#COPING BY WRITING MY OWN CANON LETS GOOOO

[satoruxx]

you're sweating when you wake up, skin sticking painfully to your bedsheets as your bleary eyes dart around, attempting to make focus of your surroundings. the room is still dark, barely touched by the slight bit of moonlight that attempts to peak through the closed windows—defiant. it takes a minute to realize that the sounds that are breaking the silence are actually coming from your own throat—breathy, wheezing gasps of terror.

your stomach drops when your fingers grip cold and empty fabric. he's gone he's gone he's go—

"what are you doing up, pretty?"

your head snaps to the doorway. satoru stands there, sweats hanging low on his hips even as his hand remains curled around a glass of water. his hair is tousled with sleep, but his cerulean eyes are sharp and lively.

as soon as he sees the panic lacing your expression, his eyes widen, long legs practically tripping over themselves as he stumbles towards you.

"what happened?" he asks sharply, frantically placing the cup on the bedside table to take your face into his palms. shades of blue dart back and forth across your features as he perches one knee on the mattress and peers down at you. "are you okay?"

his touch sends electricity through your veins—a splash of ice water pulling you away from that painful reverie.

your heart both clenches and soars, the idea of what you saw being terrifying, and yet finding out it wasn't true being that much more relieving.

"i just—" your voice comes out choked, and satoru's fingers twitch against your skin imperceptibly. "had a bad dream."

you think your brain must be cruel for conjuring up a dream in which satoru could suffer to such abhorrent extents.

"oh sweets." satoru's sigh is sympathetically soft, thumb brushing over the apple of your cheek just barely. "it was just a nightmare."

"i know," you swallow, voice shaking. there's an uncharacteristic wetness pooling at your waterline. "i-it just felt so real."

"baby..." satoru immediately pulls you against the steady planes of his chest, thick arms snaking around your waist to eliminate any measly amount of distance between you two. you prop your chin on his shoulder, sighing as you feel his snowy hair tickling at your cheek.

"it wasn't real, sweetheart," he says, pulling back just slightly to push a piece of hair from your face. his thumb then drags under your eyes, wiping away the unshed tears. "see. you're here, i'm here. everything's all good."

"yeah." you're nodding, unable to take your eyes off of him because he's real and alive and so breathtakingly perfect. "yeah, you're right."

he gives you a lopsided smile, eyes bright and glowing. "i don't like to brag, but i usually am."

you snort out a laugh, missing the way his expression turns pleased at the sound. "hilarious. you love to brag."

"you got me there," he shrugs, grinning as you stick your tongue out at him. the lighthearted banter solidifies the fact that satoru is fine and unharmed and completely yours, but you can still feel the apprehension coursing through your veins. chills run up your spine—you try not to show it.

but of course, satoru has always been able to see right through you.

his teasing smile goes soft, and he inhales deeply.

"was it about me?" he asks, climbing into bed next you. you lay back down carefully.

"yeah," you mumble, watching him tug the blankets over your body and tuck you both under a cocoon of warmth.

"hm." something in his tone tells you he's not unfamiliar with the feelings you seem to be experiencing—his body shifts closer to yours. ocean eyes carefully asses you, deep and calculating and so concerned even as he smoothes a warm palm over your shoulder blades. "wanna tell me what happened?"

the truth is you do want to, because satoru has always understood you better than you've ever understood yourself—you have no doubt he'd be able to comfort you just as well as he normally does.

and yet...

"no," you answer, pressing your nose into his neck. a deep breath in, the lively scent that is so inherently your gojo satoru filling your very soul. "it's okay. i think i'll be fine."

when you shut your eyes, images flash behind them—of bloodied bodies and stitches and swapped souls. yet a chaste kiss to your forehead pulls you back to where you're supposed to be, warm and grounding.

"i know you'll be fine," satoru murmurs, lips tickling your brow as he speaks. you think you can hear the gentle smile as he says it, and your grip on him tightens—never letting go. "i'm right here after all."

[sword-and-lance]

((okay yeah so I’ve been meaning to write down a bunch of things about Dae’s Ancientsona Ancient self, Nemesis, and now’s as good a time as any LET’S GOOOO

===

EARLY DAYS

She’s the eldest sibling out of three with her younger brother and sister being fraternal twins, Artemis and Apollo (we haven’t exactly seen how Ancients age relative to like, normal people, but it’d be the equivalent of ~10 years ish between the other two and Nemesis)

Yeah not Gaia!Artemis, a different Artemis, who is also Amba’s Ancient self coincidentally

No I have not figured out what her parents’ names were yet deal with it

REGARDLESS both of said parents were heavily researching other dimensions, interdimensional travel, that kind of thing, and while they did try they weren’t exactly great at work-life balance and wee Nemesis was more or less fending for herself once she was old enough to like, do that

Also meant she was taking care of her siblings a lot too so they got very attached to her given that they were little little and she was around quite a bit more than their own damn parents

Then said parents opened a portal to the Abyss in their fucking basement sort of on accident and whoops it’s basically Hell to anyone who’s not prepared to like, Deal With The Abyss Being Like That, and the Abyss was rather peeved at being woken back up and peeled their souls out and ate them

And also started eating the house and tried to eat Nemesis and her siblings but Nemesis managed to get them clear of the house fast enough while listening to her parents getting basically mauled

Traumatic it sure was and literally no one knew how to handle that especially for a kid Nemesis’ age, where she wasn’t old enough to really have a coping mechanism but old enough to know damn well what happened

So immediately after people just...kept their distance and hurled platitudes rather than doing anything helpful and yes Nemesis did hold a lot of resentment over that even way later on in life because it felt like she got abandoned (because she kinda did)

That said one of her parents’ work friends, Daedalus, actually wound up adopting all three of them once he heard what had happened and honestly...did his best tbh to help them, even when it was pretty damn clear that Nemesis was proooobably gonna grow up somewhat maladjusted personality-wise

The other two were really too young to understand it or remember it well though and grew up fairly normal, though Apollo had much weaker aetherial potential than Artemis or Nemesis had (even if his soulsight was extremely good)

Yes Apollo is Hythlodaeus, I just am kinda rolling with “it’s ALSO a title” as a very un-canon excuse for it in this ‘verse, shh

It was also about this point that Daedalus got to make the exciting discovery that Nemesis could do blood magic

AND HERE’S WHERE I DIGRESS ABOUT BLOOD MAGIC FOR TOO DAMN LONG

Yes this is (also) entirely non-canonical, but I do what I please and what I please is making weirdo magic systems for my personal blorbos aight?

So it’s a weird obscure branch of magic that’s kind-of-cousins to healing magic but is done somewhat differently

YOU SEE Ancients’ healing magic requires a lot of aether and also is “permanent” in the sense of “once you’re healed you’re not gonna spontaneously UN-heal later” ya know?

It’s also mostly concerned with bringing everything back to the status quo body-wise, making the body return to “baseline”

Blood magic on the other hand is capable of a great deal more effects-wise; it also is predominantly concerned with shifting your body away from baseline more than bringing it back--and it is also much less permanent and wears off over time if not actively maintained

That said, there’s a couple complications with it: the ability to even perform it seems to be genetic to some extent, and also using it generates aetherial “backlash” that acts completely chaotically and, more often than not, violently

This is ofc a bit of a fucking problem for someone trying to use it, but there’s a workaround for it, namely: channeling that backlash into a container of some sort to keep it from ricocheting off in random directions instead

Generally these containers are orbs of some sort, since it’s much easier to just have the magic spin itself in circles rather than have to deal with it putting constant huge pressure onto any corners or hard edges

But minor transformations are generally pretty safe to do without any further precautions because the backlash just dissipates harmlessly courtesy of being so small

...It still didn’t make it any less startling to Daedalus when he walked in and found a wee Nemesis skittering up the wall like a goddamn lizard and heard her go LOOKIT WHAT I CAN DO :D

For better or worse though he had actually studied historical instances of blood magic as a side gig before and so he had a fair bit of forewarning about what it could do--and a lot of literature on it

Sure he couldn’t entirely teach her everything but he could at least do a guided study kind of thing so she didn’t go up and blow up the general neighborhood or the like

And study she did because she found that kind of thing immensely fascinating

HOWEVER she always steadfastly refused to learn how to do it to people that weren’t herself; in her eyes, using blood magic effectively does require thinking about your body kinda like a meatsuit, and while thinking about your own body that way is one thing, thinking about other people like meatsuits is a one-way ticket to starting to treat them like things, and treating people like things is Bad, Okay

She got pretty damn good at the whole thing tbf and while there are certainly a lot of petty personal uses for that kind of magic, she mostly just. Used it to turn herself into varying sorts of critter because that is just how she rolls

DIGRESSION OVER BACK TO THE NEMESIS STUFF

So by the time she became a young adult she had had whatever typical schooling that Ancients had, as well as a fair bit of experience in using her particularly odd and semi-useful kind of magic

She also figured out she had a “typical” transformation at that point: a kinda Anubis hound looking thing (as compared to her sister’s deer-looking forest creature)

Ofc her brother had none lol (poor Hyth and his two hulking monster-sisters), but did get the REALLY good aethersight so it evened out a bit

Daedalus had also created a hardwood staff for Nemesis, and of course the first thing she did with it was master how to summon a scythe blade onto it at will

She had also gotten used to making backlash orbs for herself at that point and clearing them out

It was about this point she started to have a bit of an existential crisis because she was basically being expected to get a job, help the star, preserve society--even after that society had pretty effectively given her younger self the finger and kinda looked sideways at a lot of what she could do

(See the above point re: how applying it to other people requires thinking about them not as people, and also the sheer Body Horror potential it has on top of that, I mean. She could basically run around being a mini Final Days if she wanted)

(Thing is that she do not wanted, thank you very much, but try telling that to some people and it just glances off)

Also at that point the Pashtarot at the time was getting tetchy over her being “allowed” to continue practicing that magic anyway, and kept not-so-subtly floating the notion of binding that power away from her because yeah too risky to let that keep going what if she goes evil on us

But of course this is also a strange rare power that damn near never actually comes up, much less in someone that was actually pretty interested in the subject and had done a huge amount of work on it on her own even at that age

In fact the notion of just locking it away without even an opportunity to study it honestly offended Lahabrea’s notion of scholarship and so when Nemesis got offered a position at the Words of Lahabrea--

Okay honestly at first she took it as an insult because she saw in the Ancients’ creations what she saw in herself: flaws, and how black-and-white those flaws were treated, and therefore wasn’t thrilled with the notion of going to a place whose entire purpose was that

But he actually realized that and changed tack to say that she didn’t need to be a researcher, there was actually a sub-bureau (albeit a small one) that was dedicated to just catching rogue concepts

And at that point she realized that this was probably the best combo of “helping people” and “not having to actively participate in making things that’re just gonna get killed the second they’re imperfect anyway” and went OKAY SOLD

So she trained as basically a concept-catcher and while she still really didn’t like how casually society treated the creations they’d make, she also did get to see for herself that yeah actually some of these are just way too fucked-up to keep existing (and Pandaemonium was actually almost an improvement in her eyes, if just because they weren’t just offing them and also had the time-stasis thing going on so they weren’t just being made to suffer)

Despite the pragmatic approach to, uh, existing in this society, she also wound up managing to weasel an arrangement out of Lahabrea that she could actually keep some of the “flawed but not turbo dangerous” stuff at a compound by her house, and that actually helped take some of her rougher edges off when he actually like, agreed, albeit on a case-by-case basis per concept, under the conceit that it was another “facility”

And she caught onto that and actually did run it like one, and after it led to her being a lot more cooperative and congenial with him, he just kinda ran with it even if he thought she was being really goddamn weird about the whole concepts thing

(But hey she was a very good catcher and dedicated to what she was doing so whatever, he could roll with it if it meant keeping her around and interested in continuing to do her job, AND he got to study her blood magic by proxy too)

In fact he wound up basically making a registration system for her various forms so they could both keep track of that, and while she groaned a lot at first about the paperwork, it was kinda neat to be able to flip through a whole book of things she had accomplished with that magic

So basically yes they both mildly annoyed each other but kinda ran with it because they had a nice little academic mutual exchange thing going on

That said, this whole time Athena has also...been A Thing That’s Happening, and while Nemesis was never particularly fond of her, she mostly just wrote it off as yet another person I don’t like (of which there were many lmao) and left it at that

Especially because by the time Athena was seriously ramping up her bullshit and she was rather casually discarding concepts, including a number of severely dangerous ones, and leaving them for Nemesis’ department to clean up, so Nemesis was a wee bit too busy to think about the weird chick married to her boss’ boss anyway

At least until Athena swanned in one day wanting to experiment with Nemesis’ blood magic, anyway

At which point Nemesis basically got all the bad vibes and went hm. no. and got into a verbal brawl with her over it, and then had to get prodded off of that particular argument by her direct manager so they didn’t all get in hot water with Lahabrea over it

Nemesis also around that time got a (rather nebulous and circumstantial) piece of evidence tying Athena to the rash of escapes but before she and her direct manager could do anything about it, the whole incident with Erich had happened and so yeah she just dropped it because she wasn’t gonna try to persecute someone that was fuckin dead (and she also genuinely thought it was just an accident at the time like everyone else, least up until she gets pulled into the Pandaemonium questline but anyway)

And from there she basically just kept on keeping on: catching rogue concepts, keeping some of the less-bad ones, inevitably being yanked into a friendship with Azem, having to put up with Emet-Selch of all people when he started dating her brother, her sister being Emmerololth and then retiring to be a Fae ambassador...so on and so on