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nyarlathotep-thecrawlingchaos · 1 year

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Totally not projecting my own present emotional instability here but

Oh look hurt/comfort

Shiny 🤩

Probably going to be doing one for each Shanks, Zoro, Sanji, Mihawk, and apparently Buggy too who seems to have become a mainstay now.

I'm having trouble continuing my current WIPs, usually if I can crank out a oneshot or two I can focus and get back to it.

Sanji first.

And aaawwaaaaay we go~

Late Night Chats

Trigger Warnings: death of loved one

SFW and cloyingly fluffy

Hurt/comfort with

OPLA!Sanji X Reader

♫♬ Six Days In June - The Fratellis ♫♬

And if I could paint you a picture now it would be nothing less than tragic

I would trade a lifetime for a moment now of magic

Sanji knew full well he was a hopeless romantic. He had always known it. While his desire to work in the kitchens at Baratie had always been the greatest source of bitterness between him and Zeff, the second greatest probably stemmed from the older chef berating him for flirting with customers, no matter how respectful he was about it. He really couldn't help it—women were the gods' greatest gift to creation, and they deserved to be treated as such.

The hiring of a new garde manger had been another source of hostility, however briefly; Zeff had said he would consider Sanji for the position, and then tore it right out from under him, like always. He even had the nerve to roll his eyes and say, "You'll get over it." The rest of the staff stayed out of it, and kept a fair distance during prep hours that day, as it wasn't uncommon for such a row between the head chef and Sanji to devolve into physical violence.

But when the kitchen doors came open and you entered at a minute past eight that morning, he had frozen—and rather unbecomingly so, with his mouth hanging open, holding a sauté pan in the air, primed and ready to sling it right at Zeff's head.

He barely registered Zeff's snort of laughter at his reaction, or the gruff old chef's taunting apology for "the idiot waiter's behavior." Sanji's heart had simply ceased when your eyes met his, however briefly, as you glanced between him and Zeff in clear alarm at the scene you had just walked in on.

For once, Zeff was right—Sanji was already over it.

You had your work cut out for you, starting your two week stage that particular day—there was a party of more than twenty world government snobs expected at one that afternoon, which meant cold apps and hors d'oeuvres needed to be in no short supply. Sanji kept his eye on you throughout the entire shift, any time he was in the kitchen. Your station was right next to the break table in the corner, and oh, he could have watched you work all day, your graceful and precise movements as you piped filling into two trays full of deviled eggs, the deft motion of your wrist in cutting the chives to perfectly even half-inch lengths, carefully adding a few to each with your tweezers, ever so delicately topping each egg with a few salmon roe and a turn of your pepper mill.

Sanji stamped out his cigarette in the ashtray, and crossed the short distance to your station before you could call order up to retrieve the trays.

"Absolutely stunning," he commented with a small sigh.

You met his eyes briefly as you set to cleaning your station and checking your next order. "Just following the recipe."

"Well...." he chuckled lightly, leaning across the counter. "I wasn't only referring to the food, chef."

Your eyes locked with his a moment longer, before you rolled them and went back to work—but there was the slightest hint of a blush on your cheeks as he lifted the second tray, a hint of a smile curving your soft lips, and Sanji didn't fail to miss it.

Your stage was two weeks, before you would either be hired in fully or told to take a walk, but you melded so seamlessly with the rest of the staff that Sanji had no doubt you were on track to becoming a permanent fixture at Baratie—and god, he hoped he was right.

He was genuinely drawn to you—not only your talent in the busy kitchen, your ability to keep a level head and your spirits high under the high stress of the lunch and dinner rushes, but everything. The subtle and teasing way you returned his flirting. The late nights cooking with you, experimenting with new recipes after shift, or just chatting by the bar while you shared a drink and a smoke or two. Well before a week was out, he wanted to just grab you by the waist and kiss you like his life depended on it.

But he was nothing if not a gentleman, and for all the time he had been blessed to spend with you, there was still something distant about you. You skirted around any personal topics—your family, friends, your home before you came to Baratie, all of it was a mystery. Sanji didn't push it. He did prod at it occasionally out of sheer curiosity, how you had come to be so accomplished a chef at only a year younger than him, but he didn't push. He couldn't stomach the thought of pushing you away if he tried too hard to get you to open up.

Your eighth day at Baratie, just after the end of dinner rush, Sanji watched Chef Zeff hand you an envelope as you stood over the dish pit, your chef coat slung over your shoulder. He spoke to you quietly as you opened it and scanned over the letter inside. Something shifted in your eyes for a moment, so quickly that it was difficult to tell what it was.

Then you stuck the letter in your apron pocket and shook your head. Your mouth formed the words, "It's fine," as you went right back to scrubbing a plate.

Zeff gave you a nod, a light pat on the shoulder and a sigh as he passed.

And it was all Sanji could think about for the next hour as he squared away the dining area. He did so quickly, perhaps a bit less thoroughly than he should have, but that didn't matter. What mattered was that flicker in your eyes, a flicker of something. Whatever news had come to you in that envelope had been nothing good.

You were the last person left in the sprawling kitchen by the time Sanji returned, still making your way slowly through the stacks of dishes, a task that was normally split between a few of the kitchen and dining staff.

Yet you were still there, clearly taking your time, meticulously cleaning each dish that passed through your hands. Drying each one thoroughly before placing them lightly in their designated areas, your breathing slow and controlled, your eyes focused and yet somehow miles away at the same time.

Sanji plucked the ash tray from the break table and crossed the kitchen, lighting up a smoke and grabbing a dish towel before he reached you. You proved just how thoroughly you had spaced out when he set the ashtray down—you let out a small cry of alarm and dropped the plate you were holding.

Sanji managed to stoop down and catch it just before it could hit the floor and shatter. Your eyes locked with his for a moment, and there was that flicker again—pain, sadness, so much that it made his chest ache. Then, in the blink of an eye, you were back to washing dishes.

"Don't sneak up on me," you chided, elbowing him playfully as he leaned back against the counter, drying the plate. "You know how Zeff gets about anyone breaking dishes."

"That's entirely unfair, I wasn't even sneaking." He knew he had to be careful—had to play it safe, act like everything was normal. He couldn't outright ask you what was wrong without you either changing the subject or outright storming off. "Now, had I been sneaking..."

Ge set the plate down, and you were already rolling your eyes as he circled behind you, resting a hand lightly at your waist.

"I'd have come up behind you...maybe...put an arm around you..."

Your lips pursed, clearly fighting to keep a straight face as his hand slipped from your waist, across your stomach, his arm curled around you to pull you gently back against his chest. He tucked a strand of hair behind your ear, tilting his head to lean in close over your shoulder.

"Said something like, 'How about we leave these dishes for someone else and go have a drink or two, beautiful?'"

You tilted your head to meet his eyes, shaking your head a little. "I'm sure you would have," you said, giggling a little as you patted him on the cheek. Your lips lingered barely an inch from his, and for a few impossibly long seconds Sanji briefly forgot why he had approached you in the first place.

Then you reached over your shoulder and held a bowl out to him.

"Sooner we get done, sooner we can go have a couple," you said, smiling sweetly.

"Oh, fine," he sighed, taking the bowl. "But I'm going to sulk about it the whole time."

You giggled a little more when he pressed a brief kiss to your cheek, shoving at him lightly. "I wouldn't expect anything less," you laughed as he resumed leaning back against the counter beside you.

He kept his eyes on you, wondering if you thought you were hiding it well. You were far too quiet, too tense as the laughter faded from your breath and you went back to work. Your shoulders were squared, your chest rising and falling under your apron in slow, even, carefully controlled breaths, your eyes growing distant again.

Distant, sad, almost hopeless, on the verge of breaking and desperately trying to hide it.

And Sanji couldn't stand another second of it.

He plung the towel over his shoulder and placed a hand lightly on your shoulder—and before he could do more than open his mouth, you spoke up, your voice low and quiet.

"I'm...going to have to leave for a few days."

"What?" His eyes widened, his cigarette falling from the corner of his mouth in alarm. He quickly stooped down to pick it back up. "Wh—why?" he blurted out.

You swallowed, keeping your eyes on the plate in your hands, not washing it anymore but just staring at it.

"I...I have to handle funeral and burial arrangements for my father." Your voice was still quiet, still so carefully controlled, and his heart sunk right into the pit of his stomach at the slight tremor in your hands. "He...didn't have any other family so I have to...I have to go home for a few days."

That was it. The letter Zeff had handed you. Your mouth forming the words "I'm fine," when he no doubt offered to let you take the rest of the evening off. Over an hour you had stood there washing dishes, alone with nothing but your own thoughts for company, one little push from falling apart.

Sanji took one last puff from his cigarette before putting it out, before gingerly pulling the plate from your hands and setting it aside, before taking a step closer and pulling you just as gingerly into his arms. He felt as well as heard your breath hitch and stutter the slightest bit.

"I'm...so sorry, sweetheart," he said quietly, lowering his forehead over the crown of your hair, cradling your head at his shoulder. You still kept your breathing mostly level, but kept your head down, your hands shaking the slightest bit as they gripped lightly at the front of his shirt. "Was...he ill?"

You nodded shortly. "Dementia." Swallowed. "Early onset. Started around five years ago. I...we had a restaurant in Loguetown. Just a little bistro. Things...got bad a couple years ago. I couldn't keep up running a business and take care of him. He'd go down into the restaurant and try to cook, end up cutting himself or starting a fire. I had to close it and find something else. He...told me a while back that the head chef at Baratie was an old friend, so I..." Your voice cracked a little as you went on. "I had to leave him with a live-in nurse. When I left h—he didn't—he was so far gone he didn't even know who I—"

He pulled his arm a bit tighter around your waist as your sentence cut off in a small sob, his fingers curling in your hair near the nape of your neck. You had been dealing with all of this, alone, this entire week—for five years prior to that, trying to run an entire restaurant on your own and juggle it with taking care of your only family.

He was speechless—couldn't do anything for some time except lean back against the counter and hold you against him, stroke your hair and press a kiss to the top of your head while you clung to him and cried quietly.

He gladly would have held you all night, if that was what you needed—but you drew away after a few minutes, rubbing your palm into your eyes and turning to sit on the floor against the counter, glaring up at the ceiling.

"I never even really got to say bye," you said, giving a small scoff as you ran a hand back through your hair, your head falling back against the counter. Sanji took a seat beside you, and you exhaled a slow, shaking sigh as he wrapped an arm around your shoulders. "Not in any way he'd know. He just looked right at me and asked who I was."

"I'm sure he knows now. And that he'd be proud." You leaned your temple into his shoulder, swallowing, your eyes drifting shut. It didn't matter if you believed it right now—he still wanted to make sure you heard it. "You're...kind, beautiful, talented. To be honest, I could hardly take my eyes off you your first day."

"I know." You laughed quietly at that, your voice still choked from your tears. "You weren't exactly discreet about it."

"Never said I was trying to be."

You glanced up at him at that, and nudged your elbow lightly at his ribs...but you smiled as you shook your head, and that was all that mattered to him. Making you smile, genuinely smile, not just putting it on to mask the pain.

You rolled your eyes a little and closed them again. "I planned on making a point of not getting close to anyone here." You sighed slowly. "You made that impossible, of course."

"You're welcome."

"Would you stop?" you said, both of you laughing a little. A little more of your tension seemed to slip away as he pulled you closer. You shifted so your knees were bent to the side, resting over his leg, your temple at his shoulder. "I wasn't sure if I'd stay here after...." You bit your lip. "If I'd go back home and try to re-open the restaurant. But..." You shook your head. "I like it here. It's like having a family. I never really had that since it was just me and my dad." You drew in a deep breath. "I...still have to go back for a few days and handle his arrangements, but...I want to stay here. There's really nothing for me there now, anyway."

There it was. Without saying it outright...you were staying because of him. Sanji could have floated right off in that moment on a cloud of pure elation. There was nothing official between the two of you yet, but he had grown quickly to adore you. To savor every moment of time you gave him, every second of your flirtatious banter and your late night talks after the kitchen closed, and that only increased with everything he learned about you. Even if you had decided to leave, he couldn't say for sure that he wouldn't have just followed you right out the door like a lost puppy.

Even a few days was too long.

He laid his forehead over the crown of your hair, pressing a brief, chaste kiss to your temple.

"Let me come with you." He heard your breath catch in surprise, felt you freeze as he shook his head. "This isn't something you should have to do alone."

You were quiet, still as stone for several long seconds. He didn't regret the offer, wouldn't ever regret it. The worst you could do was say no, leave for a few days and come back.

You drew in a slow, deep breath after a moment.

"Are you sure Zeff would let you?" you said quietly.

Sanji laughed a little. "He's a cranky old bastard but he isn't heartless," he said, his thumb brushing against the nape of your neck in slow, small circles. "He'll probably tell me not to let the door hit me in the ass on the way out and leave it at that."

Your little giggle made his heart soar.

"You...really don't have to," you said softly, but you couldn't hide the hope in your voice. And that alone was enough to make him sigh softly, hearing hope after seeing the lost, hopeless look in your eyes as you stood over the dish pit minutes earlier.

"I want to," he said gently. "Besides...." He dug into his pocket, pulling out his cigarettes, and held the pack out. "Why in hell..." You took one when he offered it, and he tapped one out as well before tossing the pack up onto the counter behind both of you. "...would I want to stay here waiting tables and arguing with our most esteemed chef..." He leaned in close enough to light both his and your smoke together, taking a long drag and blowing the smoke away out the corner of his mouth, "when I could be spending a few days doting on the single most beautiful woman in the world?"

You gave a small snort of laughter, shaking your head before meeting his eyes again. "You never switch off, do you?"

"Never," he affirmed, grinning.

Sanji leaned back into the counter, resting his arm across his knee, staring up toward the ceiling as a thought struck him—an idea, moreso, one that he couldn't resist acting on.

"What," he said slowly, glancing down at you as you pressed the cigarette to your lips, "would you say was your old man's best dish?"

"Risotto," you said instantly. You smiled a little, turning your head to blow a cloud of smoke away. "His mushroom risotto was our most popular item, he could have made it in his sleep. Shallots, chardonnay, portobello, white truffle, little pinch of nutmeg and thyme to bring out the earthiness, it was...."

"Perfect." He smiled when you glanced uo at him. "Let's make it."

"Wh—*now*?" Your brow furrowed as he shrugged a shoulder. "But—" You nodded back at the counter, up toward the sink behind you. "I have to—the dishes—"

"Will still be there in an hour," he finished for you, and you pursed your lips. "Come on..." he said, lowering his head to rest his forehead against yours, lowering his voice to a light, teasing tone. "Say yes."

"I..." You sighed after a moment, shaking your head. "You are impossible." He lifted his eyebrows, waiting, as you returned his smile. "Fine, yes."

"Perfect," he said once more. He plucked your cigarette from your hand and stood, dropping it as well as his own into the ash tray before offering you both of his hands. You took them and he pulled you to your feet, your fingers lacing together with his.

And, without any warning or hesitation, you pulled yourself up onto your tiptoes and pressed your lips lightly to his.

And, oh, he could have melted into a puddle right there in front of the sink.

Your lips were even softer than they looked, and Sanji knew in an instant that he was going to be hopelessly addicted to them. A slow sigh left him as he tilted his head slightly, returning the slow, sweet kiss, his hands leaving yours to wrap lightly around your waist and draw you in a little closer, a little deeper. Yours came to rest just as lightly at his abdomen for a moment, before you looped your arms around his neck and sank right into him.

He was smiling when your lips parted, his forehead resting against yours as you bit your bottom lip. He curled an arm around your back and lifted his other hand, brushing your hair behind your ear as his eyes remained glued to yours.

"So..." He brushed his thumb across your cheek. "Would you call me an idiot if I said I think I'm falling for you?"

You chuckled softly. "Being that we barely met a week ago...yes." And you smiled, leaning in closer. "But I guess then I'd have to call myself an idiot, too."

And you pressed your lips to his again.

#opla #sanji opla #sanji one piece #vinsmoke sanji #sanji x reader #fluff #one piece fanfiction #opla fanfiction

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blkdaddie · 2 months

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Buns in the Oven

The kitchen was a symphony of sizzling sounds and vibrant colors, each station brimming with an array of exotic ingredients and gleaming utensils. The contestants, an eclectic mix of expectant men from all walks of life, stood ready, their hands poised to create culinary magic. The atmosphere buzzed with excitement and camaraderie, their shared journey creating an unspoken bond.

"Welcome to another thrilling episode of 'Buns in the Oven!' I'm your host, Jeremy, and today, our talented dads-to-be will be whipping up some extraordinary dishes to satisfy those unique pregnancy cravings!" Jeremy's voice echoed through the studio, his enthusiasm infectious.

"Let’s get cooking, gentlemen!" Jeremy announced, signaling the start of the competition.

At Station One, Alex, a software engineer from Seattle, was busy chopping a selection of exotic fruits. "I’m going for a spicy mango-avocado tart with a hint of chili and lime. It’s got that sweet and savory kick," he explained, exchanging a confident smile with Carlos, the contestant at the next station.

Carlos, a dance instructor from Miami, grinned back. "Sounds amazing, Alex. I’m working on a sweet plantain and black bean empanada with a guava glaze. A little taste of home for me."

Station Three housed Ravi, a chef from New York City, meticulously arranging ingredients for his dish. "I’m making a curry-infused chocolate mousse with candied ginger. It’s a fusion of my Indian heritage and classic French technique," he said, his eyes twinkling with excitement.

The judges, seated at a long table, watched intently. "These combinations are wild! I can’t wait to taste them," said Chef Maria, a renowned culinary expert.

"Remember, guys, presentation is key. We eat with our eyes first," added Chef Luis, a pastry chef known for his avant-garde creations.

As the clock ticked down, the kitchen was a whirlwind of activity. The smell of freshly baked goods and exotic spices filled the air. The men worked with a blend of precision and passion, their bellies round and their smiles wide.

"Five minutes left!" Jeremy called out, pacing the kitchen and peeking over shoulders.

At Station Four, Malik, a jazz musician from New Orleans, was putting the finishing touches on his dish. "I’ve got a beignet with a spicy crawfish filling and a sweet bourbon glaze. It’s got a little bit of everything," he said, his voice smooth and melodic.

The camaraderie was palpable. "Malik, that smells divine," Ravi called out, plating his mousse with a flourish.

"Time's up! Step away from your stations, gentlemen," Jeremy announced. The contestants exchanged high-fives and knowing winks, the energy in the room electric.

The judges made their rounds, sampling each dish with thoughtful expressions. "Alex, your tart has a wonderful balance of flavors. The heat from the chili is perfect," Chef Maria praised.

"Carlos, your empanada is incredible. The guava glaze is a fantastic touch," Chef Luis commented, nodding appreciatively.

"Ravi, your mousse is sublime. The curry and chocolate work beautifully together," said Chef Maria, clearly impressed.

"And Malik, your beignet is a revelation. The spice and sweetness are in perfect harmony," Chef Luis added.

Jeremy took the stage once more, microphone in hand. "And the winner of today’s 'Buns in the Oven' is… Malik with his spicy crawfish beignet! Congratulations, Malik!" The room erupted in cheers and applause.

"Thanks, everyone. This was such an amazing experience," Malik said, his voice full of emotion as he accepted his prize—a basket filled with goodies for both him and his soon-to-arrive baby.

As the credits rolled, Jeremy’s voiceover captured the essence of the show. "Join us next week for more mouthwatering creations and heartwarming stories on 'Buns in the Oven.' Where every dish is a labor of love."

#mpreg story #pregnant man #mpreg #mpreg kink #mpreg belly

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sebastiangarde · 2 years

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Skullstealer Crab

A man shambles closer, his clothes wet and moldy. As he looks up, eyestalks pop out of empty eyesockets, as crab-like claws reach out of the mouth.

One Man's Trash, Another Crab's Treasure. Where there is death for some, there is opportunity for others. Like regular hermit crabs, skullstealer crabs are weak and vulnerable without shelter. But instead of abandoned mollusc shells, they inhabit the skulls of drowned corpses. Crawling in either through the mouth or by cracking the back of the skull open with their powerful claws, they eat and replace the brain.

Grim Puppeteer. Wrapping their tail around the spinal cord, skullstealer crabs interface with the nervous system and gain control of the host body, piloting it like a crustacean puppetmaster. Bodies rot fast, however, so the skullstealers must be constantly on the look for new, fresher shelter. And nothing is fresher than alive.

Many skullstealer hermit crabs live near coastal settlements, crawling out of the sea at night and shambling into settlements. Possessing a rudimentary intelligence, skullstealers know to disguise themselves well enough to get within distance to extend their claws through the mouth and tear out the throat of a lone traveler.

Alien Minds. Strangely, when multiple skullstealer crabs are in close proximity, they may form a psychic connection, forming an alien hivemind. This grants them an extended ability to affect the minds of others.

They form large colonies within coastal caverns. From there, they conduct raiding parties to drag live creatures to their lair, where they use their sticky mucus to attach them to the walls until new shelters are needed.

Adventure Hooks

Cult of a sea god worships the skullstealer crabs as emissaries of their patron. They consider becoming a host the greatest honor.

Skullstealer crabs have been attacking coastal settlements in greater numbers. The rumour is that they are being used as foot soldiers by some more powerful, nefarious source.

#dungeons and dragons #dnd #dnd 5e #dnd monster #homebrew #garde creations #crab #horror #body horror

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empirearchives · 5 months

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Paris Fire Brigade — The fire department of the city of Paris

The Paris Fire Brigade was created by Napoleon on 18 September 1811 after a devastating fire in Paris in 1810. The brigade remains the same firefighting service of Paris to this day.

Illustrations created by Aaron Martinet between 1807 and 1814. Top: Imperial Guard, Engineer Sapper. Bottom: Imperial Guard, Officer of Engineer Sappers. These were the military positions which were transitioned into the fire department.

The deadly fire at the Austrian embassy ball in July 1810, during the festivities for his marriage to Marie Louise, reminded the Emperor of the importance of a well-functioning fire service in the capital.

Despite the courage and dedication of the gardes pompes [firefighters of the old organization], who are sometimes falsely accused of numerous shortcomings, the firefighting service revealed its weaknesses: delays, insufficient and unreliable equipment, poorly trained personnel and incompetent managers. The staff present at the embassy on the day of the tragedy were cleared of all suspicion by an investigation led by the Count of Montalivet. On the other hand, the leaders of the old organization were dismissed, and the corps des gardes pompes was abolished.

After this catastrophe, the Emperor reorganized this public service by creating the first military corps of firefighters, made up of the engineers from the Imperial Guard who were dedicated to defending the imperial chateaux against fire.

At the behest of Emperor Napoleon I, the creation of the Paris fire department [bataillon de sapeurs pompiers de Paris] by imperial decree on 18 September 1811 was an original and innovative step, marking the transition from a civil and municipal organization to a military body. The choice of such an atypical status for a public service echoes the creation, eleven years earlier, of the Paris Police Prefecture, an equally singular legal administrative body.

From its creation, this military corps was placed under the authority of the Paris Police Prefecture, who was responsible for the security of the capital. After a long process, this military status and subordination to a prefect became the logical consequence of the spirit of the decree of 12 messidor year 8.

When the battalion was formed in 1811, the Paris fire department took on a new mission: fighting fires, the importance and development of which they were still unaware of.

Four companies were then created to respond to fires. Relying on a typically military functional triptych (extensive training of men, systematic technological research and implementation of efficient operational procedures), the battalion quickly made its new environment its own, and by the end of the second half of the 19th century, had become a model for the organization of public fire-fighting services and a national, even international reference.

Several fire chiefs succeeded one another until 1814. At that date, command was entrusted to battalion commander Plazanet. He provided the battalion with an instruction manual, made it compulsory for sappers to be stationed in barracks, and introduced gymnastics to train efficient and daring rescuers.

Source: Brigade de sapeurs-pompiers de Paris — Le Bataillon

Picture source: Napoleon's Army: 1807-1814 as Depicted in the Prints of Aaron Martinet, By Guy C. Dempsey, Jr., (Section: Support Troops)

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lenreli · 4 months

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Conduit [Dreamling Week Day 2 - Flowers]

[AO3] | [Dreamling Week '24 Masterpost]

E, 2.9k. An innocently given gift becomes much more.

It starts with a simple gift. A flower, a red rose, made from dreams and everlasting, as long as Hob wanted it to last ― and one time, Dream thought of giving him one, in the 15th century, but threw it away, letting it dissolve into nothing before he entered The White Horse.

“It’s beautiful,” Hob whispers, brown eyes glued to the flower in his hands, held so gently and Dream wants, seeing how delicately Hob touches it, one finger going up a soft green stem to the bottom of the rose.

“A gift,” he says as he steps away, mouth dry as Hob continues to softly touch it, a finger softly touching the top of the red petals. “It will never wilt.”

Hob smiles so brightly that Dream’s unsure how the local star can compete as Hob holds it even more delicately, holding it close to his chest as Hob starts to ramble, going on about fake flowers and boutique, avant-garde art that Dream’s present could pass as.

“I’m glad you like it,” Dream whispers, watching as Hob walks around his various knick-knacks for the perfect vase to match it, eventually digging up a thin black vase with golden cracks through it from a spare room. Kinstugi.

It’s as he’s listening to a Nightmare’s concerns that Dream realises, a soft touch flowing through him that he stops, the Nightmare freezing in place.

Then another touch, fluttering inside and Dream vanishes into his room as there’s another touch, near his thighs and he shivers, shutting his eyes at the feeling. And also, to reach out to where the touch originates―

His flower, the red rose, intertwined with him, his yearning as Hob works at his office at university, and Dream gasps as a finger goes through the centre of the rose, arousal coiling the warmth of it so deep inside. Whining, he can see that Hob’s not even paying attention, the fingers pressing into the rose more of a fidget as he works at something on his laptop.

Keening, he can only feel the soft pads of Hob’s fingers inside, warmth pressing against suddenly-made ribs and organs, more for the soft wisps to touch as Hob lightly touches the outside of the petals, moving to the top and Dream can only cry, only aware as the fingers leave, cold returning in their place.

I should stop this, he thinks with harsh clarity―then, he can hear it, the vase being pulled closer to Hob, quiet words whispered to the flower. Not anything focused on Dream, more Hob talking to himself as he works through references and books, warm gusts of breath heating him up as Hob continues to work.

Dream closes his eyes and soaks in the warmth.

He… forgets. To stop it, although next time he visits Hob in his home, he’s glad to know that the rose is nowhere in the vicinity. “My friend!” Hob beams at him, coming closer like he’s going to hug―and then Hob stops.

“Hello,” he offers, strangling the disappointment and bitterness that he feels as Hob moves to get something close to him, a record. “No university today?”

Hob laughs and gets the vinyl record out, putting it softly onto the turntable setup he has “It’s the weekend, Dream!” Hob waves a hand and looks down at his clothes, a threadbare white shirt and blue boxer shorts, “and I was going to get dressed and mark some of my things at The New Inn.”

“Why the music?” Dream frowns and stares at the record spinning, Pink Floyd flooding the house as Hob walks into his kitchen. Eventually following, he finds Hob getting out a sourdough bread and eggs.

“It’s nice while making food, of course,” Hob mumbles, getting more things out of the fridge and other cupboards and Dream watches, the whorls of fingerprints still aching underneath his skin, his ribs.

At his Shores of Creation, working on a multi-limbed dream, he feels a light touch up his back. Stopping his work, he shuts his eyes and can see Hob’s office, hazy and transient as a thumb lightly touches the side of the rose. It’s a gift from a friend, Hob says, eyes soft as they stare down at the rose and Dream’s just-made heart thuds in his chest.

Some friend, huh? Someone else says, voice light and soft and can almost see her expression as Hob laughs, fingers going down the green stem and Dream lets out sound at the touch, hot and sharp from Hob’s nails. The press of it is maddening as a finger fiddles with a leaf on the stem.

He’s very important to me. Shut up, Hob pouts and pulls the rose closer, and Dream lets out a gasp at the touch of lips on top of the rose, on his head.

Okay loverboy, calm down, Hob’s friend says with a laugh and he can feel a huff, Hob’s hand curling tighter around the rose and Dream moans, shaking at the feel of so much, mind stuttering and falling over itself. Stop fondling that and let’s get lunch, you weirdo.

I’m perfectly normal, Hob mutters, and Dream lets out keen as the connection ends, ghostly touch no longer on him. Opening his eyes, he looks up at the sky as he takes a deep breath as he sits up, somehow ending up lying on the sand.

Shivering, Dream puts a hand on his chest, the touch doing nothing as his half-finished creations stare down at him.

The connection flares to life, effectively distracting from a report Mervyn is giving about ― flowers, red petals that he complains are flooding the grounds of the castle. He can feel the cause of that flowers, a touch pressing below the flower itself, at the top of the stem, can see Hob at his desk, a mass of white paper he’s focusing on.

“Again?!” Mervyn complains and stalks off, grumbling and Dream fades back into his bedroom, knowing that working like this wouldn’t be productive. A finger goes down the green stem and Dream gasps, sinking onto his bed as Hob talks to himself ― mainly, about the essays he’s grading, the words blurry and out of focus compared to the hand fiddling with the flower, stroking up and down the stem as Hob yawns and scratches his forehead.

Dream’s skin tingles as Hob seems to notice his other hand on the flower, making him grumble to himself more ― and Dream almost swallows his tongue as Hob brings the flower closer, stubble pressing into the flower ― and into him, as Hob rests his jaw on the petals. The rough, prickly feeling makes him whimper, pleasure heightening to absurd levels so quickly that it makes him dizzy, falling into the sensations even more.

Hob sighs, expression disappointed with what he’s reading and Dream can feel the orgasm approaching as a finger goes up, tracing the edge of a petal ― and the wracking pleasure of coming feels secondary to the way the finger goes inside, pressing softly inside as Hob yawns once more, stretching in his place.

The oversensitivity itches, sharp sensation at the way Hob’s jaw returns to the petal, and a sound is wrenched out of him at the way he can feel soft hair and Dream, as always, feel the urge to reach out to touch the soft skin he can feel, the calluses on the other’s hands.

Spending a morning in on Hob’s lecture is something he’s never getting enough of ― seeing Hob in his element, around people, as he asks questions of his students, and they ask in return. Hob never seems to be awkward around people, bright and engaging, and Dream envies the ease at which Hob carries himself. Even with being a King, it feels awkward and ill-fitting, not right or true, though people never realise it.

“What do you think of―Dream?” Hob asks and he blinks, thoughts crashing since they’re in Hob’s office, and he freezes at the sight of the red flower, still in its black-gold vase. “Dream?”

“Yes?” He blinks, holding himself still as Hob hovers over his desk ― and the flower, insides becoming hot at just the sight of it.

Hob looks down at his desk and shrugs, smiling, “ah. Nevermind. I never got you a gift in return for this, did I?” Hob says softly, a hand hovering above the flower and Dream goes even more still.

“It’s fine,” he replies quickly and Hob blinks, looking at him with confusion as he puts his hand onto the table. Dream relaxes, insides scorching hot at just the thought of previous touches, still imprinted onto him.

“Still, you’re my friend and I’d want to give something to you in return,” Hob sighs and gets out some things from his bag, putting it onto the table.

“You have already given me your friendship, which is enough,” he says as Hob gets out a plastic bento box.

“Even so, might do some sort of thing for you anyway,” Hob says with a grin, shaking his bento, “gonna go heat this up. Won’t be long! Don’t go anywhere. Or, at least, leave a note or something, please,” he continues and Dream nods, watching Hob rush out the door.

Dream gives a wary look to the flower, still as red and green as the day it was made ― and drifts over to Hob’s many books, eventually finding one that seems interesting enough to read while Hob has his lunch break.

Mainly, Dream has been waiting, not much work being done as Mervyn despairs even more over the constant red petals.

Then, a fizzling sensation trails up his back and Dream sinks into the sensation, into his bed. Hob is in his office, a thumb pressing up the back of the stem, staring down at the flower in contemplation and Dream wants. Can feel himself overflow with it as the thumb presses into the petal, pushing in between them and a keen gets pulled out of him.

“Hob,” he whimpers, voice loud and Hob unable to hear it as he whines, arching into it as Hob’s thumb reaches the centre, the feeling all-consuming and rough, calluses scratching against the petals. Hob sighs and rests his face on his other hand, and Dream cries out as the thumb drifts out of the flower, moving to stroke the top of it.

Dream, Hob says, browns furrowing and Dream’s insides twist, gripping at his hair as Hob continues to stare―

―Then falls against the desk, fast asleep, fingers leaving the flower―

“Dream?” Hob says, in his realm, in his room, pulled along by Dream’s crushing want.

“Touch me,” he whines, almost out of his mind with the sudden lack of feeling as Hob gapes, eyes round, in the leather jacket, pants and top he was probably wearing, beard more like 1389.

“But I was just―” Hob pauses and hovers over him, still looking but not touching―and Hob lets out a sound as Dream’s clothes vanish, as Dream grabs onto the other’s wrist. “Dream―”

“You will not touch me?” He breathes, looking up from his lashes. Hob lets out a whine, and he shivers as a hand presses against his chest, nails lightly scratching down his torso.

“I―I do, I want, it’s just. Do you really? Want this?” Hob leans over him, his other hand caressing Dream’s side, still hesitant.

“Did you not hear me?” He growls, urging the hand he’s grabbed onto to go lower. “I want you,” he whispers, watching as Hob shivers, gulping loudly in the room. “I want you inside, to feel that fully and wholly,” he states, pulling Hob closer until Hob gasps.

“I, um. Fuck,” Hob breathes, lips so close to his own ― and he moans as Hob kisses him, as hands go down to his hips, the musk of him rich and moreish, mouth tasting of spices. “And the, um. The flower?” Hob squeaks, eyes on his lower half ― at the black flower at his groin, petals unfurling out onto his thighs, his stomach, the centre cluster of it wet and leaking.

“That flower I gave you,” he breathes, arching into Hob’s fingers, gently stroking the edge of the petals on him, knowing it’s not the answer Hob’s expecting, “accidentally I made a connection with it ― to be touched like that flower, and ever since I’ve felt it, your fingerprints engraved on the inside of me as you touched and fondled that flower.”

Hob groans, other hand going into his hair as they kiss, Hobs’ tongue probing his mouth as the other hand goes closer to the centre, dipping into the folds of the flower and making him whine. “Whenever I touched it, I thought of you, wanting to touch you too, but not knowing if you’d―” Hob strangles out, fingers reaching even deeper into him and pleasure bubbles and fizzles, some far-off part of him wondering if that’s why the flower became a conduit, both of their yearning converging onto the dreamstuff that made it.

“I would like for you to stop being a tease,” he grabs onto Hob’s clothes, getting rid of them with a thought and they gasp as their skin touches.

Hob laughs, wild and cracked as he bites down his neck, making Dream moan at the feeling, “I’m still wrapping my head around this, cut me some slack,” Hob speaks into his collarbone, “and this,” Hob’s fingers crook inside the part of the flower and he keens, a hand threading through Hob’s chest hair, other hand gripping onto the back of Hob’s neck, “this is just so ― you’re so beautiful.”

Dream tries to say something, but he can only shudder as fingers leave him, ghosting over the petals, closer to the his leaking centre, watching through his lashes as Hob stares at him reverently. And looking down, Dream can see how hard Hob’s cock is, still not inside ― so he digs his nails into Hob’s neck and pulls him down, their mouths meeting desperately as a hard cock brushes against him, feeling pre-come dripping down his petals.

“Fuck,” Hob swears, language going more Old English as they rut against each other, petals sliding against the hardness so―Dream gasps, feeling fingers go into the centre, twisting roughly and making pleasure jolt through him. “How do you―you feel so soft, like silk,” Hob breathes, nails scratching against his walls and he shivers.

Putting his other hand into Hob’s hair, his thumb presses the silvers under it―then pulls him in for a brutal kiss, biting into his mouth as Hob whines and shudders against him, fingers twitching sporadically inside him. “And yet,” he doesn’t finish, their mouths connected by a string of saliva, for little how they part.

Hob swallows, eyes dark as his fingers slip out. “It’s not my fault. I’d want to play for hours if you’d let me,” he says, licking his lips as Hob lines himself up, making Dream scrabble to hold onto the other’s back as his cock finally slides in.

“After,” he manages, eyes rolling to the back of his head as Hob starts to fuck him, walls clenching tightly around the other’s cock as it slides out, then pushes back in.

Dream comes either after hours or seconds, time stretching as he is already so coiled tight from lingering ghost touches, flower at his groin curling up tightly around the other’s cock as bliss rocks through him. Hob follows him shortly, gasping as their fluids mix and leak out of him.

Dream is floating, mind clear and feeling the sensations, even after Hob’s gone back to the Waking World.

Then there’s a familiar connection, a thumb pressed against the edge of the red flower. Dream, Hob says, the hazy connection showing his home and Dream blinks, sitting up as he puts on a sheer black robe and steps into Hob’s apartment. “You’re lucky I keep spare clothes at work after that,” Hob points out, nail dragging under the top of a flower petal ― and Dream bites down a moan.

“I ― apologise,” he whines, nails and calluses pressing against his skin as a thumb goes into the outer layer of the rose.

“Nothing to be sorry for, Dream,” Hob says, a nail pressing against the bottom of the rose and Dream kneels underneath the touches. “You did say we could play after though. If you still want.”

Hob walks closer, the smell of him more concentrated in the Waking, sharp and floral ― or some of that might be the rose still in his hand, other fingers dancing along the outside of the flower and Dream’s mind scrambles under so much as he rests his head against Hob’s thigh. “Yes.”

A dual touch, a finger sliding inside a petal, inside him, as well as Hob’s other hand touching his hair, pulling a moan out of him as Hob kneels down next to him. Buzzing with pleasure, he stares at the other’s dark eyes as Hob tugs him in for a kiss, hair roughly held in his fingers ― the finger in the flower also pressing against the bottom of the flower and he shivers, the touch inside and deep.

The dual touch may be a lot, but the lack of it is even worse as Hob gets up, leaving him cold as nails scratch up the stem, and he somehow manages to get up, latching onto Hob’s waist as they kiss.

[Fin]

#dc #the sandman #dreamling #dreamling fanfic #dream x hob #hob x dream #hob x morpheus #dream of the endless #hob gadling #dreamling week #dreamling week 2024 #writing #not sfw #enjoyed this one a lot

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eyeodyssey · 1 year

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The Post-Futurist Fossils of LITCHI HIKARI CLUB In a somewhat recent research tangent, while considering the possible “genealogy” of the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s themes and aesthetics, I made an interesting personal discovery regarding Litchi Hikari Club. Specifically some distinct thematic parallels that the play shares with the Italian futurist movement, less in relation to the art of the movement itself, but rather the ideologies of the movement’s controversial founder, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and his relation to the Italian fascist party. This is all of course in the context of understanding Litchi as a transgressive/dystopian horror story. This is less of an absolute statement than it is a sort of open train of thought, so take things with a fair grain of salt. This is more or less just my own personal analysis of all the materials I could gather of the original play. Beyond inspecting the play as a possible allegory for futurism, there's also just a lot of general analysis of the play in relation to Ameya's overall body of work, both with the Tokyo Grand Guignol and also as a performance artist. I rarely put a 'keep reading' tag on these things since I'm an openly shameless product of the early days of blogging, but this one's a doozy (both in the information but also just the gargantuan length). Hopefully others will find it just as interesting. The full essay is below...

The futurist movement itself was nothing short of an oddity. In their time, the futurists were pioneers of avant-garde modernist aesthetics, with their works ranging from deconstructive paintings to reality-bending sculptures and even early pathways to noise music with the creation of the non-conventional Intonarumori instruments of Luigi Russolo. Russolo’s own futurist-adjacent manifesto, The Art of Noises, would go on to influence such artists as John Cage, Pierre Henry, Einstürzende Neubauten and the openly left-wing industrial collective Test Department. When visiting the MOMA in New York City as a child, I was fascinated by Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, a sculpture that appeared to be a spacetime malformation of the human figure encapsulated in a continual state of forward motion while in total stillness. Despite this, the futurists were also a social movement of warmongering misogynists, with their own founding manifesto by Marinetti describing the bloodshed and cruelty of war as being “… the only cure for the world”. Their manifesto would also feature quotes such as “We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice”. They would originally pin anarchism as being their ideological ground in the manifesto, but shortly thereafter Marinetti would pick up an interest in fascism along with the politics of Benito Mussolini, going on to be a coauthor for the Italian fascist manifesto alongside the futurist manifesto. In consideration of how throughout most of World War II, modernist and post-modern works were considered “degenerate” forms of art in contrast with traditionalism, a whole avant-garde movement founded from fascist ideals is paradoxical. But for a period of time, that parallel wasn’t only in existence, but backed by Mussolini himself with there being a brief effort by Marinetti to make futurism the official aesthetic of fascist Italy. One of the draws of futurism for Marinetti was an underlying sense of violence and extremity. According to Marinetti, his initial inspiration for the movement was the sensations he felt in the aftermath of a car accident where he drove into a ditch after nearly running over a band of tricyclists. He conceived his works to be acts of social disruption, intending to put people in states of unrest to cause riots and similar bouts of violence. “Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice”. He sought to destroy history to pave the way for a rapid acceleration to futuristic technological revelation.

“As shown in Edogawa Rampo’s Boy Detectives Club, young men like to hide from a world of girls and adulthood to form their own secret societies.” - June Vol. 27 In Litchi Hikari Club, a group of middle school-aged boys are faced with a crisis on the brink of puberty. At the twilight of their childhoods, they form a secret society known as the Hikari Club (or Light Club), a collective that’s devoted to the active preservation of their shared youth and virginity. The boys naively mimic an authoritarian organization and its hierarchy as they seek a means to preserve their boyhood, which they see as being idyllic in contrast to adulthood, a dreary state of existence that they call old and tired in the Usamaru Furuya manga version of the story. Similarly, in the Litchi Hikari Club-inspired short manga Moon Age 15: Damnation, the boys go on to liken their hideout with the paradisiacal garden of Eden. In said story, Zera would directly name the poem Paradise Lost in reference to the discovery of their hideout by adults (arriving in the form of ground surveyors) and the wide-eyed daughter of a land broker, with their contact to the virgin industrialized land being an ideological tainting of the sacred lair. In their mission, they seek refuge in technological inhumanity by having their penises replaced with mechanized iron penises, symbolic devices of power and violence that can only procreate with other items of technology. Working in absolute secrecy, they collectively manufacture a robot known as Lychee. The purpose of Lychee, previously only known to Zera, isn’t revealed to the other club members until its completion. It’s when they unveil their “cute” robot in a scene that parallels the 1920 German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that Zera tells the other members of Lychee’s purpose as a machine that would kidnap women for them. The robot's efforts are assisted by the girl capturing device, a strange rice cooker-shaped mask that’s laced with a sleeping drug. When questioned about the fuel source for the robot, Zera explains how it will run off the clean fuel of lychee fruits rather than an unsavory yet plentiful substance like electricity or gasoline as a means to further match the robot’s perceived beauty.

While the club share a general disdain for adulthood, they hold a special hatred to girls and women. Going off the dogmatic repulsion to sexuality that Kyusaku Shimada shows as the teacher in the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s prior play, Mercuro (1984), it could be assumed that the Hikari Club hold a similar dogmatic viewpoint about the vices of sex. In this context, it’s likely that they would’ve perceived women as being parasitic by nature as spreaders of the “old” and “tired” adult human condition through pubescent fixation and procreation. Sexual thoughts are inherent to aging for most people, given the process of discovering and exploring your identity throughout puberty. It’s that exact pubescent experience the club seek to eradicate. Further insight is given to the Hikari Club’s dystopian psyche through their open allusions to nazi ideology. While Zera travels out to gather lychees from a tree he planted, the club get a special visit from a depraved elderly showman known as the Marquis De Maruo, performed by none other than Suehiro Maruo himself in the 1985 Christmas performance. Despite the club’s disposition to adults, they hold an exception for the Marquis for his old-timey showmanship and open pandering to the children’s whims. He always comes with autopsy films to show the young boys, and as they watch the gory videos he hands out candies that he describes as being a personal favorite of the late Adolf Hitler. He was said to also be the one to convince the boys to name their robot after the lychee fruit. It isn’t until Zera returns that the Marquis is removed from the hideout on Zera’s orders. Just before his exiling, he foretells to Zera the prophecy of the black star as both a promise and a warning to the aspiring dictator. It should be noted that there is a fascist occult symbol known as the black sun.

Suehiro Maruo as the Marquis De Maruo. On the right side is a caricature of Maruo as drawn by a contributor to June magazine, excerpted from an editorial cartoon in June Vol. 27 covering Litchi's 1985 Christmas performance. In addition, the Marquis’ role alongside Jaibo’s appearances in the play (which I’ll get to later) show distinct parallels with the presence of the hobo in the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s first play, Mercuro. In Mercuro’s case, the hobo (performed by Norimizu Ameya, who would go on to also act as Jaibo) visits the classroom in secrecy to lecture the students his depraved ideologies. Whilst the hobo in Mercuro was a figure of perversion that existed in contrast to the teacher’s paranoid conservatism, in Litchi both Jaibo and the Marquis are enablers of the club’s fascistic leanings, with the Marquis being a promoter whereas Jaibo is a direct representation of the underlining perversions of fascist violence. Though completely omitted from the Furuya manga, the element of the autopsy films shines a unique light on Zera’s death at the end of the story. In both the play and the manga, Zera is gutted alive by Lychee when the robot undergoes a meltdown after being forced to drown Kanon (Marin in the original play) in a coffin lined with roses. In the manga, Zera appears deeply unsettled when realizing his intestines resemble the internals of an adult. It’s unknown if this aspect is present in the theater version, as the full script remains unreleased to this day. It would fit however knowing not just the club’s repulsion to adulthood, but also how they retreat to technological modification to eradicate the human aspects they associate with adulthood. What is described of Zera’s death in the theater version has its own disquieting qualities as, from what’s mentioned, when confronted with his own mortality he appears to regress to a state of childlike delirium, a demeanor that’s drastically different from his usual calm and orderly presentation. Upon seeing his intestines, one of the responses he is able to muster is “I’m in trouble”. He says this as he questions whether or not he can fit his organs back inside the cavity before eventually telling himself that he’s just tired, that he “need(s) to sleep for a while”.

While never directly stated, it’s heavily implied that the club’s ideologies and technological fetishism ultimately root back to Jaibo, an ambiguously European transfer student who secretly manipulates the club’s actions from behind the scenes. Referred to by Hiroyuki Tsunekawa (Zera’s actor) as the “true dark emperor” of the Hikari Club, he was said to haunt the stage from the sides, closely inspecting the Hikari Club’s activities while keeping a distance. The iron phallus was first introduced by Jaibo through a monologue where he reveals how he fixed one to his own person, carefully describing its inner mechanisms and functionality before demonstrating its inhuman reproductive qualities by using the phallus to have sex with a TV. A television that he affectionately refers to as Psychic TV Chan, in reference to the post-industrial band fronted by Genesis P’Orridge. In the same scene, he promises the other members that they would all eventually get their own iron penises just like his own. In a subsequent scene, he reveals the iron phallus’ use as a weapon when, arriving to the club’s base with a chained-up female schoolteacher who accidentally discovered the sanctuary, he uses the device to brutally kill the teacher through a mocking simulation of sexual intercourse. Just before raping her, he likens her to a landrace, bred for the sole purpose of reproducing and being processed into meat for consumption. He menacingly tells her that he will make her as “cut and dry” as her role in society before carrying out her execution. While there was some confusion on whether or not the iron phallus was a machine or solely a chastity device, it was found in bits of dialogue that the iron phallus at least shares the qualities of a pump with a described set of rubber hinges. The teacher’s death gruesomely reflects the death of Kei Fujiwara’s character in the later film Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), with the iron phallus mangling her insides as blood splatters across the stage. While the club treats adult sexuality as a plague, they manage to find through the iron phallus a way to convert their own states of chastity into a form of violence, stripping all humanity away from the penis and rendering it to a weapon of absolute power through desolate mechanized cruelty.

JAIBO: “Length, 250 mm, with a weight of 2.4 kilograms. Arm diameter, 30mm. Cylindrical thrust, 170mm… With pins, plates and rods of die-cast alloy. And hinges of rubber… the rest is pure iron. It is the iron phallus.” - June Vol. 27 In the same interview, Tsunekawa would go on to recall how the members of the Hikari Club were effectively Jaibo’s guinea pigs. In both the play and the manga, an after-school night of the long knives ensues with the slow collapse of the Hikari Club as Jaibo influences the exiling of certain club members, with Zera left ignorant to the social engineering as a mere extension of Jaibo’s elaborate puppeteering. Left embittered by a chess match where he lost to Zera, Tamiya is easily tricked by Jaibo into burning the lychee field as a way to get vengeance. Upon being caught, Tamiya is castrated of his iron phallus, resulting in his exiling from the club as a traitor while also being mockingly likened to a woman in the process. In another scene, it’s recalled that Jaibo and Zera exchange a conversation about the Hikari Club’s loyalty to Zera as they observe the outside world through their periscopes. By all contemporary recollections, Jaibo was the club’s puppet master. He would’ve been the likely source of the club’s ideologies, the underlining hatred to women and fixation on technological violence, replacing mankind with a race of humanoid weapons. Zera would be a shell without his influence. The presence of futurism could arguably even be rounded down to Lychee’s presence in the story. Beyond his theoretic work, Marinetti was also a playwright. He would be most well known for his futurist drama La donna è mobile, a story riddled with similarly perverse renditions of sexual violence. The play notably featured the presence of humanoid automatons a full decade before the term “robot” would be coined by Czechoslovakian author Karel Čapek in the play R.U.R., with the French version of Marinetti’s script referring to the machines as “puppets” for their visual similarity to humans.

All of this plays out over a soundscape that’s dominated by unnatural electronic frequencies and synthesized percussion. The sound design was arguably one of the most important aspects of Ameya’s plays, with Ameya at one point describing the Tokyo Grand Guignol productions as being an ensemble of his favorite sounds. The setting further compliments the atmosphere, made to resemble the internal of a junkyard or factory warehouse where heaps of technical jump decorate the stage around the monochrome cabinet that would eventually birth Lychee. Some of the featured artists in the play’s first act include Test Department, The Residents, 23 Skidoo and Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft. The play’s opening, which depicts the capturing and subsequent torture of a student named Toba through a so-called “baptism of light”, is underscored by the S.P.K. song Culturcide, a grim primordial industrial dirge that paints the image of a dystopia where the genocide of ethnic cultures is likened to the infection of human cells by parasitic pathogens. Instead of being hung with a noose, Toba is suspended by a meathook, left as a decoration amidst the heaps of mechanized excrement. He would eventually be joined by the lifeless bodies of various women the Hikari Club abduct as they’re steadily gathered in a small box at the back of the stage. “Membrane torn apart, scavenging with the nomads. Requiem for the vestiges. Dissected, reproduced. The nucleus is infected with hybrid’s seed. Needles soak up, the weak must destroy. Cells cry out, cells scream out. Culturcide! Culturcide! Culturcide! Culturcide!” - Culturcide (from S.P.K.'s Dekompositiones EP)

“We are now entering an era which history will come to call ANOTHER DARK AGE. But, in kontrast to the original Dark Age, defined by a lack of information, we suffer from an excess of information, which has been reduced to the repetition of media-generated signs. Through this specialization, it is no longer possible for an individual to attain a total view of society. Edukation is struktured to the performance of a limited number of funktions rather than for kreativity.” “Kommunications systems are designed for the passive entertainment of the konsumer rather than the aktive stimulation of the user’s imagination. Through the spread of the western media, all kultures come to stimulate one another. By the end of the millennium, this biological infektion will have penetrated the heart of the most isolated traditions - a total CULTURCIDE.” “Yet in every era, a small number of visionaries rise above the general malaise. Those who will succeed, will resist the pressure to become kommercialized “images”, demanding identifikation and imitation. They will uphold their principles in the face of impossible odds. By remaining anonymous, they will be free to develop their imagination with maximum diversity. For this is the TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS, - the end of the proliferation of the ikons and the advent of a new symbolism.” - From the back cover of S.P.K.’s Dekompositiones EP (released under the moniker SepPuKu) Over the course of the play, the story undergoes a drastic tonal shift as the focus moves from the Hikari Club’s hierarchical order and internal conflicts to the relationship between Lychee and Marin. Marin (performed by synthpop musician Miharu Koshi) was the first girl the Hikari Club successfully kidnap through Lychee after implementing the phrase “I am a human” in Lychee’s coding so it can understand the concept of human beauty. This small implementation causes a full unraveling in Lychee’s personality as it quickly forms a close bond with Marin, convinced that it is also a human like Marin. The soundscape changes alongside the overarching atmosphere, going from cold industrial drones and percussive electronica to ambient tracks. Some of the major scenes play out over moving piano-focused pieces and music box tunes from Haruomi Hosono’s soundtrack for Night on the Galactic Railroad. Originally created a weapon like the iron phalluses and the girl capturing device, Lychee is eventually defined in how he transcends from being a weapon to a conscious being with feelings. In this context, the play can be read as a juxtaposition of human emotion against inhuman futurist brutality.

This split was likely the product of the radically different creative ideologies of Norimizu Ameya (the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s founder and lead director) and pseudonymous author K. Tagane (the playwright for the group from Mercuro to Litchi). Ameya had come into the group with radical intentions, holding Artaudesque aspirations to transgress the literary limits of modern theater to achieve something deeply subconscious. Meanwhile, Tagane was a romantic who was known for their poetic and lyrical screenplays. Ameya purportedly sought out Tagane’s screenplays specifically to find a literary base he would “destroy” in his direction, deconstructing the poeticisms in his own unique style. He describes it briefly in an interview regarding the stage directions of Mercuro, stating how he took elaborate descriptions of a lingering moon and ultimately deconstructed them to the moon solely being an illusion set by a screen projector, mapping out the exact dimensions of the projection to being a 3-meter photograph of the moon rather than a “fantastic moon”. It’s believed by some that the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s formation and ultimately short run were the product of a miraculous balance between Ameya and Tagane’s ideologies. It’s possible that Litchi could’ve been a last straw between the two artists. After Litchi, Tagane left the group, with Ameya having to write the troupe’s final screenplay on his own. LYCHEE: “Marin is always sleeping… all she does is sleep. She doesn’t eat anything. Why does Marin sleep all day?” MARIN: “When you’re asleep, all the sadness of the world passes over you.”

"The second half of Litchi was predominantly driven by the sounds of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Haruomi Hosono. During a scene that featured a piece from the Galactic Railroad soundtrack, Miharu Koshi sang to Kyusaku Shimada while dancing like a clockwork doll to the sounds of a twisting music box. The scene lasted for a while and was very romantic, the interactions between Lychee and Marin were all very sweet and cute. The second act of Litchi was all a product of Tagane’s making. By the time of the following play, Walpurgis, I was told by a staff member that Ameya had written the screenplay by himself because Tagane had left.” “… While the first half was filled with repeated mantras and the unfolding aesthetics of an aspiring militia, the second half was immersed in the world of shoujo manga. It did appear that through the intermission, much of the junk and rubble around the podium was sorted out.” “… The Tokyo Grand Guignol’s plays were always defined by a strong nocturnal atmosphere. But in Litchi’s second half, it wasn’t a dark night, but a brightly lit one under the moonlight and plentiful stars in the sky shining through an invisible skylight. Marin doesn’t forgive Lychee immediately for his actions, responding to him harshly in a way that would confuse him and make him sulk. It came across as a somewhat bitter reimagining of a French comedy like Louis Malle’s Zazie dans le Métro or Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, it was different that way in how it wasn’t only Maruo’s inferno.” - From a Twitter thread by user Shoru Toji regarding the 1986 rerun of Litchi Hikari Club Some questionable qualities do exist in the relationship between Lychee and Marin. What should be a peaceful retreat from the dystopian corruption still has a sinister undertone in the disparities between Lychee’s cold masculine features in contrast with Marin’s childlike girly innocence. It doesn’t help that Zazie dans le Métro (one of the mentioned films in the recollection) was directed by Louis Malle, who while known for such films as My Dinner With Andre and Black Moon was also responsible for the infamously discomforting Pretty Baby. Then again, Litchi was the product of a confrontational transgressive subculture, so the sinister undertones could be intentional. Keep in mind the contents of Suehiro Maruo’s prolific adaption of Shōjo Tsubaki and how it unflinchingly depicts abuse and manipulation through the eyes of a confused child. It could be possible that Lychee himself was intended to be childlike in its mannerisms. Throughout the existing descriptions, Lychee was shown as speaking in fragmented sentences while struggling to understand basic concepts. Zera was mentioned to also use certain phrases like “cute” when referring to the robot when it was unveiled. And it’s through Marin that Lychee learns morality like a child. The robot’s masculinity could be passed off as the cast all being adults. Hiroyuki Tsunekawa for instance shows distinctly sculpted features from certain angles when performing Zera.

In his aspirations to become a human, Lychee eventually “dies” like a human. With the burning of Zera’s lychee tree, the robot is left with a finite limit on its remaining energy before it totally loses consciousness. After his rampage, Lychee attempts to reunite with Marin, but he runs out of fuel. Before what should be a moment of resolution, things are cut short as the stage goes black, eventually illuminated to show an unpowered Lychee cradling Marin’s corpse in his arms. Zera reemerges to observe the remnants of Lychee and Marin. He speaks of how Lychee will crumble into nothingness alongside Marin for foolishly giving into human emotion, further implying the club’s views on humanity. After this, recollections of the play’s final lines differentiate somewhat. It was said that in the original Christmas performance, Zera calls out to Jaibo, posing the corpses of Lychee and Marin as being his seasonal gifts to Jaibo. Whereas in most popular recollections, it’s described that after his monologue, Zera shouts “Wohlan! Beginnen!” (German for “Now! Begin!”) before prompting the decorations across the stage to collapse, revealing a set of stepladders from behind that the remaining previously deceased club members stand, all drenched in blood with spotlights illuminating their faces from below. ZERA: “And with that, our tale of a foolish romance between woman and machine reaches its conclusion. It ends before me as I stand here, watching. Lychee, the machine, will rust away into dust. And Marin, a young girl, will rot away leaving behind only her bones, which too will crumble…”

Multiple readings can be deciphered from this conclusion. The most established theory is in relation to the Hikari Club’s aspirations for eternal youth, with the members technically achieving their goal through the stagnation of death. They will remain eternal children since they died as children, unable to ever grow into adulthood. In the context of futurism and mechanized fascism however, it could be read as a bitter observation of a lasting dictatorship. With how the Hikari Club members had rendered themselves less human than their own robot, they survive death to continue their work, seeking to one day eradicate humanity in favor of a race of sentient childlike weapons. “To admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and action. Do you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past, from which you will emerge exhausted, diminished, trampled on?” “… For the dying, for invalids and for prisoners it may be all right. It is, perhaps, some sort of balm for their wounds, the admirable past, at a moment when the future is denied them. But we will have none of it, we, the young, strong and living Futurists! Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come! Here they are! Heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries! Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums! Let the glorious canvases swim ashore! Take the picks and hammers! Undermine the foundation of venerable towns! The oldest among us are not yet thirty years old: we have therefore at least ten years to accomplish our task. When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts! They will come against us from afar, leaping on the light cadence of their first poems, clutching the air with their predatory fingers and sniffing at the gates of the academies the good scent of our decaying spirits, already promised to the catacombs of the libraries.” - from the 1909 Futurist Manifesto by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

I forgot what exactly first caused the parallel to cross my mind. I do recall it being reignited when having a closer look over the poster and flyer for Litchi’s Christmas performance in December 1985. The flyer in particular is really a wonderful thing to look at. Predominantly featuring an art spread by Suehiro Maruo, a suited man with Kyusaku Shimada’s likeness is shown caressing a girl in front of a modernist cityscape with spotlights shining up to a night sky. Other suited men in goggles fly in the air with Da Vinci-reminiscent flying apparatuses between the beams of the metropolis’ spotlights. A student in full gakuran uniform flings himself into the scene from the far left side of the image with a dagger in hand, and a larger hand comes from the viewer’s perspective holding a partially peeled lychee fruit. While not based on any direct scene from the play, it perfectly instills the play’s atmosphere with an air of antiquated modernity, like the numerous illustrations of the early 1900s that show aspirational visions of what a futuristic cityscape might resemble. The bizarre neo-Victorian fashions of the future and its post-modernist formalities. The term futurism came to mind somewhat naively from this train of thought. It was a movement I recalled hearing about, but my memory of it was hazy. It wasn’t until I went in for a basic refresher that I felt the figurative lightbulb go off in my head. That was when the pieces started to come together, but then also strain apart from each other into tangents. Granted, many of these parallels could be read as coincidental. Many of them can even be passed off the play being a work of proto-cyberpunk, knowing how Tetsuo: The Iron Man would subsequently explore similar themes of cybernetics and human sexuality. It should still be noted however that in contrast with many of the Japanese cyberpunk films, Litchi was explicit in its connotations between technological inhumanity and fascism, with the machinery itself being the iconography of a dictatorship rather than a product of it. In addition, with Tetsuo the film has strong gay overtones, with the technology being an extension of the sexual tensions between the salaryman and the metal fetishist. For a period of time, efforts were made to make futurism the official aesthetic of fascist Italy, and modern fascism as we know it is in the same family tree of Italian philosophy as futurism. The Hikari Club are explicit in drawing from German aesthetics rather than Italian however, speaking in intermittent German and predominantly using German technology. The spotlight that they used when torturing Toba in the first act, for example, was a Hustadt Leuchten branded spotlight. And if that isn’t a German name I don’t know what is. It was also said that Jaibo’s outfit in the play was modeled after German school uniforms. Though then again, the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s works were a bit of a cultural slurry. Jaibo’s name for example is Spanish (derived from Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados), while the character is implied to be German.

Similar to the cited origins of futurism, Ameya stated in a 2019 tweet regarding the June 9th, 1985 abridged Mercuro performance on Tokumitsu Kazuo’s TV Forum that in the following August of that year, an airplane accident occurred that led to the conception of Litchi’s screenplay. The exact nature of the accident was never specified, but the affiliates he was communicating with all appeared to be familiar with it and expressed concern when it was brought up. This was however one of an assortment of influences that were cited behind Litchi’s production, with the two more established theories regarding the then-contemporary mystique around lychee fruit in Chinese cuisine along with the play being a loose adaption of Kazuo Umezu’s My Name is Shingo. For what it’s worth, the themes of Litchi, along with the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s other works, were closely tied with certain concepts that Ameya personally cultivated throughout his career. A frequent recurring topic Ameya would bring up in relation to his works was the nature of the human body in relation to foreign matter, need it be biological or unnatural. With Mercuro the students taught by Shimada are made into so-called Mercuroids by having their blood supplies replaced with mercurochrome, a substance that is referred to as the “antithesis of blood” by Shimada while in character. In an interview for the book About Artaud?, Ameya cites an interest in Osamu Tezuka’s manga in how certain stories of Tezuka’s paralleled Ameya’s observations of the body. He directly names Dororo and Black Jack, observing how both Hyakkimaru and Black Jack reconstructed their bodies from pieces of other people, going on to bluntly describe Pinoko as a “mass of organs covered in plastic skin”.

A section from June Vol. 27 highlighting some of the more established performers from Litchi's 1985 Christmas performance. The actors from left to right are Norimizu Ameya as Jaibo, Naomi Hagio as the female school teacher (best known in cult circles for her role as Kazuyo in the 1986 horror film Entrails of a Virgin), Suehiro Maruo out of costume and Miharu Koshi as Marin. During his temporary retirement from theater, Ameya would take up performance art, with some of his performances revolving around acts with his own blood. While my memories of these works are a bit hazy, I remember one action he performed that involved a blood transfusion, with the focus being on the experience of having another person’s blood coursing through your veins. While I didn't have much luck relocating this piece (probably from it not being covered in English), I did find on the Japan Foundation’s page for performing arts an interview where Ameya discusses being in a band with Shimada where Ameya had blood drawn from his body while he played drums. He would also describe an art exhibition where he displayed samples of the blood of a person infected with HIV. “After 1990 he left the field of theatre and began to engage himself with visual arts - still proceeding to work on his major topic - the human body - taking up themes like blood transfusion, artificial fertilization, infectious diseases, selective breeding, chemical food, and sex discrimination, creating works as a member of the collaboration unit Technocrat.” - Performing Arts Network Japan (The Japan Foundation) There are still an assortment of open questions I’m left with in regards to the contents of the original Litchi play. One of the most glaring ones is Niko’s eye. In consideration of Ameya’s interest in the body, the detail would fit perfectly with his ideologies. A club member who, to show his absolute loyalty to the Hikari Club, has his own eyeball procedurally gouged out to be made a part of the Lychee robot. Despite this perfect alignment, none of the contemporary recollections mention this element. While Niko does have an eyepatch in certain production photos, it never seems to come up as a plot point. He isn’t the only one to bear an eyepatch either, with Jacob also being shown with an eyepatch in flyers. More questions range from Jaibo’s motives in causing the dissolution of the Hikari Club to the true nature of Zera’s affiliation to Jaibo. While Tsunekawa has stood his ground in the relationship between Zera and Jaibo being totally sexless, in the cited volume of June the editor playfully refers to Jaibo as being Zera’s “best friend” in quotes.

A side-by-side comparison of the cast listings on the back of the flyers for the December 1985 performance of Litchi Hikari Club alongside its 1986 rerun. The 1985 run's lineup is at the top while the 1986 run is at the bottom. Much speculation is naturally involved when looking into the original Litchi Hikari Club since it is in essence a cultural phantom. There’s a reason I used the term genealogy in relation to my research of the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s works. It is an artistic enigma as while its presence lingers in subculture, the original works are now practically unattainable due to the inherent nature of theater. As Ameya himself would acknowledge in another interview, theater is an immediate medium that can only be perceived in its truest form for a very short span of time before eventually disintegrating. So with the Tokyo Grand Guignol’s plays, you are left to scour through the scattered remnants and contemporary recollections alongside the figurative creative descendants of the plays. You analyze the statements of both the original participants and the people they openly dismiss, as even those people were original audience members before reinterpreting the plays to their own unique visions. Despite the apparent differences, I still feel that Furuya’s manga gives a unique perspective to the story when viewed under dissection. That is if you want to see it in strict relation to the play. Outside that, I feel it firmly stands on its own merits. I like the manga no matter what Tsunekawa says, that’s what I’m trying to say. Ameya approved it anyway. It took me a full day to write all this out, and like the first time I went down this train of thought, I’m pooped. During that first excursion, after excitedly spiraling through these potential connections, I noticed in passing mention something about Marinetti’s cooking. You see, later in his life Marinetti aimed to apply futurism not just to art and theater, but cuisine also. As an Italian, Marinetti openly despised pasta, seeing it as being an edible slog that weighs down the spirits of the Italian people. Just further evidence that I would never get along with the man, no matter my liking of the Boccioni sculpture I saw at MOMA all those years ago. Well, outside of him being a fascist and all obviously. I like pasta. Either way, he was on a mission to conceive all-new all-Italian cuisines that would match the vision he had of a new fascist Italy. Nothing could prepare me though for when I saw an image of what would best be described as a towering cock and ball torture meat totem. It is exactly as it sounds, a big phallic tower of cooked meat with a set of gigantic dough-covered balls of chicken flesh on the front and back where you have to stick needles through the thing to hold it together. Words cannot express just how big it is. The thing was damn well near falling apart from how unnatural its shape was, and you’re expected to eat it while it has honey pouring from the tip of the tower. I genuinely winced watching its assembly, I instinctively crossed my legs somewhat when it was pierced by wooden sticks and then cut into sections to reveal the plant-stuffed interiors. As a person with no interest whatsoever in cooking shows, I was on the edge of my seat watching a PBS-funded webisode of someone preparing futurist dishes. Seek it out for yourself, it’s an excessively batshit culinary freakshow. That is more than enough talk about penises for the rest of the week. I’m going to spend the next few days looking at artistic yet selectively vaginal flowers to balance things out, equal opportunity symbology.

#litchi hikari club #lychee light club #norimizu ameya #suehiro maruo #tokyo grand guignol

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enqmind · 7 months

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Fic!

This is what happens when you've recently read baby trapping fics and then have a conversation about what foods you can't eat around taking certain medications.

Soap/Female Reader WC: 1.4k 18+ content.

Warnings: Baby trapping, manipulation, tampering with contraceptives, tampering with food, technically poisoning, misuse of a dietary supplement. Noncon, despite containing no actual sex (because baby trapping).

Reader notes: Implied to dislike marmite, probably isn't Scottish, dislikes masks (not a covid denier. they just make her uncomfortable).

Gothmet

Johnny has been cooking a lot lately.

“Trying to take after your compatriot?”

He’d laughed at that.

“I think you’ll find I don’t hit my Boiling Point quite so fast, love.”

You suspected he’d last five minutes in food service, since you’re not actually allowed to explode the sous chef.

But as a home cook? Oh, he was passable.

His latest creation was squid ink ravioli filled with an avant garde bacon and nigella seed concoction.

It was interesting, but good was a different question.

“Do you like it?” He asked, puppy dog enthusiasm radiating off of him in waves.

“… I don’t know,” you confessed. “It’s certainly interesting, but I’m not sure one way or the other.”

You half expected his face to fall, but instead he looked thoughtful as he took a considered bite.

“Aye, I see what you mean. This’ll take some workshopping. You willing to be my taste tester?”

You grinned at him over your wine.

“It would be my pleasure.”

“And that is my top priority, after all.”

He didn’t seem discouraged by the half hearted kick under the table, especially if his enthusiasm for ‘dessert’ was considered.

His new culinary interest expanded to baking.

The next day he presented you with a zebra cake with the highest contrast you’d ever seen. The chocolate stripes were almost jet black.

“I got some o’ that ultra Dutch processed cocoa to try making my own oreos. Ordered one of them special biscuit cutters too, but it hasn’t arrived yet. So I decided to make a very accurate zebra cake.”

“You ordered one for bourbons too, right?”

“What do you take me for, hen? Some kind of godless heathen?”

You raised your hands placatingly.

“Just making sure, Johnno. Gotta check to see if you’ve been replaced by a sexy doppelganger every now and then.”

He squinted at you.

“Yeah, well. You’ll get your bourbons. With bourbon cream, mind.”

“Always trying to ply me with something, aren’t you?”

He looked scandalised when you laughed.

Within the week he had those biscuits ready for you. True to his word the bourbons had bourbon cream and the orefauxs (as he called them) had Baileys cream. Both were as black as the devil’s bottom.

“I might need a new wardrobe soon if you keep this up,” you joked between mouthfuls.

“Ah, I’ll just help you work it off. Or just buy you a new one.”

The look you gave him might not have been as withering as you’d hoped, but he seemed to get the message.

“I’ll try to bake you something healthier next time.”

Something healthier meant a coal black loaf of bread.

“It’s a black bread,” he said cheerily, “it’s got rye in it. Thought might as well go the whole hog and added some activated charcoal to make it as black as you like your coffee.”

It was with a heavy sigh that you turned your eyes to him.

“I can’t eat this.”

His face did fall this time.

“Oh. You allergic to rye? Or are you afraid I’ve slipped some marmite in?”

“My marmite take is neither here nor there. The problem is that I’m on the pill and activated charcoal can make it not work.”

“Oh, shit.”

He looked so crestfallen that you felt even worse.

“Sorry.”

“No, no. It’s my fault. Shoulda considered that.”

You tore off a chunk and slathered it with butter, just to see him light up a little.

“Well, I guess half a loaf over a couple days can’t hurt too much.”

His grin was blinding.

“Ah, but what am I gonna do with all this spare activated charcoal? I cannae eat it all meself.”

You gave him a grin of your own.

“Could live up to your callsign and use it to make soap. Good for the skin and all that.”

“Ah,” he said sagely. “So that’s why they kept showing me that melt and pour stuff. I was starting to think I’d have to assassinate Bezos for knowing too much. How’d he even find out?”

You chuckle as you eat your chunk of bread.

“It’s really good,” you mumbled, delight rendering you mannerless.

Johnny puffed up with pride.

“I’ll try a different colourant next time. Still got that squid ink, after all.”

“How is recipe development, by the way?”

“Can’t complain. I’ll have another plate for you in a couple o’ days.”

“I look forward to it!”

In the meantime you were working your way through the biscuits, cake and that half a loaf.

The second round of ravioli was divine. Exactly what was different was a question, but if Johnny was going to continue to be a magician in the kitchen then he was allowed a few secrets.

He joked that this was the way to your heart, and he wasn’t far wrong. There was something about a handsome and rugged man cooking for you that was so very seductive. So less ‘way to your heart’ and ‘way into your knickers’.

His culinary adventures continued with a squid ink version of the bread (still delicious, barely tasted different) and so much chocolatey goodness.

Despite previously thinking such things impossible, you liked chocolate as much as the next woman, it was getting more than a bit much.

“Don’t worry. I’ll take a break on the old chocolate,” he reassured you over some jjajangmyeon. “I’ve got a few more ideas up my sleeve.”

He bought you a pie.

It was rectangular, but certainly a pie.

“I thought you said you made buns?”

“I did hen, a bun at least. This is a black bun, it’s traditional around Hogmanay.”

When he cut it open you could see why it was called that.

The filling was dark as a moonless night and chock full of dried fruit.

Granted, you were a bit leery, but you gave it a shot and were pleasantly surprised.

“This is good. Remind me to come ‘round yours for New Year’s.”

“It’ll be an invitation, not a reminder, lass.”

You grinned, even with currents stuck in your teeth.

The next thing he bought you was fudge.

You were more dubious about this one than the pie.

“Why is it black?”

“It’s liquorice flavoured. Me mam asked me to make some, thought I’d let you try it too.”

Maybe you could deal with the dried fruit, but the liquorice was a bit much. All sorts were one thing, but this flavour and this texture? It was weird and gritty and didn’t go. No thank you.

“Well, you win some you lose some,” he grinned, “they can’t all be winners.”

The liquorice might not have been, but the black sesame seed mochi certainly was.

“It’s good in a porridge too, they use rice starch to thicken it.”

You raised an eyebrow at him.

“Porridge without oats? Do your countrymen know you’re speaking such blasphemy?”

“Aye, aye. Fair point. You keep this schtumm and I'll work on some fusion cuisine so they don’t burn me in Parliament square.”

It took a few days, but the proper black sesame seed porridge was welcome. You’d been feeling a little under the weather lately.

“So what do we call this? Scorean? Kortish?”

“Please stop.”

“You’re no fun.”

Johnny pouted.

“Oh right. Before I forget; what happened to that soap making? Or am I just not getting any?” It was your turn to pout.

“Ah, I decided to go cold process. So it’ll be ready when I get back from deployment.”

You nodded.

“Do you want me to bring some down when I come pick you up so we can throw it at Simon? ‘Cause he’s gonna need it with that fucking mask he’s always wearing.”

Johnny’s eyebrow’s rose.

“I still don’t get why you hate it so much.”

“I swear he’s making faces at me under that thing.”

“Really?” He asked dubiously.

“I just don’t like it. He gives me a weird vibe.”

Johnny looked affronted.

“Hey-“

“Because of the mask. Hated it during the pandemic, too. I’d last three minutes in Japan in the winter.”

“I’ll take you in the summer then,” he smiled softly, placated.

You rolled your eyes affectionately.

“I’ll hold you to that.”

As ever, it was with a heavy heart that you saw him off the next day.

He did leave you with some treats to tide you over. Another black bun, some biscuits (chocolate was back on the menu) and a box of lovely dark parkin. Altogether, it should last most of the time he was away.

It didn’t.

You stress ate most of it when you found out you were pregnant.

#tw: dark fic #tw: baby trapping #tw: food tampering #cod fic #call of duty x reader #john soap mactavish #soap x reader #dead dove do not eat

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tacendasrevenge · 10 months

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Hey Tumblr fam! 🌸 here with a little journey through the intriguing history of hentai. 📚 Let’s explore the roots in Edo-period shunga art, evolving into the avant-garde ‘ero-guro’ of the 20th century. Fast forward to the gaming boom in the 80s and 90s, giving birth to the iconic ‘eroge’ and ‘hentai anime.’

Shunga, originating during the Edo period, was a fascinating blend of art and sexual expression, often created for the upper class. It served not only as a form of entertainment but also as a medium for sexual education. The later emergence of ‘ero-guro’ challenged societal norms with its explicit depictions of sex, violence, and horror. These underground manga pieces were a rebellion against conventional storytelling, pushing the boundaries of artistic expression in unique ways.

In the digital age, the 80s and 90s witnessed a seismic shift in Japan’s cultural landscape. The rising popularity of video games and anime led to the creation of adult-oriented content, known as ‘eroge.’ As gaming evolved, so did the hentai genre, expanding into ‘hentai anime.’ This convergence paved the way for a diverse range of narratives, exploring not only explicit content but also complex themes and emotions. It’s fascinating to see how this evolution mirrors the broader progression of Japanese media. 🌟

diving deeper into the modern era, the internet has played a pivotal role in the global dissemination of hentai. With online platforms and fan communities, individuals worldwide can access and share this genre. This digital age has democratized the creation and consumption of hentai, fostering a diverse array of artistic expressions and perspectives.

It’s essential to recognize that hentai isn’t a monolithic entity; it spans a spectrum of genres and themes, from the fantastical to the thought-provoking. Some argue it’s a space where taboos are explored, while others see it as an extension of artistic freedom. Navigating these nuanced discussions allows us to appreciate the cultural impact of hentai beyond its explicit nature, acknowledging its role in shaping the broader landscape of anime and manga.

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harrysmmm · 1 year

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𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟏 - 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐇𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐒𝐥𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧

Fanfiction: The Relics of Hogwarts (CLICK THE LINK BEFORE READING THIS)

Draco malfoy x Y/N Riddle (f!reader)

A/N: First chapter of the fanfic! It took me a whole week to write this, and a whole week to create the plot of the story. This chapter sets the tone for what is to come - more draco and the reader's interactions will happen in the following chapters. I am beyond excited to be posting this, I hope you guys enjoy it - I really had the best time writing it (it helps me deal with reality which I very much thank). Also, two things before you go and read it: one, my mother tongue is not English, once again, so forgive me for any mistake or wrong word that I might've used; two, every paragraph or conversation that is written in italic is a flashback (I think it was clear but just to be hella clear). That's everything for me to say... also you don't know the amount of research I've had to do in order to be precise on every description, family line, Hogwarts system... it's crazy the number of tabs I've opened during the creation of all of it. Last thing, I have never done this before but if you'd like to be on the taglist for each time I post a new chapter, put it in the comments or write me an inbox and I'll gladly do it! I'm going to try to do my best and post a chapter every week - two would be ideal. I tend to write pretty long chapters so it takes me a lot of time to finish them. I'm going to stop writing, this is becoming addictive. Love you, this fic is for all of you out there.

W/C: 4.3K

masterlist here

Summer was about to come to an end. It was pouring rain in the Scottish mountain range; a wild, twisted, ravaging storm that left a lifeless valley at its steps. Someone was rushing through the vast hallways, crackling footsteps as he was approaching the stone gargoyle. He whispered in a low, hoarse voice: “Cockroach clusters”. A stoned spiraled staircase revealed itself behind the statue, he marched them upstairs.

At the top, a wooden door was slightly opened revealing at its gap a dim light and an overwhelming heat. Under this particular weather, there was a need of a fireplace.

The professor stepped in the headmaster’s office.

“Severus,” Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of the Wizarding School, Hogwarts, greeted the man, “what can I do for you in this, rather hectic evening?”

“I –” he stopped, having been interrupted by a loud thunder, “have some news from You Know Who.”

Dumbledore froze for a moment. “Ah!” he uttered, heading towards his centered desk, and sitting down. “Tell me what you know.”

“You Know Who’s daughter is supposedly coming to Hogwarts this year.”

“How is that possible?” Dumbledore seemed confused.

“He has gotten back in contact with her, after seventeen years,” Snape said in a monotone voice of his range. “I have been told to keep an eye on her.”

The storm was heavily attacking the gleaming windows.

“This is no coincidence - I suppose you know that, Severus.”

“I… assumed.”

“Voldemort has something in mind – something that involves the school – or Potter.”

“The child has always been in his sight, why would it be that now he is looking to get to him by sending his abandoned daughter off to school while she has a cursed bloodline herself, it seems a little…odd… from my perspective, Professor.”

“You’re right, Severus - but we need to be en garde.” Dumbledore was looking all around his desk seeming to try to dismantle this new information. “Does the girl know why she’s coming?”

“It seems like she does.”

“U-huh,” he replied. “Well, the link between Draco’s commended mission to kill me and the arrival of Voldemort’s daughter is evident; he’s trying to gain some presence within the school.”

“And,” he continued, “the girl and Draco have known each other merely from birth, they’ve grown up together as siblings, haven’t they, Severus?”

“I wouldn’t use the word siblings, Professor – as far as I know, they roughly consider each other cousins.”

“Right, right, cousins…”

“Professor,” uttered Snape.

“Huh?”

“What should I do?”

“Well,” Dumbledore got up and walked towards the animal that was gripping a stand cage. It was an elegant phoenix; he had crimson feathers covering his entire body and a long golden tail resembling that of a peacock. His name was Fawkes. Dumbledore caressed the animal as he continued, “you have no choice – she will have to attend this year at Hogwarts. In fact, she will directly be put into Slytherin, that way your task will be eased.”

“If I may, I don’t think she would’ve been sorted into any other house, giving her lineage, Professor.”

“Right, descendant of Salazar Slytherin, right…” Dumbledore didn’t seem to be there, his thoughts spiraling up, trying to find the connecting factor.

“I see you… pensive” said Snape in return.

Dumbledore moved from the bird to the East of the room and stood next to the recollection of memories bottled up in glass jars.

“We both know, Severus, that Voldemort doesn’t hold any sort of affection towards his daughter; he’s incapable of it.” He frenetically moved to the West of the room. “That girl has been raised by Druella Black, mother of the living Bellatrix Lestrange and Narcissa Malfoy. The girl has never had any contact with her father, nor her mother for that matter.”

“If I may ask… what happened to the mother?”

“Well, no one knows what happened to her; no one even knows who she is. Voldemort hasn’t had any known-of partner in his life.”

“Right,” replied Snape. “Although the girl has, so it seems, a tight relation with the Diggory family.”

“The Diggorys… Cedric Diggory? The boy that Voldemort killed during the Triwizard Tournament?” inquired Dumbledore.

“Indeed. She’s presumably close to his father, Amos Diggory, who works in the Ministry of Magic.” completed Snape.

“How?”

“I don’t know, but she will come to the school as his niece, omitting her last name Riddle.”

“A façade.” Dumbledore had a lost look.

“Yes.”

“There’s a lot of things that we can’t grasp, Severus. You will keep an eye on her, I will deal with the rest.”

“As you wish.”

Snape turned around, swinging his cape as he moved to the door.

“Severus,” Dumbledore called him, before he could walk away, “Hogwarts is, once again, being threatened. This time, it might be the last time”. He looked at his hand, a black dark magic had scattered through most of it.

Snape understood his words but didn’t reply.

A black figure made his way down the enchanted staircase.

ྀ࿔

The hallways were full of students. Bustling chatter about summertime and vacations was spreading around the walls of the entrance hall. First years were arriving in canoes through the Great Lake that surrounded Hogwarts while upper years were progressively making an entrance, after getting off the Hogwarts Express.

She noticed the attunes of most students. Black robes seemed to be the official uniform, with varying colors on the hood, sleeves and the edge of the front depending on the student who was wearing it. At the front of it, there was a patch in accordance with the colors of the robe – she assumed it was the house patch of the student. She particularly laid her eyes on the green one, the one who seemed to have a snake in the middle. She knew that Father had attended the school – and even if she was mostly ignorant about the school system and supposed houses, she knew her father had been a green-robed student.

Snape started to climb up the Grand Stairs, she followed him. Various students and professors were hectically going up and down the stairs, making her have to pay attention to not brush shoulders with any of them. Snape was not looking back at her, swinging from side to side as if he knew seconds ahead who was going to go up or down.

Her mind wondered back to the reason why she was there; to the mission Father had commended her to do. She had heard about Wizarding Schools, Hogwarts in particular, since nearly her birth. However, Druella never wanted her to get mingled with academic wizards and witches, fearing for her life as a Riddle. That last name did not follow any welcoming reception in the Wizarding World. But after Father’s come back, things have changed all around.

She couldn’t help but travel back to the moment it all started.

“F-father?” she called him, pitch black consuming the entire room of the Malfoy Manor.

She could hear him moving. Hollow wooden floorboards slowly crackling at his steps. She could also hear his snake hissing - that’s how she knew he was standing in front of her.

“Child,” he finally said with a whispery, throaty voice, “I missed you.”

She felt two arms making their way to her ribs while slowly tangling behind her on what seemed to be a hug. She didn’t move, shivering of horror.

“My daughter.” She felt the air of his voice in her ear, making her swift breathing be noticed.

She understood that he knew she was afraid.

His arms were no longer wrapping her, and she felt how he was circling her by the crackling wood yet again.

“How have the Blacks been treating you?”

She gasped.

“Fair enough…Father.”

He seemed to have moved to the other side of the room.

“And the Malfoys? The young boy, Draco, is he nice to you?”

She tried to relax her breathing.

“He is - they all have always treated me as one of their own.”

“But you’re not one of them, are you?”. He moved closer to her again, as she felt his snake sliding next to her foot.

“I-I guess I’m not.” She could’ve sworn she saw a monster in front of her. She closed her eyes tightly.

“Your stay with them might’ve been enjoyable, but I’m afraid you must leave.”

Something in her stopped when she heard those words.

“Where?” she inquired.

“To the Diggorys.”

“I don’t know who they are.”

He was standing in front of her. She could sense it.

“They are nice people that will take you under their roof – now, I need you to befriend them, become one of them. You will need to take on their last name.”

She didn’t say a word and let him continue.

“I need some things that lay within the walls of Hogwarts; some things that someone wants to steal.”

“Harry Potter,” she whispered, not being able to contain herself.

“Do not mention his name!” he raised his voice, and she could feel his face almost touching hers.

She nearly started sobbing.

“You don’t get to say his name in front of me, do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” He leaned back some inches from her. “Some objects that are in the castle belong to me. I hid them so they would be safe - but it has come to my attention that they might be in danger.”

She kept listening.

“When the time comes, I will need you to go to Hogwarts as a Diggory and bring those objects back to me. You will be fully awarded for the act,” he paused, “and gain your place by my side.”

She heavily breathed when she heard that. After all those years, her father was offering her a chance to make him proud, to honor her last name, to have a family.

“What are these objects?”

“You’ll must bring me the cup of Helga Hufflepuff, the diadem of Rowena Ravenclaw, the locket of Salazar Slytherin and the sword of Godric Gryffindor. All of them make the Relics of Hogwarts.”

“Now,” he continued, “you will leave to the Diggorys tomorrow morning. I will be back to tell you when you will attend Hogwarts.” He paused. “I’m afraid I must leave you now, dear girl.”

“Father?” She needed to ask.

“Yes?”

“Who is my mother?” she asked away. She figured that now that he needed her, he couldn’t hurt her for asking.

The seconds that lasted the silence lingered in her like a death sentence.

“Your mother ran away as she had the chance. I would be tarnishing your name by speaking of her.”

She knew that wasn’t the truth; she sensed it in his voice.

“Did you love her?”

He breathed heavily; he was getting tired of this conversation. He swiftly approached her once again.

“Love does not exist. Don’t let them bewitch your mind.”

And just like that, he vanished through dark smoke.

ྀ࿔

“Hogwarts. What a pathetic excuse for a school,” Draco snapped. “I’d pitch myself off the Astronomy Tower if I had to continue for another two years.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Pansy Parkinson, close friend of Draco, replied.

“Let’s just say, I don’t think you’ll see me wasting my time in Charms class next year.”

Draco, Pansy and Blaise were sitting down in a wagon of the Hogwarts Express. Draco knew it was his last time returning to Hogwarts. He also knew his biggest stress this year was not going to be about returning good grades home or beating Potter in the Quidditch finals. The Dark Lord had commended him a very important mission, and now that his father was facing sentence in Azkaban, he had to bear with the responsibility of the family’s loyalty towards the Dark plan.

Blaise blurted out a small chuckle to Draco’s words.

“Amused, Blaise?” the blonde boy replied. “We’ll see just who’s laughing in the end.”

Draco heard a noise coming from the rack above their seats and saw his bag having slightly been moved. Someone was eavesdropping on the conversation through an invisibility spell, and he bet on bloody Potter. He didn’t talk much after knowing the conversation was not confidential. In what twisted pathetic adventure was Potter trying to be the hero on this time? His blood was boiling by just having to pretend not knowing he was there. That tosser that everyone always praised – he wouldn’t last two days in his position. After all, life was not about heroic acts, corny speeches, and lucky fate – some people had been given a family name to respect, an expectation to be met. He thought, once again, about the mission that had been commended to him by the Dark Lord; how his wand would have to end the life of the greatest wizard alive; how he would go onto History as the man who assassinated Albus Dumbledore. He realized his hands were sweaty and his heartbeat higher than normal. He tried to keep his composure in front of everyone in the wagon and fixed his gaze on the rich green Scottish fields – clouds welcoming him to a thunderstorm.

ྀ࿔

“Ah! Y/N Diggory! Come in, come in…” Dumbledore greeted the girl in his office.

“Thank you,” she replied, following Snape. She didn’t take too much time to have a look at the curious, but glamorous place.

“Do you fancy my office? I must admit I am really fond of collecting peculiar objects,” he approached a table where all sorts of outlandish things were scattered. She noticed the blackness of his hand when he grabbed one of the objects, “I don’t always know what they do but I find them really unique as room decoration, don’t you think?”

“I’m sure being the headmaster has its advantages when it comes to decorating.”

“Oh, being the headmaster has plenty of advantages, Miss. Diggory,” he replied in a whispery tone.

“Now, you, as a new Hogwarts student, have also a lot of advantages;” he continued, “First of all, you are skipping from year one to year six, so you won’t have to bear first years’ Potions on how to make a cure for boils or first year’s Defense Against the Dark Arts on how to cast an Expelliermus.”

You simply nodded.

“Then, Professor Snape has told me that you’ve already passed through the Sorting Hat and you have been assigned to Slytherin, is that correct, Severus?”

“It is.”

It was not correct. She hadn’t gone through any house assignation, but she understood that Dumbledore didn’t know about it, and that Snape had probably settled her in Slytherin for a reason – therefore, she didn’t question it.

“Wonderful. An ambitious, clever girl, I see”.

She smirked at him. She bet he was not by any means a Slytherin himself.

“Lastly, I assume you have all this year’s textbooks, ingredients, plants, constellation maps, perhaps? Oh! I assume you have a pet by now! And a wand…”

She looked at Snape, knowing that she hadn’t bought any of those things herself. Except for the wand that she got at Ollivanders when she was eleven, after Druella had told her she would get a private tutor to teach her magic.

“She has,” Snape simply replied, without giving her any look back.

“Then everything seems to be settled. How are you feeling, Miss. Diggory?” Dumbledore deeply stared at her. This time, she felt like he really wanted to know the answer.

“Really honored to join the school, Sir.”

“My door is always open for any visits. Never underestimate the magic of being listened, Miss. Diggory.”

She nodded and followed Snape downstairs, thinking she was probably never going to step into that office again.

Snape and Y/N arrived at the dungeons of the school, where the Slytherin dormitories could be found. Snape turned around to talk to Y/N.

“All of your things are in your dorm, number 3, all the schedule and times are also in your dorm, the password to the common room is pure-blood… don’t want you sneaking after ten p.m. or you could get… into trouble.” His intimidating black eyes were on hers. He turned around with a swing of his cape.

“Oh,” He turned towards her again, “supper starts at six.”

She was alone in the castle for the first time. She uttered the password on a low voice and a bare stretch of stone wall opened, leading her to a corridor. Once she walked through it, only lightened by torches hang up on the stone walls, she arrived at the common room. It was a high ceiling, ample room; dark green shades flickering from the multiple windows. Low backed black and dark green button-tufted, leather sofas were placed all around the room; skulls on top of tables; and dark wood cupboards. Tapestries of numerous medieval figures decorated the walls. Y/N noticed the highlighted portrait of an old man that she recognized to be Salazar Slytherin, founder of the Slytherin house and one of the four founders of Hogwarts. She knew this because she was a distant relative of his, through her father of course. She noticed she was alone and headed directly to her dorm.

Her dorm was a five-bed room with one bathroom. She recognized her bag next to one of the beds. On the side table, she found a pile of textbooks; she started leafing through some of the books: Advanced Potion-Making, A Guide To Advanced Transfiguration, Flesh-Eating Trees Of The World… Her eyes wondered to the parchment at the right where her schedule and attending courses were shown. She started to read through the different school norms and times when she felt something brushing her leg. She startled at the contact when she saw a small black kitten going under her bed. She kneeled and grabbed it, putting it on the bed. The kitten had big emerald eyes that were looking into hers, as if it had some sort of human spirit inside.

“You must be my pet, huh?” She grabbed it again and looked to confirm the sex. “A Miss… Should give you a name, shouldn’t I?” She laid down on her bed caressing the kitten on her chest, thinking of a name for her. She realized that it was the first time she let herself sink down and relax since her arrival. A lot of thoughts were constantly crossing her mind telling her to focus on everything, to plan everything, to think about everything – it was exhausting. Exhausting… she came up with something.

“Your name is Exhonia. What do you think?” she asked the kitten as if she was going to reply. The kitten was scratching her jumper.

“Okay Exhonia, don’t get too ahead on yourself.” She grabbed the rather turbulent cat and placed it next to her on the bed.

The only time she had ever dealt with a cat was a the Diggory’s house, near Ottery St Catchpole. Cedric’s pet had been a brown and white cat, a rather upset one she might add, especially when Cedric was not around anymore. She had gone to the Diggory’s a month after the boy’s death when Father had asked her to.

“What can I do for you, dear?” a middle-aged man, short and plump opened the door of the cottage.

“My name is Y/N, Sir – is this the Diggory’s house?”

“Yes, yes… what is it that you want?” he wouldn’t entirely open the front door, as if he didn’t trust the world outside.

“I came to talk to you. I was really close to Cedric.”

The man seemed to freeze.

“And I was hoping to come and meet you since you would’ve been my father-in-law”.

And that is how she managed to spend a year living under the roof of the Diggorys. Amos Diggory fully believed her when she told him the story of how she was supposed to marry Cedric once he would end the Triwizard Tournament; how they had wanted to wait until the end of it to tell his parents. She told him, through a little bit of sobbing, how her parents had dropped dead on a car accident, being herself a muggle-born, and that the only family she had left was the Diggorys – even if she had never met them before. Amos and his wife found in her a beam of light; the spirit of Cedric in a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl. They never questioned the story, nor her intentions and adopted her as a Diggory that had always belonged in the family. It was not until one year later that Y/N shared with them her dream of attending Hogwarts, as Father had contacted her back and told her it was time she fulfilled her mission. They accepted with little objection, happy that they could spoil a girl as they once did to Cedric. Y/N, as a sign of gratitude, asked them if she could inherit their last name, to which they happily agreed. She became Y/N Diggory, niece of Mr. and Mrs. Diggory, as she told them it would be more appropriate taking into consideration that no one knew about her planned marriage with Cedric. Even if Y/N didn’t really want to get mingled in the Diggorys life, she knew they were living in delusion, desperately looking to fill the void of their son’s death – which Y/N, in a way, managed to do. They were in need of a miracle, she offered them the fairiest of fairy tales… who cared if it was all a script of lies at the end of the day?

Her thoughts came back to the present moment when she heard a bell chiming the hour. Six, so she counted. She decided to go down for supper, still curious that no students had yet come to the common room.

She walked up the stairs and dived through the hallways, meeting no one on the way. When she started to hear some familiar voice she recognized as to Dumbledore’s, she followed it, understanding she was somehow late to some sort of first day speech. But in the middle of her wanderings, an old-wrinkled man with a cat yelled at her.

“And what do you think you’re doing lurking in the hallways?” He firmly grabbed her by the arm.

“I was looking for the Great H- let go of me!” she replied, trying to get rid of his grip.

“The headmaster will hear about your wanderings, young lady!” He dragged her towards the doors of the Great Hall. Both doors slammed open when he pushed them with his bare hand. Dumbledore’s speech was immediately interrupted. Hundreds of eyes turned towards the old man’ and Y/N’s direction.

“Headmaster, sorry to provoke such an entrance but I found this girl wandering around the castle, missing the opening ceremony” he gave her away to everyone in the room. He pushed her forward so everyone could see who he was screaming about.

She stood at the beginning of the corridor between the students’ tables. She looked ahead, Dumbledore standing up in a podium, several professors sitting down behind him and, of course, a few inches away from her, long tables filled with students of different ages, different houses, staring at her like she was the most bizarre specimen. She decided to say something.

“Sir, I-“

“There’s no need, Miss. Diggory,” after her last name had been dropped, all students started to look at each other, mumbles starting to form, “you can join your table with the other Slytherin students.”

She didn’t reply, hearing how the room had become a cloud of voices at this point.

“Thank you Argus for the help. But, Miss. Diggory was just lost, being this her first day at Hogwarts.” The voices intensified. “Now, while it is always very joyful to welcome new students, I must ask you to stop the chatter.” Students seemed to listen to him, and seconds later there was little to no sound.

Y/N sat down on the first free seat at the Slytherin table, still feeling like half of the students’ gazes were settled on her. Once Dumbledore had proceeded with his speech, she discretely took a look on the people that surrounded her. Four large tables divided the Great Hall, one for each house. Her gaze wondered through the Gryffindor table, looking for a certain scared-boy. She of course knew about the prophecy, as well as she knew the history between him and her father. She had thought about eventually meeting Harry Potter but never really figured how she would react to his presence. Should she hate him, pity him, fear him? The boy was her age – which didn’t leave a lot of room for fear. But she was still curious to see how they would react to one another, even if the boy was unaware of who her father was, as well as everyone. She guessed she would eventually meet the chosen one during class.

Her eyes turned back to Dumbledore, who was finishing talking, when someone pulled their arm towards her.

“They are calling you from there,” a dark-haired boy told her, while pointing to the other side of the long table.

She switched her focus to look for the person who was calling her. A blonde boy tilted his head down to meet her gaze. He playfully tilted his eyebrows while a smirk made its way to his face. She smiled at him while slowly shaking her head. It was no other than the heir of the Malfoys himself. He stared deep into her eyes a little longer, then shifted his gaze back to some Professor that had started talking. She looked at him a little longer, letting herself feel for no more than five seconds the accelerated heartbeat that she was still unfamiliar with. She eventually switched her gaze back to the Professor too. The Slytherin heir was back at Hogwarts, and this time, she had the Prince of Slytherin by her side.

part two

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