#It's all about the game of stares

[ozuzo]

The clock ticks on and on... and all that was bewitching turns into venom and blood

[suiheisen]

you think YOU had a bad day at work?

bonus: sid shrieking "no!!!! NO!!!!!" loud enough to be heard in the stands and on camera

[post-it-notes7]

a star warrior you say

[front-facing-pokemon]

[lovesickeros]

☆ de fontaine

{☆} characters furina {☆} notes cult au, imposter au, drabble, gender neutral reader {☆} warnings angst, suicidal thoughts, hurt / no comfort {☆} word count 1.4k

This wasn't fair. This wasn't fair. This wasn't fair!

She thought, for one moment, she could put the mask down and breathe – for one moment of daydreaming, she thought she could just be Furina. She thought she would finally get to live the live she should've had in the first place, the life she threw away to play God to an audience who saw her as nothing but a circus animal, dancing to their whims. Furina just wanted to be selfish for one brief and fleeting moment..and it was gone before she could even grasp it in her hand. A comet soaring past far out of her reach.

She can barely keep her hands from violently shaking as she looks down at them – broken and bloody and more a corpse then a person – and she feels so numb she can't even feel the rain pelting against her back. None of this is fair, she wants to scream, why is it always me? But her voice is silent beneath the torrent of rain. She wonders if the ocean would take her if she sank into it's depths – just for a moment, she wonders how it would feel to finally be able to sleep at ease.

Furina is tired.

But Furina is nothing if not useful, isn't she?

So she forces her feet to move, dragging against the stone beneath her heels, and drags their bloodied body into the nearest empty building, letting the rain do the work of washing away the smeared blood following her path. The smell makes her feel sick, the feeling of it sticking to her hands and gloves makes her lightheaded, but she persists. Because Furina is useful, because Furina won't let them die out in the rain, because Furina won't stand by and just let them rot on the streets like some..pest.

Furina wants to go home. She wants to sleep and she isn't she if she wants to wake up, this time. But she keeps going anyway.

Because it's all she's ever done, and the habit sticks.

An Archon she may not be, not anymore, but the expectations of five hundred years still linger like eyes on the inside of her skull. They watch her, pry and prod at her thoughts, mocking laughter and judging eyes following her as she forces herself to dance to the song they weave with glee. Furina never stepped off that stage – she's still there, she thinks, watching the crowd stare at her in disdain as the curtain call looms above her like a guillotine. She still hears Neuvillette deliver her damnation and salvation with a trembling voice, still feels her hair stand on end when electro crackled like the crack of the whip, Clorinde's blade aimed at her like a loaded gun.

She's trapped on that stage and she never left, not really.

She hates it. She thinks she hates them, but it's not their fault. They didn't ask for this, didn't ask for everyone to turn against them, didn't ask for her to save them. Neither did she..yet here they are, she thinks.

She tries to tell herself she's in control this time, though. She can stop performing her part in this horrible, bloody play any time she wants. It makes her feel better, just for a little while, if she convinces herself she's still Furina, painfully human.

And Furina has always been good at lying.

It's the believing that's the hard part.

There isn't time for her to wallow in her own self pity, though. They're still bleeding out onto the dusty, creaky floorboards of some random, broken down house and she's just standing there as the blood stains the wood. She can fix it – she's good at fixing things. She's done nothing but fix things – try to, anyway – for five hundred years. She can fix a little wound, how hard could it be? Her hands are clenched so tight they ache as she kneels down, wincing at the creak of the floorboards beneath her heels– she hesitates just long enough to wonder if she's making a mistake before she peels away just enough of the outer layer of their clothes to see the deep, bloody gash across their chest. She tries not to think about it – it's deep, too deep, and she feels dizzy just looking at it, but she's handled worse, right?

Furina can fix it. That's what she's good at.

She doesn't feel so confident when she tries to wrack her brain for..something. Five hundred years, and a little wound stumps her? No, she had to have learned something, right? She's decidedly not trying to buy time because she's panicking, parsing through hundreds of years of memories like flipping through a book. Furina isn't made for this, not really – she's running on nothing but adrenaline and she's really not sure what she's doing, but she's trying. And just like before, it won't be enough, will it?

She'll fall short again – she'll be too late to fix it before she's alone again.

Furina was an Archon..used to be. What use would she have for that sort of knowledge? Which makes her predicament all the more harrowing and bleak. What was she supposed to do?

Furina had heard it first hand, that vitriol in Neuvillette's voice. She isn't sure she's ever heard him that..angry before. She's not sure he would listen to her if she tried, either. And that scares her more then anything. All of Fontaine was up in arms about this..imposter, yet here she was, staring down at them bleeding out in front of her, and she was trying to save them.

Why? Why is she throwing away her only chance at normalcy for a fraud? Why didn't she just turn them in?

They were dying – that should've been a good thing, shouldn't it? So why didn't it feel like it?

"Why you?" Her voice breaks as she speaks in harsh tones, grabbing the front of their shirt in trembling, bloodied hands. "Why now?" She wants to scream, to demand answers they can't give, to claw back the reprieve she was promised after five hundred years of agony..and all she can do is sob into their chest, pleading for an answer that will not come. "Why me?"

Silence is their answer, and it hangs heavy on her trembling shoulders as she cries.

Of course they don't, she thinks bitterly, no one has ever answered her pleas spoken in hushed sobs. Not her other self and certainly not them.

Furina has always been alone. Furina will always be alone.

Because Furina never left that stage, never left that moment when she looked at herself in the mirror and took up a mantle too heavy for her to bear. She always finds her way back eventually. There's no one on the other side anymore – she stands alone on a stage, waiting for an inevitable end she isn't sure will come.

"Please," She pleads through tears and choked sobs, clinging to them like they are all that keeps her from sinking. "Please don't leave me, too." The words burn on her tongue – how pathetic is she that she craves companionship from the bloodied body of the imposter? Perhaps she's truly lost her mind after all these years..perhaps she's finally gone mad. She must have.

But their presence is like the first feeling of gentle warmth upon her skin as the sun crests the horizon, like the gentle lap of tides along her heels, the sway of branches and leaves as the wind blows through them like an instrument all it's own. They are the soothing sound of rain against the window as she watches the dreary skies in fond longing, the first bloom of spring as color blooms upon the landscape like paint had been spilled across the hills and valleys.

They are like the faint spark she carefully nurtures and stokes, so fragile even the smallest wind could blow it out like a candle. She cradles it within her palms, pleads with whoever will listen – prays that someone finally listens, because if not for her, then for them.

She's failed to protect too much already, let too many people with so much trust in her fall between the cracks of her fingers like grains of sand. She won't let them go – she can't.

If nothing else, if she couldn't be saved when she begged for salvation from that five hundred year long agony, even if she never got that chance..

Furina will make sure they do.

[be-queer-do-arson]

I wish we'd gotten a gym scene at some point because you know we'd have gotten a whole monologue about how watching andrew's biceps flex while he does bench presses reminds neil about how strong he is and how andrew protects neil and how he's the strongest person neil has ever known and then yet again someone would make a vague comment about neil checking andrew out and he'd be like what??? I don't understand where you could possible get that idea from

[starry-night-ly]

Now that we’ve been blessed with dual pov Miss Nora, I am so curious to know just a little bit of Andrew’s POV. Seeing Neil and Kevin from Jean and Jeremy’s pov makes me want others pov! Give me Andrew when Neil calls him out for not being drugged! When Neil wore the club clothes! When Neil payed a waiter to knock him out! I WANT IT SO BAD! I need to know how many times Andrew or anybody else just think “wtf is with this kid”

[moeblob]

Look, I just think it's VERY funny and on brand that I thought of an entire premise of colorful characters for half the cast and immediately drew the only one void of color.

[sharksliveontrains]

i would pay money to read aftg from andrews pov like

i just know he was thinking what the hell

[mattodore]

pay attention to theo’s beautiful face and not whatever matthias’s arm is doing... i liked the lighting more here than against the wall

[fisheito]

this is what i was cookin up while on nu:vacation [avoiding event spoilers] my dream.....my hopes....... EVERYONE PUT ON THE PRINCESS GOWN🗡

[toddellz]

thinking about Andrew getting cute aggression and just kinda squishing Neil or kissing him or something when he's actually fighting against the urge to squeeze his head so hard it pops, he deals with cute aggression so badly, like his hands itch to fold his boyfriend in half and rub his palms over every freckle and every mole and every scar, bite him and chew on his cheek or pull his hair but he just settles for kissing him instead with a straight face as if he isn't fighting for his life against all these foreign emotions bubbling inside him

[drenched-in-sunlight]

Wondering if Messmer was just the only one to help/sympathize with Marika on the shattering of the elden ring. His relation to snakes, fire, etc, could just be that he turned himself into a living weapon taking parts of all of the enemies of the Erd Tree he could find. Momma's boy headcanon tbh.

until the DLC is fully out and confirms otherwise, i'll stubbornly cling to the mommy's boy theory fr fr 😭😭

with Fromsoft's track record of portraying motherhood (*stare at Bloodborne*) i simply refuse to believe they made the Mom™ in Marika and won't expand on her further or won't have a kid that is just...insane over her. prayer circle for that theory to be supported in canon because i have ART to DRAW if true !

[front-facing-pokemon]

[charlotlie]

no one:

absolutely not a single person on earth:

jeremy & jean in every jerejean focused fic: i am about to form a bond so codependent—

[sincerely-sofie]

WAIT YOU GUYS HELP ME OUT HERE

Did they ever specify the timespan that the hero in PMD2 was dead for after defeating Dialga and being erased from time??? Because it always felt like it was a number of months at bare minimum, maybe even a full year between their death and their revival.

There is no way the partner in that game, sentimental and sensitive as they are, wouldn't set up an honorary gravesite or a memorial of some sort for the hero. The people of Treasure Town would probably insist on erecting something in honor of the hero's sacrifice themselves--- a way of remembering a person who touched their lives and saved them all from a doom they didn't see coming, a way of ensuring, in the hero's words, nothing like that would ever happen again. I can't stop thinking about it.

The partner goes there when they need a moment to talk to the memory of their friend. They go there when they need a moment to weep in peace. They go there when they miss their friend so deeply it makes them ache to their very bones.

And at one point after the hero is brought back, they ask their partner what that new structure is in town. And the partner has to tell them hey, you remember how you were dead for all that time after you told me to tell everyone what happened at Temporal Tower? It's in that moment the hero realizes that life went on without them. They were gone, really gone, and their partner and the rest of Treasure Town grieved them accordingly.

All of a sudden that weird structure isn't just an eyesore, it feels like an omen. A tomb waiting to be filled. And in the start of the post-game, it keeps appearing in their nightmares...