#UPDATE: I MAY BE STUPID

[m1d-45]

the scars, the wound

summary: heizou has two important skills: his intuition and his martial arts. he prefers not to use the latter when working on cases, but what happens when the first fails him?

word count: ~2k

-> warnings: mention/implication of violence near the end.. minor spoilers for heizou lore?

-> gn reader (you/yours)

-> if this looks familiar, it’s a rewrite of this. i didn’t think i posted that draft because it was in need of so much improvement when i recently re-found it, and didn’t realize until after already posting this… whoops.

taglist: @samarill || @thenyxsky || @valeriele3 || @shizunxie || @boba-is-a-soup || @yuus3n || @esthelily || @turningfrogsgay || @cupandtea24 || @genshin-impacts-me || @chaoticfivesworld || @raaawwwr

< masterlist >

heizou’s intuition is wrong, for once. it’s impossibly unlikely, something he can’t remember happening before, but it’s the only logical explanation.

he’s walking through ritou, taking a minor detour along the beach. why, he’s not certain, but some string in his stomach insisted he went. and so, following his intuition, he did.

at first, it’s sand. as all beaches are. he finds himself scanning the shore for anything strange, kicking at a few odd looking rocks. he even checks a few times with elemental sight, but all he gets are the faint wisps of hydro lingering on the sand. not that that meant much—his elemental affinity was never the highest, kazuha was far more reliable for this sort of thing—but normally he could at least gather a general idea of what his mind was trying to tell him… but not this time.

no, when he saw you sitting in the sand, it was the last thing he could have expected.

he stops, squinting a bit. the sky is darkening, approaching dusk, and he was meant to be going to a meeting with thoma. to bother a random civilian and make himself late wasn’t ideal, but to scare you off if you were a criminal could possibly be worse. so, he approaches quietly, noting the way you turned as he did.

and then he recognizes you, all at once. your face was reflected in the posters plastered all over the city, in word-of-mouth descriptions from other officers—you’re the one the whole world’s been looking for. your skin is dirty and your clothes could certainly use a few hours with a needle and thread, and paper doesn’t quite capture the blank look in your eyes as well.

still, he crouches down with a wave, crossing his arms on his knees. “hey there! detective heizou of the tenry-“

“i know you.”

your voice sends a chill down his spine. it pulls at something deep in his core, his soul screaming that you are friend, not foe. briefly, he wonders why he stopped here at all, and then shock hits him like a punch to the gut.

for the first time in a long time, his instincts were wrong.

wrong, because you’re a fugitive.

his smile turns strained, unable to shake the feeling that he’s doing something wrong despite knowing he’s within full legal right. his skin prickles, and he digs his nails into his arm guards to keep steady. “do you? gotta say, i can’t blame you. my name is flung around quite a lot.”

you’re tense but not running. you know him, you know who he is, so…

blank eyes peer at him from under the overgrown shags of your hair, half-lidded and tired. his mind constructs a metaphor without his asking, as if attempting to make sense of something far more complex than you; jewelry, rusted and ancient, luster long lost across the years.

he almost feels sympathetic, but he’s not sure why. he should hate you. you fly in the face of everything he stood for—truth, justice, his creator—but he can’t find the will to do anything to arrest you. he knows he could apprehend you in an instant, between his skill and your exhaustion, but he doesn’t. and he doesn’t know why.

it bothers him.

“so, what’re you doing on ritou? need any help getting a permit to the rest of the island?”

he tells himself he’s asking because doing that would force your hand, not because he wants to help. that’s ridiculous. when did he start thinking this way? has he caught a cold, by chance?

“no.”

“then surely there’s a more comfortable place to be than the beach?” what’s he doing? why does he care? who cared if sand plastered your skin, if you got sick from being outside? “tides get pretty high around here, it would do you good to find a place to rest.”

you look out to the sea, some of the tension leaving your body. it’s not relaxation, more like surrender. “i don’t have anywhere to go.”

his chest is beginning to feel oddly tight.

it’s like he’s seeing the stars themselves in your eyes despite the darkness and the fact that that’s not possible. there’s a small shimmer to them, the sun itself contained inside, a glow that shows when they flicker over him like you’re pulling out all of his secrets. he’s not sure why he wants to give them to you. “i’m sure you know that, though.”

he does, he knows, he was at the meeting with kujou sara and the rest of the police force. he was the one she pulled aside to personally ask he put his full attention on it—as if he hadn’t already the second she mentioned his god—and he’s heard of the stories from the mainland. he knows everything, he’s read over every single report he could get imported, and yet every word you say feels brand new. when you say ‘you’ it feels like you’re the first person to ever lay on him, and it’s scary that he doesn’t find that frightening. his mouth is dry, all of his normal quick retorts and easy replies falling out of his reach. he settles for a nod, and you look back to the sea.

you look dull, his mind says, pulling on all of his vocabulary to try and connect a sentence together that properly describes it. your entire form feels… fleeting? no, not that. impermanent, maybe, like fog. so dense from afar, yet vanishing once he gets close. you’re… everywhere, a mist lingering in the air, waiting for him to look away so you can take a solid form again.

are you a youkai looking for a bit of fun? perhaps he’s mistaken. maybe he’d guessed wrong, maybe you’d just stolen another’s face for a prank.

…that’s stupid. since when has that been one of his first explanations for something? no, something’s wrong- he has to get this- this spell off of him. now he remembers, the paper from the alchemist from mondstat, he remembers, he remembers-

he-

he remembers the soft smile on his father’s face, wiping the dirt from his knees. “you must be careful,” he says, careful not to irritate the scrapes with the cloth. “you have been blessed with this mind of yours, but you must be wise enough to use it properly.”

“i’m wise!” he insists, and his father laughs, reaching for the bandages at his side.

“you’re intuitive,” he corrects. “and every day i pray to our god that you to learn the difference.”

heizou tears his eyes away from you, pretending that the sand isn’t blurry.

you’re a fraud. he has to arrest you. you’re tricking the people, you’re impersonating the highest deity, the literal god of gods, youve fooled even his own mind, you have to be stopped. for the good of the world. for the good of the earth. for the hood of his god.

…so…

“why aren’t you trying to kill me yet?”

his heart both flares and breaks, hands twitching for both his cuffs and to hold you close. your voice is so rough, so cracked and tattered and filled with something similar enough to betrayal that it’s paralyzing.

he needs to arrest you.

(he needs to get you water.)

he has to bring you in so the shogun can kill you.

(he has to get you a room somewhere so you can rest. you look so tired.)

his mind is as blurred as his sight, confusion instead of tears muddling his thoughts.

what’s happening? why does his mind like (adore, want, need, worship) you so much, when he knows he has to take you in? he’s been given direct orders, he knows what he has to do, so why can’t he do it? when did he fall for such easy tricks? he’s shikanoin heizou, the most trusted detective of the tenryou commission, and he cannot be swayed by your words. he can’t afford to be.

(it’s not just your words. the air around you is so soft, so welcoming, inviting him to sit in the sand with you until it’s dawn again. he’s at ease in a way he hasn’t been in a long while, even despite the stress of the situation. he should, in reasonable circumstances, be stressed, but you’ve cleared his mind to a simple volley between two ideas: his loyalty to his god, and his newfound loyalty to you.)

he wants to tell you that he’d never want to hurt you. “i try to leave that to the higher-ups” is what he says instead.

you sign, running a shaking hand over your hair. it’s full of sand and salt and needs to be cut, badly. you take an equally unsteady breath, and when you speak you sound like you’re about to cry. “i don’t want to fight you, heizou.”

the way you say his name fills his chest with something hotter than fire and sweeter than honey, a supernova made into sugar and placed into the gap left by his heart.

the last of the sun shines off the water and outlines you in its glow, the only thought in his mind that of your beauty.

he licks his lips—they taste of salt—and forces words to come up. “i don’t want to fight you either.”

it’s the truth, and he hates that it is.

instead of saying anything else, you stand, and heizou scrambles to follow. he tells himself it’s because he needs to be ready to run after you. that’s it. that’s all. you take a step away and he is quick to match it, transfixed as you pick up a long wooden staff, akin to a walking stick. it’s taller than you are, and he’s not sure how he missed it laying beside you.

“you’ll lose your job if you don’t, detective.”

he might.

heizou blinks.

…he won’t.

no… he won’t.

facing you head on, the acceptance in your eyes is clearer, like you knew it would come to this. his hand drifts to his baton hesitantly, and sees your grip on the wood. it’s splintered, he notices, likely a piece of driftwood you found along the beach.

why is he waiting? why is he stalling?

he’s let this go on for too long already. he’s being ridiculous. this is wrong. it’s his job to take in criminals and he’s staring at one of the worst, so what is he hesitating for?

against his better judgement, he tightens his hands to fists. he’ll be gentle, he promises himself, but it doesn’t soothe the storm in his head. he‘ll be careful, but it doesn’t change the fact that he’s still likely to hurt you. maybe by the end of it, if he’s clever with the use of his vision, you’d barely have a bruise. did you even know how to fight properly? you don’t seem all that confident in your weapon. at least that’ll make his job easier, right?

he’s stalling again.

heizou takes a breath. against his intuition, he takes the first swing.

[flake-n-rudy]

(( Poogle Flake can't hurt you. It isn't real. ))

[goodmotorfinger]

A COLLEGE ACCEPTED ME?????

[threewaysdivided]

Kaldur: Why do feel a sudden impulse to talk about a complex personal issue with a Teammate I barely know?

Also Kaldur: It could not possibly be related to my feeling that this issue is too small to take to our supervisor or counsellor, too personal to take to my mentor-who-is-also-my-king-and-therefore-politically-complicated, something my peers would either be inexperienced or uninterested in, and the person I used to speak to about this having fallen off the radar due to his own clone-based existential crisis. No, my sudden and desperate desire to talk about an experience I have been putting aside for months as soon as someone else just barely hinted that they might have experienced something similar must be entirely unrelated and irrational.

[bluecloudious]

Nearing my demise with the Character Dresser

Context + alt (the costume I used for Vigi):

[arinishi]

It’s really interesting how Lanyon Sr thinks of Lanyon being gay; he really does want the best for his son but, like every other character in this comic, he is Not Very Good At Expressing This !! We can see that he has good intentions, he found a wife for Lanyon who is also a lesbian so this should be saving both of them from their potentially doomed fates. It’s just that he doesn’t seem too open to constructive criticism and seems pretty dead set on this path for his son, whether he really wants to or not.

It also makes me think: Does Lanyon’s father know about him and Jekyll? What about the other boys? And why did Lanyon feel as though he had to leave Jekyll because of this when he was aware that the marriage would just act as a cover for him and Everly to Be Gay In Secret?

[s0fti3w1tch]

Twice, I've mistaken 2 artists for the same person

and several times I've seen multiple drawings from the same artist but thought they were all different people

And I very recently found out that my IRL meant that the other account they were talking about.... was their mutual and not their alt account despite how drastically different their art was. My dumbass literally was like "wow, my IRL has a really expansive artstyle range :) so skilled ♥︎!" ...until l checked their bios and realized that THEY AREN'T THE SAME PERSON

[inkstaindusk]

You know what actually. Sure. Fuck it. Introduction to the Aira isekais into a BL dating sim AU except none of that is actually referenced

Sand and shattered glass dragged into your skin as you pulled yourself across the floor. The pain was minuscule; you had already numbed yourself to it. The world spun around you, ticks and tocks rung in your ears, but you kept your eye glued in front of you. Not a single thing would distract you from your goal. You pushed yourself up by your elbows, jagged edges slicing into your arms and bringing forth a new well of blood. With all that you had lost, maybe you were already dying.

He stared down at you, cheek propped on the knuckles of one hand from his spot atop the pile of broken time. In his other hand dangled an hourglass, the top almost completely run out. “You couldn’t be satisfied with this one either?” he sighed.

You pushed upwards against your hands. Stood, shakily. “No,” you said firmly. “Never.” With your one good eye, you stared over his shoulder at the images flying behind his back. You couldn’t stop. It was so small; if you looked away, surely, you would lose it again.

The time ran out and, just like its predecessors, the hourglass immediately shattered. Glass and sand fell between his fingers, slipping to join the wreckage below.

“Well,” he said, like he didn’t even notice, “I don’t dislike what I see. But, you know…” He finally lifted his head, casting his gaze around the area. Here, it was just you two, and the remnants of your losses. He reached down to pluck a broken clock from beneath him. The glass covering was cracked, its hands twisted and long having died. After a moment, he tossed it away carelessly. Its body cracked further. “You’ve used up so many of these, I don’t know if there’s any left.”

You shook your head.

“No?” he said.

You dug into your inventory and presented the key before him. It was the only thing you had left. The moment you realized this one was futile, you had expended everything to find it. Just for this.

He barked a single, started laugh. “Well, how 'bout that? It seems there really is another.” Lips pulled into an amused smirk. “Okay. Once more, then. But this is your last chance, understood?”

“Yes,” you said, looking past him again, searching. You would make this count. You had to.

He held out his hand.

[venacoeurva]

for any artists having an art block where it just feels like everything is coming out weird and wrong: check your pressure settings

[kijosakka]

will be rewriting 6 chapters. of my fic. not fully i just really want harold around and only realized that once i got to the paris chapter

[luciana-silentstar]

I decided because I love suffering that everyone gets their own halter.

[murmurmurl]

what the fuck, and might actually get back into stardew valley omg

[kiribread]

Trying my hand at animation tee hee :))))

[ribbonflies]

As if things couldn't get worse, I'm losing my job

[meme-streets]

my new insane theory that i have absolutely no proof for is that the newer designs of technology generally being sleek and bland and featureless, and the constant visual simplification of app icons and ui, etc etc, is driven by the same principle as "everyone is beautiful and no one is horny." ugly cars and minimalist interior design also. everything is getting less sexy and in my head these are all related processes

[abluescarfonwaston]

It's one thing to expect me to pay a subscription fee for something. Its another to not give me one of the Main quality of life things I enjoy.

I'm ready to scream. CONTINUOUS TEXT. REMOVE HEADER. REMOVE FOOTER. I JUST WANT CONTINUOUS TEXT WHY ISNT THIS WORKING. I AM DOUBLE CLICKING THE SPACE BETWEEN.