#also my most used tags are those to nobody's surprise

[gilbirda]

I posted 16,670 times in 2022

That's 6,991 more posts than 2021!

372 posts created (2%)

16,298 posts reblogged (98%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@mekakido

@deathcomes4u

@high-pot-in-noose

@hopefulbandittrashsoul

@sometimes-me

I tagged 2,530 of my posts in 2022

#danny phantom - 192 posts

#gil answers - 162 posts

#dp x dc - 144 posts

#dpxdc - 122 posts

#anger management ship - 102 posts

#batman dc - 90 posts

#jazz/jason - 78 posts

#jazz x jason - 71 posts

#jason todd - 69 posts

#dc x dp - 69 posts

Longest Tag: 140 characters

#add spain and that time we had 4 presidents in 4 month and some guy had to storm the congress riding a horse and declare some random dude k

I sent 1 gift in 2022

My Top Posts in 2022:

(in a read more bcs is long)

#5

Good Cop! Jason and Bad Cop! Jazz would be super hilarious 😂 Imagine Red Hood just pointing a gun at a criminal and being like, "Look, either you face my bullet or you talk your feelings out, what'll it be?"

And the criminal just scoffs, "How about we talk about my feelings?"

"Alright."

And then, this sweet young lady walks in, with a sweet smile, and says, "Now let's talk about your mommy issues."

"I'd rather face the bullet, ma'am."

AKWJDJCJFJDJJSJDJDJFJ

LMAO THIS WOULD BE THE FUNNIEST THING.

Honestly, power couple. One can make you cry and scream and regret everything.... and the other can do that as well but with a sweet smile and kind words.

Weaponized psychology.

But not like Spectra - nah, she's not into misery or causing problems. She just knows that some people would prefer death before facing their own issues.

I love this so much.

"I'd rather face the bullet, ma'am."

This will live rent free in my head.

794 notes - Posted August 7, 2022

#4

Mondays, am I right?

Or Danny is an Arkham Security Guard, from this post

Forgot to link some AMAZING art for this idea. Inspired the 'sneakers' part.

SOME FANART FOR MY FIC

[Read on AO3][Read on FF.net]

Sequel - Employee of the month >>

The first thing Danny said when Jazz expressed her interest in interning at Arkham was:

“Are you out of your goddamn mind?”

To which she answered:

“It is said that you have to be a bit crazy to work in Arkham, soooo…”

Danny had to agree that her response was quick and true, but still he didn’t like her going to that madhouse and probably die because, I dunno, Joker woke up wrong or she tried to psychoanalyze the Riddler. He said this to her through the phone, hoping that she could imagine him pacing up and down the apartment.

“The security there is top notch, Danny, and the bat-fam is always one call away.”

“You know as well as I do that’s bullshit. The guards are human, some of those crazies are not.”

“That term is very harmful, Daniel,” she used her mom voice.

“Sorry. But you see what I mean, right? If anything happens I won’t be there to save you. Not in time, at least.” He could try and measure how long it would take to fly from his apartment to Arkham, just in case.

There was a long silence. He heard his sister breathe in, breathe out, like she was mentally preparing herself to say something.

“I… I heard, from other interns I talked to, that guard positions are always open. And that it’s super easy to get in.”

“Jazz. Are you-”

“Don’t. I know you. Don’t think I’ll ever forget the ‘visits’ when I started college.”

Danny looked down and stopped pacing. Maybe he was a bit overprotective of his sister. Maybe he freaked out for weeks after she moved to her dorm, complaining about how long it took him to fly there. 

He regretted nothing.

“Gotham is too far from Amity. I prefer cutting the chase and having you with me in Arkham than dealing with a helicopter little brother on the reg.”

He swallowed the knot in his throat. “Is this your sisterly way of telling me that I should get a job?”

“I gave up after you were fired from the Nasty Burger. Nasty Burger, Danny! Not even Val was fired, and she had another job and the Red Huntress business!”

“I know…”

Jazz sighed. “I’m going to nap a bit and then finish packing things up here. I’ll text you the site where you can apply for the guard job.”

“Thanks, Jazzy.”

“Don’t call me that. Love you.”

“Love you.”

***

See the full post

813 notes - Posted February 1, 2022

#3

Time for some BatPham and DPxDC fic recs

I got a comment asking for some recs and I thought it'll be easier to have a masterlist or something in my tumblr and link that

SOOOOO I asked the BatPham server for recs and I'll just slap them here and add some that come to my mind in no particular order because it's 4:20 am (blaze it)(not really, kids, dont smoke) and ill comment some ive read personally

cheers!!!!

Now with Part 2!

Just the Typical Weirdness by Pandemi

The Phantom and the Knight by savya398

The Auction by Lalenja (young justice crossover)

30 Days of Kidnappings by Hyperintrovert

Types of Family by NerdofSpades

Unearthed, Reborn by QueenOfTheQuill

Pearls and Pomegranates by Evandarya (BrainDead (TimxDanny) inspired in Hades&Persephone)

The Fantabulous Emancipation of Danny Fenton by HistoricallyInnacurate

It Matters to Have this Ghost Clan Near (This Family I Never Knew) by SagaDuWyrm

The Captain and the King by Sivan5733 (A series featuring Captain Marvel AND John Constantine)

Change in Management by voidwriting (Love me some Sentient Gotham, I actually have to catch up with this gem of a fic) - with fanart!

Beauty lays behind the hills by Library_of_Cronos

moon's haunted by heybabybird (funny)

Speed Dial by apotheosis_avaritia (funny but short :( I want more)

Concession to Realism by wildimaginingsofhalfbakedideas (danny yeeted to WFA universe. Very cute)

Ghosts Don't go to High School by Evandarya (BrainDead cuteness tbh i love this one)

close enough to be whole again by hailsatanacab (twins Danny and Damian. ANGST. Good shit right here)

Green skies by siren_of_the_ocean

It's Hard to Make Friends When You're Half in the Grave by SagaDuWyrm

Leap Before You Think by TourettesDog

overbearing obsession by Ocearna (good shit right here, Ocearna's writing..... good)

Shrodinger’s Bat by Michaelisunderrated (angst! I have to catch up but it's really good as far as I read!!!)

Afterimage by TorScrawls (THE DESCRIPTIONS HERE! ELDRITCH DANNO..... GOOD)

Robin's Egg by Calix (really good!!!!! Damian is so serious and dangerous and will protect Danny like the "I only had X for a day but I would kill..." meme)

Raising Phantom by Imp_y (good shit!!!! de-aged Danny! Some Anger Management (JazzxJason) hints, batfam dynamics!!!)

See the full post

828 notes - Posted September 18, 2022

#2

Jason headcanon for y'alls consideration:

Jason needs glasses to read.

The boy must have read books in conditions that aren't optimal for reading. Since he was a kid.

Sure, the Pit could heal it all, but he was back it with his old habits after coming back to life, like hiding in dark corners to read. Places where no one would find him and he wouldn't be interrupted.

Sure, he could bring a lamp, but he was perfectly fine reading with whatever little light he got, why bother?

Fast forward some years, he notices that words get blurry and he has to squint more and more.

Roy mocks him. He looks like an old lady. Like a dad reading the newspaper.

He gets sent memes about old people facing small screens and modern technology

(Yes I'm pushing the Old Man Jason agenda as well, as seen in PandaRedd's skits.)

The thing is

He needs glasses to read.

Artists of Tumblr, please, I beg you. Jason with glasses.

1,372 notes - Posted October 20, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

An DC × DP AU wherein the whole of the Batclan is out of Gotham leaving Alfred with an empty mansion while the worst blizzard in decades in smothering out all crime in Gotham and Victor Fries is on a sort of parole with the League to conduct investigations on a Sub-Zero planet at the behest of the locals.

All is quiet until a silent alarm goes off and informs Alfred that one of the patio doors had been opened from the outside despite being locked, Alfred makes his way to the camera room to gaze upon the possible thief if not thieves. Instead he is greeted by a group of six poorly clad teens with two of them showing early signs of frostbite while another looks as if they are on the verge of going into hypothermia. Alfred realizes that the break in was to find shelter rather than ill intent, furthermore after listening in on the teens he is able to detect an Illinois accent among the group and mentions of a "Guys in White" as well as hearing the young woman who could be a twin of a younger Miss Gordon mentioning "waiting out the blizzard and finding Batman".

Rather than waiting or doing what anyone else in his position would do by calling upon Gotham's Finest to removing the group, Alfred maeldebhisvway to the kitchen to whip up a batch of his beloved Hot Cocoa and made his way to the teens unconcerned for his safety as none of the six seemed particularly dangerous especially the three who appeared to be in the most dire of conditions.

An AU in which Six Teens (Danny, Jazz, Sam, Tucker, Valerie, and Dani) from Amity Park are on the run from the Ghost Investigation Ward and they break into Wayne Manor in search of Safety. An Alfred centric idea as the Batclan are all elsewhere and the blizzard making moving about Gotham nearly impossible, with the GIW in search of the Six.

You know what? We need more Alfred-centric fics. Alfred is the best and is the original adopter of the Wayne clan.

I mean he looked at the wet pathetic cat that was Bruce and said "this one, this is my son now".

I can imagine he notices that the kids aren't normal kids... skittish, won't let him touch them, one looks pale but swears he isn't injured, Barbara's doppelgänger is the mom of the group despite not being much older...

He sends a text to Bruce and the others, but messages are not going through with the blizzard. He considers using the Watchtower to pass on the message, but it's not an emergency, is just a hunch.

He makes the decision, then. A secret for a secret - he works for Batman and will ask him the favor to help.

They don't buy it until Alfred proves it, somehow. And then-

Then the kids start talking. Alfred can see that they don't want to reveal a lot, that they don't want to worry him or speak too much without Batman here or are used to not speaking at all.

"Batman has the no kill rule," Alfred says after he got a clearer picture of their situation, "but I don't."

I'd love to read this. Right now I don't have the spoons, so if anybody can and want to, this is up for adoption!!!

(ha!)

1,622 notes - Posted August 8, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[cheriladycl01]

Could you do fic for Fernando Alonso with wife reader?(no age gap). He saw that someone was flirting with her and she was oblivious to it. Then, he swoops in to ‘save’ her from a bad flirt when in reality they were just jealous. He also feels insecure about his age and to make him feel better, she reveals that she had a surprise for him. You decide what it was. Just something fluff and romantic. Tag me later!! Thanks :)))

You make me feel so …. I don’t know the word in English! -McLaren Fernando Alonso x ObliviousWife! Reader

Plot: Marrying Fernando Alonso was the best decision you ever made, you loved how manly and protective he was with you. However, recently he’s been getting jealous of the other men of the grid and how they treat you.

Fernando Alonso had been your husband for many years. You were sort of childhood sweethearts who married young on a whim and stuck together through it all.

You were able to travel the world with the person, later to be people you loved most. However recently you had a glow about it, maybe it was the fact that you were 1 month pregnant not to the knowledge of Fernando and not yet showing but just had that dewy, glowing skin that made you look radiant.

Everyone in the paddock took notice of this change, not that they couldn’t appreciate your attractiveness before, but now it just made them swoon anytime you breezed into the garage in one of your pretty sun dresses.

Today was no different, it was a beautiful sunny day in Mexico, and you were handing out water and fruit for the mechanics and engineers hard at work on your husbands car. You knew them all by name, you made sure you did, so greeting them was never an issue.

However, nobody told you of the rookie employee that had joined them for Mexico in McLaren garage. You immediately started to introduce yourself to the man, talking to him about what he was doing to the car and asking when he had joined them.

Unknown to you, the mechanic was smitten with you and everything you were telling him about your life. He was listening to every word you were telling him, and that was the effect you had on a lot of people.

“So are you, I dunno coming to the team dinner tonight?” He asks scratching the back of his neck and your about to answer with an animated yes until you feel a hand snake round your waist and pull you closer to them.

You look up and see your husband making you smile and pull him into a gentle kiss.

“Mmm my wife will be attending the dinner” Fernando says, you can’t tell but it’s said with a grit in his teeth and a sharp foxy look in his eyes that tells him to back off.

Fernando was used to you getting male attention, but lately it was constant and you didn’t even know it was happening, you were just so oblivious and he hated that you didn’t realise all these people were flirting with you.

And that mechanic wasn’t even the last of it.

Maybe it was something in the Mexican air, but even Fernando couldn’t seem to keep his hands off you over the weekend, especially after your run in with Lewis, and your old friend Jenson.

When Lewis come up to you, you had a big grin on your face.

“Hey darling. How are you?” He asked kissing either side of your cheeks looking over you with those eyes that would draw any woman in, but you. You had no idea those flirty eyes were intended that way. You just saw the kind chocolate brown and assumed the sparkle and glint in there was happiness to see you.

“I’m really good Lew! Just getting to that point of the day where I’m so exhausted, not all of us are young athletes that look 10 year more youthful than they are” you joked to him making him laugh.

“Mmm you definitely don’t struggle in that department” he says looking over you and you beam at him.

“It’s just so warm, do you recon you can help me take my jacket off? I’m not sure where Fernando is, and the buttons always get caught in my hair” you ask, looking round quickly to see if you can in fact bother your husband with the minor inconvenience at hand.

“Of course, turn around for me” he instructs before pulling your hair back and carefully peeling the tight jacket from your body, now showing off the full look of the sundress you were wearing and how it clung to your most valuable assets in the best ways.

“New dress” Lewis asks observing it making you nod.

“Mmmm, I love getting to wear these kinds of dresses in this heat, they make me feel very pretty” you smile as you shove your hands into the pockets of your dress that when you first got it you couldn’t stop telling Fernando about them, before doing a little spin for Lewis, showing of the small slit in the dress.

Fernando came over the minute he saw the look on Lewis face, who was holding your jacket as he spoke to you.

“Lewis” Fernando faked a smile at the fellow driver, once again wrapping his arms around you so you were in front of him with a tight grip and nowhere to go.

“Hello Fernando” Lewis smiles coyly with a slight smirk. The two make idle conversation before Fernandos dragging you away trying to lightly ask you to stay out in the garage and don’t stray away.

But once he was in the car, you found yourself needing the toilet (Curse the start of your baby sitting on your bladder) and another drink due to the high temperatures Mexico was experiencing that day.

There you found Jenson who was just finishing up with an interview before his eyes landed on you.

“Well if it isn’t Y/N Alonso, looking as beautiful as ever” he grins and you pull him into a hug.

You’d known Jenson for pretty much your whole life being childhood friends from Primary school in the UK. You met Fernando when you went to university in Spain, you always joked that you would have still met someone even if it was later in life because Jenson would have likely introduced you.

So when Fernando saw you and him jokingly messing around with one another his face was like thunder.

Jenson could immediately tell and said a quick goodbye to you not wanting to be at the brunt of the Spaniards anger.

“Fernando baby, what’s the matter?” You ask, coming close to him and trying to thread your fingers through his but he shoves your hand away lightly.

“When will you see it?” He demands and you cock your head to the side, not understanding what he meant, making him groan at how cute you looked.

“See what mi amor?” You ask, using Spanish to see if he’d be calmer.

“You don’t see all these BOYS flirting with you and trying to win you over and you don’t see how it affects me and upsets me! And you make me so mad when you entertain it’s and and I don’t know the world in English because I don’t even think there is a word to describe it!” He exclaims all at once making you step back.

He was really really hurt by all this… and you hadn’t been able to see it.

“Have you ever thought that I don’t notice it because I only have eyes for you?” You ask softly, taking his hand happy and satisfied he lets you this time.

“I know I know, I just think… all of these men coming up to you … they are younger than us and it just makes me think they could give you more than I can” he sighs and looks at you with those little puppy dog eyes.

“Don’t you dare say that!” You exclaim almost offended. He had in fact brought your age into it aswell!

“How dare you say that they could give me more than you can, when you damn well know you’ve given me everything!” You say raising your voice.

“Fernando, I love you, and only you! How can you not see that!” You ask.

“I do see it, I just someone feel insecure and I worry that we are too late to experience certain things and its all my fault coz I put it off because of my career!” He explains and your head cocks to the side once again, wondering what he feels like he’s too late to experience.

“What, what do you think we’ve left too late?” You question.

“Kids, travelling the world without my career being there … I dunno I just had a different timeline for us when we first met” he sighs rubbing his temple before pulling you closer to him and resting his head in the crook of you neck as he takes in your sent.

“Baby, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. I was going to wait for after the race so we could tell your parents too but I think this will cheer you up a little … and stop you from worrying about me running over with your colleagues” you joke and he sighs with a light smile pulling back to look over you.

“What is it mi amor?” He asks looking over you. You take his hand and place it on your still pretty flat stomach.

“You can cross a kid of your timeline” you say nervously with a small gulp worried for his reaction.

“Are you being serious?” He asks with a huge grin and he feels around you more to see if there is a more obvious sign.

“Yeah, i only found out before the flight out here” you nod smiling at him and he lifts you up, being as careful as possible with you as he pulls you into a hug.

“I love you so so much! I’m sorry I get so jealous of you, but you can’t blame me when I’m married to such a beautiful woman. Thank you for everything” he smiles pulling you into a light kiss.

Fernando couldn’t be more content with his life right now.

Taglist:

@littlesatanicassholebitch @hockey-racing-fubol @laura-naruto-fan1998 @22yuki @simxican @sinofwriting @lewisroscoelove @cmleitora @daemyratwst @lauralarsen @the-untamed-soul l @thewulf @itsjustkhaos @purplephantomwolf @chasing-liberosis @summissss @gulphulp @starfusionsworld @jspitwall l @sierruhhhh @georgeparisole @youcannotcancelquidditch @tallbrownhairsarcastic @ourteenagetragedy @peachiicherries @formulas-bitch @cherry-piee @spilled-coffee-cup @mehrmonga @bigsimperika @blueberry64857959 @eiraethh @curseofhecate @alliwantisadonut @dark-night-sky-99 @i-wish-this-was-me @tallrock35 @butterfly-lover @barnestatic @landossainz @darleneslane @barcelonaloverf1life @r0nnsblog @ilove-tswizzle @laneyspaulding19 @malynn @viennakarma @landosgirlxoxo @marie0v @yourbane @teamnovalak @nikfigueiredo @fionaschicken @0picels0 @tinydeskwriter @ironmaiden1313 @splaterparty0-0 @formula1mount

[zoloteh-volossya]

BG3 Fanfiction Statistics, Part 1

I’ve seen some discussions of BG3 fandom trends floating around tumblr that spoke from experience but lacked hard data to refer to. As a fan of Baldur’s Gate 3, fanfiction, and graphs, I therefore thought it would be neat and illustrative to go through AO3 and document some of the statistics this fandom.

I did a similar exercise back in January and posted the results here. However, I was a bit unhappy with this analysis – it was missing some data that I consider to be relevant, I didn’t end up discussing the results much, and I only posted it to reddit. Most discussions for the creative side of fandom seem to happen on tumblr, so I made this account to post it here.

I will try and be as transparent as possible when discussing how I obtained and processed this data. A copy of my spreadsheet can be found here and contains all of the data I will be discussing. Most of the data I feature in this essay will be presented as graphs. Below each graph I will discuss the patterns shown in the graph and provide what I believe to be some relevant and/or interesting number values. If you want to see all the numbers, please refer to my spreadsheet. If you don’t care about the numbers and/or my thoughts about them, feel free to skim through and just look at the charts!

A note before I start – I gathered this data between July 21, 2024 and July 24, 2024. It is out of date as of my writing this and will be even more out of date by the time you read it. However, I believe the general fandom trends will hold up over time – the same patterns that I observed in January are largely still present in July.

Due to the tumblr post image limit and my preponderance of graphs, I will be breaking this behemoth of an essay into two parts:

General Fandom Statistics, the Player Character, and the Women

The Men, a Character Comparison, and a Pairing Analysis

We are currently in part 1. Part 2 can be found at this link. The rest of part 1 is below the read more because this is very long.

GENERAL FANDOM STATS

This information was found by looking at the side bar when browsing Baldur’s Gate fics. Therefore, this data set includes fics from the previous two Baldur’s Gate games. However, given that the games were released in 1998 and 2000, respectively, most of the fanfiction for them was likely posted to FF.net and the error from including what little fic for them was posted to AO3 is likely small.

At the time of my data gathering, there were 31,043 Baldur’s Gate fics on AO3.

RATINGS

To the surprise of nobody in the BG3 fandom, Explicit fic is the largest category, at 38% of all fics produced. It’s followed by Mature (24%), Teen and Up (20%), General (12%) and Not Rated (6%). Not all of the Explicit and Mature fics are necessarily horny – those warnings also apply to extreme violence (hello, Dark Urge). But let’s be real, most of them are tagged that way for sex.

WARNINGS

Speaking of extreme violence, let’s take a look at the warnings used for fics in this fandom.

Just about half (50.2%) of BG fics have no warnings at all. About 17.6% have warnings for graphic depictions of violence – lower than I would have expected, honestly, for a video game that features as much murder as this one does (at least, how I play it...). About 5.4% of fics feature a warning for rape, 4.7% feature major character death, and 0.5% feature underage sex.

CATEGORIES

AO3 allows users to select any categories from a list of possible options (F/M, M/M, F/F, Gen, Other, and Multi). F/M, M/M, and F/F are pretty self explanatory, Gen fics don’t focus on a relationship, Multi fics focus on a relationship between three or more people, and Other is a catch all for fics that don’t fit into any of the previous categories very well. For shipping with nonbinary (NB) characters, I have seen a variety of approaches. Some people select the category closest to the NB character’s presentation, some select multiple categories, and some select Other.

One very useful tool that I will be introducing here is the use of “otp:true.” When “otp:true” is entered into the “Search within results” bar while filtering tags, AO3 will only return fics that have just one pairing tagged. This filters out all fics that have background pairings or multiple focus pairings. Results with “otp:true” are typically solely focused on that particular pairing.

With all that explanation out of the way, the results:

We can clearly see that the most common category for Baldur’s Gate fics is M/F, with 43.3% of all fics featuring a M/F pairing. 36.4% of all fics feature a M/M pairing, 10.6% feature a F/F pairing, 11.7% are more General, 8.0% feature Multiple people in a pairing, and 10.9% are Other. These percentages add up to more than 100% because a fic can be tagged with multiple categories.

Things change a bit when you filter for “otp:true” and only include fics that focus on just one pairing. In this case, M/M predominates, with a whopping 46.0% of fics. M/F follows with 31.2%, F/F with 11.1%, 7.7% are General, 9.7% are Other, and 3.0% are still tagged as Multi (presumably for fics where the only pairing is a threesome or such).

CHARACTERS

As a last look at more general content before I begin a deep dive into looking at the various characters, I took a look at the 30 most popular character tags.

This was a surprise to me the first time I looked at it in January. In the previous two video game fandoms I was in that had a player character (Mass Effect and Fire Emblem: Three Houses), the player character was the most popular character tag in that fandom. In this case, though, Astarion has the most fics that feature him, and by a pretty significant margin (~5,000 more fics than Tav). He appears in 63.0% of fics. Tav is next, at 46.7% of fics. Then we have the rest of the six Origin characters: Gale (34.5% of fics), Shadowheart (23.7%), Karlach (20.5%), Wyll (18.6%), and Lae’zel (15.9%), as well as Halsin (15.8%) and the Dark Urge (15.3%). That they all are next to each other makes sense, as fics that focus on one character or pairing will often tag the entire ensemble. Lae’zel only showing up 16% of the time seems low, though, for a member of the main cast. To me, this indicates that not many fics are true ensemble fics that include all of the main cast.

After this block of main characters, we drop a bit to Gortash, who shows up in 7.4% of fics. He’s the most popular villain by far, followed by Cazador (4.7%) and Raphael (4.6%). Orin only shows up in 2.9% of fics and Ketheric is featured in only 1.1% of fics.

Jaheira shows up in 4.4% of fics, but her values may include fics from the earlier Baldur’s Gate games. Poor Minthara is the 16th most tagged character and only shows up in 2.5% of fics. Rolan (a tiefling NPC) shows up in more fics than she does.

Despite being featured in previous Baldur’s Gate game fics as well as BG3, Minsc does not seem popular – he’s #25, being tagged in 1.3% of fics.

One thing I did note was the comparative lack of focus on the overarching plot of the game in BG3 fics. I’ll use the Emperor as a barometer for this, as it’s inextricably interwoven into everything having to do with the Absolute, the mysterious artifact, and our protagonists’ immunity to it. Yet, it only appears in 535 fics of over 31,000 – approximately 1.7% of all BG fics. This tells me that there isn’t much engagement with the actual illithid plot of the game in most fics – at least not to the extent where major plot relevant characters are being tagged.

CHARACTER PAIRING STATISTICS

Most of my time for this analysis was spent collecting data for the various pairing tags. I went through the top 300 pairing tags by order of popularity (ending with Mystra/Cazador, of all things) and recorded how many fics each rating had and how many fics each category had both with and without “otp:true” applied. Coincidentally, this included all the pairings with 5 or more fics in them at the time – by sheer luck the 301st pairing tag had only 4 fics. I judged that I could ignore pairing tags with fewer than 5 fics without affecting the results of my analyses too much (also it had taken 4 days to get this far and I was tired).

However, a lot of authors tag their fics with both, say, Astarion/Tav and Astarion/F!OC. But for this exercise I’m not really looking at how authors refer to the Tav/Dark Urge/self insert character in their tagging nomenclature. I’m more interested in how many fics exist for, say, the pairing of Astarion and the player character.

To this end, I combined the numbers for Tav, Dark Urge, OC, F!OC, M!OC, NB!OC, Reader, and You for each character ship. In order to avoid double counting fics, once I had added the numbers for a particular tag I excluded that tag from all future counts.

[X]/PC = [X]/Tav + ([X]/Dark Urge with the [X]/Tav tag excluded) + ([X]/Original Character with the [X]/Tav and [X]/Dark Urge excluded) + ([X]/Reader with [X]/Tav, [X]/Dark Urge, and [X]/Original Character excluded) and so on.

This process dropped the total number of pairings from 300 to 162. However, it also introduces an error. Some fics ship characters with an OC who is not a Tav/Dark Urge/self insert. In condensing all pairings with original characters to the “PC” supercategory, I am ignoring that and counting their original character as a Tav/Dark Urge equivalent. Unfortunately, this is just something I have to live with in order to be able to make the data more manageable, as there is no way to tell which fics are using the OC tag to represent a Tav/Dark Urge and which are not on a mass data scale. I don’t think it will skew the results too much, at least.

I pulled out the top 20 ships for each major character in BG3 (Tav, Dark Urge, the PC, Shadowheart, Karlach, Lae’zel, Minthara, Astarion, Gale, Wyll, and Halsin) before and after I combined the player character tags into the PC supercategory. For each character, I then determined how much of each fic category (M/F, M/M, F/F, Other, Multi) they had, both for all of their pairings and for their pairing with the PC specifically.

Let's start by looking at the player character and its two representatives.

TAV

Tav is in 71 of the top 300 ship tags in the BG3 fandom.

Astarion completely dominates Tav’s ships, with a whopping 9,235 fics (1,839 otp:true fics). In fact, in order to be able to see the tiny little boxes that represent everyone else, here’s another version of this chart, this time with Astarion excluded.

There, that’s a bit more legible. The next highest is Gale, with 2,909 fics (652 otp:true) – less than a third as many fics as Astarion. Halsin comes third with 1,304 fics (207 otp:true) and Shadowheart is the first canon woman to show up, with 806 fics (132 otp:true). Astarion has more than 11 times as many fics with Tav as Shadowheart does. Karlach comes next, with 724 fics (186 otp:true). Raphael comes sixth, with 176 more fics than #7 Wyll who has 442 fics (100 otp:true). Lae’zel is #11 with 300 fics, under Gortash, Rolan, and a threesome with Halsin and Astarion. Minthara is the least popular main character to ship with Tav. She’s #15 with 146 fics (33 otp:true), and has fewer fics with Tav than Zevlor, the Emperor or Haarlep. In a marked improvement from the state of affairs in January, however, she no longer has fewer fics than Kar’niss.

Taking a look at the fic category breakdown, we can see that M/F and M/M predominate for Tav, while there is very little F/F. Dividing the values by the total number of fics, 59.8% of all fics and 50.2% of otp:true fics are tagged M/F, 35.6% of all fics and 34.9% of otp:true fics are tagged M/M, 7.6% of all fics and 4.4% of otp:true fics are tagged F/F, and 13.2% of all fics and 14.2% of otp:true fics are tagged Other. As the proportions of M/F and F/F fics drop when otp:true is applied, I assume that it is more common for M/F and F/F pairings to have background ships or be a background ship (remember that if it is not otp:true, we have no idea if the pairing with Tav is the pairing category being counted.)

THE DARK URGE

The Dark Urge is in 38 of the top 300 ship tags of the BG3 fandom, a bit over half as many as Tav.

While Astarion once again is the most popular character to ship with the Dark Urge (2,165 fics), this time he actually has competition! Gortash/Dark Urge comes in at a very respectable second place with 1,594 fics (about three quarters of Astarion/Dark Urge’s total fic count) and actually beat Astarion by over 100 fics once you apply otp:true (562 fics for Astarion vs 691 fics for Gortash). But after Gortash we once again drop down to numbers we struggle to even see on the chart. Gale is the most visible with 402 fics total (Gale has fewer fics total with the Dark Urge than Astarion or Gortash have with otp:true applied). After that we have a group of Halsin, Shadowheart, and Karlach, all with between 120-150 fics. No other pairing has over 100 fics.

Dark Urge/Tav (99 fics) and Dark Urge/Orin (87 fics) have more fics than Dark Urge/Wyll (83 fics) or Dark Urge/Minthara (80 fics). For Wyll, this is a sign that his pairing with the Dark Urge is not very popular (he drops from #7 with Tav to #9 with the Dark Urge). For Minthara, however, this is a significant climb in the rankings – she was #15 with Tav and #10 with the Dark Urge.

But what’s really interesting to me is the fic category breakdown for the Dark Urge.

The Dark Urge has noticeably more M/M content than Tav does (47.0% vs 35.6% for all fics, 56.9% vs 34.9% for opt:true) and slightly more F/F content than Tav does (10.2% vs 7.6% for all fics, 5.2% vs 4.4% for otp:true), and correspondingly less F/M content. At 13.4% for all fics and 12.8% of otp:true fics, the proportion of Other fic stays just about the same as for Tav.

THE PLAYER CHARACTER

The PC is a combination of Tav, Dark Urge, Original Character, Reader, and You. The PC is in 64 of the top 162 pairings of the BG3 fandom (losing 5 pairings from Tav as I combined Tav/Tav, Tav/Dark Urge, Tav/Reader and so on into one PC/OC category).

The player character was involved in 76.0% of all pairings and 62.1% of otp:true pairings (that is, if you add up every fic for every pairing which the PC is in and divide it by sum of all fics for all BG3 pairings I tracked). This means that over three quarters of shipping in the BG3 fandom is with the player character. It’s not surprising, but it is notable – that’s a very large proportion.

Holy smokes, Astarion! He dominates the rankings even more than before. This time, I was curious to see how much. See below for a proportional representation of all of the PC pairings (note: because many fics have multiple pairings, this circle does not represent the total number of fics but rather the total number of times any pairing with the PC has been tagged).

Astarion composes a full 45% of all pairings with the PC, Gale is bit over 13%, Gortash is 7.3% for all fics and 11.3% of otp:true fics, while Halsin has the opposite trend with 6.3% of all fics and 4.9% of otp:true fics. Shadowheart, Karlach, Raphael, and Wyll all are between 2% and 4% (with Raphael once again beating Wyll). Lae’zel is down at #11 with 1.4% and Minthara is all the way at #16 with 0.9%.

Out of curiosity, I went through all of the PC’s pairings and sorted them by the gender of the person being shipped with the PC.

Oof.

85.7% of all PC ships are with men, 10.4% are with women, and 1.9% are nonbinary beings (Haarlep, the Emperor, and Omeluum). When you apply otp:true, 87.1% of the player character’s ships are with men, 9.9% are with women, and 1.3% are with nonbinary beings.

SHADOWHEART

Welp! Let’s take a look at that 10%, starting with Shadowheart.

If you add up all the fics for all the pairings that include Shadowheart and divide that by the sum of all fics for all 162 pairings I collected, you can see that she is present in 7.0% of pairings. Interestingly, this is true both for all fics and for otp:true fics. She is in 30 of the top 300 ship tags and 24 of the 162 pairings that remain once the player character tags are consolidated.

(I have shortened Shadowheart's name to SH and Shart in various charts to keep the labels from taking up too much room in the graph.)

Lae’zel/Shadowheart is in close competition with Shadowheart/Tav. When all the player characters are condensed into the PC, though, that gap widens.

Shadowheart has 980 fics with the PC, 694 with Lae’zel, 226 with Karlach, 111 with Gale, 61 with Astarion, 51 with Nocturne, 36 with Halsin, 26 with Minthara, and 21 with Wyll (her least popular ship with a main character, at #12). 7 of her top 20 pairings are threesomes – Aylin/Isobel/SH at #8 with 35 fics, Karlach/PC/SH at #9, Karlach/Lae’zel/SH at #10, Astarion/PC/SH at #13, Halsin/PC/SH at #14, Karlach/Wyll/SH at #17, and Gale/Lae’zel/SH at #18.

Lae’zel/Shadowheart has an unusually high number of otp:true fics – almost half of its total fic count. It seems more popular to ship Shadowheart with women than men – both her ships with Lae’zel and Karlach are more popular than Astarion, Gale, or Wyll and her threesomes with women have more fics than her threesomes with men.

The fic category breakdown for Shadowheart matches this expectation.

Boy howdy is Shadowheart fic gay! She has over twice as much F/F fic than M/F fic, just looking at raw numbers of fics. Looking at the proportions of her total fic count, F/F fic represents 71.4% of all of her fics, M/F fic is 35.2%, Other is 10.0%, and Multi is 18.8%. (These percentages add up to more than 100% because many fics tag multiple categories.) This also means that we can’t know that these numbers necessarily include Shadowheart – witness the numbers of M/M fics. All it means is that these categories were on fics in which a Shadowheart pairing was also tagged.

Looking at the otp:true numbers gives us a better picture of what fics where only Shadowheart is in a relationship are like (though this not necessarily an accurate idea of patterns for her overall, as less than a third of her total fics are otp:true). 76.4% of otp:true fics are F/F, 19.8% are M/F, 3.8% are Other, and for some reason 1.2% (9 fics) are M/M. Over three quarters of Shadowheart’s otp:true pairings are femmeslash.

Shadowheart’s fics with the PC character follow pretty much the same pattern as her ships more generally, albeit with slightly less F/F (likely from the loss of the relative behemoth that is Shadowheart/Lae’zel).

32.9% of her pairings with the PC have the M/F tag, 68.1% are tagged F/F, 11.3% are tagged Other, and 18.5% are tagged Multi. Applying otp:true, 25.7% are M/F, 62.6% are F/F, and 12.3% are Other (this likely includes a substantial portion of nonbinary PCs).

KARLACH

Karlach is present in 6.0% of all fic pairings and 5.4% of otp:true fic pairings. She has 31 ship tags in the top 300 ship tags, which condense down to 26 pairings when all player character stand ins are combined.

Her second most popular ship after Tav is with Wyll, though unlike with Shadowheart the pairing is not popular enough to give Tav a run for his/her/their money. Condensing all the player characters widens this gap significantly.

The PC is overwhelmingly Karlach’s most popular ship, with 890 fics. Wyll is second, with 327 fics – less than half as many. Shadowheart and Astarion follow with 226 and 157, respectively. Dammon is next, with 91 fics, and then Lae’zel has 65. She then has a number of threesomes, Minthara (#9 with 32 fics), and Gale (#11 with 18 fics). Halsin is her least popular pairing with a main character, coming in at #15 with 11 fics.

Surprisingly, for all that Karlach is fairly butch, her pairings with men are relatively more popular than we see with the more femme Shadowheart. The category statistics illustrate this clearly.

Compared to Shadowheart, Karlach has a lower proportion of F/F and higher proportions of M/F and Multi fics. F/F is tagged on 51.8% of her fics, M/F on 42.5%, Other on 12.3% and Multi on 27.7%. (Remember that fics can be tagged with multiple categories and that just because a category is tagged doesn’t mean that Karlach is involved in that category.) Looking at otp:true gives us a look at fics where she is the sole focus. F/F is 55.0% of her otp:true fics, M/F drops to 34.4%, Multi drops to 6.1%, and Other stays fairly high at 10.4%.

In Karlach’s pairings with the player character, things change significantly.

It immediately becomes clear that the large number of M/F fics in her general pairings were largely due to her relatively popular ships with Wyll, Astarion, and Dammon. F/F dominates Karlach’s pairings with the PC with 64.0% (67.8% with otp:true applied) of fics, which puts her at just slightly less than Shadowheart. M/F is tagged in 28.5% of her fics with the PC (14.0% with otp:true applied), Multi is tagged 19.4% but drops to 1.2% for otp:true, and Other remains high with 18.0% of fics and 20.2% of otp:true fics with the PC.

Back in January, I noted that of the main cast, Karlach had the highest proportion of ships with nonbinary OCs. I didn’t track the breakdown of OC subcategories this time, but the high numbers in the Other category bear it out.

LAE'ZEL

Counting all fics for all pairings in which Lae’zel is tagged, she is in a mere 3.8% of BG3 pairings, though it rises to 4.5% when otp:true is applied. She is in 23 of the top 300 ship tags, a number that drops down to 18 when I consolidate the player character tags together.

Shadowheart/Lae’zel has twice as many fics as Lae’zel/Tav. Looking at the situation with the PC does not change this much.

Unlike any other main character, Lae’zel’s most popular ship is not with the PC but with Shadowheart. She has 694 fics with Shadowheart, 355 with the PC, 65 with Karlach, 26 with Gale, 26 with Wyll, 25 with Astarion, 16 with Minthara, and 12 with Halsin. She is in an unusually low number of threesomes – only 4. It’s notable though how skewed her numbers are towards women – a threesome with Karlach and Shadowheart has more fics than any of her pairings with a canon man. The various whole team multiship pairings, none of which have more than 11 fics, comprise most of the tail end of her ship list.

Speaking of the tail end of her ship list, what happens when we condense the player character tags is that Lae’zel does not reach a full 20 ships – she drops to 18 pairings. She has more than this, of course, but my methodology ignores all pairings with fewer than 5 fics (which means that my friend’s Lae’zel/Astarion/Tav fic is not counted). Therefore, Lae’zel’s 19th and 20th most popular pairings have 4 fics or fewer. I have represented these missing pairings with little :( emojis, because this is a sad state of affairs.

This is a symptom of a state of affairs in which Lae’zel is just not very popular in the AO3 side of BG3 fandom. Her most popular ship is Shadowheart’s second most popular ship, and the numbers crater after that. No Lae’zel ship other than Shadowheart and the PC has more than 100 fics.

Lae’zel’s most popular ships being women is demonstrated clearly by the fic category breakdown.

Wow! At a whopping 76.3% of all of Lae’zel’s fics and 88.9% of Lae’zel’s otp:true fics, Lae’zel has a higher proportion of F/F fic than Shadowheart. Granted, they’re both sizable portions of each other’s total F/F count. 26.1% of Lae’zel’s fics have the M/F tag, though this drops to a mere 7.1% when otp:true is applied. Other is tagged in 11.6% of fics but drops to 2.0% with otp:true. 18.1% of her fics are tagged Multi but this likewise drops to 4.4% with otp:true.

The pertinent question for Lae’zel is how much of her F/F count is due to her pairing with Shadowheart? How gay are her pairings with the PC?

The answer is... still pretty gay! F/F is not quite as dominant, with 67.3% of all her fics with the PC and 80.0% of her fics where only Lae’zel/PC is tagged – but 80% is a still a really high proportion! This indicates to me that a lot of the M/F in the “All Fics” chart likely does not involve Lae’zel. M/F is tagged in 33.5% of her fics with the PC, a number which is more than halved to 12.7% when otp:true is applied. 13.2% of her fics are tagged Other, which drops to 5.5% with otp:true – much less than for Shadowheart and Karlach. It seems either Lae’zel is not as popular for nonbinary OCs or that a large proportion of the Other tag is from mind flayer Tavs/Durges and people don’t write Lae’zel with a mind flayer love interest.

One other notable fact is that Lae’zel is the only female companion without any otp:true M/M PC fic. It could be due to her low fic numbers in the first place, but I prefer to think that Lae’zel fans are simply more fastidious about correctly tagging fic. It certainly fits her character.

MINTHARA

Ah, Minthara. Unquestionably the least popular of the main romanceable characters in BG3, her pairings only comprise 1.1% of all BG3 fanfic pairings, a number that rises to a whopping(/sarcastic) 1.4% of otp:true pairings. She has only 14 ship tags in the 300 most popular ship tags for BG3, a number that drops further to a mere 9 pairings once I’ve combined all the player character tags.

What’s notable about Minthara’s ship tags is the popularity of the Dark Urge relative to Tav. Minthara has 146 fics with Tav and 80 with the Dark Urge. This is a higher proportion than other main characters have. It may be because more people write her on evil routes (which likely disproportionately feature the Dark Urge) or because she has some very good lines for the Dark Urge and their Slayer form.

Another observation is the lack of primary non-PC ships. The other characters that I look at all have a major non-PC ship – Shadowheart/Lae’zel, Karlach/Wyll, Gale/Astarion, Wyll/Astarion, Halsin/Astarion. Minthara doesn’t really have that. Her most popular non-PC ship is Orin, at #5 and with a mere 45 fics. This is illustrated clearly once all the player character tags are combined.

The PC dominates Minthara’s pairings to an extent not seen with any other character, not even Astarion. She drops from 234 fics with the PC (65 otp:true) to 45 fics with Orin (26 otp:true), 32 with Karlach (16 otp:true) and 26 with Shadowheart (11 otp:true). Every other pairing has 16 or less fics. Tying into that, Minthara has very few pairings with 5 or more fics. She does not even have enough for a top 10! I have replaced her missing pairings with the :( emoji because this is sad.

Another notable thing about this chart, though, is how few fics Minthara has just in general. Lae’zel and Wyll, the other neglected companions, both have at least 500 fics with their most popular partner. Minthara does not even break 250. In fact, none of her pairings with someone other than the PC have over 50 fics.

Another interesting fact is that Minthara is the only character in this analysis to not have any threesomes or moresomes in her pairings with over 5 fics. She doesn’t share, it seems.

For some reason, Minthara has 8 ships with Councillor Florrick of all people. And it’s not all by the same author, which is what I would expect for a somewhat out there pairing. Presumably someone out there wrote a really good fic which then inspired others to play with the idea. In a small fandom like Minthara’s, one fic like that can make quite a difference.

As can be expected, Minthara’s fic categories are pretty damn gay.

F/F is tagged in 79.0% of her fics (77.6% of otp:true fics). M/M is tagged in 21.3% of her fics (17.1% of otp:true fics), Other in 6.1% (4.6% otp:true), and Multi in 8.9% though it drops to 1.3% of her otp:true fics. With these numbers, Minthara is arguably the gayest major character in the BG3 fandom by fic count, though Lae’zel beats her when you take otp:true into effect.

This pattern holds true when looking at her ship with the player character. 77.8% of her fics with the PC are tagged F/F (73.8% of otp:true fics), 23.5% are tagged M/F (15.4% otp:true), 8.5% are tagged Other (10.8% otp:true), and 9.4% are tagged Multi (3.1% otp:true). The latter is a bit confusing given that she has no multiship pairings. It may include collections of Reader/[X] fics that include Minthara.

PART 2

Welp. I’ve run into the tumblr post image limit. For part 2 of this essay, which discusses Astarion, Gale, Wyll, and Halsin and then compares all 8 of the main characters against each other on a variety of metrics, see this link.

[illvmii]

Home For The Weekend.

DBF!Miguel x FEM!Reader, NSFW!! READ WITH CAUTION!!

TAGS: DBF!Miguel, Nsfw, a little fluff ig, pining Miguel, I gave you good parents because you deserve it, oral (fem receiving), praise, p in v, unprotected (use protection gang), a little exhibisionism (people are in the house), Miguel is pretty soft in this one, LMK if I forgot anything

A/N: Because I had to swap accounts and all that, I decided to write smut as a sorry (cause I know that’s what most Miguel fans want LMFAO) so here you go!! It’s Dad’s best friend cause GODDD I love DBF Miguel lemme tell ya. Also not proof read (I’m really fucking tired rn I’ll proof read tmr probably)

You’ve been away from home for a good while at this point. Your college really wasn’t all that far away, but you’ve been so freaking busy it’s unbelievable. You called your parents at least three times a week, even at that point you were failing to do so. You were completely overwhelmed and it was awful.

But finally, finally you had a weekend where you were free. You didn’t have anything to do, so you decided to drive home and spend the weekend there. You knew your parents really missed you, so it was the best choice for all of you (plus you’d been killing to taste some of your moms cooking once again).

You had called your father to let him and your mom know you were coming, but were told a very interesting surprise. It was for sure a welcome one, though. Your father’s best bud, Miguel O’Hara, was staying with your parents for a week. Apparently the man’s house got termites which fucking blew chunks for him. But for you… well, aren’t you just lucky?

That man is HOT! We all know it, he’s absolutely stunning. So when you figured you’d be in the same house as him for a whole weekend, your entire stay seemed to get much more interesting.

Of course it was a ‘Look don’t touch’ scenario, you couldn’t even imagine the hell that would let loose if you made a hit on your dad’s best friend. You knew your father and Miguel were super close, they have been since you were a little girl. Miguel and your pops met when you were in third grade, because you were on your schools little soccer team. Miguel was the coach, since his own daughter Gabriella was on it.

You and Gabi actually became pretty good friends, still are to this day. She’s fun to be around and you text her whenever you have the chance. Of course she doesn’t know about the absolutely disgusting thoughts you have about her father on the lonelier nights. You think nobody but you really needs to know those. God forbid if your dad found out.

You haven’t seen Miguel in… what was it? Nearly three years at this point. He didn’t come around the house much after you turned 19 for some reason. Your dad and him always hung out at bars and such. So you haven’t seen him in a long time. The barbecues Miguel always had once a month were strangely on days you had told your dad you weren’t available, either. It’s very strange. You never have had the best of luck with men, so you just assume god is playing a cruel trick on you.

You eventually pulled into your childhood home driveway, the second you entered your mom pulls you to the side and presses kisses all over your face.

“Oh my gosh! It feels I haven’t seen my baby girl in ages! How have you been, honey?!”

Pressing a kiss to her cheek, you smile, “Been good. Busy, as I’ve said on our calls. But finally got some free time!”

Your mother grinned and pulled you into a hug, “I’m so glad your home, sweetheart. The house just isn’t the same without you here.”

“Dad already getting on your nerves, huh?” You snicker, hugging her back tightly.

Your mom chuckles and shakes her head, “He’s still the same ol’ grump. You should have heard him and Miguel when the soccer game was on… my goodness I was worried we were going to get a noise complaint.”

“Are they really that bad? Geez. I know Dad is bad, can’t imagine two of them.”

Your mother chuckles, “Your father is in the living room. Go say hi, hes been waiting for you all day.”

You give her a nod and walk off to the living room to greet your dad. He’s on the couch, so you plop down next to him. “Hey, Dad. How’s it hanging?”

He turns to look at you and bumps your shoulder with his, “There you are, squirt. Where you been for so long, huh? Outgrown us regular people now you’re a big shot at college?”

You smirk at his tease, “Don’t worry. I won’t forget about you. Least not yet.”

He flicks your forehead, chuckling to himself.

“Miguel is out in the pool. You should go say hi.”

Your face immediately heats up. He’s in the god damn pool?! With probably little shorts? Oh god…

You nod and stand from the couch and make your way to the pool. You slide the glass door to the patio open and dear god.

You see Miguel, hes swimming laps in the big pool. As long as you’ve known him, he’s worked out a bunch. No wonder he’s so fucking buff.

Stepping down into the patio area, you send him a wave, “Hey, Mr. O’Hara?”

He pauses his swimming and looks up at you. He flashes a smile, “My god, that you, pequeña?”

Miguel shakes his head to get the excess water out, swimming too the stairs of the pool to get out. You see now that yes, he is in little swim trunks.

He grabs his towel to wipe his extremely chiseled chest down. He smiles at you as he does, “How have you been, chica? I haven’t seen you for a while. Your dad sends me photos of you sometimes, but they really didn’t show off how much you’ve grown.”

You blush as he runs his eyes over you to really take in your growth. “I’ve been okay. College is keeping me busy. How about you? I’ve heard your house has termites.”

Miguel let’s out a loud groan, “Mhm. I could hear them in the walls at night, it was hell. At least they’re getting taken care of now, ‘Eh?”

“Yeah. I could imagine that would be hell,” You add on, not helping the conversation at all. You really couldn’t focus on conversing well. The man who has plagued your mind since you hit puberty is standing right in front of you, wet and in tiny shorts.

Miguel fully dries himself off, “I’ll go in and change, alright? Then we can talk some more.”

He walks off and you follow behind. You sit next to your dad in the living room and patiently (not at all patiently) wait for ‘Mr. O’Hara’.

Miguel walks into the living room wearing some loose shorts and a white t-shirt. He sits on a free chair and looks to your dad, “Man, look how big your girl is now! Can’t even believe it. Can’t believe how big my Gabi is, either.”

Your dad chuckles and groans, “I know, right? Time really flies when you get old.”

Miguel shoots you a smile, “I’m not that old, am I, cariño?”

You shake your head quickly, “Of course not.”

Your father chuckles, “You don’t gotta lie to Miguel, honey! Let him have it.”

Miguel leans forward to smack your father’s shoulder, “Ay! You aren’t young yourself.”

Your father and Miguel banter back and forth for a bit, before the soccer game starts out. They shut up immediately to watch, though once the plays start happening they shout at the TV like mad men. You chuckle whenever they do. It brought back memories of you and Gabriella having a play date and hearing them go nuts over the match in the other room.

After the match, it was dinner time, and holy fuck did it smell good. Your mother knew how to cook man, let me tell you.

You were sat in between your mom and Miguel. Your dad and the hunk were talking about the game, while your mother asked you questions about how college was going. You told her all about it, from the gossip to how the vending machine in the lobby stopped working again, which pissed you off to no end.

While you were talking and ranting about “those damn machines”, you felt a thigh press against yours. You glance down, seeing it was Miguel’s. Strange, because you didn’t remember his chair being this close. You shrug it off and keep talking to your mom.

After dinner you were stuffed, so you head up to your bedroom for the night. You were currently sitting on your old bed, snuggled up all nice and cozy while watching some YouTube. That was until the door creaked open. You figured your mom had done your laundry like the lovely lady she is, but indeed it was Miguel.

He stepped into the room with a soft smile, closing the door behind him, “Hey, pequeña.”

You sit up immediately at the sight of him, plucking your earbuds from your ears, “Hey, Mr. O’Hara. What do you need?”

Miguel sits himself on the edge of the bed, “You can just call me Miguel, sweetheart. Mr. O’Hara makes me feel ancient.”

“Alright, Miguel.” You smile, which makes him chuckle. He looks up at you and speaks;

“We haven’t had much time to speak one on one. I just wanted to catch up with you, hadn’t seen you in a while.”

You tilt your head endearingly, “Yeah, it has been a while. College has kept me from coming home, plus you and dad don’t hang out around the house as much as you used to.”

Miguel’s face actually pinks a little at the statement, to your bewilderment. He scratches his head, “Yeah. Just gettin’ out on the town as you kids say makes us feel young, I guess.”

Cuddling your blankets a bit closer to you, you grin at him, “You really aren’t that old. You had Gabriella decently young, right?”

“I guess so,” He shrugs, “It feels like forever ago, yet also yesterday. Can’t believe my flor pequeña is in college now.”

You nod, “Oh yeah, I can’t believe we’re in college either. Gabriella texts me all about her college days. She rants about her boyfriend constantly, she seems to really like him.”

Miguel groans, “Don’t even get me started on that boy. He is not worth my daughter, not even a little.”

You giggle at his protective nature. You’re positive that no matter who Gabriella dates, Miguel will never deem them as good enough for his daughter.

Miguel looks into your eyes, “So, you got a boyfriend, niña?”

“Oh, no. I haven’t really met the right person,” Which was a total lie, by the way. You’ve gone on dates and met super nice guys, but in your head you constantly compared them to your first crush ever, Miguel. They never shaped up, so it never went anywhere.

His eyes widen, “Really? You’re so beautiful now, I’d figure you’d have tons of boys chasing you.”

The statement makes you blush fiercely, “Ah, no.”

Miguel lets out a thoughtful sigh, “You really have grown into a lovely young woman, you know.”

You blush even harder, “Thank you, Mr. O’Hara.”

He places a hand on yours with a chuckle, “I told you, it’s Miguel.”

“Right. Sorry. Sorry,” You take some deep breaths, trying to calm yourself down. Miguel sees this and smiles.

“Why so flustered, cariño? Is it because I called you beautiful?”

You end up covering your face to hide said blush from him. Geez, your heart could not take this right now. You were dressed in some baggy Spider-Man pajamas, yet he is calling you beautiful?

“I-I’m not…”

You can’t believe you’re stuttering. The things this man does to you is insane.

Miguel reached a hand forward to take your hands away from your face. He doesn’t remove it, though. He rests it on your cheek.

“Do you want to know why I stopped coming around your house?”

You nod, staring into his chocolate brown eyes.

“It’s because of your 19th birthday. Do you remember it?”

You think back to those years ago. It was a pretty fun party. You got a bunch of friends and family over and swam in your pool. It wasn’t anything extravagant, but just a fun time.

“Yeah. What about it? Did I do something?”

He chuckles and tucks a lock of your hair behind your ear, “Nah. It’s just me. You… that day, do you remember what your swimsuit looked like?”

You think back again and blush. Not one of your smartest moments, buying a white swimsuit. It looked cute online, the thought of that it was supposed to go in water and get wet not really cementing itself in your head.

“Yeah…”

He nods and chuckles, “I saw you step out of the pool, and rushed over with a towel to cover you up. Remember? Sure, it was because I didn’t want you to expose yourself like that. However, I had a selfish reason.”

You look up and tilt your head a little.

“I didn’t want anyone else to see that part of you.”

“Huh?” Your brows furrow.

He smirks, “I was confused by the thought, too. I left right after the party and went to my house. I figured I’d stop having such strange thoughts after a day… but amor, I haven’t stopped thinking about you once.”

Your eyes widen, “Wh- Huh?”

“You’re so beautiful, I don’t think you understand. You grew into this woman who I admire, not just for your looks. You’re wonderful, absolutely wonderful. You’re kind, you’re thoughtful, you’re funny, you’re perfect. I can’t get you out of my damn head.”

You can’t manage to speak at this point. You stare up at the man in shock as he moves his hand from your cheek to the back of your neck.

“Please, let me kiss you, niña,” He basically begs, his eyes look full of desperation, “I’ve wanted to do it for years.”

You manage a tiny nod, so he rushes forward to kiss your lips. He holds you very close against him and kisses you hard. He lets out a groan at the contact. His tongue prods at your lips after a while and who are you to refuse such a man? You let him in, letting out a little groan of your own when he explores you.

After what felt like too short, you have to pull away to catch your breath. He doesn’t stop being on you, though. When you pant, he moves to kiss your jaw and neck.

You let out a little groan, “M-Miguel…”

“No good?” He speaks between kisses, “I’ve wanted to touch you for years, you don’t understand…”

You let out a little whimper, a god damn whimper.

“Please, let me touch you. Fuck, please,” He begs again. You manage a small nod once again. He dives back in to keep kissing your neck.

You wrap your arms around his neck to pull him closer. His hands move downwards towards your shirt. He tugs it over your head and moans. His hands immediately reach down to squeeze your tits, and you have to cover your mouth to keep your moans in.

He mumbles out a soft “Fuck…” when he uses his thumbs to glide over your nipples. After a few seconds, he leans down to press kisses all over your soft breasts. He still uses his hands to softly prod at them.

You let out a low whine and he looks up at you, “Be quiet, my girl. Can’t have anyone hearing you.”

You nod and keep covering your mouth as he leans down to keep pressing soft kisses to your chest. After a few moments, he tugs at your bottoms and looks up at you. You nod embarrassingly, and he takes them and your underpants off in one fell swoop.

You hear him audibly choke a breath, which makes you blush more. He manhandles you so your thighs rest on his shoulders, and just goes to town.

You let out a loud yelp when his tongue presses against your clit, so he reaches down and puts his fingers in your mouth to silence you. He keeps his mouth going, sucking on the bud to bring you pleasure.

Miguel pulls back with a long breath, “Tastes so good…”

You whimper against his fingers when he leans down to insert his tongue in you. You cry out as he holds nothing back, forcefully having his way with you.

His one hand that isn’t in your mouth is softly caressing your thigh, which is driving you crazy in its own right. It feels like everywhere he touches you is pure heaven.

Though that one hand leaves after a moment, instead he moves to insert a finger in you. You clamp down on his fingers, which makes him chuckle.

“Feel that good?”

Against his hand, you mumble, “Fingers so thick…”

He smirks and curls his index finger, making your hips buck up and you let out another whine. He can softly hear you beg for more.

He complies, of course. Hes waited for this for years, no way he won’t give his girl everything she wants.

He inserts another finger, moving them around a little until he eventually finds your most sensitive spot. He presses the pad of his fingers up against it suddenly, making you jerk and squirm around.

His mouth dives back down to suck on your clit, which drives you absolutely insane. His fingers in both your mouth and inside you, as well as his skilled mouth was far too much for one woman to handle.

Miguel looks over at one of the thighs placed on his shoulder, seeing it shiver and shake. He breaks away briefly, “Are you close already, amor? You’re so sensitive for me. Have you been wanting my touch too?”

You nod frantically when he lowers his head to your clit again. You cry out, “Uh-Huh! Y-You were my first crush!” Your words were mumbled against his fingers, but he understood them just fine.

He sucks on your clit hard and curls his fingers at the same time, which causes you to let out a moan and your thighs shake more. He breaks away,

“Look at me when you come. Look into my eyes as I make you come. You understand?”

You nod and keep eye contact with him as he inserts a third finger, pressing over and over to your g-spot. He uses his tongue to swirl around your inflated bud at the same time.

His gaze, his mouth, his fingers, it was all far too much. After one harsh suck, you came with a muffled shout.

Miguel drank it all up immediately, seemingly absolutely satisfied to be covered in your juices.

He lets you catch your breath and removes his fingers from your mouth. He also lowers your hips back to the bed, being delicate as he does so he doesn’t hurt you. You were panting very harshly, still coming down from your high.

Everything was a bit fuzzy at the moment. Though you refocused a few seconds later- holy shit.

His shorts have been discarded, along with his shirt. He was naked just as you were, and god damn was he big.

He leans down to press a kiss to your stomach, “You think you can go again? Can you take me, pretty girl?”

You try and speak only to realize that you, in fact, can’t. You settle for a thumbs up, which just makes him laugh softly.

He gives you a few more seconds before aligning himself up with your pretty pussy, pushing himself in agonizingly slow.

You let out another moan, so he quickly puts his fingers in your mouth again to keep you quiet. He really, really did not need your parents who were down in the living room to hear this.

He kept pushing himself in, holding his own groans back. He’d used his hand and imagined how you’d feel in the past, but it was nothing like this. This was perfect.

Once he was in as far as he could go, he stopped and let you get comfortable. Of course it was a battle for him, he was fighting his primal instincts to just take your hard and fast.

You keep letting out the most adorable little whimpers, which even though he’s currently fucking you, make Miguel’s heart melt.

You hum against his fingers, “Ready…”

He nods and begins to move very slowly. He focuses on your face as he watches it contort and squeeze with his movements. You were so pretty when you were experiencing such pleasure, he thought.

He whispers, “Good job, pequeña. Such a good girl for me.”

The praise makes you bite down on his fingers a little. Your hands travel upwards to scratch on his back, too. It was taking all your willpower to not be loud.

He moves a little faster, leaning down to kiss you as he does. He keeps mumbling “My pretty girl” And “So perfect, just for me” as he increases his speed.

He knows he isn’t going to last long. He’s been dreaming about you for years at this point.

He begins to sweat as his hips snap against yours. His free hand moves down to rub on your already abused clit. You grunt on his fingers, pursing your lips against them.

“You gonna come for me again, amor? Come on my cock. Can you do that for me?” He speaks very softly. Both to keep it down, but to also be intimate with you.

You breathe heavily as you feel him pound into you. You can feel tears brimming at your eyes from the sensation.

He licks his thumb and places it back down on your clit, rubbing circles over and over again. At the same time, his hips were slamming against yours. Soon enough, you reached a second orgasm. He let out a moan that was nearly too loud when you did. The sensation was his end, because a few thrusts later he pulled out and came on your stomach.

You and him sat there, panting like you’d just ran a damn marathon. Though after a few minutes, Miguel stands and walks over to your nightstand to get the wipes there. He begins to wipe you of his cum and your sweat, cleaning you off so you can sleep comfortably.

You were so fucking exhausted it was insane. You could barely register as he carefully slid your pajamas back onto you, then changed back into his own clothes.

He leans down and presses a kiss to your forehead, “If I could sleep in here, I would.”

“Mhm…” You mumble, a little upset he wouldn’t be cuddling you to sleep. But you obviously understood his reasoning.

He pressed a soft kiss to your lips,

“Let’s do this again sometime, pequeña.”

Hope you enjoyed you rabid Miguel fans!! Feedback is always welcome. I used spanishdict so please correct any mistakes you see. Reqs open too!!

This was my first time posting anything NSFW on any site ever so I’m sorry if it’s bad LOL

Don’t repost or claim as or own and all that stuff please!! ❤️❤️

[dystopicjumpsuit]

A Question of Seman-dicks

A/N: I wrote this under the influence of alcohol, edibles, and the funniest conversation in the history of Discord. Happy Friday!

Pairing: Hardcase x GN!Reader (platonic with a twist)

Rating: T

Wordcount: 960

Warnings and tags: suggestive language, terrible puns

Hardcase spotted you striding purposefully down the corridor of the Resolute, and he sped up to try to catch up with you. You turned a corner abruptly, and by the time he rounded it, you were nowhere to be found. The corridor was empty; there was nothing there but a bank of escape pods. He peered into the porthole of each one until he finally spotted you, pacing back and forth in the small space and talking animatedly. Intrigued, he opened the hatch.

You whirled to face him, guilt written plainly across your features, but when you recognized his distinctive tattoos, you relaxed.

“Oh, it’s you,” you sighed with relief. “Thank the Force.”

“What are you doing in here?” he asked curiously.

“Nothing!” you said. His expression was dubious, and you knew he wouldn’t let it drop until you told the truth. “Hiding.”

He gave you a sympathetic look. “Admiral Ice Queen?”

“I came in here to scream,” you admitted sheepishly.

“Good choice,” he said. “Conveniently close to your office, private, and most importantly, soundproof. I approve of your strategy.”

“Except I’m not supposed to be in here, and if anyone caught me, I’d be in huge trouble.”

“Someone did catch you,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t rat me out,” you replied. “You’re more likely to come in and hide with me.”

“Great idea!” he said with a grin. He stepped into the pod and sealed the hatch, then flopped down on the floor and patted the spot next to him. “Tell me all about it.”

“You know there are perfectly good seats in here,” you said.

“True, but if I sat in one of those, there wouldn’t be room for you next to me, and you look like you could use a hug.”

“Good point,” you said, sitting down with a thump.

He immediately draped his arm over your shoulders, and you leaned against him. “So what did the bad-miral do this time?”

“More of the usual,” you replied. “I swear she sets me up to fail on purpose, and then she takes an evil delight in being a massive Taungsday about it.”

“Taungsday?” he asked, baffled.

“You know, a C-U-Next-Taungsday?”

“I don’t get it,” he said.

Even though nobody was around, you leaned in and whispered the explanation in his ear. He reared back in surprise.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to say that word,” he said.

“What word would you prefer?” you asked, amused at his reaction, but still too upset to laugh.

“Lady garden,” he replied.

You snorted. “Seriously?”

“It’s more respectful,” he said with dignity.

“I don’t want to be respectful!” you complain. “I want to call her a cu—”

“Love tunnel!” he exclaimed, interrupting you before you could get the word out.

That time, you actually laughed. “What is this, a bodice ripper? I don’t need a romantic euphemism for a—”

“Hidden treasure!” he cut you off. “Or cupcake! Those are delicious.”

You let out an inelegant cackle, and he gave you a wounded look that only made you laugh harder. 

“Hardcase, I had no idea you had so many words for a woman’s—”

“Honey pot?” he asked insouciantly. 

“You can just say—”

“Nether regions?” he offered. “I don’t like that one. It sounds spooky. Like some vast, uncharted part of space.”

You tried to stifle your laughter, but it came out as an embarrassing snort, which only made you laugh harder.

“Still, it’s better than ‘penis fly trap,’” he mused. “But not as good as flower. You know, because it has petals and is also used in reproduction. I would definitely rather put my tallywacker in a flower than in a nether region. Higher probability of survival.”

By this point, you had both hands clapped over your mouth to try to muffle your shrieks of laughter as tears streamed down your face. You couldn’t even remember why you’d hidden in the escape pod in the first place, much less why Hardcase was regaling you with a comprehensive listing of every colloquialism known to the galaxy for a—

“Notorious V.A.G.,” he said. “Whoever came up with that one had obviously never felt the touch of a woman.”

You doubled over and buried your face against his chest as you howled with laughter, so you missed his pleased smile when he realized he’d successfully distracted you from your horrible boss. Unfortunately, you’d been gone long enough that you knew your absence would soon be noted.

“I wish I could hide in here with you for the rest of the day,” you gasped once you caught your breath.

“Me, too,” he said, giving your shoulders a squeeze. “Probably ought to get back to it, though.”

You nodded and wiped away your mirthful tears, hoping that you looked at least somewhat presentable. Hardcase stood and offered you his hand, pulling you to your feet with ease, and then he opened the hatch of the escape pod. The two of you spilled out into the corridor, only to run smack-dab into Jesse and Kix.

Jesse took one look at your disheveled appearance and punched Hardcase in the shoulder with a devilish grin. 

“Nice, vod,” he said. “You finally made your move.”

Hardcase looked mortified. “That’s not— We weren’t—”

“Relax, brother, we won’t tell the Atrocious Admiral,” Kix laughed. “I’m just glad you decided to do something other than pine away after all this time.”

Hardcase stared at you with panic in his eyes as he watched understanding dawn on your face. 

“I—” he began.

On impulse, you leaned in and gave him a kiss on the cheek. 

“Thanks for everything, big boy,” you said. “Be sure to stop by my bunk later, and I’ll show you how well I can swallow your baloney pony.”

[airyravenmaid]

As someone who's been secretly teetering around the SAGAU (that's "Self-Aware Genshin AU" for those who aren't aware 🥁) tag and works while thoroughly enjoying a lot of them, I think today's finally the day I put my own two cents in on it. Particularly, my two cents about how a certain redheaded owl stud would act in that verse. By all means, no hate to anybody who's written him any differently in their SAGAU stuff-- we're all here to have fun and junk; this is just how I personally think he'd be. You are free to disagree with any and everything I have to say under the cut, but I will have no badmouthing or the like.

Being perfectly honest, I haven't really seen much of Diluc in a ton of SAGAU works outside of him either being part of the "get the 'Imposter'" mob or individually attacking us if he comes across us solo and isn't in the know that we the reader are the real deal. Basically, he's more or less just kinda lumped in with the other highly devoted followers of the Creator without really standing out much in the plot. And, nothing particularly wrong with that, no, no, no, but here's where my hee-ho funny hot take comes in:

I don't actually think Diluc would really worship the Creator. In fact, I don't think he'd even like us at first. *Sojiro voice* Let me explain!

Diluc Ragnvindr is, in every sense of the word, a disenchanted young man. Now, we know he wasn't born as such, but we have the Knights of Favonius disgracing Crepus' death while the wound was still fresh and the falling out between Diluc and Kaeya upon the latter's revelation as a Khaenri'ahn spy to blame for that. Blah, blah, blah, that's right, we heard the story, over and over again, so, where does this tie into my personal interpretation of his thoughts on the Creator, you may ask? Well!

In the happier, more idealistic years before all hell broke loose on his 18th birthday, Diluc most likely did worship and revere the Creator per his upbringing since I think Crepus also worshipped them like a good chunk of Mondstadt does. No problems there. But, where was the "all-powerful, ever-benevolent" God of Teyvat when he'd lost his father and brother on that same, horrible night in different ways? What did they do when the Knights of Favonius openly spat on his father's name just to save their undeserved reputation? What did they give him during that four-year suicide mission he spent indiscriminately hunting Fatui agents before promptly getting the ban of a lifetime from the entire Nation of Cryo?

Nowhere, nothing, and radio silence.

Just another unreliable let-down added to the list, and another knife to his back.

(Imposter AU-wise) So, come present day, when the Great Big Phony™ drops and takes a throne that very much does not belong to them, everybody's over the moon and pulling out all the stops for their beloved God... except Diluc. Now, he's not so stupid that he openly badmouths the apparent Creator since that would get him some pretty unpleasant looks and land him in rather hot water, so instead, he shows no open reaction while rolling his eyes and scoffing at them wherever people can't see or hear. And, if we're going with the traditional portrayal of the Imposter being an uncaring tyrant, his already diminished opinion of the Creator's image is only further soured. He does nothing to damper or criticize anybody's faith since it's far from his place to, but they certainly won't see him joining in any day of the week, either.

And then comes the "Imposter", who's actually the true Creator that's been jiffy-popped into Genshin's world from the real one. Now, while he thinks it's beyond ridiculous that the people of Mondstadt and the Knights of Favonius (though, not as much surprise for the latter-- always so inefficient...) find it just to hunt down and torture somebody solely for looking like the Creator especially since nobody in town gives a shit that Venti and Barbatos look disturbingly alike for reasons only he (plus Jean and maybe Kaeya, if his Hangout implies anything) knows without actually presenting themselves as an active threat to humanity like, say, the Abyss Order or the Fatui, Diluc still can't help but secretly hand it to the alleged Imposter for being the first to have the guts to knock that "divine do-nothing" down a peg in some way, even if it is considered quite the risky move.

Should he encounter us while we're running for our lives worse for the wear for the above reason (and truly confirming that we mean no real harm and are just a victim of very unfortunate circumstance), Diluc is open to helping us get away safely under the radar and giving false info to the KoF like he did in his Story Quest since getting caught helping Teyvat's most wanted by the mob would not end well for him, either. And, he's pretty amicable when patching us up... but then he sees the dried gold blood and scars all over our body and realizes exactly who we really are. No, he doesn't do a full 180 and start blastin', but Diluc sure is now a lot colder towards us than he already is in general. Still helps us out, but we can taste the sudden mood drop. At some point, we discover his resent towards us for (from his perspective; can't exactly explain that we didn't actually make any of the characters' backstories since we're not HoYoverse and whatnot bc that wouldn't make sense to anyone in Genshin within the confines of the Creator!Reader AU without us sounding completely crazy) being seemingly nowhere to be seen around his and others' suffering despite being the God of All Gods capable of doing literally anything to help it, but simply choosing not to. Even if the Reader rightfully says they didn't do anything, Diluc's cold rebuttal is something along the lines of "No. You didn't.", and it's not the least bit reassuring.

If he were to stick around with us a bit longer during our escape from Mondstadt/whirlwind journey, then Diluc would come to understand that we really weren't as in control of everything bad happening to him or the world as he initially believed, especially if in his misguided blaming, it causes Reader to develop one HELL of a guilt complex feeling like they are responsible for fixing everything if it means putting an end to all the nonsense and abuse some of their once-beloved characters/acolytes are putting them through. Granted, the actual Imposter does have to be stopped and dethroned for all the shit they're pulling, but that's really all that falls on us as the unfortunate hero.

Other than that condition, though, we basically have someone that's thankfully not looking to hunt us down for absurd reasons and even helps us in our need, but at the same time curses us for letting him and many others down by not acting in some way when it mattered most.

[papermint-airplane]

10 random facts about me

I was tagged by @rebelangelsims 😘

Let's see. I think I've done some random facts asks before so there may be some overlap because I'm not a very interesting person but let's see...

When I was like 6 or something, my brother had me convinced he was Peter Pan and he gave me a little bag of pixie dust. I was (and still am) terrified of heights but he told me if I jumped off the back porch, which was really high off the ground to tiny me, that I would fly if I sprinkled the pixie dust on myself. I got as far as climbing over the railing and trying to summon the courage to jump when he stopped me. Turns out the pixie dust was powdered sugar.

My favorite song of all time is Free Somebody by Luna from f(x). Idk what it is about that song that my brain latched onto like "yesssssss this is the one" but I just love it.

I am named after Laura Ingalls Wilder.

I am intensely weirded out by puppets, particularly of the Muppet variety. There's just something about those felt-covered bastards I don't trust.

I started playing the Sims 1 in 2002 when I was 16. I never owned a single expansion pack for it, but it captivated me so much, I was almost late for work more than once because my pixel people needed me.

I always say "please" and "thank you" to my virtual assistants, not because I'm afraid of a robot uprising, but because that's just how I am. I don't even realize I do it, most of the time. Me and Bixby (I'm a Samsung user) actually have beef because I'll be like "Hey Bixby open Outlook, please" and she'll be like "lol bitch Idk what Outlookplease is" and I'm like "OPEN. OUTLOOK. Please." and she's like "Idk what you want me to do, you don't have Outlookplease installed on your phone" and I'm like "I AM TRYING TO BE NICE TO YOU" and Bixby just sits there all smug and not opening Outlook like aldjfalsdjfadsjfalsjfsd what do you want from me why won't you accept my politeness???????

I have made my Simself in every version of the game except Sims 1 because it wasn't possible to do so. But in Sims 2, 3, and 4, I have made myself and of course I am always a witch with a black cat familiar.

My addiction to CAS goes back to childhood when I used to make dresses for my Barbies out of random scraps of fabric. I didn't know how to sew, though, so everything was held together with safety pins, dental floss, school glue, and tape.

Not only can I whistle, I can whistle pretty darn well. I can't sing worth a damn so I guess God felt sorry for me and gave me one singular musical talent. It just so happens to be the one that most people find incredibly annoying.

I've been fascinated by Greek mythology since I was a small child entirely too young to be reading Greek mythology. Do you know how much incest there is in Greek mythology?! A lot. A LOT! I was raised by Fundies so it's really surprising I was allowed to read those stories and nobody was like "hey maybe the 6 year old shouldn't be reading about all this murder and incest and baby-eating". Because baby-eating also comes up a surprising amount of times. I still love it, though. Give me a good Greek myth any day.

Hmmmmmm let's see...who to tag...

Well if you read all of that crazy shit up there, I'm tagging you. Yes, you! You reading this!

Also, @venriliz, @getboolpropped, @changingplumbob, @coreene-simblr, @druidberries, and @living-undead don't ask questions just do it unless you don't want to.

[saucerfulofsins]

Same anon as before, and wow, you really get it.

And I know we can’t really say for certain what he was meaning in those interviews…he seemed pretty scattered, and maybe he was coming off a certain way and we’re just reading it wrong. But I really don’t think so.

Judging from the stuff people found from his older social media days, he seems like a pretty misogynistic guy, and that typically goes hand in hand with being homophobic and a bigot. That’s just a fact.

I think it’s shitty for him to take a job playing a character that he in his real life would most likely want nothing to do with, but I guess if the money is right someone like that will do whatever.

My husband clocked it immediately and said, “oh this man is way too much of an asshole to play a gay man, he’s hating this.” And I was like, so you see it too??? I guess it wasn’t just my Buddie obsessed brain running into overdrive.

I think it’s a shame because Oliver clearly put so much care into playing a bi character and that meant so much to me as a bi person. Oliver did everything perfectly and is so sweet and gentle about it, and he got stuck with such a creep to do his scenes with. I just hope it’s over soon.

Yeah, so... like I said in the tags on my previous response, I know a lot of guys who aren't homophobic. Like, "will kiss other guys for fun" and "are open to the possibility of being attracted to/falling in love with a man" not-homophobic. (Also, these men are distinct from bicurious because they know they aren't into men).

And LFJ's interview read as the opposite. You know how sometimes people with no knowledge still sound like they're at least accepting, in their own way? This sounds like someone with minimal knowledge trying to pass as accepting. And he's failing.

Even if things are coming off wrong, I think it's pretty egregious that someone who is a professional actor doesn't interview well at all, as well as nobody who wants him portrayed positively stopping the release of this interview. I don't think ABC needs him to be a shining light of representation (I don't think they WANT him to be at this point, the interview matches the vibes in the deleted scene), but his agency not taking measures here is fucking weird.

But yeah. It's the while package isn't it? The egocentrism, the focus on masculine masculinity and being cool, the misogyny he doesn't even CLOCK (sorry but why did Hen have to prove herself BECAUSE shes a woman?), the whole "lgbt spectrum" thing (huerk red flag), the trump support, racism etc etc on top of the uhh nepo baby vibes all of which just fucking send me. So much of this ISNT difficult!

And like yeah, actually Oliver is the opposite end of the... for lack of a better word, spectrum. He uses the word bisexual! He's doing this with a very clear intention, he's very open about Buck, and I'll be honest, I find it VERY refreshing. I know some younger actors (late teens/early 20s) have been cool about queerness, but having someone my actual age have these takes is... very healing, I won't lie. Because there definitely is a big difference in those 10 years and how we grew up?

But yeah, I can't imagine Tommy staying on the show. The fact he was meant to stay for 4 is kinda telling to begin with, and I personally wouldn't be surprised if they leaned into LFJ's creep vibes to aid Tommy's characterization. That's interesting because LFJ doesn't seem to realize any of that which... very telling! Very limited!! Tommy and Buck aren't very close, but for me, his absence during Chim's bachelor party is VERY telling. There's no reason Tommy had to leave, from a writer's perspective. That emergency was fake. It wouldn't have taken much of LFJ's time to be at those shoots, especially considering he was there for some of it anyway. And the party was important to Buck!!!! (Eddie looked so bitchy! The Buddie couple costume to hammer their pairing home! Etc).

So yeah. I fully believe it will be over soon, because there's just nothing there and besides LFJ and a handful of fans, I haven't seen any full support for the pairing... least of all from the show. He's as flat as flat characters come, a complete stereotype, and that for a show that rests predominantly on its characters! It's pretty damning, actually.

I guess what I'm hoping for is Tommy showing up a couple more times, Buck realising Tommy's hella toxic AND recognising his own patterns, breaking up with him, and figuring out not just what bisexuality really means to him but also the kind of relationship BUCK wants (versus someone else prompting Buck/falling for ONE aspect of him and never seeing the rest). He deserves that much, above everything else, and I don't think Tommy is leaving ANY room for that (possibly the least of all his relationships) .

[dearestspirit]

a note heard in heaven - 06

mizu x fem!reader | au based on the film the handmaiden | word count: 11,078 | warnings: mdni. this series will contain sexual and dark themes, including: abuse, sex, sexual assault/harrasment, period typical misogyny, murder, allusions to suicide, and period typical stigmas against mental health.

series masterlist | previous part | next part

a/n: beginning note for context: most of this chapter is within the context of the reader going through memories of their childhood, meeting mizu, and previous events of the story that happened with mizu, but moreso from the reader's perspective. also, it has the brunt of the tagged topics (abuse, suicide) but i tried my best at writing things with only as much detail as i thought they needed to have to advance the plot. take care and enjoy!

You’ve lived in this manor for a long time. From crying child to complacent adult, most of your memories are within the walls of the estate. Purgatorial fog covered the recollections of your haunted youth– knowing you were raised purely to be what you are now. A well; to be dipped into, whether it be for money or pleasure. To receive nothing in return. Nothing good, at least. No matter how far you go from that place, you’ll still flinch when you think of it. It’s why, even in the back of the carriage as you and Taigen are leaving the asylum, you grow distant. Strings of what used to be lingering fuzzily in your mind, as if the fear wants to eat away at you.

Just like it did when you were a child.

In that same dreary library, attending your reading lessons even then, that’s where horror first began its feast with you. It’s where you’d first hear the words ‘bitch’ from your eventual fiance. Where he had first met your skin with bruising metal beads. Your hands, your knuckles. They had stayed painfully red for weeks. He’d tell you to remember it. He’d tie the metal beads to the obi around your waist. Really burn it into your mind for any time after that you wanted to act out. What part of you had fear gulped into its belly then? And what part did it chew on when you were given your own bedroom, away from your dear aunt?

Madam Kaji had told you a tall tale that night. Your new room suffocated in deep shadows, curtains drawn to dim the glow of the moonlight. You remember begging her to light a candle in your room. Desperately, because while you knew you couldn’t ask for two, you might have a chance at one. Just one light to protect you. Any sense of security or safety in this place was scarce– so much so that you weren’t even surprised when the older woman sneered down at you, refusing. That doll you owned– the one you seemingly carried with you everywhere– was the only semblance of warmth you ever felt here. She crouched down, level with your eyesight. Pointing her lantern towards the door, she spoke in a hushed tone, telling you all about the ogre who’d burst into your room if it heard you scream or cry. How it’d smother you until you could no longer manage to make even a whisper of a sound. You thought you heard the now familiar sound of a stomach growling.

Until your aunt came through that very door, spooking both you and Madam Kaji.

She had tsked, shaking her head. “Don’t be scaring little ones like that.”

Her pointed glare towards the elder woman was obvious as she used her own candle to light your lamp, which had eased your fears at least a little. You remember her to have always been that kind. Always looking out for you, in a world where nobody else was. The first person to make you feel like maybe you did belong. That despite whatever horrific paths you’d find yourself on, you weren’t entirely alone. But those heartfelt moments grew to be few and far between through the interference of your eventual fiance. Short lived too, washing down the drain alongside what fragments of faith you had left. That man had doled out cruelty and punishments equally between you and your aunt, snuffing out any sense of joy in your lives.

You had learned a lot from the woman, regardless.

Like when she told you to hold out your hands, dropping a photo of your mother into your outstretched palms. Did you know, decades later, you’d be asking the same question she had?

“And me? Everybody says I don’t compare to my big sister.” She spoke with her head turned, displaying her side profile.

You must’ve spent hours looking at that picture after that. You never knew her, the only testament to her as a person being the stories passed down from your aunt. Tracing a finger down the slope of her nose, then your own. Perhaps you’d never compare, either. Not like it mattered, when every step of your life was decided for you. You wouldn’t have to compare, you would just have to exist. No desires, no grudges. No mind to dwell on the truth of your life. Just pieces of a blank slate hastily kept together by the desperation of the people around you greedily trying to take your wealth.

Despite any punishment, you’d still act out any way you could. You’d giggle and point at the dirty words and pictures in those books you were forced to read during your lessons. When your aunt would point and verbalize the parts of the human body across from your eventual fiance, you were to repeat them. You’d chuckle as she’d point out the lower areas– noticing the displeasure on the man’s face. He’d descend upon you and your aunt quickly, leaving you teary eyed and frowning.

It wasn’t long after that that you found out what a mental hospital was. The threats to send you away to one of them were frequent, becoming a little more real each time you acted out. You had been told that this sort of hysteria was typical in the women of your family– he had side-eyed your aunt at that particular comment– and that it’d do you good to get your lunacy treated. That they’d bury you into the depths of cold soil. Cover it up until you ‘improved’, after which you’d become a fucking dog to them. Leashed. Detailing the frightening ways these hospitals would treat their patients, it made your aunt start running. She had made a desperate attempt to get out of the library before that lever was pulled and the gate had shut in her face, much like it did to Mizu when she first tried to get in.

You wished you were brave enough to try.

You watched your aunt slowly grow sicker. Older now, and able to reminisce, you now knew the cause of that sickness. Those fucking readings he’d make her do during his bidding sessions. To an audience of men, delighting in a well put together woman voicing off lewd words. When he’d make her read the story of women getting defiled, smoking men gathered on the steps to view her. They’d have their own cushions and tables, treated with the highest regard to further his own influence among these sadistic individuals. At the end of it all one man would go home with the crass material, and your fiance would be even richer. You’d watch with a heavy heart from the doorway of the library as she finished up, dabbing at her cheeks with a folded handkerchief. That smile she gave to you– deeper with pity and sympathy than you could describe at the time.

When she’s found dead the next day, you think she took with you the last scrap of hope you had left. Her body swayed from the branch of that cherry tree outside your window. A servant had swiftly carried you away, trying to tear your eyes away from the gruesome scene.

You visited that tree often. Thinking of your aunt protecting you, as best she could, from the harsh realities of the world you lived in. Something about you swears those flowers bloomed even more beautifully– their hue a vibrant pink, fragrant and sweet. Your aunt’s soul in a rush of floral glory. Arms above your head, you’d let yourself feel the breeze and swing just like she did.

What acts of defiance did you have left in you?

Exhaustion buckled you into silent submission.

The estate grew with you, over time. Adulthood made little change in you, but the manor morphed beyond itself. Renovations to the library changed its appearance, now seeming more opulent. Pools of clear water embedded in the tatami floor, bonsai trees, and sections of pure white sand adorned with rocks adding a scenic flair to the room. Despite all the change, you were still just as terrified of the library as you used to be. The death of your aunt was nothing to your now fiance– the ‘proposal’, if you could call it that, happened shortly after– his only concern was those books of his. Eventually, he had replaced your aunt with… you.

In your heart, you know that your aunt’s most profound regret was that she could not save you from him.

Candlelight lit the room, your hushed voice rolling through like a fog. Crude details of sex falling on perverted ears. Bondage, whips. The faces of your listeners staring into you, hanging onto every syllable you speak. Their legs begin to tremble the more you delve into the story, the peak imminent. A new man you’ve never seen before sits proudly. Not as jittery or obvious as the others, though his eyes are just as intense.

The Count. You know him now. His ulterior motives, too. In your memories, that’s apparent in hindsight. The intense look in his eye is not that of perversion, but rather, trickery.

Your performance continued that night. Men had begun to fan themselves, fidgeting. With the last word having been read, you watched your fiance stand, describing the origins of the book and how he’d gotten his hands on it. Aristocratic nonsense that’d bore you to death. The Count had chimed in to the conversation, striking a nerve within your fiance as you see him light up at whatever he said. Mentioning an author by name, you assume. The book is flipped around to the audience to show the one problem.

An illustration, torn from its place. Only the hint of it remains in the ripped edge still holding onto its bindings.

“Before the bidding starts,” His hand waves over to you, gesturing for everyone to gaze your way. “We’ll have a demonstration.”

You’d be disrobed of the extravagant kimono you had on to reveal a lighter one underneath. With the pulling of a few levers, a wooden mannequin with maneuverable limbs would be lowered from the ceiling, coming to rest in front of you. Removing the pins from your hair as you let it down, you’d have to straddle the puppet’s legs, your own obi wrapped around its waist. You’d be bound to it, this way. An unfortunately visceral feeling of eyes crawling on whatever inch of skin they could see made your mouth dry, you remember. Your fiance would set up all the ropes on the model, it eventually coming to be hoisted in the air, you still secured in its lap. Below you, you could faintly make out the image of the many men leaning forward in their seats, as if to study your form. Leaning backwards to imitate the position you’d read out earlier, you could feel your stomach begin to turn. Your mind had grown fuzzy after that, barely perceiving the suggestive speech going on about you.

Your next clear memory of that night was of you sneaking your way through the manor. Many shortcuts were riddled throughout the strange architecture. Above the library was a particular wall. From your side, you were able to slide it aside and peer into the room below. Convenient, when you wanted to catch your fiance’s wrongdoings. Sat at one of the tables was The Count, carefully replicating an illustration from a book. A forgery. Yet their discussion landed at the one topic you expected; women, and particularly which women The Count figured he could successfully lay with during his time at the manor.

He clicked his tongue. “There is… only one who would refuse me here.”

“Madam Kaji?” Your fiance raised a brow at that.

“Your former wife who you still share a bed with?” The Count scoffed. “She’d come to my door in an instant if I showed her the right attention.”

“Then who?”

“The lady…” At his words, you peered through the slots in the wall as best you could. Anticipating his next sentence with great anxiety. “She didn’t look away when she saw me. Even if I were to meet her tonight… I couldn’t. Her body is cold, and her eyes… they have nothing. I’m certain her soul is dead inside. Go easy on her.”

You had gulped at that, slumping back a bit as the two began smoking together. At that time, your fiance had just laughed at the implications of The Count’s statement.

You found out soon after that that The Count had offered himself up to give you painting lessons; something he claimed was expected of all the ladies he met in England, where he had studied. Your fiance had insisted on the two of you sharing a meal with him. A gesture of kindness he bestowed only to those like-minded to him. You were never very lucky in receiving any sort of grace from him. When he was ushered away by a servant to take care of some important matter, The Count leaned on his elbows towards you.

“He will only be gone for a little while,” He said, eyes fixed on you despite their brief glance to where your fiance had run off to. “There’s something I’ve come to discuss with you about your future. You’ll see me waiting by the stone lamp at nightfall.”

For some reason, you had decided just this once to see. Your life had been vapid and essentially pointless after your aunt had passed– your handmaidens were not kind to you, Madam Kaji was too busy to entirely get along with you, and your fiance… well, you didn’t want him to like you to begin with. It didn’t surprise you that, after going so long without it, the tiniest glimmer of hope made your chest feel like it was bursting as you waited for midnight to come. You had sent your handmaiden away, off to some other wing of the estate so she wouldn’t be privy to whatever The Count wanted to tell you. After you heard her footsteps depart, you took a peek past the curtain of your window.

And there he stood, cigarette lit in his hands gazing back up at you. Eventually he had sauntered off out of your eyesight, but you could guess where he was going. Only minutes later was there a knock at your door.

“I’m not looking forward to having rumors spread about the two of us,” You spoke through the door, guarded. Your doll sat comfortably in your arms. “What do you want?”

“Look, it was really hard getting here,” He sneered. “I don’t need any of your princess sass. I’m the son of a farmhand, and I’ve spent a long time trying to get the skills to meet you. Bookmaking, forgeries. I came here to attract you, get rid of you, and take your money, but…”

He briefly trailed off, leaving you to wonder why. He cleared his throat after some contemplation, continuing.

“I don’t think I’m the type who would be able to seduce you, to put it in plain terms.”

You had snorted at that, opening the door. “You’d be right.”

The man had then allowed himself into your room. “So, I’ve thought of a new deal. In exchange for about,” He makes a motion with his hand to imply he’s thinking. “Half of your fortune, it can be a rescue operation. We get married, I take you far away, we split the money.”

“That’s not going to work.”

“So you rather marry that old pervert and stay here than even try?” He asked.

“I’m not going to marry anyone.” You seethed, backing away from him as you let your words sink in.

“And what of your wealth if you simply die like that? It’ll all go to him and he’ll just repeat the process from the beginning.” While he makes a good point, you can’t shake the years of trained fear of your fiance.

“He’ll… he’ll follow us,” You’ve started to quiver, securing your arms tighter around your doll. “The basement. He’ll put us in the basement.”

“What?”

You take a deep breath, eyes becoming distant. “After my aunt passed, I read in a book that there are certain things that happen to the body after being hanged. However, when I saw her body… none of the signs were there. When I asked my fiance about it, he asked if I wanted to go somewhere nice. He pulled up some of the tatami mats from the floor, leading me down a staircase.”

Even now, you could never forget the chill that seeped through your sock clad feet descending those stairs. How his words sunk in, that what had happened to your aunt was a consequence. A punishment for an attempted escape. The purpose of this room became more than clear to you; the variety of strange tools and objects. A lot of things that your mind couldn’t parse at the time. Your head throbbed at the lack of light, the underground room feeling like it was closing in on you.

A shiver courses through you. “I will never go back there again.”

The Count nods after hearing you recount your experience, exhaling noisily and rubbing his chin. “This,” He held up a small vial of an unknown liquid. “Is opium. If he ever gets a hold of you again, you can drink all of it and be dead within minutes.”

In your panic addled state, you grabbed for it eagerly. Before you could get a hold of it, he had swiped it out of reach.

“Not yet. It’ll be a wedding gift,” He huffs, shaking his head. “Quite a grim one, at that…”

Your annoyance was clear as you rolled your eyes, willing the prick of tears to go away. In that moment you knew you had to try. If your aunt could not save you, then you would save yourself.

“Then…” You wandered over to the windowsill, taking a seat on it. “Bring someone to be my handmaiden. We can send her to a madhouse under my name. I want… I want my name to be buried there. ‘I’ won’t exist after that.”

He agreed. Especially considering the plan to get rid of your current handmaiden would be to bed her. The repercussion of which would be Madam Kaji kicking her out, of course. With her commitment to routine and keeping everything in order, it’d be the very next day that your new handmaiden arrived.

Mizu.

Unbeknownst to most people– maybe your aunt or fiance had known, you weren’t sure– that spot on your door was a peephole, facing outwards into the handmaiden’s quarters. You watched Mizu fumble with her luggage, placing it away and out of sight. In a move that shocks you, she hesitantly slid the screen to your room over, peering inside. When you looked back, you saw how the lump of your blankets on the bed slightly resembles your figure. As if you were laying there, unaware of Mizu’s presence. Gently, you thud your doll against your door, spooking Mizu into shutting the door and scrambling into bed.

“Fuck.” You heard her whisper.

Your grin widens.

Mizu is exactly what you had asked for from Taigen; a foolish girl who wouldn’t know any better. But… isn’t that exactly what she thought of you, too? You knew it, by the way she looked at you with those sad eyes when you had screamed for your mother, faking a nightmare. A bit of a dirty trick to play on her first night, you admit. Even so, that didn’t stop you from being amused at the charade of it all. Taigen had suggested that you show off all your fancy belongings to her– every finely made kimono, the glamorous jewelry. Her awkwardness was more than obvious. The fact that she had never come face to face with such expansive amounts of wealth was clear every time her blue eyes widened or lit up at the various items you showed her. She… was endearing, actually.

So much so that when you found out about the other servants stealing her shoe, it genuinely enraged you. Something you hadn’t felt for a long time. Most of your emotions had boiled down to dull nothingness after years of complacency. You found little value in feeling anger, much less expressing it. With your servants lined up in front of you, you’re sure they too could sense the unease in the air. Arms crossed tightly, you stared them down.

“Which one of you took her shoe?”

At the far end, one of the servant girls is quick to bow on the ground, tears in her eyes. She must’ve known it was better for her to concede, confessing her guilt rather than letting the information reach Madam Kaji. You nodded, feeling at least a little relief she had done so.

“If she ever runs because of something any of you do to her, I will personally throw you out myself,” You sigh. “Fuck.”

You had some inkling of an idea back then, that your feelings for her were already… complicated. Those moments you had felt her eyes on you– piercing, with heavy lids, just watching you– you couldn’t suppress the thrill you felt. Taigen had told you a little bit about her. How she had grown up poor and mostly went back and forth between either the woman who took her in or that elderly man she trained under for some time. You knew her to be strong, capable. Though, she was a bit like you, wasn’t she? Not very well acquainted with the art of social skills. She certainly didn’t know much about the way of nobles like you, so her suspecting you as being just as conniving as her was unlikely. You had never felt close to someone like this, at least not someone your own age. Other handmaidens would often cower before you, not because you had specifically done anything to them, but because of Madam Kaji’s strict standards. Mizu, though? She filled your time with genuine conversation and laughter. Maybe not the most smiles because she wasn’t exactly one to outwardly express herself, but that slight upturn of the edge of her lips– you could’ve kissed her the first time you saw it. Her entire face deserved the downpour of kisses you wished to give it. Forehead, eyebrows, the lids covering her striking eyes that didn’t scare you, cheeks, the tip of her nose often reddened by the cold rainy weather, lips, chin. You truly did think of her, late at night when your back would hit the cushioned softness of your mattress.

That bath didn’t help either. Absent-mindedly, you find your tongue running over the tooth she had smoothed down. Hoping to quell how much you missed her with whatever faint trace of metal that thimble had left behind. Hoping that, if your taste buds found that metallic tang, it could calm the way your heart pounded.

It came to be a fond memory of yours– how she had so gingerly taken your face in her hands. The pads of her fingers were calloused, rough on your own skin. You desperately wished there had been no thimble barring you from feeling her thumb trace across your teeth, your tongue. If she had asked you, you would’ve gladly closed your lips around her. Hers was a painless authority– your obedience to her was not beaten into you. You supposed… you just liked her. That notion of you being hers, and her being yours? A thread of a thought that you could barely unravel before you watch her eyes trail down your body. With how bright they are, it’s impossible to not notice the way her pupils dilate, especially when you see her throat bob as her eyesight aligns with your breasts. You had seen many, many men with wandering eyes. Impolite, sleazy gazes that made you squirm in discomfort. You wonder if her staring was a result of arousal, too? Mizu was unlike them, though. While her thoughts may have been impure, her hands stayed only where you asked them to. Never seeking out more than you wished to give. However, you craved for her to keep looking. There was almost a pained whimper from you as she peeled away, removing her thumb from your mouth. How easy would it be to grasp her wrist, drag her hand down your body until she was rolling her fingers over your most sensitive parts?

“Go ahead and finish washing.” You notice the way her voice had lowered, gotten huskier.

She sits with her back to the tub, arms crossing tensely. Behind her, you could make out the visible red tint speckled across the tops of her ears. To you, the silence is comfortable, but you’re sure that it’s agony to Mizu. Smiling, you hoist yourself to your knees, taking two movements to situate yourself behind her.

“Mizu?” Your voice is breathy, right next to her ear, that gets even redder.

“What?” She snaps at you a bit, but you pay it no mind.

“Do you want to come in, too?” If you didn’t feel it would push the limits, you would’ve planted a kiss right behind her ear.

Another on her neck below it. She’s frozen, not answering you while she’s deep in thought. Probably weighing her odds– would this be something you’d go running to Madam Kaji about if she said yes? You knew you wouldn’t, but you’re not sure how to assuage those doubts in her. Mizu turns to you, a smirk on her face that sends an arrow through your heart.

She leans in close, barely space between you two at this point. “Maybe next time, princess.”

The likelihood of you falling in love with her increased tenfold after that. Even as Taigen had told you to occupy all her time, to ensure that she thinks you’re falling in love with him at a snail’s pace. As if you’d fall in love with him at all, you wanted to scoff.

You couldn’t. You were on a nosedive, falling hard for the girl he had sent to be your servant. The one you were supposed to send away. Her presence now burnt into every joyous moment you could think of. Dinner, where Taigen had called you breathtakingly beautiful. A brief flash in your mind compared to how Mizu’s body had engulfed the rest of your memory. Dressing her, giving her those earrings to wear, having her look like a noble lady in front of you. Removing every garment one by one, too. Despite the glove in between, letting your hand follow the dips of her shoulder blades. Laughing with her after your painting lessons, or on that walk where she had cradled you so kindly. Having been deprived of true affection and feeling her palms against your cheeks as she talked you out of those bleak thoughts.

It was companionship.

When you thought of how this scheme was going, the way Mizu would never be yours if it came to fruition– you could barely fathom it. Finally, here is what you think you were made for. A woman who you would do anything to call your own, but with her came that cruel twist of fate that this would be it for you two. How hellish that you’d have to put up with Taigen’s grabby hands and crude remarks for the entirety of it, too?

That day it had rained, with the two of you back at the estate waiting for Mizu to return was one such occurrence. You had slapped his hand away from your arm, eyes going wide with annoyance.

“Ugh, you men are so simple.” You mumble.

“What?” Taigen snorts. “I’m just playing around. Your fiance’s making you read too many of those books, hm? I’m not after your body, only your money.”

He had pinched your cheek, your arm, and then your ass, which you fiercely swat away.

Mizu had gone stomping around the manor, you being unaware that she had seen Taigen so boldly touching you. You had seen her in the night, sitting straight up and sighing. Her anger was so freely expressed in those eyes of hers. When she looked Taigen’s way, her hatred of him was unmistakable.

At this point, yours probably was too.

Sitting on that rock in the forest, nearly in his lap, you had told him as much. He had insisted the two of you had to make the proposal believable. Mizu would have to see the two of you tangled together in order to truly think you had accepted. You had reluctantly agreed, though the nausea in your belly wasn’t soothed at all. He had made a comment to pretend he was that wooden mannequin, and he’d pretend you were another woman as well.

You didn’t want him to be the mannequin.

You wanted him to be Mizu.

Balanced in her lap, letting her cup your thighs in her hands. Fingers tracing upwards, creating a path of flames that licked deep into your bones. Her mouth on yours, frantic and frenzied with desire, the absolute need to be close to each other. You needed to be close to her because you loved her. In all your convoluted years of living, for once, laying with her, you had felt that first twinge of simultaneous fulfillment and heartbreak. Your heart, beating once, fed itself full on the fantasy of being together with Mizu. Beating once more, it collapsed when you heard her distressed cry for you, rooted to her spot in the forest as she saw you kissing Taigen.

With all the pain in her voice, the slight watery quality to her eyes, you could’ve never guessed that she too, was shattering.

A cool breeze wafted through the library, chilling your skin. You cleared your throat, watching all the men in attendance for tonight’s bidding settle into their spots. Taigen, of course, is there too. The story laid out in front of you made you pause, knowing its contents by the title alone after having practiced it for so long.

Depicted in the erotic tale was a relationship between two women. Describing how one of them was given a small box– four small silver bells contained within. A gift for her and her lover. As you read aloud, you notice the room growing dimmer. Regardless of the candlelight fading, you were able to continue. The two women would take two bells inside of them. Legs parted and meeting each other in the middle, the melodic notes would ring as they moved against each other. Tongue wetting your dry lips, you try to keep your focus on your speech. The illustration portrayed in the book below has you nearly tripping over your words, a momentary glimpse of it recalling Mizu to mind. To feel her, no bothersome fabric blocking you from her bare skin. To willingly allow yourself that vulnerability with her. Feeling her weight, her heat, the bumps of scars littered across her skin that you wanted to kiss, wanting to take away every ill thought she may have ever had. Feel the roughness of her hands finding every part of you with curiosity and desire, no trace of malice or greed.

Abruptly, applause rang out in the darkened room. You had barely even noticed that you finished reading.

Even dabbing at your heated skin with that folded handkerchief, you couldn’t shake those thoughts of Mizu away.

Your nerves had gone cold once darkness fully encompassed the estate. Were you even sure of how you got here? Mizu, hovering over you, eyes set on the rise and fall of your bare chest.

“If he sees you like this…” She’s mumbling, so rapidly you can barely make out what she said.

In seconds, she’s descended onto you, her tongue circling around your nipple. You can feel the way her hand slides to your side, nails dipping into your tender skin. A futile attempt for her to cling onto what little restraint she has left. You know she probably thinks of you as something dainty, easily broken if treated haphazardly. Bite. You wanted to tell her. Mark you so even when the two of you were no longer, you could trail over the scarred teeth marks. Bruise. Let you see the way her love erupts across you, let her pour every ounce of unabashed need into them. Rather, her lips close around you in a languid suck, dragging an open-mouthed gasp from your throat. On impulse, your fingers card their way through her hair, pulling while you try to hold onto the last shreds of your stability. You can feel her chest rumble against your abdomen right before she’s planting wet kisses against you. She travels up your body, following the natural contours of your shape until she reaches your chin. Pulling back, she looks down at you. Her eyes, somehow even brighter than the moonlight, cause your lips to part. Mizu’s beautiful. You could see her like this every night. Every hour, and still not tire of it.

Tears dot along your lower lids, partially out of pleasure as she teases her fingers around your nipple, but also out of an indescribable anguish. Mizu was not an easy woman to read. With you two playing the roles of blushing virgin and warm mentor, did this mean anything to her? Was it only because you asked her to show you how The Count would touch you, a thinly veiled attempt to seduce her? She handled you with such a sweet touch,it was hard to think that maybe it was nothing special to her.

“Will he be this gentle, too?” You asked, noticing the rasp in your own voice.

“How could he not?” Her lips are so close, tickling your jaw right below your ear. “He’ll do this, too…”

You’re lost in a heady daze of lust as you feel her fingers creep along your calf to reach the hem of your clothing. You’d let her tear it apart if it meant her touching you even a second sooner. She pauses, not moving further until you hurriedly nod, burying your face in her shoulder. The fabric of your robe slips off you with her movements, bunching up under you. As her fingers dive deep below, gliding circles over your clit, you breathe out a wanton laugh. Finally. Mizu was here, touching you, it was meant to be like this. Clutching at her arms, pulling down the straps of her underclothes to rid her of them, you think you could die. What a precious woman to have above you, clawing lines into your sides that’ll unfortunately inevitably fade. Your fingers follow their path, wanting to imprint them upon your consciousness forever.

“Keep showing me,” You can barely speak, muttering. “Do it like The Count would.”

Briefly pausing the journey of her tongue down the dips of your thighs, she nods against you, huffing out a near mindless ‘uh-huh’. Traveling upwards from the inner crease of your knee, she licks a stripe up your thighs, her hot panting warming the cool trails of saliva.

“The Count will tell you that you’re soft, warm, and…” She’s grabbing your legs, putting your feet flat on the mattress with your knees raised and spread. Her head knocks against you as she leans, eyelids fluttering when she gazes at your center. “Breathtakingly beautiful.”

You’ve raised yourself up to your elbows at this point. Her hair tie had come loose, dark locks flowing down past her shoulders. With the moonlight bathing her in a halo, you wanted to tell her. Tell her she’s an angel. Beg for her to not leave you, as pathetic as it’d make you look. Anything to make it so that just the two of you could exist together, you didn’t care where. You’d put up with every disgusting pervert in the world if it meant she stayed by you. If, at the end of the night, you could have her slip into your bed– whether your bodies met in a flurry of excitement or not, you wanted her there.

Her hesitance, though, was noticeable. While you enjoyed the stroke of her palms against your thighs, you worried if she had any intention to do this– to want this. You swipe a thumb over her cheekbone, startling her as her irises dart to you. There’s an emotion you couldn’t quite discern in them. In hindsight, you recognize it as the same way you’ve looked at her all this time.

Lovesickness.

Petting at her hair, you smile down at her. “Would The Count be staring like this, too?”

“Sorry,” The breath of her laugh washes over you. “He would.”

With her apprehension seemingly gone, she presses a chaste kiss to your clit– so charming of her it makes you whine. Her eagerness is shoddily hidden behind her subtle actions, tongue rolling over you in leisure strokes. But her hands, gripping onto the outside of your thighs to hold you down, are shaking. It’s less like she’s keeping you steady and instead trying to maintain her own sanity. The tentative lapping had soon turned more confident, Mizu becoming more assured each time you moaned or gasped. Greedily trying to push your hips up, you feel Mizu’s palms flatten over you, exerting enough force to keep your lower body grounded to the mattress. Still, in at least some way to satisfy you, she speeds the movements of her tongue, the rhythmic patterns it traces over your clit. Her eyes flutter open to peer up at you. You can practically feel her smile into your cunt as you uselessly try to halt the wobble of your thighs. Your head buzzes with the way her noisy slurping echoes in your ears, the way you feel like your very fucking existence is driven down to this singular point of your arousal, the way the tip of her tongue dips shallowly into you. She hardly ever pauses, the rumbling of her groans and heavy breaths shooting pleasure up your spine.

“Miss,” Reluctantly, she had pulled herself off of you, head still between your thighs and mouth stained with your translucent arousal. “Should I keep showing you?”

You whimper, sitting up and wrapping your arms around her waist. You gulped in doubt, wondering how to word your next thoughts.

“Mizu… I want to,” Your eyes dart down to where she’s shed her underclothes, completely bare before you. “Can I?”

You were hopelessly, unequivocally in need of it. A hunger you needed to sate, to please the most beautiful girl you’ve ever known. Taigen had claimed you a peach. You knew better, though. It was Mizu who was worth adoring– soft in the same way the fuzz of a peach is. More than anything, you wanted to partake in every part of her she’d give you. Scrape your teeth, bite and embrace her down to her innermost pits, until the heat of your humiliating starvation could finally cool. You had always been the one devoured, be it by greed or perversion– just once, you wanted to be the ravenous one.

You’ve noticed now that she blushes very easily, up her neck all the way to the tips of her ears becomes bathed in a red flush. You can’t help but chuckle at the sight, pressing a quick kiss to the corner of her lips, finding that you taste a bit of your own wetness.

“Okay,” She nods, chest falling with a heavy exhale. “Like this.”

Mizu effortlessly moves you in her arms, positioning you both so that you’re on your sides. She’s got you between her thighs and her between yours. Part of you wanted to scold her and tell her you just wanted to fuss over her. Mizu’s seemingly content though, a soft sigh escaping past the lewd noises of her tongue. If the scene weren’t so erotic you’d have laughed, told her how cute she is. You’re not sure if she would’ve listened, having always averted her attention away from any compliments you tried to give her, but she really was.

Not wanting to waste any more time, you take her thighs in your hands and part them, making space for yourself. Your breath caught in your throat, immediately latching your mouth to her clit.

She’s loud.

Practically wailing at the first suck, the way you messily circle your tongue over her, over and over. Her voice reaches a pitch you’ve never heard from her. It fuels you, fuels the way you lay the flat of your tongue against her. A wordless plea, begging to hear even more of her moans. You quickly become addicted to her– her sounds, her taste, the feel of her cunt as she tries to ride her hips into your face. You collect every pearl of slick from her onto your tongue so you can eagerly drink its sweetness, pangs of heat throbbing within you with every drop you savor. Mizu keens into you, rutting more and more the longer you lap away at her.

You think you could for the rest of your life, sustain yourself only on the wetness that drips from her.

More. The word repeats itself in your mind as you’re shifting away from her, pulling her up and into your lap. Knees firmly planted by your sides and pelvis raised, you sneak your hand below her. Cupping her arousal in your palm and thumbing at her clit, you smile up at her. Her moans are these sharp intakes of air, lustful gasps that leave your thighs hopelessly squeezing together. Eye-level with her breasts, it’s an urge you can’t resist– taking her peaked nipple between your teeth and biting. She lets out a stuttered laugh, an angelic sound that you hope the beat of your heart replicates forever, holding you by the back of your head and snuggling you closer to her. You let your middle finger swirl against her entrance, half-lidded eyes staring up at her from where you’re still pressing kisses to her chest. Mizu swallows, teeth digging into her lower lip as she nods. Laving your tongue over her, you sink your digit inside her. She writhes a little at the intrusion, welcoming the stretch regardless. She’s more than wet enough to take it, you muse. Pushing in and out, you relish in the way her warmth clenches around you, the way her body wants you, tries to suck you back in as if you’re a vital missing piece. Biting into the soft side of her breast, you tease your ring finger alongside the other. When you feel her walls adjust to both, you fasten your pace.

“Mizu,” You’re mumbling into the valley of her chest, chaste kisses left behind in the wake of your words. “Do you like this?”

That blush of hers is dappled across her skin again, collarbones, neck, cheeks and ears dusted with a brilliant ruddy hue. Her lips shut into a tight line, hiding a warbled and muffled moan, a pitiful ‘yes’ slipping out.

“Do you like me?” You’re grinning, though you’re aware of the way your eyes must look glazed over, a collection of tears on your waterline.

Energetically nodding, she lets her hands wander up your arms, steadying on your shoulders as her hips move on their own accord in tandem with your fingers, before continuing on to take hold of your cheeks. Like she’s ready to take care of you before you even ask her to, before anything is visibly wrong, she just knows.

“Promise, then,” You’re crying now, tears having fallen down the slope of your face, hiccuping an almost grief-stricken sob. “Promise you won’t betray me.”

Mizu’s lips part, brows furrowing as she shakes her head. “Never, I never will.”

Her words tumble off into gasping, pitchy moans. Your chin on her sternum as you look up at her, your tears finally slowing. You had heard what you had wanted all this time– she promised. Her utterance of devotion, a rush of cool water over every piece of fiery anguish within you. You loved her. You loved her, and the knowledge that you do finally makes your world quiet. No nagging, lingering fear. No ogre waiting in the shadows to smother you. No unnecessary pains doled out upon your innocence. For a moment, one that would be all too short even if it lasted for eternity, the two of you are the only people that exist. No fiance, no Taigen.

Mizu, and just Mizu.

She places her hands on your shoulders, pushing you backwards so you hit the mattress with a thud. After some shuffling around, you’re able to take hold of her hand, using it to grind your pussy against hers. Mizu’s mouth drops open, eyes wide as she imitates your motions. The two of you are perfectly slotted together. Every feverish, wet pass of your clit over hers has you nearly collapsing. Your breaths mingle together, slipping out as heated sighs.

“How,” Mizu swallows thickly, trying to catch her breath. “How do you know these things?”

You just smile at her, shaking your head. Gripping her hand a little tighter, you’re able to thrust against her faster. You’re only vaguely aware of the way your inner thighs become coated in the mixture of your arousals, feeling like you’re coming apart at the seams. Mizu’s moans pick up in pace, hitching every so often when the two of you connect in a pleasurable jolt. Her other hand is clutching, nearly clawing at you, wanting so badly to break skin and leave marks on you. With her mouth falling open wide, eyes trained on you, Mizu tumbles over her peak, the quivering of her thighs noticeable against your own. Her groaning doesn’t stop, an arm flung over her eyes as you can make out the hint of tear tracks by the corners of her mouth, the redness of her cheeks hidden. Hearing her, her loud cries of pleasure as you keep going send you over the edge, a few more slick joinings of your cunts together, and you’re there with her, the current of your arousal running through your body. Finally stilling, you can hear the breathy, lighthearted chuckles of Mizu once you fall backwards, arms spread out on the mattress under you. Mizu crawls the best she can, kissing up your navel to your lips, settling beside you. Her hair’s mussed, the dark tresses flowing behind her, eyes shining and face stippled in pink blush.

What a precious woman to have by you.

That memory was one you came to ruminate on often– especially the day after that, where Taigen had put his hands on you during that painting lesson, bribing Mizu out of the room with a coin. Or at least, attempted to. Her unwillingness to leave had undoubtedly pissed Taigen off tremendously, him storming out down that rocky dirty path. Mizu followed shortly after, as did you, having secretly trailed behind both of them. You had listened in on their conversation, hiding a laugh when Mizu had stomped away after defending you.

Taigen had stood there dumbfounded, looking at you past the branches of trees you lurked behind.

“Can you at try a little fucking harder to pretend you want this marriage before she runs off?” He hisses.

Exhaling, you look out in the distance where Mizu had walked away. “I... can't. I want to quit,” You swallow, hugging yourself close. “I hate everyone here. My fiance, my mother, you...”

Taigen snorts at that, raising a brow. “And Mizu? You feel sorry for her?”

You nod. “I... can't stand her.”

He shakes his head, lighting a cigarette and taking a few drags of it. “Would you care to know some of the things she's said about you? That you're too sheltered. Even if I were to touch you intimately, you'd be completely oblivious to what a man like me wanted. She's only been nice to you out of pity, start being realistic.”

As much as you hated to admit it, you dwelled on his words for much longer than you wanted to. It's an inescapable cycle of blame you go through. It's your fault for not knowing better, then it's Mizu's fault for being so kind to you, and then it's Taigen's for starting this all in the first place; repeat until you're suffocating.

That must be why it's difficult to avoid crying when Mizu insists, yes, you will love Taigen. Resting on that lounge chair, her massaging at your weary calf muscles. When you're ripped from placid waters, thrown right into stifling flames to burn alive, it hurts, you realize. It's the best comparison you can make when Mizu all but tosses you to Taigen's waiting maw, solidifying what he had said to you. Pity. No matter how much you try to assure her that you could be happy here, happy with her, more so than you ever could be with The Count or your fiance, she doesn't budge.

“What if I said I loved someone else?” You asked, feeling the slow rising of warmth up your frame. “I don't have anyone else on this earth... would you really still tell me to marry him?”

Repeating her own words back to her, you hoped she would notice. Take the hint, absolve herself of all this, and be with you. Fix everything, prove she wasn't like everyone else in your life. You want her to be different. You need her to be different. How could she have done all this if she wasn't? Even now as you looked down upon her in anger you could feel the stains of her lips everywhere she had kissed you, could feel the brush of her knuckles across your cheekbone, the way her hands had made your body so pliant. You couldn't comprehend it. How could all of that be worth so little to her that she'd be willing to give it up for a chunk of money? Was that look in her eyes just a trick of the light, your mind's imagination?

Blinking back tears, you watch as she sighs, taking your leg into her hands once more, timidly trying to settle your frustration. “You will love him.” Mizu's looking up at you, the twinge of optimism in her eyes making you sick to your stomach.

She really believes what she's saying. She's doused you in kerosene, her insistence the final motion that sets your body alight. You would've given up this whole fucking charade if she had just kept her promise. You would've done anything to get rid of Taigen, even if it meant staying in this house, just to assure the two of you could be together. But if she doesn't even want it, then what's the point? If she doesn't even want you, then…

“Get out,” You don't even recognize your own voice, faltering with shuddering sobs as you take her by her arms to pull her up to a standing position. “Get out.”

“Wait, miss!” She calls out, but you barely register it before you're dropping her down onto her bedroll, retreating back into your room with the door slammed behind you.

Maybe Madam Kaji was right about ogres waiting to smother you. This world in which you had no one, this world which had been patiently waiting to swallow you whole, will finally get its rightful meal.

You shouldn't have been born.

Silence drenches the night, goosebumps over your skin as the breeze rustles at your clothes, your hair. You're shivering, staring up at that haunted cherry blossom tree. Tears continuously rolled down your cheeks. Fingers trailing down rough bark, wondering if it's worth it to try to ground yourself. Your fury had not been quelled, not in the slightest. In your mind, you could see Mizu's eyes, the way they were practically begging you to fall in love with Taigen. How could you tell her that it's not just that you didn't love him, but you couldn't? How could you have stupidly believed her, that she'd never betray you? Swallowing a laugh, you look down with teary eyes at the box in your hands containing a length of rope.

You shouldn't have been born. Poor, unwanted thing that you are.

Distant thuds reach your ears, harsh and quick breaths– the sound of someone nearly hyperventilating– flooding your senses. Before you can even turn around, you're hit with an overwhelming force, being corralled into a pair of arms.

“Let go.” You whimper, struggling.

“I'm sorry,” Mizu gasps, chest heaving against your back. “Don't... don't die.”

She represses a trembling sigh into your shoulder, the faint moisture of tears dotting the bare skin of your neck. You're surprised, brows raising.

“And what are you sorry for?” You question, seeing if she'll be honest.

“I was working with The Count, we were going to send you away and take your money,” She picks her head up from your shoulder so you can clearly hear her. “So, please... don't get married to him.”

“Are you worried about me?” You turn around in her arms, taking sight of her tear-stricken face. You had never seen her cry, never thought she would, at least not in front of you. “You shouldn't be.”

Taking a step back, she keeps her hands on your arms. “Why not?”

With a thumb pressed into her cheek, you swipe away any stray droplets. “Taigen and I were tricking you. You were going into the madhouse, under my name. Then I'd get to take up your name and run far, far away.”

Her eyes dart across your face, unable to sense any hint of a lie in what you've revealed to her.

“Fuck! I should've never trusted that asshole!” She yells, piercing the quiet of the night.

But her arms are back around your waist, coddling you close to her chest. Like if she can't feel the pressure of your body against hers, you'll be gone, whittled down into infinitesimal shards she couldn't see anymore. Her truth lies in the way her breath evens out, the way she gathers your wrist up in her hands, fingers caressing your pulse point, to lead you back to your room. How she checks behind her every so often to make sure you're alright. Those little actions that make her Mizu, the real one.

Maybe Madam Kaji was wrong about ogres waiting to smother you.

Mizu sits at your desk, carefully writing out a letter to her folks back home, informing them of the new turn of events; the two of you teaming up against Taigen. Placing a solid gold bracelet next to her which she could enclose as payment, you settled down alongside her. Taking the bracelet between her teeth to test its legitimacy, she grinned.

“This'll go far for them, thank you.” She tells you.

When she's feeling genuine happiness, it's hard for her to wipe the smile off her face, you notice. You hope that once you two are able to make it away from all this, she never stops smiling.

So the next morning, when your fiance beckons you over to the side of his carriage, you don't let your fear stop you.

“Just because you have a week of freedom, doesn't mean you can misbehave,” His words were full of venom as he spat them towards you. “Don't forget where I'll put you.”

You take a bow, eyes cast to the cobbled ground. You wouldn't let him get to you, not any longer when you had Mizu there for you. The two of you would be successful, and then you could run so far from this place you wouldn't remember how to get back even if you tried. Nobody would be able to find you again. If they did... you're sure Mizu would have some things to say about that.

Slowly approaching her, you smile, willing any bad thought out of your mind at the sight of her pretty face. “Let's go,” You tell her. “We don't have a lot of time before we have to leave.”

“Come, then.” While she offers you her arm, you're hesitant to take it, choosing to step past her. You would've, but the idea of Taigen still lurking around the estate and the possibility of the other servants not having gone far, you avoid her touch.

You can hear her sigh behind you, though you're aware of the light undertone to it– she knows you're trying to refrain from any rumors cropping up before you leave, lest Taigen catch wind of them. Her steps follow you, wordlessly keeping up. You're thankful she seems to understand why silence befalls the two of you. Though you feel the subtle gesture of her hand at the small of your back, tensing for a moment. Mizu's breath hits your ear when she leans in even closer to you, her raspy voice calling out to you to 'come on'.

There's a moment after packing your things that you turn to her, hands smoothing down her apron. Your fingers are twisting into the fabric, not ready to have her change into her 'disguise’– really just a cloak, her glasses and a kasa, but it does well to hide her face– quite yet. She's always been your handmaiden. Even with it being a role for her to fill, a part to play, she's tended to you with such care. You couldn't wait until you were both just normal people. No ladyship, no servantry. You wanted to dote on her, flood her with all of your affections and have no one bat an eye at it. Though, she pulls your hands from her, holding them in her own. Her thumbs graze across your palms, a distant look in her eye.

“What are you thinking about?” You ask her, which definitely startles her out of whatever daydream she's having.

“About how we need to leave,” Mizu takes your arms in her hands to spin you around to face your luggage. “Let's go, princess.”

That little nickname she's given you makes you roll your eyes, watching as she cloaks herself and puts on her glasses and kasa. The sight almost makes you blush, the way she's effortlessly beautiful and handsome at the same time.

“Actually,” You speak up, turning to her anxiously. “Would you follow me?”

She's unsure, you can tell by the way her eyes squint, but she agrees. After last night, you're sure she's on edge, rightfully so. Finding out the tables were turned on her must've been difficult, but she knows you feel no loyalty to Taigen. Despite everything, you two are each other's safety. Taking her down that stepping stone path to the library, you're not entirely sure where you're going with this. That place had been your whole life, and maybe the idea of leaving it behind was a little terrifying, regardless of the grim reality it held within its walls. Perhaps you just needed to see it one last time, really make sure you were leaving it behind.

Mizu's startled by that ceramic snake again, carefully toeing the barrier between inside and outside. She steps over it once she sees you bypass it, unafraid. You see her briefly grimace at the sight of a small, erotic porcelain statuette. Your fiance has a few of those around, blatantly making his predilections known to those who enter. Perhaps she thought it was just a little one off, a bizarre trinket owned simply for the peculiarness of it. She's corrected when you hand her the volume of some series she's never heard of. Flipping through the pages, she halts when she comes across the illustrated pages. Women in various degrading positions, breasts and nether regions fully drawn. Those blue irises of hers somehow become even icier, glancing from the book, to you, back down to the book.

Her gaze catches on the spinel earrings one of the women is depicted wearing.

“Is this...” Her voice is gravelly, like she's straining to get the words out. “What you've been reading, this whole time? To your fiance, those men that show up?”

You're not sure what you expected when you brought her here. Maybe your whole life, you've known that what's been done to you has been wrong, that you've been used as an object of desire to satisfy certain pleasures. Her anger, though, radiated through you. Tugged on a heartstring so deep within you you thought it had been entirely cut loose. She looks up at you one more time, meeting that teary gaze of yours. Mizu shakes her head, taking that page in her hands and ripping it from its bindings. Striking the long buried part of you that felt you were worth something. Worth fighting for, worth rendering this whole library asunder. Throwing the book on the ground once the drawing is in tiny pieces, she moves forward fast, looking for whatever she can get her hands on and destroy. Her chest heaves with every agonizing huff of breath she inhales, fueled by the heights of her rage. That saddened look in your eye, which had been hardened over time into something you had resentfully accepted– the pure hatred she felt for anyone who had ever betrayed you, tortured you, anyone you had ever read a fucking word to.

Her cape billowed behind her as she moved through the room, grabbing books from their rightful places and hurtling them to the ground below, ultimately damaging their spines and covers. You're trailing after her, a lost puppy watching in amazement. Shreds of paper litter the floor, stepping on them in your rush to follow. Pulling a concealed dagger from you don't know where on her person, she's slashing through the parchment of as many scrolls as she can find. Kneeling on the ground and slicing page upon page. Those familiar stories, all ones you recognized, made useless at the hands of someone who loved you. She yelps, the dagger handle slipping out of her palms with how furious her motions were. It does little to deter her though, collecting it and continuing her assault of the library. Shoving entire rows of novels onto the floor, books ending up in ruined heaps. She throws open one of the glass display cases, the lid shattering upon impact to the floor. Carrying over pots of colored ink, she smears it over the illustrations housed within. Hands stained all manners of red and blue, you can't stop the few tears that finally slowly shed.

You wet your lips, feeling pieces of you come together at this unhinged spectacle of romance. Isn't that what the relationship between you two has been all this time, anyway? An unexpected force that knocked you on your ass the moment you realized you loved her. More than that, the moment you realized she loved you. Yes, exhaustion had buckled you into submission, but love had weathered you into a storm.

Hurrying over to the tatami mat floor, you remove some of them to uncover the shallow pools of water that lay below. Mizu nodded, gathering up piles of the books in her arms to bring them over. Helping her, you could feel your lungs burn, eyes painfully wet with... astonishment? Pain? Some mixture of the two, perhaps. She kicks her shoes off, stepping into the water to fully submerge the books. To the side stands you, holding some more pots of ink. You're petrified. Until she looks up at you, and the fury in her eyes subsides when she sees you, turning into that gaze you know, now.

Lovesickness.

You hurl ink into the water, effectively dyeing the books into a muddle of colors. Joining her in the water, you stomp away, pulling even more books in. Breathing labored, Mizu steps out. Gripping a flat length of metal adorned with a tassel in her hands, she stands before that snake. Steadying it in her hands and widening her stance, she swings hard. Shards of ceramic go flying, the head taken clean off the sculpture.

It's your life in summary. Those bits of shrapnel, the way Mizu had torn your life apart the second she stepped foot in it.

Your savior.

Your Mizu.

There's a renewed vigor in Mizu's movements as she guides you out of the manor. One of her last acts of protecting you before she begrudgingly has to place you in the arms of Taigen to fulfill the rest of the plan. This time, when she offers her arm to you, you take it. She keeps you level over even the most jagged paths, catching you when you stumble. A cobbled wall stands between you and your freedom, slowing down to a stop when you reach it. Mizu drops the satchels you carry to the ground, heading over the wall. Her arms go around your waist, picking you up and placing you down on the other side with little difficulty.When she lands next to you after grabbing your bags, you can't help but smile at her, a dreamy look in your eyes.

“What?” She asks, a hint of awkwardness in her tone.

“Nothing, nothing!” You bump into her with your shoulder.

She sighs, shaking her head but hiding her expression from you. “Come on, we don't have any time to waste.”

Running through grassy fields, the sun finally starts to peek through the treeline. You barely ever have any time to catch your breath, but your rowdy laughter and wide smiles are proof you don't care. You know it won't be long before Taigen meets up with you, taking you away and sending Mizu off into that asylum. For now, you're together. In this world only the two of you exist, where your hands can meet, lips can kiss. Your only witnesses being the fall of the moon and the rising of the sun, the soft blades of grass beneath your feet, the bubbling creeks of water.

Everything up to that point had led you here– Mizu being hauled away, crying out for you. Yet your cheeks hurt from containing your chuckles, the knowledge that Taigen would have everything handed back to him, tenfold. All the unnecessary shit he's put you both through... He'd be nothing in a matter of days.

You click your tongue, clearing the tears out of your eyes.

“I'm hungry, Taigen.”

a/n: so, this chapter is like. over twice the length of any of the others, sorry about that. hopefully that makes sense for why it took longer to update! i would've split this chapter in two, but… i couldn't see it being split in any good way, personally. also, it's likely that the next chapter will be the last, i'm not sure if i'll do an epilogue yet though. anyway, i hope you've all been enjoying the story so far!

[catboygirljoker]

lrb: i also see artists sometimes say things like "tumblr has no algorithm! likes do literally nothing!!" which, again, lrb, it DOES do something, it tells me you liked my post, but...its just entirely false?

just because YOU and your group of mutuals/ people you follow don't use the "based on your likes" or "for you" features doesnt mean that nobody else does. (or that using those features is The Wrong Way To Do Tumblr.)

i regularly see people discover my posts or art by going through term or tag search results (at the very least, i assume so based on which posts people like/reblog and in what order), and the order in which posts are displayed in search results weighs notes (including likes!) in some way, even if it isn't strictly most-notes-first.

there's also the "posts like this one" feature (when you focus on a post in desktop or mobile and the site suggests similar posts) that i don't know for certain is based on what people have liked, but i wouldn't be surprised if it does.

like. be a doomer about people not performing sufficient social media engagement for you if you want, but at least be accurate about it.

[thecoffeelorian]

Unsung Heroes; Unspoken Lines: Issue #1

Good morning, all, and welcome to what I hope can become a new discussion group for all of the unsung heroes of "The Bad Batch", as well as the many plot directions that never quite made it to the small screen.

Some of you may have already seen me in the tags already, while others may have not. You might have also tuned in for one of my "Fandom Friday" posts, or perhaps haven't seen any yet. Nevertheless, I will type my thoughts to the best of my ability here, as well as triple-check every post before submission so that I don't come across as complaining solely for the sake of complaining.

Before we get started, though, let me just offer up a huge thank-you to everybody who took the time to respond to my request post, as I really didn't think this would go past 3 likes...yet here we are now with around 20 brave souls besides myself, so. You all have my gratitude for this, and again, I will do my best not to squander it.

Second, just a few rules to put out here: as this is meant to be an actual discussion, and not just some Instagrammy thing where you like this post and disappear...I really prefer the responses made with typing words, and not the ones made with pictures, so please answer accordingly.

Thirdly, if there's anyone out there who never wants to question so much as a single line that megacorporation-produced entertainment delivers to them, and also lowkey mocks anyone that does on their own blogs...please filter out the tag "tbb: deep dives" so that our extensive observations don't ruin your fun.

And so, now that I've set up the format and guidelines...without further adieu, let us go to our first subject of this series: The Lawquanes!

In the beginning, I believed that characters such as Cut and Suu would be the basis for an extended support network for the Batch, even if just through a secure comm or two. They could have served quite well in this regard, too, be it as two of several insiders warning them to steer clear of certain planets; helping answer as many parenting questions as they could; and more or less showing that nobody now having to look after a young person would be required to go it alone.

Furthermore, as there are such things as family friends and child-raising discussion groups in real life, and on a more general note, ZOOM calls…naturally, I didn’t expect anything different for the likes of Hunter, Echo, and the rest.

Except it…kind of was. Other than Shep Hazard’s few appearances in Season 2, once Cut and Suu took their kids and hit the skids…that was pretty much it for any and all outside help, for the family was never brought up again.

This, in turn, meant no secret chats between Shaeeah and Omega; no surprise stealth visits from Cut just to see how everybody was adjusting; no deliveries of hand-me-down clothing or toys for the squad to save their credits; and, frankly, in the absence of a support network, it started to feel like these company execs were suggesting that it’s much better for newly formed families to go it alone rather than even think about asking for help.

Add to this the idea of introducing characters from previous series solely to take them away not long after, and it amounts to a bad habit of isolating the title characters, if not also alienating those who might have otherwise created long-term relationships with them.

Granted, in the early stages of this series, there was the creeping evil of the Empire to worry about and early on, it wasn’t hesitating to crack down. That idea was 100% concrete, so far be it from me to question such things.

What wasn’t so concrete, however, was the need to keep on avoiding each other when one, most of the title cast were able to interact with Rex during all 3 seasons and had slim to no consequences; two, they could pretty much go anywhere as long as the galaxy thought them dead; and three, there was no further chatter about going after deserters. This created quite the opening for new faces to show up and stay there…yet again, not a word from the Lawquanes, who simply vanished into the ether and never returned.

So, if I may have the opportunity to ask, and if you all have the time to answer...it just might be time for our first Question Of The Week.

QOTW::

If more attention had been given to all four Lawquanes, what role(s) might they have had going forward, and would it have involved the Batch or not?

Please respond in the comments or reblogs to get the conversation going, and I hope to answer back as soon as possible. Thank you, have a good morning, and good luck.

No Pressure Tags: @theosb0rnway @megmca @brownielocks69 @alwaysflexfoampads @lucky-ducky006

@travellingnorthwards @moe-oh @depeachy @petrivbatig @sadiecoocoo

@maddyknight28 @traveller-of-word-and-screen @greyangelpain @tbnrpotato @lilithastar

@sillishit @techs-goggles9902 @amandamadeathing @number1morphfan @darthbecky726

[imabillyami]

can you pleaseeeee do me a no.2 with my men. pleaseeee babe

You know how much I love writing this particular rarepair, especially if I get to write them for you 💕

You ask and I shall deliver. Simple as that. Also tagging @crxssjae and @dontletme--cavein cause I remember you enjoyed this ship in the past!

-> Once again for this challenge, which I'm still taking requests for.

--//--//--//--//--//--//--//--//--//--//--//--//--//--//--//--

Prompt: this was a mistake

(JimmyKev, 613 words, mature)

“Ugh this was such a mistake.” 

He’s still breathing hard, coming down from what had been an earth-shattering orgasm only a minute ago. That is, if he’s being totally honest with himself - which - as per usual - he’s not. 

An equally out of breath chuckle from next to him “Yup.” 

Of course. In typical Kevin-fashion he isn’t bothered by this at all. Always hung up on and exploding over the tiniest and most insignificant things, but when it came to the most glaring issues, he’d just shrug, possibly laugh it off, and move right along, acting completely indifferent.

Of course this had to be one of those instances. 

It started out easily enough.

Like the two childish hotheads they continuously proved themselves to be, they’d gotten into another squabble with each other. 

And, like the two very functional adults constantly failed to be, they went with the only logical solution and banged it out. Quick and dirty and surprisingly good and addicting. 

After all, all that tension was too good to go to waste, and hate sex was better than no sex at all, right? 

Right? 

Well, now that he’s coming down from the high and living in the aftermath of their stupid decision, he isn’t so sure about that anymore. 

“Relax, I can hear you thinking from all the way over here.” They’re both still flat on their backs, a good bit of distance between their bodies, staring at the ceiling, not daring to look at each other. 

He’s honestly surprised that Kevin is even still here. He fully expected him to be the fuck n’ run type. Apparently he clocked that one wrong though. He’s trying very hard not to think about what this means.

“This shoulda never happened!” He can feel the panic rise inside of him. Oh god, what if anyone finds them out? What if Kevin, the smug and angry and impulsive asshole that he is, uses this against him for all the world to hear? For his family to hear?

All it takes is one scathing promo and he’s ruined forever. Fuck, yeah. This was a total mistake. How could he ever-? 

Before he knows what’s happening, Kevin’s face appears above him and a hand firmly grabs his chin, forcing Jimmy to look at him. 

“Hey. Hey! Relax, okay? Nobody’s gonna know. I won’t tell anyone. You won’t tell anyone. It’s fine!” He says it with such conviction that Jimmy is almost willing to believe him. Almost. 

He still thinks this is his biggest fuck-up to date and that it’ll come back to bite him in the ass. More importantly though, right this second? 

He’s distracted all over again by the close proximity of their faces, more specifically their mouths, just like he’d been earlier. He can still taste Kevin on his lips if he tries. So against better judgment, bringing his tongue out to his bottom lip, that’s exactly what he does.

And while this is still a very very bad idea, the longer he stares at the other man’s lips, the more he wonders if Kevin would wanna do it again. After all, the damage is done already. Might as well. 

And as if he’s suddenly gained the magical power to read Jimmy’s mind, the look on Kevin’s face changes, his eyes getting back that inciting fire in them that had gotten them into this mess in the first place. 

Surprisingly enough he’s the one to ask “Hey… so, uh. You wanna go again?” 

Instead of granting him an answer, Jimmy quickly surges up to connect their lips, the arousal in his gut already spreading like wildfire again.

He thinks that’s a good enough answer anyway.

[lazuliquetzal]

Fic Stats Game

Ohoho thank you @tavina-writes for the tag!! Pretty sure this is gonna be the same 3 fics over and over but we'll see :)

rules: give us the links to your fic with the most hits, second most kudos, third most comments, fourth most bookmarks, fifth most words, and fic with the fewest words.

1) Most Hits

It's AA Batteries (Daiya no Ace). I know this without even looking, it's AAB 100% and by... not a significant, but a decent lead. That thing breached containment. I'm glad that it did, because I had fun writing it, but it always surprises me because sports anime twin OC fic? Really?

But I'm glad it's my most popular fic, even if I don't consider it my best, because even if it's a canon rewrite, I finished a 100K+ fic and I am proud. I'm literally never over it, I could talk about it all day.

Like, I usually don't ship things very strongly, but Misawa is insane to me. Also, do you know how embarrassing it is to relate to Miyuki Kazuya? And not even in a 'generic repressed character' way, I'm talking in a Hey I Literally Was In His Shoes And Made The Same Exact Fucking Mistakes And Decisions way. Nobody gets Miyuki Kazuya like I do. I'm fucking Miyuki kin. I didn't ask for this. I didn't--

2) Second Most Kudos

This one is also AAB, so I'll go with first place: Reflection (The Magnus Archives). A classic. A nice and simple time travel fix-it comedy.

I remember the writing of this one because I had been utterly obsessed with TMA. It would not let me go. I drafted the early chapters on my phone while walking across my college campus. I almost got ran over by a bike when I was writing the "Martin witnesses Jon have a mild breakdown in the break room" scene.

3) Third Most Comments

Dawn of the Fourth (Linked Universe). The LU fandom is super giving with their comments! Probably the most comment-friendly fandom I've been in.

I think it also helped that DotF is one of those stories where every chapter is a punch to the throat lol. If you didn't comment after ch7, it's probably because you zoomed through haha.

4) Fourth Most Bookmarks

It's DotF again, so I'll go with third place: ain't no rest for the wicked (Naruto).

Ah, this one... I'm fond of it, in the way I'm fond of all my writing, but also I was in high school. There's a lot about it that I would do differently now. But I learned a lot from writing it, and actually Chie, Issei, and Riku are still my children and I love them all. I'm proud of the color test. :)

5) Fewest Words

If you ignore the Zelda comic and the CSS formatting test and the anonymous April Fool's fic that I will not be claiming ownership of publicly, my shortest fic is Blackout Blues (Daiya no Ace) at 1101 words. If you subscribe to the belief that a picture is worth a thousand words, then that bumps the word count up to 4101 words.

I should draw more art for my fanfic. I have the power. It's fun.

tagging (if you want!): @yellowocaballero @xxsolar-writesxx @ellie-tarts @zarvasace @dottie-wan-kenobi and anyone else who wants to!

[ink-flavored]

Writerly Questionnaire

Taking advantage of the open tag @vacantgodling offered, thanks !!

Tagging everyone ahead of time because this is long: @foxys-fantasy-tales @noblebs @ceph-the-ghost-writer @auntdarth @damageinkorporated @srjacksin @wyked-ao3 @duelistkingdom @void-botanist @ink-enchanted @sigridhawke and anyone else who feels like it!

About Me

When did you first start writing?

I’ve been doing some form of writing for basically my whole life. I kept approximately one hundred journals as a child, I would tell improvised stories to my younger sibling, I wrote my first fanfiction in an email when I was like 12. I don’t really think there was ever a time in my life when I wasn’t crafting some kind of story, or creating some kind of art.

Are the genres/themes you enjoy reading different from the ones you write?

I’ve been reading a lot more non-fiction these days than anything else, so I guess in that sense not really (unless you count poetry as non-fiction, in which case eeehhhhh it depends). When I do go for fiction, it tends to be fantasy, sci-fi, a smattering of contemporary fiction, and softball horror like House of Leaves or the Welcome to Nigh Vale novels. I definitely write mostly fantasy, I’m more of a dabbler in sci-fi, I usually only write contemporary fiction if it’s romantic or urban fantasy or both. I don’t really write horror, nor do I read much of it, so that tracks!!

I used to read a lot more romance novels than I currently do, and I’ve been meaning to pick that habit back up. Also erotica, since those are the two genres I’m currently writing the most these days.

Is there an author (or just a fellow writer!) you want to emulate, or one to whom you’re often compared?

Emulate, not really. I do take several truckloads of inspiration from Christopher Paolini, though. Reading The Inheritance Cycle over and over again is basically why I know how to write at all—it’s what taught me about formatting dialogue and paragraph breaks. Emulating his style is how I got started writing, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I ever got called out on it in the future. Especially in some of my high fantasy writing, it’s only a matter of time.

Can you tell me a little about your writing space(s)? (Room, coffee shop, desk, etc.)

I got a laptop desk this past Christmas, so I do most of my writing on the couch now! I sit with my tiny Windows Surface Pro and clack away with a cup of tea or a snack. Until the battery dies on this poor thing, and then I go back to my desk.

What’s your most effective way to muster up some muse?

Extremely detailed daydreaming while my brain is melting at work. Usually if I do that long enough, I’ll have to write the scenes in my head before they start leaking out of my ears. Failing that, though, I’ve found that you can’t force it. If I can’t write today, I can’t write today. When that happens, I try to read something instead.

Did the place(s) you grew up in influence the people and places you write about?

Probably! I don’t tend to write about suburban America specifically because it’s where I grew up and I think it’s boring as hell. My dad was a huge fantasy buff and is basically 60% of the reason why I’m like this, so that checks out.

Are there any recurring themes in your writing, and if so, do they surprise you at all?

Opposites Attract is a big one, and it surprised me a little when I noticed it, but not that much. I think it’s compelling when people from completely different backgrounds are forced to find a common cause. And maybe kiiiiiss? 😳

Redemption, I guess? I write a lot about the idea that nobody is unforgivable. You can grow and change and become a better person no matter how shitty you used to be, and you don’t need anyone else’s approval to become that better person/forgive yourself/etc. It’s not surprising to me at all, because it’s one of my most deeply held beliefs in real life.

Struggling With Religion/Religious Identity. This one is because of my issues 👍

Way more under the cut!

About My Characters

Would you please tell me about your current favorite character?

Saying it’s Pride feels predictable, but yeah, it’s Pride. He’s my current brainworm.

I created Pride in a way that’s much more intentional than most of my other characters, which means there is far too much I can say about him. I invented him from the bottom-up instead of from the top-down, if that makes sense.

The transgender/demon metaphor is obvious I think—the whole of his arc is that he needs to learn to forgive himself to heal instead of wallowing in his pain, and he gets to craft a version of himself he loves, with people he loves, and no longer needs approval from the God that cast him out. Deeply metaphorical there, but when I was creating him, I was also struggling with gender issues in real life! I was living in Florida at the time, had no idea if I would be able to get HRT, I didn’t even know if I wanted HRT in the first place because I was nervous about the changes and if I would even like them. I really did craft Pride as a sort of… subconscious test-drive. He’s very much a Gender Envy Projection on my part, but I didn’t realize that until I thought about it later. I made a guy who looks the way I’m nervous about looking, and it turns out people still love him, and he loves himself too. Crazy how I’m on T now.

Which of your characters do you think you’d be friends with in real life?

I really want to be friends with Hayden, because he has 5 pet dragons and I desperately need to know someone who has 5 pet dragons. Also, he’s a nice guy! I’m sure he’d also be happy to have another friend who’s 1) willing to believe that dragons exist and 2) willing to help out with the 5 baby dragons in his small Chicago apartment.

Which of your characters would you dislike the most if you met them?

Honesty. She is the exact kind of old white lady who needs to get a grip that I dread interacting with and am not excited to see at my cousin’s wedding next month. Anyway,

Tell me about the process of coming up with one, all, or any of your characters.

Every character that spawns from my brain got there in a different way. Sometimes they come to me in dreams, sometimes I make them up on purpose, sometimes they just show up one day and are like, “Hi, I represent something about your subconscious you won’t realize for a few months,” and I go, “Sure, whatever you say, little buddy.”

Most of the time I have a silhouette or a role in the story that needs to be filled by someone with [x] personality trait, and then craft them around those details. Like, in Pride’s case I needed him to make a human friend, but it would also have to be someone he would respect enough to be friends with. Boom, Olivia was born, the exact kind of person who would never take Pride’s bullshit lying down, but is understanding enough that he doesn’t just hate her right off the bat. I made her trans because it gives them something to connect over besides his Issues, and then from her I crafted the rest of his friends to balance out his inner circle. Most of the time it’s very “domino effect,” where I decide one thing, and the rest just happens, as if it had always been that way.

Do you notice any recurring themes/traits among your characters?

The Struggling With Religion of it all, surely. Most of them are striving to do good for others, or to become better people, whether they know it or not. A lot of them are emotionally suppressed in some way, which probably means nothing.

How do you picture them? (As real people you imagined, as models/actors who exist in real life, as imaginary artwork, as artwork you made or commissioned, anime style, etc)

Well, one of my girlfriends (@/auroblaze) is a gem and an artist who just draws my OCs for me, because she is the best. Even if she hasn’t drawn whatever character I’m thinking about, I picture them either in her style or as close to real life human people as my brain can conjure.

About My Writing

What’s your reason for writing?

Honestly, because I have never been able to imagine myself doing anything else. It is so hard to picture Future Me doing anything except writing. That’s the one thing about myself I know will remain constant, from now until I’m in the ground. I will write. I must write.

Is there a specific comment or type of comment you find particularly motivating coming from your readers?

I am a huge fan of when people spot my literary devices. The people who pick out the foreshadowing or metaphors or symbolism or intentional repetition, those are my favorites. Like, yes!! I put those there for you to find!! Someone found them, awesome!!!!!

How do you want to be thought of by those who read your work? (For example: as a literary genius, or as a writer who “gets” the human condition; as a talented worldbuilder, as a role model, etc.)

I don’t know, I’ve never really thought about it. I just want to inspire people. The highest honor I can think of is being called “the author who got me into writing.”

What do you feel is your greatest strength as a writer?

Prose! Description! Love that shit! And character writing, I think I’m good at writing dynamics between characters and I can build a damn good character arc.

What have you been frequently told your greatest writing strength is by others?

People have often told me that my work makes them feel very intense emotions (crying, intense rage, laughing embarrassingly loud in public, etc.) so I would say, according to my readers, I am an “affecting” writer. I can Getcha.

How do you feel about your own writing? (Answer in whatever way you interpret this question.)

After most of my life and a degree, I am confident that I’m a good writer. I’m not a genius or anything, but I’ve been doing this too long to think I’m bad. I know what a compelling story needs, I’ve developed my writer’s voice, I have a good grasp on how to put all the pieces together to create a solid piece of work. I think at worst, I am competent but over-confident in how clean my first drafts are. At best... I'm fuckin’ epic babey 😎

If you were the last person on earth and knew your writing would never be read by another human, would you still write?

Well, all the ancient files on my flash drive certainly aren’t being seen by anyone now! I think I would probably be less motivated to write, but I don’t think I could ever completely stop myself from telling stories. Even just to myself.

When you write, are you influenced by what others might enjoy reading, or do you write purely what you enjoy? If it’s a mix of the two, which holds the most influence?

Ehhh, I try to write mainly for myself. I don’t think it’s practical to be chasing trends or what you think people will like. Audiences are fickle, they hop from one thing to the next all the time, and often don’t know what they want until they have it.

I have the outlook that, “If I enjoy writing it, someone will enjoy reading it.” There’s no point in writing something I hate, or even just think is kinda boring, because a lot of people can tell when you’re not invested in the story you’re telling. It’s hard to hide contempt in something as personal as art. I do, ultimately, want people to like the things I write, but my priority is making sure I like it too. There’s no point in writing it if I don’t want to be there.

[dujour13]

Thanks for the tag @kaleido-scope-lady! 💕 This was highly appreciated for procrastination purposes.

Tag game: Give your KC’s first impression and final opinion of each of their companions!

Siavash's (not spoiler-free) hot takes:

First impressions

Seelah – A paladin with a party spirit. Now this is someone I can really get behind. (wink)

Camellia – Not even a smile? How about a little half-elf solidarity? ...Not that either? Give it time. I’ll find her angle. She can’t be as bad as she seems.

Lann – Weird combination, and not just the body parts. Pessimism and determination. Seems like a reliable guy and since that’s one thing I’m not, he’ll be good to have around. Also – perfect straight man for my routines.

Wenduag – Tough as Hell. I wish she didn’t beat Lann up about his idealism because that’s the one thing that might save him. I wonder if she has any idealism left to save herself.

Woljif – Dreamboat. I do look like the kinda guy that would work on, don’t I? He’s got my number already. …and he can have it.

Ember – Dreamer, this poor child. The things she says are so crazy they’re almost inspired.

Daeran – The folly of feudalism: exhibit one. Surprised nobody’s slapped him yet.

Nenio – Curious, for someone who knows so much trivia I don’t think she knows how funny she is.

Ulbrig – This towering barbarian calling me warchief is excellent for the bit

Galfrey – Exhibit two. No, that’s uncharitable. She’s had a lot on her plate, and for longer than most people could stomach. She needs to lighten up. Maybe I can show her running a crusade doesn’t have to be soul-crushing. It can be fun!

Sosiel – I think this kid is tougher than he seems, coming all the way here from Carpenden. I sure hope so, because I’d hate to see that freshness turn sour.

Regill – Who invited this guy?

Trever – This is what happens. Dreamer, don’t let it happen to me.

Arueshalae – This is one of those times when Desna tests you – gives your heart the choice of Cynosure or cynicism. I’m going to believe in her if it kills me.

Greybor – You know what, I’m just gonna prove him wrong. “Professional” doesn’t have to dress sober.

Aivu – Best. Friend. Forever.

Final opinion

Seelah – Biggest heart in the world. And after everything - party spirit intact. Dreamer I’m lucky I crossed paths with this woman. Wouldn’t have made it without her hugs. Well, also without her as body shield.

Camellia – How could I have been quite that blind? Only saw what I wanted to see. It’s hard to admit but I’m not sure there was anything that could have been done for her. For all his faults Horgus did try. Even setting her free to find her own way would have ended badly for her, because it wouldn’t have been freedom.

Lann – Love this guy. I’ll never forget that moment, seeing him look up at the starry sky and see possibility for the first time.

Wenduag – Ironic how trying to claw her way up is what brought her down. Probably because she never looked up far enough to see the stars.

Woljif – My love, forgive me if I ever doubted that your heart was stronger than your shadow.

Ember – What was it Lann said? A saint or insane, or maybe both? Both. She doesn’t believe mortals can save ourselves, so all we can do is be kind to each other. I have so much to learn from her.

Daeran – You know what I admire most? This man knows what he wants out of life – and fiercely, unapologetically pursues it. I count myself lucky that true friendship is one of those things because it turns out he's great fun and I'm surprised how fond of him I am now.

Nenio – I think she cited me in her entry on “Friendship.” By name. Sometimes I regret taking my pants off that one time. But actually no.

Ulbrig – I can really relate to having two more-or-less incompatible halves pulling opposite directions. I’m glad he let his guard down with me eventually because behind all the stubborn bluster the poor guy really felt lost, and commiserating with someone helped us both. Second only to Seelah for great hugs.

Galfrey – The best thing about her is her humanness. I wouldn’t like her nearly as much I do now if she hadn’t had indulged in a little spite. Just kinda wish it hadn’t been directed at me. No no, we're good. It's fine. Would you guess she can be surprisingly funny?

Sosiel – He did turn out to be tough. Strong enough to face terrible things, temper his idealism and still keep his heart. That portrait… (he starts to tear up) …if that’s how he sees me there’s no greater compliment.

Regill – The thing is, I trust him with my life. Because even if there’s a perfectly logical reason why he ought to kill me he’ll be three chess moves ahead with an even better reason not to. One thing I resent about the lawful types is the arrogance in thinking they’re following some universal order when it’s really just their heart all along. Yeah, you can tell him I said that.

Trever – When I visited the Vaenics in Carpenden after the war I saw him with his lathe, and as he worked there was such peace in his face and hands. Scarred as they are. He made me the most beautiful rosewood writing desk, a true work of art. There’s so much hope in that.

Arueshalae – One of the strongest people I’ve ever met. I have an idea what it’s like to try to keep your eyes fixed on an impossible star even with the claws of the Abyss pulling you under. Where we connect is that we both want to be better people, and to do that you sometimes have to look back and face what you’ve done wrong.

Greybor – Is he happier now? I like to think so. Being an assassin was easy for him. Being a father, not so much. He needed a new challenge.

Aivu – Best. Friend. Forever.

Tagging no pressure: @the-raging-tempest, @dragonologist-phd, @arendaes, @yunessa, @bite-the-bloody-hand

Everyone please take a free tag if you want one!

[nekoannie-chan]

Nobody can take your place

Pairing: Steve Rogers X Reader.

Word count: 678 words.

Summary: Steve waited for you after the Snap.

Warnings: Little sad but happy ending.

A/N: This is my entry to @springdandelixn​  Beannie’s Double-Trouble Sleepover with lyric #9:

“And you need to know that nobody can take your place.”

“Spring.”

@saiyanprincessswanie​

My native language is Spanish so I wanna improve my writing skills in English if you notice any mistakes, please let me know and I will correct them.

I don’t give any kind of permission that my fics to be posted on other platforms or languages (I translate myself my work) or the use of my graphics (my dividers are included in this), I did them exclusively for my fics, please respect my work and don't steal it. There are some people here who make dividers that anyone can use, mine is not this type, please look for the other's people. The only exception is the ones I gifted 'cuz now belong to someone else. If you find any of my works on a different platform and are not one of my accounts, please let me know. Reblogs and comments are always welcome.

DISCLAIMER: I don't own Marvel's characters (unfortunately), except for the original characters and the story.

Add yourself to my taglist here.

My other media where I publish:  Ao3, Wattpad, ffnet, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter. 

If you like it, please vote, comment, and give me feedback to improve my skills and reblog.

Tags: @sinceimetyou​  @unnuevosoltransformalarealidad​ @navybrat817​ @angrythingstarlight​ @shield-agent78​ @charmed-asylum​ @pandaxnienke​ @real-fbi​ @smokeandnailz​  @white-wolf1940​ @tenaciousperfectionunknown​ @xoxonotme​ @bluemusickid​ @leyannrae​  @harrysthiccthighss​ @marvelatthisone​ @caplanbuckybarnes​ @sapphire-rogers​ @lizzieolseniskinda @notyourtypicalrose​  @hallecarey1​ @nana1000night​ @talia-rumlow​ @writingshae​ @alexxavicry​  @azulatodoryuga​ @daemonslittlebitch​ @chaoticcollectivenightmare​  @endlesstwanted​

Steve opened the window, spring was beginning, and the flowers were blooming to show their beautiful colorful petals, you had taught Steve to appreciate all those details.

He was sure you would enjoy the view, but you weren't there to appreciate it.

He always told others that they should move on with their lives, not dwell on what had happened, but he didn't do that.

He took his favorite picture of you, you were so smiling, showing him a giant sunflower, just the one you had liked the most when you went to the sunflower field, he put it in front of the window as if he wanted to show you the scenery.

“I bet you'd like us to go on a picnic, and take lots of pictures together," Steve whispered, not caring if he had no answer or no one had heard him.

Steve let them heal his wound, he hoped that everything had really worked out, you had been home the first time, and he had hoped you were still there since he didn't see you in the battle.

It took the others a little while to convince him to let them heal his wounds but just saying that you were going to worry if you saw him in that state was enough.

He was urgent to go home to be reunited with you.

You looked up when you heard the door open, everything was very confusing, the last thing you remembered was screams in the street and a strange feeling in your body, and then you woke up on the carpet of the house, but you were not entirely sure that it was your house. You also didn't know where else to go and Steve hadn't answered his mobile phone.

“Steve? What happened? “You asked confused.

“Y/N... Are you really here? This isn’t... This isn’t a dream? “Steve's voice sounded on the verge of cracking, he couldn't believe they had finally made it, you were back with him.

You looked around you and everything seemed so similar, but at the same time so different, suddenly you were surprised to be surrounded by Steve's strong arms.

“Steve, what happened? “you asked again.

“It's been five years since we last saw each other," Steve answered seriously. Then he began to tell you all the events that happened from the moment you disappeared.

You went through different states, as it seemed implausible what he was telling you, although you were also beginning to understand why some things looked different, but what else had Steve done in those years?

You took a breath, you had to ask a question, five years seemed like a long time and maybe Steve...

“What have you done over the years, is there anyone else? “your voice trembled at the second question. You were afraid of the answer you might get, especially since maybe the next question might be "where are my things so I can go and you can be happy?"

“And you need to know that nobody can take your place. “He replied, still looking at you.

“Steve, did you really wait for me all this time? “You took a deep breath, you didn't want to cry, although you were very surprised by his answer, you didn't believe that someone would wait so long if they didn't even know if there was any way to fix what happened.

“Always, I promised you when we got married," Steve continued talking, taking your hands, he needed to touch you again, to feel you, it was the same as he remembered.

“Steve... you were older than me before... now you're five years extra older “you joked, you had so many feelings and emotions, you needed to get them out somehow.

Steve laughed, he missed so much your jokes, your laughter; he had dreamed so many times of hearing your voice again, your smell, your skin.

He knew that in the next few weeks, you two were going to be very busy, making up for the time you hadn't been able to spend together.