#WE DO NOT NEED TO MAKE AN ENTIRE SECTION SEVERAL MONTHS INTO THE FUTURE FOR LIKE TWO ASKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[bonestrouslingbones]

OK CAN MY BRAIN STOP COMING UP WITH IDEAS PLEASE

[pawborough]

May 2024 Check In

Hello, all! 

Thank you for keeping up with our development! Let's jump right in on what we've been working on! 

We have received over 400 applications for Alpha testing. We are currently on track for a June start date, and we’ll divulge the gritty details of where we're at in development at the end of this update. 

However, we had mentioned a fauna present going to chosen volunteers in exchange for the requested labor. 

We wanted to give everyone a peak! Introducing… 

Nephrune 

Design and illustration by Hydde

Researchers are not certain if this legendary creature truly exists or if it is a fable-born myth, but folklore says the Nephrune slumbers underground among the earthen bounties. As the only natural creature made entirely of crystalline inorganics, legend has it that this mighty beast is the mother of all magics in Mewmoia. Its awakening would spell disaster.

It is worth mentioning once again that Alpha volunteering will not be the only way to obtain a Nephrune. We plan to have this fauna setup as an exclusive incentive for bug hunting and reporting (a bug bounty) in the future. We do not intend to permanently retire the beast, however it will be rare. 

New Icons 

Turmeric, Ink Jar, Lotus, Basil, Rosemary, Sage, and Oregano illustrated by Tybaxel

New Accessories 

We have continued accessory illustration! Last month, we previewed the fourth set of our catalog: 

The Woolen set! 

Illustration by Remmie

Alongside, we have continued working on backer accessories!

It has been our goal to develop several points of synergy in the aesthetics of our accessories. This includes backer accessories. As it turns out, several backer accessories worked together well enough to commit to one more set.

The Regal set! 

Illustration by Hydde

The Regal Crown and the Pheonix Mantle were both concepted and sponsored by SolsticeStar and Ralsha respectively. We've added to their concepts to create a versatile outfit! 

We also have further renders of the Kickstarter item:

Necromantic Cloak

Illustration by Hydde

Dynamic Accessorizing 

We wanted to take a moment to briefly talk about the dynamic layering we’ve implemented in accessories! 

We’ve implemented a system which allows the back of accessories to layer behind  accessories they're on top of. 

What this means: Socks will layer over the back hem of boots while remaining under the boot, items with back capes like the Necromantic Cloak can have poofy pants under them without clipping, wigs can be worn under hats or hoods without clipping the back brim, and the list goes on! 

It's a small QoL addition, but it makes layered outfits much easier to construct! 

Sol Site Theme

Daily Duties 

Next, take a look at our designs for play of the Territory Grounds section! 

NOTE: These are early concept mockups, and still need significant tweaking before final approval!

Performing a cat’s daily duty in your Territory is a consistent way for your camp to get item resources. 

Cats can participate in a number of different daily activities in order to gain different items. Hunting will gain items like the Common Mouse, while fishing will gain items like the Red Snapper. 

How well your cat does at a duty will depend on their statistics! In addition to playing the Guild, a cat which frequently does activities will raise their statistics. 

However, we wanted to make this process customizable and streamlined. 

Which is why we designed territory parties! You can create and save a party of cats with a certain territory activity, then send all the party cats on their daily duties at once. 

This way, if you really need meat items, you can choose to send all your cats hunting without painstakingly clicking several times. You can curate a consistent daily gain pool while at any time choosing to deviate from it! 

Parties are also versatile. Even if a cat has already been sent on a different duty, you may still send the party without that cat. 

This system will need testing to find any kinks or pain points, but our goal is to reduce the amount of clicking while still requiring some resource management strategy from the user! 

Map of Mewmoia

Above is the political map which presents Borough boundaries, however we also present a climate map, which outlines the conditions of each location: 

Map illustration by Hydde

Lore is finally something we can take some time to focus on. 

Refreshing and lengthening the writing found on our original prototype website is now being done. We have mockups for a better, interactive lore page! 

However, we must stress that this page does not take precedent over the game itself, so while we can communicate that its on our radar, we can't promise it before delivering on MVP mechanics. 

Speaking of lore… 

The Metropolis Logo

Illustration edits by Tybaxel The moon has now been better placed to represent the eyeshine, and a World Spire has been made front and center. This tower is sculpted to resemble a cat’s pupil, thus better fitting in with the other simplistic yet intentional visuals. 

The Metropolis will have its visuals updated on our demo website during our next improvement push!

Development Update

So where are we on development? 

Well, recently we wrapped up Alpha combat development. This includes movement, conditions, tile generation, NPC behaviors, item use, and combat abilities. 

Introducing Errands 

Take a peak at Errands, which is the Alpha version of the multiplayer Missions. 

Errands are smaller, short-term jobs that only one cat may go on. They take 1-3 minutes (VS. Missions taking 10-20 minutes) and will similarly have different objectives to accomplish.

Going on an errand will still gain you experience, items, currency, and help you raise the rank of your Team, but they are tailored towards casual play. While missions will be available for longer play-sessions, errands are for when you want to do something smaller!

Here you can see the method of browsing errands. Current errands can be refreshed via clearing all of them, re-checking the next day, or a premium instant refresh. Errands can also be clipped and saved for later if you don't want to start them immediately, but see one you're intrigued by! 

Dev Progress Check

Going forward, the big things we are currently working on, in order: 

Daily Duties 

Forums

Item Integration

Player to player trade; markets and currency

Dashboard Functionality 

Cooking / Crafting Functionality 

After which, all further features will be additional buffs to the loop and QoL features. Things such as a player and Team notebook to post and feature journal entries, aesthetic buffs to the scene builder (color tints on items, shadow tints, etc.), mobile QoL, the achievement badge system, a tagging system, and integrating multiplayer combat functionality. 

These additions are all things we hope to prioritize adding over the lifespan of our beta! 

Wahoo! Lots of good things! Everyone on the team is buzzing with excitement over how close we're getting to something fully playable. Thank you for being along for the ride!

To Summarize: We showed the Nephrune, new accessory sets and accessory dynamics, the Sol site theme, Territory Ground play, the Site Map, a new Metropolis logo, Errand setup, and the check-in for where we are in mechanic development. 

What to expect next month: Alpha functionality, further asset renderings, potential recolors, potential Moontail update!

[theculturedmarxist]

In Gaza, Israel is gearing up to commit genocide. It is not doing so quietly. It is repeating its intent every day, announcing it to the world in both its words and actions. Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has described those in Gaza as ‘human animals’, while declaring that Israel is cutting off water, fuel, electricity and food to the entire blockaded strip. Likud officials have called for nuclear strikes as well as a second Nakba. Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, has rejected the distinction between civilians and combatants, asserting that ‘it is an entire nation out there that is responsible’. Israeli military officials have made clear that their aim is ‘damage, not precision’. All the while, Israel has subjected the 365-square-kilometre area to relentless shelling, dropping the same number of bombs on its 2.3 million inhabitants as the United States unleashed on Afghanistan in an entire year, at the height of its murderous invasion. Hospitals, mosques, schools and homes – all have been deemed adequate military targets. At least 2,750 people have died so far, over one million have been displaced, nearly ten thousand are wounded.

Half of Gaza’s inhabitants were told to relocate to the south of the strip via military-approved ‘safe routes’. Israel then bombed these routes while people were doing just that. Many other Palestinians refused to follow the order. They know better than anyone that this is a straightforward attempt at ethnic cleansing. Nearly 80% of Palestinians in Gaza are refugees, expelled from their lands in 1948 and refused their right to return by their colonial rulers. In the south, the situation is dire too, thanks to continual aerial bombardment, shortages of water, food and electricity, and the influx of new arrivals. Israel continues to block the entry of humanitarian aid through the Rafah crossing, which has been hit repeatedly by air raids. 

Israeli officials, including Netanyahu himself, have announced that this is ‘only the beginning’. Three hundred thousand troops have gathered near Gaza and are awaiting orders to launch a ground offensive which could, we are told, last months. The resultant death and destruction would be unimaginable. There is a high likelihood that the entire northern Gaza Strip would be razed to the ground, and that the inhabitants of the enclave would be corralled into an even smaller area – forcing them to choose between death, unbearable captivity, or exile. Israel justifies this indiscriminate bloodshed as a response to the killing of 1,300 Israelis in the days following the Palestinian break-out on 7 October, and the need to prevent Hamas from carrying out further operations. Its current assault must be understood, first and foremost, as a response to the political humiliation it suffered at the hands of the most isolated section of the Palestinian population.

After eighteen years of siege by land, air and water, during which Israel’s stated policy was to ‘put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger’ by severely restricting food access, while regularly ‘mowing the grass’ – i.e., carrying out campaigns of assassination and mass killing – Palestinians in Gaza finally managed to tear down the barbed wire that kept them captive. Through that act alone, they endangered the political future of Netanyahu and his coalition, along with the process of normalization between Israel and the region’s most autocratic and repressive regimes. In addition, they punctured Israel’s illusion of omnipotence, exposing its vulnerability for the whole world – and, more importantly, for all Palestinians – to see. Retribution will now be conducted by all available means – including forced displacement or outright annihilation.

The question facing all of us in the West is how to stop the impending genocide. Our rulers have made it clear that they will allow Israel to carry out its plans – invoking the country’s ‘right to defend itself’ by carpet bombing a civilian population. The US and the UK have sent battleships to demonstrate their unflinching support. Ursula von der Leyen travelled to Tel Aviv to give Netanyahu the EU’s backing. Keir Starmer insisted that Israel had a right to cut off vital supplies to the entire blockaded population. Simultaneously, our governments have tried their best to repress Palestine solidarity movements on the domestic front: France banned pro-Palestine demonstrations altogether, Berlin followed suit, and the UK considered joining in. Of course, this follows a years-long attempt to criminalize the Palestinian cause and stamp out the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, under the guise of ‘countering terrorism’ or ‘fighting antisemitism’. Why is our political class so invested in suppressing criticism of the apartheid regime? The answer is obvious. Western states support Israel in order to maintain their power at a crucial crossroads of world trade. Challenging that power is impermissible, because any attempt to hold Israel accountable for its crimes is – by definition – an attempt to hold our own states accountable for their involvement in them. Not only are our rulers prepared to let Israel level Gaza; they will even provide it with diplomatic cover and military supplies.

What is standing between Gaza and genocide, then, is political pressure – an internationalist movement whose aim is to force Western governments to backtrack and restrain the Israeli killing machine. Last weekend we saw the first stirrings of this movement in its current phase. Across the globe, hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – turned out to march. Sana’a, Baghdad, Rabat, and Amman were filled with protesters as far as the eye could see, bringing cold sweats to the rulers of the region, who see the connection between their populations’ demands for Palestinian liberation and demands for their own. In London, Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin, in New York, Brussels and Rome, in Cape Town, Tunis, and Nairobi, in Sydney and Santiago, people took to the street to demand an end to the onslaught, an end to the siege, and a free Palestine.

These scenes were extraordinary – but they alone will not be enough. In the US, activists have targeted the offices of key policymakers, staging protests and sit-ins, demanding that they drop their support for Israel’s crimes and take action to end the assault. Shaming politicians in this way will be an important tactic in the days and weeks to come. The recent history of the solidarity movement offers other methods that may also prove effective. In the UK, Palestine Action has spent years targeting armaments factories and stopping the production of weapons intended for use against Palestinians. Dockers in Italy, South Africa and the US have refused to handle Israeli cargo during previous military assaults on Gaza, disrupting the flow of goods and weapons to the country. During the winter of 2008-9, as Israel launched its first massive assault on the strip following the imposition of the blockade three years earlier, students across the UK occupied their campuses, calling for their universities to show concrete solidarity with Palestinians and for their government to cut diplomatic ties. They used the occupied spaces to host lectures, discussions and debates. Amid growing repression against the Palestine solidarity movement, such spaces could once again play a crucial role in enabling street-level organization.

It is up to activists themselves to decide which methods are most suited to their local and national contexts. Yet, across the board, there can be no return to business as usual. We have a collective obligation to ratchet up the pressure on our governments, and on Israel itself, to stop the genocide and mass displacement. In the UK, several trade unions expressed support for the demonstration last weekend, as well as their concern about the situation in Gaza. Can such concern be translated into meaningful interventions? Can union militants move from making solidarity statements to taking solidarity industrial action? If lecturers and teachers, dockers and train drivers – to name but a few of those who turned out at the rally in London – could organize work stoppages, demanding that the government reverse its position and stop the ongoing mass murder, then Britain’s leaders would not have the political space to give Israel a carte blanche.

Today, Palestinian unions have called on trade unionists across the world to show their solidarity by refusing to continue with the provision of arms to Israel. They have asked that workers in relevant industries make the following commitments:

These demands must now be brought to workplaces and unions across the West, where they will find important allies among existing campaigns against the arms trade. Points four and five are not industry-specific, and can have a much wider application across the labour movement.  

The task ahead of us is clear. Genocide, ethnic cleansing and a second Nakba are not acts of God. They can be prevented. Our governments have so far refused to raise objections. Let us remind them of the costs of their complicity.

[synchronousemma]

15th August: The party from London arrives

Read the post and comment on WordPress

Read: Vol. 3, ch. 16; pp. 316–317 (“If Emma had still” to “unintelligble to Emma”).

Context

Harriet returns from London. She is pleased to hear that Emma approves of her engagement.

The party arrives in Highbury from London “in August,” (vol. 3, ch. 17; p. 305) a “very few days” (p. 316) after Robert Martin shared the news of his engagement and about a “month” (vol. 3, ch. 17; p. 305) after Harriet began her visit. Harriet presumably sees Emma again that day or the next.

Readings and Interpretations

Self-Deceived, Before

Upon beginning to speak with Emma about her late engagement to Robert Martin, Harriet did look “a little foolish at first: but having once owned that she had been presumptuous and silly, and self-deceived, before, her pain and confusion seemed to die away with the words, and leave her without a care for the past, and with the fullest exultation in the present and future” (p. 317). This occurrence of pain dying away at the same time as, or as a result of, speaking, reminds me of Nicholas Dames’ reading of the burning of Harriet’s “most precious treasures” (vol. 3, ch. 4 [40]). Dames argues that Austen produces a communal, “cosmopolitan” nostalgia that “makes the individual past available to others” and, in so doing, has the power to “dilute[]” unpleasant memories (p. 132); “nostalgic processes of disconnection, communality, and naming or judgment—Harriet calls her former infatuation [with Mr. Elton] ‘madness’ and ‘’nonsense’—lead to a form of memory capable of making former pain […] pleasurable for a social grouping” (p. 133). Here we also see a process of naming, worked out for an audience: Harriet “own[s] that she had been presumptuous and silly, and self-deceived,” which naming in itself alleviates the pain of the recollection. For Juliet McMaster, this is a moment in which Harriet “achieve[s] a kind of catharsis through confession” (p. 32).

Emily Rohrbach, you may recall, argues that Emma at several points undercuts the characters’ and the readers’ ability to imagine the narrative proceeding any differently:

The relative restriction on the reader’s freedom to imagine counterfactual narratives in Emma […] leaves the protagonist, ultimately, in a position free from mourning the lives she might have led. […] That the narrative of Emma proceeds as a progressive reduction in the counterfactual imagination suggests that the ‘perfect happiness’ in which it concludes amounts to a world without inclinations to imagine things otherwise. […]

In the final chapters, momentum toward ‘perfect happiness’ builds through the steady elimination of reasons for regret—that is, less through dramatic change or turning points than in moments and acts that salute what has always been, which is to say that these eventualities need not displace other possibilities; no other line of development could be recognised, even potentially, as such. (p. 483)

This tendency continues in this section: “as for Harriet Smith, ‘The fact was, as Emma could now acknowledge, that Harriet had always liked Robert Martin; and that his continuing to love her had been irresistible’. This development in the story of Harriet was, of course, initiated before the narration of Emma begins, rendering its origins at least partly obscure” (p. 483).

It Must Be Ever Unintelligible

Mark Parker writes that, in the opening paragraph of this chapter, the “rendering of Emma’s concerns for Harriet in the form of a hypothesis adds a stamp of finality to the entire episode, as does the shift from the possible ‘momentary doubt’ to the removal of ‘such uncertainty’” (p. 349). Immediately afterward,

Emma is “perfectly satisfied”—an apparent hint that we are out of the realm of the narrative game—by Harriet’s account of her change of heart. But embedded in all this conclusive transparency is an interjection which is at odds with the drift of the paragraph. The phrase “unaccountable as it was!” seems to be another of those subtle shifts into the words of Emma Woodhouse herself, and its relation to the rest of the paragraph is as ambiguous as is its own status. Are these Emma’s own words, adduced to give ironic evidence of her satisfaction? Is the phrase an ironic reflection on the good-natured malleability of Harriet by the narrative voice? Or is it the narrative voice speaking through Emma’s own words to comment ironically on a deficiency in understanding on the part of Emma herself? […] The narrative voice carefully cultivates our inability to choose conclusively among these options. (ibid.)

The next paragraph “supports a literal reading for ‘unaccountable,’ but only at the cost of raising other difficulties”: Harriet’s “burst of confidences and happiness seems to make any residual guilt on Emma’s part superfluous” (p. 350).

Harriet has returned to much the same place that she began the book, and Emma's meddling has apparently produced only pleasant changes in her friend, improvements sanctioned even by the searching eye of Mr. Knightley himself. But the process of this courtship, despite Emma’s admission that Harriet liked (not loved?) Robert Martin all along, is yet “unintelligible.” Although Martin’s love is admittedly “irresistible,” Harriet’s engagement is “unintelligible” to Emma. […] Emma’s inability to comprehend Harriet’s rapid shift of affection tells us, as do all her other thoughts and actions, as much about Emma as the situation described. Harriet’s actions must remain inexplicable to Emma because the process of making them accountable and intelligible poses dangers to Emma: reflection on the basis of Harriet’s affections and their mobility […] might spark a parallel reflection about the process of Emma’s own choice of partner. […] (ibid.)

We can see Emma’s defensiveness in her apparent inattention to Harriet’s narration. Though “Harriet gives the details of the various encounters with Martin in London—Astley’s, dinner—which suggest a series of events presumably as interesting to Harriet as those which bring Emma and Knightley together are to Emma,” “the narrator gives us a tale that spares us all but the barest details”:

The omission, even near-suppression, of this parallel story […] is a mark of Emma’s refusal to enter Harriet’s story imaginatively because of its consequent reflection upon her own. Emma further distances the events by adopting a light-hearted, almost dismissive tone. Harriet’s rapid shifts of affection are a cause for delight, as all the world of Highbury moves inexorably toward marriage: they are […] a kind of comic relief that, as it stresses community on one level, reinforces hierarchy and class distinctions on another. (pp. 350–1)

Thus, if we understand that Emma’s realization of her love for Mr. Knightley was at least as rapid and just as potentially artificial as Harriet’s love for Robert Martin (“Emma’s reassessment is less cognition than performance, more will than understanding,” with Emma “not so much finding the key to the past as choosing one”), it becomes clear that “Emma’s treatment of Harriet’s story in the final chapter [is] a defensive move. If Emma were to examine the particulars of her own confession of love, she might find them at least as ‘inexplicable’ and ‘unintelligible’ as she finds Robert Martin’s supplantation of Mr. Knightley in Harriet's affection” (p. 354).

Harry Shaw also emphasizes how these paragraphs work within the world of Emma to reaffirm social boundaries. For Austen, writing before the advent of the “liberal modern world,” “self-knowledge” may have been more social than psychological:

Harriet was self-deceived, but now she knows better. What is the nature of the knowledge she has gained? Well, one could imagine a scenario in which her discovery was that, deep down, she had really loved Robert Martin all along. In fact, however, depth is just what is lacking here. Emma’s mild assessment seems persuasive: “Harriet had always liked Robert Martin; and . . . his continuing to love her had been irresistible.” However strongly Robert Martin might have felt, Harriet hadn’t returned those feelings with fervor (and for that matter, she still may not). Her “love” for Mr Knightley seems even less substantial. Her self-deception, then, did not involve suppressing a passion for any of the men in her life. What did it involve? Harriet admits “that she had been presumptuous and silly, and self-deceived, before.” I believe that all three adjectives sound in the same register; in different ways, they all suggest that Harriet’s was a social mistake. She had no business to imagine that love would be appropriate (which is to say, possible) between a person in her social position and a person in Knightley’s. It thus appears that, in this instance at least, self-deception and self-knowledge involve grasping your place in society. (p. 208)

Discussion Questions

Why is Harriet’s account of her last few days in London not produced directly?

Is Emma’s understanding of Harriet’s engagement as “unintelligible” a mature realization of the fact that she cannot read others’ minds (see Stewart, p. 74), a defensive move, or a dismissal performed for other reasons?

Bibliography

Austen, Jane. Emma (Norton Critical Edition). 3rd ed. Ed. Stephen M. Parrish. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1815] 2000.

Dames, Nicholas. “Austen’s Nostalgics.” Representations 73.1 (Winter 2001), pp. 117–43.

McMaster, Juliet. “The Critics of Talk in Emma.” Persuasions 38 (2016), pp. 30–40.

Parker, Mark. “The End of Emma: Drawing the Boundaries of Class in Austen.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 91.3 (July 1992), pp. 344–59.

Rohrbach, Emily. “‘Without You, I am Nothing’: On the Counterfactual Imagination in Emma.” Textual Practice 32.3, pp. 471–88. DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2018.1442396.

Shaw, Harry E. “Austen’s Realist Play.” In A Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Claudia Johnson and Clara Tuite. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell (2009), pp. 206–15.

Stewart, Maaja. “The Fools in Austen’s Emma.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 41.1 (June 1986), pp. 72–86. DOI: 10.2307/3045055.

[mejomonster]

hi! Not to be nosy sorry but what do you mean you're doing physical therapy for your scar tissues now?? I've never heard of it. If you don't mind explaining, that would be great. No worries if you don't want to!

If you've got any scar tissue that's causing physical pain or limitation I definitely think physical therapy is worth trying out!

Below the cut:

So I started PT for general intense pain across my whole abdomen which I figured was from my intense gi health issues ive had for the past 2 years, and 3 bulging disks in my back from an injury I got this past September.

When they started helping me they noticed I had a lot of acar tissue by my gallbladder removal scar that had attached somewhat to my diaphram, making breathing harder and meaning I struggled to diaphram breath. Also causing my muscles near that scar tissue to be tenser, causing additional pain. They did a lot of myofascial releases on muscles for several weeks, and gave me stretches to do at home and during PT to help keep the muscles from re-tensing up. (Also I imagine going to a massage place for myofascial release could also help in this way). Since about 2 months in my whole upper ab section, sides, and part below ribs feels significantly less painful and less painful during exercise and generally the muscles don't tense as much as they used to. I can actually diaphram breath when I lay down now which I couldn't before. But I still struggle go diaphram breath when sitting as the area is still tighter than pre having scar tissue.

Now we are mainly focusing on my lower abdomen. I have scar tissue they were able to feel near the middle and left of my belly button, which makes sense as most of my surgeries had to cut or remove (other older) scar tissue or staples from that area or just did incisions on my abdomen. At first the pain was across my entire abdomen, PT says it's because the muscles guard from the pain I'm in, and others overcompensate (also related to me overusing back muscles when my abdomen hurts so much and my back injury causing me to try to over rely on my abdomen muscles and that's a big negative loop mess right now lol since both are in pain). So my hip flexor muscles are really tight, my hip muscles that go around to back are tight (causing back pain to increase), my pelvic muscles are bound up, and just in general muscles connected to the scar tissue area also feel that increase in pain. Same treatment at PT: myofascial release frequently to the tense muscles, stretches at PT and home to keep them from re-tensing as much, and the last few sessions specific work where the physical therapist is breaking down the scar tissue. It's also a kind of massage or pressure. So far its working great and now my general all over abdomen pain is only directly below and to left of my belly button in about a 6 inch chunk area. The pain is way more manageable since it's a smaller clear location, and I'm no longer vomiting frequently from intense abdomen pain and haven't for the last 2 months which I'm really happy about, since I was vomiting weekly or more for the last 1.5ish years before PT. I'd feel an intense pressure like my abdomen was a hard bowling ball or a thick metal bar was being shoved against me hard constantly, have nausea, and throw up a lot. I threw up until November 2022, kept getting just the nausea until about December, and as of last month I'm no longer getting the nausea at all. So I'm steadily improving wooh!

I'm also doing abdomen and back strength training exercise for the back injury and fixing it/preventing future injury, and because more back strength will help abdomen muscles overcompensate less (and therefore hurt less), meanwhile the abdomen strength training I'm doing will help back muscles overcompensate less (and hurt less). But that's unrelated to scar tissue, more like long term side issues that developed cause I was in pain so long that just need to be worked on too.

I definitely again recommend trying it if you have scar tissue and pain in your body near that scar (or near where stuff was moved internally etc). The main things PT will do are myofascial release (you can Alternatively go to a massage place for this), stretches (you can also look up these online), and scar releases (which is similar to massage). I am not sure how much more aware of it though a physical therapist is than a massage place, the physical therapist can feel my muscles and pinpoint by feeling exactly what's a scar, normal tense muscle, how deep to go into a muscle to loosen it, where that muscle connects to another position on the body so how a tense muscle on the side may actually be causing pain on the back. So if you can do PT I find their knowledge on that stuff really helpful.

If you think you need help with the pain, feel free to try. I feel eons better than when I started in September 2022. Mainly because my back injury I recovered great from with their help, also not vomiting ever is so amazing I am so grateful I was over the moon when that was no longer happening because of PT progress. I can wear pants with less pain and sit up longer and hike again. I can eat more reliably without increase in gi/abdomen pain. The diaphram area loosening just makes breathing itself easier and my whole body hurt less when walking since my sides/ribs used to hurt so bad when standing or sitting. And I'm so glad we are still working on the scar tissue in my abdomen because I think if it gets better I may eventually be able to stop needing a heatpad daily and nightly and just my nonstop pain there will be less intense which I'm really hopeful for.

[anarchoherbalism]

Mental health is a lawn; Desire is a prairie

Introduction

A little over a month ago, I began posting about upcoming changes in my practice, which I’ve been working on since. As I said in an instagram story, I realized that I’ve been pretty bad about replacing surface-level words instead of actually challenging underlying concepts; so, I’ve been taking some time to work on learning to better articulate my philosophy.

In the following essay I am going to try to explain my critique of psychiatry and offer a framework to replace it. You don’t have to agree with anything I say to receive herbs, advice or education from me. If I only wanted to work with people that believe the same things as me, I would stick to caring for my network of friends and accomplices. I have a public-facing practice to offer something immediately and materially useful to (broadly speaking) anyone that asks for it. I’m writing this because—while we may or may not be/become friends—my services are a personal gift, and I do not want them to be received as a function of psychiatry.

Most of all, I believe that everyone has an idea about what the future will hold, and everyone is trying to bring that idea to fruition. Ultimately there is nothing in my lifetime that will result in everyone being on the same page about what we all “should” be doing; and we are all relatively powerless on a global scale. What I can do is help the people I can touch, and walk away from those that want to force me to believe things I don’t want to believe in. I can’t make universal healthcare happen, right now or decades in the future; but I can fight tooth and nail to help heal the people around me for free, and I can share, liberate and generate knowledge to help others do the same.

I’m writing with a very limited scope here—if I was having an easier time writing this it would very quickly become an entire book, not a 3,700-some-odd word essay. I’m asking to you believe at face value that this is what I consider to be true; unfortunately I don’t have the capacity to write out an argument containing all the applicable historical evidence and referential sources right now. I hope at some point I do.

Part 1: Groundwork

Lobotomistic violence

I’m going to start by laying out a definition that I think is important to understanding where I’m coming from. I started using this term because I think it marks a useful distinction in how certain people are treated by psychiatry.

Lobotomistic violence is the set of psychiatric “treatments” that intend to make someone “normal” by reducing/inhibiting function in certain parts of their brain. While surgical lobotomies are generally considered outdated and barbaric in mental health culture, the root concept is still very much alive and well. Several antipsychotic drugs have similar effects to surgical lobotomies, and many more otherwise limit brain function in other ways. These drugs can prevent the people they’re prescribed to from thinking abstractly or feeling deeply, and often cut them off from meaningful parts of themselves.

According to the psychiatric framework there are people who need support, understanding, and accommodation; and people who need their bodyminds* to be physically altered and parts of them literally removed/made nonfunctional. Lobotomistic violence is a “last ditch” effort, when less extreme forms of medication or therapy are considered “ineffective”. Sometimes this comes after a long process of trying different treatments—but a lot of people are subjected to lobotomistic violence because they occupy a social position that society sees as a lost cause from the start, like people kidnapped off the street by ambulances in the middle of a psychotic break, or kids in state custody.

*Bodymind is a popular term in mad liberation that refers to the mind and body as a cohesive whole–it invokes the idea that we do not just inhabit our bodies, we ARE our bodies.

Defining mental health

(In this section, I’m using a very charitable interpretation of psychiatry from a scientific standpoint. Even the most advanced neuroscience cannot reliably identify specific mental disorders or their causes—but even if it could, it would still be fundamentally bad, and that’s the point I want to make.)

Civilization is an organism and an ecosystem in its own right, with structures to achieve equilibrium and to perpetuate itself. The choices that we make and options we see as available have been formed by thousands of years of accidents and choices that shape patterns of behavior and create social constructs. It is these structures I’m referring to when I talk about control.

In order for civilization to exist as it currently does, the people and things subjected to it must be easily understood, because things that are understood can be controlled. An example my friend used was a small, early agrarian state—a ruler wants to collect tax, with the goal of collecting as much as possible to enrich his position against neighboring states. He cannot collect too much tax, or else the population will either starve, or get angry and refuse to participate in the state; so to maximize what can be taken he has to know how much is produced, and in turn the farmers have to know how much they produce to know what they owe and what they need to meet immediate needs. Civilization needs to reduce complicated questions to knowable categories in order to respond in ways that benefit itself. This legibility occludes true understanding, pares down the messy, beautiful, difficult-to-communicate nature of life into one-dimensional criteria to be accounted for and processed. To see how these criteria are constructed, let’s look at an oak tree.

The name “oak tree” refers to a thing that exists, pretty indisputably (at least until you get into existentialism but, uh, let’s not go there). However, the name “oak” is something people made up. There are many different perspectives one might understand an oak tree from. Whatever lens you want to use impacts what characteristics you focus on and how you understand them in relation to the whole. You focus on certain attributes to create a story—if you’re using a scientific lens, you might look at DNA and draw connections to other DNA to tell a story about genetic history. Genetic history is also a human construct that only focuses on the pieces that are significant to the stories our culture wants to tell. These stories are what we use to build knowable categories; but a squirrel doesn’t give two nuts about the genetic history of an oak tree, and likely has its own stories that are entirely alien to us—because different attributes are significant to its life.

Mental disorders are real in the same way an oak tree is real—and fake in the same way an oak tree is fake.

The experiences that diagnostic labels describe are real, but the way disorders are defined is 100% a social construct that is entirely dependent on what is significant to our culture, scientifically backed or not.

“Health” is defined as bodymind states that are convenient for cultural perpetuation; and illness is bodymind states that are not. What experiences and attributes are constructed as diagnostic categories is dependent on what is valued and relevant to the dominant culture—and more importantly, what is conducive to the reproduction of that culture.

In our modern society, people who do not fit squarely into the mold of a responsible, reproductive citizen are either validated or marginalized. These are both methods of control, pushing people into legible categories to make them more easily understood and influenced by society. Validation might look like a kid who’s disruptive in class getting diagnosed with ADHD and working more closely with the school to receive accommodation, whereas marginalization might look like a disruptive kid getting diagnosed with ODD and being treated as if any resistance to an authority figure is a symptom of disease for the rest of their life.

In psychiatry, validation is “positivity”. This extends from clinical practice to what I’m going to call “mental health culture”, the expansion of psychiatry from a form of medicine to a fixture of culture. I’m going to talk about this more in a minute, but for now the point is: mental health does not identify a list of “problems” that exist in a vacuum. It constructs sicknesses in order to justify control. Which leads us to…

This wouldn’t work if we didn’t care about each other

Unfortunately, there’s no simple malice to blame here. A lot of the ways psychiatry hurts people are made possible by compassion. I try not to make generalizations about the human condition OR evolution-based arguments, but I do believe very deeply that humans are a fundamentally social species and that we are physically predisposed to caring about each other—evidenced in part by how much of the coerced labor necessary for society to function depends on making it hard to even SEE enslaved and low-class people, let alone extend solidarity and care to each other. The history of modern psychiatry (mostly over the past 200 years) and the birth of mental health is a chaotic mash of capitalistic profiteering, attempts to stifle liberatory movements, and individuals who are genuinely trying to take care of other people, all informed by the underlying assumptions about what “mental illness” is that I just described.

Brief digression: I’m always tempted to put “mental health” into quotes, but “mental health” implies a distinction between what I’m referring to and some other legitimate, non-fucked-up mental health that just doesn’t exist, so assume whenever I say mental health I’m using a slightly sarcastic tone.

Mental illnesses are, by and large, defined and diagnosed based on suffering, and the treatments, by and large, are designed to reduce suffering—or, the assumption that someone is suffering. How that suffering is measured and defined is still dependent on the basic assumption that correctly reproducing culture is good for you and not doing so is bad for you. For example, many diagnostic criteria measure one’s ability to work productively, and our society assumes wage labor is the norm for a healthy life. Sometimes, this is obfuscated by so many layers of reformed language and liberal feel-good-ism that many people who would disagree with that assumption when said so plainly (reproducing culture is good for you and not doing it is bad for you) are still deeply invested in mental health culture.

Diagnostic categories pick out certain experiences and characteristics to name as symptoms of a disease—but human brains are not very easy to put into boxes. Who is pathologized—labeled as diseased—is heavily dependent on their class status, and how well their behaviors contribute to the status quo. A lower-class non-Christian is more likely to be labeled as psychotic for describing their spiritual beliefs and experiences; whereas a richer person who talks about “being spoken to by the Holy Ghost” is simply a religious fanatic. We see consistently demographic-based diagnostic biases for disorders that are supposedly an issue with predetermined brain “hardwiring”, such as autism and ADHD being diagnosed more in white children, whereas Black children receive ODD diagnoses. By associating abnormality with suffering, and enforcing suffering for the abnormal, attempting to make people normal can represent reduction of suffering and a kindness. This dynamic is even more heavily enforced when people actively choose non-normative lifestyles: someone’s body state is not conducive to them living a “normal” life and they don’t even WANT to change, that means they are extra unhealthy. Under this logic, (attempting to/)forcing them to change is doing a good thing for them and thus the kindest course of action.

Everyone who advocates for broader mental health services is contributing to psychiatric and lobotomistic violence through kindness. There are plenty of people who think positively of their interactions with psychiatric institutions or mental health culture, AND there are ways to reduce harm when participating in mental health culture/be more honest about the risks involved; but encouraging people to participate in clinical settings is still encouraging people to put themselves in vulnerable, potentially dangerous positions.

Madness vs. pathology

Anyone can be crazy. I highly recommend trying it. Experiences are individually varied and highly personal—some people see and hear things other people don’t, some think in ways that are strange or confusing to others, and so on—but madness is simply refusal to conform to normative categories of mind-state and behavior. It is not bowing to social norms and the embrace of abnormal experiences that get in the way of a middle-class aspirations.

Pathologizing is the process by which madness is constructed as sickness. Pathology includes all the things that are “unapproved” about madness and it increasingly includes things that are only minorly inconvenient to our legibility and our participation. People re-contextualize experiences they never thought twice about as part of a disease, simply because they were given a label. “I never knew that was a BPD thing!”

Mental health culture encourages and facilitates this creep because even though its participants will often nominally criticizing practitioners who enact psychiatric violence, they continue to rely on the frameworks this violence is based on. Mainstream criticism of psych focuses on the idea that individual doctors (and/or institutions) apply psychiatry poorly, but it caries the implicit assumption that if it was only used correctly it would be a benefit. This can look like social/support groups of people identifying with a common or related diagnoses criticizing the way psychiatrists behave while encouraging people to self-diagnose, seek certain medication or therapy, or otherwise enforcing mainstream assumptions about the ontology of mental disorders.

Pathologizing talk surrounds us: “I think you might have ___”, “I’m like this because I have ___”, etc. It feels very similar to the ways in which certain queer spaces invent and push labels to describe every possible facet of gender or attraction, because well, it is. Both fixations gain traction because we are told that making ourselves legible to the outside world and making those around us legible in the same way will make us feel less lonely or invisible. Unfortunately, only letting people understand us in terms of our categories instead of on our own, unique terms continues to compound this loneliness. In an effort to make the system “work” we expand what experiences are known, create new labels and try to champion “inclusion”, instead of addressing the forces and dynamics surrounding the things that feel lonely, invisible, and difficult to communicate… A list of abbreviations doesn’t tell the world who you are, it tells the world how to react to you.

Many people who ascribe to psychiatric frameworks still live in ways that resist legibility. There are also plenty of people who are both mad and mentally ill, who use diagnostic labels but do not seek to conform to standards of “treatment”. There are also many people who use these labels to pressure conformity from themselves and those around them. It seems to me like the majority of people who, for example, encourage everyone around them to go to therapy, have never had a practitioner make good on the implicit threat of psychiatric violence.

The role of saneism

It would be incomplete for me to talk about the role of kindness without talking about the role of prejudice.

Saneism is a different form of bigotry than say, racism. It is not hatred of an “other” group that the “perpetrator” is not and never will be a part of. It’s more like fatphobia: hatred of a body state that every human being has the potential to experience. It is self-inflicted as much as it is wielded against the other.

Saneism is a tool to select who is and isn’t crazy. It should be clear at this point that there is no “sane” human being; sanity is only the ideal they beat you with. If you can emulate sanity well enough, driven by fear of internal and external hatred of madness, you are sane. If you can’t, you are insane, and either you can be mentally ill, assimilate to the categories and modes of behavior that are deemed acceptable for people like you; or, if you can’t do that, you’re crazy, and your options are either to submit to lobotomistic violence or to refuse to participate in psychiatry.

Part 2: Praxis

As I said at the beginning: The experiences that psychiatry addresses are real. Critique is all well and good in that it helps us name and understand the systems we live in, but it is only part of the process towards doing something better. Here is my attempt at building a model. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.

A lawn is an artificially maintained shape, but a prairie is created organically through small and large events, which lines up nicely with the idea that mental health, as a noun is a standard that must be maintained, but desire, as a verb is a process of seeking, experiencing and evaluating that builds and grows in symbiosis.

Mental Health is a Lawn

The process of maintaining mental health through the reduction of suffering is like the process of maintain a lawn. A lawn is a pre-defined shape created through the prescription of behaviors and chemicals (weeding/mowing; herbicides/pesticides); regulated to be non-challenging and “safe” (no spikey plants, bee or wasp nests, etc) in the name people’s comfort and at the cost of native species; and prioritizing a certain socially-imposed aesthetic at great cost to the environment. Lawns have to be nourished (fertilized and watered) to grow, but are not allowed to get taller or more robust than a set value so that they’re easy to trim regularly with minimal effort. Lawns are monocultures with shallow roots that do not stand up to environmental conditions like drought without intervention. Lawns are also a standard everyone knows–and holds each other to, judges each other based on.

Likewise, to maintain “mental health”, people are regulated to a predefined standard that prioritizes “normal” aesthetics and the “safety” and comfort of others through the prescription of chemicals and habits (medication and therapy). Everyone knows the rules enough to police themselves and each other. Peoples’ material and emotional needs are taken into consideration enough for them to survive (and not commit suicide), but no one is well-supported enough to not feel the pressure to work; and people do not have the freedom to self-regulate on their own so when crisis occurs, you either have to keep working or rely on psychiatric intervention such as hospitalization.

Desire is a Prairie

Seeking desire is like how a prairie or grassland maintains itself as an ecosystem. Many types of plants grow deep symbiotic root systems that create resiliency and allow the ecosystem to survive through many environmental changes. Critters and bugs may kill/destroy plants at times, but they also reuse and decompose detritus and allow the ecosystem to recycle material and stored energy, spread seeds, etc. A prairie is too tall to be mowed easily by a conventional lawn mower and must be poisoned or crushed via heavy machinery. It is a complicated, compelling and beautiful organism that takes years of interaction to understand.

Desire cultivates varied experiences that let us practice the flexibility to survive distress emotionally, and shapes our lifestyles to prioritize self-regulation. Pain, whether external, self inflicted, or both, is an inherent part of life; but pain can allow us to grieve, process and grow, to clarify our desires, and maintain our bodyminds. When we live by desire we become unwilling to bend to social rules that don’t suit us, become uncontrollably mad, and are accustomed to freedom such that we can only be recuperated through incarceration and lobotomistic violence.

A prairie takes a long time to grow, and is difficult to support in a society that demands lawns. Switching from a mental health model to a desire model isn’t a simple or quick thing. Most of us will resemble something more like an overgrown lot, which is just as valuable.

Part 3: What this means for me

It’s taken a long-ass time to be able to articulate these concepts, so it feels extremely good to have finally made the pieces click.

Ultimately, what I offer isn’t substantially changing—at least right now, though I do have a new offering I’ll be announcing in the near future that incorporates herbalism into pleasure-seeking activities. I’ll still be here for consultations, workshops, and informal support; but the foundations are different, and I will be more explicitly incorporating these ideas into how I teach and discuss concepts. You might notice that the pages on my website have been rewritten and restructured, hopefully in ways that represent these ideological changes.

Something that comes up fairly frequently in conversation with my friends and accomplices who do similar public-facing non-hierarchical healing work is how to respond when people come to us expecting more standard frameworks: When people talk to us expecting to be told things about their bodies, or for us to diagnose a sickness and tell them what to do about it. To me, figuring out how to deal with these interactions is a matter of building and improving social skills; figuring out what questions to ask to break the script. This is just as much practical as it is ideological: What I do is in no way compatible with Western Medicine or psychiatry—the tools I have work granularly, effecting a few parts of the body at a time in specific ways. I can help you sleep, eat, relax, play, reduce fear, increase focus, cope with grief, ground thoughts and emotions, feel pleasure… but I do not use diagnostic categories, I do not offer “antidepressants” or treat disease. Someone telling me they have PTSD gives me exactly 0 information about what they want me to be doing for them. In some ways what I think what I already do in these interactions does more to ground my practice outside of psychiatry than any long-ass manifesto or theoretical explanation; but if you want to know why I do what I do, well, there you have it I guess.

[delimeful]

(don’t) take this the wrong way (7) (END)

final chapter of dtttww :) i had a lot of fun with this verse so i may take requests set in it in the future, and this might receive some more copy editing later, but for now this is the epilogue!

warnings: mild injury, mild hypnosis, for once no miscommunication :)

-

[Several months later…]

Sunlight trickled down through the water in wavy bands, illuminating the shallows and growing fainter and fainter as the distance from the surface increased.

Virgil didn’t spend much time in the shallows, too wary of being without escape, being made vulnerable to human vessels or poachers. Despite his dark and gloomy aesthetic, he couldn’t go too far into the depths either, simply because his fragile fish bones weren't built for it. His eyes weren’t built for it either, and down there where anything could be lurking, he would need more than speed to avoid danger.

So, on an average, sunny day like this, he could be found miles offshore, in waters that were easily too deep for unsuited humans to reach, but still well-illuminated by the light above.

There were a few old wrecks scattered about the ocean floor here, and though they’d probably been stripped by a pod in the past, he figured he’d go through them and check for anything that was left behind. Things that weren’t useful to a pod could certainly be things that were useful to him, after all.

He’d been poking through the undercarriage of one of the larger ships for an hour or two, relaxed as he ever got. He could take his time. The only creatures around to judge him were the shoals of fish and layers of barnacles built up amidst the metal, wood, and rust.

Actually… Virgil paused in his inspection of an old cutlery set to glance around.

What had happened to the fish?

Through a hole in the ship’s hull, he watched as a broad shadow passed over the ground and ships alike, large enough to belong to a whale.

There hadn’t been a single shred of whalesong above.

Virgil edged further back from the hole, eyeing the outside warily as the shadow receded, leaving behind only wavering sunlight on sand as though it had never been there at all.

There was nothing here that was worth sticking around.

He carefully made his way back to one of the other exits, in the opposite direction of where he’d seen the shadow head, the strokes of his fin cutting through the water with barely a whisper. The porthole was easily wide enough for him, and the ocean stretched out blue and vast before him, a promise of safety if he just moved fast enough.

A moment’s pause, to make sure he didn’t hear or see anything out of place, and then he was out, flitting from rock outcropping to bone reef and scanning the seas above. Not for the first time, he wished his scales were a little less distinctive in the day.

Behind him, an ominous creak.

He froze, and watched with mounting apprehension as a shadow spilled over him, looming closer and darker than before. The silhouette of an arm stretched out, heading towards him…

“Virgil, you must help,” a huge voice pleaded, “I’ve been had.”

He twisted around just in time to see a huge arm flop down onto the floor next to him, kicking up a cloud of sand and panicked burrower fish in the process.

It was wrapped in heavy wire netting from fingertips to forearm, and behind it, a giant mer was pouting at him with the best seal pup eyes he could manage, which, considering who his best friend was, were fairly potent.

Roman was huge, and he was a shark, with teeth and claws designed to shred and tear, and hands that could enclose him entirely-- but his elbows were braced against the ground with delicate balance so he wouldn’t crush anything, and he’d never grabbed for Virgil past that first disastrous encounter, and even now, his brow was furrowing with worry.

“Pufferfish status?” he asked, voice lowered from the dramatic plea of before.

Virgil’s mouth pulled up at the corners without his permission.

Roman was huge, yes, but he was also theatrical and eager and witty, full of sharp return quips for every barb Virgil had to offer.

He could hurt him, but he wouldn’t. Virgil believed that much.

“Prickly for a second, but I’m smooth now,” he answered, shrugging away the last of the tension. “Try not to sneak up on me without a warning click?”

“You have my word,” Roman replied, and if someone had told him months ago that he’d dare to ask anything of a giant mer, he’d have laughed in their faces. Now, Virgil knew that just like all the other requests, Roman would do his best to heed it.

“But really, my fingers are starting to feel numb. Help?” he entreated with a tilt of his head, shifting his net-wrapped hand a little closer.

Virgil rolled his eyes, but his smile didn’t go away, though it tilted more towards amused now. He darted forward, twisting in a spiral around Roman’s hand to try and see the extent of the damage.

“How’d you even manage this? At least I had the excuse of being caught up in a storm,” he snarked, picking at a loose section with his claws. Roman’s fingers twitched a little, and he shot him an apologetic glance.

“I was… perhaps… trying to get a glimpse of those sailors that Logan mentioned patrolled the coast?” Roman offered, more than a little sheepish.

Virgil’s gaze turned sharp in a heartbeat. “Did they spot you?”

Logan had warned both Patton and Roman several times that not many humans would take as kindly to their long-term existence near human settlements as Logan himself had.

“No!” Roman assured, “I was very stealthy, truly, I was just… so focused on being stealthy that I missed the other vessel and the nets it had dragging along behind it. It could have happened to anyone!”

“I seriously doubt that,” Virgil replied dryly. He’d snapped a few of the looser wires with his teeth, but already his jaw was beginning to ache with the strain. “Well, you get to explain this to Specs, ‘cause we’re going to need his expertise in detangling for this one.”

Roman groaned in answer, dropping his head to plonk against the ground.

---

Logan carefully set one foot in front of the other, all of his focus on the thin strip of rock below him.

If he switched his gaze to even a few inches to either side, he’d be faced with the sight of a vertigo-inducing drop to the waves below, one that would have all but the most experienced tightrope walkers dizzy with panic.

His gaze didn’t move, though, unerringly focused on the ground beneath him, and on his own body. There was no need to look at anything but the ledge, a soft presence confirmed in the back of his mind, because he wasn’t going to fall.

Another part of him was skeptical, seeing as he wasn’t known for a lack of clumsiness by most. There was just so much to get distracted by, and it was so easy to look away and miss a curb or accidentally trip over his own feet--

But not now. Now, he was focused on just this one task, a gentle voice dragging his attention back whenever it began to stray. He was hyper aware of where each of his limbs were and where he needed to put them to continue forward, step by careful step.

Only a little farther…

“Logan!”

The harsh call snapped him right out of the trance, and he was abruptly made very aware of both the distance he could fall and the effects that sudden instinctual terror had on his sense of balance.

“Newton’s fucking Cradle,” he swore, and then wobbled again, precariously close to falling over.

There was the sound of water crashing against rock, and in the next moment, two giant hands had curled up on either side of him like the shells of an oyster. They provided him some much needed stability to lean his weight against, and he struggled to steady his breathing as relief swept through him.

“It’s okay, Virgil, I won’t let him fall! No cliffs, ands, or buts about it,” Patton’s voice was muffled, but not enough to miss the pun.

Logan sighed loudly, but he also shifted to let his full weight rest against the curl of Patton’s left palm, tapping twice to let him know it was alright for him to move.

His stomach still swooped slightly as Patton slowly shifted his hands away from the thin rock ledge, but there were some things that one had to adapt to when living with two very affectionate, grabby sea giants, and being toted around was one of those things.

Before long, he was level with the flattest segment of rock that made up their meeting place, which could be called an island if one was feeling gracious, but was really more of a collection of rocky spires and bridges that stuck out of the ocean.

Logan was barely able to sit up before Virgil pulled himself up at the edge of Patton’s palm, expression thunderous but his hands gentle as he carefully checked him over for scrapes or injuries.

“Nearly gave me a heart attack,” he grumbled, a phrase that he used much more frequently around Logan for some reason. Logan had already been reassured that it was an exaggeration and Virgil had no heart problems he knew of, so instead of worrying, he bore his friend’s fussing with good grace. “Did we or did we not agree that you need a spotter if you want to play around with bullshit sirensong magic?”

The mer paused. “No offense, Pat.”

“None taken!” Patton replied from where he had sunk further into the water to put himself closer to eye-level.

“I figured you would be along shortly,” Logan defended, and then perked up at the reminder of his most recent experiment. “Besides, one of the things tested in this trial was if the siren song could overshadow significant fear or even terror, and I wouldn’t have been nearly as afraid if you’d been there with me.”

“Aw,” Roman cooed, curling his tail up and leaning against one of the larger rock outcroppings, his posture slightly off.

Virgil dragged a hand over his face with a sigh, and then flapped a ‘go on’ gesture at Logan, distracting him. “So, what’d you figure out this time?”

Logan needed no further encouragement.

“Even the lightest application of a siren’s song can overwhelm other emotions,” he started, recalling the utter honed focus he had experienced. “While in the past I’ve felt distant or removed from my body while under its effects, this time I had Patton focus on requesting a very specific task, and due to the intense concentration it took, I was very present in the moment while fulfilling that task.”

“You didn’t snap out of it until I called for you,” Virgil interjected, more curious than wary. “Was it harder than normal to use the grounding tactics?”

One of the first things Logan had investigated was what it took for him to resist and even break free from Patton’s song, a task that Virgil had demanded in order to let him run any experiments with the siren’s magic. Back then, Virgil hadn’t expected Patton to agree, and he’d outright sulked for weeks to cover up the nerves he felt whenever the siren thralled Logan.

“It was,” Logan said, his excitement growing as he considered the new information. “Without significant outside stimulus, all of my attention was focused on the task, and so I couldn’t pull away mentally to do my normal grounding techniques!”

“I’ve never heard someone so excited about being hypnotized better,” Roman commented wryly.

“He should get a hypnoprize,” Patton added, and Virgil grinned, because he was a traitor who enabled Patton’s wordplay habits.

“Is there an award for smart people doing dumb things?” Virgil mused teasingly. “Logan could be voted ‘most likely to throw himself into danger in the pursuit of knowledge.’”

“That’s why he has us, Finding Emo,” Roman countered, gesturing extravagantly with one hand. “We would never abandon him to the cruel clutches of his own nerdiness.”

Logan couldn’t help but feel a thrill of pride at the casual way that Virgil ducked beneath one of Roman’s sweeping gestures, no trace of the blatant fear or suspicion that had been present as recently as a month ago.

They’d really come a long way from the misunderstandings of that first encounter, all of them.

A glint of light at the edge of the shark mer’s submerged forearm caught Logan’s eye, and he frowned. “Roman, what’s happened to your arm?”

Roman’s prideful grin dropped into sheepishness immediately. “Well, about that…”

“Princey here was abandoned to the cruel clutches of his own reckless dumbassery,” Virgil informed him, ignoring Roman’s trill of offense to drift back and shove at the hand in question until Roman finally lifted it, displaying the impressive collection of netting that he’d managed to get tangled in.

“Oh, you poor thing,” Patton clucked sympathetically, and Roman soaked in the attention like a very dramatic sponge. Virgil rolled his eyes even as he sawed at a few of the looser wires, and Logan sighed in fond exasperation as he reached for his pocket knife.

Perhaps some things would never change.

[spiritsonic]

As we've gotten into the "road to issue 50" it's become more clear how your stories in issues 45-49 and Ian's work in Imposter Syndrome at least seem pretty connected so far (which does make sense as it's all part of the same road). I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind talking about how often you and Ian communicated in the process of writing these stories. Like, was it more of a collaborative process or maybe just writing separately, comparing notes, and making adjustments?

Our collaboration style is still evolving, but so far it's mostly worked like so:

-Create a variety of story ideas, individually and as a team-- this is mostly a passive thing that happens all the time, coming up with an idea and writing it down to save for later. We do a lot of casual brainstorming in our work IMs, as well as just waiting for ideas to come spontaneously/planning for fun.

(Credit where credit's due, often other team members are organically involved in the group chat and will toss in their own ideas. Nothing is used without expressed agreement though, of course. )

-When it's time to outline the next "season" (the next 12 or so issues, not a hard number), we have a brainstorming meeting with our editors by video call. We discuss any suggestions or requests SEGA has made, what direction we as a team are into, and pitch our collected ideas.

-Oftentimes, ideas can be combined to enhance and branch off of each other, which informs the overall direction of the season.

(At this point, it's often required to ask SEGA some questions about what we can and can't do with such-and-such thing, to make sure we don't build our story on faulty foundations. We may also have a phone meeting with our SEGA contacts occasionally to make sure everyone is on the same page, or discuss story points we feel we need to push back on/reach a compromise.)

-After that, Ian and I start putting together the master outline. One of us will start laying down the big plot points of the season, and we'll take turns fleshing out the sections we each agreed to cover in the planning meeting (decided by who pitched what, who most wants to write which characters, and making sure everyone has an even share of work). This stage usually takes several drafts of us swapping the doc back and forth, check each others' work and making adjustments so it all flows together.

-Once we're happy with it, we hand it off to the editors who will provide their own round of notes which we'll make revisions for.

-Then, finally, it's handed off to SEGA for them to check and provide notes and feedback. A round or two of final revisions is done, and the the master outline for the season is approved! Then we can actually start writing scripts!

---

This whole drafting process usually takes a couple months, with extra time on top of that for SEGA's feedback. The master outline is very detailed and mostly immutable, to avoid any nasty surprises while writing scripts. But still, things always change as we go and the communication and idea-creating process never stops. Just a couple weeks ago we accidentally ended up brainstorming an entire future story arc in the group chat-- can't really plan for stuff like that!

[kiame-sama]

28 Years (5th Pregnancy)- Yandere!Silva x Reader

Warnings; yandere relationship, yandere tendencies, yandere behavior, yandere, mention of past trauma, pregnancy, c-section, more arguing, vasectomy, Zeno is so done with his son's bullshit

"No. We are not doing this again. I won't allow it!" "Hey, I told you how to fix this from ever happening again." "I did use protection. It clearly didn't work." "I didn't say 'use protection' did I? I said you should get a vasectomy since it's clear that regular protection and emergency medication doesn't work!" "I shouldn't have to-"

"ENOUGH!"

You and Silva fell silent at the firm and loud command from Zeno, looking over at the frustrated elder assassin. He happened to be holding young Alluka in his arms while the infant whined and cried from all the noise, compelling you to take the young child and set to comforting the infant. Alluka quickly quieted once in your grasp and allowed you to return your attention to the matter at hand, the new heartbeat that originated from within you.

You had been trying to avoid a third pregnancy given your prior back-to-back pregnancies and your already fragile health, yet here you were with another infant growing within you. You assumed something like this would happen, given your past attempts with contraceptives and how little they actually worked. Naturally, you suggested Silva have a vasectomy as it was not only a surefire way, but also a reversible surgery.

Originally, you suggested getting your tubes tied despite the danger that came with it but Silva quickly shot down the idea with his usual explanation of not wanting to lose you. Silva knew somewhere in him that the typical contraceptives wouldn't work, given the fact that he had used several similar methods to trigger a termination of prior pregnancies you were unaware of. He had hoped in some way that your body hadn't built up a resistance to them, but he also knew it was going to happen eventually.

He did plan on undergoing a vasectomy when you had first suggested it, but he quickly forgot about it in favor of getting to finally fuck you senseless now that your body had somewhat recovered after your most recent pregnancy. He had just been so relieved you were able to be brought back from your cardiac arrest following his mistake of once again taking your child away, and couldn't help himself from indulging in his favorite pass-time; fucking you. It was clear to everyone how addicted Silva was to you, in the way he would always return to your side after a job, how he would guard you jealously from anyone other than himself.

He was so whipped for you.

But now, you had a serious choice to make for your future and the future of the life already growing within you. It wasn't hard to guess what Silva wants to have happen, and some part of you agreed after enduring all that you had. Yet... You still felt that maternal connection already forming, wanting to protect all of your children from Silva, even the new child within you that had yet to take even a first breath.

"You're not keeping it." "Yes, I am." "No. I won't tolerate this again!" "Good thing you aren't the one who has to tolerate it. Last time I checked, its my body that goes through all the strain and effort of pregnancy, not your’s." "Are you doing this just to hurt yourself? To try and exhaust your body to the point of death?" "... Again, last time I checked, I wasn't the cause of my heart stopping." "..."

Silva stood silently, passive expression on his face as he wrestled with his own mind over the matter at hand. On one side, you were right; he was the reason he almost lost you, he's been the reason every single time. Even if it was complications during birth, it was still his fault entirely for getting you pregnant in the first place. On the other, he knew the immense toll another pregnancy will have on your body and the chances of you dying during birth increased with each one. The odds were not good.

It was then Silva spoke, his voice gentle and not at all like what you were expecting him to growl out with. It was the voice you scarcely heard on those far and few between days Silva would be truly gentle in every way, usually reserved for when he decided to honestly apologize to you for something. He was proud and cold, but there were those moments when that pride was set aside, when he would actually explain how he felt instead of leaving it at short sentences that never offered answers.

"(Y/n), don't do this again. Don't stubbornly hold on to this one. I know you already love it, as you love all of our children, and you will always fight for their safety no matter what, but for once you need to let me win. Let it go." "... If I say 'no', will you take it from me anyway?" "(Y/n)..." "Are you going to take my baby away from me again, Silva?" "..."

A soft sigh left Silva's lips as he frowned, knowing you were going to win the argument regardless of what he said or did. He knew he owed you more than he could give and there was no way he would force you to give the child up. If you truly wanted to keep it, he wouldn't be able to convince you otherwise. Still didn't mean he had to like it.

"There is no sense in saying the obvious or telling you the risks you run having another baby so soon after your two prior pregnancies." "I know..."

Zeno hummed in a contemplative way, knowing Silva would refuse to go out on a job while you are pregnant and he had already refused to leave the Zoldyck estate in favor of keeping an eye on you. Given how intensely and fiercely he protected you, Zeno knew the immense toll the pregnancies have taken on Silva as well as you. But no one in the family wanted a repeat of the events that took place after Silva had taken Alluka away from you without telling you.

It was going to be a long eight months.

~~~~Four Months~~~~

"You need to sleep, (y/n)." "But what if something happens?" "Nothing is going to happen." "You don't know that..."

Silva frowned as he watched you pace in front of the couch in your shared rooms, chewing on your lip as you cradled your youngest in your arms. The child had already fallen asleep in your arms an hour ago, yet you still held on securely and refused to set your baby down for even a moment. Silva had seen the way you reacted to Illumi being taken and the subsequent over protective behavior you showed once you got him back in your arms.

Your behavior now was similar to how you behaved then, refusing to let your infant out of your sight to the point of impacting your health negatively. Silva knew you were reacting the way you were because of how he had managed to take Alluka from you in the first place. He had taken Alluka while you were sleeping even though you slept with the infant swaddled in a pile of blankets in your arms, so now you refused to sleep in fear Alluka would disappear from your arms once again.

Now he had to face the lasting consequences of his actions in the form of soothing you to the point of trusting him once more. It was going to take a while, however, as Silva had broken your already fragile trust yet again by stealing away your newborn, so it was unlikely he would be able to get you to trust him completely any time soon. Instead of the trust he once had, he had to watch you slip away into anxiety driven behavior due to his careless and selfish behavior.

It was driving him mad to watch you slip into such frenzied behavior, especially given the fact that you were enduring your third pregnancy in a row. Not only did you need sleep now more than ever, but you also had been refusing food in favor of feeding Alluka instead. It infuriated Silva to no end, as he had no choice but to let your anxious behavior play out until you calmed down once more. He wasn't going to chance doing anything that may be upsetting to you, but that also meant he wasn't going to force you to rest no matter how much he wanted to.

"At least sit down, (y/n)." "With you? No. No, not again." "I swear to you, I won't take-" "You've said that before, and it didn't stop you from taking Alluka away from me." "I'm aware I made a mistake, but I assure you-" "No."

It was going to be a long four months until you gave birth again and potentially trusted him once more.

~~~~Six Months~~~~

You hummed as you looked down at where your darling Alluka slept, curled up and held securely in the arms of Illumi. Silva had reached a breaking point when it came to your anxious and stressed behavior, deciding to allow Illumi to be by your side consistently so you would finally relax and get some much needed sleep. The presence of your eldest nearby did wonders to soothe you, trusting in your son to take care of his little sibling and keep Silva from stealing the infant away.

Though Silva disliked the fact that he had to share your attention and affection with his eldest son, the alternative was far worse in his opinion. You had gotten to the point of rarely sleeping so you could ensure Silva could not steal your baby away, draining yourself immensely in the process to the point you were not only rapidly losing weight, but you were becoming far less coordinated by the day. When enough was enough, he consulted his father on what his next step should be and the answer was obvious; let Illumi help take care of your wellbeing.

Your eldest practically jumped at the chance to spend unlimited amounts of time with you, not even perturbed by the fact that he had to take care of his youngest sibling. An extra cot was added into the bedroom, allowing Illumi to be present for around the clock assistance in child-care and to give you the added comfort of having your most trusted son nearby. You ensured to teach him how to properly hold an infant and how to soothe Alluka's fussing relatively quickly, only strengthening your motherly bond with Illumi by allowing you to put full faith in him with Alluka's well-being.

For once, Silva's plan worked like a charm. Not only did you finally start catching up on the rest you needed, you began to eat your meals with Illumi and therefore began to eat regularly once more. Along with your physical health, your mental health began to improve as well. You started smiling and talking more, resting with surprising ease in the arms of the very man you refused to so much as blink around only weeks prior.

Thanks to your teachings, Illumi was a rather brilliant nanny in your stead. Alluka would hardly make a peep when held in the comforting arms of Illumi and similarly, Illumi would make little to no noise while caring for his sibling. Even if he had more responsibilities with taking care of Alluka, Illumi wouldn't trade that time for anything in the world. He could spend time with you, talk with you, relax in your maternal love and affection.

Truly it was a win for all three of you. Alluka was always cared for. Illumi was finally able to spend more time with you. You were able to relax for the first time in who knows how long. Even Silva had relatively few losses, given how much more affectionate you were with him now you knew your infant was safe.

~~~~Eight Months~~~~

Silva paced outside of the delivery room, looking up almost every minute to check the time before resuming his endless pacing. He was much like a caged lion or bear, pacing just to pass the time and to do something other than sit still. He certainly was far more dangerous than any of those animals combined, only serving to add a rather pointed reminder to any doctor of what their fate would be should they fail.

But that was the whole purpose of this endeavor, to ensure nothing failed. Surely nothing could have gone wrong with all the precautions that were put into place.

Surely.

Either way, the long time it was taking only served to make Silva more anxious and his presence all the more intimidating. It in truth had only been a few hours since you went under so the doctors could perform a c-section to safely deliver what would be your fifth child. After the close calls with both Killua and Alluka as well as the fact this was your third back-to-back pregnancy, Silva wanted to take no chances with your life.

A c-section was how Killua and Alluka ultimately had to be delivered despite the fact you were able to have a 'typical' birth with Illumi and Milluki, so naturally it would only make sense for your fifth child to be delivered via c-section. It didn't sit well with Silva, however. Nothing would sit well with him until you were safely out of surgery and in his arms.

But what was taking so damn long?

"For fuck's sake, Silva, sit down. Pacing doesn't make it go faster and intimidating the doctors will only make it more likely for them to mess up." "Their lives are forfeit if they so much as make a single mistake." "And they know this. They've known this. All you're doing is adding another element no one wants to deal with."

Despite his father's chiding words, Silva continued to pace and glare at nothing in particular. Where it always seemed as if the man had a scowl on his face, it seemed ten times worse given he was actually scowling. The moment the door opened, Silva was pushing past the frightened doctor and into the room where his wife lay motionless.

For a moment, Silva felt an honest pang of fear in his chest when he saw you were not awake, the ever present beep of the EKG soothed him to know you were still alive and merely unconscious. The doctors all scattered like frightened rats, scurrying away from the intimidating mountain of a man who silently pulled up a chair, sitting by your side and refusing to take his eyes off of you.

Zeno, Maha, Milluki, and Illumi entered the room in a much calmer manner as they also came to stand around you. Alluka had been moved into Zeno's care given the impending delivery of the new addition to the family, and Illumi stood ready to receive the newborn and care for it while you recovered. Everyone had been preparing for the newborn in their own way, from the butlers ensuring the utmost safety to Zeno taking over Alluka's care, it seemed everything was finally prepared for and taken into account.

Meanwhile, in the past month, Silva had finally undergone a vasectomy so there would be no further chance of yet another pregnancy threatening your future with him. It was possible that it could be reversed and so it was the only surefire way no unexpected pregnancy would happen again. Where Silva felt he would have no reason to reverse the change since he already had five children, the option was always still available should something ever come up.

Perhaps finally there could be peace in the house. At least, peaceful enough no sudden pregnancy could threaten your life. Now all that needed to happen was getting the new infant out before Silva could finally have you all to himself once again.

He could wait. He could wait as long as he needed to. Because in the end, you would always be his.

[narakurosaki]

Edward and Winry: Why They Definitely Dated During the Two Year Gap

Since the end of the manga as well as Brotherhood, I’ve observed a chunk of the FMA fandom adopting the notion that Edward and Winry do not begin their romantic relationship until the exchange at the train station, two years after the Elric brothers have been home. Admittedly, this fanon has always been a pet peeve of mine, and it was one that I actively ignored, even as an awkward high schooler that had not yet been in a romantic relationship.

As awkward as Edward is, it’s odd to me that many people believe that he would skip the process of building a solid romantic relationship with Winry before asking her to marry him. Sure, they’re best friends and have known each other since childhood, but, ask yourself: if you were in love with your best friend, would you propose marriage at random, having never made your feelings known, before? I’m not a betting woman, but I think it’s safe to say most, if not all of you, wouldn’t.

We’re going to take a look at several moments within the manga and Brotherhood that serve to hint towards Ed and Winry engaging in a romantic relationship during those two years spent in Resembool.

I’ll be opening with Brotherhood’s fifth opening, “Rain”. It has always intrigued me that the version of Truth Edward sees takes on the form of Winry. I’ve had many theories regarding this that I’ve shared in the Edwin Discord server, but, recently, while researching Truth for a oneshot I’m writing, I discovered this in Truth’s trivia section:

For some reason, in the fifth Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood opening "Rain", Winry Rockbell appears as Truth. Perhaps Winry is what Ed needed most at the time of the episode in which the opening first aired. Another possible reason for Winry's appearance in the opening "Rain": at this point, the scene is playing a review of Edward's review of his journey to this point. When he faces Truth originally, and is then dragged backward through his Door (his ten year old self), he glimpses an outline of Trisha, the object of his sacrifice that brought him to the Portal of Truth, and also the most important female in his life at that time. But in "Rain", he sees Winry instead of Trisha, the current object of his affections and, after regaining Alphonse's body, his goal. A third possibility, is that Winry-as-Truth, was meant to show what he desired as a trap, fitting the next scene: of him screaming within a Philosopher's Stone, before images of every homunculus except Greed. Winry, his desire that tempts him away from what must be done, and the homunculi, whom he must face to succeed.

When we assess the second theory listed in Truth’s trivia section of its wiki page, it is easy to conclude that Edward, though a typical teenage boy concerning romance (not to mention emotionally constipated), came to some sort of realization regarding his feelings towards his best friend. Alphonse has always been his priority since the night the brothers performed human transmutation; he never thought of his future past that. He saw his goal—get his and Al’s original bodies back—and was determined to achieve it. It was the only thing he saw in his future for years. And, suddenly, his father returns, and the fate of Amestris (perhaps, the world, even) is thrust upon him. This, I believe, is what forces Edward to face the emotions he never bothered to acknowledge. There was always a possibility of failure on the Promised Day—Father could have succeeded, and any future Edward envisioned for himself would be unobtainable. He suddenly saw himself sharing his life with his best friend, the woman he had fallen for at some point in his life. Sure, he denied having feelings for her time and time again throughout the series (Hawkeye, anyone?), but that can be chalked up to being a typical teenage boy. Not to mention, he didn’t have time to think about being with Winry. He acted selflessly, focused on getting his little brother’s body back and fulfilling the promise he made to him.

This is somewhat touched upon in the third theory on Truth’s wiki page—the feelings he has for Winry tempt him away from the task at hand. While it does not tempt him away from the promise he made Al, it tempts him away from saving the country. While Edward is not so selfish as to abandon his friends and family on the Promised Day, he does urge Winry to take Pinako and Den out of the country, saving them from the country-wide human transmutation. Though he does not say he will join them, the request is still selfish on Ed’s part. He cares deeply for Winry, and Pinako has become a found family member for the brothers. While he’s unsure if he will make it out alive, he at least wants Winry to see another day.

At the end of “Rain” we see that the storm has cleared, as shown by the sun shining on Winry. She watches Ed sleep peacefully, a smile on his face. This is what Ed wants, this is the goal he wants to achieve after regaining Al’s body—a happy life with Winry.

This moment will be talked about briefly—in opening 4, “Period” (my favorite), Ed and Al pass through each other and look to their surroundings, noticing that they’re alone. Their world comes back into their view with the assistance of those who matter most to them. Winry is seen smiling behind Edward, reminding him that he isn’t alone. Being the first person he sees (or thinks of, depending on how you look at it), it speaks volumes as to Winry’s importance in Edward’s life. She is so much more to him than his mechanic and best friend.

In a blink and you’ll miss it moment, Edward thinks back to those who have impacted his life in a positive way when facing Truth one last time. Truth asks him multiple times if he’s certain on giving up his alchemy; Edward hears the voices of Roy, Riza, Hohenheim, Armstrong, Izumi, Mei, and Alphonse calling out his name. After a brief pause, he hears Winry, This is when Ed proudly asks, “Who needs alchemy when I’ve got them?”

The pause is significant. Ed is able to think of the others—familial and platonic relationships—without missing a beat. When he thinks to Winry, however, there is a pause. We hear her call out his name as he looks Truth in the eye. His goal has been achieved—he is able to sacrifice his Gate to bring his brother’s body back. With this in mind, and with Father having been defeated, Ed is free to think towards the future, and that is a future involving Winry. The pause symbolizes Ed’s freedom to do so, as well as his next goal, so to speak: live an “ordinary life” with the woman he loves.

There is a time skip of at least two months following the Promised Day. This specific scene is worded different between the English dub and the subbed versions. As shown above, Alphonse asks his brother if he’s “…sure about Winry…” in the subbed version as they return home. While we would expect to see Edward freak out to some degree (i.e. spitting out his coffee when asked by Hawkeye; reciting the periodic table when remembering the conversation in Winry’s presence) he only stares at his little brother questioning my. The question by Al suggests that he and Ed had some form of discussion regarding the latter’s feelings towards their best friend. To ask someone if they’re sure of something suggests that the individual has made some sort of decision. For example, one may ask me if I’m sure about my decision to go to college, something I’ve made known to those around me. During those two months spent in Central, or even during the train ride home to Resembool, the brothers had to have discussed Winry. Alphonse is not only Edward’s little brother, but his best friend and confidant. He can tell him anything without fear of judgment, and he feels safe in divulging what he thought of as selfish desires now that his brother has his body back.

In the English dub, the question is worded differently. Alphonse instead asks “What about you and Winry?” While not entirely the same as the Japanese, this question does continue to emply that Edward spoke of his feelings to Al at some point. This line is Al’s way of asking his brother what his plans with Winry are now that they’re home—how will he go about sharing his feelings with her?

Sadly, we don’t get an answer to either version of the question, as the Rockbell home comes into view and the boys prepare to make their return.

Now, to the most compelling evidence, in my opinion… The white hoodie.

Remember the hoodie Edward returns home in? Just a plain ok’ hoodie, right? No significance whatsoever. Or so we all thought.

Two years after their return, Winry is seen wearing the same hoodie when she sees Edward off to the West (in both Brotherhood and manga!). Now, why would a simple friend have possession of your hoodie? Sure, people share clothing all of the time, but it carries a much deeper meaning when both parties have feelings for each other.

Winry had this hoodie before Ed’s awkward marriage proposal, not after, and while this may be the only canon scene we see her in it, the artists for Brotherhood drew Winry in the hoodie at an earlier time.

Notice how Ed’s and Al’s outfits are different from what we see them in in their final scenes. (Note: It’s easy to argue that Al’s outfit is the same, but he actually lacks the tie he wears in his final scene!) The trio seem to be headed for Trisha’s grave, hence the flowers and the cemetery in the background. Winry is seen in that same hoodie she wears at the train station, and the same hoodie Edward wore home. While her outfit is not different whatsoever from the train station (lazy artists, maybe?) this artwork clearly takes place prior to the seeing the brothers’ off on their journeys. She’s also seen carrying a basket, presumably with apple pie, as the basket has made appearances in other Brotherhood art. It’s clear the trio plan to stay out for awhile, which leads me to doubt that even Alphonse is headed out in this day.

Can we also take notice of the heel on Winry’s shoes? She’s clearly shorter than Ed by a lot. Guess she just can’t handle it.

When you have feelings for someone, you don’t just hand them your hoodie for fun. The boyfriend hoodie, as I’ve dubbed it, is a common thing seen in various types of media. When in a relationship, the other party steals their partner’s hoodie and wears it proudly, even if it’s a bit too big for them (also seen in the manga, as the sleeves reach well past the middle of Winry’s hands). Do you really think Edward would let her steal the hoodie he came home in if they were still just friends? He would freak out to some degree and snatch it back. It’s a different story if the two of them are in a relationship.

With how awkward this boy is, there is no way in hell he let two years go by without confessing, only to propose out of the blue before leaving. While the proposal itself was awkward, what proposal isn’t? Rings are dropped, words are jumbled… Nerves get the better of both parties, and that’s what happened here. It wasn’t a confession of feelings, either. When you tell someone you like them (or love) do you ask for half of their life in return for half of yours? Edward was behaving like anyone would when proposing marriage—even if the love you share with your partner is indestructible, there is always that anxiety nagging you in the back of your mind. What if they say no? What if this is too soon? What if I mess up? What if, what if, what if…

In the timeline provided by Arakawa, Edward leaves for the west in 1917. He also marries Winry in the same year. Again, had the proposal been the beginning of their relationship, I just don’t see them marrying so quickly. Edward most likely returned home after a short stint in the western countries, having his fill of traveling, missing his fiancée more than anything. He rushed back home (within six months is my guess) and neither could wait to start their lives together. They’d been together for two years at that point, and lived without making their feelings known for years. I don’t blame them for rushing into their marriage; it’s actually quite cute to think about! But I fail to understand the idea that Ed and Winry kept their feelings for each other under wraps under the same roof for two entire years. Not to mention, Alphonse and Pinako had to have teased the ever-loving hell out of the two of them. There was no way possible they endured two years of that, mixed with awkward, sexually tense encounters.

[ncssian]

A Favor: Part Fourteen

Nessian Modern AU

Masterlist

a/n: my quickest AND longest update to date?? who am i??

merry christmas for real this time. thank you sm for reading i never voice my appreciation for yall but it’s there i swear

tw: abuse mention

***

Cassian’s plan to grab his stuff and get the hell back home is intercepted by Feyre, who pulls him aside and proceeds to spill everything about her fight with Nesta to him.

His heart hurts for Feyre—he of all people knows what it’s like to feel unwanted by your biological family. But what did she really think would happen? Their entire friend group is about placing chosen bonds over blood bonds. Feyre can’t be that offended if Nesta prefers the company of her friends over her little sisters. And trying to talk to Nesta about her therapy? Jesus.

But Cassian has a feeling it’ll take both Feyre and Elain a long spelling out of things before they can begin to understand Nesta the way he does, and he doesn’t have time for that right now. He’s too distracted to even provide the comfort Feyre came to him for.

Somehow, he makes up an excuse and detaches himself from the conversation, leaving to find his coat and keys. Azriel spies him on the way to the door and gives him a look.

“Not a fucking word,” Cassian growls as he passes. Everyone else is engrossed in a game of poker and getting progressively more drunk. Feyre now sits on Rhys’s lap, once again content. Azriel only smirks but shakes his head, letting Cassian slip out of the penthouse unnoticed.

He takes the long way home, needing the night air and flashing headlights to clear his head. Once he gets off the freeway leading to town, though, he picks up his phone and calls Nesta.

She doesn’t pick up.

On the fourth call that goes unanswered, Cassian gives up. Fine. She doesn’t want to talk to him tonight. But still he finds himself driving past her neighborhood, once, twice, as if he’s listless without being able to talk to her. He has too many feelings he needs to get off his chest, and she’s the first person he always goes to for those things.

Try to consider her feelings.

It’s that thought that forces him to turn around and drive back to the cabin. They’ll both feel better in the morning, anyway. He can find her and talk as soon as the day starts.

It’s past midnight when he finally pulls up to the driveway, and still he’s disappointed to not see Nesta’s car there. Still he’s disappointed to enter an empty cabin.

The Christmas tree they decorated together sits unlit in the corner of the living room, their presents untouched under the fir leaves. Without turning the lights on, Cassian trudges upstairs and heads straight to bed.

Any sleep he finds is short and restless. His eyes shut sometime around three in the morning, and when they next open, early dawn light is streaming in through the windows. Snow flurries gently against the glass.

Giving up on the prospect of genuine rest, Cassian accepts that he’ll have to seek out Nesta with dark circles and a half-functioning brain today.

He already has a list in his mind as he heads downstairs: get coffee and breakfast for Nesta, get dressed, be at her door by the time she wakes at nine.

Then he reaches the foot of the stairs, and realizes none of that is necessary.

Straight out of his dreams, Nesta is sitting cross-legged on the ground before the coffee table, inspecting a puzzle piece in the cutest sweater he’s ever seen.

Cassian freezes with his hand on the banister, wondering if he’s still asleep. He watches her bite her lip intently, trying to fit the puzzle piece into a corner of the puzzle. It doesn’t fit.

“Fuck,” she swears softly, tossing the piece aside. Cassian clears his throat.

Nesta’s head shoots up, her focus broken. “You’re awake.”

“You’re in my house,” he says dumbly.

“That’s what the key you gave me is for, isn’t it?”

Hesitantly, like he’s approaching a wounded bear, Cassian walks farther into the living room. “Are you—I mean, are we…?”

“Use your words, baby.”

He breathes a sigh of relief. She doesn’t seem upset. There’s so much he wants to ask her: did she sleep well? Where did she get her Christmas sweater from, and does it mean she’s secretly been a fan of Christmas all along? Does she want hot chocolate or coffee with her breakfast?

“How was your night?” he settles on. He moves to sit across from her at the coffee table.

“Find where this goes,” Nesta demands, handing him a new puzzle piece and pointing to their nearly finished puzzle.

Cassian obeys, and Nesta talks while he works. “I was pretty pissed when I got home last night,” she says. “I wanted to tell you all about this stupid fight I had with my boyfriend, and how I knew he was right but I was still furious at him, until I remembered that you were my boyfriend, and I didn’t want to see you.”

Cassian pretends to focus on the puzzle, letting Nesta get her words out.

“So Gwyn called to say thank you for her present—you were right, by the way, she loves it—and then we ended up talking the whole night, and I told her everything about my sisters and,” she waves a hand, “the other shit.

“And at one point I realized that I was telling her the stuff I needed to be telling you. So I came here as soon as I hung up with Gwyn.”

Cassian looks up. “When was that?”

Nesta shrugs. “Five in the morning?”

“Nesta,” he scolds. “You’ll fuck up your sleep cycle.”

“Will you let me get to my point, damn it?”

Cassian shuts up and sits back.

Nesta is staring down at the puzzle, fiddling with her fingernails. Carefully selecting her next words like an attorney would. “I wanted to apologize for—the things I said last night. I was projecting my insecurities onto you, and I’m sure you already know it, but that doesn’t make it okay.” She looks up, face serious. “My sisters and I bring out the worst in each other. We always have. But I let that affect how I treated you when you had nothing to do with it.”

“But you were right.” Cassian can’t stay quiet anymore. “I mean, a lot of what you said was wrong, but at the heart of your point you were right.” It took Cassian all night to sift through what Nesta had said, to separate the truth from the meaningless words of hurt. He finally sees it now.

“I should have watched out for you last night, even if I couldn’t claim you as my girlfriend. I know how you are in new environments with new people and I left you to the wolves.” The wolves are his most trusted friends, sure, but they aren’t Nesta’s. And he was an idiot to forget it.

Nesta fixes another puzzle piece into place, and for the first time this morning, true regret passes over her face. “I didn’t enjoy hurting you. I hated every second of it while I was doing it. So as long as you know I didn’t mean any of it, I’ll be fine.”

We were good distractions for each other in your lonely little cabin, but deep down you know we wouldn’t last a day in the real world.

You were sad and desperate for acknowledgement when we first met, and you’re the same way now.

Cassian nods once. “I know,” he says softly. “You could never lie to me.” Even if some of her words had struck a little truer than they should have. Cassian realizes bitterly it’s because her insecurities are the same as his.

“So are you going to tell me about what the real problem was yesterday?” He dares to broach the elephant in the room.

Nesta stiffens, refocusing on the puzzle to avoid his gaze. “I already told you,” she says. “My sisters and I bring out the worst in each other.”

“There’s more to it than that, though.” When Nesta doesn’t respond, he adds, “Feyre told me her side of the story. It probably wasn’t all of it, but if it makes you feel better, I agreed with you.”

Nesta snorts derisively. “She was being unreasonable, but I made it worse. You know that, don’t you?” She raises a brow. “You know how I am.”

Cassian remembers their screaming match from the time he tried to get her a doctor’s appointment, and oddly enough, smiles. “I know you hate it,” he says, “and I know it’s frustrating as hell, but people stop taking your arguments seriously when you start flinging insults. It probably isn’t fair, but you’ve been in a courtroom. You know how it works.”

Nesta grimaces. “Believe me, the future lawyer in me is not proud of how I held up in last night’s fight.”

“Right there.” Cassian slides a section of green pieces over to himself and fits them into place, completing the rolling hills of the landscape scene. There’s only a handful of pieces left, all in the sky area. He waits for Nesta to be ready to speak.

After several moments of working in silence, she says, “My sisters have never really accepted me the way I am. I used to think Elain did back when we were kids, but then I stopped prioritizing her and she stopped understanding.”

Cassian knows Elain is pissed that her once-closest sister no longer cares to talk to her. But what he wants to know is why Nesta stopped answering her calls. Why she pulled away and went into isolation, and wouldn’t come out for anyone until a few short months ago.

Nesta clears her throat. “I was not a well-adjusted kid. I’m not a well-adjusted adult, either, but—I was even worse in my youth. I had a deadbeat dad, who I hated while my sisters adored him. I hated the life we had to live because of him, and I let that hate seep everywhere. Into everything and everyone else.” She blows out a breath and shakes her head. “There was no place closer to hell than that fucking one-bedroom apartment. I hated the person I was in that place—like I had no control over my emotions, my tantrums, my entire self. I was stuck in this childlike state of rage and I couldn’t move on, couldn’t grow up.

“No one could figure out what was wrong with me, so I had to take care of my issues myself. I read more books, I went out more often, I always had headphones in—I learned how to escape. I learned how to limit the destruction. Once I did that, I could care for Elain more openly. I could have civil conversations with Feyre, too. That’s where we went wrong, I think. I gave Feyre hope that I could be a better person, and once she latched onto it, she refused to let go.” Nesta picks at the sleeves of her knit sweater. “She never understood that I was cold and removed just because I was. She always had this belief that deep down, I secretly had a heart of gold and a shit ton of love to give. I never bothered telling her she was wrong, so her expectations of me grew. And so did Elain’s. And then I graduated high school.” She shrugs.

Cassian frowns. “That’s when you left your family and moved here?”

She nods. “The distance helped. For a short time, I thought I was free. No responsibilities or people to answer to. But then I met Tomas—my ex—and Feyre and Elain followed me to Colorado not long after my dad died. And even then I stayed optimistic, because most people would be lucky to have their sisters and boyfriend all in the same place. I thought I could finally have all the relationships a normal person my age was supposed to have if I just put in the effort.” She meets Cassian’s eyes. “I never told you much about Tomas, did I?”

His stomach sinks, but he shakes his head.

“It was not a fun first love. But the only reason I didn’t tell you about it earlier was because I didn’t know how to describe it myself.” She rubs her palms down her thighs, but it isn’t enough to hide their tremble.

“I know what to call it now,” Nesta says. “It was abusive.”

Cassian says nothing. He can’t. But his hands curl into hard fists under the coffee table.

“Lana made me work up to using that word.” She rolls her eyes, like the whole thing annoys and embarrasses her. “He was abusive: physically, verbally, emotionally. I’m not going to go into the details or anything, but it’s what was happening to me during those college years that my sisters needed me to be there for them.”

Cassian would never in a thousand years ask Nesta for information she isn’t ready to give, but in that moment he’s overwhelmed with the need to know everything—every little thing that’s ever been done to her, so he can draw up a list and exact calculated revenge for all of it. His voice is rough against the lump in his throat, out of fury or despair he doesn’t know. “Nesta…”

“I promise I’m almost done.” She holds up a hand.

Take your time. Tell me everything.

“This isn’t about him,” Nesta says. “This is about my sisters. Because even if I hadn’t been stupid enough to let that man waste almost four years of my life, I would have ended up in the same place with Feyre and Elain. They’d still be disappointed when they realized I couldn’t be what they wanted me to be.” She wraps her arms around herself in a hug, and Cassian wishes he’d sat beside her so those could be his arms.

She shakes her head. “I did my best so I wouldn’t be cooped up with them, wouldn’t be lashing out at them… and it still wasn’t enough. They wanted me to be nice, friendly, talkative. So I tried doing that too, even though I hated it. But around the same time things with Tomas started to get unbearable, Feyre found Rhysand and you guys. So now I had to hang out with my sister while she had a group of strangers constantly surrounding her, and go back home to a man who hated me at the end of the day.” She looks up at Cassian then, and her blue-gray gaze hits him with the force of a truck. “As soon as Feyre moved away to Velaris, I saw my way out. I finally broke up with Tomas. I gave up on all my relationships and I let go, and I don’t care if you or anyone else thinks it’s pathetic, or the bare minimum. It’s all I had to give.”

Cassian swallows roughly, unable to find his words. “It’s not pathetic, Nesta,” he finally says. “There’s nothing pathetic about doing what doesn’t come easily to you.”

There’s a million other things he needs to say to her, to make sure that she knows she isn’t stupid, or embarrassing, or not enough. But it all floats right out of his head when she heaves a big, dramatic sigh, as if a great weight has been lifted off her chest. As if Cassian’s measly words were all she needed to hear to feel alright.

She snatches up the final remaining puzzle piece and clicks it into place. “And we’re done,” she declares.

Cassian looks down at the table between them, which is now fully lit by the beaming morning sun outside. His eyes land on an empty space near the corner of the landscape, and his face falls. “There’s a piece missing,” he says.

“No way, where?” Nesta leans closer.

Cassian is already on his hands and knees, checking under and around the table for the missing piece.

“This is all your fault,” Nesta is saying above him. “You bumped into the table that time we were making out and all those pieces went flying.”

“Well, how fucking far could it have gone? Help me find it.” He’s serious now, searching the floor with intent. They can’t leave the puzzle unfinished. It was the only thing he could find in his garage all those months ago that could distract Nesta from anticipating her MRI results. And after the diagnosis, it had been a way to lift her mood, to give the two of them an excuse to spend every evening together—

“Sweetheart, it’s just a puzzle.”

Cassian sits up straight at that. “Just a puzzle?” He narrows his eyes at her.

“Well, it’s either that or an overextended metaphor for our relationship—are you crying?”

“No.” He blinks quickly. If there’s wetness there, he doesn’t know how Nesta glimpsed it.

He’s had a hard twelve hours. Nesta even more so. “I just feel really bad, about last night and everything else.” Because even if she acts like what she just spilled to him isn’t a big deal, he’ll never forget it.

He looks up to find Nesta laughing. Hand-over-her-mouth cackling. Before he can ask what’s wrong with her, she’s climbing up onto the coffee table, breaking up the puzzle and sending pieces scattering as she crawls across it. “Nesta—” he starts to protest.

She drops into his lap, winding her arms and legs around his powerful body. And she leans in and kisses him, long and deep and sweet. His hands settle into the curve of her hips, where they’ve always fit perfectly.

She breaks the kiss to fit her palm to his cheek. “I’m sorry,” she says. She never says that. “I didn’t mean to make you upset.” Her lips quirk up teasingly, but real guilt from the night before lingers in her eyes. Cassian realizes in that moment that Nesta could never hurt anybody more than she hurts herself.

“Don’t waste your apologies on me.” He nudges her nose with his. “Save them for people who’ll actually need to hear them.”

A real smile starts to bloom on her face. “I’ll try.”

Pride and love take his breath away, but he manages to say, “Thank you. For sharing so much of yourself with me.”

She makes an embarrassed noise and waves him off, but emotion shines in her eyes. Just to spare her, Cassian changes the subject. “Now what in the world are you wearing?”

She glances down at herself, frowning. “You don’t like it?”

“I love it.” The sweater looks hand knit, bright red with a green Christmas tree in the center. Balls of colorful fuzz decorate the tree as ornaments. “I want you to wear it every day,” he says.

“Over my dead body. I’d rather you help me take it off.”

Nesta’s hips feel especially snug against his as heat rushes to his crotch. She smirks like she caught him on a hook and leans in to whisper, “You look tired. Did you stay up thinking about my dress last night?”

Cassian swallows roughly. It might have crossed his mind a few times—not just the dress, but the fact that she had picked it out for him. He didn’t know that Nesta cared about things like that.

She rubs a thumb under his weary and reddened eyes. “After your anger faded, did you think about all the make-up sex we were going to have? Because I did.”

“Nesta,” he groans, dropping his head to rest against her chest. Either she plays him too well or he’s too easy to play, because Cassian is half a second away from damning everything to hell and dragging her to the living room carpet.

Until Nesta’s stomach growls loudly.

That’s when he remembers: it’s Christmas morning, he’s with the love of his life, and they’re both starving and sleep-deprived.

He looks up to find her eyes screwed shut in frustration. Before she can protest, he warns, “Don’t even think about it.” He pats her thighs. “Let’s get some food in you.”

***

Cassian makes them chocolate chip pancakes, and Nesta, feeling clingier than usual today, hangs piggyback off his body the entire time he cooks. She hasn’t slept in almost twenty-four hours, yet she feels like she was born anew this morning.

In the middle of breakfast, Cassian’s phone vibrates. He hardly even glances at it before turning it over.

“Who was it?” Nesta asks through a mouthful of pancakes. She hasn’t asked him about how his own night went, but she expects that his friends will want to call and talk to him at some point today.

“Feyre,” he says without looking at her. “She asked where I went last night.”

“Why’re you ignoring her?” She raises a brow.

Cassian looks a little surprised. “I thought we were mad at her.”

“No.” Nesta sets her fork down. “I’m mad at her. What’s your excuse?”

He shrugs. “Solidarity. I’m mad that you had your Christmas Eve ruined. I know what it took you just to show up there.”

“You’re the only one that knows.” Nesta supposes that not everything has been cleared up with Cassian after all. “Listen,” she tries to soften her blunt tone. “Whatever is between me and my sisters… you don’t need to concern yourself with it. You’ll never have to choose sides between us.”

He watches her closely, carefully. “Even if I want to defend my girlfriend?”

Her stomach flutters at that inconsequential word, but she doesn’t show it. “Even then. Feyre looks at you like an older brother. I’m sure Elain does too, a little bit. Don’t let me get in the way of that.” He probably feels guilty every time he texts Feyre, the loyal bastard.

Cassian looks at his plate, then nods resolutely. “I can do that.” He adds a moment later, “For what it’s worth, I do get where the girls are coming from. Even if they had a shit way of going about it.” His eyes darken as he remembers.

Nesta doesn’t know what he was told about the fight, but she chuckles at his moody face anyway. “I expected you to. You’ve always loved spending time with your family, and you’ve never known anything different. But the reality is this: the closeness you have between you and your brothers isn’t something that can be forced onto every group of siblings. And the more Feyre and Elain try to force it, the more I push against it.”

“It sounds stifling.” His face is open, understanding. “To feel like you’re always too much but never enough.”

Nesta pauses, stunned. Cassian is almost too empathetic sometimes, like he carries a thousand past lives within him. Maybe he spent his time learning Nesta by heart in those lives.

Or maybe she’s getting too damn sentimental. She chokes out a dismissive laugh, going back to her pancakes. “Just text Feyre back. Then we can have the rest of the day to ourselves.”

***

Late morning brings heavy snowfall and a chill that infiltrates the walls of the cabin. The Christmas tree in the living room is lit—something Cassian didn’t notice earlier when he came downstairs to find Nesta in his house. Realizing that she’s the one who lit it up first thing in the morning does something to his chest, but he pushes the feeling down where it can’t scare Nesta away.

The weight of the past day must finally catch up to her, though, because by the time Cassian finishes lighting the fireplace, she’s knocked out asleep on the couch.

“No makeup sex then, Nes?” he says softly. Getting up from the hearth, he goes to pull the fur couch throw over her body. Cassian settles at the end of the couch near her feet, taking care so she doesn’t wake, and picks up his laptop from the coffee table. He’s been slacking with his work ever since he got with Nesta, and he might as well catch up on it now before Rhysand takes notice.

The first email that pops up in his inbox is a corporate reminder about the annual New Year’s Eve fundraiser gala, hosted in some high-class hotel in Denver this year. Cassian reads the email once, twice, three times before reaching for his phone.

Rhys answers on the first ring. “Oh, so you don’t hate us,” he drawls.

“What?” Cassian is confused.

“Because with the way you’ve been acting at family events lately, one would have reason to think you don’t want to be around your family much.”

“Oh—no, this isn’t about that.” Cassian refuses to let Rhys linger on this topic. “I called about the New Year’s party.”

“What about it?” he says. “Other than that tacky hotel.”

Cassian decides to spit it out. “I’m not coming.”

Rhys is stunned silent over the line for a moment. “What do you mean, you’re not coming?” Cassian never misses company events, no matter how much he hates dressing up and driving out to the city to schmooze with donors.

But too many of his holidays have gone to Rhys instead of Nesta this year, and he finds himself unwilling to give more.

“I’ve been stressed as hell lately,” he lies, trying to stay quiet for Nesta. “I’m always the one driving hours to see everyone else, and I can’t go all the way out to Denver for another party. I’m sorry.”

“Bullshit,” Rhys responds. “You have nothing going on at work and nothing going on outside of it. What could you be stressed about?”

Cassian makes a mental note to find a hobby that doesn’t include his brothers, if only so he can use it as an excuse to spend time with his secret girlfriend in the future. For now, he has to settle with the truth. “I can’t tell you.”

It’s a petty card to play, but it’s a valid one. No matter how nosy his family might be, they know how to back off when a line is drawn, no explanation required.

Rhys’s voice softens. “Is it serious? Is it a health issue?”

Cassian nearly laughs, even though he feels bad for making Rhys worry. “No, nothing like that. But I still can’t come.”

“What can I do to make it easier for you?” Rhys tries again. “New Year’s isn’t the same without all of my family in one place.”

Cassian snorts. “Come over to my place then.” He says it half-jokingly, but then Rhys doesn’t answer, as if he’s thinking.

“The gala guest list is too big to fit in the cabin…” he ponders. “But I guess I could have it narrowed down at the last minute. The Mayfairs certainly won’t be happy about it, though.”

Cassian’s eyes widen, and he looks over at Nesta’s sleeping form. “Uh…” He scrambles for something to get him out of this.

“New Year’s at a luxury cabin, all of us reuniting at your home for the first time in months? I love it,” Rhys declares. “Better than fucking Denver, that’s for sure.”

Cassian coughs, then covers it up with a forced chuckle. “I’ll have the place ready by next week.”

The call is over before he knows it, and all he can do is stare at the phone in his hand wondering what the hell just happened.

You didn’t entirely lose, he thinks to himself. You’re spending New Year’s with Nesta.

Yeah—New Year’s with Nesta and his entire family. He drops his head back against the couch and groans quietly.

***

Nesta wakes up late in the afternoon to Cassian presenting her with a mug of eggnog and bad news about New Year’s Eve.

The idea of another party, especially one with her sisters present, so soon after the last one makes Nesta’s very bones ache. But she supposes she’ll just have to take the next week to recover and prepare, because she isn’t missing out on a holiday with Cassian for anything.

The way she’s started romanticizing simple things like the new year should probably alarm her, but it doesn’t.

They sit down to open presents with the TV playing lowly in the background. It’s nothing serious, and Nesta isn’t expecting to get anything much until she unwraps her present.

It’s a vinyl record packaged in an elaborate sleeve with the words Nesta’s Mix etched across it. She slowly pulls the record out of the sleeve, staring at it. “What’s this?”

“It’s called a vinyl.”

She spears him with a look. “I got that. What’s on it?”

Cassian turns sheepish, sprawled out across from her on the carpet. “I stalked your Spotify to figure out what you listen to. Then I made a playlist based off what I thought you’d like and got it turned into vinyl. It’s all new music…” He trails off at the look on her face. “But if you hate it, the B-side has your favorite songs on there. You can listen to it either way.”

“I don’t hate it.” Nesta blinks her burning eyes rapidly, staring down at the gift in her hands. She’s not used to receiving thoughtful gifts—or pricey ones. “Thank you,” she says plainly, trying to let her feelings speak for themselves in those two words. “I love it.” She knows she should be saying more, damn it, but what can she say?

Cassian reaches out to put a hand on her knee, his thumb stroking circles across her leg. She looks up at him and realizes she doesn’t need words. Leaning forward, she lands a kiss on his cheek and can only hope that it’s sufficient. “Where am I going to play it?” she asks.

“I was close to getting you a record player when I remembered I already have one. I’ve never used it in my life.” He looks at her more gently now. “So it’s basically yours.”

Nesta’s chest tightens painfully. Not because he’s giving the record player to her, but because he’s suggesting they own it together.

“My present is going to look so stupid next to yours,” she says quietly.

Cassian grins. “Now I really need to see it.”

Nesta buries her head in her hands in humiliation while he tears open the wrapping paper of his gift, and only looks up when she hears him laugh aloud.

He’s holding a copy of one of Nesta’s favorite romances, and the first of many of her books that he’s ever stolen from her and read. He turns the vintage paperback around in his hands. “I remember this one. I totally had a sex dream about it.” He gazes in reminiscence at the busty blonde on the cover.

Nesta snorts, but scoots closer to him eagerly. “Look inside.”

He flips it open to find dark scribbles along the margins, in every single margin.

“I annotated it,” Nesta says hesitantly. “With my thoughts and analysis on each scene. It’s probably dumb to critically analyze a ninetie’s erotica novel, but I thought you’d find it funny.”

Cassian is flipping through the pages more slowly now, taking his time to read each one. “I don’t think it’s funny,” he says after a moment, his eyes still on the book. “I think it’s more than anything I could have asked for.”

“Well, that’s a bit dramatic for a romance book—”

“Not the book.” He looks up at her with something in his eyes. “It’s all your thoughts.” He looks back at the book in wonder. “Written out for me in detail to keep.”

He starts to smirk, searching for a specific page. “I already know how you feel about the boat scene, but now I need to read about it.”

Nesta makes a noise of protest, grabbing for the book. “Don’t spoil the good parts yet.” She can hardly believe it. He finds her joke present good. “You always spoil the good parts first and get sad about it later.”

He makes a face. “True.” He lowers the book, growing serious. “Nesta.” He clears his throat, and her heart starts pounding. She can hear the words before he says them—

“You’re a really good gift giver.”

Nesta’s breath shudders out of her, in relief or disappointment she doesn’t know. Cassian is still staring at her in amazement, and she can only respond by throwing herself at him, her arms holding him tight.

He doesn’t falter under her weight, but pulls her closer. “Thank you,” he says into her ear.

She pulls back far enough to see him. His beautiful face is outlined with too many emotions for her to read, yet somehow she knows exactly what he’s feeling.

Overwhelmed, she leans in to place a soft kiss above his upper lip, then on his mouth. “Merry Christmas,” she whispers against his lips.

“Merry Christmas, Nesta.”

***

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[rivalsforlife]

AA7 Speculation Post: One Year Later

here we go again.

A year and a day ago, I made a speculation post about if/when we’d ever be seeing AA7. Obviously, my claim that AA7 would be announced in September 2020 did not turn out to be true, but later that year we did get a leaked calendar containing information on the new ports for Chronicles, and also plans for a new aa7, which I summarized in this post.

Now that we have Chronicles we can verify that the leaks contained legitimate information (as if a statement from Capcom saying they were hacked wasn’t legitimate enough). So that leaves us with one key question: is AA7 still happening? If so, when can we expect it? As well, what other information from the leaked calendar can we consider, especially with early sales data on Chronicles? In addition, what are the implications of this new survey on Chronicles from Capcom?

All of that will be discussed under the cut so that this doesn’t take up too much space.

Revisiting The Calendar

Once again, here is a rough translation of the calendar that was present in the leaks:

As a note, in this post, I’ll be referring to our new games as “Chronicles” to prevent this from being blocked by people avoiding spoilers.

So: this original calendar, generated before the pandemic, had Chronicles releasing in Q1 of FY2021 - and it’s also important to note that in Japan, each fiscal year starts in April 1st, so FY2021 is actually April-June 2021. This shows that Chronicles was pushed back about a quarter from their expected release date. However, Chronicles was a port of already existing games, therefore somewhat less work was needed on them - upscaling models and textures, adding in some new features like autoplay and story mode, and of course, the English translation and voicework were needed, which is still a lot of course, but less compared to development on an entirely new game. In addition to that, the pandemic hit AA7 in its early development stage, assuming this schedule was still being followed by the time the pandemic hit. That could cause more delays than expected.

So the original plan was for AA7 to be released in Q3 of 2021, which corresponds to October-December, aligning with the 20th anniversary of the series in October. While it’s a desirable goal, it’s quite likely the pandemic pushed it back at least a quarter, if not more, if not cancelled it entirely. ... haha.

We’ll only know the fate of AA7 for certain when it’s announced. Which it is possible it may never be. However, I have two theories for, if AA7 is getting an announcement, when it will be:

1) Sometime during September 2021, either in the leadup to or during Tokyo Game Show this year. These are for the same reasons as I outlined in my initial speculation post. It’s a popular time for Ace Attorney game announcements, after all. TGS, according to what I can find, will be held online this year from September 30th to October 3rd. If Capcom announces AA7 earlier in September through Famitsu, like they did with AA6 for example, then we can expect to get some information during TGS... 

2) Sometime during a 20th Anniversary Event, possibly in October 2021. I’m assuming AA is planning something for the 20th anniversary - Chronicles wasn’t really marketed as a 20th anniversary release, for instance. If they can’t release a new game for the 20th anniversary (which at this rate, seems unlikely, as we’re about two months out from that with no word about it) then an announcement would be just as good at generating hype for it.

Naturally, if we reach this time next year with absolutely no news on AA7, it’s probably safe to say it’s been cancelled or at least delayed so severely that anything we currently know about it isn’t worth much.

There’s one more point of interest on the calendar: reconsidering the porting of 456. I feel that this depends heavily on how well the Chronicles ports are doing; if it’s not financially viable to keep porting games, then why bother? So, let’s take a look at that.

The Success of Chronicles

As I write this, it’s about two and a half weeks since the release of Chronicles worldwide. So... how did the games do? It’s a bit hard to tell, especially as I am not a game marketer and don’t know the expectations for Chronicles. What is obvious is that, if Chronicles does much better than expected, porting 456 and possibly even the investigations games seems likely. (If Chronicles, indeed, does especially well in the West, than a porting of the investigations games and localization of investigations 2 after ten years could very well be possible.) If Chronicles does absolutely terribly, it damages the chances of porting, and possibly of continuing the series. If it does terribly especially in the West, where the games are essentially new, it could damage the chances of any new games being localized at all.

So, a lot is riding on this, and I don’t know enough to tell how well it did. Here’s what I have found, however:

Nintendo Enthusiast reports on Famitsu sales of Switch games, and overall thinks it’s not doing so great. Chronicles ranks third on the list of Switch sales in its first week, with 14,460 units sold, over 4000 less than NEO: The World Ends With You, which was released on July 27th. Keep in mind that Chronicles was released in Japan on July 29th, which is two days later, and that these are only Japanese sales (where they’ve had Chronicles for years on both mobile and 3DS) and only Switch sales, where NEO:TWEWY is currently only available on Switch and PS4 (Chronicles has the additional platform of Steam, where there could be many more sales). In the next week, Chronicles ranked 22 overall, with NEO:TWEWY at 23, though of course they’re still a little less than 4000 units behind NEO:TWEWY overall. Slightly closing the gap, I guess.  

How about overseas data, then? ... It’s hard to tell. I can find this report from gamespot which discusses the top 20 games sold in the US in July, and Chronicles is not on the list, while NEO:TWEWY is at 16. However, they don’t give any number for the units sold, and it seems that they aren’t considering digital sales for a lot of them, so it’s hard to tell how much of a hit that is.

However, let’s go back to Japanese sales for a bit, and look at the 2019 Trilogy re-release for a comparison against Chronicles. Allegedly, combined Switch and PS4 sales in the first week of the trilogy’s release only amounted to about 8000 units, a little more than half that of Chronicles’ Switch sales. It’s also important to note that the 2019 trilogy ended up being the only ace attorney game to sell over a million copies. Ace Attorney is not a big series; I’m sure Capcom takes this into account when considering sales data, especially for ports. If Chronicles does end up doing better than the trilogy overall, it’s definitely looking good for ports and especially so for Chronicles.

However, there’s more to this than just sales data.

The Survey

Capcom now has a user survey for Chronicles, which you can answer even if you’re partway through the first game. I believe it’s only open until September 30 2021, so if you think you can finish the game before then, I’d recommend filling it out once you’re done so that you can give the best feedback.

It asks you a bunch of questions like what platform you bought it on, why you bought it, your expectations, and all sorts of detailed questions on the various mechanics, difficulty and enjoyment of the trials and investigations, satisfaction of visuals, plot, characters, music, and even free response sections for what you liked and disliked about the game. It’s a very detailed survey that’s pretty long but I think is worth filling out. At the end they ask you to fill out some demographic questions (such as age, gender (male, female, other), country, what kind of things you like to spend money on, and what kind of games you like, what platforms you have to play games on). But what’s possibly the most interesting question is this:

“If a new [Chronicles] game is released in the future, do you think you would buy it?”

This means that, depending on the answers to the survey, they could very well decide to work on a third game to Chronicles.

This has huge implications for the future of the series. I’ll probably make a separate post on plot-related stuff later, but for now... let’s talk about logistics.

In my initial AA7 speculation post I said I highly doubted that they would ever make another Chronicles game. I also said that they probably never would be localized, so, guess who’s a clown now. 

Right now the AA series is in a bit of a dry period, with no new games having been released in the last four years. As well, with Yamazaki (the director of the investigations games and AA5/6) having left Capcom, the next director of the mainline games is completely unknown. As described in this video, the main reason Chronicles ever came about was because Capcom went ahead with mainline AA5 before Takumi could come back from the Layton crossover. Now, since 2017, we don’t really know what Takumi is working on. It’s possible he’s gone back to mainline to work on AA7 (though of course, there is absolutely no evidence suggesting that he has, so definitely don’t take that as any sort of confirmation).

However, if we do get a Chronicles 3, it’s quite likely Takumi would return to work on that, as he directed the previous two games. In addition, if Chronicles ends up being such a success to completely eclipse mainline (from what I’ve heard, though I have no serious proof, Resolve is considered as highly rated as T&T by many Japanese fans) then the series could permanently go down the road of writing more Chronicles games, leaving mainline stagnant (which, let’s be real, it’s already stagnating). The success of that is uncertain considering how neatly our current Chronicles duology wraps up, but... we’ll have to see how things unfold in the future.

For now, I highly recommend filling out the survey to give your input to the series’ future directions. Maybe mention that you want localized investigations 2 somewhere in the free response section because uhh I forgot to do it in mine. do that for me.

TL;DR

Main takeaways from this post are:

- I personally expect an AA7 announcement either during TGS or a 20th anniversary event

- If Chronicles does extremely well, then 456 ports are likely to happen, and I personally speculate investigations ports (along with localized investigations 2) will as well.

- Fill out this Chronicles survey before September 30th to give your input on the games and possibly the future direction of the series. I recommend completing the games before you do, but if you think you won’t before September 30th, you can fill it out at any time.

- We Very Well May Get Another Chronicles Game. Who saw that coming. Not me.

Thanks if you read through all of this, let’s hope September/October doesn’t leave me looking like a fool again.

[cosmicpines]

code july day 1 - future

au where jeremie's anti-xana program didn't work, taking place half a year after.

“Do’ya think we should start future-proofing our whole situation?” Odd was the first one to speak out loud in at least a half an hour, his voice echoing around the computer lab.

It was late. Not just “it’s a school night, we should turn off the Playstation” late, but “sunrise is in an hour” late. Ulrich, Jeremie, and Aelita were crowded on the couch – a fairly new addition to the lab that William and Odd had dragged over a mile to the factory after finding it on the street, a several-hour long affair that left them both sore for a week – blearily staring at chunky school-loaned laptop screens with piles of overdue library books on the floor in front of them. Odd and William were across the room, hunched over an oversized posterboard, surrounded by an accoutrement of Odd’s art supplies and printed out sheets of paper. What was keeping them up was potentially world-ending, but not in the usual way; instead of an evil AI, it was a history project due at 10 AM.

It wasn’t entirely their fault they didn’t start earlier – saving the world was a full-time job, afterall – but it’s not like they could give an excuse to Mr. Fumet that he would have believed. As the clock ticked over to 4, the prospect of having to pull the trigger on a return trip to finish loomed over them. They had already done it once, blearily uploading PowerPoint slides to the supercomputer to save them, giving Yumi an apologetic phone call in the morning. She was used to the disorienting resets at this point, having done them for half a year after graduating and moving across the country, but they usually texted ahead of time to warn her. She was sympathetic over the phone – she always was – but she was definitely irritated about having to retake an exam. They didn’t want to put her through that again and, besides, they couldn’t exactly keep the poster board from getting erased to time.

“Future-proofing the fact half of us might fail history?” Ulrich grumbled in response from across the room, leaning against the armrest of the couch. His eyes were glazed over in a stupor as he clicked idly around on the screen.

“Ulrich, are you done with your slides yet?” Aelita spat at him, now that the silent spell was broken, “I want to start stitching them together.”

“Uh… no.” Ulrich glanced at her, subtly turning his screen away from her piercing gaze, “Gimme ten more minutes? I’m almost there.”

Aelita clicked her tongue, probably remembering the last promise of the slides “in ten minutes.” She turned to her left and nudged Jeremie, “How about you – oh my god, Jeremie, can you focus?”

“Huh?” He looked up, and guiltly alt-tabbed back to a blank PowerPoint slide. “Sorry, I was just… I had a breakthrough about the bug in the Skid and I was…” He trailed off under her glare, “Sorry.”

Aelita clutched the side of her head, groaning. “Is it too late to go back to living on Lyoko where I don’t have to care about World War I and don’t need sleep?”

“Me too, thanks.” William muttered at Odd’s side, aggressively erasing a sentence on the poster, “Being XANA’s slave was less painful than this.”

He let out a bitter laugh, then raised his head, half smirk fading at the frozen-in-terror looks on his friend’s faces, “Sorry. Too soon?”

Odd, as he so often did, interrupted the awkward silence before people could make it worse, “Future-proofing us, is what I meant. Thanks for asking!” Nobody humored him as the typing across the room started back up and William started writing again, “Look, I’m just saying; we’re not getting any younger.” He brandished a red marker, filling in bubble letters on the top of the poster, “Yumi graduated. We’ve only got a semester left at Kadic –,”

“Could just all repeat a year like I did.” William grimaced. “And might again.”

Ulrich snorted, “Odd and I are probably on track for that.”

“Cheers,” William said, raising his pencil like a glass, without looking up, “Join the failure club.”

“BUT,” Odd interrupted, “Assuming we don’t! Because this presentation is going to be incredible,” That one earned a snort from everyone in the room (which was fair), “We’ll need someone who can do our jobs if we have to leave the good fight. Lyoko Warriors, the Next Generation! Kadic’s Next Top Lyoko Warriors!” He chuckled at himself, standing up, “We should put an ad in the paper: ‘Want a challenging, world-altering job? Come down to the abandoned factory!’” He hummed to himself, tapping his chin, “Our criteria would have to be strict. Can you imagine getting someone like, I dunno, Johnny? So, Johnny. Please, tell me: what’s your greatest fear? Giant crabs, you say? Why yes, that’s both oddly specific and also a dealbreaker. Next!”

Odd looked up, laughing, waiting for his friends to join in – Ulrich telling him he was being dumb, Aelita offering some other students and joking with him about their interviews, William making a snide remark about how he didn’t get an interview, a silent, but appreciative smirk from Jeremie – but got nothing. Jeremie’s head was buried in his laptop, and Aelita was – Aelita was glaring at him?

“What?” He asked her, but she said nothing, just raised an eyebrow in a you know what’s wrong look. Odd clearly didn’t, and turned to Ulrich for a clue, but Ulrich wasn’t giving him anything; he was just back to sulking, staring at his laptop. Odd ran through what he said again in his head, trying to find the offending phrase, when William punched him in the leg. “Hey –,” Odd started, ready to give a snappy retort, before seeing William was urgently tapping at the poster, where he’d just written something. Odd crouched down to read it.

you’re upsetting jeremie.

Odd glanced back at Einstein across the room, whose face was impassive, just typing away. Looking closer, though, he could see Jeremie had all the appearances of someone trying valiantly to pretend they weren’t upset – hunched shoulders, scrunched up face, not a single glance away from the screen. Aelita had stopped glaring to put a hand on Jeremie’s shoulder, but he shrugged it off.

Ugh. Odd sighed, wondering if he would have to apologize for just trying to lighten the mood. How was anything he said upsetting to Jeremie? He reached over for a pencil to respond to William, scribbling down on the poster.

Can’t he take a joke?

idk. Guess he thinks you’re blaming him.

Blaming him?? For what???? bro when did I even say anything like that??

you didn’t. don’t bro me bro. not my fault

Odd underlined his first bro, giving William a smile. William rolled his eyes before rubbing out their conversation with an eraser. Odd turned back to his coloring job and took a breath, surprised to see it come in shaky. It’s not your fault he’s upset, he thought to himself, pulling the cap off his marker. It’s fine. He leaned over to finish his coloring before noticing his hands were shaking. He clenched them, angrily. It wasn’t his fault Jeremie was upset. He was fine. Not his fault if Jeremie wanted to over-react. He’ll get over it and… where were the scissors?

He dug around their supplies for them, then, picking up a pile of pictures of historic figures, streaked from the bad library printer, took a pair of trembling scissors to extracting them. They were nearly done. One more section and they’d be done. One more and they could go to bed and Jeremie would get over whatever he was upset about and it was fine and it would all go away and it was fine it wasn’t his fault and –

“I’m working as hard as I can,” Odd felt a bit in his stomach open up as Jeremie spoke in a quiet, bitter voice. Odd stared pointedly down at the poster, blinking rapidly to try and assuage the pressure building behind his eyes, “I know we screwed up by not finishing before Yumi graduated, okay? I’m just… It’s a lot to figure out and I’m trying?! Is that not enough for – No. No, I know it’s not enough – I know I’m keeping us from having a normal life and it’s my fault William had to repeat a year and… and I –,” Jeremie’s breath caught, and Odd finally dared to turn his eyes to him, seeing his friend aggressively rubbing his eyes under his glasses, “I – I don’t mean to – look! It’s hard, alright?! It’s hard and I – I’m just so tired all the time and I’m sorry that we’re still awake for this too and that I –,” His voice finally broke as he started crying in earnest, his fist coming down on the side of the couch. Odd wanted to turn back to his work and brush it off, but the guilt clenching his stomach wasn’t letting go.

Hesitantly, Aelita put her hand on his shoulder again, “Jeremie…” but he shook it off again, turning away from her. She persisted. “It’s not your fault. We know you’re working –,”

“And it’s not enough! I’ve been working at this for years and I just I can’t come up with anything to defeat XANA –,”

“You had a lot of other things you needed to do first.”

He didn’t mean to, Odd was sure, but Ulrich’s eyes flickered to William for just a moment, and William’s eyes narrowed.

“Oh, are we doing this now?” William grumbled, dropping his pencil. “Jeremie, you’re fine. Look, I’m sorry. Again. You don’t think I don’t regret every moment that I didn’t listen like a fucking idiot –” Jeremie, despite being wracked with tears, winced at the swear, earning a brief hint of a smile from Odd, “ – and got myself captured? Who then was a thorn in your asses for months? No. I get it. You’d probably be rid of XANA already if it wasn’t for me; you’ve made that crystal clear.”

“That’s not what I –,” Aelita glared at him, “You of all people should understand that I would never blame you for being trapped on Lyoko.”

“It’s not you that is. It’s him.” He jerked his thumb at Ulrich, who glared back at him.

“I’m not,” Ulrich muttered, “Cut it out.”

“Oh yeah? What did that look mean then, huh?”

“I didn’t –,”

“You blame me, and we all know it. You’re just butt-hurt over Yumi still, even though you had plenty of chances –,”

“Okay, that’s it.” Ulrich sat up straighter, “Maybe you’re still using Yumi as a scapegoat in all our arguments, but I’m done with that. Maybe I was an ass to you before because of her, but I don’t blame you for XANA, William. I never have. I was over it before you even joined,” He scowled at the ground, Jeremie’s crying filling the brief silence. “It was probably my fault you got captured in the first place. I wasn’t there because I had to talk to my stupid Dad and it was my job to tell Odd and I didn’t make sure – hell, even before that! Who was it that couldn’t protect Aelita back when XANA escaped from the supercomputer in the first place? If she hadn’t been alone, the Scyphozoa wouldn’t have gotten her, and XANA wouldn’t have escaped, and we would have been done.”

“Come on,” Aelita crossed her arms, turning away from Jeremie to the boy on her other side, “You’re being ridiculous. Half of that isn’t your fault.”

Odd wanted to chime in that it was Sam’s fault she didn’t listen to Ulrich, but his voice was still missing in action, his throat tight and unresponsive.

“I should have been able to protect myself,” Aelita continued, “It wasn’t your responsibility –,”

Jeremie laughed suddenly, hurt and bitter, “Protect yourself how? You couldn’t protect yourself because I was dragging my feet on giving you a proper weapon –,”

“We’ve talked about this!” She said, “We agreed it was more worth your time to work on an antivirus!”

“For a virus that didn’t exist! If I had just double checked –,”

“Double checked what? The faulty data you were being fed? There was nothing you could have done! If you want to blame anyone, blame me. Maybe it – maybe helping me made sense at first, when things were able to be stopped at a moment’s notice. But then even when you got me to Earth it wasn’t over, and things got worse, things got more dangerous – when we realized XANA could escape? That we couldn’t just turn it off with a switch? That – that should have been it.” Her voice dropped as she took a shaky breath, “You should have just let me turn the supercomputer off.”

“You were ALWAYS worth the risk, Aelita!” Odd finally snapped, terror shooting through his heart at the broken look on her face, the implications of her words, “You… you matter to us more than anything! Look, I’m sorry for bringing this all up, alright? I thought we could just joke around about running Lyoko Warrior interviews! I didn’t mean to get everyone upset. And speaking of! Jeez! All of you are such downers on yourselves! There’s like, a billion different things that could have happened!” He held out a hand, ticking them off, “Maybe William might not have gotten captured and instead XANA got Yumi or anyone else! Maybe, I dunno, Ulrich saved Aelita temporarily but then XANA tossed him in the digital sea! Maybe Jeremie could have noticed that Aelita didn’t have a virus sooner, and XANA just made a move sooner! Maybe – maybe – maybe if you had just let Kiwi be virtualized normally and not fuse with me he would have been a great Lyoko Warrior and would have bit the Scyphozoa and killed XANA! We don’t know, alright? I’m just trying to say that – ugh, forget it! Sorry! Jeez!”

Odd rubbed at his eyes, surrendering to the frustrated and exhausted stream of tears that leaked out of them. All of them, all of this – he kept trying to play superhero, to pretend that everything was going to be alright like in the movies, but in his heart he had to admit that this was starting to feel futile. Aelita’s virus, XANA’s escape from the supercomputer, William’s capture, Jeremie’s first botched attempt at his anti-XANA program, Franz Hopper’s sacrifice, Yumi’s graduation, their failure to stop space station from falling, Jeremie’s second anti-XANA program getting stolen by the AI, and now the looming threat of their own graduation… he wanted to be joking about needing to interview new Lyoko Warriors, really, but if graduation took them away from the factory… away from each other…

A hand landed on his shoulder, he realized he didn’t need to know who it was to press his own on top of it, to squeeze it and feel loved, as more hands, more friends, found their way to his other shoulder, to his back.

“I’m sorry, Jeremie,” he said, “And everyone else. I didn’t mean to –,”

“Don’t,” came a muttered reply from Jeremie, “We’re all acting tired and stupid. I shouldn’t have yelled. I knew you didn’t mean it.”

Odd let out an exhausted laugh, rubbing his eyes of the last of the tears, looking up and seeing his friends around him, “How late is it?”

“Too late,” Ulrich replied, pulling his phone out of his pocket, “We’ve got… three hours until classes start.”

A collective groan broke the spell over the room. Odd looked under his feet to the almost-finished-poster. Silently, all of them returned to their working positions. Odd kneeled down to finish gluing down the last of the faces to the poster. As the lull of busy work started taking over his mind, William nudged him.

“Sorry, I, uh…” William looked uncharacteristically bewildered, “This must have happened while I was – did you say Kiwi fused with you?”

[everlarkficexchange]

On the Hunt

Author: @hutchhitched

Prompt 39: Katniss has been bumping into the same stranger (Peeta) for months. When they get stuck in an unfortunate situation together, she decides to be the first to say hello. [submitted by @eiramrelyat / @taylerwrites]

Ratings/Warnings: T

The first time Katniss sees him, he takes her breath away. It’s from afar. He probably doesn’t even catch a glimpse of her, but her whole world tilts off its axis.

She’s not sure why he stands out to her. There’s nothing particularly unique about him. He’s not short or tall or big or small. He’s not drop-dead gorgeous or ugly like a troll. He doesn’t move like an athlete or sparkle with the magic of a performer. He appears normal in every sense of the word, but that doesn’t mean she can’t see how special he really is. At least she thinks he might be—if she had a chance to actually speak to him.

That doesn’t happen, though. She’s too far away when she sees him picking up a loaf of bread, and she can’t seem to move once he’s left her line of sight. She stays frozen in the freezer section (the irony!) for several minutes. Hopefully, everyone else thinks she’s considering her options in breakfast burritos, but she’s actually involved in an out of body experience that follows the young man from the back of the store to the registers, out the door, and into the parking lot where he must load his groceries into his car and drive away. His life is no different, but hers will never be the same.

It has to be because she’s lonely. It’s been a very long time since she’s been in a relationship. In fact, it’s been so long since she’s kissed a man, she kind of wonders if she’s forgotten how to do it. Katniss has never been that popular, but she’s enjoyed her fair share of attention. She tries really hard not to spiral out in the freezer section, but Christ on a cracker! Something about that specimen of manhood has made her question her life’s choices. Why hasn’t she run into him before now? Clearly, she’s been living wrong.

Except, she hasn’t. She’s done absolutely everything she knows to do to be a good person. She supports her little sister and sends money to her mother who needs every speck of help she can get. She has a best friend who’s been by her side since they both lost their fathers when they were barely teenagers. She helps out at a shelter and donates money to the food bank because she knows way too well how hunger can impact a person’s life. In other words, there’s no reason her weekly grocery trip should result in an upheaval to her world. It’s simply not fair, and she plans to file a complaint to who it is that runs fate and destiny. She has a bone to pick.

Somehow, she finds everything on her list and heads to the front of the store. When she gets there, she unloads her groceries and watches as the cashier scans each item. Digging into her wallet, she’s stunned to find she only has a twenty and the total keeps rising. Mortified, she watches as the number climbs to $34.15.

“I don’t have… I mean, can you take off the…”

Trying to figure out what she can live without until her next paycheck, she surveys the food and toiletries. Almost in tears, she stammers for a few seconds before the cashier speaks.

“Don’t worry. Another patron paid it forward. He left a twenty and asked that I use it if anyone needed help. Looks like you could use some.”

“I— I couldn’t. It’s not right.”

“The guy seemed pretty adamant that I only offer it to someone who could use a break. It seems like that could be you today.”

Katniss nodded slowly. “Do you have any idea who it is? I’d like to thank them.”

The cashier shook her head. “Young guy. Stocky, medium height, ashy blonde hair, blue eyes. Very polite. Named Peter, I think. Something like that.”

It’s got to be him. The description’s too similar to be a coincidence. It seems the guy that froze her in place with his looks is as kind and compassionate as he is special. Now, he’s even more intimidating.

She nods her thanks and takes the change and her purchases. The five in her pocket gives her a little joy, but the feeling of not having money still bothers her. Maybe it’s time to get a credit card. She’s been warned off them for so long that she never applied for one, but now, it might be something she should do. Maybe. It makes her nervous to think she could get in financial trouble with it. She’s been poor her entire life. It might be too tempting to resist.

When she makes it back to her apartment, her attempt to unpack her groceries is interrupted frequently by long pauses in which she fantasizes about finding the guy who’s rocked her world and given her daydreams about all the ways she needs to thank him (appropriately and not so much) for the rest of her life. It’s not unrealistic at all. Totally doable, she decides. After all, how hard can it be to find him again? They live in the same town.

****

The answer to that question is that it’s very hard. Difficult isn’t even the word to describe the problem she has in trying to find the Boy With the Bread, which is what she calls him even though he’s definitely an adult. The person she saw from afar was all man if the stretch of his shirt across broad shoulders was any indication. Still, the alliteration makes her smile, so she continues to refer to him as such.

It shouldn’t take so long, but it does. Months pass, and she wonders if she’s made it all up and imagined the creature that changed her life. She keeps her eyes open in public, scans the local news and social media sites, and seriously considers setting up an online dating site just to see if he’s looking for someone. She’s getting desperate, but then fate smiles on her again.

She’s sitting in a coffee shop, something she hardly ever does, when he walks in the door. She doesn’t normally have time for such a mundane, normal activity that other people her age seem to enjoy all the time. She’s usually working during the day, and she has no desire to consume copious amounts of caffeine after 5 pm when she gets off work. Today, though, she has time. She’s taken a half day to run errands and go to the dentist, and she needs the jolt the espresso will give her to survive her reduced shift.

He ducks through the doorway just as she’s taken a sip of her hot beverage, and she almost chokes on the liquid. He shakes the umbrella he’s holding just outside the door and shoves a riot of blonde curls off his forehead that have shrunken up and frizzed from the rain. It’s adorable.

He’s wearing an emerald Henley and faded jeans that hug all the right places. The sight of him freezes her in place, but that doesn’t stop her from tracking him as moves past her. She’s close enough to see his eyes are blue before he marches across the café and approaches a man sitting alone in the corner. They clasp hands and grin at each other, and the vision in green heads to the counter to order.

She’s dumbfounded. Here he is again after so long, and she can’t think of a single thing to say to him or how in the world to actually approach him without making her look absolutely insane. She racks her brain trying to think of an intelligent topic, but she’s jolted from that when the barista walks to the end of the bar and calls a name.

“Peeta! Chai Latte.”

That’s his name, she realizes, and it’s like the sun’s broken through thick, heavy clouds. It’s just unusual enough to fit him and still feel familiar. He smiles at the woman behind the bar and takes the cup from her. He ordered chai, and she files that information away for future reference. He might not like coffee, which seems important.

She’s pondering a trip to the bathroom just so she has an excuse to pass by him when she suddenly understands that he’s leaving. He and his friend are talking as they walk to the door, and she catches the sound of his voice.

“—we can change that, the numbers will—”

His words are swallowed by the rush of traffic outside, but that silky tone she hardly had a chance to listen to has already taken up residence in the part of her brain that creates unrealistic fantasies. She daydreams for longer than she should. In fact, it’s only the vibration of her phone against the table that reminds her she has to get to her job. What a chance encounter, but now she has a name to go with that face.

****

She’s tried to find him again. She’s googled and returned to the coffee shop when she’s had a spare minute or two. She’s asked around and continues to check dating sites. Nothing. She’s found absolutely nothing. Without a last name, she has very little idea how to find out anything else. Frustrated, she goes about her daily life with a weight on her shoulders that shouldn’t be there. He’s a stranger she’s glimpsed only a couple of times.

Frustrated and full of pent-up energy, she joins a gym. There’s nothing quite like working up a good sweat to ease tension and kickstart her brain, so she spends her free time running the track, lifting, and participating in every hot yoga class the establishment offers. After a month, she’s leaner and stronger than ever, but she hasn’t managed to come up with any ideas that might help her find the guy she desperately wants to thank for saving her when she wasn’t sure how she’d eat for a week.

She’s two laps into her normal ten when she glances down from the elevated track and spots a pickup game of three on three basketball on the far court. Three blonde men face off against three with dark hair, one of whom looks remarkably like her best friend Gale Hawthorne, who she hasn’t seen since he left town for a job almost a year ago. As she jogs closer to the court, she realizes it is him teamed up with his brothers. The blonde men look like siblings, too, but she doesn’t spare them much of a glance. She’s got more laps to go, and she doesn’t want to draw any attention to herself. Gale didn’t bother to tell her that he’s in town, and she’s a little miffed by that.

It’s another three passes by the court before it hits her that the blonde men look familiar. She puts on a burst of speed to get back to where she can see the men closeup and almost trips over her own feet when she spies him. It’s the guy. THE guy. The cashier had said Peter, and the barista had called him Peeta. She stops in her tracks and grabs the railing when someone bumps into her from behind.

“Watch it!” he yells as the jogger passes her. “You’re not supposed to stop on the track!”

She dismisses him with a wave and sprints to the nearest stairwell. If she can just catch them… She bounds down the stairs, three at a time, and bursts into a bustling walkway. She dodges and shoves her way free and streaks around the corner to find—

“Catnip! What are you doing here?”

“Gale!” Sweat drips down her forehead and stings her eyes. Cringing, she swipes her hand across her face and tries not to cry. “Where are—? I thought you were playing basketball.”

He throws her a bewildered look and nods like she’s lost it a little. “We were.”

“You’re done?”

“Yeah? We’d been at it for a while. Are you… Have you been watching me?”

Katniss rolls her eyes, although that’s not really very fair. She had noticed him. It’s not like that’s not the case. “Who were you playing with? I saw Vic and Rory, but the blonde guys… Who, er, who were they?”

The expression on his face would be priceless if she weren’t so desperate to find out the information. He looks like he’s swallowed something very, very distasteful, and she tries hard not to snort with laughter.

“Why?”

She takes in his narrowed eyes and realizes she’s going to have to lie to get what she wants. Part of the reason they haven’t been as close since he left town is due to his sudden confessions of feelings toward her. She’d let him down easy, but things have been strained since then. There’s no need to rub that in his face when all she wants is to find out about Peeta. With a straight face and innocent eyes, she explains, “I think one of them door dinged my car a couple of weeks ago. The gym won’t give out membership information, but if you know who they are… Well, I’d be really grateful, Gale.”

He falls for it when she bats her eyelashes at him. She should feel terrible, but all’s fair in love and basketball. Of all people, Gale should want her to be happy, no matter if that means she’s interested in someone else or not. She’s no damsel in distress, unless she can’t pay for her groceries or something. However, her simpering works, and that’s really what she needs.

“Mellark is the last name. They all have bread names. It’s weird.”

She rolls the name around in her head for a bit. Peeta Mellark. It’s a nice solid name, and now she has more information to help her figure out how to find him. Almost giddy with victory, she stretches up on her tiptoes and kisses Gale’s cheek in gratitude. Backing away before he can reciprocate, she hears him as the distance widens between them.

“Do you want to grab dinner sometime? Maybe?”

“Sorry, Gale! Got to go. Really good to see you!”

With that, she turns her back and slips down the hall to the women’s locker room. She doesn’t bother to shower before grabbing her bag and heading to her car. She’s barely closed the door before she’s on her phone and typing in the name Peeta Mellark. She has a thank you to deliver.

****

Surprisingly, it’s not much easier to find him now that she knows his full name. She unveils a lot of information about his family, but not him. Apparently, they own a few local bakeries that she tries out and loves. Still, Peeta’s family is not the same thing as Peeta, who is remarkably absent from social media and with no online presence. She’s willing to admit, she got cocky, and now she can’t figure out how to recover from it.

“Where the hell is he?” she mutters as she comes up empty. Again.

Frustrated, she runs over all the data she’s gathered about him. He’s kind, compassionate, and thoughtful; all of those qualities were on display at the grocery store. He drinks tea and has a very good-looking friend who he talks to about numbers; that she learned at the coffee shop. He’s athletic and has two brothers he likes well enough to exercise with them; that information, and his last name, came from the gym. It should be enough to go on. It’s not.

She’s at home on her couch and paying bills when it suddenly hits her that she may never see this guy again. Peeta Mellark seems to be a figment of her imagination for all the good it’s done to try to find him. That and the small number in her bank account are both so unpleasant that she decides she’s going to have to break down and do something she’s been avoiding and delaying for a very long time. She’s going to have to open a line of credit. She’ll only use it for emergencies, but she can’t rely on the kindness of strangers to bail her out the next time she doesn’t have money for groceries, let alone car maintenance or an unforeseen medical crisis. It’s been months since Peeta saved her, but the humiliation of not being able to take care of herself still hasn’t faded. Before she can change her mind, she grabs her purse and heads to the bank. The time is now.

“Can I help you?” A bubbly blonde teller named Delly asks, and Katniss takes a deep breath to fortify herself.

“I’d like to open a line of credit. Can I talk to someone about that?”

“Sure!” she practically squeals. “Let me just call someone to help you.”

She’s led down the hallway and past a few desks to a small office. Once ushered inside, she sits and raises her eyes to view the person across from her.

“Oh…”

The man before her is stunning—green eyes, bronze hair, a swimmer’s build. It’s the guy’s—Peeta’s—friend, the one he was with at the coffee shop.

“Ms. Everdeen. I’m Finnick Odair. Want some sugar?” he asks and nudges a candy bowl toward her.

“No, I’m fi—.”

“Hey, Finn. Can you— Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you were with a customer.”

She jerks at the sound of his voice. Peeta Mellark is standing in the doorway, and her heart is in her throat. She has a sudden flashback of the coffee shop, when the two of them walked past her discussing numbers… Now, it all makes sense. They work at a bank together. Of course they do. Peeta turns to leave, and she calls out.

“Wait! Stay with me.”

She claps her hands over her mouth and wills herself not to blush, but it’s no use. She’s just asked a perfect stranger to stay with her, and her invitation sounds much more intimate than she means it to. He must think she’s insane. Maybe she actually is. She pushes down a sudden urge to flee the situation and escape to the safety of her apartment.

This is out of her wheelhouse. Shy, introverted, and intensely private, Katniss worries the end of her braid and bites her lip. Every instinct she has tells her to run, but the temptation of him before her is too great. Rising, she crosses to him and holds out her hand.

“Hi. My name is Katniss. You saved my life once, and I’ve been on the hunt to find you for months. Thank you.”

Peeta and his friend exchange looks, and she fights the urge to shrivel back into herself. Finally, he looks directly at her and takes her palm in his. With a smile so disarming she nearly faints, he answers.

“Peeta Mellark. It’s nice to meet you.”

The touch of his hand on hers melts her insides. She dreads when she finally has to let go, but maybe she won’t have to. With a shy smile, she cocks out her hip and looks up at him through long lashes. Her flirting may be a disaster, but it’s all she’s got.

“It’s so nice to meet you, too.”

The flicker in his eyes makes her knees weak. An hour later, she’s left the bank with a line of credit, a phone number, and a dinner date. The hunt is finally over.

[marjansmarwani]

we won the cosmic lottery

2.1k || ao3

When Mya convinces Carlos to try speed dating on what would otherwise be a lonely Valentine’s Day, he’s pretty sure it’s going to be a disaster. Until a man who manages to light up his world with one look slides into the seat before him, that is. Suddenly he’s feeling a lot more optimistic.

Or, Tarlos Alternate First Meeting: Speed Dating Edition

I wrote fluff again and I am probably more surprised than you are. 

But I found this prompt from @madamewriterofwrongs in my inbox from several months ago and figured why not write a Valentine’s Day fic and try to stretch those fluff muscles again. Beta’d by @officereyes 💕 

-----------

As bad ideas went, Carlos was pretty sure this was one. 

“I cannot believe I let you talk me into this.” 

“What, you had other hot plans for Valentine’s Day?” Mya asked him, raising a skeptical eyebrow at him over her drink. 

“No,” Carlos admitted, “but that doesn’t mean this was the correct alternative.” 

“Why not? You’ll waste an hour of your life, talk to some people, come out with some good stories if nothing else. I think it sounds like the perfect alternative to spending the night home alone with Netflix.” 

“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,” he told her, tipping his glass to her before taking another drink.

“I have tried it Carlos, far too many times. You have too - that’s why we’re here.” 

“To get a look at Austin’s future serial killers?” 

Mya rolled her eyes at him before lightly smacking his arm with her clutch, “No, Officer Buzzkill. We’re here for a chance to maybe meet Mr. or Ms. Right.” 

Carlos twisted on his stool to survey the crowd gathered in the reserved section of the bar. He typically didn’t like to make assumptions without at least trying to get to know someone first, but he could honestly say that none of the men in the crowd even gave him the slightest glimmer of hope for the evening. He should have stayed home. 

He turned back to Mya with a dubious expression and she rolled her eyes again, “Lighten up Carlos, at the very least it can’t hurt.”

Carlos cast a glance back to one guy who was leering at him from the other side of the room and grimaced, “I’m not too sure about that.” 

His partner opened her mouth to respond but was interrupted by someone grabbing a microphone and calling the crowd to attention. 

“Good evening lonely hearts!” the host said once the din of the crowd had died down. Carlos shot Mya a look but she ignored him. 

“We’re going to get started here in a few minutes,” the host continued, “but before we start moving I just wanted to go over the specifics. Upon checking in you were given a bracelet. These are to help with the logistics. If you received a red bracelet you will be taking a seat at any of the open tables. If you got a pink one you will be rotating between the tables.”

Carlos glanced down at his wrist to see a red bracelet sitting there. Mya held up her own wrist to show another red one, “Looks like we both get to have people come to us tonight.” 

Carlos chuckled at her before turning his attention back to the host, who was still explaining the rules. 

“When the bell dings, you will rotate to the table to your right. You will have 3 minutes with each potential suitor and when the bell rings, you will move to the next one. Make sure that you write down their number and check yes or no before you part on the card provided - that’s how we will be pairing you! At the end of the evening we will be comparing all the lists and you will receive a list of the names and contact info of any suitors you mutually matched with to the email provided. After that, the ball is in your court! So make sure you make the most of these three minutes; it could be the time you find your soulmate!” 

The room filled with polite clapping and Carlos turned again to Mya, “You can’t be serious.” 

“Lighten up Reyes,” she said with a wink, “you wouldn’t want to scare your potential soulmate away.” 

“Fine, I’ll ‘lighten up’. But if one of these creeps murders me to make a skin suit, I’m holding you personally responsible.” 

“I don’t believe in ghosts so your threats have no effect on me.” 

There were several more things he wanted to say to his partner, but he was interrupted by the sound of the host telling them all to head to their respective areas. As they went to stand up, Mya reached out to touch his arm, “it’s going to be fine Carlos, really. You’ve got this; try to have some fun for once.” 

Her tone and expression were much more gentle than before and he took a deep breath, forcing himself to relax, “Thanks Mya,” he replied with a grateful smile. “Now go find Ms. Right.” 

She matched his smile and with a wave, she was gone. Carlos took another steady breath and headed to the guy’s section of the room, taking a seat at one of the tables. He pulled the card out of his jacket pocket and picked up one of the pencils waiting on the table, twirling it through his fingers anxiously. And when the first contender of the night slid into the seat before him he forced on a warm smile and held out his hand in greeting. Mya was right, he had this. 

--------

7 dates later he was less sure he had this. 

They hadn’t all been creeps, per se (though numbers 2 and 6 definitely had been) but they also hadn’t done anything to elicit any kind of spark in Carlos. They had been nice enough and reasonably good looking, but Carlos had decided a long time ago that good enough wasn’t worth the effort. If he was going to try and make a go of something with someone, they had to be someone who made him feel something. It had to be worth the risk. 

He was contemplating his abysmal luck when the next guy slid into the chair across from him. Carlos looked up and all coherent thoughts fled his head. This guy was... gorgeous was the only word Carlos could come up with that did him justice. Everything about him was perfect and Carlos couldn’t bring himself to look away. 

He eventually noticed the extended hand in what he sincerely hoped was a normal amount of time and took it, still studying him as he blurted out the first thought that came to mind: “I didn’t see you here before.” 

He definitely hadn’t been here when things were starting, Carlos would have noticed him in a crowd, he was absolutely sure about that. The other man smiled sheepishly, “yeah, I got here a bit late. I was trying to convince myself to actually come. My friends had to practically push me in the door.” 

Carlos chuckled, “My friend had to pretty much drag me here with her. Are your friends here?” 

“They’re at a bar down the street for ‘moral support’,” he responded with an eye roll, but a fond expression. 

“That’s so helpful.” 

“Isn’t it?” 

They both laughed again before Carlos suddenly realized they had yet to even exchange names, “I’m Carlos, by the way.” 

“TK, nice to meet you.” 

“That’s an interesting name. Does it stand for something?” 

TK grinned at him coyly, “It does, but that’s at least a level 4 backstory, and we’re barely at level one.” 

Carlos grinned back, feeling the quip come easily despite the butterflies definitely fluttering in his stomach, “Well, we’ve got some time to work on that. Personally though I recommend we skip over levels 1 and 2, those are mundane at best.” 

TK’s green eyes lit up as he laughed. The sound sent a shock through Carlos’s entire body and in that moment, Carlos decided he had been wrong. He owed Mya an apology: this had been an excellent idea after all. 

-----

His three minutes with TK had not been nearly long enough. When the bell had dinged he had nearly jumped out of his skin. He had been so absorbed in their conversation he hadn't noticed the passage of time. It felt like they had been talking all night, but also as if they had barely begun to talk at all. 

TK gave him an apologetic smile as he stood from his chair, “I guess that’s my cue. It was really nice talking to you though, Carlos.”

“Yeah, you too,” he responded. He hesitated for a moment as he studied the other man. In only three minutes he had felt more of a connection with TK than he had with people he had dated for weeks. Maybe it was that they were both first responders, maybe it was something else, but he wasn’t ready to let this go. So many things were mysteries, but Carlos knew one thing for sure: if he let TK walk away from him tonight, he might just end up regretting it for the rest of his life. 

“Would you maybe like to catch up when we’re done here? Maybe get a drink, talk some more?” 

TK paused mid-stride, raising an eyebrow, “You still have two more dates left, how do you know you won’t want to spend the evening with them instead?” 

“Call it intuition.” 

He could call it intuition or blind hope or desperation if he wanted, Carlos really didn’t care. He just knew in his gut that it was right, that TK was someone he needed to get to know more. TK was still considering him, and Carlos anxiously awaited his verdict. This was so far outside of his comfort zone and he was pretty sure that if TK turned him down he was going to head back to his condo tonight and not leave for at least two days, too buried in embarrassment and shame to face the outside world. But this felt worth the risk; he just hoped he hadn’t read these feelings wrong. 

Finally, after what felt like a lifetime passing in the moment of a breath, TK smiled. “I’d like that,” he said, “I guess bachelors 9 and 10 are out of luck for both of us then.” 

“Try to let them down easy.” 

TK laughed again, squeezing his shoulder as he walked away, “As long as you promise to do the same—getting turned down by you would be a tough pill to swallow, Carlos. Try to break their hearts gently.”  

-------

Carlos was still feeling the euphoria of TK’s smile 10 minutes later when a figure slid into the seat next to him at the bar. He turned eagerly, ready to see TK’s eyes again and felt disappointment, followed by instant guilt, when it wasn’t TK but Mya occupying the seat next to him. 

“Well that was a waste of time,” she declared as she slumped forward onto the bar, “you were right. I shouldn’t have dragged you here, I’m sorry. Wanna go get tacos at that truck you love to drown our sorrows?” 

“Actually,” Carlos began, but their conversation was interrupted by the sound of someone calling his same from behind them. They turned in tandem and Carlos felt his heart beat just a little faster at the sight of TK, who was looking between him and Mya. 

“Hey Carlos, I just wanted to see if you were ready for that drink yet. If you’re not we can...” 

Mya interrupted before TK could finish his sentence, “I was just leaving, actually. I’m Mya, by the way—Carlos’s partner and friend.” 

TK turned his gorgeous smile on her and held out a hand, “TK Strand, nice to meet you.” 

“TK’s a firefighter,” Carlos told Mya, biting back a smile as she raised an eyebrow and TK nodded, “I’m with the 126.”

“Well, TK Strand with the 126, take good care of my partner here. He’s pretty special.” 

“I’ve already gotten that feeling,” TK agreed, giving Carlos another grin that he felt straight through to his soul. 

Mya smirked as she stood from her seat, looking between them as she pulled out her keys, “I’d say have a good rest of the night, but I think that’s already a given. I’ll see you on Monday Carlos, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“And that would be what, exactly?” 

Mya shrugged as she started to walk away, “I’m sure I’ll think of something.” 

“Text me when you get home!” he called after her. 

“Yes mom!” she called back as she reached the door. Before she opened it to head out into the Austin night she turned one more time and shot him a smile and a thumbs up. He rolled his eyes fondly, but nodded. Then she was gone and he turned all of his attention to the man beside him. He was grinning too and Carlos was starting to get the feeling that he might never get used to the things that smile did to him.  

TK slid into Mya’s abandoned seat and leaned closer to him, “So where do we start?” 

Carlos smiled back and waved down the bartender to get drinks for them. He wasn’t sure where to begin, but he had a feeling wherever it was would be the beginning of something great. He turned and caught TK’s eyes again, savoring the warmth that emanated from them. 

Tonight may have started out feeling like a mistake, but he was starting to think it may have actually been more like fate. 

[thiswasinevitableid]

For the meet-ugly prompts: #13, Indruck, SFW ? 👁️👁️

Here you go!

13: we make contact before trying to steal the last seat on the subway/bus/train and I end up in your lap and fuck you, I’m going to stay here because I’ve had a really long day and this seat was mine

The Phoenix Starport is a labyrinth, while technically made of chrome and touch-screens, is really made of lines.

Duck stands in line to show his ticket, to deposit his bags, to go through three separate security check-points and, when he gets to the section for the shuttle to take him to the Starliner, a fourth one because when your clients are high paying, you don’t want them getting blown to pieces.

He isn’t high-paying, he isn’t a seasoned space traveler, and he isn’t going to spend one second more on his feet than he has to. It’s been two solid hours of that just to get to this point. Unfortunately, every other passenger shares this sentiment. When the shuttle door opens a mass of lifeforms pile in, hunting for seats. Duck spots one, turns to sit, and finds it’s much fuzzier than it looked.

“Excuse me.” The creature whose laps he’s in reminds him of the pictures of Mothman scattered around his home state, “but this seat is taken.”

“Yeah, by me, because I saw it first.”

A click from inside the mothmans chest, “You are wrong. I saw it first, and did not foresee anyone being rude enough to use me in its place.”

Every other seat is filled, and it’s a fifteen minute ride to the Starliner. Duck crosses his arms, “you don’t wanna be a seat, you better get up.”

That earns him an annoyed chirr, “Not a chance.”

The shuttle ride is smooth, but his seat keeps prodding him with a clawed finger whenever he puts his weight on it. When they arrive, the two of them stand one after the other. The mothman shakes out his feathers, tosses a glare over his shoulder, and steps through the doors.

Unsurprisingly, the Sylvain Dream makes opulence seem subdued. There are rare flowers studding the fountain by the concierge desk, art from across the universe on the walls, and a sound dampening, shimmering carpet lining the hall to his room. He’s looking forward to some alone time; while all the suites at this level are technically two person, they’re so expensive that most travelers get their own rooms.

He keys open the door and comes face to chest with the same fucking alien from the shuttle.

“Ah. So we are in this timeline. Lovely.” The mothman says dryly, passing him to greet the bellhop who just finished scurrying up the stairs, “I see you have a message from minister Woodbridge. Kindly have someone reply and tell him that if it’s an emergency, they may contact me directly, but if the matter is anything else, they are to leave me in peace during my journey.”

“Yes, Seer Cold.”

“Thank you.” the seer drops a coin into his hand and brushes past Duck without another word.

Duck finally makes it past the entryway and gasps; when the people paying for his journey asked if he’d prefer forest, city, beach, or desert, he assumed it was some sort of vague theme. Instead, the carpet is lush, soft grass, there are flowers everywhere, and the furniture is all made to be woodsy and rustic. The bath and shower are like a mini water-fall and pool, his bed housed in a mock cabin.

“This is amazing.”

“If you are here purely for a leisure trip.” His suite-mate crosses both sets of arms, “some of us are being transported back to work.”

“Now look, this is a work trip for me too. You gotta admit this is pretty swank.”

“And an attempt to soften the blow.” Mothman mutters.

Duck rolls his eyes, decides this is not his problem to deal with, and goes to unpack for the month-long journey ahead.

-----------------------------------------------------

For the first two days he and Indrid--which is what the aloof, perpetually touchy Sylph likes to be called--do their best to ignore each other. They’re stuck on the same dining schedule, which means Duck accidentally insults the alien by giggling when he sees him lick his dessert up with an absurdly long tongue. He makes it up to the next night by saving the pineapple soda delivered in their lunch basket for the Sylph.

On day three, he’s reading by the holo-fire pit when a white badge with blue writing dangles before him.

“Would you like to accompany me to the spa?”

“Uh….”

“Since I foresee you asking no, we do not have to spend the entire time together.”

“I, uh, I was gonna say sure, but was wonderin’ why you offered it to me.”

“Oh.” His antenna flick in a new way, “I, ah, they gave me two. I have no one else to go with and it seemed silly to let it go to waste.”

“I gotta wear anything special?”

“Since humans require clothes in all but a few scenarios, I suggest wearing your robe.”

The spa is just as elaborate as the rest of the ship, with cushy chairs and complimentary booze. The secretary hands them each a menu of treatments bigger than any Duck’s held at a restaurant.

“Sugar scrub….talon wax….rock massage. Do they mean hot rocks?”

“No, that treatment helps those with scales shed.”

“Huh.” Duck pokes his tongue in his cheek, “wish they said which of these were safe for, uh, squishy human bodies.”

Indrid reaches out a claw, tapping several on the list, “This ful massage would be good; you’re muscular, it will be nice to have those muscles tended to.”

“Oh, uh, thanks. Have been workin out more, nice to have someone else notice.”

The Sylph smiles, “you may also like the hair luxury add-on; I’ve always thought humans with salt and pepper hair should show it off.”

Before Duck can ask how Indrid developed that opinion or learned that slang, they’re ushered off into separate rooms. He’s scrubbed and rubbed until his body surrenders the last of it’s stress, the oils they rub on his skin and into his hair smelling pleasantly of pine and cedar. His session ends with one of the staff leading him to a small room covered in deep green marble, where he can rinse and dry off in his own time.

Indrid is in the same room, reclining in a chair with a sun lamp on his wings. They’ve been groomed, the feather straighter and smoother than this morning. Duck takes his first real look at them, notices how the black is iridescent and that there are two bands of deep grey on the inside close to Indrid’s torso.

He’s really quite stunning.

“I feel” Indrid murmurs, “as if we got off to a bad start.”

“You think?” Duck aims for a genial tone.

Indrid cocks his head, “Yes. That is why I said it. I, ah, I ought to apologize for my temperament over the last few days. I am so very fond of earth, of humans, and I’d hoped to be able to work there indefinitely. But Sylvain is in crisis, and so they need me near. Never mind that we have the capability to transmit messages quickly between planets.”

“What’s the crisis?”

“Our plants are dying or failing to produce the resources we need. The belief is that-”

“-it’s a leftover contamination or mutation from the earth plants that crossed through the gate before it was destroyed.”

Indrid blinks, then grins, “it is novel to be the one having their sentences finished. Yes, Duck Newton; the gate has been gone for over two hundred years, but both our worlds will feel it’s effects for many more years.” His antenna perk up, “you’re the one they’re bringing on to consult.”

“Yep. That’s why they gave me such a sweet deal on the trip; they know it’s gonna be fuckin exhaustin work. Even with all the other perks they’re offerin, I know a lot of folks didn’t wanna apply.”

“Why did you feel differently?”

He pushes to the other side of the little pool so they can be closer, “I spent my whole life in the town I grew up in. I love what I do, I love helpin forests stay healthy and regrow and I...I dunno, how often do you get the chance to go to space and see forests on another planet?”

“Once, if you are me.” Indrid closes his wings, clicks off the light, and offers Duck a hand, “and I am glad you will have the chance to do the same.”

-----------------------------------------------

“You know” Indrid passes Duck the plate of toast, “I am named for Sylph who was the second most recent seer after myself. He and I are the same kind of Sylph, and when my parents learned their mothling-to-be was the next seer, they decided I would be Indrid Cold.”

“Not gonna lie, people actin like your fate is set in stone from birth gives me the creeps.”

“Understandable. I would not admit this to the other ministers, but I am no longer content with reporting on the futures. I try to change fate when I can. In this way, I am also like the first Indrid Cold. He kept trying to intervene in disasters; that’s how he got seen when he should not have been.”

“Holy fuck, there really was a mothman!”

“Indeed. I also learned from his personal notes that he was so fond of humans, he ended up marrying one.”

“Damn” Duck passes him the sweetener for his tea, teases, “you share that habit too?”

Red eyes linger a moment too long on his body before Indrid grins, “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

----------------------------------------------

“You sure you don’t wanna swim?” Duck treads water in the green lagoon of some distant moon. The cruise is docked for an activity day, Duck having selected to spend it snorkeling and Indrid deciding to spend it with Duck.

“The wings are not built for it. Though the water does look pleasant.” Indrid lazily sifts black sand through his claws.

“You could wade in. It stays pretty shallow there” he points to a sand bar.

“If I get in over my head, will you come to my aid?”

“You know it.”

Indrid wades in, chirping as the waves hit his knees. When Duck next glances at him, Indrid is glancing right back. He’s smiling, soft and secretive.

“I am glad you picked this spot. The view is spectacular.”

-----------------------------------------------

They’ve hit turbulence a handful of times, all of which pale in comparison to the jolt that sends him tumbling out of bed. There are stabilizer controls to lighten the gravity in the room so they won’t feel the bumps as badly. But when he wobbles over, he finds it’s already up to the lowest it can be without him floating.

He stumbles to the window, the curtains shut against the vast universe. Is turbulence this severe normal? If the gravity doohickey isn’t able to help, maybe that means they’ve never hit a storm this bad.

Opening the window is a terrible idea; there’s no cause of the turbulence to be seen, and now he’s in a dark room staring into the depths of space, it’s so big, he’s so small, they all are, the forces of nature still have it in them to crack this ship like an egg, killing them all.

“Would it help if I said there are no futures where this storm poses a threat to us?” Indrid whispers from behind him.

“Kinda.”

“Would it help to see something breathtaking?”

“Wh-”

Indrid taps the glass, drawing Ducks attention to two massive, starry shapes, “Celestial whales. At least that’s the human name for them.”

“Holy fuck.” They remind Duck of Whale Sharks, but impossibly bigger, skin coated in thousands of star-spots, “how can they do that? I mean, obviously they ain’t mammals, but fuckin nothin thrives in deep space.”

“No one is certain.” Indrid sighs, happily, “isn’t it wonderful to know there are such things in the universe?”

“Yeah. AHfuck” He hits the wall as the whole ship shudders, “fuck, sorry-”

“It’s alright. It can be alarming when you’re on your first trip through the cosmos. I, ah, I have something that may help, if you’re alright with me touching you some.”

“Fine by me.” Duck follows Indrid to the Sylph’s bed. The seer sits cross-legged with his back against the wall and instructs Duck to rest his head in his lap. The points of his claws begin rubbing his neck and the base of his skull, Indrid humming at a low, steady pitch until Duck’s eyes start to close.

The pressure points are helping, he can tell by his loosening spine. But what soothes him to sleep is the repetitive reminder of Indrid there with him in the dark.

When he wakes up the storm is gone. His body is still moving, rising and falling in time with Indrid’s breath as he sleeps. He pulled Duck atop him in the night, and at some point must have wrapped him in his wings, since once, is still half-flopped on Duck’s back.

Seized with affection, Duck kisses his shoulder. When this earns him a happy chirp, he does it again, then kisses a cheerful path up to Indrid’s cheek. Red eyes open, sleepy and full of tenderness, just in time for the Sylph to turn his head and kiss Duck properly.

“What a lovely thing to awaken to.”

“No kiddin” Duck kisses him again, “fuck, Indrid, this is the weirdest goddamn thing to ever happen to me and I’m thinkin it might also be the best.”

Indrid hugs him close, “We shall have ample time to find out, if you wish to do so.”

“Hell yeah. But we only got a few days before we hit Sylvain.”

“Yes” Indrid kisses his nose, “but I happen to foresee Woodbridge ignoring my request for peace and sending me a message saying I will be working closely with a certain, visiting forestry expert.”