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thepringlesofblood · 2 years

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heroforge hoes: pt 1(?)

i keep making guys in heroforge. i don’t know why. is this what ocd is???? i can’t stop????

anyway. i want to share these so that I can stop working on them. so that I can go “there. it is done. it has been put out into the world, and it is complete. stop adjusting tiny little things and do your fucking homework. or eat. or sleep. or shower.”

also, i am weirdly proud of them. but the point of me posting them is so that my brain will consider them “finished” and will stop adjusting every. little. thing.

99% of these are blorbos from my various shows. these are the ones I will be posting (in a series of posts so I don’t waste ALL of today), bc part of this obsession seems to be with getting things “right” - i.e. accurate to the source material. by solidifying one representation of them, and throwing it out into the internet, i’m filing them away under “vetted and approved.”

so please, please, please do not comment “oh you missed this actually :)” no matter how well meaning. keep it to yourself. I guarantee you, I have already thought of it and attempted to do a heroforge representation of it somehow. it’s a good system but it is limited. compliments are fine just. i can’t fix these. fix them yourself if you want but don’t tell me about it.

I’m going to do screenshots as well as links. heroforge is a free service and doesn’t have any ads or anything so it’s not gonna throw a bunch of popups at you. (you can buy heroforge pro but it just unlocks some extra stuff and early access).

For this one I’m going to start with just posting my good omens characters.

one of the first guys i made was Aziraphale, and I’m pretty proud of how he turned out

I was kind of PO’d that I couldn’t put the watch in his jacket but I think it worked out fine. I was originally going to give him a full afro (I’ve always liked the afro = halo look in aziraphale art) but the one they had kind of blocked off part of his face so I went with a shorter one. still a great style, just didn’t really work for me.

One thing I do wish heroforge had is the option to give a character stretchmarks*. I’ve always loved the headcanon of aziraphale with golden stretchmarks. I cobbled together these two options from other kinds of body decals, and I think they’re decent, but still. hf lets you make your characters pretty fat but the proportions can get a little fucky sometimes, especially when you consider that these guys were designed to be 3d printed.

*whenever I complain about heroforge not having something, understand that I am both a. very appreciative of it as a free, kickstarted service with limited staff and time and a variety of options for players of many different cultures, play styles, campaign settings, abilities, gender identities, etc. and b. thinking every goddamned day about the TWENTY-ONE discrete kinds of eyebrow scars you can put on your guy (and they all look the same!!!)

anyway.

here’s crowley!

smallest face tattoo I could find, I think it worked out OK. the shoes actually have the “reptile: black” skin texture lol but hf doesn’t really render individual scales for reptiles most of the time so it just looks black :/ he gets a molotov cocktail bc there’s no tire iron or car/bentley situation and i think he deserves it. as a treat. for the wine bottle on the ground you have the option to both put a label on it AND put a symbol on it, which is great, and there’s a LOT of symbols to choose from, but none that are just “scribbly writing that looks like a wine label” so i chose a rune of draconic power. I also wanted to do some secret scales for him, but again the body decal gods were not in my favor. here’s the two options I came up with.

the “dapples” are p cool and it’s awesome that they have so many options for vitiligo, but also given the sheer volume of “lizard/snake person/dragon/crocodile” options they have it’s real weird that there’s no all-purpose “scales” body decal.

speaking of snakes...here’s an all-snake person crowley. they let you be a “naga” (half-snake half-person, like a mermaid but snake) or a “serpent-folk” (a person-size snake). i didn’t do a naga since I have a person-crowley and a snake-crowley so just like. jam em up in your imagination.

as you can see, surprisingly few scales. the “bands” on the bottom are a body decal called “coral snake” that was the closest I could get to an overall scaly look. they got the belly scutes, the head, the hood (which is optional i just thought it looked nice on him), the tops of the forearms, the hands and some shoulder and back scales. but the real snakey bit - nada. fascinating. i still like him. I would’ve made him all one color and less shiny, but the “coral snake” bands have to stand out somehow, and I figured i’ll make up for the lack of scales in shininess

and the final good omens character I have made...anathema!!!!!

this one was Hard. so we got the Book, we got her bread knife (something left out of the show that I personally love), and I couldn’t really find many weird witchy looking instruments so I went with some bottles. her outfit is really just 50 shades of green and black, but it has all this lace and different kinds of fabrics to keep it interesting. here she’s just. different greens. and blacks. hf can’t do lace (completely understandable can u imagine trying to 3d print that??) and while you can sort of do different textures, it’s just not the same. I think she turned out OK though! glass in the glasses kind of just got in the way of seeing her eyes, so I took it out. I was surprised at how thick the frames are! they’re all like that - very sturdy. also this jacket is called “undercover jacket” hf my guy that is the loudest looking jacket i ever seen in my life.

now you may say ‘fuck finally, that’s the last good omens character i’ll stop reading this post now’ but ohohoho not quite so. you see. i do have several permutations of aziraphale and crowley, so while they’re not new good omens characters they are new takes on the boys.

now. before we go any further you must check out @worse0mens and their many wonderful fics on ao3. these versions of aziraphale and crowley are based on their marvelous Lord of the Rings AUs, and were made early into my heroforge phase, when it was mostly just me playing dress-up with this dnd character creator, before the Madness set in and it became an ocd thing. they’re some of my favorites of all time!

I’ll link the fics each of them came from next to each character, but I cannot suggest enough that if you like Good Omens aus or fics of any kind (perchance, omens of another kind?) I would highly recommend checking them out! ^v^

enough dillydallying, here’s Orc Crowley from “The Orc and the Elf” “What Remains of a Heart” and “The Good Orc”!

ladies, gents, and those of us who know better, you cannot make this dog look not derpy. i hate even saying derpy but there’s no other way to describe him. I tried every menu and sub-menu to see if there were any controls for the warg’s expression but alas, no dice. the warg mount just. looks like that. it’s a dope ass character model though can’t complain about that in a 3d printed model you’d never notice it, he just stares like he sees the end of all things and comprehends none of it. though maybe that’s accurate for some dogs. Rover didn’t strike me as a pinnacle of intellect when I was reading the fic (he is of course still a very very good boy!) but I did want to try and making him look more dynamic. c’est la vie!

I really had fun making this guy. one great thing about the heroforge coloration system (which I will always sing the praises of, it’s WILD how customized you can get without it being a burden to do for each character, there’s so many options) is that you can make anything glow if you want. I decided to give crowley little a eyeglow. as a treat. and I’m super glad I did! it makes them so distinct.

so. one of his hands is gripping the mane to hold on and one is just sort of. floatin. this is because for some reason, of the 3 “riding a horse/pony/warg” poses, none of them is “holding on to the very fast thing you’re riding” I guess it’s to make held items easier to distinguish, but it’s weird that it’s not even an option for characters who aren’t holding things. I had to get in the “advanced poses” menu and really finagle to get that one hand on Rover’s mane (that’s why its clipping through), and after those 15 minutes or so were spent I decided you know what, crowley’s a big strong orc, maybe he only needs one hand to hang on after all!

For some reason, I always wind up picturing crowley with freckles, and I am a sucker for magic people having like. glowing or weird freckles that look like stars. idk where this love came from but here it is. the fic describes crowley’s skin as “pebble-gray” so I went with a bright metallic silver for his freckles, and I’m really proud of how it turned out!

also for some reason while there’s a million daggers/shortblades you can have, only like. 5 of them can come in sheaths. the rest just hang loose wherever you decide to put them. hazardous! so crowley’s “twin daggers” wound up being kukri knives, since tbh I thought they looked cool and the basic “sheathed dagger” is like. really really small. which is great for some things but I figured crowley would have something with a little more heft.

the fic describes crowley’s sword as a “scimitar”, and the 2 swords hf has with “scimitar” in the name were just not sparking joy for some reason, so I looked up the sword I thought looked best (the janissary kilij) and it turns out it is a type of scimitar! incurable pickiness justified.

I pretty much just pictured elf aziraphale as normal aziraphale but with elf ears (i am not a huge elf fan, I very much enjoyed the fic dunking on thranduil lol), so I didn’t wind up making him.

I did make the hobbit!aziraphale from worse0mens’ other lotr au, There and Back Again (And Again, And Again...) though!

for some reason, when you click on “halfling” as an option, they don’t give you the hairy feet. idk if this is a dnd change for copyright reasons from the tolkien estate (everyone knows “halfling” = “hobbit” its just a matter of intellectual property and shit) or what, but I was kinda sad, since I was excited to have a woman with obvious body hair (there’s no decals for body hair either, except for upper chest hair). I tried to find various hairy-looking shoes, but no success. I did give her the vitiligo leg/foot decal and colored all of the patches to match her skin tone except for the bottoms of her feet, which I did a slightly darker color, to indicate calluses bc hobbits walk barefoot everywhere bc they’re just Built Different. I tried not to go too overboard with it though since she is a very clean and fastidious lady and generally just hangs out in her house (oh, to be a wealthy single hobbit spending the day reading unbothered by the whims of society...)

hf also doesn’t do patterns on clothes, unless they’re physically molded into the cloth (like anathema’s jacket). so no tartan :/ I imagined aziraphale to have a dark green tartan shirt under her vest for some reason so I chased that bliss, and otherwise generally followed the “brown and cream” theme.

I was going to try and get some braids and beads in her hair (if ya know ya know) but the braided buns all got rid of the loose strands framing her face and the other braids were really really long and kind of clashed with the vibe, so i stuck with the unbraided bun. and there’s no hair beads. which is fair tbh its a very specific thing (then again.....21 eyebrow scars)

for reasons unknown to me, some objects have a myriad of decals to choose from, and some only let you have blood splatter (and more recently, dirt stains or colorful powder stains). like, anathema’s “ornate book”? only blood splatter. but these books on the tops of the stacks here? a bajillion options. I went with a dragon (bc lol smaug-shadowing for the hobbit, which takes place after this fic) and some flowers to make aziraphale’s folk medicine book ;)

I don’t want to just complain abt all the stuff hf doesn’t have bc it’s a good, free service with no annoying ads, so I do want to say that the default coloring for the books and cups looked really nice - I only made a few tweaks, which is a big deal for my very picky eyes. letting you pick a “theme” which automatically colors clothes/gear/everything but the actual person is really useful for when you don’t want to go as deep in the paint as I usually do. you can still color each individual item if you want, but if you don’t want to do that it offers an alternative where it shows you like 10-15 basic color schemes for you to pick from.

I had to decide b/w the bowtie and the zirak-baraz necklace, and I went with the bowtie, since the necklace options really don’t jive with the look and she wears it under her shirt a lot of the time anyway. also, aziraphale + bowtie = iconic. the normal plain bowtie looked weirdly big on her and kept clipping so I went with another one that was wild west themed or something, but I think it still works.

I did run into hf’s weird ideas about body configuration here. they do let you make your guys decently fat, but it’s really hard to get a ratio that doesn’t look grossly exaggerated, and its partly based on species. the default setting for halflings is like, REALLY skinny, which sucks, and the default for p much all “female” versions of species is large tits and small waists. the waist slider is honestly kind of bullshit in terms of making realistic people. i 100% get that some people like to make cartoon-y looking guys or more caricature-like looks, but since I prefer more realistic-looking characters, I pretty much ALWAYS have to turn the waist slider all the way just for them to look healthy. and then it creates a weird dent where you can turn up the other sliders for weight but the waist is stuck at its maximum so you get these hourglass shapes with sharp corners. it gets covered up a bit when you put clothes on at least, you really can’t see it with aziraphale thankfully. but it does wind up putting a cap on how fat you can make your guys without them looking really unbalanced and cartoonish. I wanted to make her much chubbier but this was sort of as far as i could get with the waist restriction and clipping (and thats a whole other issue) without her look really unbalanced, and *SPOILERS FOR THE FIC* i wasn’t trying to make aziraphale in her pregnancy era here, and idk if it would’ve worked out well. *END SPOILERS*

For dwarf!crowley I wound up making 2 versions, one casual and one in traditional dwarven clothes (and a little grimier) on a pony (if you know you know), mostly bc while i love me some dwarves, i am not a tolkien expert and have only a loose grasp on the aesthetic. some of crowley’s outfits described in the fic are pretty basic, some more complicated, so I decided to do one for each.

here’s casual crowley

I wanted to give them matching teacups so it looks like they’re toasting each other ^v^

also crowley’s tea is way lighter than aziraphales bc i firmly believe this is a ‘coffee as dark as my soul’ ‘so like white chocolate mocha?’ relationship.

the dagger sheaths got me again with this one. crowley’s dagger is specifically described as having a leather sheath, and being as long as aziraphale’s arm. couldn’t get the dwarven runes bc again, the decal gods did not will it. this one is actually called a “disciple of death dagger” - yikes! at least there’s no skulls or anything lol

he’s got the “thin black shirt” from when he’s chopping wood, plus the axe. I couldn’t exactly get a serpent beltbuckle, but I tried to at least get some silver things on him to nod at the whole “crowley silvertongue” thing.

his pants are actually fucking mariachi pants. one thing that does kind of piss me off w hf is that there’s not just. a normal, basic ass pair of pants. or plain leggings. everything has a belt or fringe or pleats or something. the closest you get is scrubs but the drawstring just makes em look like sweatpants. and its not like there’s not basic shit for shirts! there’s a bunch of plain ass t-shirts! but this was sort of the closest I could get without having an extra belt. I will say that you will not lack for belt buckles in heroforge, but they are all the same basic, utilitarian kind for the most part.

both dwarves and halflings by default are really really short. I’m glad the fic specified crowley as 5 ft and aziraphale as 4 ft, which tracks w general tolkien lore n shit, but i had to scale them up a lot from the default setting. huh. another dnd difference?

hf also decided when you click on male dwarf, you still get decent sized tits. I think its the muscle in a compressed space. I am not opposed! i decided he gets to keep them, as a treat. he’s pretty muscular (”lanky for a dwarf” but dwarves are fuckin absolute units) so it checks out and it really works w the 3 button shirt v sexy (can you tell I think dwarves are more attractive than elves?)

the “earring” is my attempt as using the clipping to my advantage to make it look like a hair bead. I think it’s not bad, though you can definitely still tell its on his ear.

one thing that surprised me is the options for wearing braids: single braid (several variations, including queue (think the dai li from atla)). hair down with two braids on top (see above). cornrows (and several combinations of cornrows and afros/natural textured hair). braided bun. “bun held with stick.” “thick braided curls” (held back in an updo).

it surprised me bc #1 good on you hf for having a variety of options for people of color, i wish this wasn’t surprising but still, props #2 you can’t have pigtail braids (2 braids one on either side of your head), and #3 there’s only 1 option for having straight hair down and having braids mixed into it. idk maybe this is a regional thing to where I’m from but people having one or more braids mixed into straight/wavy hair that’s not tied up or in a bun or anything seems p common to me, and at the very least p common in the popular perception of dwarves and their aesthetics. not upset just confused.

I tried to make him a little bit paler due to the dwarf-living-underground thing but i cannot give up my freckle headcanon unfortunately - i just made them very light. maybe he gets them when visiting the shire.

here’s the other one, w the dwarven gear on the pony

it stopped letting me upload screenshots. I have committed way too hard to this. this might be a counterproductive endeavor. we’ll see I guess. here’s the url in case it fucked itself over https://www.heroforge.com/load_config%3D502896335/

the fuckin. even on a pony they don’t give you reins. i am confusion. w a warg i kinda get it theres not much to hold onto but a pony or horse? no excuse. reins let me at em. i did go through the trouble to get both his hands in there bc crowley does have a history of being bad with horses, and idk if this followed him into this au or if its ok bc its a pony, but i figured he should have both hands in there just in case. he’s very determined at the moment.

I really like the “roan” face decal bc it lets you get your guy grimy around the edges of his face, and as we all know grime is VERY important to the lotr experience. hopefully one day when I have a normal relationship with heroforge i can make an aragorn and he can be so so grimy. or perhaps i can just look up someone else’s aragorn heroforge to check on the grime factor.

its. tilted. the pony. its like tilted to one side. i don’t know why this is. it didn’t start out like that. i don’t know how it got like that. was it all the advanced hand posing to get crowley to grab onto the nonexistent reins??? how would that affect the pony tilting??? maybe he’s going around a very fast corner.

ok thats it. fuck. maybe this way a bad idea. either way, i am putting away these designs and saying “these are complete. I do not need to spend any energy on them anymore. they are done.” I’m even gonna mark their names to say they are done.

if you stuck w this all the way through you’re a fuckin lunatic and i love it.

i use tumblr primarily to either spit things into the void and get them out of my head, keep up on memes, and reblog/compliment fanart, so I really don’t care about any criticism, constructive or not**, and am very much asking you to not do that. compliments are fine just like. please don’t insinuate I should continue to work on these, or find problems with them. they are done. they have taken up far too much brainspace, and I need to let them go. this is me sending them off into the world. i mean use them for your dnd or whatever if you want, just talk to @worse0mens if its one of their characters obviously.

hope you’re doing well and that this was fun and not depressing. I am growing and healing each day. ^v^

**unless you’re worse0mens bc some of them are your characters and I want to be as respectful as possible towards them

#cw discussion of mental illness #cw ocd #cw ocd mention #cw hyperfixation #like the bad kind #good omens #lotr #heroforge #original post

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ri-ahhh · 4 years

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can u just give me mushy gushy shit with grayson like ethan has a girl over so the two of you decide to go out for a burger date and a walk at night? idk something like that pls 👉🏻👈🏻

A/N: I couldn’t even tell you how long this has been sitting in my drafts but I was looking through trying to find something to finish bc I was in the mood to write but not from scratch and found this lol. It was about halfway done and I have no idea where I was going with it but this is what it turned into as of today. Idek if there’s even anyone around here anymore to read this but whatever haha here it is.

You don’t usually mind being single. Even when your best friend/roommate Stella started seeing her boyfriend Charlie seriously, it didn’t give you any longing for a relationship of your own.

But there are some nights where you feel down and you just can’t handle it. The scenes of casual intimacy as soon as you get home and see them together — the vase of flowers on the kitchen island he must have brought over; the playful bickering across the room.

The incessant, unrelenting sound of a marathon session going on through the shared wall of your and Stella’s bedrooms.

You groan and turn the volume up on your AirPods, going straight to your messages next.

Wyd?

{G} 👀

Don’t be weird.

Pretty sure Stella and Charlie are trying to put a hole in the wall w her headboard and I can’t take it anymore.

Your roommate chooses that moment to let out a particularly enthusiastic “fuck!” If she weren’t your best friend, you might have given in to the urge to bang on the wall, but your phone lights up with Grayson’s reply anyway.

{G} E too.

{G} I mean like I can’t hear him but ik what’s going down in there

{G} I’d offer to pick u up but sounds like u need to get outta there lol. Meet me here?

You like the message and slip on some shoes, making sure to slam your bedroom door closed on your way out, as if it would make them pause even one thrust.

In the year that you’ve known him, Grayson Dolan has become one of your closest friends. The kind where you met as acquaintances, never talked much, but then you reconnected randomly and the conversation never stopped from there on. You talk about anything and everything, but recently you’ve bonded even more about being a perpetual third wheel. You knew he’d understand and not pass judgement on you in times like this, so it had been a no-brainer to text him as an escape from tonight.

He buzzes you into the gate when you get to his house, and he tells you over another text to go ahead and hop in the Porsche before he even gets outside. It makes you smile; night drives are your favorite, and while the Tesla is a vibe in its own right, there’s just something calming about someone (your attractive friend, no less) tangibly driving you around. It’s exactly what you need right now, no matter what destination he has in mind.

When he slides into the driver’s side not even a minute later, you’re almost overwhelmed by him. Looking far too good in your eyes for how casual he’s dressed in a well-fitting T-shirt and some grey sweats. Hair slightly damp from a recent shower.

He greets you with a grin and leans over the console to kiss your cheek, and you can smell the combination of his shampoo and a bit of cologne. You always appreciated that he doesn’t overdo the fragrance, and if possible it makes him even more intoxicating at times.

“Hey,” he says simply, sitting back in his seat and fastening the seatbelt.

“Hey.” You smile and watch him with a silent but fairly obvious appreciation as he reaches a hand to rest on the back of your seat, twisting the bit he needs to look out the back windshield. The Porsche has a backup camera, obviously, but he’s a cautious driver to a fault and insists he doesn’t fully trust them.

Grayson gets the car facing enough of the right direction to throw it in drive and exit down the long driveway. You shake your head and settle back, kicking off your shoes with a sigh and tucking your feet onto the seat beneath you.

“One day, we’ll be the ones making them leave the house,” he jokes, stopping for the gate to open.

You know it’s implied that he’s referring to the two of you with separate people, but you can’t help but consider the option that the two of you could make that happen together.

“I know for a fact you have a booty call list a mile long, Dolan,” you say with a raised brow. Despite the fleeting thought, keeping things lighthearted and platonic is much easier to deal with in reality. “You could have called one of them and done just that.”

He scoffs and pretends like you’ve just hurt him deeply, slapping a hand to his burly chest to clutch at his heart. “Excuse me, it is not a mile long.” He glances over at you with a held-back smirk. “A couple hundred yards, tops.”

You throw your head back with a loud cackle, looking out the window now as he turns onto the main road. “You’re incorrigible.”

“Damn, that’s a big word.” He likes to tease you about your extended vocabulary.

“Hopeless,” you elaborate, crossing your arms and rolling your eyes.

“Is that what that word means, or are you making fun of my high school dropout vocab?”

“Both.”

You let your head roll back against the headrest, turning to watch him, knees swayed to the side a bit. His form isn’t hidden in the dark at all, features lit up by the dash in front of him and the streetlights you’re passing by outside.

“Why didn’t you, then? Call one of them?”

Grayson shrugs. “Just didn’t really feel like spending time with people tonight.”

You’re silent for a moment and consider his answer. “Why did you agree to hang out, then? You didn’t have to.”

His eyes never leave the road, but you see the veins in his hand gripping the steering wheel bulge out for a moment as he squeezes it tightly.

“I guess I meant I didn’t want to spend time with people I don’t really care about.”

Your heart skips a beat, but you play it off with a sarcastic tone. “Aw, you care about me?”

“Of course I do,” he replies easily. “I’m not sure why, though. You’re so fuckin sassy sometimes.”

“You love it.”

The car rolls to a stop at a red light. Grayson’s hand slides from where it’s lightly gripping the gear shift, to yours, which is picking at a loose string on your leggings.

Your easy smile at the comfortable banter between you and Grayson falters some in surprise, but you let him turn your palm over and trace the lines of your hand softly. Both of your gazes are fixated on the way he tickles your skin when he says, “Yeah. I do.”

Your eyes shoot up, just in time to meet his. He looks at you with a weird mixture heat and vulnerability, and there’s a thick moment of silence, no longer than the single beat of your heart that you can hear thudding loud and clear in your ears, when suddenly the car behind you lays on the horn.

Both of you startle, and Grayson’s attention returns to the road ahead. He steps on the gas and takes his hand away, carding it through his hair roughly as you sink back into your seat with a disbelieving scoff.

“Oh my God, dude, you can’t just do that to me,” you blurt out, your heart in your stomach and your brain even lower. A helpless giggle escapes you, and you tug on your own locks. “Shit...”

“What?” he asks defensively, but you hear the tiny bit of the grin he’s wearing in his voice.

You turn your head to deadpan him, eyes wide. “You can’t just... imply something like that and give me sex eyes and not think you did something to me! Are you crazy?”

He gives a one-shouldered shrug with the arm resting on top of the steering wheel again. “Maybe. You’re proving my ‘sassy’ point all over again.”

“Oh my — don’t fuck with my head, Gray.”

“Hey.” His voice is deeper, more serious as the car comes to another stop. You’re only just now realizing you’ve reached the burger joint, and that the late hour made finding parking a nonexistent problem. He puts the car in park and unbuckles his seatbelt before doing the same to yours. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to fuck with your head, I promise. I just... didn’t want it to seem like I was coming on too strong too suddenly. I, uh, have a history of doing that.”

You stare at him, processing everything. “I know.”

He chuckles dryly. “Yeah, I know you do.”

There’s more silence. That heavy kind that happened right after his little impromptu confession.

“You know,” you finally speak up, finding your voice after mulling over your words, “I kinda love that you’re a douche.”

He looks a little taken aback, until understanding dawns on him, and his eyes light up in a way that has you smiling instantly with him. “Really?”

You nod. “Call me crazy.”

Grayson shifts closer in his seat, his pink tongue darting out to lick those plump lips. You mirror him, and this time you take the initiative to reach out for his hand. It’s warm and strong, just like the rest of him.

Like earlier, you watch your hands lightly caressing each other as you speak. “And I love that you come on strong. And that you put your heart out there.” You interlace your fingers, immediately in love with the contrast of his huge ones between your slim ones. “Makes things way easier for me.”

He grins wide. “There’s that sass again.”

You bite your lip through your smirk and tug him close to you with your clasped hands, your free one reaching behind his neck to drag his lips to yours. “Mm. Better shut me up, then.”

#here I go again with yet another friends to lovers lmao #dolan twins #Grayson Dolan #blurb #g blurb

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spvce-cowboy · 3 years

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Requests and those prompt pages you shared make me go full on thot...but soft

Frankie with "when one of them has never had a proper birthday party for whatever reason, and their lover makes it their mission to give them the best day ever, followed by “you didn’t have to do all this for me. just being with you is enough.” “i know. but i thought you deserved ?’’ and their lover smiles, a kiss is shared"

And maybe the dialogue prompt "I wanted to say I love you for the first time without stuttering, but that failed"

Is that too much? Too weird? I'd be happy for either one :)

soft thots are the best thots no one can convince me otherwise 😌😌😌

i added a lil... somethin somethin to this bc i honestly just couldn’t resist.

frankie always lets his birthday pass quietly. it’s been that way since you’ve met him--he usually preferred a quiet night out with his friends, maybe ordering some nice meal in, but never anything big.

he firmly resisted your suggestions of throwing a party in celebration for the first two years you were together, not adamantly, but with enough gentle insistence that you knew to back off. you could tell that there was some weight there, something unspoken that made him dark and moody during the week that lead up to the day, but you figured he’d let you know on his own time, if ever.

so you’re more than a little nervous for the surprise dinner you had spent the past month planning. you’d coordinated his whole crew to fly back to Texas for his birthday weekend, figured maybe after the year Frankie had had it would be a nice break, if not to celebrate then to distract.

you made the delta force boys well aware of it, that if he didn’t want to do anything official the lot of your would play along without insisting anything more. the sparklers and cake you were hiding in the kitchen was purely optional, depending on how you read Frankie’s mood after the surprise reveal.

you’re all nerves for the entire day leading up to the party. luckily, Frankie is out of the house for most of it, and you told him you’d take him to a fancy dinner so he’d come pick you up from the apartment straight from work, already dressed in the suit jacket and button-down you’d picked out for him.

the boys and their dates help you with the last of the preparations--you’ve spent most of the day cooking, so they set up the table while you change into a pair of heels and Frankie’s favorite sundress of yours. you take one calming breath before stepping out of your bedroom and back into the fray.

the click of the lock sliding back is the only warning you get as Frankie shoulders the door open. his hands are busy with something and he has his back turned to you as he throws his keys on the side-table by the door.

“hey, sweetheart--listen i called the restaurant about our reservation and they said they didn’t have anything down under your name so i made something for--”

and he freezes, eyes wide with utter disbelief at the scene in front of him.

you’re in the center of the gathered group, made up of the delta force crew as well as some other friends from work. the house is warm with the smell of dinner, with a few, sparse decorations mostly consisting of candles and thin, paper wall hangings.

you give him your biggest possible smile as you and your guests burst out in a synchronous:

“happy birthday!”

the grin Frankie gifts you with is enough to have made all the anxious planning worth it. he crosses the distance between the two of you in a few quick strides. cradled in the crook of his arm is a bouquet of flowers, which he hands to you with a still-shocked “thank you, baby,” after kissing your cheek. then the boys start crowding around him in a mass of back-clapping hugs and loud laughter.

once he makes his rounds to greet everyone and finishes the beer Santi placed in his hand as soon as he handed you the bouquet, Frankie places a hand at the small of your back and ducks his head to speak directly into your ear.

“can i talk to you for a second, on the balcony?”

there’s a quavering quality of seriousness in his tone that catches you utterly off-guard. you lick you lips and try to feign a confident smile as you nod, leading the way. you can practically hear your own heartbeat, a frantic pulse in your ears.

he clears his throat after closing the sliding glass doors behind himself. your eyes widen further as you realize he’s flexing his hands in that way that he does when he’s trying to get them to stop shaking.

your heart drops to the pit of your stomach as he guides you away from the doors and into the sequestered corner of the balcony, where you’d spent the better half of last week replanting your pollinator bushes in preparation for the summer. the bulbed fairy lights he’d helped you install last summer were still holding up, casting the balcony in warm hues of pink and orange. your brain seems to work on over-time, utterly unsure of what the fuck could possibly be going on.

“first, i just want to thank you for planning all of this. it um--i really wasn’t expecting it, so, surprise well planned and all,” he gives a nervous laugh, rubbing his hand over the lower half of his face as his eyes flick towards the flood of light emanating from the living room on the other side of the sliding doors. in the quiet that follows, you can barely hear the chatter of music and conversation from the people inside because you genuinely can’t read the pained expression on Frankie’s face right now and that has literally never happened before and honestly you’re utterly terrified.

because it sure as hell felt like he was about to give you an ultimatum.

so you do what you always do whenever you get freaked out. you start to babble.

“listen, i--i’m really sorry, i know you usually like to keep things low key and everything but Santi texted me that he was thinking of coming up and surprising you so then i thought that maybe i could reach out to the whole team too but i can totally tell them to leave and you guys can just do your own thing and--” you cut yourself off because the look he’s giving you now is just confused. you take in a gulp of air, these next words just as rushed as the previous ones were. “please don’t break up with me.”

Frankie’s jaw hangs open for a second.

and then he starts laughing.

full-body laughing, his face breaking out into that great big smile that you were so relieved to see not even a half-hour ago. but now you’re as confused as he once was.

“i was... i was going to do this later tonight, over dinner but, given the circumstances...” he’s trying to fish something out of his suit jacket’s pocket.

the realization slams into you like a brick wall.

because holy shit he’s trying to fish something out of the suit jacket pocket.

you half realize what’s happening and you half don’t, because he’s balancing a small velvet box in the palm of his hand which he holds in the space between the two of you like he’s cradling a small bird and holy fuck you were absolutely in no way prepared for this of all things.

you think he knows as much because when you look up at him with tear-filled eyes, your hand raised to your mouth in shock, he has a bit of a sheepish look on his face.

“i know it’s a lot,” he clears his throat. “and you don’t have to say yes right away but i just... i wanted to let you know that if you wanted this, it would make me the luckiest man in the world to be able to give it to you. whenever you’re ready and i--i’d love to be able to celebrate this,” he opens the box. the ring is beautiful, simple but delicate and understated and perfect. absolutely perfect. “to celebrate us around this time of year, too. i’d love that more than anything.”

“i--Frankie,” you rip your gaze from the ring in his palm, lip wobbling as your tears begin to fall. christ, you had no idea how full your heart would feel. you thought, in fantasy, that you would but it was nothing compared to this. “Frankie, i wanted tonight to--”

“you don’t have to say anything now, if you don’t want to,” his words are as rushed as you feel, a bit frantic. “i understand if it’s too much for right i just thought i should make my intentions--”

you shut him up with a kiss.

“yes,” your voice is infinitely firmer than you expected it to be, you kiss him again, as if it could serve as punctuation. “yes, yes--a million times, yes.”

he laughs against your mouth in turn, wrapping both arms around your waist and lifting you up in the air without breaking the kiss.

placing you gently on the ground, both your and Frankie’s hands are shaking so hard that he can barely put the ring on you. it sits on your ring-finger perfectly. you can’t bring yourself to take your eyes off of it for more than a second. neither can he.

someone turns the music up inside, the heightened volume of chatter is the only thing to break your combined reverie.

Frankie tucks you into his side with an arm slung over your shoulders, kissing the crown of your head. there’s a rare ease to his posture that you can already see yourself getting used to.

“let’s see if they notice,” he whispers in your ear with a mischievous wink. you don’t think you’ve ever seen his eyes so bright. grinning, you lean further into his side. the two of you step back into the living room.

#frankie morales x reader #frankie morales #thots (tm)#frankie thots

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fanfictionfansmiction · 4 years

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hii! i was just wondering if i could a request a ron imagine where he really likes the reader and he does what he does to fleur in the movies and yells at her to go to the ball with him? and ginny is like comforting him how she was in the movies but reader runs after him and they’re all in shock bc she actually wants to go with him and liked him back? (i’m sorry this is long, i’m bad at explaining)

This is my first request!! Very exciting, so I have written this based on what you said rather than watching the clip from the film so it might not happen exactly the same as that but I hope you enjoy it anyway it was really fun to write so please do send in more requests!

Word Count: 1594

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Ron was never great with his expressing his feelings, especially when it came to you. He was always saying the wrong thing or saying the right thing the wrong way. It wasn’t always like that though you two were close for a long time and you even considered him your closest friend. Ron kicked himself every time he saw you and acted like an idiot and so did his friends.

“Ron why don’t you just go and talk to her?” Hermione said reading the paper not looking at Ron or Harry as she did but still sensing Ron’s pining look that was laid upon you sat with your Hufflepuff friends. Ron only groaned in response pushing his breakfast around on the plate.

“Obviously, it’s because he can’t talk to her or he’ll just die it’s so embarrassing she’s just so beautiful and perfect what could he possibly offer her.” Harry imitated Ron. “I’m sorry mate but this has been going on too long and its painful to watch, if you don’t do something about it in the next two days, I’ll…” Harry trailed off thinking of an appropriate threat for a friend. “Or I’ll tell Fred and George about it.” There that seemed good enough. Harry looking fairly pleased with himself started to eat his breakfast assuming that would be the end of it today. Ron rested his head in his hands feeling sorry for himself.

“But what would I talk to her about?” Ron asked his two friends hoping for a helpful response. Neither had any response, Herimone who now seemed to be filling out the crossword puzzle and Harry who was instead thinking about his own love life. No such luck for Ron instead Ginny sat herself next to Hermione stealing a sausage off Ron’s plate and munching on it.

“What’s everyone’s plans for the Yule Ball then?” she asks holding eye contact with Harry who chokes on his orange juice. Pleased with his reaction she grins looking at her brother. “Ron who’s your date?”

“He’s just about to ask them.” Hermione announces folding up the newspaper now more invested in the whole situation, shooting Ron a pointed look. Harry, happy to have Ginny’s eyes off him agrees with Hermione.

“Oh, this’ll be great. What’s the plan Ron?” Ginny asks filling a glass scoffing at the thought of her brother asking the object of his affections out on a date, successfully.

“Instead of thinking about it he was actually just about to ask them now. Weren’t you Ron?” Harry says nudging Ron’s arm.

“Hermione will you- “

“You aren’t getting out of it that easily Ronald. We all know who you want to ask. Besides, I already have a date. You’re on your own with this one.” She responds her eyes drifting over to Viktor who was already looking at her.

“Stop being a chicken Ron and go ask them.” Ginny says commanding the same power as her mother. Ron shakily stands whipping his sweaty hands along his trousers. He takes a deep breathe in and makes his way to where you are sitting with your Hufflepuff friends. For a moment Ron thinks about turning back because what is the worst Ginny could do if he didn’t ask. What could Fred and George do that would be worse than rejection? A quick turn of his head told him that no matter how scary rejection was his little sister would be worse. Besides that, you had already spotted him focusing your attention on him. Your friends still talking to you, but you were looking at Ron and he felt his face light up. It had been a while since you had looked at him, properly looked at him.

“Hello Ron.” You said with a large smile on your face lighting up your eyes.

He breathed you name, and his heart hammered in his chest. He remembered his sweating palms and his friend watching him and your friends watching him and you looking at him with those sweet eyes. Any drop confidence he had just drained out of him and he felt stuck. To make matters worse your friends began whispering and giggling. Why didn’t he plan out how to ask you? What if when he asked you couldn’t hear him. Or what if when he asked you burst out laughing revealing you already had a date a much better date. A date who asked you with flowers. He should have brought you flowers.

“Everything okay?” You ask bringing him back to the room. Ron’s throat felt dry.

“WOULD YOU LIKE TO GO TO THE YULE BALL WITH ME AS MY DATE. WELL, IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE LIKE A DATE DATE WE COULD GO AS FRIENDS.” He burst out far louder than he intended. Clapping his hands over his mouth confused at how he managed to produce such a loud volume. This did it all your friends laughed and so did the entire room at this strange outburst. He could see how pink you had gotten mouth opening and closing like a fish looking around at your friends who all seemed extremely amused. So, he apologised and immediately began powerwalking out of the hall because running out would be far more embarrassing.

He didn’t stop walking until he felt he was far enough away from the sound of everyone’s laughter. Laughing at him. Why did he do that? He asked himself. In the morning sun out in the courtyard he kicked a tree really regretting embarrassing you in front of all those people. He didn’t even realise he was talking to himself until someone interrupted him.

“Finally found some good company?” Ginny said leaning against the tree.

“What do you want Gin?” Ron asked croakily not realising he had been crying.

“I want you to know that you are an idiot but its also okay. You very easily could have never asked her, never spoken to her again. Never given her idea of how you felt but you did. And I hate to say it Ron but not everything is going to go as you want it everyone doesn’t always like you back. It’s okay that she didn’t want to go with you there are plenty of others who might. It’s okay if she doesn’t see you that way you know, that right?”

Just as Ron opens his mouth to respond someone else does.

“I never said I didn’t want to go with you Ron.”

Ginny grins once again watching as her brothers face lights up and she sees the hope return to his body. She walks away leaving the two of them some time alone.

Ron says your name like a wish. Like he doesn’t really believe you’ll be there when he turns around. But you are and he sees the blush still on your face. And that you’re breathless like you ran after him all that way. Ron wants to say something to say anything to you, but he doesn’t. Thankfully as it finally gives you the space to say how you feel.

“I just wasn’t expecting you ask me Ron. You haven’t spoken to me properly in weeks, I thought I did something to upset you. My friends only laughed because we were literally just talking about you. I was planning on asking you to Yule Ball myself. Look Ron I really like you and not having my close friend there to talk to and to laugh with was really strange.”

“I really like you too. I just never thought you felt the same way.” Ron closes the space between you.

“That’s because you never asked.” You laugh placing you hand on his cheek. Another flush of red taking over his face. His eyes look down not sure enough of himself to meet your gaze. Placing your other hand on his other cheek you say, “So ask me Ron.” Ron smiles lopsided and goofy looking at you still rather nervous.

“So, I was wondering if you wanted to go to the Yule Ball with me? As my date.” He breathes.

“Oh, I’m not sure what day is that on again?” You tease taking your hands away from his face feigning deep thought, causing him to laugh with you relaxing him. “I’d love to go to the ball as your date Ron. Maybe before then we could go on a little date.” You ask playing with the collar of his shirt.

“Wasn’t that his line.” You hear Harry add from behind you. Ron shoots him a look of humorous disapproval.

“As much as I’m annoyed that he was watching that I have to agree with him. I think I was supposed to ask you that.” He says now looking at you so intensely you almost forget how to talk.

“Why because he’s the guy?” Ginny adds.

“How archaic.” Hermione adds.

“Sorry mate we just had to see how this plays out.”

Ron shakes his head with an infectious laugh, he snakes his arm round your waist holding you closely.

“Fred and George just wouldn’t believe you without eyewitnesses, really I’m doing you a favour.” Harry laughs.

“How about we go somewhere a little more private to plan this date.” You say gazing up at Ron with delight.

“That sounds perfect.” He says before kissing you soft and sweet.

“Okay now it’s weird.” Ginny says, “Let’s leave these lovebirds alone. Have fun you two.”

Ron smiles down at you and you feel relief flood through you. The two of you this close, sharing space in the universe together felt righter than anything you’d ever known before.

#ron weasly imagine #ron x you #ron x y/n #ron weasly x reader #ron weasley x y/n #harry potter imagine #harry potter reader insert #ron weasley #ronald weasley x reader #ronald weasley x y/n #Ron reader insert #reader insert

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vyvesvi · 3 years

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updated top albums list + recommended tracks from each bc im bored lol

*tentatively* in order

unnatural - wjsn | recommended songs: all of them (especially unnatural, supermoon, and yalla) except for rewind | skips: just rewind bc ballad /// im not sure what style to call this album but they really made such a smash, its crazy that it came out so early in the year and no gg is touching it (album wise). literally the only complaints i have are the obligatory ballad (that they always do bc they can all sing lmfao), the album cover/title (dont love the cover design and i dont love when the album name is the tt name, except in certain circumstances (a full album (especially where the title isnt necessarily from the title track) like montero) or when it's a single album (the inverse of this being rsq's prequel which couldve just been called colorfull since that was the only damn song 😐)). i also was disappointed with the outfits for last dance but that's peripheral.

timeabout, - yukika | recommended songs: insomnia & secret | skips: none /// okay to keep it very real im genuinely scared that she'll never surpass soul lady. i love, and i mean LOVE timeabout, but soul lady was on another plane of existence. like she could've held that album a little bit

the other side of the moon - gwsn | recommended songs: like it hot, starry night, i cant breathe | skips: i sing, depending on my mood /// i dont have much commentary tbh,this is just a very solid mini idk. id like to see a fusion of i cant breathe/tweaks/after the bloom/burn, maybe on their next mini. i love their brighter stuff but maybe a darker concept next (halloween cb pls pls pls)

montero - lil nas x | lowkey too soon for me to pick recommended songs but i'll say montero, scoop, lost in the citadel, sun goes down, and am i dreaming for now. will update! | skips: none /// i cant say that this is this year's sawayama bc sawayama was kinda more like a collection of really strong singles? whereas i feel like these songs shine as an album. i dont even know what to say except that im soooo surprised and impressed because i didnt know that this is the type of music he made???? like he raps but theres a lot of singing? not like belting but definitely not rapping. its kinda...alt ish? in some places? if i had to use ine genre to describe the whole album id probably say alt pop? idk but whatever it is it's definitely working

hide & seek - purple kiss | recommended songs: zombie & so why (tbh all of them) | 2am and zzzz depend on my mood but theyre def not full skips /// no bad song on the album this is crazy....i might rerank since i just listened to it for the first time but as of now idk, its good im just super impressed. ponzona wasnt for me but this cb theyre really doing all the things, lovr tht for them

produced by: [myself] - onlyoneof | recommended songs: coy & night flight | question mark depends on my mood /// im still mad at them (read: 8d) sooooo...idk. i can’t really listen to their music rn. but this mini is still good

play game: holiday - weeekly | recommended songs: check it out, weekend, holiday party | i like memories of summer rain and la luna but it depends on my mood /// very cohesive mini, def their best overall imo! not much to say, but i hope jiyoon gets well soon TTTT

enchant - orbit | recommended songs: gokurakuchouka & never gonna get away but also all of them except flor lunar | skips: flor lunar is nice but boring /// i need kpoppies to get into it im tired of being here alone cmon y’all

set - woodz | recommended songs: feel like | skips: none /// i prefer his bright tracks but this mini was solid as usual. where is the full album tho seungyoun hmmm????

guess who - itzy | recommended songs: sorry not sorry, tennis (0:0), kidding me | skips: in the morning, occasionally wild wild west /// i remember being very surprised that i liked this album, especially given that i dont like mitm. not anything groundbreaking but still solid. i think the naming of tennis (0:0) was really clever

intersection: trace - bae173 | recommended songs: green light, loved you | skips: none (sometimes the intro tho) /// honestly their music is really good??? mbk just hasn’t promoted them well, i feel like they make it a little hard to stan...i really appreciate that they’re not doing the stereotypical hard bg concept thing

lilac - iu | recommended songs: coin, flu, ah puh, troll | skips: honestly id have to relisten, some of the songs a lil boring but idr them at the moment

hello future - nct dream | recommended songs: hello future, life is still going on | skips: idr tbh, probably hot sauce though //// was very surprised that i liked this album, but the outro of hello future really got me after a few listens so i had to check it out. very decent!

killa - mirae | recommended songs: killa, sweet dreams, 1 thing | skips: none really but all of the bsides are a little mid tbh /// i will be 1000% honest in saying that the three reasons this allbum made this list are 1.) killa (the tt), 2.) none of the songs are bad, 3.) lien’s vocals. something about lien....he really just sells whatever song he’s on. his belting >>>>>>>>>>>. he makes their music very enjoyable to listen to, next in that department would be junhyuk. based on their most recent cb, siyoung and khael also contribute a lot as well. shame that the rest of the cb album kinda does nothing for me idk. random but i would really like a gg to cover higher and/or killa

& - loona | recommended songs: ur, ptt | skips: a different night, dance on my own /// these r my girls but this is not their best. ur is wonderful though, and ptt is addicting somehow. wow and be honest are fine but really not their best. i like wow’s choreo tho!

albums im excited to listen to (no particular order):

last year was weird volume 3, tkay maidza (i’ve already listened to a bunch of it but i need to sit and just listen to the whole thing)

troubled paradise, slayyter (same as above, but i didn’t even realize it came out this year, i thought it was old for some reason lol)

jo1, challenger (every song of theirs i hear i like pretty much so i need to take an organized look at them lmfao)

jo1, stranger (same as above)

only lovers left, woodz (duhhh its woodz. not out yet but im excited! i do prefer his brighter concepts and this def isn’t that. he says its not gonna be like what he’s done before but the title and concept photo that’s out rn is giving lift up)

the book of us: negentropy - chaos swallowed up in love, day6 (the title kinda bored me but we’ll see. also sungjin’s gone so.....................we’ll see.)

ancient dreams in a modern land, marina (i barely got past venus fly trap because its soooooo good. i’ve listened to a little after that but the songs i heard didn’t really compare. i have to give it a shot tho)

the chaos chapter: fight or escape, txt (i liked the blue hour mini so i need to give them a chance i suppose)

333, tinashe (i just feel like i should idk)

honorable mentions (no particular order):

blue hour, txt - discovered this year, came out last year. retroactively makes the 2020 albums list bc whew the market research that went into that thing paid off

hula hoop/ starseed ~kakusei~, loona (why tf does the album not have a name) - duhhh loona + synths = a smash. in fact like i said when it dropped i dont even wanna call them loona anymore. this is kongetsu no shoujo!!! this isn’t on my top albums list because im counting as two songs and my limit is 3. i might add it anyways lmfao. we’ll see

ugly beauty, jolin tsai - discovered this year, came out in 2018. i just really like jolin tsai idk. i had only heard that album w play and i’m not yours, both are iconic but the production quality sounds...low? like its older but ik they’re not *that* old. either way, ugly beauty does everything i wanted it to - dramatic, vocals, rapping, boa vibes...jolin tsai is a queen what can i say

also, there are of course a ton of singles that i love as well, this is albums only though lmfao. i have no idea if i could even attempt to organize the singles lol

#vyvesvi's year #song rec

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chubsonthemoon · 3 years

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tagged by @storybookprincess!! (thank you!!) here are some of my fave fics I’ve written! tbh this was kinda difficult; I am very aware that nothing I write is neither perfect nor very polished (it wouldn’t be even remotely fun for me if I tried to do that), but mostly everything I’ve written I’ve written for the sole audience members of me myself and I (and also sometimes a friend :3), so these are some of my more recent faves. under a cut because this got kinda long, whoopsie!

tagging! @superish, @dodici12, and @owletstarlet! <3

Letters from Heaven: haikyuu!!, kagehina, 60k

this fic was written for last year’s kghn big bang and it was so fun! It’s the longest thing I’ve written yet, and boy oh boy it was such a challenge to juggle a bunch of different things that I hadn’t done on this kind of scale before, like longer character arcs and, especially given that this is a violet evergarden AU, describing things in a way that fits with kyoani’s style and VibeTM. My last longer fic, thy kingdom come, was about half this length and almost made the list simply because of how bonkers it was (like I hadn’t written at all that year and suddenly signed up for a big bang and then had to take a month long break in the middle because of school stuff, and then boom I ended up writing the latter half of it a few days before the deadline LOL), but anyway. It’s not perfect (nothing is!) but it’s chock full of recurring metaphors and long-winded descriptions about the sky and pining out the wazoo (basically: all wildly self-indulgent things catered to me and me alone) and I love it all the same. (also bajillion thanks to janine for this one heh she is to blame for most of my kghn madness)

over the edge (of all our knowings): hunter x hunter, killugon, 13k

okay this one almost went to my other killugon fic again bc everything I write is so self-indulgent but!! this fic is probably one of the few fics that I set out to write very intentionally? that sounds weird, hmm how to explain. I tend to write fic mostly to let out Emotions but tbh it’s so much easier and way more fun for me to do that through reading other people’s works--less work for me to read abt my faves than to write them, after all! so most of what’s on my profile before this fic is exactly that: I sat down at like one in the morning with my notebook and fever-dream scribbled out a oneshot that I spent maybe the next two or three days typing up, reading over once, and then yeeting it up onto the archive. but not with this fic! I had already written my Vent fic for the boys in question, but my goals with this fic were more deliberately geared towards examining and changing up my approach to writing: 1) I really wanted to explore gon after the world tree and what his healing might look like, but gon is Really Hard for me to write (the boy is so!! ARGHSLKDFJ). So: deeply inhabiting unfamiliar character pov practice. Asking myself, after every single line of dialogue and event and inner monologue, how this character would react and why. How will this impact their next action? How will it impact their relationship with this other character? How about this? and this? and so on and so forth 2) I wanted to find a balance with my metaphors on both a sentence by sentence and an overarching basis (I tend to just go for the first--I can’t help it I love purple-y prose jslkdfj). 3) Time!! I also went a lot slower with this one. Every night for over a month, writing a little bit at a time in my notebook. And I found that going slower...is actually really nice? Takes a lot of the stress away. tldr; this fic was basically one long exercise in me examining my writing (also ngl my creative writing professor’s feedback on my work for class really kickstarted this LOL) and boy oh boy was it satisfying to see it posted when I finished. I learned a lot! Also I got some of the kindest comments that made me tear up, which was so wonderful. god this got long okay moving on.

your heart, bright heart: natsume yuujinchou, tanunatsu & gen, 7k

after over a year of quarantine I’ve read more fic than I ever have in my LIFE and I have figured some stuff out about what makes me go absolutely bonkers, writing-wise. this fic was an attempt, after several months of reading literally hundreds of fics across dozens of fandoms and relationships and pairings (like geeze! hxh, run with the wind, hq, yuri on ice, the great pretender, ouran highschool host club, snk, mdzs, final fantasy xv, and yes natsuyuu too LOL), an attempt at making myself go bonkers, if you will. and I still can’t quite put my finger on what it IS but I know it has something to do with the naming of things. like an author will Name a Thing, very specifically, whether it is an action or a character thought or something very simple about the environment--and that something speaks volumes about the character and their relationships and the core themes of the series and it’s like. it’s like there’s a moment of understanding between that character and the reader, an oh! I know what that means. it’s wonderful and I’m butchering the explanation here but anyway. I still have no idea how to do this myself yet but goddammit I’m gonna get there one day. This fic was my first attempt in the Naming of Things. idk if there are any oh! moments in it myself, but natsuyuu is the perfect series for the kind of quiet that I think you need for those small moments.

holy SHIT this got long uh. if you’ve made it this far--thank you?? this was also useful for me to articulate what the hell I’m doing in hamsterland. Recently a visiting poet came to one of my classes at university and talked about language-making as a physical art. Language has a physical existence, she said; it leaves the body and enters another and causes a physical reaction in both speaker and listener. She talked about how writers are creators of physical things, and how writing is mostly thinking before the creating. The physicality of language. To say it made me lose my marbles is an understatement!! tldr; there’s so much inspiration everywhere, and I wanna write more!!! So I’m gonna!!

#tag game #rambling #my fic

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oliviaischillin1204 · 5 years

Text

roman’s experiment

Pairings: Platonic Royality, Platonic Logince, Platonic Prinxiety (none of them interact w each other except roman but everything can be LAMP if u believe)

Word Count: 3,498

inspired by (and directly stolen from) (jk jk i love you) this post by @ssm0lb34n which. is VERY good y’all. i was just going to comment on their post but then this hit 1.5K and i said “hm maybe not”. anyways that’s it love u mwah

also i didn’t realize til i was almost done that, thematically and storywise, tis very similar to ‘music to my ears’, but. it’s a good formula lmao (although i got hella carried away again lmao. idk if it’s bc it was the last pairing or bc i am prinxiety trash, but anything prinxiety is just gonna end up being twice as long as the others and i’m just gonna have to be ok with that)

Roman glanced curiously as his hands. He had been playing around with his appearance in the Imagination, and had somehow accidentally given himself long nails. He flexed his fingers, wiggling them back and forth. It felt kinda weird, but he decided they weren’t that bad. Especially, he realized suddenly, because of how useful they could be in certain... situations.

He paused, smirking to himself. Oh, this could be fun.

“Hey, Padre!”

Patton looked over his shoulder to see Roman standing behind the couch.

“Hey, Ro!” He responded with a smile. “What’re you doing back there?”

“I had an idea,” Roman replied. “Would you care to be my guinea pig?”

Patton’s grin brightened. “Of course! What do I do?”

“Right now, nothing. Just sit there and stay still. Okay? No moving.”

Patton quirked his head a little, but he nodded. “Alright, here I go!”

He turned and faced forward, scrunching his face in concentration. Roman was silent for a few seconds, and the longer he waited, the more Patton wanted to squirm.

Finally Patton had to speak up. “Am I doing it right, Ro-oman!”

Patton cut himself off with a gasp at the feeling of… something drawing slow circles on his upper back. He tensed, grabbing his legs as a couple giggles escaped his mouth.

“Ro-Roman, what is thahahat?”

Roman didn’t answer, just hummed playfully. Patton was about to ask again when the senstions moved from the top of his back to lightly scraping over his shoulderblades, reaching the back of his ribs and scratching up and down relentlessly.

Patton laughed outright, jerking forward in an attempt to escape the tickly feeling, but the tickles just followed him, ruthlessly not deviating from that one little spot where his waistline met his back. He brought his arms up against his chest, uselessly clenching and unclenching his fists.

“Better keep still, Patton,” Roman sang. “Otherwise I’ll have to start my experiment all over again!”

But Patton couldn’t stop squirming now if he tried, throwing his body left and right as his laughter increased in volume.

“Ah! Rohoman, no!” Patton squealed. “That’s not fahahair!”

The tickly feelings left the back of his sides (thank GOD) before returning to his shoulder blades (oh, come ON!). Patton felt several different pokey things begin to dig in all around those sensitive bones, spidering over his left shoulder blade while clawing in circles around his right.

Patton couldn’t help the shocked laughter that burst from his lips. “ROMAN! NO! NO-O, NO, NO NO NO!”

He threw himself backwards, slamming his back against the couch cushions, but all that did was pin Roman’s evil hands behind him. The tickles seemed to intensify even more, which he didn’t even think was possible.

Patton barely heard Roman chuckle over his own laughter. “You gotta free my hands, Pops! If they can’t escape, they’ll just keep tickling and tickling and tickling…”

Patton screamed, throwing himself forward yet again, this time rolling all the way to the floor to escape the sensations at last. He laid there, taking greedy breaths as he tried to make his back stop tingling.

“Whahahat was that, Ro?” He asked through his lingering giggles, catching the creative side’s eye over the back of the couch.

Roman just smiled and held up his hands, showing off his unusually long nails. Patton’s eyes widened.

“That’s all it was? Just your nails?”

Roman nodded, coming around the couch to help the paternal side of the ground. “How did it feel?”

“Oh, my gosh, Ro,” Patton replied, still a little breathless, “that tickled like crazy! I thought I was gonna lose my mind!”

Roman quirked an eyebrow. “And imagine what could’ve happened if I had gone for your neck, or your ears, or-”

“No!” Patton exclaimed, covering his ears and scrunching his neck defensively. Roman burst out laughing.

“Don’t worry, Padre, I’m done with you. For now,” he added sweetly, causing Patton to giggle lightly in nervous anticipation.

“I’m off to find my next guinea pig.”

He didn’t have to look very far.

Roman passed Patton’s bedroom open bedroom door, coming to the next closed door in the hallway: Logan’s room.

He rapped his knuckles on the door and promptly hid his hands behind his back. “Logan!”

No answer. Roman bounced on his heels.

“Yo, Teach! Open up!”

Still nothing.

“Logan! I need your help with an experiment!“

Immediately the door swung open. “Hello, Roman. How may I help you?”

Roman grinned. “I’ll tell you how you can help me.” He pulled his hands out from behind his back, wiggling his clawed fingers menancingly.

“You can start laughing!”

Roman waited for Logan to react with fear, or excitement, or… well. Any reaction, really.

Instead, Logan raised a single eyebrow. “Why would I be laughing?”

Roman paused. “Because I’m going to tickle you.”

Logan’s brow furrowed. “Ah. I see. No, thank you.”

He went to shut the door in Roman’s face, but the creative side held it open.

“Come on, Specs! It’ll be fun.”

“I do not see how forcefully stimulating my nerve endings would be fun,” Logan replied, returning to where he had been reclining on his bed. “I was having a perfectly satisfactory afternoon, and I wish to continue it now.”

Roman moved to stand the foot of Logan’s bed. “Logan,” he whined. “I wanna try tickling you with my new nails! Please?”

Logan sighed, crossing one leg over another as he picked up the book on his bedside table. “Do whatever you want, but please don’t bother me.”

He opened his book to the bookmarked page without another word.

The creative side pouted. It wouldn’t be any fun if Logan wasn’t going to play along. He let his gaze drift around, until he caught sight of Logan’s socked feet near the end of his bed.

Roman felt himself begin to smile as the gears turned in his head. He knew how to make it fun.

He quietly knelt down, leaning his elbows on the end of Logan’s mattress. The logical side did not react, although whether he was absorbed in his book or simply ignoring Roman, he couldn’t be sure.

He stayed there for a few seconds, not doing anything, before lifting one finger and dragging the sharpened nail slowly down Logan’s foot.

He watched the serious side for any indication that he should stop. He didn’t want Logan to actually get mad at him, after all. But Roman was surprised to find that there was pretty much no reaction, except-

Except his fingers tightened slightly where they held the book. Roman grinned widely. Bingo.

He repeated the motion, this time with one nail on each foot, pressing not hard enough to hurt, but certainly hard enough to send tickly sensations through Logan’s socks.

He heard the other side inhale just a little to quickly, exhale a little too forcefully for it to be natural. But he still didn’t say anything.

Roman repeated these little motions for a while longer before he sighed. “I guess this isn’t working, because you’re clearly not ticklish,” he admitted with a fake frown. Logan cleared his throat.

“Clearly,” he replied, although there was a tremor in his voice.

“Well, since you’re not ticklish… and since you haven’t asked me to stop…” Roman said, relishing in the way Logan’s eyes widened when he realized his mistake, “You wouldn’t mind if I continued? You know, for my experiment?”

Logan opened his mouth to respond, but immediately slammed it shut again when Roman began focusing all of his attention on the balls of his feet, scratching his nails roughly to really make the tickles unbearable.

Roman leaned back with a smug look on his face. Oh, this was delightful. Logan was blushing, a rare sight on the normally stoic side. He was biting his bottom lip fiercely, clearly doing everything in his power not to laugh, but there was no hiding that wobbly smile on his face.

“You, okay, Logan?” Roman asked, lacing his voice with faux-concern. “You look a little funny.”

“I am fi- mmph!” Logan clamped his lips shut again, his smile fully dominating his face. Maybe it had something to do with the way Roman had just dug his fingers right underneath his toes.

“Are you sure?” Roman asked. “You seem to be having trouble talking- not that I’m complaining.” He smirked up at Logan from his position by his feet. The logical side refused to look at him, keeping his gaze solely on the book that Roman was sure he hasn’t read a word of in the past five minutes.

“Is this the way to shut you up, Lo?” He teased, watching in glee as the blush on Logan’s face deepened. “Just some itty bitty scratchies right under the teacher’s ticklish toesies? Aw, but it surely can’t tickle, because you’re not ticklish, right?”

The baby talk pushed him over: Logan finally broke into desperate giggles. He tried to pull his feet away, but Roman was too quick, pinning both ankles with one hand while he used the other to rake his fingers down both of Logan’s soles at the same time.

“Ro-man!” The word barely escaped Logan’s mouth before he succumbed to full belly laughter, fruitlessly jerking his legs in Roman’s grasp.

The creative side merely laughed. “I wonder what these nails would feel like on your bare feet-”

“NO!” Logan screamed, the word ripping through his throat as he finally yanked his feet out of Roman’s clutches.

Roman couldn’t stop the laughter that exploded from him even if he wanted to. Logan’s face, flustered and embarrassed and slightly murderous, was just too funny.

When he finally regained his breath, he smiled cheekily at Logan. “Wasn’t that so much fun, Logi Bear?”

Logan scowled at the childish nickname, but his lips still threatened to curl up at the edges.

“You are atrocious,” he muttered. Roman raised an eyebrow and reached for his feet.

“I could keep going-”

Logan pulled his knees up to his chest. “Please don’t.”

Roman smiled at the panic in Logan’s voice. “Alright, alright. I’ll leave you alone.”

As he left Logan’s room, shutting the door behind him, he grinned. These nails were a better idea than he’d ever expected.

Roman retreated to his room after what he considered a very successful day. His experiences with Patton and Logan definitely proved to him how strategic long nails could be. The one thing that somewhat dimmed his excitement at his discovery was the fact that there was one side in particular that he hadn’t gotten a chance to use them on: Virgil.

He had tried to look for the anxious side after he was done with Logan, but he was nowhere to be found. In fact, they didn’t see him at all for the rest of the evening. Patton had been a little concerned (Roman was as well, but he’d never admit it), but Logan assured them that it was perfectly normal behavior for Virgil to spend a prolonged amount of time by himself, and that there was nothing to worry about.

Roman was comforted by Logan’s assurance that everything would be okay (although, again, he’d never admit it), but he was a little disappointed the grumpy side hadn’t gotten to be a part of Roman’s experiment. However, Roman knew it wasn’t the end of the world. Virgil didn’t always want to play in the same way Roman played with the others, and that was totally fine.

Besides, Roman thought as he examined his nails, they weren’t just good for tickling, and in fact they looked rather good on him anyway. As he reclined in his bed, Roman pulled out a nail file, making sure to maintain his nails to their ideal shape and length.

He hadn’t been filing his nails for very long before his door was opened rather forcefully. He looked up in surprise to find Virgil standing in the doorway.

“Um, knock much?” He asked, frowning at the intrusion.

“Nah,” Virgil replied, uncharacteristically flippant. He walked over to Roman’s bed and flopped next to the creative side, jostling him quite badly.

Roman watched him with a confused look on his face. “Can I help you?”

“Nah,” Virgil repeated. Roman’s eyes narrowed.

“Did you come in here just to be a nuisance?”

“Yup.”

Roman sighed, bringing his attention back to his nails. “Well, keep still. I’m trying to work on something here.”

There was no snarky response from the other side, which was suspicious. Roman shot another glance at Virgil, only to realize that his focus was solely on Roman’s hands.

He glanced down at his nails, smiling a little as he wiggled them. “You like ‘em? I’ve had ‘em like this all day.”

Virgil snapped out of his little trance, shooting an irritated look at Roman. “Does that have anything to do with why Patton and Logan were screaming so loudly earlier?”

Roman smirked, fondly remembering the shenanigans from that afternoon. “Afraid so. I hope we didn’t bother you.”

“You did,” Virgil replied bluntly. “You interrupted my naps. I couldn’t sleep all day.”

If Logan were here, he’d probably lecture Virgil about the importance of a regular sleep cycle and how detrimental mid-day naps can be, but Roman was not Logan. Instead, he tried to summon his inner Patton.

“I’m sorry, Virgil,” he said genuinely, “I didn’t realize we were being so loud-”

“It’s fine,” Virgil interjected. “You can make it up to me by letting me sleep in here.”

With that, he crawled right over Roman’s legs, attempting to... lay on top of him, for some reason?

“What the-? Get off!” Roman insisted, grabbing the emo side. The two wrestled for a few moments before Virgil ended up lying on his back in Roman’s lap.

“Virgil!” Roman wasn’t really angry, just highly confused. “What are you doing? Go sleep in your own bed!”

“Shh,” Virgil insisted, closing his eyes and folding his arms across his chest. “Let me sleep.”

Roman was almost at a loss for words. Virgil was normally so closed off, reserved, and totally aversive to unnecessary or intimate touch. Yet here he was, laying right across Roman’s lap for absolutely no reason. He and Roman bickered often, but Virgil was never this outwardly and intentionally annoying.

... Well. There was one reason that would make Virgil act like this.

Roman’s eyes flicked to the file in his hand, then to Virgil’s stomach, and back again. His eyes widened, and he smirked. Oh, he knew what Virgil was doing. But if he thought it was gonna be that easy, he had another thing coming.

“Okay, then,” Roman replied, and went back to filing his nails.

It was quiet for a bit, just the light shuffling sound of Roman’s file. Out of his peripheral, he saw Virgil frown at the lack of attention.

Suddenly he heaved a great sigh, wiggling around in Roman’s lap and jostling his hands yet again. A little bit of his hoodie and t-shirt pulled up, revealing a small stretch of tummy.

“Virgil, can you stop moving? I’m busy.”

Roman made sure to keep his face neutral at Virgil’s petulant look, but the emo side said nothing as Roman returned to the task at hand (pun intended).

This continued for several minutes, Virgil shifting around in increasingly obvious ways, while Roman ignored him in favor of meticulously perfecting his nails, giving the task much more attention than he normally would.

By the time he finished, almost Virgil’s entire tummy was exposed, but Roman had not done a single thing about it. Instead, he let the anxious side become more and more desperate, knowing that the anticipation was making him even more sensitive than he already was.

As Roman set aside the nail file, he noticed that there was a bit of nail dust left on his fingers. He grinned to himself, returning his hands to their place over Virgil’s torso before taking a deep breath and blowing the dust away, making sure that the stream of breath hit Virgil’s tummy.

The emo side jerked under him, his sensitivity through the roof after waiting so long for Roman to tickle him. He looked at Roman with wide eyes, but the creative side just smiled sweetly.

“Oh, sorry, Virgil. I didn’t mean to bother you, I know you’re trying to sleep. In fact, let me get out of your way, I don’t want to be a distraction-” He began to manuever himself out from underneath Virgil, but the emo side grabbed his sleeve rather forcefully.

“Roman...” Virgil pleaded, his voice low and slightly strained. Roman stopped, giving him an innocent smile.

“Yes, Virgil?”

The emo side didn’t respond, just folded his arms across his face and groaned.

“Sorry, Virgil, what was that?” Roman asked, sitting back fully.

Virgil muttered something unintelligible, his voice muffled by his hoodie.

Roman tsked. “Virge, you know you gotta speak loud and clear for me. Otherwise there’s nothing I can do to help you.”

Knowing that Virgil wasn’t looking at him, Roman hovered both of his freshly manicured hands over Virgil’s tummy.

“So I’m gonna ask you one more time: what do you want, Virgil?”

Virgil groaned even louder, slamming his arms down. “I want you to tickle me!”

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Virgil’s gaze flicked from Roman’s face to his hands, now mere inches away from his vulnerable tummy. He gasped, sucking in his gut, but Roman only laughed.

“Oh? That’s it?” He responded, wiggling his fingers as he slowly edged them toward Virgil’s tummy. “Well, why didn’t you just say so?”

“Wait wait wait wahahait,” Virgil begged, giggles already coming out of his mouth.

Roman hummed in consideration. “No, I think you’ve waited long enough.”

With that, he touched down on Virgil’s skin, drawing delicate designs with his newly-filed fingernails.

There was no hiding his laughter this time; Virgil was already way too keyed up to even try that. Instead he broke into nervous giggles immediately, a steady stream of laughter that increased in volume whenever Roman moved too close to certain spots- like his bottom rib, for instance. Or just above his naval. Or the dip of his hipbone. Or halfway down his side. Or- well. Let’s just say there were a lot of ticklish little spots for Roman to work with.

“Aw, Virgil,” Roman cooed as the usually grumpy side laughed his head off, half-curled up in Roman’s lap, “I had no idea you’d like my nails so much! I wish I’d known sooner- we could’ve played together like this all day long.” He made sure to lace his words with as much sugar as he could muster, knowing that the one thing that made Virgil more ticklish, was talking about his ticklishness.

Well, Roman thought as he remembered how desperate the emo side had been for some tummy tickles, who was he to deny his good friend Virgil what he so obviously desired?

“Now Virgil, this is an experiment, you know,” he continued as if Virgil wasn’t giggling uncontrollably. “So I need to know, what tickles more? When I do this-”

He spidered his nails on either side of Virgil’s belly button, causing him to squeal.

“-Or this?” He finished, slowly raking his nails down Virgil’s ribs. Virgil’s laughter turned into gasps as he struggled not to pull Roman’s hands away from his belly, instead waving his arms rather uselessly around him.

“N- no- Ro- I cahahahan’t!” He cried, his wide smile lighting up the room.

Roman laughed. “Didn’t you ask for this, stormcloud? Isn’t this what you wanted?” Virgil couldn’t answer through his laughter, but the blush across his cheeks told Roman that he was right. He redirected his hands yet again, one hand raking his nails across where Virgil’s side met his tummy, and the other dipping it pointer finger inside Virgil’s bellybutton.

“Ahahahahaha- Roman!” Virgil shrieked, kicking his legs as his peals of laughter left him.

Roman hummed. “If it’s such a problem, then move away.” He did slow his tickle attack, just in case Virgil really wanted to stop, but the other side made no move to escape.

“Sh- shuhuhut up!” He spit through his giggles, which grew back into loud laughter as Roman resumed his fierce tickles.

“No one tells me to shut up!” Roman declared, not holding back as he scratched and skittered his nails all over Virgil’s tummy, sides, and hips. “Prepare for death!”

Death was right; by the time Virgil batted Roman’s arm, giving the signal to stop, he was nearly out of breath altogether. Roman rubbed away the tingles with the palm of his hand, making sure to keep his nails from accidentally grazing Virgil’s skin.

“So? What do you think?” He asked Virgil once he caught his breath.

He shrugged, looking up at Roman with a content expression. “It was your experiment. What do you think?”

Roman stopped and pondered, before smiling. “I think these nails will definitely come in handy around here.”

#sanders sides tickling #tickle fic #tickle community #ler!roman #lee!patton #lee!logan #lee!virgil #roman's experiment #my writing #my posts #sanders sides

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magnaflourious-nerdity · 4 years

Text

But Through Darkened Glasses

(You Need Chaos in Your Soul)

" And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you."

There was a prompt on some Halloween themed fandom challenge for October. Monday's was 'Black Cat' and for whatever reason. This is what happened. Bc im just going with that kind of thing lately I guess, I decided to spit it out here. I didn't beta this thoroughly enough I guarantee bc im lazy and also the fandom is like 20 people big, and generally full of forgiving, lovely, content starved ppl. The last point I am extrapolating from my own experiences of being in the fandom, haha.

_____

It's weird, he thinks, twining in and out of the fence post he's been following for the past few minutes, trying to get his bearings now that he's been saddled with twice his accustomed amount of limbs. It's weird that I'm not more freaked out about this. He pauses, grooms himself briefly and crosses the street under the lamp light. The bulb blows out halfway across. He doesn't even jump this time. Maybe it's a bonus of having nine lives, you don't worry so much about one or two practice runs. His ears twitch minutely as the wind shifts and brings a low, buzzing, sound sighing through the fronds of the willow at the edge of his yard. They're even more sensitive now that he's a cat- the ears that is -twitching at the slightest whisper of a sound in the night.

He doesn't even bother to slow his pace as he hops the fence and passes through his own back yard, simply fixing jade eyes on the window he knows to be Becky's, turning them away again with the knowledge that there's no way she'd be at home tonight. Not on a night where she's basically been given free reign to go full-tilt feral social-climber on every party in town. There's no gaining entrance into his lair in his current state (nor is he particularly keen to meet Rasputin face to face right now either) and his parents are out of the question. Can't guarantee his dad won't be too drunk this late on a Halloween to tie a bottle rocket to his newly acquired tail. Don't really care to see him if he's sober either. Or just in general

Instead, His attention remains fixed on the sound he'd heard in the distance before, as he cuts across lawns and ducks down the well trod neighborhood backalleys, avoiding any heards of desperate, last-minute, trick-or-treaters or gaggles of drunken party-goers he catches wind of.

He's at the point of shrugging off the weird sounds he's been hearing as the result of some sort of particularly lumbering rodent in the underbrush, turning his attention instead to the little flashes of lamp light glinting off of abandoned candy wrappers. Batting at one every now and then non-committaly. It wasn't as exciting as one might think, being a cat. Kind of a snooze even, as far as curses went.

Well, at least it had the wherewithal and the courtesy as a curse to take aesthetics into account.

He was definitely the kind of cat his father would have chased off the lawn with a bb gun, if it had showed up at their door looking for food. He examines the pitch-colored shroud of his newly acquired fur as best as he can, glad- in a removed sort of way -that at least he was a proper Halloween cat. Scruffy and mysterious, not one of those opulently fluffy, pearl-colored, fancy-feast models.

There was dignity in being a black cat on Halloween. There was style! There was pinache!

A whisper, a low hum beyond his perception.

There were secrets. There was power. All of it his for the taking now that the opportunity had been unwittingly granted.

He'd read a legend once- in one of his massive, dusty, volumes on the lore of shapeshifters, dating back to antiquity -that on Halloween, black cats were at the most transient state of their existances. They could- if they could find the right chinks in reality's armour, where the space between things overlapped and folded in on itself like challah -use the threads surrounding and connecting the worlds to perform any number of impossibilities. Assume other forms, be anywhere at once, sew prosperity or discord at a whim.

It was said that those creatures most in-tune with with the pathways could even travel between them all. All of the worlds bookended against and, at certain times like tonight, overlapping their own. Those most-adept cats could slip in and out of dimensions as easily as a shadow slips under doorway.

I mean, I guess now is as good a time as any to test that hypothesis, Merton mused, slit-pupils zeroing in on the slightest movement down the street from Tommy's house, which was naturally where his slinky, purposeful, wandering had taken him. There were no other thoughts to it really. After all. He and Tommy were each other's lifeboats, lashed together to weather whatever bullshit came their way, side-by-side.

At least where finding ourselves on the wrong side of dark magic is concerned. He amended to himself. There was no one else here so he wasn't sure why he even bothered really.

He hesitated silently under a street lamp. The crackling sound of the light flickering above him sounded grating to his sensitive ears. He could understand Tommy's super-hearing-based woes a lot better now at least. With his gaze shifting uneasily between the safety of Tommy's house- the safety of his company, and of his unconditional presence, and of his unwavering dedication to Merton's protection despite the workload that it was turning out to be- and back to the subtle, but suddenly noticeable undulations of the shadows at the farthest edge of the neighbor's hedgerows. An opportunity had manifested itself.

Almost neigh-imperceptably, something shifts in the air, pervading every cranny of the now darkened street.

A moment of choice for Merton. The unexplored possibilities mount in his head, weighed against the cons of breaching the utterly unknowable. He is bewitched, rooted to the spot. Eve on the precipice of the apple, by virtue of both temptation and fear.

He'd gone to more extreme means, on less intel, for far more ridiculous pursuits. This was just a short walk to the end of the street. But he hesitates nonetheless, his own mind overriding the detatched curiosity that grew into him- into his bones -the longer he was attached to this form. He feels the pull of the interstitial static of the spaces between space, it hums and pulses gently along to the music of the spheres. Soft, inviting, unknowable.

He thinks of slipping between the phases of reality. Could he regain his body on his own that way? Could he pick a better one? He pads gently forward, going only a few, cautious steps, questioning himself all the while and trying to brace his senses against the hypnotic call of whatever the netherspace was wordlessly offering to him. He is waiting to see when the time will be right. If it will be at all. What will come of it.

I can fix this on my own for once, right now. He tells himself . I can learn so much. About everything. I can fix so much if I can just...

The pull of the place between is Urgent. Heady. Disorienting, he finds. It beckons him more insistently with each passing moment, and every sound made in the darkness is a soft, sighing, call to action. To adventure. To satisfy all of his human spawned, feline fueled, curiosities alike.

But another sound, this one from inside Tommy's house- still nearly right next to him -severs the tie. It's Tommy's laugh, loud and sharp and as intimately familiar to him as a siren song of his own.

Tommy. His tail lifts up into the air of its own accord as he starts to correct course towards the tree in Tommy's back yard, one which frequent exposure to the Dawkin's household tells him leads to the- usually wide open -2nd floor window landing of his best friend's bedroom.

The whispering from behind him grows more urgent as he turns away from it. Easier to discern from the normal night-music of Pleasantville. It grows in pitch, insistent, like a vulture pecking at the stripped down bones of its roadside carrion.

Despite his growing unease, Merton still feels the gravity of the thin places of the world eying him up, clawing at him. He realizes, with detached horror, that if the last few minutes are anything to go by, in this form, he isn't even sure if he can resist it at all. Much less how long his moment of self possession can last.

Merton, as a cat, finds himself to be mostly a loose collection of animal instincts and a haphazard jigsaw of the the bits of the world that don't seem to want to fit right with himself; all of this sewed up into a body thats more suggestive of physical form than equitable to one. He doesn't know how to even begin to navigate the puzzle of resisting the undertow of the universe as it digs its fingers solidly into the newest and most vulnerable parts of his shared but singular conciousness. The shadows in the hedgerows, the ripples of what's underneath the idea of them, begin to pulsate. They flail. Or it flails, because he can't tell the collective from the distinct anymore, can only watch with awe as the patch of space and time it is currently occupying shimmers, and cracks, and grows, and reaches. Merton swears he can hear it SCREAMING in the back of his head. At the place where his thoughts dissolve into notions less definable by words, and transform instead into a swirling mass of impulses conducted by the now-shrill trans-dimensional, thrumming of the universe's insistent, staticky back beat.

He sees something solidifying in the ectoplasm of that open sore in the flesh of the world. Something besides the thrashing, churning, cult of tendrils reaching out from the places they can squeeze through in the cracks. The sight makes every single one of his hairs stand on end. Which is something, given he has a significant deal more of them now than he usually would. But there is no mistaking what he is seeing being melded together in the eye of that widening miasma. A hand claws its way past the meshing, roiling tentacles of that dark expanse. Pulling itself forward into the physical, out of the theoretical. A set of shoulders struggles past, dragging the other arm in to being along side it, pale and wan. There is a pause, one last still moment before, with repulsion thrumming through every part of him, he focuses on the well of dark magics still spewing forth parts of the creature. He sees the top of a head breech through the dimensional weak spot. The head turns in Merton's direction at his displeased hisses of fright. Merton locks up in immediate, gut-wrenching, horror when the creature gazes back at him, wearing his own face.

‐-----

I'll probably never continue this or even do anything at all w it,, but it was fun! In case you were wondering about the subtext between tommy and merton, yes. gay. Also whats dialague don't know her

#gothicwolf #halloween prompt #writing challenge #tommy dawkins #merton dingle

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rimalupin · 4 years

Audio

Concept: After a meeting with the Savior, Ray - who has now transformed into “Saeran” - struggles with his duties to Mint Eye and his feelings for MC. Loosely based on/inspired by this moment below:

A/N: GUESS WHO’S BACK WITH A SONG PARODY THAT NO ONE ASKED FOR. And this time, it’s kind of an outdated one, LOL. 😅 I wrote this song back when Ray’s route was released (that was like 2 years ago as of now!!), but I hadn’t had time to record it until now because I’ve been struggling with editing the audio (sorry for any weird volume/mic issues y’all might hear btw) and quarantine has given me nothing better to do so here i am asdfghjkl. I’ve actually been revisiting song spoofs I’ve written in the past and seeing if they need more editing or if they’re good enough to record. Ofc this one made the cut bc “I Won’t Say I’m In Love” is one of my fave Disney songs (it’s a frikin BOP y’all), plus I think this song fits Ray/Saeran’s inner thoughts perfectly when it comes to him trying to push away/deny his feelings for MC while working for Mint Eye.

Lyrics below the cut! This is just for funsies, so thanks for jamming out with me for a bit, hehe~! 😊

LYRICS

[Verse 1: Saeran] I feel myself becoming stronger Guess the elixir was worth it Weakness won’t lead me to salvation Ray’s in the past, now your time’s up, princess [Bridge 1: Chorus (Saeran)] Who d'you think you're kiddin'? She’s the earth and heaven to ya Try to keep it hidden Honey, we can see right through ya (Oh nooo) Boy, you can't conceal it We know how you feel And how you think of her [Chorus 1: Saeran + Chorus] No chance, no way I won't say it, no, no (You swoon, you sigh) (Why deny it? Uh-oh) It’s all just play There’s no way I'm in love [Verse 2: Saeran] Though I’ve exposed her to this torture I’ll feel more empty if she’s kicked out My head is pounding - Oh the pain, it hurts! Drink more elixir to drive weak Ray out

[Bridge 2: Chorus (Saeran)] (Ohhh...) You keep on denying Who you are and how you're feeling Baby, we're not buying Hon, we saw you hit the ceiling (Oh, no) Face it like a grown-up When you gonna own up That you got, got, got it bad? [Chorus 2: Saeran + Chorus] No chance, no way I won't say it, no, no (Give up, give in) (Let her in; you're in love) It’s all a game

There's no way I'm in love (Heed our advice) (Paradise is your love!) The weak boy’s gone. I won't say it! But if he’s not, would I say it? (There’s time to change!) (It's okay, you're in love)

Ohhh... After all I’ve done I really don’t deserve her love (Shoo do, shoo do, shoo do, shoo do) (Sha-la-la-la la la, ahh)

#this was actually really fun to write and record #it helps that the og song is such a bop~#anyway i haven't done this in a while so i'll just plop this here lol #also i think this song was my excuse to portray ray/saeran as a disney prince hehe~#mystic messenger #mysme #ray route #mysme ray #mysme saeran #mysme saeran choi #saeran choi #mysme unknown #mint eye #song parody #disney song parody #i won't say i'm in love #song parody by me #song edit by me #rima sings

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freevoidman · 4 years

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Haven’t posted one of THESE in a while, but I’m actually interested in how Volume 8 turns out. I want it to air later, but I can still be genuinely curious as to how the hell they’re going to pull this off.

These are a mix of predictions, wishful thinking, and slightly cynical thoughts about how RWBY is handled, both in-show and out (you can all see that art contest box up there). Admittedly, some of these things could maybe be guaranteed, but some are just hopes. I did my best to not include any speculation based on that brief preview clip shown at Comic-con (I think it was shown there? The thirty second preview of the kids on the hoverbikes), but like I said, most of these are either insubstantial and just hopes, or they’re predicted based on how RWBY has handled its past volumes.

I do think that RWBY is improving with each volume, but there are still plenty of hiccups they need to iron out. I’ve tagged this as both ‘rwby’ and ‘rwde’ because... well, some of these are definitely edging into ‘rwde’ territory, but it’s also a bingo card. I’ll be tagging this with “RWBY V8 BINGO” if you want to blacklist this!

Other additional, just as likely but slightly ridiculous/salty predictions below the cut that I wanted to add but didn’t, with the reasons for why in brackets and bolded!

Cordovin appears in some fashion (in person, over transmission, or is mentioned), possibly with the two guards.

[Highly unlikely as there would be no reason to bring her back in-show. Plus, her inclusion would feel weird, and I don’t want to see her again...]

Something happens to Amity Arena (either destroyed or fully powered)

[I figured this was basically a guarantee “catch-all” and I had other, more interesting predictions to add.]

Salem gets one of the Relics--either the lantern or the staff.

[Basically confirmed in the trailers. At the time of making the card, the trailers weren’t out, but I considered this too much of a guarantee to add back them, too]

We finally see the fucking staff of creation.

[Honestly still possible! I feel like it’d be better if we didn’t, though, as that would possibly mean the cast would carry around two relics.]

Jinn’s final question is used (potentially for Ironwood backstory?)

[Again more-or-less confirmed by trailers that Jinn’s final question will be asked. I doubt it’d be for Ironwood backstory now, though]

New semi-important, named-in-show character appears out of nowhere!

[Another “guarantee catch-all” prediction. There’s at least one new named character every volume and, though unlikely given V8′s plot, I didn’t want to add it]

Team FNKI has some relevance in this volume

[Somewhat unlikely? I can’t see how, but I doubt nothing at this point.]

Winter angst.

[Somewhat guaranteed with Ironwood on the warpath and mad about losing the Maiden.]

Whitley angst.

[I hope to god not mother fucker but I would not be surprised.]

Jacques Schnee talks shit to Qrow and Robyn in prison, specifically Robyn, because holy shit she deserves it.

[I honestly still really want this to happen??? God it would be so cathartic with how dumb Robyn was in the finale, but it would feel a bit unwarranted if Jacques specifically knew what happened.]

Tyrian dies OR is the one who tells Salem what’s going down.

[I... can’t remember what I meant by “what’s going down” but yeah, honestly wouldn’t be surprised if death flags were waving for Tyrian. However, he’s the only villain I somewhat enjoy so I want him to stick around]

The only way to kill the Whale Grimm is by getting eaten by the Whale Grimm and killing it from the inside.

[Highly probable, I just had other things to add. Plus, if this isn’t the case, I’m honestly willing to believe that the whale is either unkillable or only killable through SEW powers.]

Ironwood is deposed and Robyn takes his place

[I don’t want this to happen but if it does I want the bragging rights of saying “I called it,” even if I didn’t put it on the bingo card.]

Adam and/or the White Fang get brought up in some capacity (I’m also gonna define “White Fang” here as also including Blake’s Parents and Ilia just because).

[Hahaha, here I am hoping that the WF will get mentioned even though the writers are doing their best to get away from it! Still, it’s possible, if only for Blake angst.]

Sun is mentioned.

[Unlikely, he probably won’t be mentioned until they go to Vacuo for some inane reason.]

CFVY is mentioned (possible tie-in to the books?).

[Unlikely for the same reasons as Sun. They are firmly locked away in side-content land in the never-ending mystery of Vacuo.]

A Macguffin that is not the relic(s) is used to get rid of the Grimm invading (this could be anything from Ruby’s silver eyes to a secret giant laser that Ironwood was ALSO constructing without anyone knowing or something.)

[Once more, another catch all considering I believe the whale will likely be killed with SE powers. It’d piss me off if this was the case, however.]

Salem wins, gets both relics, and Atlas + Mantle fall.

[Honestly I almost regret not putting this on the card bc I want an undeniable bad ending to happen bc that’s the only way I could see the cast being developed, moving forward, and wanting to go to Vacuo.]

#RWBY V8 BINGO #rwde #rwby

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a-very-fond-farewell · 4 years

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The forbidden crack! Untamed prompts: 24/?

CLAMP AU n.3 [chengyu? yucheng? (JC/MXY) edition. don’t...question my taste bruh]: “Somewhere, sometime.”

[tw eating disorders mentioned + tw suicide mention (body sacrifice)]

[ok fam. ok. I get it. I would basically ship JC with a rock if it meant I could play with my crack AUs. but I have solid evidence for this one. I promise you.]

[so, “Kobato” from CLAMP is possibly my favorite series from them. it’s 6 volumes long, roughly 40 chapters (and I only recently found out there was an epilogue...even though it was not there in my published version of the series. bc your local cryptid did in fact buy the entire thing in the flesh, that’s how much I love it)]

[in this AU I’ll change some things for the sake of consistency, but I suggest you read it bc the hurt/comfort and pining is enjoyable...so...if you read my silly AU I’m afraid I will spoil the plot for u :( and that’s the last thing I want to do...I understand if you decide to go read the manga and skip my prompt. it’s ok, I’m fine, go and have fun ;-;]

[if you kept reading, hi :D]

[now. am I uncomfortable with certain common tropes in CLAMP’s work in general? yes. especially the age gaps between some of the characters, some of which are not adults. hence the reason behind the changes in this AU. but! the aesthetics fam. the beautiful drawings. the cute outfits. (*ﾉ▽ﾉ)

do you see these?? how cute would Mo XuanYu look in these fam?? I honestly hc him enjoying skirts and feminine outfits a whole lot, but you can imagine him with pants and they would be just as cute. my favorite one is the second from the left btw.]

(imagine Mo XuanYu like this btw and check out the fancomic by the same op! an anon suggested it to me a while ago and now I’m hooked!)

[other mangacaps bc you need visuals:

yeah. angry boy meets bby with a mission to accomplish, bonding over their inferiority complex. yep. I only love the nicest things in life. that’s me.

also look at my baby girl ;-; so cuTe]

[the title is from the ost from the anime series, “Itsuka dokoka de” (check it out!). the anime feels more cohesive than the original manga, possibly bc the pacing is handled a little bit better (since the manga was cut short and the end felt a bit sloppy, but the emotional engagement was still good). and I remember being 17 and crying like a baby when this song came in. if you don’t have time for the manga binge the anime instead! there are plot holes in both of them and the stories are different but still both very enjoyable if you like soft things and angsty vibes.]

[enjoy!]

When YanLi saw him for the first time in front of her door, at the beginning of spring, she thought XuanYu was too pretty and too young for his own good. Sitting across her on the floor, a tea set between them as he politely answered her questions, the boy couldn’t have looked older than sixteen yet he assured her he was of age and well into adulthood. Which seemed pretty difficult to assess, not with the way he dressed: cute button down, beret slightly askew on top of his pretty head and an old-looking suitcases in hand. She didn’t mention the stuffed black rabbit poking out from the front pocket of his luggage, which seemed more of a comfort thing than a reliable source of company.

Moreover, Jin Ling seemed transfixed by him, toddling his way towards their guest asking for cuddles... something her son had never done in front of strangers.

XuanYu refused to give his last name, nor did he have an ID he could show her, nor did he seem worried about how strange that was. And YanLi knew ZiXuan would have been against it, but she couldn’t leave the kid looking all over Lanling for a place to stay... so she gave him the only available room in their rundown pension.

She only hoped Jiang Cheng would be a nice neighbor and leave the kid alone. Who knew what horrors XuanYu was running away from, after all.

When XiChen heard from YanLi of her new tenant, he would have never guessed the kid to look so naive. Not in a bad way, mind you. But his smiles, for how genuine they seemed to be, looked a little bit too big. A little bit too strained not to be a distraction tactic from his part. Or maybe XiChen had lived too long surrounded by fake smiles and closed off people to not worry.

That’s probably why he gave XuanYu a job when YanLi asked him to look over the kid. More to prove himself there were still trustworthy people in the world than to give the younger man a chance. He couldn’t even pay him a full salary, not with the debt collectors breathing on his neck as he tried to run his late mother’s kindergarten.

But maybe that would have been enough for now. A starting point for something better, something new.

A-Yuan had always known the kindergarten used to be an orphanage back in the days, but now he had reached an age where doubts stuck to his head instead of being forgotten with the passing of time. Wen Qing and A-Ning were always busy -be it in the hospital or in university- and A-Yuan didn’t know if they loved him enough to keep him. Ever since granny had passed away he had wondered, day after day, when his cousins would have left him behind for good.

He was thinking about such things when he first met XuanYu, on the man’s first day on the job as a teaching assistant. A-Yuan was mulling over his sadness when XuanYu had come to his rescue, asking him what was wrong... before enthusiastically praising his cousins for working so hard after hearing they were late to take A-Yuan home. XuanYu stayed with him and they played on the swings as they waited for A-Ning to come pick him up, apologizing profusely.

On the way home, his cousin held him close and kissed his forehead as he asked him if he had had fun with the new teacher. And A-Yuan felt less doubtful afterwards.

After hearing the story from her brother, Wen Qing had made it her job to look into XuanYu and his weird approach to life in general. She took every opportunity she could grasp to spy on the younger man, lunch breaks be damned. She needed to confirm if the kid was a trust worthy person or a runaway child pretending to be older than what he actually was. Well, maybe tailing an unsuspecting young man on the streets of Lanling in scrubs and sunglasses would be considered a bit much, she could admit as much. But it was the thought that counted, no?

Her friend MianMian told her to knock it off and talk to the kid like a normal human being, but the truth was that... well, XuanYu was really too weird to be considered normal. He seldom put himself in dangerous situations without much care, such as picking up a random (and still lit) cigarette from the ground just to give it back to the person who had “accidentally dropped it”. Other times he would cross a road without looking left and right first, risking to be run over by cars at every corner. He never, never, fumbled with a phone and he frequently talked to himself... sometimes even directing his words to that creepy stuffed rabbit of his.

No thank you, Wen Qing felt safer behind light poles and crumpled newspapers held upside down. Even if that made her look sketchy as fuck.

Wen Ning made sure to arrive on time to pick A-Yuan up after that time, often chatting with XuanYu as they waited for his baby cousin to retrieve his backpack and raincoat. It was refreshing to speak with the younger man, no matter how weird he acted sometimes. Like that time A-Yuan asked him to tie his shoe-laces for him and XuanYu didn’t know how to do it. Or that time they caught the man taking a nap on the floor in the middle of the school hall. Or that time XiChen had ordered a cake for one of the kids’ birthday and XuanYu didn’t seem to know how to sing the birthday song.

Wen Ning had no place to judge, after all. But XuanYu’s smiles felt like balm on his heart. And if his sweet voice followed Wen Ning home as he bounced A-Yuan in his arms, well. Nobody needed to know that.

The last thing Meng Yao would have expected to hear that summer day when he called the kindergarten was a voice so different from XiChen’s. Startled, he had confusedly asked if the kid worked there and how so, given that the school definitely couldn’t afford to hire anyone. He ought to know. He was the debt collector.

But the kid apologized, introduced himself, and then explained XiChen had offered him a part-time job out of kindness more than out of need. The idiot. XiChen should have remembered who his money belonged to instead of taking charity cases left and right.

But when Meng Yao said as much to naive XuanYu, the other vehemently protested, surprising the debt collector with strong opinions on how he shouldn’t underestimate other people’s intelligence and kindness in the first place.

Meng Yao laughed out at that, genuinely so.

There was more to that kid XuanYu than what one would have expected.

Nie HuaiSang caught a first glimpse of the mystery man only in late summer, when XuanYu stepped into his cake shop to look at the display. His coworker MianMian seemed to recognize the younger man immediately, greeting him by saying they had a friend in common, namely Wen Qing. The kid merely tilted his head and answered he had never formerly met “Miss. Wen” and that he only knew who she was from what the woman’s younger brother had told him about her.

MianMian shrugged and smiled at him.

To which HuaiSang asked him what they could do for him and XuanYu... just... stopped working. Saying that he had wondered if he could do something for them instead. Apparently, Wen Ning had let it slip they were currently understaffed and needed a hand to deliver their sweets.

Delighted, MianMian set him to work, no matter how many times HuaiSang assured her they didn’t need to force the kid to help them... also because they didn’t actually have the means to pay him in kind. But XuanYu refused money altogether, simply asking them to let him help.

To their amusement (and horror) XuanYu didn’t know how to ride a bicycle, so he insisted on covering the deliveries by foot in the neighborhood instead.

HuaiSang called XiChen on the phone that same evening, asking him to give the kid some slack the following day. And maybe buy him some balm for blisters as well.

Jin Ling was young but he wasn’t stupid. Turning three had made him wiser, he knew as much. So he knew XuanYu was magical. He just did.

His pretty-gege talked with stuffed animals, always wore nice things, and kept in his satchel bag a vial filling up with magical candies every time he did something nice for others. A-Ling had seen it with his own eyes, that time XuanYu had put a plaster on his scrapped knee and blew on it to make the pain go away: the golden candy had appeared in the bottle out of nowhere and XuanYu had asked him to keep the secret.

And A-Ling may have been young, but he wasn’t a snitch.

No sir.

ZiXuan eventually stumbled upon their new tenant even though YanLi had tried everything in her power to prevent it. He was very displeased with her: taking a scrawny kid in, cutting his rent in half merely because he couldn’t afford to pay the room in full. Utter nonsense.

No matter how much this kid XuanYu praised A-Ling’s personality or YanLi’s cooking, no matter how much he smiled and made himself look accommodating and unthreatening. ZiXuan didn’t work pro bono even at the firm, let alone for his wife’s business.

Yet, when he asked to be let inside the kid’s room to formally discuss the terms of his contract (and tell him to pack his things and leave at the end of summer), ZiXuan was left speechless. There was no bed, no table or chairs. The fridge wasn’t humming and the AC wasn’t working. The only things he could see were the younger man’s clothes neatly folded in his open suitcase or hanging by the window to dry. No books, no snacks, no nothing.

Usually tenants brought their things in right off the bat, their stuff mailed in within a week after moving in. YanLi was very particular about it, she would have not overlooked something like that. But maybe she had been too busy with A-Ling these past few months and hadn’t noticed the kid was actually too poor to even breathe.

And now that he looked at him, XuanYu looked suspiciously skinny.

Was he sleeping on the floor? Didn’t he have covers for the colder season? Was his fridge broken, empty, or -gods forbid- purposely left with no power because the kid couldn’t afford the electricity bill?

“Do you actually live like this?”

XuanYu didn’t answer to that, but smiled anyway. It looked sinister in a way ZiXuan couldn’t explain, afraid of the things such a young man may or may not have endured in the past. And was maybe still enduring now.

The following day ZiXuan gave the kid their spare futon they bought in Japan on their honeymoon. They never had guests anyway and they could afford to pay for a tenant’s electricity bill every now and then, they weren’t poor.

Certainly YanLi would have agreed with him on the matter.

JinGy saw it. He did! He wasn’t lying! Xuan-ge was there, surrounded by darkness and shadows, looking over the children during their nap time, only a sliver of light coming from the door left ajar... casting shadows on half of his pretty face.

And he saw him reviving that stuffed black rabbit he always had on him.

The rabbit just rose on his hind legs and turned his head up and started whispering things to Xuan-ge, who nodded every now and then in deep though.

JinGyi had read about how paper-man talismans had been stuff of legends in the past. His books spoke of ancient times in which even corpses could be brought back to life. How even animals could turn into godly beasts if enough resentful energy polluted them. But he would have never thought magic could actually be real and so easy to play with.

And Xuan-ge had looked nothing but beautiful as he was talking to the stuffed animal, humming softly under his breath.

When Jiang Cheng dropped out of university for the second time, YanLi didn’t say anything and instead welcomed him back in his old room. So much for enrolling in law school at twenty-three, uh? ZiXuan would have been disappointed in him like the first time that had happened in his bachelor anyway, no point in avoiding the man. It was autumn anyway: it was either going back to the apartment complex or look for a new flatmate. But the school housing had rightfully kicked him out after dropping out in the middle of the academic year, so there would have been little hope for him to find a new place anytime soon.

What he did not expect to find was a new tenant living next door.

Sleeping in front of the door, clutching a satchel bag and a fucking stuffed animal on his lap.

Jiang Cheng jolted him awake and took in the sight of his shoulder length hair, his long lashes and sleepy eyes and thought he looked ridiculous. Wearing a silly hat and moccasins, purple shadows under his eyes, a confused expression on his worn out face. When asked what the hell he was doing there, sleeping out of his room instead of inside of it, the younger man said he had forgotten his keys inside that morning.

He was clearly an idiot, so Jiang Cheng walked away and returned to his room after more than a year away. If someone asked him who had rung YanLi to bring the spare keys to help the idiot he would have shrugged at them and shut the door in their face.

He didn’t have time for that, he had to think how to ask XiChen to let him back to work at the school the following day.

A-Qing had seen many things in life, met many horrible people, dealt with the scum of the scum... but she had yet to meet XuanYu.

A menace. A hurricane. A fool. The amount of times she had had to scoop him up from the ground after he had clumsily slipped on invisible bananas and such should have earned her a honorary title for outstanding citizen. It’s been months since his arrival and the kids had already learned to make way whenever they saw him. He inspired fear even in their tiny heads, honestly. What a fellow teaching assistant, really.

She was just there to score brownie points for his electives and internship program to become a social service worker, that was true. But she cared about the kids enough to know she had to do something about that. The children loved XuanYu and they were this fucking close to either worship him like a small deity or criminal and something ought to be done.

The last thing she would have expected to see, however, was Jiang Cheng coming back so soon. Crawling back from university to ask to work there, wagging his tail like the lovesick dog he was. She could easily imagine what the older student would have said to XiChen, something on the line of “you know goddamn well I’m not doing it for the money. I grew up here, I don’t want to see this place crumbling down. I’m definitely not doing it because I’m in love with you and seeing you sad makes me want to gag.”

Well, maybe the last part could be considered artistic license from her part, but judging by what she could overhear behind XiChen’s office door... yep. She had definitely nailed the part about being fond of the ex-orphanage and for the rest... the sentiment was there. The pining bastard.

“Do you need anything, A-Qing?”, XuanYu asked her out of no-fucking-where, startling her as she pretended to dust off the floor very close to a door. Cheek-plastered-on-it kind of close.

“Nothing. Mind your business,” she answered, flustered as fuck.

XuanYu couldn’t be that naive, he knew what he was fucking doing. His creepy little smile so similar to the one the debt collect always had on his face. No wonder XiChen had fallen for such a tricky bitch.

“Then will you help me find JinGyi? He doesn’t want me to help him with his project for the festival and went into hiding again.”

There, that smile and knowing gaze. Judging poser. He looked much older than his alleged twenty years. He knew what he was fucking doi...

“You?!”

Jiang Cheng’s honest-to-gods screech pulled A-Qing out of her thoughts. She turned and had to witness XiChen amiably patting Jiang Cheng on the head as their boss explained him how XuanYu worked there.

“It’s been almost six months now, he’s a very valuable kid and helped out around here while you were studying.”

Jiang Cheng was both livid and red with longing, because his touch-starved ass was all over that hand patting him platonically on the head. He was also angry, which was default for him... but there was something else underneath. Something promising in the way he stared XuanYu down.

Maybe A-Qing could win some candy by betting with the kids about such unexpected turn of events.

ZiZhen believed A-Yi. If his friend had told him the new teacher assistant was a witch then he was right. So they had started researching witches at the school, but only found a couple of colored books on the matter, mostly useless. All but one, telling the story of a nanny called Mary Poppins... some western thing.

But everything checked for the most part. The hat was there, every day a different one, but ultimately never leaving XuanYu’s head. The umbrella was not, but both him and A-Yuan had seen their gege with a parasol once and that was enough. His satchel contained infinite amount of things, from sweets to possessed stuffed animals, like a qiankun bag from the legends! He talked with things as if he could control them.

Well, even the teacher sometimes tried to convince the printer to work with sweet words, gently coaxing it back to life... maybe that was just how adults functioned. Even his dad would ask the fridge where his favorite cake had disappeared sometimes. Adults were weird.

Fuck Lanling. Rain day and night, autumn planning everyone’s demise by flooding every bloody year. Xue Yang was over it.

He took a random umbrella from the rack by the door of the convenience store and left without a second thought, already wondering what he could say to convince XingChen to offer him dinner somewhere new. The man wasn’t married anymore after all, so Xue Yang could technically have his way with him now, right?

“Excuse me!”

Xue Yang was not in the mood for people calling him out on his bullshit that night, but he turned anyway and saw the weirdest thing. A young man roughly his age, maybe a year or so younger, drenched from head to toe after rushing to him. He was panting, clutching a plastic bag full of cleaning supplies from the convenience store Xue Yang had just left.

“I believe you mistakenly took my umbrella,” the other said, pretty face framed by wet hair sticking to his forehead and cheeks.

Amused, Xue Yang shut the clear plastic umbrella he had “mistakenly taken” and held it at arm’s length by the handle, directing the pointy edge to the other like a sword. Hell if he was going to get wet himself, he needed to prove something to the idiot. He could handle a bit of rain for the sake of being dramatic.

“You want it back?” Xue Yang asked, rising his chin and arching an eyebrow at the other. The man nodded, holding his now wet beret in place on top of his head as if he was more worried about it falling on the ground than keeping his crown dry.

“I knew it was someone else’s when I took it.”

“But...?”

“And what’ll you give me back for it? What are you gonna do about it?”

This should have taught him not to mess with him: he didn’t even have to use his business tone to make the other take a step back. Meng Yao, the bastard, had taught him smiles went a long way in dealing with stupid people after all.

“Right, if I take it from you... you won’t have one to go back home with.”

Uh?

“Wait here. I’ll go buy you one at the convenience store. I’ll be back.”

Uh??

The idiot actually run back to the store and purchased him a fucking umbrella. And Xue Yang was twice as stupid because he waited for him to come back, startled as he was. The idiot was smiling megawatt bright when he came back as well, what the fuck?

The sick bastard extended the clear plastic umbrella to him like Xue Yang had done earlier, but he held it by the middle, as if surrendering his weapon. It was fairly similar to the one Xue Yang had stolen anyway, why bother asking for his umbrella back?

“Did your dead mother give this particular one to you or something?”

The bite in his words only mildly deterred the other man, who pressed his lips together before forcing an even bigger smile on his face.

“No. It’s pretty cheap. But it’s mine. It’s the first thing I bought with my money.”

Xue Yang left after that. With the stolen umbrella. Because he was still a scumbag and not a sentimental asshole. But he was very quiet that evening when XingChen treated him to some fancy takeout on his couch while lovingly drying Xue Yang’s hair with a towel.

Nothing made sense anymore.

Qin Su worried over Jiang Cheng. He was her best worker, but she knew for a fact that he had a million part-time jobs in town and she didn’t want to overwork him. She also knew he would give all of his hard-earned money to XiChen anyway. All to pay a stupid debt. The huge lovesick idiot.

Was he the fastest delivery driver? Yes. Was he the most well behaved of his staff? Not even close. But he was respectful enough to work over his issues and she trusted him with doing his job at the end of the day.

So when she found a young man in a frilly outfit waiting for her on the lobby of her shop asking for Jiang Cheng... well, she was pleasantly surprised.

He introduced himself as XuanYu and held a lunch box in his hands, saying Jiang Cheng had forgotten it at home. Which left A-Su properly impressed. How could a man as angry as Jiang Cheng secure himself such a lovely person was beyond her comprehension, honestly.

He was adorable and she wanted to be his sister like, yesterday.

But when Jiang Cheng came back from a delivery, entering the dumpling shop with his helmet still on, he stared XuanYu down and told him off right off the bat.

“Not you again,” he said, to A-Su’s utter confusion, “Can’t you take a fucking hint? I’m already avoiding you at work. I don’t want to be your friend.”

Something akin to hurt painted XuanYu’s feature for a fraction of a second before he could retrieve his smile and point at the lunch box.

“Your sister asked me to give this to you on my way out. A-Ling helped making rice cakes this time and wanted to hear from you if you liked them or not.”

Qin Su could have easily missed the change in XuanYu’s voice at that, that’s how much of a good actor he was. But Jiang Cheng had no face even to feel ashamed for lashing out at the kid like that. How much older could he be from XuanYu, three years? Two? Had nobody taught him some respect?

“XuanYu, if he bullies you again you come here. Am I understood?”

Like hell she was gonna let this gem of a child slip away from Jiang Cheng’s hands.

Not in a million years.

Song Lan breathed in and out. In and out. The clear morning air surrounded him like an old friend, hugging him closely as he clutched the papers for his divorce.

XingChen had signed them in the end. Five years together were now in the past for him.

Maybe they had been too young back then, when they had taken the chance to get married the moment the government announced the change in the law for people like them. How old have they been, twenty-three? Twenty-four? Another lifetime. An existence away.

He wished he could cry. It would have been easier.

But, as he turned a corner, someone stumbled into him and sent the papers scattering on the sidewalk. Song Lan tried to save them from being dirtied on a puddle but was unsuccessful. He didn’t know why he bothered anymore. It felt like the last piece of his lover had left and Song Lan couldn’t even prevent something as simple as that. XingChen’s signature dirtied in a pool, but not enough to be washed away. What a joke.

The young man in front him bowed down, apologizing profusely, trying to save the documents at the best of his abilities. He even suggested finding a public toilet to dry the sheets under the hot air blowing machine, the silly man.

Song Lan smiled instead, reassuring him it was fine.

He was fine.

But the kid accidentally read the first few lines of the agreement before looking up at Song Lan. And where he would have expected pity, Song Lan only saw consternation instead on his pale face. It was so startling to see it, that he had to crouch back down on the ground next to the kid and reassure him everything was fine. It was just paper, it wasn’t important, he didn’t have to feel so guilty about...

“It is important. Your life is important.”

Such a dramatic sentence, uttered so vehemently, should have sounded weird to Song Lan. Especially because he disapproved of such antics in the first place. But it sounded so sincere, so earnest that he felt touched for a moment.

So he helped the kid up on his feet and asked him to walk a bit with him, to keep him company. Reserved as he was, he would have never thought possible opening up to a stranger the way he did that day. But there was something calming about the kid, almost as if he had been put on earth to soothe other people’s existence.

So he told him how his husband had fallen in love with someone else, someone much younger than them. How this had strained their marriage even if Song Lan had known all along his husband had the ability to fall in love with more than one person at a time. But Song Lan was monogamous and would have never justified forcing his lover to suppress his feelings just to please him. So it had been Song Lan himself to call it quits and wish him all the luck in the world.

The kid had started crying at some point, without Song Lan even noticing at first.

“Why are you crying? Please no, I didn’t wan to upset you.”

“So much love. In different ways but... it’s too much. There’s so much of it, of course I’m crying for you and your loved one.”

Song Lan was many things. Too stern, too rigid, too peculiar about who could touch him or not, too cold in expressing his emotions. But he felt warm then, in front of a kid crying for him in the middle of the street, one day of late autumn.

“Thank you.”

***

XuanYu let it slip once with Mrs. Jin how little he remembered of his past.

It wasn’t a lie, he really didn’t remember what it had been of him before he had met her, asking for a room. But the kind woman just assumed he was talking about his past or youth, so he didn’t correct her on the matter.

Knowing the truth would have scared her, after all.

But he still let himself trust her that day as they sat in front of a pot of tea and he pretended to drink and eat the pastries on the low table. He didn’t need to eat or drink. He wasn’t even sure he had a digestive system.

“I only remember... a song.”

“A song?”

“Yes. Someone singing every night before falling asleep. I don’t think it was meant for me to hear... but my body remembers the shivers. The feeling of being loved.”

“The body remembers the weirdest things, XuanYu. You should trust it more.”

He smiled at that, wriggling his hands on the handkerchief where he had hidden the pastries from sight.

“I’m pretty sure that song wasn’t for me. My body was merely there to listen.”

YanLi looked uncomfortable at that, something scary painting her features.

“Maybe I was eavesdropping,” he reassured her with a self-deprecating joke, not sure if that would have made her feel more at ease or not, “Maybe I was listening in, hoping such lovely words could be directed at me for once.”

Mrs. Jin sipped her tea for a long while afterwards, before finding the resolution to look up and stare him down with a serious expression.

“Unrequited feelings hurt, don’t they?”

XuanYu didn’t know what she meant by that, but he nodded anyway.

He heard something rustling in his bag and hid the sweets inside of it the moment YanLi turned to clear the table. If A-Ling heard someone munching their protests away from inside of the bag, he didn’t snitch on XuanYu and retrieved playing with Fairy on the carpeted floor next to him instead.

Lan Zhan was disappointed in him, XuanYu knew that much. They were admiring the sunset from the small balcony in their room, folding laundry.

XuanYu always wondered why Lan Zhan assumed the form of a black stuffed rabbit, of all things, but he didn’t want to pry. He didn’t even know his real name. The other had told him he used to be a human in his past life and that he hadn’t technically reincarnated in this lifetime. That his current form was just a mean to a goal, that he could use it to guide XuanYu and help him better that way without expending much spiritual energy.

He told him someone dear to him taught him how to manipulate paper-man talismans in his previous life. How similar the process had been to move around in a stuffed animal’s body. How convenient.

XuanYu believed he secretly loved it, even if Lan Zhan would have never said as much. He already talked very little to begin with.

“You told her you don’t remember your past.”

“That I did.”

“Don’t do it again”

XuanYu folded the last towel on his lap and then let Lan Zhan take a nap on it. He felt silly having to take showers and pretend to be a normal human being. He hated inconveniencing the Jins with him, accepting their bedding and paid kitchen appliances and so on. But if he wanted to accomplish his mission he had to make an effort to look normal... instead of spirited away from another world or maybe simply another era.

“I won’t do it again, don’t worry Lan Zhan.”

Lan Zhan was disappointed, but he was also patient to a fault.

Sure, it would have been much appreciated if Mo XuanYu didn’t lose him around every other day. This time the younger man had forgotten to pick him up from the floor where he had been reading stories to the children at the kindergarten.

But Lan Zhan was also a stuffed animal now, so it wasn’t like he could move around and risk being seeing by normal humans. His body was a vessel and any damage would have had repercussions on his soul as well.

What to do.

He tried not to panic when he felt someone picking him up from the floor after an hour or so. He silently prayed for them not to be A-Qing: even in this life she was too smart for her own good and he couldn’t risk being found out so soon. Mo XuanYu wasn’t even halfway to complete his mission and Lan Zhan couldn’t...

“I’m sure A-Yu is looking for you, little guy. What are doing all the way back here?”

It was always difficult to hear his older brother’s voice in this life. To see his face, to notice how sad he was even in this new reincarnation of his.

Lan Zhan didn’t move a single muscle as XiChen dusted him off and put him in his apron front pocket as he looked for “A-Yu”.

In order to give a second chance to Mo XuanYu, Lan Zhan had sacrificed any possibility to ever reincarnate until his mission was accomplished. So XiChen didn’t have a younger brother in this lifetime and he would have not had one for a while. Lan Zhan missed him, but they had to wait for a bit more.

They still had three months to fill the bottle the King of Hell had entrusted Mo XuanYu with. Then he would have entered the list for reincarnation once more and everything will have been fine in the end.

Lan Zhan owed the kid his life, so he trusted him.

No matter what.

XuanYu remembered the boy who had stolen his umbrella. He remembered him well enough to recognize him when he found him crawling on the floor, a stab wound in his belly, one winter night.

Panicked, he asked Lan Zhan what they could do as he instinctively pressed the wound with his bare hands. Lan Zhan didn’t dare move not to attract attention on himself. The other man snarled out at XuanYu, asking him why did he even bother, seemingly recognizing him.

“I took your fucking umbrella. Hate me and leave me alone.”

“Ridiculous.”

Lan Zhan would have been proud of him for that remark, but XuanYu was too scared to think about it. He didn’t have a phone and he didn’t even know the number for emergencies. He wasn’t even qualified to be a teacher. How had he survived until then. He was useless and stupid and...

“What the fuck?” Jiang Cheng’s voice came in a whisper behind him.

What a sorry view the older man had to take in that night: a pool of blood staining otherwise clean clothes, a moaning boy on the ground in restless pain, a crying mess of a sad excuse of a human pressing on a throbbing wound next to him.

Jiang Cheng muttered something about the boy being one of Meng Yao’s men, that they should leave him there to die for all he cared.

The man under XuanYu barked back, telling him he had tried to “convince the idiot of the same”. But XuanYu was horrified by what he had just heard.

“People die for nothing. People die for fucking nothing. You don’t leave someone behind just because you fucking hate them.”

XuanYu has never cursed in this brief, borrowed life of his. Maybe spending so much time with Jiang Cheng had rubbed some of his habits off on him in the end.

Startled, Jiang Cheng seemed to agree with him because he fished out his phone and called an ambulance right away.

The stabbed man laughed at that.

Lan Zhan was clutched in XuanYu’s hands as they waited in the corridor of a badly lit hospital. The kid was crying, hard. He must have remembered how his family in Mo Manor had mistreated him in the past, how easily his own relatives had starved him off just out of spite. How already impossibly emaciated he had been when he had sacrificed his body for Wei Ying, to bring him back in a weakened vessel just to seek revenge. Just to let his hatred run free.

Such cruelty had earned him nothing but distrust from the hell judges, who sentenced him to never be reincarnated again. Only when Lan Zhan had ascended to heaven -many centuries after reaching immortality- he had been able to make them relent.

If Mo XuanYu could prove to be a good human being during a trial time of one year on planet earth, filling a vial with good actions in the form of golden gems, then they would have considered Lan Zhan’s proposal. Mo XuanYu would have atoned his sin and be granted a new life, a clean record, and a second chance at happiness.

Seeing someone almost die in front of him must have awaken something ugly in him. His stained hands, the iron stench in the air. All that blood... like the last thing he had most probably seen in his previous life before his body sacrifice. A scarlet array under his feet, another soul replacing his in his own body.

Lan Zhan let himself be held tightly in Mo XuanYu’s hands that night at the hospital.

And hugged back without anyone else noticing.

Xiao XingChen. That was the name of the man showing up at the kindergarten one week later. XuanYu had never seen him before, but the man hugged him in front of the kids, alerting both XiChen and Jiang Cheng.

“Thank you,” the tall man said in between tears, holding him tight.

“I don’t understand. I...”

“You saved A-Yang. Thank you.”

XuanYu pressed his lips together tightly at that, so overwhelmed he didn’t know what to say. His fingertips hurting with sometimes akin to electricity the more he let himself be held so fiercely by the other man.

He started crying in earnest only after the man had left, surrounded by the children who worried and fussed over him. He fell asleep with them during nap time and when he woke up he found Jiang Cheng placing a quilt over him.

Caught red handed, the older man feigned disinterest in the beginning... but then he sat down next to him. Just like he had done in the hospital one week ago.

“Did you see someone die before?” Jiang Cheng asked then, awkwardly scratching the back of his head, “You had such a strong... reaction to my words. It was insensitive of me. I apologize for angering you. I’ll better myself.”

XuanYu didn’t answer at that.

Jiang Cheng would have never understood what it meant to sacrifice yourself to hatred and revenge. How much it had scarred him to be brought back to life, but only as a worn out set of robes on top of someone else’s soul. How distant he had felt when the Yiling Patriarch had inhabited his body and had let himself be touched by someone else.

Jiang Cheng would have never understood what it meant to be touched in the flesh but be utterly unreachable as a soul. Or how much it hurt to become an empty body filled by someone foreign and new. Someone who could wear his skin better than him.

Jiang Cheng would have never understood. And thank all the gods for that.

So XuanYu... Mo XuanYu kept quiet and smiled instead.

Lan Zhan didn’t trust Jiang Cheng. He hadn’t in the past and he wasn’t gonna start now. Wei Ying would have been so disappointed in him for thinking badly of his baby brother, but there was little Lan Zhan could do about that.

Wei Ying wasn’t there to judge him for it.

Mo XuanYu would wake up every morning and wash himself, get dressed and tidy up the room before leaving. He would fix his appearance in a mirror Young Lady Jiang had gifted him in autumn, making sure his hat was still in place.

“What would happen if I were to...?”

“You must keep your hat on... even when you sleep. You know this much.”

“I wear a headband to bed.”

“And what of it?”

“It’s... silly.”

“Nobody can see you in your sleep. Why the sudden worry?”

Mo XuanYu said nothing in response to that, but Lan Zhan knew. The kid had never worried too much about his appearance aside from looking proper and well dressed. He had never fussed over his features, but recently he had taken the habit to walk dangerously close to makeup stores and check various displays at the convenience store close by. Lan Zhan knew Mo XuanYu had remembered his past... how he had quickly realized he was already an adult. With needs and desires.

But now a brand new reincarnation of Jiang WanYin would wait for him every morning to walk to work together. Now Jiang Cheng acted pleasantly enough to be considered kind and doting to someone starved of affection like Mo XuanYu had always been. Which wasn’t planned, it had never been.

Lan Zhan didn’t like where this was going.

He didn’t like it at all.

Nie HuaiSang came to bring a cake for XuanYu one day or so before the end of the year, snow sticking to his hair and flushed cheeks.

“I don’t know when your birthday is... so I’m pretty sure I’m late to the game. But I wanted to thank you for helping me and MianMian that one time. So I made a cake for you. I hope you like strawberries.”

Mo XuanYu had no idea if he liked them or not. He couldn’t even eat.

He started crying in the middle of his room, where HuaiSang had placed the boxed cake on top of his low table.

Panicked, HuaiSang jumped up and out of the room to alert Jiang Cheng next door. But upon seeing the other man’s worried expression XuanYu cried even harder.

“What did you do to him, you bastard?”

“I’m not the one who used to prank people all the time. Grow up!”

“You clearly did something horrible to him for...”

“A-Cheng we’re not twelve anymore. Who do you take me for?”

XuanYu took his chance to stuff his face with cake, gulping it down bit by bit even if he knew he didn’t have the necessary organs to process it without vomiting it all out in an hour or so. He had tried many times to hold food down to no avail. His body rejecting it as if it was poisonous and dangerous.

He had tried so many times... to practice. To be able to appreciate YanLi’s generous cooking, to help A-Ling and the children at school prep their lunches and maybe... maybe to eat with Jiang Cheng every now and then.

Nie HuaiSang hugged him and patted his head, confused but too scared to ask for an explanation. Mo XuanYu smiled at him and lied, saying his cake was the best he had ever eaten. It wasn’t the best. It was simply the first.

He had no way to compare it with anything else, really.

Wen Ning had heard about his “stomachache” from XiChen, who had known all about it from YanLi and Jiang Cheng. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise for XuanYu when he saw the older boy in front of his apartment complex the last day of the year.

But it was a surprise.

“Can we talk for a bit?” Wen Ning asked, holding his umbrella up for XuanYu to walk beside him, protecting him from the icy snow.

They walked to the nearest park, sitting under the gazebo to watch the snow falling down. Their heavy coats keeping them warm, despite the cold.

They used to take long walks back from the kindergarten with A-Yuan after school, since the Wens lived close to XuanYu. Before Jiang Cheng came back anyway.

Wen Ning looked uncomfortable, fidgeting with his fingers as he tried to find the right words. He surprised XuanYu by telling him how, in the past, he had suffered from an eating disorder and had been hospitalized for a while in his teens. How worried his sister and their grandma had been for him, how much they helped him in his recovery. How alone he had felt for years still, no matter how loved he was.

“A-Yuan told me he never saw you eat. So I was wondering if you needed help.”

It wasn’t the case, but XuanYu knew he meant well. Telling him everything was fine would have only worried him more, so he tried to explain an half-truth that could satisfy him. Saying it was difficult for him to process food, that in the past he had suffered from malnutrition and now he had digestive issues.

He was talking about his past life, but he figured that could work as well.

When they parted ways in front of the apartment complex, Wen Ning asked to hold XuanYu’s hands for a bit. He cradled them carefully, as if they were precious. His slender fingers cupping XuanYu’s smaller palms almost reverently.

“I know you don’t feel the same about me. But I’ll ask you to look after yourself anyway. Not out of obligation for me... but out of respect for yourself, if nothing else.”

The moment Wen Ning let go of his hands, Jiang Cheng stepped out of the front door of the building and saw them.

He said nothing and walked away after stepping out of the gate.

Lan Zhan would have very much liked to flip a finger at Jiang WanYin’s forehead. Hard. Wei Ying would have done the same, he was sure.

Wei Ying would have also smacked some sense in his baby brother, forcing him to face his feelings and take responsibility for what he was doing to poor Mo XuanYu.

Who was currently waiting for the other man’s return like a dog by his room balcony, surveying the front courtyard like a bird of prey from above.

Lan Zhan tried to coax the kid inside, reminding him snow was still falling down and that his beanie was slipping away. He tried to be gentle about it, knowing how much XuanYu had grown resentful of the hats he had to constantly wear.

But the younger man simply shrugged, saying he wanted to wait for another five minutes. Just one more. Just to make sure.

Jiang Cheng didn’t come back that night.

And Mo XuanYu cried in his sleep clutching the half-empty vial to his chest.

Lan Zhan spent the night watching over him, singing to him the song he had written for Wei Ying. He snuggled close to XuanYu and made sure his wide headband was covering the crown of his head, before pressing himself to the other’s forehead.

He never stopped singing.

Wishing he could take all the pain away.

YanLi, A-Yuan and even ZiXuan knocked on his door to greet him into the new year, despite how XuanYu should have been the one to pay his respects to his landlords.

But they asked him to visit the funeral home with them instead, to say their thanks to YanLi’s parents with offers and flowers.

He dressed in his best clothes, having never been in what seemed to be a modern version of the ancestral halls of his childhood in a past life. The establishment was fairly sterile, with shelves filled with plaques and pictures instead of wooden inscriptions on an altar. The lot of them bowed and said their thanks, chatting with the late Jiangs almost as if they had never left. YanLi apologized to her mother for Jiang Cheng’s absence that year like any other year, while ZiXuan told his father-in-law how they would have visited the Jin ancestors during Chūnjié to make it fair.

XuanYu looked at them and barely kept himself from crying.

On their way back, YanLi explained her parents had died when she was still twelve and Jiang Cheng was merely six. How they had lived in the orphanage run by XiChen’s mother and made friends with the boy, who was YanLi’s classmate. How the siblings stayed there until YanLi came of age and got custody of her baby brother. ZiXuan’s family of lawyers had helped her pro bono and that was how she had met the man and fallen in love with him. Even if it had taken a while for ZiXuan to notice her at first, preoccupied with university and law school as he had been at the time. But the Jins helped her with the inheritance left by the late Madame Yu: the apartment complex where they currently lived.

Watching them explaining their past in such detail moved XuanYu deeply. Feeling as if they wanted to make him part of their family by filling in the gaps for him.

That was still his older brother after all and those were still his sister-in-law and his beloved nephew and he... he loved them. He had missed them so, so much.

And he was about to leave them again soon.

Wen Qing finally showed herself up one day at the park, when Mo XuanYu was taking Fairy out for an evening walk. She approached him by telling the younger man she had assisted in the surgery Xue Yang had undergone some time back.

Lan Zhan (hiding in the kid’s coat pocket) could see how startled the kid was at the mention of the criminal, but he decided to trust this version of Lady Wen as he would have done in the past.

Wei Ying cared deeply for her, after all.

Whatever truths she was about to entrust Mo XuanYu with, Lan Zhan knew the kid could take it.

He hoped as much, at least.

Jiang Cheng came back only for Chinese New Year. Saying he had stayed at XiChen’s since the winter break allowed them to take it easy and figure some stuff out for the following school year.

It hurt to know where he had been all along, but XuanYu braved a smile anyway. He knew how much Jiang Cheng cared for the older man, how much he wanted to save the school from the debt collector. How much he didn’t love XuanYu back.

So he let himself cry one last time before waking up one morning and deciding he had had enough.

He talked with Lan Zhan, asking him to tell him all about Wei WuXian and their love. If XuanYu’s sacrifice had allowed them to be happy as they deserved in the end. If Lan Zhan hated him now, for forcing him away from his loved one, who was currently waiting for him to come back to heaven.

Mo XuanYu knew the couple had sacrificed their chance at reincarnation to allow him to seek a second lifetime for himself. He knew Wei Ying watched over them from up above, waiting for Lan Zhan to secure a new life for the kid.

They talked all day and then well into the night.

By dawn Mo XuanYu had decided what to do.

XuanYu properly met Meng Yao one day of early spring, when flowers weren’t yet brave enough to poke their way out and greet the sun. The man was dressed in black, his hair cut short, a sigarette between his lips as he waited patiently for the kindergarten to open.

It was XuanYu’s duty to open that morning, so he was the one to greet the man.

Upon hearing his voice, Meng Yao immediately recognized him.

“There you are. I was waiting for you.”

“Me?”

“You’re the kid who answered the phone. And the one who helped my subordinate back in winter, right?”

His dimples were so deep, his face so pleasant.

Mo XuanYu remembered him from another lifetime. He remembered how much he had cared for his older brother Jin GuangYao. How hurt he had felt when the other had lied and accused him of harassment just to get rid of him.

But this was a new life and Meng Yao was just a man.

Who happened to have been married with XiChen for a while before turning to a life filled with crime and gang violence.

Wen Qing had told him Meng Yao had initially tried to live far away from his adoptive father Wen RuoHan. All for the sake of marrying XiChen and keep him safe. But XiChen’s mother still had had a debt to pay for the construction of the orphanage, a price too high for her to pay with her poor health and delicate disposition. A debt that XiChen had inherited from her when she had died.

That was why Meng Yao had left him: to go back to his father and ask him to handle the debt himself, supplicating him to overlook such small issue and let him dry XiChen out of every penny and cent instead.

Wen Qing may have learned this only from the gossiping running in her family, with the Wen Clan being as big as it was, but she was pretty sure of what she had told XuanYu. That Meng Yao had simply faked having fallen out of love with XiChen to protect him from his adoptive father and his cruelty. That XiChen still loved him and was waiting for him to fight alongside him instead.

Mo XuanYu knew all of this.

So now he could act and fulfill his mission.

“I want to pay the debt XiChen owes you.”

“You are full of surprises, XuanYu. And how do you plan to do that?”

“I can do many things.”

“You’re very pretty, you can make good money out of it.”

XuanYu considered his words before shaking his head.

“It’s not something I can do.”

“Then what can you do?”

“I’ll solve everything.”

“I’m all ears.”

“But you’ll have to stop making XiChen worry so much.”

“That’s not how business work...”

“Lie to me. Give your word and I’ll... I will solve everything.”

Meng Yao humored him and nodded.

Then and only then, Mo XuanYu took his hat off.

Lan Zhan had watched the entire scene unfold before his eyes without intervening, trusting Mo XuanYu with such an important choice. He took in the sight of the beautiful spiritual light shining brightly on top of XuanYu’s head like a crown.

His soul in full display, its energy so raw it had slowed down time all around them.

Lan Zhan turned around and looked at XiChen, who had just turned a corner and had been walking towards XuanYu to greet him good morning. Frozen in time, his older brother’s face still looked peaceful... simply because he had had no time to notice Meng Yao’s presence quite yet.

Lan Zhan turned once more and saw Jiang WanYin making his way in a rush towards them, surely to protect XuanYu from Meng Yao. When did he arrive? His features trapped in a perpetual frown, scared for the one he truly loved in this lifetime.

Then, Lan Zhan looked up at Mo XuanYu and saw him taking the bottle only half filled with gold... which symbolized his goodwill and generous spirit.

“Will this be enough to grant a wish, Lan Zhan?”

When XuanYu said his name like that he sounded so much like his Wei Ying, full of hope and love.

“It depends on the wish, A-Yu.”

“I reckon it’s not enough for a new reincarnation, eh?”

“It’s enough to save a life... but not yours.”

XuanYu looked crestfallen, but he persevered still.

The bottle transformed into a bag filled with money and XuanYu made his way to XiChen and left it at his feet before smiling up at his mentor and employer.

“I cannot rewrite the past, but maybe I can plan a better future for you.”

Still smiling, XuanYu slowly walked over to Jiang Cheng and said his farewells.

Then he crouched down and took Lan Zhan in his hands, kissing him goodbye on the head affectionately.

“Erase me well, Lan Zhan,” he whispered then.

Before disappearing into thin air.

***

Wei Ying had agreed with him, suggesting the idea himself.

In the end the King of Hell had granted Lan Zhan’s request and offered Mo XuanYu a second chance anyway. Since this new self-sacrifice had been fueled by positive emotions instead of anger and despair, the hell judges had considered the atonement fulfilled and put the kid’s name back on the reincarnation list.

Twenty years had past and many things had changed.

For starters, the kid’s last name wasn’t Mo anymore, but Nie. The boy had, in fact, born into Nie MingJue’s family and had lived overseas in Japan for a while before moving back to Lanling when XuanYu turned twenty. Nie HuaiSang had met him many times during summer vacations and other festivities, visiting his brother and his wife every chance he had gotten to dote on his cute nephew XuanYu.

Nie MingJue had done a remarkable job in protecting him from harm. So, by the time their little family had decided to move close to HuaiSang, XuanYu had become a well adjusted adult with a brilliant future ahead of him.

Nobody remembered him.

Or so Lan Zhan had thought.

Apparently, he had forgotten to wipe Jin Ling’s memories thoroughly. So, when The Nie family had come to greet HuaiSang’s friends YanLi and ZiXuan, A-Ling almost had a stroke out of incredulity and happiness for being reunited with his “A-Yu”. Even if Jin Ling was now older than the pretty-gege from his memories. Even if he had spent years trying to figure out why nobody seemed to remember the weird uncle living next door to his Jiujiu years back.

XiChen and Meng Yao had solved their problems and had started running the school together right after Wen RuoHan sudden and mysterious disappearance. The man had many enemies after all.

A-Yuan had grown up into a fine young man, someone Wei Ying would have certainly been proud of, working with his cousin Wen Ning at the local botanical garden while his friends still studied in university.

Nie HuaiSang had married Qin Su and opened a restaurant with her.

MianMian and Wen Qing had decided to live together and adopt a bunch of dogs just because.

Xiao XingChen and Xue Yang still lived together while Song Lan had found his way back to them after talking it out with the couple.

A-Qing was probably running some sketchy business in social services to protect kids from horrible families.

Lan Zhan was still, unfortunately, a stuffed rabbit. Following XuanYu in his new life in the most unexpected of ways. In the form of the first present the boy’s uncle had gifted him in childhood. If Wei Ying had pulled a string or two from heaven to make that happen, well, Lan Zhan himself was none the wiser. The only thing he knew was that XuanYu had always taken him with him in all his travels even if he didn’t know he could speak. Lan Zhan had preferred not to reveal his nature and let the kid have a normal childhood. Especially since he had no memories of his past as a tenant in Jiang YanLi’s house. Nor of his life as a cultivator.

Wei Ying had agreed they could wait to be reunited again. The both of them wanting to look over XuanYu for a little longer before getting their own chance at reincarnation. They had all eternity to be together again... they could definitely wait a bit more for the kid.

All was well.

Aside from the other person whose mind Lan Zhan had conveniently forgot to wipe clean of any memory of XuanYu.

In his defense, Lan Zhan had tried to make Jiang Cheng forget. But something about XuanYu must have touched him so deeply... that Lan Zhan had not been able to do much about it. The kid’s smiles and clumsy antics would always linger in the back of the other’s mind no matter how much he tried to ignore them.

Coming back from his job at ZiXuan’s firm, exhausted and vulnerable, Jiang Cheng decided to visit his sister the same day Nie MingJue had brought his family there. So he was particularly weak to the sight of a bright, soft XuanYu when YanLi introduced her younger brother to their guests.

To Lan Zhan’s absolute delight, Jiang Cheng immediately bowed down to a scary looking Nie MingJue and asked his son’s hand in marriage.

Yes, grovel to this precious boy and learn your place.

XuanYu only tilted his head at that weird man bowing to his parents and smiled.

His laughter ringing up to the sky, where Wei Ying was still listening.

From where he would have kept watching.

[I worked so hard on this please reblog]

[kobato means “little dove” I thought it was cute since XuanYu is a magpie! + I wanted MXY a chance at life and for once this is a reversal-sacrifice from WWX’s part and I think it’s neat.]

[JC would be 43 or so... which yikes. but this is all I could do. I don’t like huge age gaps but at least everyone is a consenting adult, okay?]

[the thing that started this was like “what if LXC was an only child and LWJ did not reincarnate bc he’s still in the afterlife or something? then the entire thing escalated so...yeah.]

now I will cry for ages. I worked so hard on this good god D:

#mdzs #cql #the untamed #mo dao zu shi #mdzs/au: clamp #mdzs/au: kindergarten #mdzs/au: kobato #mdzs/au: modern #mo xuanyu #jiang cheng #the forbidden crack! untamed prompts #RAREPAIR ALERT #I AM TRASH I WILL SHIP JC WITH A ROCK FOR ALL I CARE #xiyao #tw eating disorders mentioned #wangxian #yucheng #chengyu

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