#and Ao Lie has green eyes instead of black eyes

[mintaikk]

I don't think the fandom talks enough about how Mei can turn into a gigantic fucking dragon

[soundofez]

@mastar-week​ 2021, day 3// solace

The Untamed AU. In the end, even Black Star cannot defy his own death. The clans gather to facilitate his fall.

Maka doesn’t let them. It drives her own clan half-mad, but she will not give the world a dying man to execute. She will not give up the man she has left so long abandoned. She will not let Black die unloved.

Warnings: hurt/comfort but mostly hurt, insanity, major character death. this one's a big ouchie my guys ಥvಥ

Ten Years Ago.

After the last surviving branch of the Star clan finally submits itself to the judgment of the Death clan, the wards around the Sunken Hills fail.

The other clans swarm, metaphorical pitchforks readied, eager to tear apart the notorious Last Dragon of Star. Maka arrives too late to stop them from trespassing; she flies past trampled gardens that twist her heart with grief and fury. How dare they disregard the toil of the people who lived there; how dare they claim themselves superior to innocents who wished only to survive.

She arrives in the central cave, the so-called Den of the Last Dragon, to find Black Star holding the rioting clans at bay, untouchable even now, shorn hair tied into powerful charms and dried blood applied with morbid skill to woven talismans. The stink of rotting yin is almost overpowering: lesser cultivators lie strewn about, their natural yang insufficient to counter such high concentrations of that dark energy.

Maka waits until she is noticed, until the assembled cultivators finally back away from Black's final wards. They ask her if she wants the honor, and she nods curtly in return. "Only right," they agree, though their voices betray a rapacious hunger for violence. "Only right for the Jade of Death to avenge her young master."

She does not deign to use words with them. They are not the ones who need to hear what she has to say.

When at last they all stand silent and waiting, like circling crows, she walks past their bedraggled ranks to stand before Black Star.

He nods as she approaches, and she walks directly through the wards that had so powerfully repelled the other cultivators. He keeps his charms and talismans to hand, but he makes no move to use them against her.

The look in his eyes frightens her. He is not defeated, not quite; but he is weary and grieving, and to Maka he appears to be awaiting condemnation.

From your sword, he had once told her, I will face my death and consider it just.

Maka casts her own wards in one smooth flourish. They blaze behind her, brighter than Black's wards are dark. "Leave," she says aloud. She does not look away from Black. She cannot bear to, not now, not when there is so little time left between them.

The cultivators grumble with confusion that morphs into surprise and indignation and shock. "She has been bewitched," one of them cries. "He has corrupted her," shouts another.

Maka turns to face them. "Leave," she repeats.

She has to encourage them with a sweeping blow from her sword before they obey. She grants them no more words, even as they express promises to return. (To free her, the stupider ones declare; to slay her, the smarter ones say.)

They do not understand what she is doing. How could they, when they are so utterly convinced of the guilt of the man she is protecting?

Black Star does not seem to understand, either. "What are you doing?" he asks as their opponents flee.

"I'm doing what I should have done a long time ago," Maka replies.

Black spreads his arms. "Kill me, then."

The accusation stings. Maka permits it. She has done nothing to earn his faith. "I won't," she replies.

Black Star smiles at her, coughs— there is blood in his teeth, dribbling down his chin— his wards fail, and her own are suddenly blindingly bright—

She lunges to catch him before he can hit the ground.

—

In the end, even Black Star cannot resist his fate. His cultivation technique, which draws so heavily on natural quantities of yin, overwhelms his body's supply of yang.

Maka had known it would happen. She hadn't known how little time Black had left.

They spend those last months together, her and Black Star and a surprise child she found around the back of the cave. The girl's eyes as green as Maka's, though her hair is that brilliant blue infamous to the Star Clan. She looks startlingly, heart-achingly similar to how a child might look if Maka ever bore one for Black Star.

Maka salvages what she can of the former gardens, replanting radishes while little Hoshino Ao does her best to plant herself, too. They collect Black's favorite lychee from the trees, hard-won little things that Black had been so proud to show the cuttings of eighteen months ago, when they had stumbled into each other in the little town at the base of the Sunken Hills. Maka washes and peels and pits the tiny fruits, saving their precious flesh in a shallow dish specially reserved for them. Ao loves them as much as Black does; Maka has to teach the little girl restraint, even as she wishes that she could peel all the lychees the two Stars could ever desire. Ao obliges even so, sharing the dish with Black while 

Maka inspects the illusory wards alone. They cover a smaller area than Black's old wards had, but there is no longer a clan here who needs the space. Maka doesn't have access to the same techniques Black had used to cover such an enormous area, anyway. She secures the edges of the wards as the clans storm around invisible border, oblivious to her presence; Maka in particular watches her father, who appears more distraught than dissatisfied. He is one of the few cultivators to come daily, and the only one to beg and grovel for her to come home. He has an uncanny knack for knowing when she is present; he always seems to start pleading when she is around to hear him.

Maybe it is not so uncanny. He knows the feel of Death clan wards as well as she does, even if he cannot get through them. Still, Maka cannot safely speak to him, and so she doesn't. Time enough for forgiveness after Black dies.

—

They talk quite a lot in those last months, even as excessive yin rots his body and decays his mind. "Why are you protecting me?" he asks early on, while he still has his sanity. "The honorable Jade of Death shouldn't be helping an evil cultivator such as myself."

"You were never evil," Maka says hotly. "I should have protected you sooner."

Black laughs her off, light-hearted even as he waits for his grave.

At other times, Black is morbid. "You'll have to live here forever," he informs her. "If you leave this place, they'll kill you." He says this with regret. You shouldn't have come for me, Maka hears, even though the words do not leave his mouth.

"They won't kill me," Maka replies.

Still other times, Black flirts with her. "You can have your way with me, you know," he'll say, winking. "Nobody can stop you, least of all me. I'll never tell, either."

He is trying to drive her away. Tough: she's not leaving him until one of them dies. She tells him as much, though instead of acknowledging his failing body, she simply says, "I'm never leaving you again."

His spirit fails. He is tormented by ghosts who do not exist and nightmares that escape the realms of sleep. Still, he seems to recognize her. "I missed you, you know," he tells her, half-delirious. "All these months I spent cooped up in these hills, I missed you."

"I missed you, too," Maka replies, pressing a cup of water or a bowl of radish stew to his lips. He seems to hear her, and he smiles.

He starts to forget that she's there: when she returns from gardening or lychee-picking or checking the wards, he will startle and beam at her. "Maka, you've come to visit!" he will cry, or even, "You! I love you!"

She never knows if these last words are truly meant for her. "I love you, too," she replies anyway, pressing lychee flesh to his lips and letting him lick the sweet nectar from her fingers like a child. The fruit seems to keep the horrors at bay, at least for a little bit, at least while she's with him.

The last time he speaks to her, he is strangely coherent. "You shouldn't have gotten involved, Maka."

She sits beside him. "If I'd gotten involved sooner, you wouldn't be dying," she replies, thinking bitterly of the years she's spent dithering, and for what? She is already twenty-two, fast leaving marriageable age, and the love of her life is dying.

He is only twenty-two, and he is dying.

"You don't know that," he replies. "And that's beside the point. You should have let them kill me. The gods know I deserve it."

She leans over him, takes his face in her hands. "You promised you would be killed only by my hands," she tells him. "I will not kill you. I will not let the world execute an innocent man. I will not leave you because you are dying. I should never—" Her voice cracks on the word. She swallows and continues, staring into his black eyes, wondering if she will ever fall into such blackness again. Never, she thinks. It's impossible. "I should never have abandoned you, Black."

I will not let you die unloved, she wants to tell him later, but by then he is beyond hearing.

—

She buries his body. She does not take down the wards. She steps out from the Den of the Last Dragon and into her weeping father's embrace. She pushes Hoshino Ao into his arms before she submits to the clans' judgment.

She is not executed, as she had predicted. Lord Death is still too fond of her. Still, she is sentenced to daily lashes and seclusion for a year. It takes another year for her to recover.

Of course, she never really recovers. She continues living, and she is dutiful to the clan, and she finds some measure of joy in teaching the new cultivators; but she does not begin to recover until she sees a man in plain grey robes, his hair white but his eyes that impossible black, placing a talisman she’s seen many times before on a corpse who should have been long gone.

[clarenecessities]

spooky metaphors

Word Count: 1877 & the democrats would gloat Rating: PG

Summary: Who’s ready for a chat about a cosmological principle analogous with vibratory sympathetic resonance?? Chapter Warnings: extremely strained metaphors

[First] [Previous] [Next]

AO3

“So when Adrien signs a contract, he’ll like… grow a soul?” asked Nino, squinting as he tried to wrap his head around it. Sabine laughed, pulling a pot out of a cupboard beside the fridge and setting it on the stove. She pulled a wand from somewhere and, flicking it at the sink, directed a stream of water into the waiting pot.

“No,” she corrected gently. “A familiar contract is a sort of… joining of souls. So as long as he isn’t signing with another of the aos sídhe, it will be his pò soul and natural magic joining with the hún and pò soul of his partner. That’s why so many witches look at the aos sídhe for their familiars—it’s a lot of raw power, and it’s advantageous to both parties, because with access to a hún soul, the aos sídhe can self-regulate their natural rhythms.”

“Self-regulate?” Marinette broke in. Adrien blinked at her tone, looking over to where she and Alya were still tangled together against the sink. She looked pensive, frowning at him instead of her mother.

“Well, it can be learned of course, but young aos sídhe are especially prone to throwing fits, or losing control of their magic. They get caught in a feedback loop that manifests as… almost anxiety, really, and it can cause accidents here and there,” said Sabine.

“It happens a lot,” Adrien confessed, rubbing the back of his neck in a sheepish gesture. “Plagg says at the rate I wreck stuff, it’s no wonder black cats are supposed to be bad luck.”

“Yeah, but—what about yesterday?” Marinette protested, raising her eyebrows at him. He stared at her blankly, until she raised one hand and wiggled her fingers.

Oh. Yesterday.

“Yesterday?” asked Sabine, looking between them with evident amusement as she retrieved a package of meat from the fridge.

“He was freaking out, and I guess his magic was too, but then I touched him and it just—stopped.”

Sabine looked delighted. “Marinette! You helped him regulate!”

“Great,” said Marinette, her eyebrows pulling down into an exasperated scowl, “what does that mean?”

“It means my little baby is growing up,” cooed Sabine, swooping in and kissing a squawking Marinette on the cheek.

“Maman!”

“Oh, fine, fine. It mostly means you have a better grasp of your gifts than I had realized. You were able to assess and understand his emotions so thoroughly that when you touched him, you adjusted your own feelings accordingly and balanced out his anxiety with your own calm.”

“There’s a hole in that theory,” drawled a familiar voice. Alya and Marinette jumped, looking wildly around, while Nino, in an attempt to spring to his feet, fell backwards off of his seat. Sabine turned her gaze upwards, while Adrien threw his head back and groaned.

Not again.

Plagg grinned down at him from atop the fridge, his long tail swishing back and forth across the photos and notes held to it with magnets.

“Plagg,” said Sabine, with a dip of her head and a wry smile.

“Sabine,” he purred in answer. “While that explains how she was able to calm the boy down, it would hardly explain how she was able to quiet his magic. She can’t feel it.”

“Oh,” said Sabine, blinking. “You’re right. It only covers emotional empathy, doesn’t it?”

“Tikki’s specialty,” said Plagg, rolling his eyes. “Impractical, if you ask me. It’s only good for telling when someone’s trying to trick you, and that’s a bit redundant under the circumstances, isn’t it?”

“Not everyone wears their displeasure so openly, Plagg,” she chided. “Marinette has found it very helpful—”

“But as helpful as luck?” Plagg broke in, lifting his chin. Adrien groaned. Here he went again. If he had a chance to ramble about his own specialty, he’d never shut up—

“Did you tell him about my luck?” Marinette asked, interrupting Plagg’s inevitable monologue. Adrien stared at her, surprised. She was staring at her mother, blinking rapidly. Ah, he thought, his eyes drawn to the bright red ladybugs in her ears, that’s right: She’s lucky.

Wait.

If Marinette was lucky, and Plagg’s specialty was granting luck, and Plagg knew Marinette, then—

“No,” Plagg retorted, “I told her about your luck. I’m the one who gave it to you.”

Nino had scarcely picked himself off the ground before Adrien crashed backwards off of his own stool, nearly taking out the werewolf on the way down.

“WHAT?” he shrieked, scrambling to his knees and gaping at Plagg from over the lip of the counter. His voice had shot up several octaves in shock, a high-pitched squeak that had him wincing from the auditory recoil.

“I have a life outside the sídhe, Adrien.”

“You gave Marinette a boon?” he demanded, hauling himself up, his feet getting tangled in the fallen stool. He forced it with brute strength, a vertical pushup that managed to get him free of the wooden cage. “When?”

“I second that question!” Marinette squeaked, looking quite as shocked as Adrien felt, standing pale and bewildered in the kitchen. Alya stood beside her with an ill-concealed grin, flashing laughing hazel eyes at a visibly confused Nino.

“Oh, a long time ago,” said Plagg, waving a vague paw. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

“… Thanks,” said Marinette, somewhat begrudgingly.

“Yeah, um, why?” Adrien spluttered, gesturing helplessly between them.

“As a reward, of course. Honestly kid, you never listen when I try to teach you about this stuff.”

“What did she do to earn the reward?” Adrien clarified through gritted teeth.

“Oh,” said Plagg. “It wasn’t her. It was Sabine.” He nodded at Marinette’s mother, where she stood stirring some kind of sauce into a pan with the meat. Adrien fought the urge to throw something at his guardian. If he had to ask one more specifically worded question to get a cryptic pseudo-answer, then—

“So… the empathy? And the lie-detecting?” asked Marinette.

“Those weren’t me,” Plagg said simply. He got to his feet, stretching leisurely before jumping to the floor, silent despite his weight.

“They’re boons too, dear,” Sabine put in, with a reassuring smile.

Marinette looked as if she didn’t know how to feel about this.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked after a moment. Adrien was distressed to see that she had officially crossed into ‘upset’.

Sabine softened. “It’s your power, Marinette. We never wanted you to doubt that. It’s no different than any other part of your magic. Before now it didn’t really matter—it’s just part of who you are.”

“It’s not like Stormy Weather,” said Adrien, making a face at the memory. “Boons aren’t supposed to be like that. That was… horrible, and wrong, and… awful. It’s like having someone else’s arm sewed onto your chest. A boon from Plagg is like being born with your mom’s hair. It’s just the way things are. It’s who you are.”

“I don’t grant boons lightly,” Plagg put in, looking up at Marinette with his hypnotically green eyes. “It’s like looking at someone and knowing a piece of them is missing.” His gaze flickered to Adrien. The young cat sídhe smiled back at his senior, glad that he was being helpful for once.

“Okay,” said Marinette, in a small voice. It made Adrien’s heart hurt. He felt guilty, somehow, like he’d been the one to tell her. Well, Plagg was probably only here because of him anyway—in a way, it was his fault.

“So what were you saying about their magic, Plagg?” Sabine asked politely, drawing the eyes of the teens back to her. She was probably trying to give her daughter time to process; Adrien felt a surge of appreciation for her gentle tact. If only certain cats could take a page out of her book…

“Ah, right. Well, if she can’t even feel it, there’s no way she could have balanced it, even unconsciously. It’d be like painting a masterpiece in pitch darkness. Even with all the luck in the world, you’d still mess up here and there.”

“But if it wasn’t her empathy that corrected his magic, then what was it? As far as I know, she’s only had the three boons,” said Sabine.

“Uh, well… If we’re sticking with the cave analogy, then I guess magic is less like a painting and more like… music,” said Plagg. He looked up at Adrien, who had righted his stool and was settling himself down, a speculative frown beginning to form. “So Adrien’s ‘music’ was getting louder and louder and it might have burst a metaphorical wine glass, but Marinette intervened.”

“Intervened how?” Alya asked eagerly, clutching Marinette’s elbow. “Like harmonizing? Like their souls play complementary tunes and they’re destined to be together and—”

“Alya!” Marinette hissed.

“No,” laughed Plagg. “No, it’s more likely that it was just… resonating.”

“Gǎnyìng!” said Sabine, tapping a spatula against the pan delightedly. “Really?”

“How is resonating different from harmonizing?” asked Nino. “I mean I know how it’s different in like, actual music, but uh, this analogy has me a bit lost.”

“Well, if you think of harmonizing like Alya was putting it, as two different tunes that come together to form a cohesive whole, it implies a conscious effort again. Like she felt his magic and set hers to the right frequency to balance it out. Resonance here would be… like her magic was reacting on its own, with no input from her,” said Plagg. “Mm, but… that’s not quite it. Sabine?”

“Well, gǎnyìng is the principle of simultaneous stimulus and response,” said Sabine, humming as she checked the pot beside her on the stove. “So things with an affinity for one another, at their core, will seek one another out. Water flows to what is wet, fire turns to what is dry. Clouds follow the dragon, wind follows the tiger. If you tune two zithers to the same scale, and pluck the note ‘do’ on one, ‘do’ will play on the other, because they’re alike. If you want to continue the analogy, it’s like their magic was already on the same frequency.”

“Frankly, I think it makes way more sense,” said Plagg, rounding the counter and pawing at Adrien’s pant leg to be picked up. Adrien obliged with a heavy sigh. “My luck might not be able to help you paint in the dark, but it could sure set you on a path to meet a like soul.”

“So they’re soulmates, yes or no?” asked Alya, making a chopping motion with her hands. Marinette immediately pounced, trying to lower them. “Give me the deets, Catdad.”

“No,” said Nino, “and I’m really sorry for using this as a reference point again, but it’s like they’re the same type in Pokémon, I think?” His voice rose uncertainly at the end, making it more of a question than an answer.

“Exactly,” said Plagg, giving him a pleased smile. “Except there’s like, a million different types, so it’s rarer to find someone of the same type. It’s not unique in the sense that it’s only these two who could possibly be on this ‘frequency,’ but it is very rare. Luck certainly played its part.”

“So what you’re saying is,” Adrien began, looking down at Plagg, his heartbeat picking up, “ideal witch-familiar-combo?”

Plagg grinned.