#Dream is a leviathan with centuries of existence

[aoi-kanna]

Blue Story IV

< II >

~(￣▽￣)~

Leviathantale by Sku

XTale by Jakei

DreamTale By Joku

KiIler // By Rahafwabas

[orionsangel86]

Hob Gadling - A Queer Romantic?

I have been listening to The World's End chapters of The Sandman on Audible lately and just finished Hob's Leviathan. I didn't pay this story much attention when I first read the comic, as I tended to read through the stories quickly and put more focus into the stories where Dream had a larger role. But one of the reasons I like listening to the Audible book is because it allows me to absorb each story more thoroughly and take my time thinking about each one and the (usually multiple) meanings behind them.

Hob Gadling is a character that fandom has fallen in love with. I think this is clear to anyone that takes even a partial glance at Sandman fandom. This isn't a criticism - Ferdie's performance as Hob in the Netflix show has done wonders for Hob's character. He has made his version of Hob very easy to fall in love with!

But the truth is that in The Sandman comics, Hob is a minor character who we only get to know very little about. The story Hob's Leviathan appears in The Worlds End Sandman book. We only meet him twice before this, once in The Doll's House, where we are introduced to him in Men of Good Fortune, and again in Season of Mists when Dream comes to let him know that he may miss their next meeting. In both these issues, Hob is introduced via the narrator, and therefore I like to think that we are given a fairly honest representation of the kind of person he is. We watch him grow and learn throughout the centuries in MoGF, but one of the major takeaways from this I believe is that he tends to always be on the wrong side of history. He makes bad choices and can be a bit narrow minded. He is rude and selfish and also rather self-absorbed. I actually think that the performance of the voice actor who plays Hob in the Audible book emphasises these character flaws making him even more unlikeable in many ways, though I am aware that this could just be my own experience and opinion.

But Hob's Leviathan takes a different view of Hob. Literally. The narrator of this story is a young boy of 16 called Jim. Jim met Hob on a ship travelling from Bombay to Liverpool in 1914. Jim was working on the ship as a cabin boy and Hob had bought his passage back to England - though it is revealled at the end of the story that Hob actually owned the ship they were travelling on. It is clear that at this point in time, Hob is extremely wealthy.

Jim attends to Hob throughout the journey, and grows very fond of him. In Jim's tale, Hob is a good man, who is kind and thoughtful and cares about others. He saves the life of a stowaway (who turns out to be another immortal). He is shown to be patient, and funny, and very intelligent. Jim waxes poetic about how smart Hob is, and how much he impressed him. It is particularly clear in the Audible book that Jim is taken with Hob, to the point that it could arguably be a crush.

It is fascinating how much more likeable Hob is when narrated from the viewpoint of someone with a crush on him, whether this story is exaggerated through rose tinted glasses is of course something to consider. All the tales in World's End are just that, tales. There is a constant undercurrent of exaggeration and make believe to them where even the other patrons of the inn question elements to each of the stories. We are not supposed to take these stories as absolute fact, rather they are supposed to reveal to us more about the narrators as well as their own experiences existing in this magical and strange world.

When it is revealled that Jim is actually a girl called Peggy in disguise so they can get work on the ships, the quite obvious crush makes more sense to a heteronormative audience, but what I particularly like about this story is its queer potential. See in the comic, it isn't really clarified if Jim goes by Jim because they feel more themselves as a boy, rather than a girl, or if they are disguising themself as a boy just to get work as a means to an end. I would argue that the latter is the more obvious interpretation. Jim tells the other World's End patrons that they are getting too old to keep up the disguise and will eventually have to stop working in shipping, and that when that happens, they will take on a new name, a new identity and do something else, but that for now, the patrons can keep calling them Jim.

*for a lack of clarity around the point in the comic, I am going to use gender neutral pronouns for Jim going forward*

Now from Hob's POV, he figured out that Jim was a girl, and they talk about it briefly along with the sea serpent they saw. I think that at this point, Hob is impressively progressive compared to the previous times we have met him. Now whether or not this is biased storytelling from someone who has a crush on him remains to be seen, but if we take Jim's word as truth, not only is 1914 Hob a fair and honest man who is willing to pay the way of a stowaway and fully respect the secrets of a young girl disguised as a boy so they can work on ships, but he's also totally comfortable flirting with them.

I like that he calls Jim the "handsome cabin boy". I like that this version of Hob, whether real or an exaggeration skewed by Jim's feelings for him, respects Jim's identity. Jim may be a girl in disguise, but Hob doesnt call her pretty, he calls him handsome.

It's all just a bit subtly queer and I like that for Hob (But then I would do, I'm a Dreamling shipper HA)

When Jim finishes their story, they state that they didn't see Hob again after that, but the comics later do give us a possible outcome to Jim's story...

We next see Hob in The Kindly Ones where he is mourning the death of his girlfriend Audrey. He briefly reveals that Audrey was the first person he had loved since Peggy, who was his lover until her death during the Blitz. Whilst it isn't made clear that Hob's lover Peggy is the same Jim that we meet in World's End, it is a bit too much of a coincidence. The timing adds up. If Jim was 16 in 1914, they'd be in their early 40s during the Blitz. Hob remains forever in his early 30s so I'd say its a safe bet that Jim eventually found Hob again and they were together. Hob loved them enough that he wasn't with anyone again until Audrey in the 80s. That's 50 years worth of mourning. A long time not to be with anyone, even for an immortal.

It's funny because we know so little about Hob, but one thing that I have seen commented on here a lot is that comic Hob is deemed to be as Straight as an arrow. Now I admit that the voice actor in the Audible book plays him very straight, but that is still only one interpretation.

All this is to say that I am fascinated with how the Netflix show will adapt this, since Hob in the show already comes across much kinder and more selfless than his comic counterpart. He already has an entire fandom viewing him as queer, and the comics certainly don't outright shut down such interpretations. There are moments in the comics that you have to wonder on. He does call Jim handsome rather than pretty, and when he talks to Audrey's grave he mentions his wives and loves as separate groups. He talks about finding it easy to get sex if you want it, and he talks about it in generally gender neutral terms. In Sunday Mourning Gwen reveals that she thought he was gay when she first met him, though her reasonings were that he knew so many dead people (a dark reminder that these comics were published at the height of the Aids epidemic). He reacts very badly to the news of Morpheus' death. He states on several occassions just how much he liked Morpheus, and he is one of the few people to wake up from the Wake with tears running down his cheeks. I would arguably state that its between Hob and Matthew as to who had the worst reaction to Morpheus' death, showing just how much both Hob and Matthew cared about him, and placing Hob on par with Matthew in the comics is a big deal. He seriously considers accepting Death's gift when she offers it, simply because Morpheus is dead. He doesn't, because at the end of the day, its just not in his nature to do so, and given he then dreams of Morpheus, I like to think that it was a test, that he passed.

When it comes to how the show will adapt all this, I genuinely think it will take a new approach with Jim/Peggy. I think they will be either a trans man, or at least non binary. But I think having Jim be a trans man is the better option. In the comics, Jim's tale is only very subtly queer, Jim clearly likes being Jim, but it seems like its a means to an end, a convenience in order to get work on the ships, rather than being something that is core to Jim's feelings on their gender. Besides, if we assume that Jim is indeed the Peggy Hob talks about in The Kindly Ones, then we know that Jim goes back to being Peggy when they get older and apparently continues living as a woman whilst they are with Hob, otherwise I doubt Hob would have referred to one of his greatest loves by a name they themselves rejected and only used she/her pronouns when talking about them. Nevertheless there is no reason for the show to take this approach, and if they DO decide that Jim should be a trans man, then their relationship with Hob is canonically a queer one. Trans men are men and if one of Hob's greatest loves is a trans man, then Hob is a queer man himself. I genuinely believe the show will take this route and I can't wait to see it.

Going back to my point about narrators bias, if MoGF, SoM, tKO, and TW are all narrated by a neutral third party, then this must be the true Hob. A not overly likeable rather selfish man. He has his good points, and he has certainly grown and changed over the centuries, and carries a lot of guilt for his past mistakes, but he is still quite self absorbed. Jim paints a picture of a rose tinted Hob that is far more the dreamy romantic older gentleman that took a young person under his wing. Which is fair enough.

The show is of course its own adaptation, with changes from the comics as it sees fit, but I do feel it's my duty to remind you that the show also has a narrator guiding the audience through its many stories. Dream of the Endless, Lord Morpheus, King of Nightmares and Prince of Stories himself. Take from that whatever you will.

;-)

[itsclydebitches]

OFMD Drabble #7

Prompt: Idioms (“Speak of the devil”)

This was not how his Sunday was supposed to go.

Stede stood gaping at the towering, thoroughly impossible creature that had just appeared in his kitchen. Men of any sort shouldn’t be materializing in his house at 2:00pm, but when they sported curved horns, a smoking physique, and hair that moved like the tentacles of some underwater leviathan, that was edging into the realm of offensively absurd.

The fact that the man—beast—thing—was completely naked certainly didn’t help matters.

“Greetings, mortal,” he said, voice dripping like the richest honey. Despite the beauty of it, he sounded terribly bored, speaking like he was reciting from the world’s most uninspired grocery list. “You have made your pact and will now reap the rewards of—”

“Get out!”

The creature blinked. The smoke seemed to dissipate just a bit and his hair... drooped?

“Sorry?”

“I said get out.” Stede snatched up his whisk and held it aloft like a knife, valiantly ignoring the sting in his palm. “I don’t know who or—or—what you are, but you’d best leave before I... uh...”

Well, that was the rub, wasn’t it? Stede couldn’t even defend himself against the bullies of his childhood, let alone whatever this thing might be.

Perhaps he was dreaming. Yes, that was it. An off glass of milk before bed, maybe. Or something stress related after the divorce. Stede flexed his hand, hoping that another flash of pain would wake him.

Instead, the creature just raised an eyebrow. He pointed a long, claw-like nail at the drop of blood that had fallen onto the counter.

“You summoned me,” he said.

Stede felt his jaw unhinge. “I certainly did not!”

“Did too! Or do you think I don’t know how this works after seven fucking centuries?” Animated now, the creature snapped what looked like a contract into existence — causing Stede to flinch back — but he couldn’t read the language on it. Still, the creature pointed stubbornly to a particular line. “Right here: you kept the appropriate sigils near your heart for a full week’s time.”

Sigils?

... He couldn’t possibly mean the etching Stede had taken off that church pillar, could he? It had just been a curious little design, copied onto a sheet of Stede’s stationary and, he now remembered, forgotten about in the pocket of his jacket.

He pursed his lips. “That’s hardly — ”

“And here!” The creature pointed again. “A willing sacrifice made at dawn.”

Antigone? His poor goldfish that — rest her soul — had passed just yesterday? Stede had hardly meant to drop her bowl.

“And then you, you know,” the clawed hand waved spastically at Stede’s entire person, which seemed rather rude, all things considered. “Blood offering. Summoning. That’s why I’m here.”

Stede looked at his bleeding hand. Dumbly, he made a mental note to throw this whisk out. “...I cut myself while slicing oranges.”

The creature stared. Stede stared back. The smoke surrounding his figure fully disappeared and Stede hesitantly lowered the whisk.

“Huh,” the creature said. The again: “Huh. That does sound like a fuck-up, actually. That’s... never happened before.” He jerked like he was coming out of a daze, then smiled. “That’s never happened before! Wow. Fucking stellar, mate.”

Stede rather felt like he’d had all the breath punched out of him. That smile was beautiful.

If he noticed Stede’s sudden difficulty breathing, the creature didn’t show it. He came around the island — with Stede not looking down, thank you very much — and grinned at the collection of ingredients. He shimmied in excitement, like this was the best day of his (immortal?) life.

“I’m Ed, by the way,” he said and before Stede could grapple with a supernatural entity being named Ed he continued with, “Whatcha making?”

“Uh... orange marmalade.”

“Marmalade! Fucking fancy mortal shit, never had it. Can I try some?”

“Wait. you expect me to just hand over my cooking to the Devil?”

It came out more assertive than Stede was feeling. He didn’t know what he expected to happen after issuing another challenge, but a moment of surprise bleeding into a sultry grin was definitely not it.

“Devil? Pff, you got that all wrong. I’m an incubus, Stede Bonnet.”

Oh.

Ed smirked, stepping tantalizingly close. “Contracts are binding, mate. You’re stuck with me, so you might as well fork over some of that marmalade, yeah?”

Well that... that didn’t sound too bad, actually. Stede did just that, offering a taste of his first batch. As he did, he determinedly ignored the feeling of signing over his soul as Ed took up marmalade and blood both from the whisk, smiling, and swallowing them down.

[orginllazyblog]

The Only Sea Sepant: Leviathan

Mizuki Abyss Story

Warning: deaths, side characters u just meet leaves, negative parents

Where should I start? I guess I'll start off my 1st life when I was the second eldest Imperial Princess. I was once adored by everyone by my natural beauty. One night, I was wandering around the Palace Garden until I encountered a terrifying demon. I thought those creatures don't exist. I remember like it was a never-ending nightmare.

"Your beauty is just like the moon. Skin so light, and your eyes shine like the stars. Won't you be my bride?~"

Of course, no! I have standards and my responsibilities as the princess. Eventually, the demon got so mad that I thought I was going to be a goner.

"You shall regret your decision. I place this powerful ancient curse upon you: You shall never receive love, and you'll die at a young age repeatedly."

The next morning, I was public executive by my envy elder sister. She was jealous not only by my beauty but that I had more love from the King and Queen and the people.

"She made a deal with a demon! I saw it with my own eyes!"

"The Eldest Princess is right! I saw it too!"

Well, she was right about me with a demon, but if she only witnessed me being cursed by the demon, then it was a misunderstanding. I wanted to yell, scream, and plead with my old parents that I would never do such a thing. All I saw was the disgusted face.

Slash

I died at the age of 15.

●•○•●●•••○○○●●•○○••●•

If I knew this was just a dream, then I wouldn't have rested. In my second life, I was reborn as an ordinary citizen. The parents... they were not very affection. With what's going on, a century has passed after I died as a princess, and a war has been going on for years. My secondary parents wanted a boy who would join the military, you know, all that wanting a boy because it's better than a girl cliché.

"If you were a boy, we could have a better life."

"I wanted a son, not a dumb girl. Who's going to take my place as the war general? Just get out of my sight!"

I wanted to cry, but that would make it worse. As I grew up a bit, maybe at the age of 10, I decided to take my old man's place. I cut my hair to disguise myself to be more masculine and work out to build muscles. I didn't tell them I was going to war, so when was 13, I took most of the food, clothes, boots, and lastly, old man's weapon. Did I leave a note? Nah! I learned that if I gave a little affection to them, I might die in the next minute. I wanted to live to at least above 15 years old.

I joined the army not only to end the war but to feel what it is like to be alive. I was then again the top and strong soilder the military has ever seen. I received jealous stares from the other soldiers, which I didn't care about. The only person who welcomed me was a guy who admired my strength. Terrance? Jeffery? I can't remember his name. I thought I got rid of this feeling, but I couldn't help but fall in love with him. He was cute, reliable, and honest. We were sometimes paired sometimes for quests, so we were able to hang out secretly.

What came to my mind was as long as I didn't confess this 'feeling' to him to remain friends. To twsit the curse. I was wrong.

"####! WE HAVE TO LEAVE THIS TOWN!"

Screams everywhere around the small town. People were running to the exit as the enemy was almost approaching. My crush was running the opposite, trying to find a lost child who was separated from their mother. I reached out to him to tell him we had to leave. This can't happen..why? Why do you have such a kind heart?

"####... you were a good friend. I just want to see my love who is waiting for me up there in the sky. Thank you, ####"

BOOM

Not only I got friend-zone, I died again at the age of 15.

Again

__________________________________________________

They say that a third time is the charm. But I was almost losing my mind of this never-ending nightmare.

In my third life, the time period is more modern than the previous lives. So I started off with a new mom and dad, but this time, a twin brother. I didn't know what to feel since I had a bad relationship with my older sister in my first life. This time, I'm the older one than him.

"Lisa! Can we go to the park?"

"Sure thing, Haneul. Let me ask mom first."

I had to remind myself that if I showed or had real love affection, then my death will come for me.

As I thought, there was another war, which led to another dispared.

"Big sister!"

"Haneul!"

My memory was blury as I can only recall my twin brother being taken away from me as soldiers were kidnapping us when we were just children. As for the parents, I believe they were already dead.

Years passed since that incident, I managed to sneek to a cruise ship to escape to a different country.

It wasn't because I didn't like my home country, it was because I was almost turning 15 years old. I was scared.

When I arrived to another country, I thought I could be safe this time, though this time I was a girl,again, which makes things worse.

If it weren't for the person who stood out for me, Esméralda, I would have been dead already by those men.

"Are you alright, child?"

"Um...yes, t-thank you."

"Hmm...do you have a family looking for you? I can help you find them."

"...I don't have a family...not anymore."

"Well, now you do. I can simply adopt you. I'm already at a age where I'm supposed to start a family of my own. Would that be alright with you?"

"B-but...I'm..."

I didn't know how to tell them back then. Would they believe me if I was curse-

"I can help you lift off your curse."

"Eh?!"

So Esméralda took me to their house where its far away from cities. The house was indeed beautiful back to what I remember.

"What's your name, child?"

"I'm Lisa."

"Well then, Lisa. Can you tell me about your curse?"

I explain everything I can remember. I told them that a powerful demon placed this curse, which every time I felt true love either to family or lover, I die. I even told them I would die very soon by the time I aged to 15 years old.

"Lisa, remember this, I can only change a bit of this curse. Since this is a demon work, it would be difficult for me. Now, lay down on this couch."

"Okay."

I did what I was told. I lay down on the couch as 'she' did her 'magic'.

"Hac maledictione nova, antequam ad quadraginta annos perveneris, vives; Ut letalem hanc maledictionem frangas, te et socium verum amorem esse sentias. Si particeps tua idem sentiat, frangatur maledictio. Utrum corporis intimitas sit necne, libertatem senties."

("With this new curse, you shall thou live before you reach at the age of forty; To break this deadly curse, you and your partner must feel true love. If your partner feels the same way, the curse would be broken. Whether it's physical intimacy or ot, you shall feel freedom.")

_______________________

Back to the present time

Mizuki: And that's how we both meet

Mizuki was explaining to the Ramshackle residents such as their old friend Esmeralda or Esme, now known as Yueme. The trio ghosts who were complete shock, and as for grim was holding back his tears.

Mizuki: I think my curse is gone as I would have been reborn to a human again.

Yueme: So what are now?

Mizuki: Hmm...

Mizuki: The current mom side of the family were the first generation of early sirens, and my old man is a literal demon.

Yueme: ???

Grim: ???

Trio Ghosts: ???

Mizuki: Yeah, I know. I'm some kind of hybrid. But as time went by, the noble demons noticed my abilities. Chernabog, the demon king, gave me the title of the new sin of envy; Prince of the Deep Abyss, Mizuki Abyss.

Grim: Myaah! That's so cool!

Trio Ghosts: This Chernabog person seems to be the chill guy

Yueme: So, does that mean?

Mizuki: Yes, I got the materials for the dorm uniform!

And that is how your twst oc's old bestie join you in Twisted Wonderland.

One thing I need to mention is that I used to be in Obey Me fandom way back in...2019 or 2020?

I left that fandom for one good reason: my phone broke, and I forgot the password of my obey me account. I HAD AT LEAST TWO OR THREE UR CARDS THAT WERE LIMITED

I was not going to redo the whole family drama story again.

Also, I'm going to redo Mizuki's design bc I realize the deep sea creatures are dull colors. I had them with white hair with light blue highlights, so it wasn't going to make sense.

[senatushq]

NAME. Severon AGE & BIRTH DATE.  May 17, approx. 3000 BCE / 5,000+ GENDER & PRONOUNS. Male & He/Him SPECIES. Terror  VARIANT. Drow OCCUPATION. Priest of Lloth, Smithmaster FACE CLAIM. Ben Barnes

biography

Three queens, born once, fallen twice. Reared in the kingdom of Hyperborea, Sulevan had once the greatest of magic and technology within reach and within memory. Towering spires, crystalline buildings and beauty and magnificence unrivaled within in every corner of his home. Until it was all lost, and he fell for the first time with the rest of the elves. His mothers did not survive the fall, but he was a child who followed the Queen, her royal daughter and the rest of what remained of their people into a new world and a new land. They were different now, merely a flicker of the flame that they had once been as High Elves. He was Eladrin now, a fey. Sulevan always had a preference for the creation of Spring, and so it became the season that he remained with. No more strength of winter, beauty of summer, or joy of autumn. A Spring fey when once he had been a High Elf of Hyperborea. Sulevan was more academic than warrior, more builder than destroyer. For a time he assisted in collecting what remained of their lost home and saving knowledge that he believed would otherwise be lost to them in the eternity to come. For a time, he was successful and stood prideful at the side of his new Queen Titania. But he missed home. Bitterness set into his heart at the memory of a place that he would no longer know and no longer see again. Eternity was more a burden than a gift when it came at the cost of knowing the past. Sulevan grew restless and bored, until one day he set out into the world to find more meaning to his existence and never returned.

And so he fell for the second time.

When he was born a drow centuries later, Sulevan was no longer. Crafted meticulously by Lloth and born to a Matron Mother, the drow boy was given the name Severon. For a time, he tried to do as all the rest did and meet the many expectations placed before a child of one of the Underdark’s leaders. He knew how to wield the shadows and summon monsters, but his efforts were dull and dim compared to those of the other drow. His mind focused on the questions: why? how? He watched the shadows and the monsters instead of instructing them. He wondered about their power and their potential and played with the magic of shadow and vice like a restless child. He wove the ideas that went through his head with his hands, creating that which wasn’t there before. In an audience with his new shadow Queen, Severon confessed that their world was barren and their lives were lacking. He confessed his curiousity for the world that they’d left behind at death. He bowed to his Queen and showed her where they could build, where they could improve, where their soldiers could be strengthened and their armies given more power like those of the fey. His Majesty was merciful in his eyes, as she allowed him to show her his ideas and then further allowed him to bring his dreams into reality. His dreams would become nightmares to all that the drow opposed. With his mind and his ambition, he became a favored of Ayi’ig. Severon dreamed of the kingdom of drow becoming greater than even that of the fey or elven. A metropolis of darkness, magic and power unlike anything the realms have ever seen before.

As the Court of the Drow became reality, Severon did not stop to rejoice or celebrate the victory of his Queen. He immediately set to the task of collecting the magic and the technology that the fey had left behind, knowing that this was only the very beginning of what would be the birth of a greater Otherworld. But he restless. His ambition no longer knew bounds or limits, and his eyes had set upon the mortal world too and all that it had within it. The Eye was equipped with stolen technology of the fey, as well as human-made ingenuity. The witches and Leviathan had divine and dark powers that even they did not yet fully understand. He would collect it all, find it all, bring it all to his Queen. Severon had no idea what perfection was, but he sought it. Full of pride perhaps, but it was greed which spurred him to unimaginable lengths. Even with all the knowledge and power in the world, in his hubris he knew that he would still try to find a way to change and improve it all even more. After all, it was what his Queen wanted. His Queen wanted everything and he was but the vessel to help her obtain it.

personality

+ enterprising, ambitious, erudite – detached, savage, reliant

played by dany. est. she/her.

[qierxing]

Descension

Yan! Leviathan x Angel! Reader

Word Count: 3572

TW/CW: Mutilation, gore, blood, sharp weapons

You can’t be friends with someone who wants your life.

-

His wings were broken.

Bent at an angle that shouldn't be possible, that you knew it must've been agonizing to bear. Blood spurting out of messy open wounds, snapped bones poking out of marred flesh, satin white all covered in crimson red. His black sleeves torn, deep blue shawl ripped to threads, golden halo nowhere to be seen.

You shouldn't have helped him. It was war, and Father wouldn't have taken kindly to helping those who defied Him.

But why was He inflicting such pain upon His own children? He taught you to be kind, to be gentle. How could He tell you to maim and slaughter those who you considered your family?

"I'm sorry." You murmur to Leviathan, lifting him to lie face first on your lap.

You don't have much time. And judging by the way his feathers are already disintegrating, the process of corruption has already begun. You know what you must do. It's a kindness, really, but it doesn't make the lump in your throat go away when you bring out your daggers, sharp and gleaming, to his back.

"I'm sorry." You repeat, even though there's no point in saying it. Your hands tremble as they hold the blades, as you take a shaking breath. There's no saving his wings, you remind yourself. The strong and mighty structures are now nothing more than a burden, a weight dragged in the dirt.

It's a clean cut. The sharp blade slices through marrow and bone like butter, carving a path like a butcher. And the once radiant angel doesn't make any noise as you shear away his proud wings, now smeared and broken beyond repair.

"I'm sorry." You gasp out, tears overflowing and dripping down your cheeks, dripping upon his skin and mixing with blood. His wings sit in a bloody pile, the disintegrated feathers leaving black charcoal dust on the bones and flesh and your robes. He's passed out, and you're glad, because it means he can't feel that his back is so much lighter now. You wrap the wounds tightly with your torn cloth, and lift him again.

What you're doing is amounting to treason, you know. But you refuse to stand by and watch as those dearest to you were ordered to be executed.

When you silently leave him by his brothers' side, you pray he will be safe.

-

When Michael picks you to be part of the Demon Prince's exchange program, you feel a sliver of hope.

It's been centuries since the Great War, and now there are talks of peace and treaties between the two realms, and even the human realm. Relationships between demons, angels, and humans are to be improved through the program, so they say.

Simeon and Luke were the first ones chosen to go for the first year. At the time, you were considering begging Michael if you could go, but something held you back. A fear that, after these long years, that your friend would have forgotten you.

After all, the Celestial realm had no problem moving on after the exile of the brothers. Any trace, evidence they had existed, lived, in the Celestial realm were wiped; their presence faded into cherub's fables, used to scare any young angel from defying Father. Sometimes, even you feel your memories of the brothers had gotten foggy and unclear, like a puddle that has filled with mud.

Would he blame you? For destroying his wings, for not doing more? Would he curse you, scream at you for abandoning him? Those fears sewn your mouth shut and made you still your tongue as you watched your friends get sent to the Devildom for the program.

"[First], since the program has been a success, I'm sending you and Raphael with the others for this year."

You could hardly believe your own ears. Was it true? Were you dreaming? No...it was happening. You're excited, scared, and nervous, all at once, but you pray and pray that you get to see your friends, if just to tell them you're glad to see them alive.

You pray that they don't resent you for not falling with them.

-

There's a ghost in front of you.

You wouldn't have been able to recognize him if not for his hair, still as shockingly violet and in the usual simple bowl cut style.

"Leviathan?"

The demon looks confused at you addressing him, but after looking at you closer, his orange tinted eyes widen.

"[First]?" He whispers in disbelief.

Before he can say another word, you've taken several swift steps and engulfed him in a bear hug, hot tears leaking out of your eyes. He's a bit cold, and he still smells of sea salt and mint, a scent that comforts you greatly. Even after everything, he was still your Levi.

"I'm so glad you're safe," you choke out, holding him tighter, "I was so scared...that you wouldn't have made it."

He doesn't say anything back for awhile, but his tight grip mirrors yours, his face buried in your shoulder. "I'm…glad you're okay too."

Even though you sense his brothers and your fellow angels still around you, they let you both have your emotional reunion without interruption, something you're extremely grateful for.

Finally, you pull back, and Levi's clutch reluctantly loosens to allow you to lean back and examine his face, leaning into your warm hands as you stroke his cheek. Your laugh is watery as you inhale and smile.

"You still look nerdy as ever, Levi."

His pale skin heats under your palms, pout coming to his face as naturally as breathing. "[First]!!!" You giggle as he whines at your light-hearted teasing.

You lean forward and place your forehead against his and close your eyes.

"It's good to see you again, Levi."

-

It's hard to get used to this form.

Your hands are nothing but gentle, as they roam over his elongated horns, rough and blunt, much like coral that grows undersea. His skin and long tail is dotted with dark, reflective scales like the creatures that inhabit the ocean, and under the overhead fluorescent light they glimmer in iridescent colors.

Despite the drastic change, it strangely fits him. You brush a stray strand of hair aside as his cheeks bloom red, eyes pleadingly looking at yours like a puppy, making you grin.

"You look pretty." There's no hesitation or reluctance in your voice, and somehow his face burns brighter under the cold lighting of his room.

"N-no way, you’re just saying that to make me feel better!”

“You of all people know that I wouldn’t do that.” You shake your head as you run your knuckles against his cheek. As your hand pulls away, his face follows, chasing after your reassurance, making your heart melt.

He stutters, eyes dropping to his hands curled in his lap. “But I’m just a no good shut in and a ugly demon now…there's no way I'm pretty.”

Your smile drops and your hands slowly retract from his, curling around yourself. "I-I'm…" Your throat closes up. You've run this conversation through your head thousands of times, and yet it was so hard to choke out the words in the moment.

"I'm sorry." Levi looks taken back by your choked sob, confused at your weeping face. "For…taking your wings, for not being there for you-oh God, I'm so, so sorry-!" You wail, chest heaving as your voice cracks. Levi is quick to envelope you in a hug, his tail wrapping around your legs and squeezing.

"Are you kidding?" He murmurs fiercely into your neck. "If it weren't for you, I would've died there...I wouldn't be able to get this room and all my merch…" At this, you give a dry laugh.

"Never change, Levi." You shake your head, wiping your stray tears away. “Enough about the past. How have you been, Levi? What have you been doing?”

“Ahh, I don’t even know where to begin!” He leans back, eyes sparkling with a vitality you didn’t you’d ever see in the former recluse angel. “There’s been so much I’ve watched and read, but I guess I should start with-”

“Have you heard of anime and manga?”

-

The days of the program pass by like a dream.

Being able to spend time with Levi after so long, made your heart light. It eased the anxieties and fears that long perched on your shoulder, whispering the worst in your ears in the past centuries, waving them away like pesky flies. Not only that, but seeing the brothers again, in good health, also eased your worries.

“Satan?” You tilt your head.

“Oh right, [First] hasn’t met him yet!” Asmodeus giggles, picking up his cup of coffee. “Say hello to my adorable new older brother. Isn’t he so handsome?”

“Don’t need the flattery, Asmo,” The blond brother sighs, shaking his head. He meets your eyes and offers his hand. “Nice to meet you, [First]. You’re my brothers’ friend up in the Celestial realm, right?”

“Likewise.” You politely smile, accepting his handshake. “And yeah, we hung out often before…”

Before Father struck them down to Hell.

You trail off, realizing what you were about to say, and your blood freezes over. Something jostles you and you startle out of your dark thoughts, turning to see Leviathan burrowing himself into your side, eyes focused on the console in his hands.

“Before we became demons.” He blandly finishes your sentence, and your blood thaws ever so slightly.

“I see.” Satan has the manners to not point out how your eyes had glazed over and your hands had grown cold and damp before letting go of the handshake.

“My, Levi, getting cozy there, aren’t we?” Asmodeus coos, “Seems like you always trailing after [First] hasn’t changed at all.”

“I am not trailing after [First], Asmo.” Leviathan snaps, focus torn from his game, quickly hiding his red face in your side. You weakly chuckle. Asmodeus wasn’t wrong. Levi always had a penchant for shadowing you, always using you as a support crutch in social situations. It’s long become a habit now, and it seems Leviathan intends to keep it that way.

“Speaking of getting cozy, how’s Devildom treating you, hon?” Asmodeus sips at his coffee, liquid golden eyes curiously gazing at you.

“It’s been good. Besides the occasional demon trying to eat me.” You sheepishly laugh, scratching your cheek. Something grips you, and you look down in confusion. Leviathan is tightly clutching onto your clothes, game abandoned by his lap, still playing tinny music.

“Hm…well, if they ever get to be a problem, you just let us know, okay, sweetie?” You look back up to see Asmodeus frowning. “They’re just low level pests, but we don’t want our dear friend to get hurt.”

“Y-yeah…” Never mind the fact that you were a seasoned warrior that has spent their life cutting down foes. You look back down at Levi’s face still buried in your side, hands gripping your clothes in a death grip. There’s an urgency and desperation in the way he’s burrowed in your side, as if you were going to vanish at some point. Your throat closes in on itself at the sight.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

-

“The young master would like to invite you to tea, if you're available?”

You’ve only seen Barbatos only a couple times, most of it for official exchange program business or when he was escorting you through the Demon Lord’s castle. It was rare that the two of you spoke outside of that. And to be invited by Prince Diavolo, of all things.

“Oh, uh…I would be honored!” You fluster, a little anxious with the prospect talking with the demon prince.

As Barbatos escorts you to the castle, you remember with a jolt that you promised Levi that you would both walk home after classes to watch a new anime. Quickly taking out your D.D.D., you type a rushed text that you wouldn’t be able to walk with him because of a sudden invitation from Diavolo. Putting the device back in your bag, you don’t hear the ping that resounds before it’s encased in the leather.

It seems you didn’t have to worry much about the prince after all. He was charming and polite, making sure you felt comfortable the whole time, asking if there was anything he could do for you. Barbatos even brewed a delicious tasting human world tea, something called a ‘chai’ tea? Humans really have cultivated some tasty beverages in recent ages. The tea time was spent bantering over the human world, both of you exchanging facts and hearsay about humans and their unique habits.

It’s when you finally leave and check your D.D.D again that you realize you have nearly tens of hundreds of missed calls and unread text messages, all from Leviathan. Did something happen?

Opening the chat, you’re greeted with a bombardment of frantic texts.

Hey, where are you?

Are you ignoring me?

Did you leave without me?

You furrow your brows with worry. Did he not get your message?

Hey, this isn't funny.

You can't abandon me!

How could you leave me alone?

Something winds through your throat and your chest, suffocating your lungs. Leviathan often had bouts of insecurity and panic but these messages far outweighed simple anxiety over a missed hangout.

Despite your gut twisting, you hesitantly open a voicemail and listen.

'[First]? I'm by the entrance, are you still in class? Text me soon, okay?'

You open another one.

'Hey, did you leave without me? You promised we would watch that anime today! Where are you?'

'[First], why won’t you answer my texts or calls? Is someone with you? I bet you don’t want to hang out with this no good otaku huh…'

‘Even if I'm a pathetic waste of space, please just respond, please, please, please, [First]…’

‘It’s not fair, [First]! Why do I have to be left alone?! It’s not fair, it’s not fair!’

Chills run down your spine at the most recent voicemail, timestamped three minutes ago.

‘T-that’s right, [First]…you didn’t want to leave me, right? You would never abandon me. This…this is just a test of my love for you, right? Hahaha…oh [First], I will always love you no matter what, so please…won’t you come back to me?’

Your grip on your D.D.D. tightens and loosens. Of all the things that you’ve experienced in your long, long life, you’ve never felt the fear that slithers and coils around you at these voicemails and messages. You want to run and hide, even call Michael and beg him to let you come back to the Celestial realm.

That wasn’t your friend, that was an illusion, a fake. It couldn’t be him, he could never be so…so corrupted.

But you owe him an explanation at the very least, so you find yourself outside his room.

“Levi?…” You call, not bothering to knock for once, opening the door to pure darkness. His aquarium reflects some dim lights onto the floor, but his usual computer and gaming monitors were all turned off, not even his usual rainbow colored glow lamps on.

“Levi?” You step more into the room, trying to find the lightswitch to the room. Was he not in his room? Maybe you should ask his brothers if they’ve seen him—

The door slams shut and you jump, whirling around.

“L-Levi?” Your voice comes out in a terrified whisper.

You’re tugged back, being dragged by something long and snake-like, and you scream, terror gripping your heart. Struggling with all your might does nothing, and the appendage wraps around your mouth, muffling your screams.

You hit an end, and something else wraps around you, and hot breath tickles your ear.

“You came back.” The voice is no stranger and tears are streaming down your cheeks as your eyes try to frantically see behind you. A heavy, relieved sigh rolls over your ear. “I’m so glad.”

Your head is tucked under his chin as you thrash to no avail, whatever holding you in place solid and cold and unbending. You’ve given up on screaming, but trying to speak is no good either, words coming out in a muffled garble. Horror grows as you realize the bindings holding you is none other than Leviathan’s tail.

“Do you know how lonely I was, waiting for you?” He mumbles, rubbing his cheek against yours in a mocking imitation of a lover’s embrace. “How agonizing it was, knowing you were with others, probably having a better time than with me?”

It’s a misunderstanding, Levi, please, I’m sorry, you want to sob, shaking your head.

“No matter, no matter,” you feel him grin, sharp teeth brushing against your skin, “you came back, and now you don’t have to leave. I got everything you need here…snacks…water…clothes…just stay with me forever here.”

Your heart plummets to your stomach, and you finally manage to elbow him in the gut, causing him to cough and loosen his grip. The small window is enough for you to clamber out of the bathtub he trapped you in, quickly summoning your wings to get on your feet quickly.

With your back to the door, the one you used to call a dear friend stares at you with madness in his glowing orange eyes.

“Aahh hah…you look so beautiful in your angel form…” He reaches out a clawed hand out to you, and you flinch, cold sweat trickling down your forehead.

You scramble for purchase behind you, finding the doorknob through your feathers, tugging harshly to no avail. Your wings flutter fast, frantic at the thought of being trapped again.

His eyes slide from yours to the white feathers, then back lazily. His tail flicks back and forth behind him. A predator poised to strike its prey.

“But I think you should lose the wings. That way, you can’t leave me.”

You can’t take it anymore. Using your full strength, you blast the door behind you open, sending it flying in the hallway. You shoot out of the entryway, and straight through the roof, uncaring of the debris and damage that came with it. Unfurling your wings to their full span, you chance a look down.

Leviathan stares up at you with glowing eyes trained on your form, smiling like a madman.

You shudder and let your wings take you away, far away.

-

Were you blind to the nature of demons all along?

Blinded by your past friendship as fellow angels that you couldn’t see the corruption bubbling underneath your friend’s exterior? That you couldn’t sense the dark aura he contained whenever he was angered? Or was it because it was in your nature to forgive, that you couldn’t bring yourself to see that your friend had changed after all?

“Finally, that overgrown serpent left you alone.” You feel numb, staring at the demon across from you. “Took him long enough.”

Sharp teeth are revealed in a nasty smirk as the lower level demon’s eyes glow ominously. “Now stay still, and make yourself an easy meal!”

He lunges, and you ready your blades with your wings spread in a defensive position with a grimace. You just need to corner him so you can disable him temporarily—

In a blink, your face is splashed with blood.

Your eyes burn with the scene in front of you.

The demon is completely halved, his innards and guts splattered against the ground, torso and legs bent at awkward angles. You swear he blinks despite his distorted anguished face, the last moments of the brain comprehending the body’s state. Gooey bits of meat have been flung everywhere, with bits of broken bone, scattered on the concrete and the walls.

You forgot Leviathan used to be a fellow warrior too. Not just any warrior, a strategist, one who always and only calculated for victory. He was a general.

“Disgusting filth.” The avatar of envy clicks his tongue in disdain, flicking away the blood and gore on his tail and claws. “As if he could even touch you.”

His head whips towards you as your daggers drop out of your hands. You’re frozen, trembling at the gruesome sight before you, that you can’t get away when he starts striding towards you.

“Hey, you feel bad for taking my wings, right?” He asks, picking up one of the daggers that you’ve dropped on the ground. A sense of dread fills your heart. “I’ll just take yours then! That’ll make everything even. I’ll even forgive you for abandoning me for Lord Diavolo!”

When he takes your arm in a tight grip, you try to revert back, but it’s too late.

You scream in agony, your back on molten fire. It’s like your bones are being ripped out of your flesh, blood and feathers staining your skin. The pain makes you nearly black out, collapsing into Leviathan’s welcoming arms. You’re reduced to a blubbering mess, the messy lacerations left by your own dagger simmering into a throbbing, stinging sensation.

Leviathan hums happily, and you blearily recognize the tune to be from one of his favorite anime. Pressing a long kiss to your lips, he smiles like he used to, with no envy or madness clouding his countenance, an innocent blush on his cheeks.

“I love you, [First].”

His envy made him take your wings, your life, and now with nothing to your name, you were finally on his level to take.

[pen-observing]

Humans, huh?

synopsis: You saw the way humans were depicted in Devildom tv shows. You detested it and demanded Diavolo to give you space to show the truth. You depicted some things that the brothers can’t stop thinking about - and here they are.

MASTERLIST

For Lucifer, it is the ability to immediately click and understand someone. What does it mean to feel their ‘vibe’? And this ‘vibe’ immediately connects you in an intimate way with that other person? You are able to base a stable friendship from something so simple? He doesn’t like that feeling. He doesn’t understand it. He looks at Satan and wonders what their relationship would be like if they had that ability. For how long have they lived and how great the distance between them still?

We all know that Mammon gets completely immersed in romance stories. We all know that he cries too. But, since you came along he has been questioning how he is so impatient with everything else but you. And then he sees it; he sees the story of pining and yearning love. A male lead who has spent years loving and caring for the other person as a friend. A male lead who is never able to stop thinking about them and desperately hopes for more than friendship – yet, he doesn’t say anything. Mammon now knows how he remains patient. Mammon now hopes you give the yearning love a happy ending.

What gets to Leviathan is an episode about genuine friendship. You wanted to show friendship can exist between a person and everything else in life. Immediate friendships, childhood ones, friendships that are formed on accident and even; enemies to friends. Leviathan can’t help but think about it. However, what really gets to him is; friendship as a basis for soulmates. He thinks of you. However, at the end of the episode when the final message is that “You have to be a friend to yourself as well” hits home he thinks, just a bit, that you’d like him to be less hard on himself.

Satan is a little bit annoyed when you show how humans have a natural tendency to gravitate towards some things more than others. He cannot comprehend the talent which enables someone knowledge. So, you mean to tell him that the girl can’t do equations but can speak 5 languages?? Knowledge is not supposed to work like that! Satan can’t accept it. For centuries he has seemed and seeks knowledge of all forms, works hard to obtain it and now?? A human has something innate for it? It gets to him. Talk to Satan about the innate talents you see in him, maybe then he will be willing to open up to the innateness hypothesis of language. What do you mean a baby born talking MC?

Asmodeus is unusually quiet when episode on unrequited love comes along. He is able to get everything and everyone to love him. He is able to experience love humans cannot even dream of yet his beautiful eyes are staring at the screen, watching the character hurt for years. How can someone hurt so beautifully while their love of years upon years sits across them and says they have someone else. How can they genuinely smile with sad eyes and a ‘ congratulations' past their lips? Asmo knows that you are his exception to the power he possesses. Asmo still hopes his love for you won’t be like the one on the screen.

Beelzebub has something inkling to a realization as he sits on the couch with you next to his right side. The idea of ‘found family' stirs something within him. Ever since you came along and helped him, helped his brothers – he always considered you family? He felt love and he felt protective of your happiness. He didn’t even wonder of the in between steps that might exist. You were a stranger and now you’re his found family? He also begins to think in what context it can be applied to his brothers. He doesn’t say anything but he looks at you fondly. After it ends he thanks you and you will never know what for.

Belphegor’s excitement to learn more about you and humans he loved once almost becomes reluctance when he sees a redemption arc. He could feel it coming on and he dreads it. He dreads the fact that he as a demon had no better way to redeem himself to you. He hates it. Humans don’t brush things off so easily and while he knows your relationship is better than before – he thinks back to the past. The character left on a year long journey helping the hero  

[sirpeanutthethirdom]

How they confess | Demon Bro’s & Diavolo

I usually write Dead By Daylight related stuff but decided to finish all my old Obey Me! stuff I have written years ago and post ‘em all here, especially since I’m coming back to the fandom. I’ll still make DBD stuff (got a new ask too, wahey) but now I’ll spam the shit out of this blog with Obey Me stuff. Btw, since I mentioned that this is all old stuff, don’t expect quality writing here as I’m too lazy to fix all my mistakes.

plus, I upgraded the masterlist for this, you can go there to see my DBD related stuff. 

SirPeanutTheThirdOM is a new blog I created dedicated for this kind of stuff cause I realized how spammy things would be if I posted them on my main blog.

• Lucifer

He's a man full of pride, nothing could've been able to make the mighty firstborn shy or flustered in any way. And that clearly showed in his confession! His words were as clear as the night sky on the day he confessed. The moon illuminated his face stunningly that night, a growing desire has made you carve for his lips more than ever. And in the end, you gave in the temptation and you're damn glad you did."Somebody like you exists only once in all three worlds. Yet I'm the only one to have the pleasure to have you. You're mine. Understood?"

• Mammon

There's a reason why everybody called Mammon a tsundere, a very obvious reason that your oblivious ass overlooked. After all, why would a goddamn stupid but powerful and adorable demon love a mistake on two legs? That's what you thought. But your thoughts were proven wrong immediately when you two spend some alone time together. Mammon's heart opened just like how his soul stripped naked in front of you. He didn't want to keep any secrets and let you know all about him, like his feelings for you."You are my first and you'll always be it. Listen, 'cause I'm only sayin' it once, meetin' ya has been the best thing that has happened in my life."

• Asmodeus

Being the romantic guy Asmodeus is, he tried to make his confession something grand and beautiful, a moment that will linger in your minds even after centuries have passed. He wanted to overdo it in many ways possible, flowers, music, flower pallets, everything he could come up with! The big event that he had planned out for you didn't bug you at all, it was more the fact that Asmodeus himself fell in love with you. A scenario from your dreams has turned into reality and with a smile of happiness, you fell into his arms, letting him carry you into the night."Never would I have thought I'd meet someone as cute and beautiful as me. From all the faces I have seen and voices I have heard, yours is all I want to keep."

• Leviathan

Every day that has passed his feelings grew even harder for you. They rested on his heart like warm stones. But what was once a pleasant warmth has turned into a burning desire. Locking himself inside his room seemed to be the only way to conceal his feelings for you but the flaming desire to be with you grew along with the time he'd spent locked inside his room. Your voice, your touch, your love... It's all he wanted to embrace. Like a fragile porcelain flower in his hands that shined brightly even under the glistering moon. But the fear coursed through his veins that he'll end up dropping the flower, thus ruining what could've been beautiful. Still, it was worth a try for him anyway. Or else his hands will become sweaty and he'll drop the flower either way. But what has been one flower has turned into a beautiful garden as you embraced him deeply, returning his feelings and desires."I might not always be the best or the strongest... But I promise I will always try to be a good boyfriend!"

• Beelzebub

How shall I confess to them? That's a question that has lingered for too long in his mind. Gathering the confidence and courage wasn't too much of a task for him (although there were slight hesitations and what-if questions) but the way he wanted to confess should be unforgettable. He wants to make it memorable. His first idea was baking a pie but... Well... It's pretty hard to resist eating it all in one bite. Beel asked Luke instead if he could help him. But being the stubborn demon-hater number 1, he denied it at first because he thought Beel wanted the cake all to himself. However, after Beel explained to Luke his situation, Luke didn't hesitate to bake the perfect cake for the confession. You and Beel ate the cake together and afterward cuddled on his bed."I always want to eat cake or other delicious food with you. And after eating, I want to lay down with you and talk about our days."

• Belphegor

Just like Beelzebub, he wasn't too worried about the confession but rather how he should do it. A big event? No, it will only put you on the spot and pressure you into saying yes. He wanted something quick and easy, a bouquet maybe and some nice words thrown into it. But he also wanted to show that this confession and the moment they spend together means a lot to him. He took them to the planetarium and watched the stars together, scooting a little closer every second. His eye has been locked with theirs, it's as if someone stole the stars from the sky and placed them personally in their eyes."I thought I'd never been able to like humans again. But my connection with you... It's something special. Let me be your star and watch over you."

• Satan

It seems like Satan has overestimated his abilities to ask someone out once the final moment hit and the right time in the clock struck, his mouth sealed itself shut. Any attempts at opening them have resulted in a big failure. His gaze wouldn't leave you as you pointed gleefully at the stars and fawned at how beautiful they are. He wanted to be smooth and say you were prettier than them but instead he watched you get happy over every little thing. Seeing you like this made his body almost move on his own, one second you're blabbering how beautiful the stars are, on the next Satan has captured your lips perfectly against his own. "Human lives are just like books. They are both beautiful but also short. Let me be the person inside the rest of your pages."

• Diavolo

Imagine if the all-mighty demon prince has fallen for a fragile little human. That crazy little idea became Diavolos reality. He envied how (Y/N) had only spent their time with the seven demon brothers and rarely with him. He tried everything to get their time and spent it together but it was never enough to satisfy him. What he wasn't aware of though was how the human felt the same. One day on a beautiful night he confessed his feelings to them. Nothing fancy or extravagant, just words laced perfectly with his love like a strawberry with melting chocolate on it."Never would I have expected that I'd fall for you. But I did. Fate likes to write crazy stories and I hope I'll be a part of yours."

[zealous-whispers-of-us-redux]

don't ever laugh when a hearse goes by

A/N: A funny story about this- it was a vivid dream I had when I was on heavy-duty pain meds after abdominal surgery. I just found it in my Google docs. Also, I maaaaaaaay write a prequel of some sort.

Hope you like my soft version of Chase Collins! xx

___

Chase woke to a pile of snakes writhing in his bed. He rolled over and looked at the clock, running his hand over his face as he noticed the time. He stood, pulled on a pair of shoes, scolded a particularly mischievous garter snake who was trying to eat one of his spiders, and headed outside.

The ground was muddy from the three-day thunderstorm that she had started for a little bit of fun, and Chase's shoes got dirty as he trekked out behind the tiny cottage. Snakes greeted him wherever he stepped. He greeted his favorite -an Eastern milk snake she had named Leviathan- with a pat on the head. Leviathan wound her way up his body as he knelt down, peering into the grave. He had to squint, but he could just make out her shape, pretty and half-buried in the dirt. Chase threw a pebble at her, and she sat up eerily, like a vampire rising from its coffin.

"Yes?" she asked.

"It's two," Chase said.

"Ah. I imagine I must get up."

She heaved herself out of her grave, and as soon as she landed next to Chase, she was buried under a pile of happy snakes, each greeting her with hisses and tongue flicks. She laid her head on Chase's shoulder, and he kissed her head.

His girlfriend was a witch, though what kind she was didn't have a name because she was the last of her kind. She and Chase had met when he was eighteen, drunk and terrified of himself. He had killed his adoptive parents only hours before stumbling into the forest in an attempt to escape everything. Following a pit of snakes, Chase had found her cabin. She had taken him in and taught him things, though she didn't understand his magic (just as he didn't understand hers). And after his fight with Caleb Danvers left him trapped behind the veil, unable to return, he had called out for her until she woke up from her sleep. When he was twenty-six, she came for him after eight years of being stuck in perpetual nothingness and trying to fight off anything attempting to get into his body. They had been together ever since.

"Happiest of birthdays, Son of Ipswich," she said in her strange, lilting way that showcased all of her three thousand years. "You should go back to sleep. It is late, and you have not slept well these last few nights. Your birthday can wait."

"I'll be okay," Chase replied.

He felt strange. It was easy to ignore his birthday when he did not exist, but now that he was here among the living, he found himself hating it again. It meant that he was all the closer to his death. It brought up memories he wished he could forget. Death and unimaginable power that he both loved and hated. That he'd killed for and would do it again.

She turned to face Chase, her eyes flickering colors as they always did when she first woke up. She pressed her fingers into his skin and tilted his head this way and that way.

"You are aging," she said. "What have I told you?"

"It's not fucking fair that mine ages me whenever I use it and yours doesn't," Chase flared, though he knew that she was only saying it because she cared.

"Your power's curse is age." She looked sad. "Mine is to stay young forever. Chase, I would have chosen to die centuries ago if I could. I miss my homeland, but the people are no more. Just artifacts locked up in museums and archeologists trying to decode a language no one speaks. We used to be worshipped. Now, I am the only one left."

Chase deflated. What had happened to him wasn't her doing. She understood more than anyone- this idea of feeling alone and lost with unimaginable power.

After she had saved him, he was hellbent on getting revenge on the other Sons for quite a long time. She didn't deter him, but he almost wanted her to. Then the day he was to carry out his plan, she had sat him down and told him everything. Civil war amongst those like her, and when she finally dragged her eyes away from her weapon, she saw the bodies and what she had done. She was the winner, but at what cost? She had told the story and cried so pretty that Chase decided against his revenge. Falling in love with her helped, too.

"Come," she said, getting to her feet and holding out her hand. "Let us go to the cemetery and see who's there tonight. Perhaps we will see a black dog."

"Sure," Chase replied, taking her hand. "But I thought you said hellhounds make awful pets."

"They make wonderful allies."

As they began to walk across the wrinkled grass, snakes followed. Chase looked down, expecting to see her favorite snake- the Egyptian cobra as old as she. She was quick to dispel his worries.

"I sent Nehebukau on an errand for your birthday," she said.

"Right. Should I be worried?"

"No. He is always conscientious."

The cemetery was still as they entered through the fence. The door creaked like always, and Chase reminded himself for the millionth time to get some oil. Thanks to how loud the gate was, the groundskeeper had nearly caught them.

She stopped walking, her head tilting like she was listening to something. Chase waited patiently for her to finish up with her conversation. When it seemed like it would be one of the ones where she talked for longer than five minutes, he sat down on the ground. Several snakes raced over to him, flicking their tongues out as Chase patted their heads. Several spiders joined the party too, and by the time she was done with her conversation, Chase was nothing more than a wiggling pile of animals. When she sat down, the snakes dropped off Chase and slithered over to her, eager for her attention.

Chase watched a spider dance through his fingers:

"What were you talking about?" he asked.

"This and that."

"What, I can't know?"

"It wasn't that interesting, really. We were talking about his good old days." She leaned her head on Chase's shoulder. "The 1880s."

"Right, of course, the 1880s, yeah. How interesting. What even happened then?"

"Apparently, there was a technology boom. And Coca-Cola was invented. I took him at his word. I was asleep then."

"In your grave?" Chase asked.

"In my grave," she confirmed. "You should try it."

"I dunno, it reminds me too much of "The Hearse Song." You know, "the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out. The worms play pinochle on your snout.'"

"Don't ever laugh when a hearse goes by, for you may be the next to die," she sang, nudging Chase.

"Exactly."

"That is true, you know. When you laugh at the dead, they get angry. They'll kill you if you laugh at a particularly powerful shade."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Mhm. They reach into your chest and squeeze your heart until it stops beating."

Chase snorted. "That's dark."

"It's only death," she replied. "There is nothing to fear about it."

"Unless-" Chase stopped, his smile fading fast as he thought about it.

"Unless?"

"Unless you're damned."

"Chase." She reached for him, cupping his face in her palms. "You are not damned."

"I hate it sometimes," Chase said quietly like he was trying to hide from the truth. "I wish I didn't have it. Wish I had a choice. But then I can't imagine being without it. The more I use it, the better it feels."

"It is an addiction."

"I know it is! I know! Damn it. I just," Chase wiped a clammy hand down his face, "-Yeah, I get that. I just wish it could be as ordinary as caffeine addiction. People rarely die from that. Instead, it's more- like amphetamines. The longer I go without using it, I get hot and achy. But I don't want to die young. I regret what it made me do. I lost years of my life. Do you know what it's like?"

"To be part of this world and the next," she said. "To be in a state that is like sleeping but not. To sense that you are surrounded by others who are trapped like you, unable to call out for help. You cannot think; you cannot dream. You know nothing except darkness."

"Time goes both slow and fast. You can't see or hear or touch anything. No one can hear you scream."

Chase hated to sleep. Sleeping brought nightmares of the void. It was nothing and everything. Being unable to move, surrounded by oppressive blankness with terrible things just out of reach but watching so you could feel their gaze. You couldn't sleep, couldn't move, couldn't dream. Chase's powers did not work. Time went so slow that a day felt like one hundred years.

It was also a punishment to put misbehaving witches into the void in her time. She had known witches who went mad in their captivity. After the civil war, she forced herself into exile as punishment for the blood she had spilled. She had spent so long in there that it made her a little mad. She was more void than not nowadays. She learned how to master it, take that nothingness and channel it into her magic. She no longer feared it. But she would not deny Chase comfort when it invaded his dreams.

"Yes," she said, putting a hand on Chase's cheek, "I know what that is like."

She was covered in mud. Her hair had a worm in it, but Chase still threw his arms around her and kissed her until he felt better. Then he pulled her to her feet, and they headed to the bathing area. Her cottage was small on the inside, and she had not seen the point in indoor plumbing, seeing as she was alone and didn't understand it anyway. Chase talked her into adding a small bathroom. It was semi outdoors, but no strangers ever wandered by, even as an accident.

Chase turned on the shower, and she jumped, still unused to the noise even though she could stand near the loudest waterfall and not be bothered. He couldn't stop his laughter.

"That wretched thing. I'd curse it if it had a soul," she said.

She was pouting. It really was cute, and seeing it made Chase feel better. He kissed her again.

"You're covered in dirt," Chase said after, pulling off his clothes simultaneously.

"That has never stopped me before. I do not understand why you wanted this madness."

"When you grow up as a mortal, you come to expect a certain level of creature comforts. That includes modern plumbing."

"Ridiculous. The ancient Egyptians had a fine plumbing system."

"So, you've said. Are you coming in or not?"

"If I must."

She dragged her feet like Chase was forcing her to the guillotine. He ducked under the spray and sighed. His dreams were very far away now. She threw off her top and slipped her shorts down her legs. She stood away from the shower, glaring at it, but Chase grabbed her hand and tugged her in. It was a testament to how much he loved her when he pulled the worm from her hair. She took the shampoo bottle he offered her and went to work washing the mud from her hair.

"Let me," Chase offered.

She tilted her head for his hands to scrub her scalp. She leaned into his hands, humming like she had never had her hair washed before. She could pout about plumbing until she was blue in the face, but Chase knew that she secretly liked it.

"You know how I can turn invisible?" Chase asked.

"Mhm."

"At my old high school, there were communal showers. You know, a bunch of private showers pushed together for guys and girls to use."

"And you turned invisible for nefarious reasons or because you were young and curious?" she asked.

"The first- well, both, I suppose."

"And no one knew you were there?"

"I was invisible, remember?"

She sniffed. "I can always tell."

"Mortals never see what they don't want to see."

"That is true. They are blind to even the most obvious of hidden things. Were the girls you watched attractive to you?"

Chase hadn't thought about anyone but the Sons for years. He didn't remember anyone besides the Sons. He barely remembered his adoptive parents. The void did that sometimes, she had told him once. It would erase memories if one did not think about them much. Chase didn't know how to answer. It was a strange question, either way. She asked it like she was genuinely baffled as to why he would ever turn invisible to watch girls in the shower. He remembered she was a teenager around nine hundred and seventy years ago. She probably didn't remember what it was like.

"I don't remember," he said, content with that answer.

(When she pulled him from out behind the veil, he had been angry. Not at her for rescuing him, but at the loss of himself. The void chipped away at a person. He had not remembered much. He hadn't wanted much. He was pretty confident he had a mansion in his name but still had no idea where it was or even if he wanted it. For a long time, Chase was angry that he didn't remember how to be a person. She would ask him questions that he no longer had the answers to, which would lead him to knock down trees in his rage. The longer he was here with her in their woods and snakes and spiders, he felt better. It was like he had been reborn or some other bullshit.)

"They must not have been, then," she said.

"I guess not." Chase leaned down and bit her shoulder. "I think I got all of the mud out. Rinse your hair."

She turned to dunk her head under the shower spray. One snake weaved its way around her thigh and relaxed against her hip as she cleaned her hair. Chase felt another snake weave its way around his shin. He patted the snake's head. This one was a northern copperhead that he had named Bruce. Bruce flicked his tongue out in greeting.

Truthfully, the snakes annoyed him at first. The snakes followed her everywhere she went, no matter where she went. His spiders didn't follow him everywhere he went. She and Chase had to close their bedroom door whenever they had sex, or else the snakes would be clamoring to join them on the bed. They were like overly long, extra excitable puppies. Once Chase told them that his boundaries were different than hers, they quit following him as closely as they followed her. Now that Chase could use the toilet in peace and wasn't tripping over snakes every other step he took, he liked them. They all had such unique personalities. They were a part of her, and Chase would be loath to part her from her snakes.

"Andromeda, I am trying to wash," she told a rat snake who was attempting to curl around her.

"Here," Chase offered, removing Andromeda and setting her in the grass.

The snake looked like she was pouting.

"Away, you silly thing. Go and hunt," she said, and Chase laughed.

He began washing his face in the shower spray, but when he pulled back, he jumped, letting out a noise of surprise at the large cobra staring back at him.

"Ah, Nehebukau, you've returned, good," she said. "Did it -Cassandra, join your sister. I cannot get clean while you are wrapped around my leg like that. Thank you- did your errand go well?"

Nehebukau flicked his tongue out and hissed. Whether that answered her question, Chase didn't know. He couldn't understand snakes like she could. He called her a Parselmouth once, but she didn't get the reference.

"Good," she said. "I am glad. We will be inside in a moment."

As Nehebukau went inside, they finished their shower without any more snakes. She stepped out first and handed Chase a towel, which he took, and patted Bruce dry first. He caught her smiling and wrapped an arm around her. He pulled her in, damp and smelling like pine, and kissed her forehead.

"What did you get me?" Chase asked.

"Let us go in and see."

She took his hand and pushed open the front door. Chase was half expecting some dancing skeletons or something. Still, there was only a fire going in her fireplace and three packages on their kitchen table. A frosted cake sat cooling on top of the oven. Chase had no idea how he didn't notice everything before leaving the cottage.

"Nehebukau told me about birthday candles," she said, pushing Chase into a seat. "I hope the ones he found are sufficient."

"How'd you do all this? You were sleeping."

"Are you sure about that?" she teased. "No, I left my body to bake the cake and wrap your gifts. It is quieter that way. That is why I did not wake before you."

She brought the cake over and lit the candles with a flick of her fingertips. Chase looked at her, and she looked back. They blinked at one another before she tilted her head in confusion.

"What?" she asked.

Nehebukau hissed.

"Oh, you're right, my mistake. All right, everyone, we are singing for Chase," she said to the room at large.

There were snakes everywhere. Chase felt honored, strangely enough (he needed to get out more).

The snakes all joined in the best they could when she started singing. The rattlesnakes rattled, and the others hissed along. Chase swore he heard Nehebukau singing in a distinctly human voice, but he wasn't sure when the song was over. It was the weirdest birthday song Chase had ever been a part of. He loved it. (He definitely needed to get out more).

"Happiest of birthdays," she said once the candles were out.

"Thanks," Chase said.

He pulled the first gift towards himself and ripped it open. Inside, there was a laptop. He blinked in surprise.

"That is a laptop, yes?" She looked nervous. "Is it suitable enough? I know you miss things like this."

"It's great. It's just that it needs internet to run."

"That is no problem. I found a spell from a "modern witch's" spellbook that creates the same effect. You should be able to do whatever you please."

She said "modern witch" the same way she snarled the word Wiccan, and Chase snorted. He knew the feeling.

"Thank you," he said sincerely. "I love it."

The next gift contained spider's eggs. Chase was delighted.

"Huntsmen aren't even in Massachusetts!" he said.

"Not even in the United States," she replied.

"No, not even. Thanks. They need heat?"

"We can accommodate that. Open the last one."

The third gift was contained in a nondescript shoe box. When Chase opened it, he found a book. The cover looked like it was made of human skin and seemed to glow with unnatural light. It looked dangerous, like as soon as Chase picked it up, it would tear his head from his neck. Still, he was drawn to it. The skin was dry to the touch.

"It is a spellbook of my people," she said, sitting in the chair next to Chase. "I have added my own work inside and translated it for you."

"My magic-"

"There are ways. Incantations and potions that can stop you from dying when you use your magic."

"Just dying?"

"Yes. You will age as much as your body allows, but you will not die. If you are unwilling to take that chance, there are spells inside the book that will not age you. There is older magic in the world than what is in you. Magic does not always harm the user. At least, not in physical ways."

"I'll get even more addicted," he said, but he didn't care.

She smiled. "All magic is an addiction."

Chase set the book on the table. Already, he could feel the want stirring in his blood. He could feel his magic pulsing in his head like it was responding to the book in front of him. He ached to know what was in there, so he opened it.

"Is this... blood?" he asked, rubbing a finger over a word.

"It is. We were quite dramatic at the time. Our lives began in blood and ended in blood." She began to cut the cake. "Poetic, really."

"A resurrection spell?" Chase asked.

"That one is, indeed. The spell will bring back anyone no matter when they die. There is no catch or consequence unless you lose control and they run amuck. Though, chaos of that sort is quite fun. Anyway, after you have no use for them, they will return from whence they came. But it is best not to bring back loved ones. That only brings heartache."

Chase closed the book and pushed it to the side. He wrapped his arms around her waist, pulled her onto his lap, and pressed his lips to her cheek.

"Are you speaking from experience?" he asked.

She nodded.

"I am. Would you like a slice of cake?"

Chase did. It was delicious. He'd spent his last eight birthdays in the void. It was nice to be here with her and her snakes.

"This is great," he said with his mouth full.

"Happiest of birthdays, Son of Ipswich," she replied.

[payasita]

Hubble Knight au

Somewhere in the endless void between stars drifts a space station of unparalleled size and beauty, if the legends are to be believed.

The legends also say that this station was the passion project of undiscovered alien beings larger than life itself, who sought to seed a kingdom of their own by way of constructing a marvelous floating nest out of miracles both magical and technological; ore and plasma and soul welded together in absolute perfection. 

It is believed that a vast, undulating leviathan soaring between sectors found his mate in a massive vascular plant who sunk her roots planet-wide in a world caught in his path. Though it was the Wyrm in his ambition who incited everything that would come to pass, the two shared dreams of sovereignty, and they remade themselves to better accomplish it together as they built their masterpiece over the centuries. Curated by his hand, and held together by her roots.

They were hailed as gods by the little creatures of neighboring worlds who followed them into the stars. And so the station was named by these ancients as Hallownest; a mythological civilization blessed by alien riches and enlightenment beyond any planetsider's mundane imagination. The Hallownest orbited no sun, and her people followed only the light of their King, creator, and captain at the helm.

So say legends that have been around for eons. If such a place ever existed, it would be scrap, now.

But that didn't stop every starship within a few hundred light years from taking notice of a strange distress signal, faint and unfamiliar, originating from somewhere in that old, dead galaxy where the station of gods was said to sail. There was no recognizable language to the beacon. Just a long pulse, thin and shrill with static, bracketed by a long silence that made it sound more like an ancient recording of a scream than any universal code.

It was mostly wanderers and would-be plunderers that would bother with pursuing the signal through such a lonely part of the universe, chasing stories of hidden riches still waiting in the depths of a kingdom forever frozen in deep space.

One such wanderer, though, was only heeding the call. For it was the first communication to ever light up the tarnished screens of its worn old cruiser pod, as far as it could remember.

(Shortly beyond, still some hundred thousand miles away, something is chained, plugged into the heart of the station by its pauldrons. Its enhancements hijacked, it sends out a cry that is not its own through every operating system on the station, all still active through a life support protocol at which it was the core. It is utterly still, save for a drip, drip, drip, falling from its cracked metal faceplate upon the broken panels below, brilliant golden discharge stark against the eternal dark of its tomb.

Just outside, a screen kicks to life and glows with the activation of a long dormant failsafe. Three more resting places activate their defenses, protecting the batteries slumbering in cryostasis within. The AI simulacrums of their minds will be searching and dispatching of all potential dangers.)

And so the wanderer pushed on through the thick cloud of dust and icy debris that made up the wastes around its destination, until finally some of the station came into view. The sheer expanse of it was such that the wanderer could only make out with any clarity the remains of a tiny, shielded settlement at the station's edge, once its vision cleared. But the settlement still had an open port, and so the wanderer made its steep descent. Past a withered defense grid that needed little more than persistent blunt force to crumble and shatter, and past an automated greeting protocol bidding the occupant of the visiting space pod welcome to the last and only civilization in all the known universe, and warning it to heed their laws. By order of the captain; of the King.

Once the wanderer reached the settlement, an elderly creature of familiar anatomy greeted it kindly, and with instant resignation that it intended to explore the lower levels of the station, as all past travelers and his own neighbors once had. None had returned. There was a sickness in the recycled air pumping through that old kingdom, he said, and one had to be careful when chasing their dreams down below.

"Creatures turn mad, and travellers are robbed of their memories. Perhaps dreams aren't such great things after all."

With that advice, it descended again. Silently, with its unknowably old, cracked weapon in hand.

The passageways below town sprawled every which way in a network of tunnels and caverns, and every step would echo a clang of metal on metal as the wanderer made its way down. Forgotten roads and waystations reeked of death and sugar-sweet sick, and the wanderer was beset upon by hostile inhabitants around every corner. 

It could read no normal pulse from any of them, though something did course through their veins and overflowed out from their eyes, their joints, and their wounds. A pathogen like none it knew of, and one its heavily augmented body seemed to resist just fine. 

The wanderer was not the only one unworried for its health. It met another traveler quickly enough, standing curiously before a heavily secured vault bearing runes and sigils that glowed with some actively running program. The stranger muttered to themself, or to someone unseen, before finally striking up a conversation. He introduced himself, and relayed that he was only fascinated by this place, as it was the latest in a seasoned life of interstellar sightseeing. The uncharted mystique of the Hallownest had apparently all but called to him.

"I do so love a mystery," the LED display on his helmet smiled down at the wanderer, "And who knows what other marvels lie even deeper below us?"

Quirrel was friendly enough, though the wanderer felt as if they were being scanned by the mask above his head. That feeling would persist as they continued to meet, and moreso when the wanderer once caught him talking to that mask. Scrutiny from an AI was still scrutiny, after all.

Somewhere above the hydroponics levels, where the air was thick and acrid, and the greenhouses long since overrun by unchecked foliage that now conquered an entire wing of the station, it would meet someone else.

It would stalk her through there, out of either curiosity or a sense of urgency. Her respirator was topped off, and looked polished enough to be new, as was the alien weapon she commanded with such control over its power source--be it high tech or high magic-- that she would manipulate that energy as silken thread. 

She would not take so kindly to the wanderer's intrusion. She would try to destroy it, and it would defend itself.

She would call it a ghost, and act as if she knew it better than it knew itself. Perhaps that was somehow true. If it was a "Ghost", then that was a starting point. 

But she defended this land, citing some claim to it as her home. 

(She knew a lot of this place, and where to find Ghost. Always on the precipice of friend or foe, with some agenda of her own that would occasionally tip that scale one way or another. 

She would be the one to guide them, in her distant way. She would cite depths of the station that held secrets she expected it to understand, or earn. 

She protected those secrets. For besting her again, she allowed the wanderer access to an ornate passkey, marked as the Biotechnology Restricted Access Network Decryption key. This, she said, would unlock the truth of this place, and of the little Ghost itself.)

But upon her first defeat, something shifted. The station's internal defense systems alerted themselves to the wanderer, its only warning of danger being the sudden apparition of three holograms alongside a blinding siren light. 

Though they were each spectral representatives of a complex security system, they argued amongst themselves briefly, their individual desires seeming to clash. In the end, though, their prime directive to preserve the Hallownest won out, and the activated laser turrets along the ceiling of Greenpath acquired target lock.

"Let us sleep, little shadow. Return to your darkness. Leave us to our peace."

And the turrets opened fire.

Ghost would not die here. 

But it would make use of a nearby fallen creature much like itself to modify its protective cloak. Assimilating foreign powers came remarkably easily. 

As if it'd been made for this place.

-

@chipper-smol and i did an au oop go look at their designs 

[obeymeshallwedate-latinplayer]

Traditional costumes (Part 1) (GN!MC)

Hello there my darlings How´s it going? First of all, I must say the following:

OMG YASS! YASS I CAN DO IT!!! There are so many that It´s sad I can only put 11 of them but YES YES I´LL DO IT. I´m actually really excited about this, that we will have to parts of it! 

Second: Thank you!!! Today we are 308 followers!!!! For me having this number of followers it´s still a dream, and I really loved so much the idea of the typical costume, that it will be a 308 followers special divided in 2 parts, welcome to the first part. Thank you for following! I will keep doing my very best!!

Lucifer (Jarocho Veracruz)

Lucifer was walking by, when he saw you taking care of a big white dress, the first thing he thought “A brides dress?” He wasn´t enterally wrong, but he wasn´t right.

He asked you nicely what were you doing and why did you have a bride’s dress. The only thing you could do was laugh, Lucifer might be the all mighty one above the seven brothers, but sometimes he was too naïve. Or maybe that was just your imagination.

He saw the embroidery in the apron that was over the skirt, and he wondered: How many hours it took to do that embroidery?  Even the skirt was way to thick, and sometimes he forgot that humans had many ways to dress up. He touched the fabric, even that red fabric was so beautiful How was it called? Rebozo?

He looked so intrigued that you decided to tell the story about the dress.

“In the colony time, Veracruz were one of the most important ports around the world. Spanish women stayed in Papaloma´s river basin, the wore big old dresses, with thick fabric, but in Veracruz that doesn´t take place, not back then not even now, it´s beach and it has a humid climate. The Spanish and creoles used to dress a colorful skirt and an apron with embroidery flowers, also a shawl with lace, and silk ribbons, even a hand fan, by the other hand, indigenous and mestizas women used to use flowery skirts and blanket blouses with a rebozo and their hair were braided. But the dress of the Spanish and the creoles didn´t work out, the weather was so hot that they simply decided to use cotton and organdy. But I guess, this “new” dress was used for the creoles wedding dress. Now a days is typical to be use in folkloric dances.”

For someone like Lucifer, he didn´t waste a second, and he dreamt, maybe in some years you could use that dress on your wedding day.

Mammon. (Charro Jalisco)

He was sneaking into your room, for sure he was searching something to steal and then sell it, maybe the great Mammom would buy something for you, something nice. His human must use something nice, maybe a necklace. He knew that you kept your precious little something in the closet, so he check it, and oh surprise, that ain´t little.

That was a heavy suit for a human your size, and are those silver buttons? He was actually impressed, he looked to every single detail in the costume, that hat is actually so beautiful that he needed to use it, no matter what, he needed to put that in his head.

That´s why you discover him, he was in front of your mirror, you took a mentally note, he needed a charro suit to, maybe you will teach him the folklore dance. When he heard you laugh he started to blush, saying that he wasn´t doing nothing at all. 

“Mammon. Would you like to hear the story of this suit?” His eyes had that childish sparkle, and he immediately sat in your bed, waiting for the story.

“The charro suit started from decades away, in the colonial time, must say in the XVI century, with a very fine work, with gold and silver buttons, embroidery of golden thread. But, you know, only the wealthy ones could use the accessories, the intelligent ones, would make their owns, with maybe some paint, and creating the best suit of them all, just like the saying says. “El charro de cuero se viste, por ser lo que más resiste”.   Now a days mariachis and dancers use it, and also some horse riders for exhibitions. “

Mammon was as happy as a child, he needed that suit from old centuries, maybe Lucifer had one.

Leviathan (Azteca Tenochtitlán (This city does not longer exist, it´s not even a state) ) 

  Levi was sitting in the living room, when he heard something, were does bells? No way that noise wasn´t a bell one, it was more like a bone sound, so he followed the sound, and there you where, in the garden, with your full costume, dancing for the gods and for practice, you didn´t want to forget the dance your ancestors made so many centuries away.

When you felt the presence of him you turned around and smiled at him. “Levi, do you like my Hueseras? My grandpa made them for me! Aren´t them cute? Oh maybe you prefer the penacho? It´s so hard to find the Quetzal feathers.” He just stopped breathing, you looked just like that final boss of the game: “Trying to avoid to be a sacrifice for the Gods and keeping my heart on my chest.”

He just nodded, after that a big silence started between the two of you. So you decided to keep dancing, and he was just there watching you, with stars in his eyes, and you decided to tell him the story about the clothing,

“Before the conquest, my ancestors used to use beautiful clothing, with animal skin and feathers of birds, they made each outfit for each person in the social pyramid, the Tlatoani used the Penachos, also some bishops did it too, and head military ones, usually the military were decorated with  gold and seashells, and a difficult headpieces, women if they weren´t in the high society used to use Huipiles and Quexquémitl, with skirts and natural pigments.”

Levi was amazed, just like in his game, but this time he needed a translator to understand those words you said, he wanted to use one of them too.

“Now, how about I teach you how to dance.”

Satan.  (Traje elegante Nuevo León) 

Satan had been invited to an opening from a new restaurant in Devildom, sometimes he would ask himself if it was fine for him to go alone for this type of events. Today he wanted to take you out for a nice dinner. Formal clothing, or that´s what it says in the invitation, well you had the fanciest clothing in the whole world just in your closet, so you took it out, you prepared yourself and you were ready to go. The avatar of wrath didn´t mention a thing, although you clothing of tonight was stunning and tons of looks were on you that night, after few drinks, and you telling every demon, that the mezcal of your country was ten times better than the drink in the Devildom, some of those demons actually asked. “Why are you in a custom?” Oh dear, not even Satan could make something when you picked the microphone. “Demons, this ain´t a costume, now, sit and listen to the story of this magnificent outfit. It all started in the colonial age in Mexico, Nuevo León did not had that extraordinary change from the conquest, actually the indigenous were nomads and we don´t have much of their cultural information.  Women and men needed to have a hard character. In 1960 the dress maker Ramón Validosera made this beautiful suit for all of us, in 1970 it was one of the most important yet one of the greatest folkloric costumes in Mexico. This suit was made for the ones that will work hard enough in the fields, even though the women one is more complex than the male one.” After the explanation they stopped watching you with smirks in their faces, they actually asked if you could take a photo with them. When the party was over, Satan took your hand and escort you back to the house. “You didn´t mention that the suit was made for a beer festival”. He told you, and you laugh. “It wasn’t necessary. And it will be our secrete.”

Asmo ( China poblana Puebla)

Asmo had this epiphany, he had seen a folkloric dance of Mexico so long ago, and he just remembered it, he was sitting in one of the library armchairs, watching an old photo album, wondering if you were in the house, he started to seek you. When he heard you in Levi´s room he took you away.

“Mc! You are from Puebla, right?” You made a silent nod. “So, do you own one of the folkloric dress?” The question leaves you thinking. “I guess, but is in the human realm.” With those words Asmo actually begged Lucifer for authorization to go into the human realm.

When you arrived into your house, Asmo asked you nicely if you could tell him all about the dress. “Well, the story starts in the Colonial age, the legend says, that a chines woman was sold as a slave, but ended up in the hands of the richest. Actually she wasn´t chines nor from Puebla, she was a princes from Mongolia, but they were in a war so she was captured and sold as a slave, from hand to hand was sold, just like Malinche, anyway she found a good person that protected her, and then she married a merchant in Puebla, after that she lived until her 70´s. Her clothing was so beautiful and weird for the age, in one part beautiful Indigenous colors and in the other Spanish silk, with big ornaments in her hair. After some years they improve the dress, It consists of a white short-sleeved shirt, low on the chest, made of fine cotton embroidered with various colorful motifs. The skirt is a long skirt of thick fabric in dark red, with embroidery on the front that reproduce the national symbols: the eagle devouring the serpent perched on a cactus, or the Aztec calendar. The outfit is completed by a fine silk shawl in the tones of the colors of our national flag; and the one that requires the bun braided with tricolor bows, several necklaces of paper beads and large gold earrings.”

When you finished the story Asmo was tearing, a poor young woman who was sold by a men, but she found true love, was just, too beautiful.

After that he made you use the dress and well, the rest is story.

Let´s learn some Spanish and more than that:

Malinche: Indigenous women that helped Hernán Cortés for the conquest in Mexico. And it´s also a volcanos name, so be careful when you talk about her, you might be talking about the volcano. 

Huaseras: Bells that are included in the aztec dance, also known as: Ayoyotl. 

Penacho: Set of raised feathers that certain birds have on top of their heads

Quetzal: Bird from Mexico, in Nahuatl the name means long tail of bright feathers. 

Tlatoani: Head of the Aztec society, something like a president. 

El charro de cuero se viste, por ser lo que más resiste” :  The leather charro dresses, for being the thing that resists the most

Rebozo: Shawl or cloak of cotton, wool or silk of various colors, used by some village women to cover their heads, shoulders, chest and back as a coat; It is also used to wrap and carry a child.

[kashimalin-fanfiction]

If Each Brother Had A Soulmate... (Obey Me! Brothers Headcanons)

Thank you, Anon, for this request! Definitely the first one that inspired me in the inbox, and here, I decided to give each brother their OWN soulmate AU!

Characters: Lucifer; Mammon; Leviathan; Satan; Asmodeus; Beelzebub; Belphegor

Overall Rating: Teen & Up

Warnings: SPOILERS for canon information related to the Celestial War, Lilith, and various other canon aspects || Mentions of battle scars.

• [Here’s where I’d put links… if Tumblr allowed them. Please click on my blog to view more of my work!!] • Requests are Closed, but Commissions are Open! •

Lucifer: The Celestial realm was all whites and golds, art done in pastel shades and floral fields an array of colors. Not that any of it mattered to Lucifer, whose world was entirely black and white. He learned what shades of gray to call “red” and “blue” and still struggled to tell the difference. So instead, he cherished his shimmering armor and sword, the reflecting light making him feel as if he was a radiant force, glowing with all the colors of a brilliant rainbow. (He tried to not think about how he had never seen a rainbow in all its glory.)

When he fell into the Devildom, Lucifer discovered that black reigned supreme. Little demons were impossible to distinguish from the background, and little color existed elsewhere. Lucifer had given up on seeing color entirely.

Until he met you. When you arrived in the Devildom, you brought the most stunning sights of his life. He had long forgotten the significance of seeing color, instead going to take in every sight with eager eyes. Seeing color was a liberation, a freeing act that released him from his self-made prison. He redecorated his office, took the time to make trips to the human world to admire sights that he had never seen, and began to appreciate everything in an entirely new way. He knew you, the curious little human, were the cause, but did not think to ask what you had seen in return.

It was only when Simeon mentioned something off-hand about you seeing color when you first arrived in the Devildom. However, you had been met with by seven brothers at the same time, and therefore had no way to pinpoint which one was your soulmate. Lucifer remembered the age-old stories then – the significance of seeing color when one met their soulmate, to express how their life was complete with them at your side. It was only a matter of time before he approached you and confessed to seeing color, and knew that a pact would soon follow. He loved you – the human who had brought more than just happiness; you brought color, laughter, and love, too.

(AU: Soulmates see in black-and-white until they meet their soulmate, and then their world is flooded with color.)

Mammon: His brothers and other demons have clear, distinctive dreams about their soulmates – or don’t dream of them at all, indicating their soulmate hasn’t been born yet. Mammon fell into the latter category for centuries now, until recently … when he dreamed in fuzzy colors and blurred images. Wondering why his dreams weren’t like the stories, he asked around. The witches told him it meant that his soulmate was impossibly far away. Anybody unlucky enough to catch him in one of his self-agonizing lamentations would mention that the chance of meeting his soulmate was close to zero, but not impossible. (He would like to state: this did nothing to soothe his wounded heart.)

So, he came to loathe sleeping, because his dreams weren’t like everybody else’s. They lasted for several years, and his soulmate never grew clearer. Their face was always blurred, their voice inaudible. However, he could tell some key things: they were growing taller, they had a hairstyle he liked, and talked despite never being heard. The two of them share a hundred scenarios without ever knowing each other’s names, going through the scenes and motions until one is forced to wake up. He develops wordless, blurry codes that might be considered a little excessive, but he’s thrilled when his soulmate agrees to with them without question, knowing that it is the best chance of communication.

They persist into the start of the Exchange Program. You arrive in the Devildom, and he’s frustrated that he has a “silly human” to look after. The Great Mammon – demoted to this? He spends an exhausting day showing you around and heads to his room after you decide to sleep, and ends up taking a quick nap on his sofa. He has a dream with all the indicators that his soulmate is asleep too, so he decides he wants to see them.

And it’s you. The two of you are stunned to see each other, with voices crystal clear and expressions just as animated as when you were awake. The realization dawns at the same time – because you are in the Devildom, the same realm, you must be able to see each other more clearly. A thousand magical forces no longer separate you, just a few steps between bedrooms. You spend all hours of your mutual sleep talking in your dreams, learning more about one another and reminiscing about the older dreams from when you were younger. When finally forced to wake up, the two of you do everything you can to stick together. You’re soulmates, after all!

(AU: Soulmates share dreams when they are asleep at the same time.)

Leviathan: He has always had a mark that stood out from the rest. When in the Celestial Realm, he wore it with pride, knowing that it would it help him find his future soulmate… but as time went on, his mark never matched another angel’s. So, when he fell with his brothers, he wondered if he was cursed from the start to have a demon soulmate. The mark still stood out from the diamond-shaped scales on his body, clear enough for anyone to see if he put it on display.

Ashamed of not having found a soulmate yet – and wondering if he had missed his chance – he began to cover it up with jackets and hoodies. His devotion to Ruri-chan and other characters came from the feeling of “missing out,” deciding to focus on something he knew he loved rather than finding the impossible soulmate his tattoo promised him. It never once occurred to Levi to ask you or Solomon about tattoos in the human world.

When you started to work your way into the brothers’ lives, he started to wonder and fall. You were nothing but kind, understanding, and respectful – save for the few times you opted to tease him or work against him – and he trusted you. He would even catch himself glancing your way when you extended an arm or stretched from your chair after an anime session, hoping to catch a glimpse of a mark that matched his, but always gave up far too quickly. What were the chances yours matched his? Zero. His chances had always been zero.

Then, one day, he was granted the opportunity to see your tattoo. And it was a perfect copy of his own. The very notion that you were his soulmate positively shook him to the core. There it was, settled right next to his pact, as if screaming that the two of you were meant to be. It took only seconds for the doubt to creep into the edges of his mind. He had to be wrong. There was no way it was you. He changed in the darkness, wore long sleeves and three layers, doing his best to prevent himself from looking at his own mark to prove it. It took the combined efforts of you and the other brothers to finally draw out what was bothering him, and when you saw his mark, you knew it was meant to be.

When you pulled him close and told him the two of you matched, that you were soulmates, Levi could not recall a time when you looked so happy. Except – he had. You looked at him the way you always had.

With love in your eyes.

(AU: Soulmates possess matching tattoos.)

Satan: He had always known that his anger was difficult to control. It manifested in frustrating, incomprehensible ways. There was no way of calming it down once it flared up, save for diving head-first into books. Satan would never resurface until he felt soothed by the black text on white pages, comforting him in a way nothing else had. It was through his voracious reading that he discovered a surprising fact: if you concentrated enough, you could write out your soulmate’s thoughts.

Curious enough to try, Satan retrieved a quill and parchment. With a bit of demonic power and a measure of intense concentration, he started to write. Thus began the first of many curious scraps of paper, detailing the mundane thoughts of your chores, about what you had to do on the farm, or the ingredients for supper that night. Time passed, and you mused about soulmates, about yours, and about living alone in your family home. He mourned a person he had never met – his soulmate, clearly human and, therefore, out of his reach.

Then, there was a time where he could not draw anything from his soulmate. No amount of power or concentration could reach them. He’s mere seconds from marching up to the human world himself before Lucifer stops him, telling him off and dragging him back to the House of Lamentation. He reached out at least three times a week, reading and rereading what thoughts he had preserved.

… One day, he made contact. The rush of relief was unlike anything he had ever felt, soothing the fiery anger that had been burning away the edges of his self-control. He seized a blank sheet and began to write them out.

They were the musings of a child. Single words became basic sentences. Mundane desires went to temper tantrums. You complained about trivial things and about the thoughts of your soulmate. He realized early on that you had been reincarnated, and that while he still couldn’t meet you, he could still get to know you and every consecutive reincarnation. This was a constant that saw him through the centuries until fate finally brought the two of you together. He knew it was you who was coming for the Exchange Program, after all.

For written on his last paper was only one sentence:

“I’m nervous about going down to the Devildom for an exchange program. But I think I’ll be okay.”

(AU: A blend of two Soulmate AUs: “When concentrating, you can write out your soulmate’s thoughts,” and a reincarnation AU for his soulmate so that he always can hear them, and they can always be with him.)

Asmodeus: Angels did not typically have strings, so Asmodeus never worried about it. He lived life freely in the Celestial Realm and even more in the Devildom after he fell. He met angels with and without strings, he loved demons with and without strings. (Having a string never mattered to him, if it didn’t bother his partner for that evening.)

It was only when his string appeared that he realized how significant such an occurrence was. Each time he closed his eyes, he could see it dangling down from above, twining into a small knot around his pinky finger. The string was really all too innocent for the trouble it caused him, sending his thoughts into a spin each time he closed his eyes. He didn’t want it gone, didn’t want to ignore it – but sometimes, he would see it when he closed his eyes in the throes of passion, ascending to a place that seemed out of his reach. He thought he could settle for the person in his arms.

So, he was all too surprised when he decided to look at his string a day or two after you arrived. Miraculously, the red string no longer dangled down from above. Instead, it was yanked taut, and drew him forward like a magnet. Asmo was scarcely able to believe it, leaping from his bed to follow the trail to your door. He threw it open and saw the image of you in his mind’s eye, the other end of his string wrapped around your finger. You invite him in, shutting the door and smiling wide, unable to believe that the two of you had truly found each other.

You spend the beginning of the night talking, wondering about your strings. You explain that yours had always dropped right down to the ground, and people teased you for it. You mention having to lie about it – nobody could see your string away – so Asmo makes a point of kissing it adoringly. There’s a slight spark when your hands lace together, and he whispers that he simply grateful the two of you have finally met. You will never have to hide your passion and love again.

(AU: Red String of Fate, tied around the pinky. You can only see the string when you close your eyes, and if close enough, you can see it connected to your soulmate. If your soulmate isn’t alive yet, there is no string.)

Beelzebub: He got his own fair share of scars from the Celestial War. All his brothers did, of course – but Beel’s came from the inherent drive to protect his siblings when they needed him most. He drew the arrow’s fire towards himself, preferring to handle the brunt of the attacks than let Lilith or Belphie get hurt during their escape… even if the circumstances turned out differently than he expected.

One might see hints of his scars on his arms, across his back and front, and down his legs. They used to ache, a constant reminder that he only saved one of his cherished siblings, but it soon faded into a dull pain that only flared up after a terrifying nightmare. You don’t ask any questions about them, which he appreciates. He tells you about the reason for the scars in his own time, a secret you cherish and take with understanding and patience.

It was when Solomon was visiting the House of Lamentation for a meal and some company that you and Beel listened to him expand on some of the topics from class that day. The sorcerer spoke of Soulmate Magic – innate spells that the caster or receiver might experience, potentially living life completely unaware of their existence. One of them was most curious: if a soulmate bade a lover’s scars good-bye, then kissed them, they would disappear. Beel stopped eating for a moment to listen intently, stealing the occasional glance at you. You had already begun to heal some of the scars etched across his thoughts, soothing them with comforting words and a relationship now strengthened by a pact. He wondered if maybe, just maybe, you might be the one who could heal some of his physical ones, too.  

The time came after you had entered a relationship. When you walked into the room on a particularly warm day, you noticed that Beel was not wearing his shirt. The expanse of scars across his body made you recall the information Solomon had shared, and you wondered if maybe, just maybe—

A simple whisper of a good-bye and a kiss was all it took for a scar to fade from his skin. He insists that he doesn’t want to get rid of all of them – as they were a reminder of Lilith in his own way – but he gradually allowed you to kiss away one or two each time, helping soothe his painful memories, and promised that he would kiss away any of yours, should the need arise.

(AU: The only way for your scars to disappear is when your soulmate kisses them good-bye.)

Belphegor: Several centuries was the number listed on his wrist. That was the strangest thing when Belphegor was created – he was an angel born with something that, normally, only humans possessed. The timer tied him to the human world, an inexplicable connection that frequently drew him down to the surface. He went there more often than the rest of his siblings, watching the humans meet their soulmates at cafes or on the street, and spent time picturing his own future meeting. Would it really be with a human? What would a romance with them be like?

Then humans forced the angels’ hands, and all the brothers fell. Belphie hated them, after that. He did everything he could in an attempt to destroy the timer on his wrist, but still it counted the centuries by. Its presence mocked him further when one century became ninety-nine years, ninety-eight, ninety-seven… and he realized that he had prevent the meeting with his human partner. It was all too easy to avoid the human world, right? (He told himself this when his thoughts whispered otherwise, the years counting down further and further.)

When Diavolo announced the Exchange program, Belphie was against it for several reasons. Bringing humans to the Devildom? The people who had killed Lilith, who had caused them to fall, and might, by some cruel twist of fate, be his soulmate? He was relieved when Lucifer locked him away for his rebellion, but still he wished on every star that his being locked away would prevent the human from ever meeting him. Despite his wishes, the timer counted down without pause.

Zero years, zero months, zero days. Mere minutes. He heard Lucifer telling someone off at the bottom of the stairs, unable to make out the words before he walked off. When the timer hit zero, he breathed a sigh of relief. He had successfully avoided fate—

(“Hello?”)

He turned in shock and saw you there – and without even looking, he knew.

Belphie knew that the timer on your wrist read “zero.”

(AU: A timer on the wrist counts down to when you meet your soulmate.)

[diavolosthots]

Thanks so much for answering my last question I loved it so much😫💕 I’m in desperate need of angst rn and I had this random idea of the boys falling in love with one of MC’s past descendants from centuries ago who might’ve been a nun but always saw the best in the demon bois and never condemned them so to speak, and since they’re human they eventually die from old age. Just one of those sad almost fantasy like star-crossed lovers tales that make me weep, hc’s for that would kill me 💕

Since I'm feeling nostalgic anyway, might as well tackle this. Im only doing the brothers though :3

WARNINGS: sadness? Also like one curse word.

THE BROTHERS taking a trip down memory lane

Lucifer:

It wasnt often that Lucifer got a moment to himself, but sometimes, when it's late and everyone is surely asleep, or at least tucked away in their rooms, he takes a minute to unwind. Maybe he'll get a glass of century old bourbon or maybe even some deep red wine. Whatever it may be, he always sits himself down in his red cushioned chair and looks out the window, into the dark Devildom sky. More often than not, his mind begins to shift away from reality and he soon finds himself deep in thought, reliving moments from millennia ago. There used to be someone, someone who managed to amaze him in every sense of the way, and as he sits there, the cold glass of bourbon in his gloved hand, he feels the pain tuck at his heart... And he smiles sadly... Knowing that they're just that; a memory.

Mammon:

He loves life. Loves the thrill. Loves to have no consequences. He puts himself in dangerous situation. He loves to go crazy. But he doesn't do it for fun. He does it because every time he feels the world slow down and time catch up to him, he knows he's in a bad situation. He cant take it. Not again. To see, to feel, the dead body in his hands once more, murdered by the people he most hates, sends a shiver down his spine. The day has long passed, but he hasnt stopped running since. Running from them. Running from the problems. Running from himself. And he won't stop running, ever. Not until he knows it's safe. But in this world, is it ever truly safe?

Leviathan:

The reason he drowns himself in games and technology, maybe even the sea, is because he cant bear the pain of stopping. Its been centuries since he last saw their face, a picture thats slowly fading into nothingness every time he tries to reach for it. He knows it's useless, knows theyre long dead and definitely not here in the Devildom. For days hes searched for their soul, searched for their being when he heard of their death, but he knew they would never end up down here with him... He is a monster after all.

Satan:

Satan loves the stars. Loves the night sky. Loves the candlelight and moonlight. He finds romance in it; love. Peace. But he doesnt see it often. God wouldnt grant him such peace when his whole being is made of turmoil. So he sits there, alone at night, surrounded by thousands of stories that live forever, just like he lives forever, and he wishes he didn't. He dares dip into his head at night, past the anger, past the turmoil, and into the softness of himself that he hasnt felt in a long time. Not ever since they left him. Ever since their being turned around and walked out, saying hes too much. Too strong. Too angry. Too much of him. But how can he change himself? He would. For them. But he cant, not anymore. He realized that far too late.

Asmodeus:

Maybe the reason he despises real love is because of the commitment. Maybe it's because of the star-struck eyes. Or maybe it's because of the happiness it brings. Deep down, he knows why. But he wont admit it. Yet, when his body is weak, and the whores have run out; when he lays in his bed at night surrounded by lovers long forgotten, he admits it to himself. Silently. Slowly. Quietly. He admits that his heart has been stolen by someone from ages ago. He admits that he was once so in love, that it crushed him; betrayed him. And he swore to himself that he cant let it happen again. That he'd rather be the heartbreaker than the heartbroken. That he'd stay true to his demon form and put misery into the world, to protect himself.

Beelzebub:

Its days like these, where he stuffs himself full of food; all kinds of food. Human. Demon. Angel. That he remembers the one food he'll never touch. The food that shared so many memories between them and him. So many laughs. So many adventures. And as much as the memory of their laughter resonates within his heart, lights his whole being on fire, he cant bear to listen to it for long. Its like a cursed record that plays the sweetest melody, that draws one in and makes them want to stay forever, not realizing that the minute the sound stops, theyre already damned and left to suffer. So here he stands now, the food long forgotten, while he clutched his heart and tried to keep the tears from falling.

Belphegor:

Dreams are an escape to another reality. A world, where no rules and laws exist and its just oneself. He loves drifting of to sleep for that very reason; he can create his own world, live his own life. Yet, sometimes he is plagued by beautifully terrifying images of a person; a person he hoped to forget a long time ago. Seeing their smiling face, feeling their hand in his, and reliving the days in the sun, sends a tsunami over his soul; a tsunami thats sure to wash him away. But everytime he sees that face again, so realistic in front of his closed eyes, he screams. In panic. In fear. In sadness. Because he can't admit that he hates to be apart from them, for so many centuries long.

[tanadrin]

Khoda Station

For a long time after she joined the Project, Sirrek had found Tjumak to be a puzzle, the most difficult to understand of her colleagues. She took as read that you had to have pretty good reasons to want to risk defying the Archive’s most sacrosanct law, and also to spend half of every year out in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest transport routes and thousands from the nearest settlements. For most of the people at the station, their motives were actually pretty simple. Koridek believed passionately in the work; so passionately that he was willing to break his most deeply held convictions about what it meant to be an Archivist. For him it was all about values. His desire to serve humanity ran deep, and that was what made him a good fit for the Archive. His desire to serve Paradise, well, that ran even deeper; it was the source of his desire to serve humanity, to protect their nascent colony, but also to violate an order that had been created decades before Sirrek was born, to prevent terrible bloodshed. Depending on how you looked at it, that made him a very bad archivist indeed.

Ardhat was also simple. She was a problem-solver. That wasn’t all of it, but it was most of it. Of course, she believed mightily, too, but Sirrek doubted anyone could believe in anything as strongly as Koridek did. But above all else, Ardhat wanted to solve the biggest problems she could find. That was what got her up in the mornings, and drove her forward. She was a puzzle-cracker, a code-breaker, a solution-seeker, a builder-of-systems. She would have been a fine architect, or a talented engineer, or a clever physicist. But what greater puzzle was there than the Great Record? What greater problem to solve could there be than resurrecting a lost world out of the most ancient memory of the past? Of building a whole new ecosystem, alongside and on top on alien to it that already existed? Sirrek was quite certain that Ardhat would die to protect the Project if it ever came to it, but in the meantime, she would live for its mysteries.

Sirrek? Well, introspection wasn’t her strong suit. But where Ardhat had a cordial indifference to authority and Koridek a deep but respectful complaint against it, Sirrek just hated being told what to do. And they had told her, you shall not be a biologist. Not in the way you want to be. You shall not undertake any part of the great work--for it will not begin in your lifetime. They had said to her, you shall leave Paradise fallow, at least for a human definition of the term. And so Sirrek hated them for that, hated them for deciding before she was born that all her talents and her ambition must be sacrificed in the name of politics, hated the religious zealots and the blind ideologues whose fledgeling war meant that it would be many lifetimes before the Paradise she dreamed of would come to be. She was compelled to disobey. That was what got her out of bed in the morning.

But Tjumak. There was a mystery. He affected it a little, Sirrek thought. He spent his days ensconced in the middle of his dark laboratory, like the heart of an animal, or the engine of a machine. He did not come and go, like Koridek. The dim light of the displays shone on the glossy exterior of his support apparatus. He had once had a survival suit, Koridek said, and had gone back and forth from the surface like most of the other Archivists, returning to Ammas Echor when the strain of surface living became too great. Archivists were not born for planetbound life; they were humanity as it lived between the stars, made for the long dreamlike time in the cold and dark, and for keeping the long memory of their people alive. How long did our ancestors travel from star to star? Sirrek had once asked her mother, when she was young. For countless ages, she had replied. Since the Garden was lost to us in the beginning of time.

A survival suit was meant to be a temporary thing, a way to endure the stresses of gravity and the immoderate temperatures of the surface. What, do you go naked in space? Sirrek had asked Koridek. Koridek laughed. No, he said. We still have to wear suits on the vessel, though they are much lighter. You see me only as a hulking, heavy thing in this armor. In microgravity, I am considered graceful; above the sky, I can dance. Why someone would exchange that for a planetbound prison, much less one where they could not leave the room they worked in, Sirrek struggled to guess. But that was what Tjumak had done. From the outside, he looked almost like a silly toy: a round, smooth metal body, topped with a round, smooth head on a short, flexible neck. His arms were more graceful, and the apparatus in which he set could turn this way and that to reach th various monitors and keyboards around him; but apparently much of the interface was actually inside the suit, which in Tjumak’s case was more of a chamber, one in which he floated in a carefully-formulated synthetic fluid. And if the power goes out? Sirrek had asked. He will be very annoyed until someone finds the switch for the backup generator, Koridek said.

Direct neural prosthetics like the Archivists used, and which Tjumak relied on for his work, were rare among the younger generations, so it was probably a less claustrophobic way of living than Sirrek imagined. And if he really had to, he probably could switch back to a survival suit. Like if they ever got caught, and had to evacuate the station. That was a possibility she did her best not to dwell on.

She got a little window into Tjumak’s world, or at least his thought process, when they spent several long weeks working on a section of the Great Record. It was a frustrating and exceedingly difficult task, and the missing portions that Sirrek needed amounted to only a handful of characters, but the Record was nearly impossible to work with directly. When she was little, her teachers had explained that the Great Record was a library of the genetic information of every animal and plant and little microscopic beastie that had ever lived in the Garden, the world humankind had come from. And when their most ancient ancestors, the ancestors of their unimaginably remote ancestors, had had to leave the Garden as exiles, they preserved the Record, and kept it safe, for hundreds of thousands of years.

That was almost, but not quite, entirely a lie. When she had started studying biology, with an eye to genetics and to endobotany specifically (back when she imagined that she might be permitted to do something with her training), she started learning about how the Great Record worked. It wasn’t just a record of DNA; that on its own would have been quite useless, she was assured. DNA was an important part of it, of course, nuclear and mitochondrial both, but only a small part. Rather, the Record had been compiled as an image of the shape of a living cell: it described actual genetic code, but also how DNA was formed, how proteins were folded, how DNA and RNA were transcribed, processes of methylation and copying, how mitosis and meiosis functioned, and so on and so forth, attempting to describe the metabolism of an ideal cell, one which contained within it the potential to embody almost any form of life to which humankind had once been related; and it was by reference to this elaborate, ideal lifeform that literally millions of other species, from single-celled bacteria that lived in the human gut to storybook leviathans, were described. And the reason, Sirrek was told, that the Record had been composed in this way was that, long long ago, their ancestors had once had the technology to use those reference descriptions directly. The heart of the Record was a terrible lacuna, a tool that had been so widespread, and so useful, that it had once been presumed it would never be lost.

Oh, fathers of my fathers and mothers of my mothers! Sirrek had thought. How far your children have fallen. The senior geneticists referred to this technology as the key to the universal cell; or just the key. What, exactly, it was and how it had functioned was hard to guess. It was related to other technologies they had that barely worked, and that they did not understand at all, like the ones the Archivists used to modify their genes and to improve their neural prosthetics. There were baseline humans who had been brought all the way from Rauk on the last journey, in sarcophagi that had preserved them between life and death. It was a form of the key that had brought them back to wholeness, and let them live out the rest of a natural lifespan. But it was a specialized version, a crippled and ghostly version. They did not have the true key; and they were working to rebuild it. Perhaps one day, many centuries from now, they would live up to the promise of those long-ago masters of the living world, and they would read forth out of the Record a whole teeming world, as had been intended.

But they didn’t need the key to start understanding the Record, and ordinary genetic engineering and cell manipulation techniques would serve to clone the most basic organisms recorded there. Of course, all of this was hampered by the fact that the Record was at both extremely terse, intending to encode an enormous amount of information in as small a space as possible, and maddeningly repetitive. It was not really one Record, but many; the collocation of multiple copies, in some places defective, and in others damaged. Later, totally uncomprehending generations had apparently lost all but the memory of the importance of the thing, and carefully copied what they did not understand into new forms. It was only in the glare of Rauk, millennia ago, that the Janese had finally understood what they had had in their grasp, and built it into the skeleton of Ammas Echor itself.

Understanding the Record had been the original purpose of the Archive, and in the long, slow journey to Paradise they had labored ceaselessly at their task. Still, it was slow work. And since their station did not have the benefit of access to either the Archive on Ammas Echor, or to all the latest work from investigators working on the surface, sometimes they had to work at it themselves. At Ardhat’s encouragement, Sirrek had been trying to get a handle on some of the plant species that, by their position in the Record, seemed to be relatively basal. Much of the work in unraveling that portion of the Archive had been done by others, and was well-known, but little attention had been paid to the bryophytes. Under the logic of the agreement between the Renewalists and the Instrumentalists, this didn’t matter. Actual resurrection of species was not slated to begin for nearly eighty years, and even then it would be confined to laboratories. But Sirrek wanted practical results. What she ideally wanted was trees, flowers, grasses, important primary producers that also occupied slightly different ecological niches from the xenophytes, and could be integrated alongside them. But mosses were step zero. Possibly even step negative one. All she needed was a single viable spore. In theory, everything she needed was in the Record, somewhere.

In their long, slow labor, the Archivists had painstakingly indexed the Record, but it was an immense of information, and one that was only partly understood. The language of the record, if it could be called that, was a sophisticated polyvalent writing system that could encode chemical formulae, the structure of molecules and proteins and organelles, and dipped in its most specific registers into the subatomic scale, to describe the precise interaction by which choloroplasts captured the light of the sun, to convert into energy; and at its most general, sketched a mathematical relationship between the populations of a predator and its prey. Yet for all that it said, it also left maddening amounts unsaid, details that were perhaps assumed by its creators to be common knowledge, or which simply could not be fit in.

“It’s almost gibberish,” Tjumak had observed dryly. “Almost.”

“Why do you think they made it in the first place?” Sirrek asked Tjumak. “Do you suppose they really thought the umpteenth children of their children would be able to make use of it?”

“I can only assume so. Hubris, perhaps, or merely an unfathomably acute case of optimism.”

“It had to have been made in the Garden, right?”

A small movement suggested a shrug from Tjumak. “To speculate on the historicity of our people before the last journey is to engage in theology as far as I can tell. Whatever the Garden once was, it is now more myth than fact.”

“Maybe,” said Sirrek, tapping her chin as she moved the same section of the Record back and forth on the display. The curling, two-dimensional network of shapes blurred together if you tried to take in too much of it at once, not to mention it was dispiriting. It was far easier to concentrate on the smallest legible piece, and work through it one symbol at a time. Tjumak peeked over her shoulder, and glanced at her notes.

“No, that’s not right,” he said. “That’s not a DNA sequence, it’s a protein sequence. Look, that’s a symbol for a folding geometry, in the corner.”

Sirrek muttered an impolite word and started backtracking.

“They can’t have made it during the Exile, anyway,” she said. “You can’t put millions of species on a generation ship. Even if most of them are beetles.”

“Perhaps not,” said Tjumak. “But what is an object such as this? It is a monument against ruin. If they made it in the Garden, they made it knowing its desolation was close at hand.”

“So you’re definitely in camp made-to-be-used.”

“I think… I think it doesn’t matter why they made it,” Tjumak said. He was scanning his own section of the text, which in real terms was inscribed about a meter and a half away from Sirrek’s on the same section of Ammas Echor’s structural frame; but which felt like it might as well have been on the other side of the planet. “The question is, why do we want to use it?”

“Hubris, and/or an unfathomably acute case of optimism?”

“It’s a reasonable question. We could have come to Paradise, gone down from the Ammas Echor, and made our living on this world as it is, with no attempt to change it besides the introduction of ourselves. For that matter, we could have stayed in orbit, bringing up such resources as we needed, air and water and soil, to make life there far more comfortable than it ever could have been on one of the airless or gasping worlds our ancestors lived their lives on, and left Paradise almost entirely unchanged. Yet when we arrived, we nearly fought a war against one another, not over whether to make use of the Record to resurrect the creatures of the Garden, but only how.”

“Do you think we should have considered the possibility?”

Tjumak leaned back from the display he was hunched over. The head of his support apparatus tilted up toward the ceiling, which was as close as he ever got to looking pensieve.

“I cannot honestly say yes. I’ve known space, Sirrek, real space. Not orbital microgravity, but the deepness beyond the summit of the sky. Some of my earliest memories are of the firing of Ammas Echor’s great engines, to turn our path inward toward the light below. Of the long, slow spiral down to the inner worlds of Kdjemmu. And even that emptiness was brighter and warmer by far than the great darkness between the stars that my mother and father were born into. When they were young, ever joule of energy was precious beyond reckoning, every drop of water or puff of air worth more than a human life. 

“The other worlds around this star, they’re airless, or formless giants, or scorching hot, or worse. And every world our ancestors ever visited, if the tales are true, from the Garden-which-was-lost to Usukuul-we-mourn, was as barren as them. I cannot imagine what suffering generation after generation endured to bring us here--and it would spit in the face of every soul that died on the journey not to bring Paradise to flower.”

“We will, Tjumak,” Sirrek said softly. She had never seen Tjumak speak so earnestly before. “And we will not ravage, and we will not burn. And one day we will call our brothers and sisters out of the darkness to live with us again.” The rhythm of the ancient litanies came back to her smoothly. Her parents had not been religious, but her grandmother had been. She had recited the litanies to Sirrek when she was small, a soothing voice to sleep to.

“Will they thank us?”

“The other Exiles?”

Tjumak shook his head, then pointed at his display. “No. The ghosts we’re going to call up.”

“What do you mean?” Sirrek asked, perplexed.

Tjumak swiveled in place to another display, and tapped a few keys on the panel next to it. The image of another part of the Record appeared, this one displayed alongside long sections of plain text. There were ghostly outlines of various creatures superimposed on it and displayed alongside it, gracile things with four legs and taut muscles, and things with sharp teeth and long claws.

“This part of the Record was indexed four generations ago, and pretty well translated,” Tjumak said. “It’s an unusual one--it’s organized by relationship between constituent elements, not by phylogeny. It’s probably from a lesser Record that was only integrated into the whole later.”

“What are they?”

“Animals. Warm-blooded, furry, placental. Very much like us, in some ways, but quadrupedal. And, to judge by the annotations, quick. Well-muscled. Herbivorous and carnivorous.”

“One is predator, and one is prey?”

“Likely.”

Sirrek had that dark feeling again, the one that was tinged with despair. Sometimes it came up when she looked at too much of the Record at once, or when she spent too long thinking about the aching gulfs of time that they hoped to bridge with the Project. The feeling that it was too much--too much for her, too much for anyone, too much for innumerable lifetimes.

“We’re a long way from placental mammals, Tjumak.”

“Yes. But we’ll get there one day. I don’t doubt that. What I wonder is, what would they say? If we could ask them. And, you know, they could talk.”

“I don’t think there’s anything alive that doesn’t want to live.”

“Ah, but they are not alive. Not right now. It will be us who make them live, if we choose to. And consider, my friend, what that will mean. For some, they will be the prey. The hunted. The fearful. The one whose existence ends with blood and pain and screaming. And others, they will be the predator. Hungry, ever-hunting, fearing that one day their source of food will move beyond the hills, or that a harsh winter will kill them all, and leave the hunter to starve.”

“You think it’s not a life worth living?”

“Would you want to live such a life?”

Sirrek shook her head. “It’s not a coherent question. Does the ferngrass or the swarmbug want to live? The ferngrass can’t react to external stimuli at all, and the swarmbug has six neurons wired in sequence--basically glorified clockwork that tells it when to fly and when to land, and when to lay eggs. There are more complicated xenozoa in Paradise, but they aren’t anything like us, either. And these mammals? Maybe they’ll be able to feel pain, and hunger, and a kind of fear in the moment--but ‘life worth living’ is a human concept. I’m not sure it applies.”

“Surely it must. Even to creatures without language, without tool use, without abstract thought. If they can suffer and feel joy, there is a place where suffering outweighs joy, however you favor one side of the equation over the other. Someone that brought a child into the world, knowing their whole life would be without joy and full of suffering, would be cruel indeed.”

“Are you really proposing we put the entire Project on hold to decide if the creatures we bring back might suffer too much for the Project to be worth it?”

“Just humor me for a bit.”

“All right, fine. A parent has moral responsibility for their child’s welfare.”

“Unless and until we discover something wiser than us already living here, we have moral responsibility for this world.”

“And it would be cruel of us to go out of our way to inflict suffering on the things living in it. You don’t see me pulling the wings off swarmbugs. But that moral responsibility only goes so far, because we can’t impose human values without limit onto things which live very different existences from us.”

“Not so different, these beasts here,” Tjumak said, tapping the display.

“Different enough. Different enough that in order to even begin to pose the question of whether their life was worth living, you would have to alter them mind and body until they were far more human than anything else. If you cannot pose the question without destroying the thing you propose to investigate, it is a bad question.”

Tjumak tilted his head in what Sirrek had come to recognize as the sign of a smile somewhere on the face she could not see. But he didn’t seem ready to drop the argument yet.

“Aren’t all values human values in the end? Unless you believe in a creating power with the authority to order the ethical universe by its own whim, which seems rather like a self-contradicting idea to me. The only values we have to judge the world by are human values. They’re limited tools, but they’re the best ones available. So if a human could have a life not worth living, so could an animal, by the only standard we have available to judge.”

“I don’t know if I buy that,” Sirrek said. “But even so: everything that lives desires to live. If you could bring one of those beasts back, and then you tried to hurt or kill it, it would run away. There’s something like volition there, and as far as I can tell, a vote in the ‘let me live!’ direction.”

“Hardly a spirited defense of the idea, though!” Tjumak said. “A mere stimulus response, maybe.”

“You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say a beast’s volition matters if it doesn’t want to suffer, but doesn’t matter if it wants to live. It’s not human, so you can’t ask the question as you would to a human, or to another creature capable of abstract thought, and in the only way it knows how to tell you, it tells you it wants to live. And, presumably, do other things. Eat. Run. Have babies. You might not let it do all those things. You certainly don’t have to let it eat you. But if the creature’s experience of the world matters at all, its desires must matter in some sense, too.”

“There’s always the option of just leaving out the carnivores, you know,” Tjumak said. “After all, your moss here doesn’t feel pain. Probably.”

Sirrek smiled. “I really hope not. And maybe that is an option. Or maybe we don’t know enough. Maybe the carnivores are as essential to the herbivores as the herbivores are to them, in some way we haven’t seen. I think a certain expansive humility is necessary when poking at these questions.”

“Humility. Humility!” Tjumak roared with mock outrage. “Expansive humility, says the woman who opposes the Archive and the consensus of the whole world, and seeks to resurrect an ancient biosphere from the dead! While remaking an alien one to boot!”

“You can be ambitious and humble at the same time,” Sirrek said. “It just means you set your sights high, but aren’t surprised when you fuck everything up.”

Tjumak laughed sharply. “You’re a good sparring partner,” he said. “Koridek always gets annoyed with me when I try to start an argument, and Ardhat has learned to ignore me. It’s good to have a new face around.”

And for the rest of the evening, that’s all Sirrek thought their conversation was--a verbal wrestling match for Tjumak, a way for him to sharpen his wits, and get to know Sirrek at the same time. But later that night, as she was brewing a cup of bitterstalk tea to take to bed with her, she saw a dull glow from Tjumak’s lab, when his monitors were usually all dark, and he was asleep. She went to the door, thinking to say goodnight, but paused when she got there. His back was turned to her, and he was looking at the image on his monitor, the one that showed the ghostly outline of runners and hunters, of the ones that long ago had died, and the ones that long ago had killed. He seemed to be staring at it, intently, one finger tapping slowly on the side of the display.

As she lay in bed waiting for sleep to overtake her, it occurred to her that Tjumak’s cynicism was just as much a kind of protection as his support equipment. It was his armor against the world, and the fears of his own heart. She didn’t doubt his commitment to the project. She did not doubt the commitment of a man who had exiled himself indefinitely to the loneliest place in the world. But he understood, perhaps, that he was responsible for the world he hoped to create. Maybe it was right that it should keep them all up at night from time to time.

[owl-with-a-pen]

A little introduction...

I probably should have done this sooner, but hi! This is my writing blog where I write stuff! So far it’s predominately Supergirl-related (heavy on Brainiac-5 and Nia Nal content), but I love writing for all the characters very much and hey, I may branch out to other shows as time goes on! 

(Scroll to the read more at the bottom to find a masterlist for every prompt I’ve written so far!)

On this blog, you will find:

- Sneak peeks for some of my AO3 works. 

- Story prompts. Suggestions can be made through my ask box, but I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to fulfil every one. 

- Any stories that were either too short or didn’t fit with the themes of existing works I have on my AO3.

- Answers to any queries you may have! If you want to talk writing, fandom, or anything, really, my ask box is open. 

SUPERGIRL PLAYLISTS:

The Heart isn’t Logical - A playlist for all things Brainia

In My Dreams - A Brainia playlist for when they were separated in 6x20

Uninhibited - A Brainy playlist exploring his character development from inhibited to uninhibited

SOME OF MY AO3 PROJECTS YOU SHOULD TOTALLY CHECK OUT:

Love Cannot Fit Inside a Theory: There was a 100% chance it was going to happen eventually, and after a year of planning, Nia and Brainy finally make good on their biggest promise to one another. In other words, the wedding fic is finally here!

All the Ways to Show I Care : - SUMMARY:  A series of mini fics focused on Brainy and Nia's relationship and the inevitable fluffiness that ensues. (Note: Prompts for this story in particular can be made by commenting directly on the fic!) 

Present, Past and Future Hunt Me : (COMPLETE) - SUMMARY: When a probe from none other than Brainy’s most feared ancestor, Brainiac, arrives on Earth, there is precious time to find a way of stopping him before he can come to collect.        

As Brainiac draws closer to Earth, it becomes abundantly clear that the DEO is being sabotaged from the inside. With the Super Friends' assistance, Brainy works tirelessly to defeat his evil ancestor, but without his inhibitors, unanticipated complications arise.

The countdown has started. Can anyone be trusted?

PROMPTS MASTERLIST :

BRAINY/NIA (enhance your experience with my Brainia playlist)

Dead :- Nia is too late to save Brainy from Leviathan’s ship. (Character Death TW)

Home :- With the AI virus defeated, the Legion return for Brainy. Brainy has to make a decision about his future with Nia.

Fanfiction :- Nia and Brainy discover the wonders of Alternate Earth internet.

Possessed :- Brainy is taken over by an alien’s influence.

Vocabulary :- During a card game, the Super Friends notice a few changes in Nia’s vocabulary.

Anniversary :- Nia forgets their anniversary.

31st Century :- Brainy takes Nia with him to meet the Legion.

Argument :- Nia realises she was holding more of a grudge about Shelley Island than she’d thought.

Stuck :- Nia gets stuck in the dreamscape. Naturally, she tries to get Brainy’s attention.

MIA :- Nia gets captured on a run-of-the-mill mission.

Mother :- Nia meets Brainy’s mom. ALSO ON AO3

Aftermath :- Brainy comforts Nia after a run-in with a particularly nasty foe.

Snow :- Brainy experiences snow for the first time in National City.

Mistletoe :- Nia enlists Brainy’s help in making Christmas cookies.

Night Terror :- Brainy wakes from a nightmare convinced that he’s alone.

Sofa Cuddles :- After a stressful day, Nia finds comfort in Brainy’s arms.

Valentine :- Nia and Brainy share their first Valentines together since Leviathan.

Director Dox :- Nia finds out a little more about Brainy’s female doppelganger.

Follow the Leader :- Tension runs high when Brainy asks Nia to lead a DEO mission.

Eruption :- When Nia is hurt in the field, Brainy blames himself.

Murderous :- Nia wants to kill Lex for what he did. Brainy tries to talk her down.

Pinky Promise :- An alternate take to the pinky promise scene in 6x01

Not Fun :- An extension to the pinky promise scene in 6x01. Brainy is exhausted, Nia is there for him.

The Chair :- Extension to 6x06. Brainy and Nia have a little fun before their ship is due to arrive back in the present.

Not Dead :- Extension to 6x07. Nia gets the hug she deserves from the person she thought she’d lost.

While You Dream :- Nia wakes to find someone watching over her.  

Ice Skating :- Kara proposes an interesting group activity.

Nuzzle Cuddles :- Nia indulges in her favourite kind of affection with a sleep deprived Brainy. 

Voicemail :- When Yvette takes Nia out post 5x10, things get a little messy. Brainy can’t help but to come to the rescue. 

Back Rubs :- When Brainy struggles with his anger, Nia finds the perfect remedy.

First Night Alone :- Nia struggles to sleep when Brainy’s not there. Fortunately, he left something behind.

Awkward Angles :- Nia falls asleep at an inopportune moment. Brainy makes sure she gets to bed safely.

Truth :- After William’s death, Brainy reveals the truth about the merge to Nia. A truth of which Nia refuses to accept.

Dream Echo :- Nia experiences a dream echo of Brainy’s death. Good thing Brainy is right at her side to help her back to sleep.

Slow Dance :- Brainy and Nia share a slow dance at Alex and Kelly’s wedding.

The Proposal :- After all, there’s a 100% chance it was gonna happen at some point. ALSO ON AO3

Sushi :- Nia teaches Brainy how to use chopsticks for the first time.

Valentine 2 :- Brainy decides to do something a little more impressive for their second proper Valentine’s Day together.

Together Again :- In the aftermath of 6x20, Nia and Brainy share a kiss during game night.

Close Call :- Brainy and Nia jump into action when Esme puts herself in a life-threatening situation.

Let It Out :- Nia comforts Brainy through a bad day without his inhibitors. 

Magic :- Set during 6x14 - Brainy helps Nia after Lena’s magic breaks her brain.

Freezing :-  Brainy keeps Nia warm when they become trapped in an unforgivingly cold environment. Later, Nia repays the favour. ALSO ON AO3

Dark Timeline :- In the dark timeline, saving Brainy from Lena’s influence is only the start of the healing he requires, but Nia promises to stay at his side no matter what.

Piano :- At Alex and Kelly’s wedding, Brainy teaches Nia how to play the piano.

Affections :- Nia expresses Naltorian affection to Brainy who is more than happy to reciprocate.

Phantom Nightmare :- The night they return from the Phantom Zone, Brainy and Nia open up to each other about what they experienced.

Side Effects :-  Extension to 6x01. The radiation's effect on Brainy rears its head at an inopportune moment. Despite recent tensions, Lena and Nia are there to help. ALSO ON AO3

Holiday Special :- Nia and Brainy return to Parthas for the holidays, but there’s one guest that Nia’s more than nervous about seeing again.

The First Dreamer :- Additional scene following the events of the Flash season 9 episode ‘Wildest Dreams’. Nia comes home to Brainy and explains what she was able to uncover about her powers’ history.

That Brought Me to My Knees :- An alternate ending to the Bottle Episode. What if Brainy’s evil doppelganger hadn’t been quite as defeated as everyone thought? What if Nia pays the price? ON AO3

The Stare :- A new power develops for Nia during a hostage mission gone sour.

Headache :- An additional scene for the end of season 4. Guilty over all he has yet to tell Nia about his ancestral memory, Brainy faces the consequences of his realignment.

Restore Required :- Brainy hasn’t been sleeping. When he passes out at his desk, Nia steps in to help. 

Sick & Tired :- Sick and exhausted from the aftermath of Leviathan’s radiation, Brainy falls into a nightmare of his own devising. Nia helps to guide him out. 

In Too Deep :- Additional scene set during 6x13 showing what actually happened when Brainy couldn’t wake Nia from her dreams.

ALEX & BRAINY

Crying :- Alex finds Brainy crying at the DEO.

Coffee :- While searching for Supergirl, Alex makes sure Brainy takes a break.

LENA & BRAINY

Hair :- Lena finds out the real reasons Brainy grew his hair out again.

BRAINY/NIA/KARA

Recovery :- Kara and Nia snuggle with Brainy while he recovers from Leviathan’s radiation.

Nightmares :- Brainy has a nightmare. Kara and Nia are there to comfort him.

Bottled :- When Brainy closes himself off to them, Nia and Kara ask for Bottled!Brainy’s help.

Glasses :- Joking around at the table leads Kara to a daunting realisation.

Inducer:- Brainy reveals a big decision to Nia and Kara.

BRAINY & KARA

Outcast :- Set during 6x06. Young!Kara opens up to Brandon about some of her insecurities.

Worst Fears :- An alternate scene from 6x07. When Brainy’s fear vision makes him believe that Kara is dead, he loses all sense of hope.

Streaky 2.0 :- Brainy surprises Kara with a perplexing gift.

NIA & KARA

Cat Grant :- Nia panics when she and Kara run into a very familiar face at CatCo.

Before You Fall :-  Nia wasn't flourishing, it just took Kara far too long to see it.  ALSO ON AO3

Something Borrowed :- Nia enlists Kara’s help when she needs to find something special for her wedding day.

J'ONN & BRAINY

Advice :- Brainy goes to J'onn for relationship advice. ALSO ON AO3

ALEX & KARA

The Boys!AU :- In a world where Kara and Alex are ‘heroes’ from The Boys, Alex speaks out against Kara’s growing dispassionate behaviour.

I’ll Protect You :- In the aftermath of 6x07, Alex helps Kara get some well deserved sleep.

NOVA!AU

2040 :- During a mission to the future, Brainy and Nia accidentally run into their daughter.

Handful :- At five years old, Nova proves to be a handful even for superhero parents to deal with.

BRAINY &/VS ZOR-EL

Argo :- When Brainy takes Zor-El home in the Legion ship, old wounds are re-opened for both of them.

BRAINY VS LEX

Lex :- Whilst helping Lena with an errand, Brainy is forced to speak face to face with Lex Luthor after his charges are dropped.

STARGIRL/SUPERGIRL CROSSOVER

First Meet :- Courtney meets the Super Friends.

Brass Goggles :- Brainy meets Beth Chapel.

THE FLASH/SUPERGIRL CROSSOVER

Team Flash :- Brainy goes to Team Flash for help.

[wolf-with-no-pelt]

Alleliuah-Skye Maccon

The Important Bits

Names: Alleliuah-Skye Maccon. 

Previous Names: Alleliuah-Skye Faolán || Lady of Winter’s Thorns ||  Wolfheart

Deednames: None.

Species: Changeling (Beast Hunterheart) || Kinfolk: Get of Fenris/Fianna by Marriage

Birthday: Unknown (July 21)

Location: Three River Valley Sept

Appearance

Eye Color: Dark, bruise-violet.

Hair Color: Golden and wildly curled.

Skin Color: Tanned.

Fashion Sense: Old, worn and comfortable. Her husband’s shirt, a pair of tattered jeans and her old boots are her favorite outfit.

Tattoos: None.

Scars: The canvas of her frame is littered with a variety of scars, some ritual, some earned, some given. Ritual scars: Large wings spread over her back, while an eye is centered in between them, against her spine. What used to be a thorny vine wrapped around her left bicep, but has been since mangled. Against her right shoulder are claw marks. On the left between the joint and her collarbone is an open triquetra. Around her navel is a crescent moon connected to a half sun with wandering rays. A Black Spiral Dancer once carved his name into her lower back, but that has been since burnt and healed off.

Mien: That golden hair of hers seems to be all the more wild and crazed, bristling with a life all its own. There are eyes hidden in her hair, that allow her to see all around her, as a manifestation of her paranoia. Her eyes are the bright amber of a wolf's, and her canines are enlarged, and she has sharp nails and pointed ears. Her scars remain.

Personality: Alleliuah is a quiet woman, but violent. Quiet only when things are calm, but at the blink of an eye, her temper can take over. Constantly swimming in the mire of a world she barely knows, PTSD and memories, along with the clean cut demand for survival, she has no qualms jumping into the thick of battle. Conversely, she's not great at showing her affection, but she will sacrifice herself without a thought for her loved ones.

Weapons: 

A war hammer forged by Gideon "Smiles-Until-Dawn" Sawyer of iron, oak and the bones of her fallen brothers, which has been imbued with Nymph magicks by Verena Ironbourn for maximum impact. 

She also wields a broadsword, originally Gideon's that she has recently discovered has the magick of flames embedded within the metal.

A Shadow Lord Fang Dagger.

A Skin-Dancer’s skinning knife

Dragon-Piercer, a Grand-Klaive Fetish previously owned by Wilhelm

Likes: 

Cherries

Macarons

Blackwater Whiskey

Wood Carving

Relaxing in her Hammock

Blacksmithing

Dislikes: 

Heat

Winter

Being Belittled

Slavery

Relationships

Current Lover: Rory “Red Hill” Maccon {Husband}

Former Lovers: Kael, The Lord of Winter’s Thorns  ||  Kana

Family: 

Wilhelm "Thunder-Howler" Faolán (Adopted Brother {Deceased}) 

Nelly Faolán (Sister-in-law) 

Kylar & Desmond Faolán (Nephews)

Duncan Deathbearer (Adopted nephew/packmate)

Arlene Iceheart (packmate)

Painted-Eyes (packmate {Deceased})

Speaker-of-Kings (packmate {Deceased})

Sees-Only-Blood (Adopted son) 

Fjord Maccon (Son {Deceased})

Friends: 

Kolina "Bloodsinger" Forepaw 

Mina Hudson 

Maximus "Rises From White Flames" Bloodwalker

Nadya "Luna's Claw Striking to Darkness" Aleksandra 

Gideon "Smiles Until Dawn" Sawyer {Deceased}

Mentor: Siv “Witchhunter” Kramer

Enemy: 

Tamaris

Kael, The Lord of Winter’s Thorns 

Eolian 

Ramiro  

Adam Haupt

The Story

Alleliuah was born on Hellifyno, in the mountainous region of the Northern Continent as the product of bastardized creatures. From the spoiled breeding of Fenrir wolves, and Fae magicks came a kinfolk with gnosis. This oddity led to the interest of the Lord of Winter’s Thorns, who took her as a Bride & Hunter. Over the years, her memory of her homeland was reduced to dim recollection.

Alleliuah's bizarre existence and bloodline from the Hand of Tyr, as well as being blessed by Gnosis made her attractive to the Lord. She became his wife and personal guard dog who accompanied him on hunts and was sent with a partner, Kana, from time to time to track down prized Changelings that had yet to get through the Hedge. He also enjoyed setting his dogs and changelings to fight in The Furnace during full moons. 

Occasionally, Alleliuah was kept in a cage with the other beasts, but often slept beside her husband. Like all Fae, he ran hot and cold and would often punish her, or simply neglect her. 

It was during one of these periods when she managed to make her escape. Tracking down a Changeling with Kana, who had fled, they were attacked by the woman. Alleliuah fell into a frozen river when it cracked, and was sucked below the ice. A great Leviathan of a Beast guarded a Hedge Gate hidden under the Glaeyze River, and it was pure luck that Alleliuah managed to get through.

FURTHER STORY

Centuries ago, Beowulf defeated Grendal and was crowned. But the life of luxury for the Fenrir was not in his interests. He began to seek out other monsters to slay. His Court's Mage located a powerful artifact in the midst of this, held by an incredibly powerful Fae. They managed to make it to Arcadia, but found themselves fighting a losing battle.

Some managed to stumble out of the Hedge on sheer accident, making their home in the mountains of the Northern Continent. Others, did not. Over time, they were pursued and forced to breed, and became warped by the magicks of Arcadia. As the decades and centuries wore on, they grew to be pale shades of what they once were. Limited to a single form, an archaic, garbled form of the garou tongue and loyal to an absolute fault. Hardy, relentless and violent. Those that did not make the cut, were left to roam. Those that did, were the Hounds of the Wild Hunt. The Lord of Winter's Thorns had been raising these wolves to fill in the ranks of his hunting packs, as well as his own personal Wild Hunt for changelings that escaped him.

The Lord of Winter's Thorns was a True Fae that had been corrupted over the years by a tainted circlet once created by the Bastet to mimic the Silver Fang crown. It had given him dreams and visions over the years, culminating to a War where Wyrm hopes to destroy the Garou that have arrived.

Contracts: 

Beast's Blessing: She has a supernatural affinity with wolves, and has a powerful personal magnetism about her.

Hunterheart Blessing: Her teeth and nails are far stronger than a mortal's and can deliver lethal damage.

Relentless Endurance: She can take grievous amounts of damage, but sequester the pain to the back of her mind and ignore it. Once the scene is over however, it comes back.

Lady Luck: Good fortune seems to follow her. However, usage of this Contract invites terrible consequences.

Trespasser's Spoor: Once the changeling writes their name on the entrance in chalk and blood, they may sense any threats that enter their territory.

Wildwalker: After sleeping outdoors, a changeling can freely move through nature with no obstacles.

Beast's Keen Senses: If the changeling touches an animal-type of their contract, they acquire the senses of that animal.

Nevertread: By stopping to cover a single footprint and expending the Glamour, all of her footsteps from there on until the Contract ends, will be obscured. Only supernatural means will be able to track her path. As a Beast, she can extend this coverage to benefit those that travel with her. Even when the Contract has ended, the footsteps that were covered, will remain covered.

Might of the Terrible Brute: The changeling drains her opponent's strength to boost her own.

Red Revenge: By calling out to all of the hatred and misery in the world, she can summon her wrath like an aura. Her skin blisters and splits, and blood surrounds her in a haze. It acts like an armor, moves quicker and incites fear in the opponent. It causes her to go berserk.

Trusty Blades: The changeling cannot be easily disarmed, and rearming or drawing blades is done reflexively.

Song of Flashing Steel: By using this clause, the changeling calls to her hand a weapon with which she is familiar that is in line of sight (or in the same world by expending Willpower). The blade will avoid all obstacles in its path there, bar solid barriers.

Gifts:

Ice Echo: She can conjure a perfect reflection of herself. The image is identical to the her, except that it is reversed, as though seen in a mirror (so any writing on her clothing would be backwards, scars would be on the wrong side, etc.) She can control the image easily, giving it voice and guiding its motion. Taught by the Wendigo lupus ancestor spirit, Little - Bear.

Howl of the Banshee: The werewolf emits a fearful howl that causes those who hear it to run in terror. A Banshee —  a mournful spirit of the dead — teaches this Gift.

Speech of the World: This Gift allows Gaia’s warriors to read and wield the spirit of speech, bypassing the need to learn different languages and dialects. The Garou may speak and understand any human language she encounters, though she speaks with an obvious accent, marking her as an outsider. Speech of the World doesn’t convey literacy, nor is it an encyclopedia of cultural information. An ancestor-spirit teaches this Gift.

Rite of the Hunting Ground: Lupus Garou mark their territory by urinating on trees and bushes. After the rite, no wolf or Garou can come into the area without immediately realizing they have entered another's territory. There is no compunction not to enter, however. Typically, the Garou must spend an hour marking her territory. Special messages, such as a greeting to other Garou, can be left as well.

Voice of the Jackal: This rite is performed when a Garou's behavior has shamed not just herself, but her entire sept or tribe. When the ritemaster performs this rite, he blows a handful of dust or ashes onto the offender and speaks the following: "Because thy (cowardice/gluttony/selfishness/etc.) has proved thee to be of jackal blood, let thy voice proclaim thy true breed!" As the dust and words envelop the punished Garou, her voice changes. Thereafter, she will speak in an annoying shrill and piercing nasal whine until the ritemaster repeals the punishment.

Aesthetics

Playlist

Roralle Ship Playlist

Pinterest 

Roralle Pinterest

Quote: Aut viam inveniam aut faciam. If I cannot find a way, I will make one.