck, Aaron made P2 before she got to move up, and it's driven me nuts.

Look, I have no idea what a realistic timeline is in the real world. But Nolan's Golden Ticket allowed him to move up. Nyla moved up. Angela moved up. Tim's moved up. It's about damn time my fictional bestie got her turn.

Second, Supportive Tim Supremacy for the Win! Like, once he's on the right page, he doesn't skip a beat. Since I am married to the most supportive man in the world, I'm grateful Lucy's gonna marry the most supportive man in The Rookie world.

"So you got the tap." "Harper and Lopez are backing me."

Look at the glee on our girl's face! And that little chuckle from Tim? Oh, swoon!! Yes, I am a sucker for a supportive partner.

If you knew the number of times over the last near-20 years that this man has had my back, you'd shake your head and wonder why he's stuck around with how many times I've leaned on that support. Supportive partners make my weary heart happy.

"All I have to do is score in the top 12, which-" "Which you will."

BAM! Because Lucy Chen can do anything. Tim once held her hand (yes, it was a handshake, go with me here...) and told her to never let anyone tell her she couldn't do something.

Translation: Lucy Chen can do anything and Tim Bradford earnestly believes that.

And Lucy feels that support. In all of her relationships—friendship, romantic, familial—she has yearned for support. Sadly, the most supportive of her friends is gone. Her parents are dead to me (I hope the Mother's Day flowers Lucy sent were dried and shriveled like her mother's heart).

And her last boyfriend tried to persuade her to walk away from her dreams. Contrast that with Tim Bradford who was willing to push her towards them, even when that meant pushing her away from him. And now, as they're together, Tim is still supporting her without question.

My husband is that way. I often ask him about things. Not because he rules me (nope. I'd never survive a relationship like that), but because I believe in communication. So, I'll talk things out with him, and before I offer him my reasoning he says, "Do it." That's been his general answer to me for nearly two decades.

So, seeing Tim mirror my beloved plastered a grin on my face so wide I was approached on the street to be in the sequel to SMILE.

Lucy's got a smile on her face, too, as she hums out her appreciation and leans in for the kiss.

Special Shout Out to the DP and Director for giving us that two-shot with push-in of the kiss with the loud LIPSMACK to counterbalance Chenford's last apartment kiss/near-kiss that left me wondering if coffee tumblers made kissy sounds as the hot liquid settled.

I feel like someone on the decision-making team was like, "They want to see lip locks? No fucking way they'll miss this one! This'll shut them up."

No way to miss Tim leaning on the counter with one arm (bringing him closer to Lucy's height, because this man is taller than her in both legs and torso). And we actually see lips-meeting-lips.

Though it's a simple-enough kiss, there's suction there, which helps imply action and intention rather than passivity. Wow, I'm a weirdo analyzing a kiss this deeply, but whatever. It's my Meta, I'll over-analyze if I want to. It's square-kissing versus Tim's top-lip-sucking action he reserves for more passionate moments.

And that's beautiful. Because not every kiss is about undressing. Some kisses are about being beautifully exposed and fully accepted and loved. That's Tim and Lucy in this moment.

Tim is the supportive lover of her dreams. Lucy is the supportive lover of his dreams.

In a world where both of them grew up feeling unloved and unsupported for one reason or another, they have found more than a safety net in one another—they've found home.

Tim's affectionately rubbing her arm, and she is completely relaxed in his love.

"Well, I guess we should get used to not seeing each other so much."

The Metro move afforded them more time together than Lucy switching stations would have. But this latest move for her will add to her hours.

It's not a reason not to make this move. But... there's another move these two could make together. *hint hint* The kind that involves one set of keys for two lives? *hint hint*

Lucy deserves this. Hands down. And Tim knows that. But he also has a lot of trauma where UC and working long hours with someone he loves. It ended in heartbreak.

Now, Tim doesn't believe that's where he and Lucy are headed... but I think a small part of him in the back of his mind fears it. And that's something the two of them need to talk out.

Also, can we note the interesting choice to use the kiss as an opportunity to change angles? We went from being behind the counter aimed toward the windows to being in front of the windows aimed at the kitchen.

I'm not sure of the motivation for the move, but the film minor in me made note of it. Fairly classic technique.

"Mm, right. Yeah. Between Detective Hours and Metro Hours..." "Well, it's okay. We'll figure it out."

Tim winks to her as he departs, echoing Lucy's words to Tamara when they were first confronted with the difficulties of navigating work and love.

"Is that the sign up list for the Detectives exam?" "Two weeks to go." "I'll be ready." "I have no doubt about that."

Nyla has been a champion for Lucy for a long time. She was the first one to see Lucy's aptitude for undercover, and she's the one who prepped and primed her for her first solo op.

Love seeing women supporting women. There are too many shows that pit woman-against-woman in the name of drama.

Yes, it happens. I had a coworker once who was the most backstabbing person you could ever meet. I once told my boss that I thought she was coming for my job. My boss, of course, told me I was overthinking.

Two weeks later my boss called me into her office to tell me that I was right. Yeah, I knew I was right.

But there were also really amazing women who I worked with—women who uplifted you, who helped you when things were tough, who excelled at the give-and-take of being coworkers.

It's nice to see that type of relationship amplified on a show like this.

"No way you make Top 12. One of the detectives has it out for you. No matter how well you do on the written, they're going to sink you on the Oral."

Smitty might be the unreliable narrator 90% off the time, but that 10% can be crucial, and Lucy's smart enough to be aware of that.

"So you won't be making detective. But, um, there's other career paths, right?"

Aaron can be direct, and that music cue made it seem like we needed to smile and laugh, but it felt pretty final, actually.

I don't want to see anything taken away from Lucy. She's put in so much work and watched as Nolan was promoted ahead of her. As her best friend was taken from her. She helped Tim get promoted.

But now it feels as if her own career is standing still, and I selfishly want more for Lucy than just Chenford.

I am not of the opinion that a relationship can fulfill your every need. In fact, I encourage my husband to go out with his friends and do things without me. I think it's healthy for us to have different interests, even though many overlap. He supports the fact that I love working and abhor the idea of being a stay-at-home mother.

Our relationship works for us. Everyone wants something different in their relationship. But I feel like Lucy really wants to do something more and move forward in her career. And if that's what she wants, I want it for her.

Ball Camera

Anyone else having a BB-8 geek out moment? Or is that just me? Also, we've come a long way from Tim pushing his chest camera into a room with his baton.

"Hey, Harper. Uh, Tim is still in with IA." "Look the Officer Involved Shooting Interview is very thorough. Tim's fine."

Tim is not fine, and his girlfriend wife knows it. Maybe he'll be fine career-wise, but Lucy's worried about more than that. She's worried about his state of mind.

"Hey, Chen. I've got news for you." "It's not a great time Smitty." "It's about the Detective exam. The detective blocking you is Prim."

Ohhhh, that name. I remember that name. From the five-player trade. Lucy tried so hard to be discrete, but as soon as it got out there, it was only a matter of time for the Cop Gossip of this bizarre High School extension to take over.

"I did warn you." "I know."

And we all knew that it was going to come back around, at some point. Is it wrong that I wish Lucy didn't have to deal with this fall out?

And much as this is Nyla's "I told you so" moment, she takes no pride in it. That's why we don't hate her in this moment. She is right and she doesn't like it any more than Lucy does.

"Hey. Let him talk to Grey first." "Yeah."

Lucy wants so much to go to his side. Her Tim Sense is tingling as soon as he walks by, but his brain is on the next thing that needs to be done. He's on autopilot, and she can see it.

Look, Tim's no stranger to having to pull the trigger. That doesn't make it any easier. Tim values human life, so ending one is never going to be a light matter.

And pulling the trigger on someone who wears the uniform? For Tim, that's gotta be even harder.

Remember, this is the guy who stayed inside the lines for years and stood by while racism ran rampant. He rationalized it away, right? But, then he started to really face and confront the darker elements and systemic injustices inherent to the Force.

This is another extension of that—a truly awful cop who used their influence, position, and authority to kidnap and murder little girls. Yes, Tim pulled the trigger because he was about to be the one buried if he didn't. But it doesn't make it any easier.

"Hey, you know you had to take the shot." "I know." "Just because he wanted to die doesn't mean he wasn't dangerous." "I know."

Even Grey can see that Tim's veil is slipping. He is a human being, damnit, and he feels this shit.

Grey stands, trying to make a connection, to get closer to Tim, to approach him man-to-man. But the words coming out of his mouth echo typical talking points of the Badge.

Grey sighs, dropping the list of "reasons". He tries another tactic. My favorite tactic—asking.

I worked for a humanitarian non-profit for almost a decade, and my favorite part of the work was our policy of "Ask, Don't Tell". We never walked into a disaster zone with a game plan. Too many organizations do that, and it doesn't address the immediate needs of the community.

Instead, we would ask what was needed. And I think in life that's also a damn good strategy.

"Is there anything I can do?" "Can I get back to you on that?" "Take your time."

This I love. Two men meeting in the middle. Acknowledging that sometimes shit just sucks and nothing you can say will change that.

But, also, Grey's abandoning the "just throw things at it until something sticks" tactic to earnestly ask what Tim would have him do. And that's so much deeper than empty words.

And the fact that Tim Bradford, who never asks for help, leaves it open ended? That's growth.

Yes, it's important that he lets Lucy in more and more. But it's also important that he lets others in. This isn't just about growing in a romantic relationship, but growing as a person.

Yes, I know I harp on this a lot. But I've seen too many good people backslide horribly because they invested all their growth in a relationship rather than in themselves.

Relationships are great. I'm in one. I'm in a damn good one. But my healing and growth are mine and have to be separate from Matthew. If he dies tomorrow, suddenly, my progress can't die with him. I have to be able to stand on my own.

And that's what I wish for Lucy and Tim. The standing on their own part, I mean.

"You're a badass. And I'm no slouch."

I need to do Wopez next. I keep saying that when I catch up on Chenford, I need to go back and do Wopez. And lines like this really make me wanna.

"How are you doing with everything?" "I'll be okay."

It's taken a while, but Tim and Lucy have worked their way up to light PDA in the workplace, and I love it for them. Likely, they aren't seeing as much of each other at home, so it's natural that it might leak out more when they're in public.

I love how Lucy briefly has both her hands on his arm. There's something resembling a hug, there, that I love.

She know Tim well enough to know he doesn't want to hug it out at the station. But she's still trying to find her own ways to let him know that she's there for him.

Also: Is this the episode of the comeback clothes!? Because that jacket is totally the one from Season 4, Episode 3 when Tim and Lucy were discussing how people might get the wrong idea about them if she became his aide, right?!

I know one of y'all will correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm leaving it in, because I'm fairly convinced.

Also, Tim and Lucy, y'all didn't need to worry about people getting the wrong idea. We all got the right idea, and y'all are adorable together.

"I want to be helpful." "I know. Thank you."

Her little hand on his chest (right over his heart) is so sweet, but also a little sad. Because she knows that's the part of him that's really hurting right now.

Also, I love Tim thanking her. We're a long cry from all the times when Tim would tell Lucy she was overstepping in the past. Because, they're partners in life, now, and this is her place.

And his little arm tap? It's so cute to get to see them start to be more tactile.

Remember, this wasn't a typical transition. They went from being best friends—the most important relationship in each other's lives—to one-and-only. They had to transition everything over from a very intimate point, already, and add in the layers and figure out what felt right for them as a couple.

But, selfishly I'm loving the light PDA. Feels just about right for them.

Plus, it's more than either of them typically displays at the station with past love interests. Yes, I know there was one kiss way back with an ex of Tim's, but he wanted out of that, so it doesn't count.

"You need help studying? There's no way I would have have scored as well on the Sergeant's exam without you."

Oh, how I love a good call-back. This is going back to Season 2, y'all, and TO Tim era. And I adore the surprise on Lucy's face. She really wasn't expecting him to offer, and it's damn adorable that he did.

Lucy isn't giving up. She knows that Prim's got it out for her, but she's still going after this. And I'm damn proud of her.

"That's right. You owe me." "I don't owe you."

Ah, and there's Tim's bull-headedness coming back to remind us that he's not all warm and fuzzy. And, y'know, it made me chuckle. Because Tim didn't magically change over the course of the show.

Has he healed a lot? Yes. But at the core he was always a tough-outside, smoothie-inside... at least for his people. His trauma and pain caused him to wear that toughness as a roughly-patched-together armor.

And Look. At. Our. Babies. FLIRTING! Lucy even got the finger point in there!

"You owe me." "Okay."

Lucy gets a hand on his open shirt (wow, she has a thing for tugging at his clothing that's unexpected and yet totally in-character), and he's gone. Boy is gone for his girl.

Because Lucy probably wants to spend a little time studying up on other things before they get to the books. And Tim's totally onboard.

And has Lucy been wearing the Valentine's Day necklace most of the episode? It's so small that it's hard to tell, but I think she has. So, we're really owing some love to the Costuming Department this week. Thanks, y'all. We love you.

And I love you! Thank you for reading and taking this ride with me. It's been a really tough few weeks with illness and broken down cars (and bumped into cars) and juggling too many things. So, Chenford night is a nice respite for which I'm thankful.

Did it take Tim and Lucy a while to get comfortable? Sure. I posit this was the first episode written after we got a taste of post-coitus Chenford and folks started vocalizing what they wanted to see out of the duo, because I feel like about 12 boxes were ticked in that first scene alone.

I'm not going to get worked up about the promo for the next episode. If TPTB want to rip my heart out and stomp it, they wouldn't be the first. Actually, the wouldn't be in the first two dozen TPTB to do that.

No, I'm not kidding. When you dream of someday working in television, you watch a lot of television. Inevitably, I ship someone in every show.

But The Rookie's track record with core ships does give me some hope. A little. A microscopic amount. And that's enough, for now.

Stay kind, beautiful humans. I hope to see you on the next.

[sovonight]

since it's come up a couple times, i thought i'd just make a post about it! here we go:

i keep seeing you talk about this xan guy, but who is he?

xan is a potential companion in baldur's gate, the first game in the baldur's gate series. in the vanilla game, he has basic voice lines that play in reaction to commands, other companions, and the locations you're in. in fact, all of his voice lines can be viewed in the "quotes" section on the wiki; that's the extent of the content he has.

wait, i thought he was a full-fledged companion with friendship and romance paths? also, isn't he in baldur's gate 2?

he is, but only with the use of mods!

BG1NPC adds xan's banter, commentary, and romance path to bg1 (alongside a lot of other things, take a look at the readme!)

Xan's friendship path adds xan's friendship path to bg1

Xan BG2 NPC adds xan to bg2, as well as 2 romance paths, a friendship path, and a new soundset

Alternate Xan Soundset for BG2 restores xan's bg1 soundset to him in bg2, because nothing beats the original

if you want to romance him, make sure to play as an elf, unless you're ready for a bit of heartbreak ;( non-elves can romance him for a bit in bg1, but at one point you'll be forced to break it off.

i'm interested in playing the series, but where should i start?

i've broken it down here!

do you have any other mod recs?

i still play with the original (non-ee) games, so a lot of my mods are just widescreen fixes & bug fixes that are already covered in the ee games. but one list i have on hand is glittergear's bg2 mod recs!

why don't you like xan in bg2?

spoilers ahead, but:

i don't agree with his characterization and the execution of his romance paths as a whole

his bonded bg2 romance is worse than his bg1 romance, and intimacy with him almost always involves sex now, when it didn't before

he's been made ridiculously old

he's out of character, and many of his reactions are just odd

i don't agree with his death, and here's more paragraphs why

bonded xan is too ready to serve goddess!charname, when based on past behavior i'd think he would have a firm stance against it

his player-initiated dialogue options are poorly thought out

he was altered to have proficiency in darts instead of slings. darts fucking suck, why would you do this to him

his behavior would hurt radri, a lot

the list goes on

why are you still drawing/writing about him in bg2, then?

i love xan and radri together, i can't just write him out of bg2

😔 i can fix him 😔

but you think xan in bg1 is perfect, right?

not totally, i've always felt like his romance was biased in favor of one personality type

he is SO ace-coded to me, but his author clearly had a different vision for him

there's more, but they're all minor nitpicks compared to my complaints about him in bg2

you've complained a lot about him, so what do you even like about xan??

he's just so ridiculous, in the best ways

he can be snippy and dramatic, but also so kind

i love his romance in bg1

i enjoy his habit of carrying charname for romantic gestures, even though radri is like 200 lbs with light armor, and he's, what, 130 lbs sopping wet? i know, he was probably written with an elven waif of a charname in mind, but it's almost sweeter to think of him going out of his way to make it happen

you keep mentioning radri, but who is she?

my gorion's ward, my bhaalspawn, my charname, my beloved protagonist

she's like the kicked puppy to xan's pathetic kitten

here's an introduction, but honestly, it's easier just to read about them

why do you like the series, but not baldur's gate 3?

baldur's gate 3 has next to nothing to do with the series and should've been named something else

i was disappointed by it when i did play it

there's a sexual overtone over the entirety of the game

i'm tired of romances that put sex first

it's impossible for me to relax and enjoy the game

again, it's a really horny game

i'm just way too ace for it

bg3 overtakes all search results when trying to search for information on bg1 (which, being titled baldur's gate, doesn't get the benefit of a number to set it apart from the other games). sure, filters exist, but that doesn't change the fact that an era of easy information retrieval is over

what do you think about the references to xan in baldur's gate 3?

i want to die

i would rather kill xan myself than let bg3 touch him

it's a small mercy that he wasn't cursed with an actual cameo

[poisonousquinzel]

Harley Quinn (2021 - ) #28: Dawn of DC arc | Writer: Tini Howard | Artist: Sweeney Boo

Covers ♡

What did you want to expand on with this well-established but ever-growing character?

Boo: I feel like Tini is showing new facets of Harley. We get more in-depth with who she is inside and what she wants to be. It's hard not to fall in love with her.

Preview Panels | By Sweeney Boo ♡

What were you most excited to pick up on from Harley's current continuity?

Howard: Harley has friends, a girlfriend, and a good head on her shoulders. All good stuff to pick up and shake around really hard. No, truly, it's a huge relief to have Ivy there. I'm a longtime lover of those two as a couple, and the fact that it's there and real for us to engage with as storytellers is fantastic. It's so freeing to be able to tell that story, and we're working closely with Willow and the Ivy team so that we always know we're on the same page with the girls. It's not unlike how I talk to Chip about Catwoman and Batman. It's all hilariously like my little fan-fiction writer days, kind of delightfully so.

Boo: Her friendships and relationships, especially that one famous girlfriend of hers! *wink wink*

Tini, what were you most excited to see Sweeney bring to life on the page?

Howard: That's a huge spoiler, but I'll say this. Working with an artist like Sweeney is what's given me the freedom to pursue where we're going with this story. We really needed a human rainbow, just an exciting kaleidoscope of an artist who can jump the hell right off the page while also nailing the mundane, little jokes of Harley's life. Sweeney Boo's that artist. Oh, there's a lot of Bud and Lou in this run, too -- I love the way Sweeney draws them.

Sweeney, what were you most excited to illustrate based on Tini's script?

Boo: Drawing Harley's apartment! There is no better way to get into someone's head and get a glimpse of who they are until you see where they live. I wanted to get crazy and really play with that! There are so many intimate scenes of Harley being at home and being cozy with Bud and Lou. It's just so adorable.

Can you share with us what you are most excited for fans to see and experience with this chapter of Harley's life?

Howard: I think Harley's a really unique character, especially for queer women right now, because she's not being forced to be aspirational. She can be foul-mouthed and disastrous and troubled and weird and also be a great character we're always rooting for. Our run is really about Harley coming to terms with her position in the DC Universe at large, about what your career path is if you're too big for primetime but not up for the Justice League or the Legion of Doom. It's also a love letter to the funniest parts of the DC Universe. To me. If there's one thing I think a Harley Quinn book needs to be, it's funny, and the DC Universe is so weird and can be so, so funny. Like, think of the five funniest things that are [actually] important DC plot points, and I guarantee one of them is in this run.

Boo: Harley's trying to do her best, even if sometimes she hasn't the most honest of ideas. I think seeing her trying to grow is very relatable, but for her, it might involve big hammers and dynamite.

[thatblondeperson]

Do you have your own ranking of Tim and Stephanie's suits?

Sure, I'll give 'em scores out of 10.

Starting with Tim:

The Classic: 10/10. Who doesn't love the original? It was a brand new take on Robin and it stood out and still does to this day given that it's the one most seen on merchandise. This suit became the default in a way, and for good reason. It's simple, functional, and timeless. Great suit.

The "my best friend is dead" Robin suit: 7/10. I don't hate it, it's just not as good as the original. The more simplistic and darker color scheme is indicative of not just Tim's meaning for the colors, but the decline in a lot of his optimism. This was the start of his downward spiral and he never really came back from this era. It's a good suit, I wouldn't call it great. She's basic (affectionate).

Red Robin (the 2009 run): 9/10. I would put this at a perfect 10 if he didn't have the stupid cowl. I hate that thing, and the only saving grace for it is the fact that it could have been there to cover his burn scars. Swap that for the Unternet mask and it would be my fav.

See?

(^Original art by Marcus To, recolored and posted on Reddit)

Unternet Red Robin: 10/10. Ok this one is so cute because it shows just how much Tim still looks up to Dick. This is basically a rebranded Nightwing suit, complete with finger stripes, and it's adorable. This is what Tim envisioned himself as in the Unternet and is that not just precious? And I love this dorky mask. It's got a giant bird beak and it's so stupid that it's endearing as hell.

Swan Queen Red Robin: 2/10. Not sorry, I hate this suit. I don't know what it's trying to be but it's a mess. There's too much going on and it needs to be simplified. I hate the tiny logo on his chest.

This stupid shit: 0/10. What the fuck is this?

The Rebirth Robin suit: 10/10. This suit is spectacular. Plays on the original but modernizes it in a way that still feels like Tim. I love this suit, it is exactly the kind of look I would want for Tim in this day and age as Robin.

Drake: 0/10. Burn it. I don't think anything needs to be said. We all agree, yes? Good.

Not going to speak on the video game suits but just know that I hate all of those too.

Moving on to Steph:

The Classic: 10/10. It's campy, it's colorful, I love it. She made this herself and I think that makes it even better. It's such a classic look for the time and I think it's wonderful. Look at that giant shoulder strap. What is that for? No one knows. It went through a few variations over the years. The shoulder strap got smaller but so dud the outward facing underwear and they gave her basically a thong. Not cool, DC.

Stephanie's homemade Robin suit: 2/10. This is just pure over sexualization and I hate it. Why does it have to be a loose crop top? Why is it so tight?

Stephie the Hedgehog: 9/10. This one is also way too boob heavy but I like the overall look better. The skirt is still debatable as far as movability goes, but the hair is so great that I'm just going to ignore the flaws, silently dock it a point and move on.

Spoiler 2.0: 8/10. It's a good suit. This is the one I based my cosplay off of. It's simplistic but it still has the essence of the original with those ridiculous boots and gloves. I still love this, I just like the original better.

Katavi: ?/10. I don't know how to comment on this design. I love that Stephanie just wanted to help and took up a new persona in a new place to do so. I think the design is lovely but I can't speak on whether it's as appropriate worn by a white character. I think character wise, it makers sense for Stephanie, but I don't know what to say about it past that.

Batgirl (the 2009 run): 10/10. I'm skipping past the borrowed suit since this suit is specifically Steph's, and it's perfection. It's classic but with the touch of purple to make it hers. It's simple, but it's great. I'd love to have this suit someday.

Nightwing: 10/10. This is a great suit that we were robbed of. I would love this look more with Stephanie's short bob that she had for a while, but this look is so great.

The New52 suit: 10/10. This may come as a shock considering my distaste for the Ew52, but I actually really love this Spoiler suit. It's a great mix of some of the elements of her classic Spoiler suit, heavily mixed with her Batgirl 2009 look, and modernized in a way that feels very Steph. It's scrappy looking, idk. I just like it. I really love the half mask on it too.

Future's End: 6/10. I feel like it's missing a lot. It's drab.

Future State: 0/10. This is Rose Wilson.

The Batgirls suit: 7/10. This is just the Rebirth look with a purple bat slapped on. Lazy. I still like the look, but I wish they did something new.

There we go! Best I can do on this anon, I hope you enjoyed!

[hashtagloveloses]

hi hashtagloveloses,

I'm a new user and saw your post about reblogs. Is there anything else I should pay attention to? Could you tell me if there is a post or guide or something I can consult on how tumblr works? I'm still getting really lost here and have trouble finding anything.

there’s actually an official staff blog with a bunch of good tips called @tips everybody should know about! but off the top of my head also:

1) make sure you have a profile photo. you don’t need a cover photo you can even just turn that off in your blog settings. this is to make sure people don’t think you’re a bot

2) have a different username here than you have other places and don’t share personal information of any kind here (huge mistake i made….). despite what some people say you do not need to share anything about ur sexuality, pronouns, diagnoses, opinions, etc. frankly if i could advise my younger self, i’d say just don’t make original posts or comments at all (if u wanna make commentary in reblog tags maybe?). use a diary or a journal instead of original posts about yourself or your opinions or comments on others’ posts. even if you delete your blog or change your username, the reblogs of things you say live on here forever.

4) reblog instead of like, and tag posts with what they’re about when you post and reblog (this is something i don’t do as much as i should bc im often on mobile and don’t feel like it and only do it for original posts). at least make sure you’re tagging for common content warnings and spoilers. don’t censor words in posts or tags if you’re trying to tag, bc that breaks people’s mute/blocklists. DO censor words/tags if you’re talking about something you don’t want to clog the tag for or attract attention to or something.

5) if you personally want to keep track of original posts, asks, and queued posts, create tags you use for each of those and on mobile manually tag with them every time you do one of those posts, and on desktop you can have an extension do it. in your blog settings you can make like your original post tag one of your “featured tags” if you want easy access, or other people to be able to see, which just means when they hit the search bar on your blog it’s suggested.

6) make sure you go to your dashboard settings and turn OFF “best things first”. i keep on the other algorithmic stuff like showing stuff based on likes as well, and i flip between the various feeds, but most of what you should be doing is following blogs that post or reblog what you like, following the TAGS of things you like, and those will appear chronologically in your regular dash “following” feed.

7) freely block, unfollow, and filter/mute people and topics. do not feel like you have any obligation to anyone. curate your experience on here.

8) turn off submissions on your blog, and turn off anon asks or even asks all together if you don’t want them. you are not obligated to answer every ask or even have an open ask box. you should also take a look at your settings for private messages and replies to set them to what you’re comfortable with.

9) how i use notifications is different than a lot of ppl bc i get a LOT of them but explore how the Activity and notifications page works to your favor, but turn off push notifs and as much as you can. followers, likes, etc, do not matter that much here if you’re not trying to build a following for art or something and you shouldn’t pay attention to it other than just for fun.

10) learn what T*RF, SW*RF, and white supremacist dogwhistles are and how to spot them bc they can still be prevalent on here and you may not realize. a lot of seemingly normal posts about feminism on here can be crypto t*rf shit so you need to learn how to spot it. (those kinds of posts spread to a lot of platforms and people don’t realize….)

11) do not get into discourse on here. of any kind. even if you’re right. some idiot will drain the life out of you arguing with you and people get weird. you’re not gonna convince people online of anything in a discourse fight most of the time and you will only come out of it drained or harassed yourself (frankly this is good advice for anywhere and sometimes even i slip up). in general even on here where engagement is not encouraged as much, every platform has engagement bait and discourse either purposely seeded to piss you off, or if it’s not on purpose it’s still pushed by algorithms.

12) for things like news, etc, this is general online advice but make sure you’re practicing basic media literacy to check how real a headline or a video or something is. what’s the source? how old is it? did they provide sources? etc

13) DO NOT REPOST ART. EITHER FROM HERE OR FROM OTHER WEBSITES. unless the artist says you can repost it (and you need to do so with credit, and look and see if they need to give permission). do not REBLOG reposted art either. you may find it in tags sometimes. do not encourage that behavior.

14) to that same end, do not post AI bullshit here. chatGPT, character AI, voiceover deepfakes, AI videos, etc. don’t do or support those in general but don’t post that shit here

15) in general, and this is something i try to tell people on EVERY platform, remember that what you see people discussing online is often a small minority of what most people think or feel. it may FEEL like everyone is talking about a certain thing, or fighting about a certain thing, but it does not represent the whole. there’s so many discourses where people are like “why do x always say y” and i’m like well they don’t. the very online segment of x often say y bc it gets engagement or bc they are very loud. (this isn’t the case for everything but it happens often for very stupid topics). this isn’t to dismiss important conversations had online by a minority of people that aren’t being discussed wider enough either - bc that also does happen. but that is often for things that are more important than like, the same movie sex scene discourse i see on twitter every 2 weeks.

16) don’t feel any obligation to your “followers”. you are not an influencer you are just here having fun, and your followers follow for the things you reblog, not for you. be FREE.

17) on desktop browser, get the XKit Rewritten extension and go wild with the settings. its a really nice tool and has a lot of good features, like the quick reblog and queue features that give you those auto tags and stuff. (also if you aren’t already using Ublock Origin extension as your adblocker on desktop, get that too).

18) if you have an iphone, apple store limits what they can show you within the app, so if you want to look at more NSFW, the mobile browser version of tumblr is quite decent. but also go to your blog settings on desktop and make sure your settings of what it is showing you on your dash include sensitive content (even if you set it to have a filter over it at first), bc it sometimes autoflags random shit as “sensitive”. also play with your dashboard filters with tags for nsfw content to your comfort - it wont remove it it’ll just put a thing over it so it doesn’t pop up in public accidentally before you click to look at it.

[vex-cti]

[LONGPOST] I just finished... Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth

I wanna write down all my thoughts before I delve into more in-depth online opinions. I'm writing this on the same day as having done the last two chapters of the game, so I may have not had time to process the story completely. However, I've been playing this game for the entire month and I got a lot to say. Obvious spoilers ahead, but I'll still try to keep some things vague enough.

Okay Square Enix, you win, I'll use photo mode

Graphics in video games are like how attractive a dessert looks, it doesn't dictate how it will taste, but it makes you want to try it. Rebirth feels like one of those games that is finally showing what the PS5 is capable of, with environments extremely rich in detail, superb lightning that's both colorful and conveys the right emotion for each scene, this is the prettiest Final Fantasy has ever looked, even compared to 16 which had some optimization issues and dull lightning in some areas, specially towards endgame. No single location in Rebirth feels half-baked, what used to be single screens and flat textures in the original have been completely re-imagined to have their own identity. I will talk about more about the open environments when I talk about gameplay and exploration.

Reliving the moments: Going above and beyond

The cutscene direction for this game is absolutely phenomenal, I love that they have amped up the campiness of the original 7, while also being faithful to the serious and emotional moments. What shines even more in Remake is the excellent writing when it comes to the characters, their performances are full of charisma, and it made it clear to me why the cast of seven ended up becoming so iconic to gaming as a whole. Every scene with these characters interacting, no matter if it was the dullest of sidequests, made everything entertaining. But the best part of Rebirth, like its predecessor, it's when it brings back the iconic moments we all wanted to see. The Junon Parade, Costa del Sol, Red XIII and Cosmo Canyon, Barret and Corel, and many more of these moments have barely altered from how they happened originally, reliving these moments feels like watching a high production TV Series based on a book you loved as a kid. If you love the original FFVII but have no intentions of playing the remake due to how things change, I at least recommend you look up the scenes that do stay faithful.

Some things left me wanting

Still, Rebirth only covers up to the end of Disc 1 section of the story, and has some blatant teases from trailers and the game itself that left me wanting. The Planet's weapons are mentioned and different versions appear, but there's no Diamond or Ruby weapon superboss yet. Both Cid and Vincent make their debuts near the final chapters, but are not playable for now, which left me a little disappointed. And this lets me segway perfectly into the other best part of Rebirth...

Can I just say I love the portraits in this game? Love me some PNGs

When I first played Part 1 of the Remake saga, I felt like I had no idea of what I was doing with the combat, I found the action-hybrid system too complicated and visually cluttered I felt like I was brute forcing every fight and not really enjoying myself. I finished the game and didn't come back to it until early this year where I decided to do Hard Mode for the Platinum, and this time I had a way better time, now understanding the combat system and each fight better. It makes for a flashy, semi tactical game with very visceral and satisfying animations, powers, character building thanks to materia, the importance of positioning, blocking, switching aggro, it felt like the realization of what games like FF12 and 13 aimed to be.

So imagine my surprise when Rebirth made it even better. Fundamentals are still the same, new skills were to be expected, but my favorite new addition are synergy skills. Not only do you get special commands you can perform with your partners in the party with extremely satisfying animations, you also have synergy real time action commands which reward you for being more reactive and agressive, now adding perfect blocks and counters, now every time you play with a different team composition you're gonna feel the difference of having Barret or Red or Yuffie as your partner, as you get access to different skills.

They also help you build ATB for characters not actively controlled at any given time, which is an excellent quality of life improvement. My only nitpick is that despite the menus allowing you to have 3 different party compositions and even allowing you to set the leader for each, Cloud is mandatory. Cloud is of course good at everything, so it's not the worst thing, but it does suck that I can't play as a team of Barret, Red, and Yuffie at any time in the open world. Though you can do that at virtual combat challenges or the colliseum. This feels like an oversight.

Fortunately, this meant I was playing around different characters all the time, because they're all great, and it feels super satisfying to set the right materia for each one according to what you envision them to be and complement their abbilities. Some are obvious: give Yuffie the steal materia, give Aerith healing materia. But who gets to be the mage, the debuffer, the buffer, the tank, that's up to you. I found Red XIII + Darkside materia works extremely well thanks to his Reaper Claw abbility and his health regeneration, sort of like a bestial Dark Knight, great crowd control and support all around. Cait Sith takes some work to get used to, and requires lots of setup, but his luck based gameplay can have some serious benefits, I'm sure he will come in handy in hard mode. Yuffie plays almost identically to her DLC, and she is excellent for handling boss fights with multiple parts or different weaknesses.

Exploring will either be fun or tedious, depends on who you ask

I feel like the other primary component of the gameplay, which is the exploration and traversal, will be a bit more divisive. It takes tropes from standard open world games like towers, points of interest, fast travel, loot locations, hunts, there is nothing new or original about it. However, that doesn't mean it can't be fun. Completing areas feels like I'm playing a collect-a-thon akin to Sonic Frontiers, where while it may not be the most exciting thing in the world, it is very relaxing for me, as I take in the sights and look for ways to get to new areas and find the next rare fiend. What I enjoy about the world design is that areas are not large, but are very packed and designed in such a way where you can't get everywhere by just looking at markers on the map, sometimes you do have to look for clues on the environment to get to where you need to, meaning you're looking at where you're going more than your tracker, which is great, but you still get the benefits of one. So it's a nice compromise, not as open ended as BoTW or Elden Ring, but not as braindead as a Ubisoft game. However, completing these areas can take a while, and if you're like me and plan to do all of them, don't be surprised when each area can take you up to 10 hours if you want to do everything.

"No seriously Cloud, I'm still waiting!" -Sephiroth, 100 hours into your game file

If you remember FF16 (I love that game too btw), you might remember how universally hated the sidequests were, not so much for their stories, but for their large amount and lack of variety. It seems like Rebirth is an active effort to avoid those same mistakes. Most sidequests in this game has you doing something different, have an entertaining story or character development attached to them, or even have you doing something dumb like bringing chickens back to their sweet innocent mother, or following an Ex Shinra employee in some brutal gold saucer challenges. I won't say every sidequest is a winner, at the end of the day, they're still busywork, and never will a game make you feel good saying "Congratulations on your progress, you have unlocked even more sidequests to do!". Still, I have to commend them, they do not bombard you with them, you can do a few at a time and be good for the next area, and the rewards allow your party to access more skills.

They have some of the most fun music too

The sidequest also introduce an excuse to have you do more of the minigames and take on their harder difficulties. And BOY did they add soooo many minigames, I could not believe I was encountering a new one what feels like every hour. There's something both horrifying and admirable about the devs commitment to bring back the spirit of a ps1 classic in this way. Have you noticed that triple AAA games basicly don't do minigames anymore? Yea fishing games are still around I guess, but Rebirth is not ashamed to harken to those videogamey roots and sheer goofiness. Red football, Fort Condor (love the reinterpretation), Super Dolphin Sunshine, and so many more. Enjoy youself with these minigames, and pick your least favorites too because there will be at least one that will make you want to break your controller. Contenders for me are Glide de Chocobo for it's terrible camera, and Gears & Gambits for having an overwhelming amount of Gambits for such a simple minigame (even FF12 had you start with a small amount). Still, there is more bad than good here. What I was not expecting was a brand new card game, akin to Triple Triad in 8 and 14: Queen's Blood.

*Insert Yugioh abridged reference here*

Not only did I not expect a new card game 2 hours into the game, I did not expect it to be so good, and have me thinking about different deck builds, deck synergy, strategies, and ways to one up your opponent with some smart plays. Queen's Blood is an extremely fun time sink and nice break from all the combat and normal exploration. It can be overwhelming at first, and having so many different cards with effects each is a hassle I've seen many not even wanting to bother with, finding some of its rules to be too confusing. I will say that if you're not constantly updating your deck with better cards you won't be making much progress, but you also won't know what cards are better if you don't play enough to get what your objective is, so it's best to start getting into it the sooner you start the game. Do make sure you take note of some of the later puzzles and challenges, as they can teach you strategies to make comebacks on hard duels.Screw the survival challenges, though.

But the journey isn't quite the same, after all

Perhaps the stuff I have the least things to say about, are the new elements to the story, which are more prevalent during the beginning and ending sequences of the game. I was honestly intrigued at the start, the tension and anxiety felt in this unknown timeline Zack has walked into, and the mystery surrounding the true fate of our protagonists, as it shows you bits and pieces of more information the further you progress, I was curious to where things were going. Unfortunately, the ending provided even more questions than answers, and I still feel like it's not as emotionally impactful as perhaps it intends to be, maybe due to the lack of clear information. I understand it wants to keep itself vague with the idea of multiple timelines and universes colliding, or what Sephirot's actual plan is. But it does make things like the Whispers feel even more pointless than when they showed up in Remake, but at least their presence has been reduced, as expected. Areas where changes to the story were most effective were when they were not pointed out to be a product of a split timeline, like the conclusion to the Junon festival, or the Gongaga reactor sections.

But of course, what most people were more curious about, was how was the ending going to change, we all knew it was going to be different no matter what. And while I feel like these convoluted elements do take off some of the emotion of the original scene, there is one element which does seem to align these new events with the emotions of the original: Cloud himself. For he experiences the events of the ending differently from the rest, and it's left unclear how reliable is his perspective. Add Sephiroth's manipulation of Cloud's emotions and he becomes this genuinely creepy and ruthless shell of himself. This new problem does not completely go away by the end, as Cloud is not fully aware of it yet. But with how the new version of the ending has unfolded, it left me with these feeling of doubt and... hollowness, confusion, not sure if to be sad, or hopeful. Which I feel is exactly how Cloud feels as well, as his human nature is questioned.

Despite thinking a faithful story remake would have been more satisfying, I can't deny these new events had me thinking about the story of FInal Fantasy 7 in ways I could connect emotionally to it even more. Perhaps, what this game truly achieved for me, is remind me just how much I love this franchise, for its extremely creative worlds and creatures, to its unique stories and unforgettable characters. Rebirth is a celebration of Final Fantasy, a joy to look and play, to relive and to guess. It's got one more part to prove if these changes to the narrative were really worth it, nonetheless. And honestly, I hope they don't keep relying on vagueness as much.

But when they are not being vague, I promise you, every moment, old or new, will feel exciting.

[tfseeds]

Random TF brainworms

Other TF prompts that have been rattling around in my brain the past year(s), mostly franchise-based:

Slime Rancher 2 - With all the weird future/alien mystery science going on, it's prime free TF-estate. And c'mon, there is NO way Viktor Humphries wouldn't have a way to splice slime DNA for science. A cotton slime-ified Gaius would be so stinking cute.

Speaking of slimes, I was definitely on a slime kick -

Stardew Valley - Basically, story involving getting caught on the wrong end of the witch's temper while cave-delving, and getting a good old fashioned slow-burn curse transforming poor farmer Gaius into a slime. Also plays into my favorite trope of trying to keep the changes hidden - as patches of blue ooze-y spots form around his mid section, he tries to wrap them with cloth to keep it from saturating into his shirt. Plastic wrap is also attempted. Too much clothing is worn during the summer. Hats to cover hair that's more like a jello mold. Close friends who discover the secret using a wheelbarrow to haul the poor unconscious slime-guy home before he puddles all over the Halloween party. Figuring out how to maintain a solid enough form to wear clothes, use tools, etc.

BIG OL FFXIV SHADOWBRINGERS/ENDWALKER SPOILERS BEYOND HERE

FFXIV - Aaaaa there's so much I want to draw and design properly.

The whole light corruption/lightwarden arc of Shadowbringers was absolutely my jam, complete with soul-cracking strain and coughing up light gunk. I'm still not satisfied with my first take on Gaius's lightwarden form. The rough mental concepts: Large and bulky, like Zinogre from MHW. Maybe a semi-quadriped. Hooves on the rear feet. Wings for sure, white mane, gold horns. Blend bull and lion and other creatures.

The thing is I really want to bring a lasting physical representation of the corruption to Gaius's current form. I'm struggling with how to do that. Lots of other WoLs changed their hair white after the events of ShB, but that doesn't fit Gaius. I've been playing with the idea of a glowing scar of some sort, like markings on his neck or maybe chest that he keeps covered. I love using the bandana in his regular fashions and could be a fun way to tie it into his lore.

Throwing in my hella-old Zinogre doodles because I want to capture some of that mid-way feature goodness with Gaius's light corruption.

The whole journey of Shadowbringers is such prime real estate for transformation trauma - budding horns, patches of skin/fur bleaching out, those random soul-crunching episodes as a little more light escapes and furthers the process... All the while having to keep moving forward, despite the quest literally eating him. The other fun part with going sineater is the invisible changes, like a growing craving for aether, and losing the clarity of other senses like physical touch and taste. Gaius's character has always been a boisterous lover of food with a bottomless appetite. It's part of his love language - he makes sure his friends are well fed with snacks and home-made meals. This is something Minfilia/Ryne gets to experience intensely as he does his best to make sure the young girl is well nourished through their travels, and as a way to include her in the family.

There is a whole comic I will probably never get around to drawing, highlighting group meals along their journey - Gaius sharing his travel snacks in Il Mheg, getting her to join them for drinks and a big meal in the Crystarium, forcing a second helping of stew on her in Rak'tika with Runar. But then it comes to a small camp in the Tempest as the Scions overlook the skyline of Amaurot, one last rest before they venture into the final leg of their journey. Ryne is the one who brings a bowl of soup to Gaius, who is sitting apart from the others. The man is already showing extreme lightwarden features which have been spreading since the episode on Mt. Gulg. "I brought you some soup. To keep your strength up," she offers. He turns his one still-blue eye to her and smiles sadly. "Thanks, but I'm not hungry." He wishes he was. He wishes he could still taste anything. He wishes food didn't sit like a rock in his stomach. The look of grief and pity on Ryne's face is obvious.

Just, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. *rolls around in traumatizing-OCs-for-fun brainworms*

I want to tie the whole light corruption in with Gaius's struggle with his Inner Release beast - probably the best and terrible example I could give of what's in my brain is like how Naruto has the fox spirit sealed inside him. Inner Release is a whole other monster or side of Gaius that he harnesses for power, but not without risk of losing himself to it. Like something during the post-ARR banquet breaks it and that's why he takes up Samurai during HW, as a way to learn to control himself with discipline, meditation, and patience. The whole lightwarden thing either corrupts or fuses with his inner release, and maybe he still manifests some features while he's berserking, like vestigial horns and spikes. IDK, still playing around with that. I do think he keeps his hair longer to cover the small gold horns left over from his light corruption, along with whatever other scarring I settle on. Trying to distance himself from the 'beast' is a big long part of Gaius's struggle through FFXIV.

AND AND. I THINK ZENOS GOT TO FIGHT FULL-ON LIGHT INNER RELEASE BEAST GAIUS AT THE VERY END. Where Gaius finally let's himself fully sink into the pit and embrace everything he's kept buried away, that even he is too afraid to acknowledge. Accepting Zenos also includes accepting the entirety of himself, beast and all. Fray would be proud.

[loversdelusions]

I’ve read all your work and delusion hun and I just gotta say your incredible, the way you write the characters , the theme the setting is amazing ! If you ever publish a book , tell us and I’ll be the first to buy . ( also I’m wondering about Vigilante! Deku have you got any HCs on him or was he based on a au , same question with villian waifu Deku ,I’m really interested in them , I would love to hear your thoughts on them ! Also hope your doing ok and drinking plenty of water ❤️) 🌸anon

Aw, omg it makes me so happy! Literally, you made my heart squeeze with happiness. I really hope to continue writing stuff you'd enjoy, cause it all I ever wanted.

Getting to know people who read my stuff makes me feel like people are around me, like what I'm doing isn't a waste.

You really have no idea just how much this means to me. Thank you so much, 🌸anon!

P.S. Why does water taste so weird to me

[Slight Manga Spoilers Ahead!]

Vigilante Deku is an interesting character to me and I use the recent events in the manga to base him. Cause Deku kinda went off and did the vigilante thing anyways- I imagine he didn't make it to UA and the whole One For All thing didn't happen.

I think he is completely dependent on his intelligence and tools to do his job. He didn't just start doing the Hero thing, he had a job and collected savings to buy his tools, and even made some of his own, though that largely ended in disaster.

He works with the underground heroes along with his vigilante works. He is actually a great resource for heroes even underneath the fake name. Izuku kept analysis notebooks since he was a kid, and now, he keeps them for information to give to heroes as well as analysing villains and selling weaknesses and strategies to the underground so he can take them down.

It was simply the next logical step, right? From gathering and selling information to fighting face to face with villains, proving Quirks do nothing in comparison to determination and perseverance. He's very proud of himself, seeing what people used to identify as a disability now used as his greatest strength.

It was a nice little fuck you for everyone who underestimated him.

Vigilante Izuku is on the run. All the time, it's a difficult life to lead. So you will probably have to follow him around too. He's sweet too, though. He makes up for it by being an amazing partner though, he tries to make the best of things because he understands that his life is a lot of work. He's always a bit paranoid that you'll get sick of him, sick of his lifestyle. So he overcorrects a lot, he also understands just how difficult it is to see someone you love coming home with injuries that may be life-threatening at times.

All in all, he really tries his best.

Villain Waifu Deku from all my research came from a webcomic created by @kimbapchan. When I first got the ask, I looked into their blog and then thought of how a villain spouse would be, especially when their hero partner doesn't know about their present.

He is a bit of a chaotic man, so he doesn't always cover his tracks properly. Though his ongoing hero obsession is a great cover-up. Find a weird pocket that has a gash that seems familiar to you? Well--um he's trying to recreate that villain's suit which you gashed so expertly, he's your biggest fan!

That's what it is, of course.

Though he's a great homemaker! The house is spotless at all times and food is always ready for you when you get home. Your clothes get washed and are pressed well when you need to go to work. Of course, there are bloodstains, and you get injured! You must not remember, you're not home a lot of the time.

He's quite the manipulator. You're not gonna know anything is wrong because he is sniffling, the glint in his eyes, the quivering lip and side look, the little notes of how you're not home, you're not noticing enough about what he does for you, and yes, he knows your work is important but he is also your husband, you should know! You should notice! He does so much!

Then he'll throw in his hail mary. He loves you, he doesn't want to fight, he just wants to nuzzle in your comfort and hold you in his arms...It definitely escalates. He loves you so much after all.

Then it's back to the way it always is.

[mcl-mia]

//another day, another route completed! this time we have nox, and amazingly, i don't think i have too many thoughts on this one, mostly because a lot of them cover... multiple bases. i'll try to explain that the best i can. blah blah blah, beware of spoilers.

okay, so i actually briefly started nox's route when it was first released, but i had to abandon it because... well, it was a bad idea to do that when i was so behind on routes in the first place, so it's not like i was going in 100% blind. this did not lead to a detrimental experience lol.

so.... nox. look. he's hot. i like his stupid little mullet and his very charming blue eyes, okay? he's hot and i'm not going to pretend that he isn't. it is still annoying to me though that you can REAAAAAALLLY tell that he was drawn by a different sprite artist. one of the best parts of the night class is that they ARE drawn by the same person, so it makes the cast look AND feel cohesive. not the biggest complaint, but it DOES bother me very slightly every time i look at nox when he's on screen with another character.

i've expressed this before, but nox's outfit as "nightmare" is... not great and knowing that it is COCO'S fault? absolutely hilarious. nox, i'm begging you to never take fashion advice from a cat again. i can fix you.

coming off that note, i know that there was budgeting issues for WH at this point in time (i believe nox's route came out around the time obey me got released, so... yikes), but i REALLY wished that they would have given nox a different pose or SOMETHING to hide that it was nox a little better. something like how the day class boys have different sprites for when they are holding their wands. i know that they basically stopped doing this after the night class boys (unless your name is alfonse), but.... sigh. come to think of it, i don't think even klaus had his front-facing sprites re-touched with the new ministry clothes. can't believe i didn't realize that until now.

i do also appreciate that they make sure to mention that nox's voice DOES change while he's in costume. i was wondering about that for the longest time lol.

speaking of chocolate cake, i am very glad that coco was a very minor character. coco is so one-note, which is disappointing because i think coco has a fantastic design. weird how that works out.

overall, the route itself is... fine. it's very day class-core, in which liz and nox get together very quickly. i mean, they TECHNICALLY get together only in the final chapters, but the quickness of both nox and rex falling in love with liz... goodness. y'all have known each other for like, 5 days. chill.

okay, i can't NOT talk about the love triangle. look, i'll be honest, it's so hard to sell a love triangle in an otome game. like, narratively, liz by the point in time rex's route begins, doesn't even reciprocate rex's feelings. it's funny to me in the moment knowing this, but it is a little annoying in practice. imo, if your love triangle is unable to become a reasonable threesome then don't write a love triangle. imo, nox and rex lack that kind of chemistry, so it's not the Good Shit. not to say that i don't think nox and rex shouldn't be hate-fucking each other (because they should, we love rivals to lovers here), it's just that they don't know how to fucking share and it would be way too distracting and nothing would happen. do you understand what i mean by this. i can't wait to get to gray's route so i can see liz turn the both of them down.

i will never tire of lucious being such a good friend.

genuinely, this puts a smile on my face. like, all of the night class boys do, but lucious being the first person to notice when liz falls in love is so important to me (ESPECIALLY BECAUSE AMELIA!!! IS STILL!!!!! BARELY HERE!!!!!!!!!). i love that liz has another person to talk about boys with. it's so delightful.

i do appreciate that nox has a good reason for being the phantom thief, but... come on, man. you're REALLY telling me that NOBODY is going to figure out that you're nightmare? let's just compile the evidence for a sec:

works in a magical tool shop (strike 1)

said magical tool shop SPECIALIZES in roger nigel's tools, which nox is an expert on. like, at some point you have to wonder where they're getting their stock, even if nox keeps the important ones hidden.

while nox does use his mother's maiden name, i'm pretty sure that anyone that looks into roger nigel in ANY capacity is going to figure out who roger's wife was. i would not be surprised if rex, who is literally a reference dept. worker, would have access to this info. this would expose his relationship to roger immediately.

the way nox does his calling cards for the cast is dangerous. rex picks up on the fact that nightmare had "convenient timing, like he was listening in on their conversations" (which... lol, he was). there is a point where he literally sends one while in the SAME ROOM as everyone else (especially rex, who 100% has him figured out). ballsy, but unnecessarily risky. i'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he doesn't do this with all of his calling cards.

if liz can look into nightmare's eyes and be able to tell it's nox, i'm sure the other people who spent many years with him would be able to do do the same.

like, come on man. be a better phantom thief LMAO.

actually, i want to talk about rex for a second. because i will admit, i don't find him nearly as attractive or interesting as nox, but i have to respect the HUGE big dick energy play he did in nox's happy ending.

LIKE. HOLY SHIT. ACTUALLY GREAT TWIST. i actually gasped lmao.

the 'our little brothers' comment does certainly solidify to me that rex already figured it out, though. i'm curious to see why he hasn't turned nox in yet... but i'm sure it has something to do with their rivalry. whatever it is, i think it's a selfish reason, since i doubt rex would know the real reason why nox is collecting the tools.

overall it's not a bad route, it's just not very remarkable. since there's no big bad threat looming over the narrative, there's less stakes. i get the feeling as though this mystery series (and possibly the next two, but i hear that clive's route has some particularly juicy dramatic bits so we'll see) is going to feel like a filler arc. not a bad thing by any means, it's very welcome, but just not as fulfilling as some of the other routes in the game. again, it's very day class-core, so it does evoke some nostalgic feelings in that way.

[geesuv]

So, I have a mixed relationship Magic the Gathering. I haven't played for years for various reasons and I'm not a huge fan of the really try hard, rules-focus culture of the player base. This is the point of the game, I know, but it's how I feel. But on the other hand, the worldbuilding of their creative team is simply on point. Frankly, D&D could learn a thing or five from the amount of imagination, craft and simply compelling ideas they manage to fit into their many planes. So I like to keep on top of the set releases and ogle all the new art for that very reason. But I stopped reading the fiction around Amonkhet/Ixalan when I realised that it generally involved the characters doing incredibly asinine things so the pre-determined story could move along. My point is, I haven't really followed things. But this morning, I got looking at the wiki page for the Phyrexian invasion. Spoilers for the phyrexian invasion plotline beyond this point!

Long story short, fantasy robots invade every plane in the setting. Honestly, these big meta-threats don't really do anything for me. I'm much more interested in hearing about the local quirks, problems and struggles of each of the planes. Every time one of the Big Bads stomps around, it dilutes that. "Check out this really cool techno-magical world! But don't forget about the phyrexians! They're a thing, you know! Watch as they assimilate one of the few ligitimately interesting planeswalkers! Hm? Technomagical what now? Oh, the setting! Right, yes, here it is..." Anyway, the Phyrexians are basically the fantasy Borg. They invade, take people over, so on and so forth. I got reading this wiki page and it has a list of planes and how they got invaded. There's few details, but it covers the essentials. Then I noticed something. Eldraine, a plane of powerful fae magic and well-organising military culture of knights, widely defeated and the ruling courts collapse under the onslaught. Until a spell macguffin wins the day. Strixhaven, a literal magic school who were warned and prepared to meet the invasion. completely overrun and all the faculty killed. Until a spell macguffin wins the day. Kamigawa, a plane of technomagical mecha, organised samurai and skilled ninjas. Suffer heavy losses and barely hold the invasion, but seem to be fighting a losing battle. Theros, a plane of powerful gods and greece-style heroes. Widely defeated and many gods fallen. Fiora, a plane known for widespread and convoluted conspiracies and schemes. Successfully and decisively defeats the invading force. Hold up. Run that back a bit. Fiora? The political scheming plane?! A world that can be best summed up by the phrase "chronic backstabbing disorder"?! They defeated the fantasy borg where magic, heroes and literal gods failed?! For context, Fiora was the setting for the two Conspiracy sets. Which are, in my biased opinion, some of the best and most fun sets MtG has ever done. They broke down the tryhard numbers experience and set up an environment where you needed to scheme with other players to try to win. It was great. Details are sparse. All the first page says is "Queen Marchesa secured the grip on her throne and the loyalty of her people by leading the defence of the plane and successfully beating the Phyrexians back." and the Fiora page simply reads "Queen Marchesa refused all who trespassed." Be still my beating heart. Queen Marchesa, The Black Rose, Mother of Assassins, poisoner, necromancer and Monarch of Paliano, is just the best and one of my favourite MtG characters. Learning that she took one look at this invading army of assimilating fantasy robots and said "No. I don't think you will." really just made my day.

[golbrocklovely]

the nine books i read this year (part one)

while this isn't technically related to sam and colby, i figured i would tell you guys about the books i read this past year. originally i was trying to read at least one book a month, but that didn't work out in the end. but i did get to nine and that was like seven or eight more than i read last year, so i'll take it.

i'm gonna try not to give any spoilers for any of these books. just my general thoughts and overall how many stars i would give them. but if i do plan to talk about spoilers, i'll give you a fair warning.

so without further ado…

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson

this book was SO fucking good. i bought it bc i saw it in target and thought it looked interesting. then i literally read it all in one night because i could not put it down. if you like murder mysteries/crime solving novels, you will like this book.

super easy to read, and it made me immediately want to watch veronica mars again. it definitely gave me that vibe when i was reading it too, so if you like that show, you'll like this.

i know there is a sequel and then a threquel and then i think a prequel???, but i haven't read any of those yet. i did go out the next day and grab the sequel tho. i just never got around to reading it. but i plan to do that this year.

probably one of my favorite books i read this year.

Rating: 5/5

Belle Morte by Bella Higgins

yall know me, i love me a good vampire book. and i think this one got recommended to me on tiktok, or i might have saw it in target and thought to buy it. the cover of this book is fantastic, and i think that along with the general premise drew me in.

that being said, this book was… fine, at best. at worst? kinda lazy.

i think the overall idea of it is interesting. vampires being known to humans but living in almost fraternity like houses, and they themselves being celebs now, humans being donors to them - all of that sounded cool to me. this book kinda hits all of the vampire shows/movies in one: a bit of true blood mixed with twilight and vampire diaries and even bits of dracula. and i'm usually here for that type of stuff.

but… this story was just not hitting the way i wanted it too.

it read like a wattpad fanfic, and then come to find out it was publish by wattpad. and look i'm happy that bella higgins got her story published, that's great. but i just think parts of this story could have been so much better. like while i was reading it, all i could imagine was "if i was writing something like this, i would do this instead of that". that's not to say i think my writing is superior or anything, i just felt like a lot of the choices in the story maybe could have used another person in the room to either flesh them out or give her another avenue to go down.

there's a sequel to this book, but i will not be reading it.

also ngl, i completely forgot what this book was about until i had to write this review and the only way i remembered what this was about was reading ppl's spoliers on goodreads so… do with that as you will.

Rating: 3/5

The DUFF by Kody Keplinger

this was a surprise read for me. i remember hearing about this book years ago back in hs, but never read it bc i really didn't want to read a book about being a DUFF (designated ugly fat friend) which is what i kinda saw myself as back then.

there's a lot to unpack there.

but, i've loved the movie version of this book and ended up watching it like three times in one week and was like "let me see if i can find this book online". i did, and then i read it all in one night. and you know what? it was weirdly refreshing to read.

first off, nothing like the movie for the most part which was both intriguing and not. secondly, the author wrote this when she was 17, and it was loosely based off of her time in hs. and honestly, it read like a high schooler speaking about being in hs. and i don't mean that as a diss. i mean that as it was nice to hear a 17 year old talk like a 17 year old and not a 26+ year old trying to write like high schoolers.

you'll hear more about that in the next review.

this book also reminded me of hs, but not in the "oh gross i hated that time" kind of way, but in a more nostalgic sort of way. it was no where near how my hs experience went, but i still enjoyed my time reading it. it was written incredibly well for a 17 year old author.

also one fabulous line that stuck out to me so much so that i wrote it down: For a girl with a such a fat ass, I felt pretty invisible.

same here girlie lmao

Rating: 4.5/5

The Hating Game by Sally Thorne

another surprise read !

so, this year i bought a hulu subscription. one of the first movies that popped up for me was "the hating game". i watched it, and then immediately watched it about four more times in the span of couple days.

safe to say it, i like the movie.

found out it was based off of a book and decided i had to read it. the movie and book, in my opinion, are similar enough that if you don't want to sit through reading the entire thing, you could just watch the movie and get the same general gist. also i kinda think the movie is better.

i realized after reading this book that ppl either LOVE it or they despise it. which is very weird to me only bc the story itself is fine. the language used either by the characters/author is a bit… questionable at times, but that doesn't sour the whole book for me, if that makes any sense.

minus one instance which i will tell you about in a bit.

i think the movie made the two mc very likeable and cute (but with their own problems) but this book kinda made them more…. realistic (so, less likeable lol). but i don't mean that in a rude way, just more of like "i've definitely met ppl like this, and while i didn't hate them, i didn't love them either".

slight tangent i want to go off on: i will NEVER understand how ppl that read romance novels get so up in arms about "toxic" relationships or men in these stories and then rate the book super low bc "this relationship is terrible! you should never strive to have a man like this in your life! this is all RED FLAGS" ect, ect. and it's like…….. yeah babe, i know that. IT'S A FANTASY. this isn't real life. i'm not looking for a dude like joshua templeman. calm the fuck down and stop sucking the fun out of everything you read bc it's not totally toxicity free.

it's the same reason i get so fucking annoyed when ppl point out in twilight "omg he's 109 year old dating a 17 year old girl he's disgusting!!" ………HE'S A VAMPIRE WHO IS PERMANENTLY 17. THIS ISN'T REAL LIFE.

anyway…

i will say tho, there were some annoying parts to this story. like the amount of times the main woman character talked about how small she is compared to the guy just got a bit redundant after a while. like it's not like she's 4'11 or something. she's like my height or close to mine, somewhere between 5'0 to 5'2. and he's like maybe 6'4 MAX. so while he's definitely taller, he's not a fucking giant. that was like the only thing that stuck out to me the most while reading, bc i swear it's like every couple pages she's saying "omg i'm so smol and he's so big".

so i have to bring up the one instance of this book that i THROUGHLY did not enjoy. i had planned to rate this book a very soft 4/5. i enjoyed my time reading it, i thought the romance itself was cute for the most part, the love-to-hate/enemies-to-lovers was written decently well, a little bit too mean at times maybe, but overall i liked the book for what it was. but then…. i got to the end of the book. or the last couple pages. i won't give too much away in case you want to read it. but let me lay out the scene for you.

josh and lucy, the main characters, are in a room together. they might have just finished having sex????? i think, either way they're in bed with one another i believe. they're talking sort of romantically with one another. josh is speaking. he's telling her all of this stuff…. and then all of sudden he just casually says the r-word/r-slur. mind you, this man has barely uttered a curse word in this story, let alone a slur. and this man is intellegent, maybe a bit of a narotic dick sometimes, but not someone that would casually say that word, ESPECIALLY in the middle of borderline confessing his love for this girl he's been pining for.

so i had to knock this book down a whole ass number bc i was that upset that he said it. it felt like a word that the author uses, but not the characters, if you catch my drift. like it didn't feel like part of the lexicon josh would use, at least to me.

also earlier in the book, lucy uses the g-slur, in case you needed to know about that too. i know some ppl don't know that that word is a slur for romania ppl, so i try to give the benefit of the doubt with that, but just thought i would mention it.

Rating: 3.5/5

okay… didn't realize how long this was gonna be, so i'm gonna break this up into two parts. you can read the rest of my review on the books i've read this past year here.