#or the loop effect libraries or something

[pagesofkenna]

my nephew was playing some Roblox music on his phone as background during game night, and I know we've talked a bit about Homestuck's influence on comics and storytelling but I don't think we talk enough about how the Homesuck music team had a real tangible effect on indie game music. maybe even music in general. it's not uncommon for me to be listening to some musical thing and think 'is that homestuck??'

[ghettogirly]

𝑱𝑼𝑱𝑼 𝑾𝑨𝑻𝑲𝑰𝑵𝑺 𝑮𝑹𝑼𝑴𝑷𝒀 𝑿 𝑺𝑼𝑵𝑺𝑯𝑰𝑵𝑬 𝑯𝑬𝑨𝑫𝑪𝑨𝑵𝑵𝑶𝑵!

-> summary: how juju would deal with a gf who’s overly optimistic. A golden retriever x black cat aesthetic.

-> format: headcannon w/ drabble.

━━━━━━━━━━

- seeing you around USC campus, you carried an aura of tranquility and happiness. Gravitating towards people with your cheerful energy and enthusiasm.

- being in your class, she noticed your resilient persona when doing your work as whenever things got hard, you had a tendency to overcome it.

- she admired that about you as it was something you both had in common. however, for her it was different.

- the gruelling pain of challenges motivating her every step, especially on the court. She would never be satisfied with her performance, even if she had amazing finishes and handles.

- god forbid, you ever said something positive about a game she lost.

“Hey Juju,” you carefully spoke as you walked up to her near the changing rooms. “You should be proud of yourself today,” practically squeaking the words as a wide smile formed across your face. Yet, the response was disappointing. A scoff was heard from the taller woman as she just stood up and walked off into the corridor, leaving you alone and embarrassed.

━━━━━━━━━━

- after that encounter, she couldn’t help but toss and turn in her bed following the loss. Not only was she disappointed in her performance from the game, but she couldn’t wrap around the thought of you still being encouraging.

- what was there to be happy about after losing a game?

- a couple of weeks followed and Juju saw you more and more often. The swirl of your tennis skirt marching with your polka dot blouse as you walked alongside your friends to a table.

- That sweet giggle she heard from across the table tormenting her mind, unable to block out the constant loop of happiness.

- Looking up at you from across the room, she frowned at the sight of you laughing with your friends.

- That was meant to be her too.

━━━━━━━━━━

A sigh escaped from Juju’s lips as she closed her locker next to the library, finishing up for the day as she finally found the effort and the time to study. Sliding those black headphones in front of her bun, she flung her backpack on and headed down to the exit. Streams of a deep purple and blue colour fused together to form an enticing sunset, transitioning into the night. Headlights slowly turned on down the street, illuminating the paths below.

After briefly taking in the view, Juju turned the corner to find her car. Clicking it open, she threw her backpack in the passenger seat. However, a sniffle was heard.

Then another one.

And another.

Furrowing her eyebrows in confusion, she closed the door in attempts to find out what the situation was about. Walking around the back, it was not hard to recognise the once familiar girl who tried to cheer Juju up at the game.

Yet, you looked different. Mascara ran down your face as your lip quivered, no longer having the glitter lipgloss that everyone noticed. You slowly tilted your head upwards, quickly wiping your eyes as you notice the taller woman who stood there, her once confused face now showing concern. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine, what’s wrong?”

So there you guys spent, that question causing your emotions to fall apart again. You spoke about the stress of college and the assignments, as well as the stress of family not being supportive and having to juggle a job alongside all of this. The toll of being overly optimistic and the effects it can eventually have on you after a period of time. Weirdly enough, she was a good listener. Not interrupting you, slowly draping her arm across your shoulder to let you know that she’s there for you.

And honestly, both of you guys saw a side of each other , you never saw before.

[takeariskao3]

as per usual, i am late to the memegeddon… but here is a lil something based on this meme from @petalsthefish

James stabbed the last carrot on his plate with a bit more violence than the action called for. However, it had no effect on the conversation happening a few seats down at the Gryffindor table.

“I s’pose the library?” Albert Jenkins-Wright prattled on. “Where do girls like her even hang out?”

Across from James, Sirius snorted.

“And she’s never on her own,” one of Jenkins-Wright’s sixth year mates chimed in. “It’ll be like asking her out in front of her whole dormitory.”

The small group of boys all made equal, yet indiscernible, noises of agreement and glanced around to where the fifth year girls had their heads together. James couldn’t help it, he peeked up as well. The girls in his year were all giggling in hushed tones over their pudding. As he watched, the object of their infernal conversation threw her head back and laughed in full merriment. James’ insides twisted painfully and he refocused on his empty plate.

“Valentine’s Day though,” another of the boys chimed in. “That’s a lot of pressure for a first date, isn’t it?”

James had heard quite enough. He shoved back on his bench and snapped, “She has to say yes first.”

Albert Jenkins-Wright glowered at him. Thankfully, Sirius also stood from his seat, albeit less petulantly, and smirked. “Good luck with that.”

Peter and Remus followed, Remus shoveling his last few bites of potatoes into his mouth. A small slice of guilt broke through James’ foul mood, but he stalked away nonetheless.

“I thought you were attempting indifference?” Peter hissed as they reached the entrance hall.

Out of the corner of his eye, James saw Remus grin. “Yes, I distinctly remember that New Year’s resolution too.”

“Let’s be honest,” Sirius sighed, clapping James on the shoulder. “We all knew it was doomed.”

“Jenkins-Wright is a prat,” James said without any real bite behind it.

Peter rolled his eyes. “Every bloke who likes Evans is a prat.“

“Including you,” Sirius added.

Remus covered a laugh with a cough; Peter sniggered.

As they mounted the marble staircase, James ground his teeth together, determined not to be a prat.

He made it as far as the second floor.

“What kind of name is Jenkins-Wright, anyhow?”

His three friends groaned.

Ten minutes, two floors, and a password later, they found armchairs tucked into a corner of the common room. James had exhausted his complaints about Albert Jenkins-Wrights’s name and had now moved on to his intelligence.

“Like she’d ever go out with a bloke who couldn’t even scrape an E in Charms.” James insisted.

“Do shut up,” Sirius grumbled, settling deeper into the cushions.

James scowled, and had just opened his mouth to release a very un-witty retort when an eruption of giggles tumbled through the portrait hole.

“The tea leaves don’t lie!” Anna Perry cackled while looping her arm through Evans’.

Green eyes flashed and Evans shot her friend a flat look. “Your only proof is a lump of soggy Earl Grey and something about Saturn’s anus–“

“Janus,” Anna Perry stressed. “It’s the moon of discernment, and its current alignment with Venus makes tonight the perfect conditions for predicting–“

As the girls walked by their cluster of chairs, James couldn’t help himself. “What’s this about Saturn’s anus?”

“Never you mind,” Evans spat. At the same time, Anna burst, “I’ve just read her teacup. And it’s fascinating–“

“Hardly.” Evans rounded on her friend. “You think my soulmate is at Hogwarts.”

James’ heart lept into his throat.

“Well, obviously,” Anna huffed, clearly exasperated. “It showed they were near! Could be proximity, could be timing, it could be the next person who asks you out!”

Evans looked increasingly unimpressed.

James, however, suffered a temporary bout of insanity. “Hey, Evans? Go out with me?”

“No,” she replied smoothly, without so much as looking at him.

The rejection was expected, and only made James grin wider.

“See?” Evans gestured to where James leaned over the back of his chair. “By your logic, Potter is my one true love. Some prediction that was.”

Anna’s shoulders slumped. “Fine, don’t believe me. But I know what I saw.”

Evans rolled her eyes and yanked Anna toward the rest of the girls, who had settled at a long table and were pulling out homework.

Watching them go, James sunk back into his seat, unable to control the self-satisfied smirk stretching across his face.

He was met with three expressions of equal disapproval.

“What?” he asked with an air of false innocence. “I wasn’t about to let her fall madly in love with Albert Jenkins-Wright.” When none of his friends showed signs of going along with this farce, James continued, “Apathy is overrated, anyway. Whatever happened to going after what you want, huh? Where are the proper grand gestures? Men used to duel for the hand of a lady, you know…”

Silence hung between the four of them for several long moments before Sirius lounged back into his seat and rumbled, “You’re a nuisance to society.”

[hustlerose]

any tips for a total novice interested in music production? electronic is definitely a genre im most interested in. sorry if youve been asked this a bajillion times xx

this is great question! i'm 100% self taught, so idk if i've done everything the "right way" but i'll do my best

fall in love with it. fall deeply in love with a genre and learn everything you can about it. this will be your gateway, your reason to learn how to make music. for me it was chiptune, then synthwave, then breakcore. keep that love alive

get a DAW and learn it inside and out. ableton has a generous trial period, or i'd recommend pirating FL studio

every major DAW comes with a suite of stock plugins, both synths and effects. find tutorials for all of them. for most purposes, thess are all the tools you'll ever need. get used to programming them yourself, but also don't be ashamed of using presets!

find out how to make the sounds that are specific to your genre. the sound design, the tempos, chords, structures, common samples, everything

every major DAW also comes with a library of samples. loops, drum hits, etc. these probably suck, but they're enough to get you started. start building your own sample library, and keep it organized. you'll be collecting samples for as long as you stick with this hobby

make things! small things, big things, different styles, different plugins. see what works. i'd encourage you to finish a couple small projects first. like 30-60 seconds. they can be just loops, or a piece with an A section and a B section

learn and ask questions as you go. it will only get easier

be proud of what you make. don't put too much pressure on yourself to make something "professional." making music is fun! improving your skills is fun! make art for the sake of making art! i believe in you <3

[leonawriter]

This is what Angela says earlier on in the loops:

"Are humans nothing more than ingredients to you in this ever-repeating play? I thought you wanted to save humanity? Is it a price that must be paid... The price you ought to pay for a ticket to escape from this hell-"

Then, in loop 71,527...

???/Ayin: ...Kill me. I can't stand this hell anymore... Angela: You were just another human, after all.

Like.

That "just another human after all" line speaks volumes.

She'd earlier been saying about how humans are just "ingredients" and how they're a price that must be paid to get out - and yet, and yet... she later realises that he himself is only human.

I wonder what she thought he was before? Something amazing, something more than human?

Either way, she has her preconceptions of him shattered when he shows that he's just the same as every single one of the employees who she's seen begging for their lives up to now.

And that really speaks to how he put himself into the same script as them, and in spite of being "above" them in terms of being the Manager, he's also on the same level, in that he too is only human and is suffering, repeating thousands and thousands of deaths and wipes and all of this despair.

It isn't just that he's "just another human" as well; he's also "just another ingredient" - he even sees himself as just another part of that price that has to be paid.

And it's even more poignant when considering the fact that Ayin himself... never truly "escapes the hell." Not really. The others do, ironically, by way of Angela and the Library sticking around, and they're able to move on.

But Ayin? Ayin makes it into the Light, but is that peaceful? Knowing what we do at the end of Ruina, about how Carmen's in there distorting people all the time, and Angela - who is so much like Ayin - saying that she'll oppose Carmen for as long as she's in the Light... I can't see that being peaceful. Ayin, I'm sure, would be constantly doing something to ensure that Carmen couldn't fuck everything up more than it already has been.

He's just spent ten thousand years in the torment nexus because of her plan, his idea was that this would work, and now... she's the one he's struggling against, who he used to trust.

....Actually, y'know what Ayin being both the Manager and also one of the "ingredients" and part of the "price" reminds me of? The fact that Dante is both the Executive Manager of the Bus, but also ranked no higher than "Sinner #10." To the higher ups, they are just another Sinner, and as Hohenheim says, they effectively don't have the right to say no to anything the Company says they should do anymore than any other Sinner.

[dr-spencer-reids-queen]

The Best Kind of Blush

Pairing: Spencer Reid x Female!Reader

Word Count: ~500

Warnings: fluff

Summary: Spencer helps you pick the best kind of blush for you.

Square Filled: roommate's best friend (2021) for @spencerreidbingo

Author’s Note: any and all comments are appreciated <3

x

Spencer doesn’t understand the hype around makeup or why women love it so much, but he sees the smile on your face whenever you can paint your face. When you both have the day of, he likes to sit on the bed and watch you expertly blend makeup products to create something flawless. You’re already flawless but he likes seeing how much time and effort you spend on one look. It helps that you’re a makeup artist for low-budget films and TV shows. You’re making your way up the chain to bigger and better projects, but it’s a slow climb.

Your roommate, JJ, doesn’t mind Spencer being over all the time since they work together. She likes seeing him happy, and if you make him happy, then she supports your relationship.

You’re running out of makeup for your job as well as a few products for your everyday use, so you drag Spencer along to the store so he can help you pick out the best ones. The first section you go to is the special effects makeup products to get a new supply of items. Your job comes first, and when you see you have money left over for personal use, you drag Spencer to the eyeshadows.

“Hold your hand out.”

Spencer does, and you grab the sparkly palette you had your eye on for a while. The color glides on smoothly on his skin, and it’s fantastically glittery. You use his hand for multiple palettes and decide on two of them. You’d use your hands but they are covered with tattoos and the color wouldn’t show right. The next product you move onto is the blushes, and you grab the one you use almost every day. However, you want to try different ones you think might compliment your skin tone.

“Help me decide what blush I should get next.”

Spencer smirks and looks around the store to see if anyone is around. He wants to make sure people aren’t staring at him when he does what he’s gonna do.

“If you want a blush, I can give you a blush. For free, I might add.”

“What place do you know that has free blushes?”

Spencer isn’t big on PDA but he will do it if he knows no one is watching. He gives you a childish grin as he hooks his fingers in your belt loops. He pulls you closer and plants his lips on yours. He kisses you slowly and passionately like he would in the bedroom. He slides his tongue on your bottom lip and you’re inclined to give him what he wants. His tongue massages your own gently and leaves no inch untouched by him. When you feel butterflies go straight to your pussy, you pull back from him. Your cheeks are hot and you can only imagine they’re dark, too. You turn away from him to calm yourself down and he chuckles lowly.

“There it is,” Spencer chuckles. “Anytime you want a blush, you come to me.”

“Okay, Fabio, calm down,” you smile. “Go wait in the car.”

Spencer laughs and allows you to calm down without him next to you. You’re almost done shopping, and then you’re going to take him home and show him he can get a blush, too.

x

Follow my library blog @aqueenslibrary​​​​​​ where I reblog all my stories, so you can put notifications on there without the extra stuff :)

[haartemis]

https://www.tumblr.com/lottins-only/768953075788644352/send-me-a-song-title-a-player-and-ill-write-a

little things ~ ella mai & jude 🫶🏼

little things - jude bellingham

A/N : got carried away and this ended up being longer than a drabble lol

the life of a final year university student during exam season is pure chaos. you're no exception: for the past couple days, you've been stuck in a loop of caffeine fueled days and long, sleepless nights. you've been so buried in exams and papers that you couldn't even go to your boyfriend jude's champions league away game.

you follow the match on a grainy stream from the library, and when he scores a beautiful goal, you jump from your seat so suddenly you startle the person sitting across from you.

you: YOU SCORED. so proud of you bby 💗

jude: thanks babe

jude: flight lands in about an hour. mind if i come straight to your place? you know i won't be able to sleep if i don't 😚

its true. the adrenaline after an evening game usually means a sleepless night for him. but that's not an issue when you're around. you have a calming effect on him, your mere presence in those times lulling him to sleep.

you: ofc. i'll be at the library for a couple more hours, but you have your key right?

jude: yupp.

jude: i’ll be there. make sure you eat something, yeah?

you: yes, dad.

jude: don’t “yes, dad” me. i mean it. i know how you get.

a couple of hours later, you trudge back home, exhausted. all you want is to curl up in bed with your boyfriend and sleep, but you can’t. the paper due at midnight, the one you thought you’d finish before leaving the library, is proving more difficult than you expected. so unfortunately you have to get it done before you can even think about resting.

when you unlock the door to your apartment, the sight that greets you makes you pause. the space that had been ground zero for your finals week chaos is now spotless. papers that were stewn all over the place, now organized neatly on your coffee table. the dishes that had piled up on the kitchen sink are washed and put away. floor swept, cat's litter box cleaned.

he's standing by the couch, airpods on, carefully folding your throw blanket. when he sees you there, his face immediately lights up. when you reach him, he pulls you into a tight hug and kisses your forehead, his arms wrapping around you like a shield. as always, being in his arms feels warm, grounding, and above all, comforting. it hasn't even been 48 hours since you last saw him, but it feels like you've been apart for weeks.

"you okay?" he asks softly, brushing a stray strand of curls from your face.

"no," you say in a panicked voice. "i’m not done with my paper, and it's due in like two hours."

"hey, it’s okay,” he says, squeezing your shoulders. "i can help... i think"

he says the last part cautiously, and you start laughing - but stop when you realize maybe he can help.

there's no time to waste, a couple moments later you sit at your tiny kitchen table, you on your laptop and him on his ipad , the same google doc open on each screen. your job is to write the actual paper, while jude does the citations.

“so, are we doing apa, chicago, or... something else?” jude squints at his phone with a confused look on his face, as if he’s reading a foreign language. you suppose for him it might as well be.

“chicago,” you say firmly, not looking up from your screen.

“got it,” he replies, setting his phone aside and rolling up his sleeves like he’s actually about to get his hands dirty.

and then you start working. for more than an hour the only sounds filling the room is the sound of keyboards clicking. jude works with the same focus and intensity you’ve seen from him when he plays football—brows knitted, his lips slightly parted as he carefully organizes the citations at the bottom of the document.

every now and then he mutters under his breath in a frustrated tone. “wait... is this a journal article or a book chapter? never mind, i got it.” or: “fuckin hell, who publishes something without a visible date?” each time, you answer without hesitation, grateful he’s doing the most boring, tedious part of your work for you.

at one point, your cat leaps onto the table and sits right next to jude’s ipad. he barely glances up, one hand absentmindedly scratching behind the cat’s ears while his other continues to scroll through a citation guide. it makes your heart swell, seeing him like that. superstar footballer who just scored in a champions league game mere hours ago, now sitting in your cramped kitchen giving your cat affection while helping write your essay. only jude. my sweet angle, you think to yourself.

“okay,” you announce finally, leaning back in your chair and stretching your arms above your head. “i think i’m done.”

“that’s my girl!” he exclaims, suddenly leaping up from his seat. before you can react, he picks you up from your chair, effortlessly lifting you into the air.

“jude!” you squeal, laughing as he flips you over and sets you back on your feet, his hands steadying you as he does.

you poke his chest, laughing. “couldn’t have done it without you.”

“obviously. who knew i was so good at this?” he kisses the top of your head. “think i'll charge you by the hour next time”

you roll your eyes at him, but inside you're just happy. happy to have submitted the essay, and happy you have jude as a boyfriend.

the stress of the night has melted away, and you feel a little lighter. you have an exam tomorrow at nine for a econ elective you regret not dropping, but there's no turning back now. all you can do is push through. in a couple of days, it will all be over.

with that somewhat encouraging thought in mind, you make your way to your bed, ready to pass out. and you almost reach it too, until jude pulls you back into the kitchen.

"you need to eat," he says sternly. he points to the takeout box sitting on the kitchen counter. "got that on my way here"

"i’m fine," you protest weakly as he heats up the food in the microwave. "i honestly just wanna sleep now"

"no, you’re not fine. you've barely eaten all day," he replies. when the microwave pings, he pulls out the food and plates it for you before putting it on the kitchen table, gesturing for you to sit.

you roll your eyes at him but comply. jude leans against the counter, watching you eat quietly, reassuringly. you can tell by his eyes he's tired too. undoubtedly drained from a physically demanding match, with the only sleep he's had since being a nap on the plane. yet here he is, prioritizing you above his own rest without a second thought.

“you didn’t have to do all this, you know,” you say in between bites. “cleaning, helping me with my paper... you should be resting.”

he shakes his head, a small smile on his lips. “you’re more important. i’ll rest when i know you’re okay.”

his words make your chest tighten, and you have to look away. it overwhelms you sometimes, his kindness and thoughtfulness.

when you finish eating, you go over to the sink and wash the dishes. jude leans against the counter, arms crossed, watching. he tells you all about his trip: the surprisingly good airplane food, the awful water pressure in the locker room showers, the cute baby he'd taken a picture with at the airport on the way back. the mundane details he can't help sharing with you, his way of showing you even when he's away, you're the biggest part of his life.

afterwards, you both do your nighttime routine in companionable silence before crawling into bed. the covers are soft and inviting as you settle in comfortably. jude pulls you closer, his arms wrapping around your waist as he settles behind you, his lips pressing a soft kiss to your shoulder that makes goosebumps rise up on your skin.

the last thing you hear before you drift off to sleep is jude's low, sleepy voice murmuring "finally"

in the morning, you're rudely awaken by an insistent shake on the shoulders.

“y/n wake up,” jude says softly.

you groan, burying your face deeper into the pillow. “five more minutes,” you mumble, still half asleep.

“you don’t have five more minutes,” he says, his tone shifting. “it’s 8.40. you’re gonna be late for your exam.”

that does it. you sit up so fast you almost get dizzy, the panic hitting you hard.

“oh my god!” you gasp, throwing the blanket off and scrambling out of the bed.

you quickly brush your teeth and get changed while jude, bless him, packs your bag for you. when you emerge out of the bathroom fully ready, he's waiting for you with your backpack, all packed and ready to go.

"did you—?"

he nods, his lips quirking into a small smile. “yeah. laptop, pens, calculator, everything. and here—” he tosses you an energy bar, which you catch clumsily. “ eat that on the way.”

"you're a lifesaver" you say as you slip on your shoes.

"go ace it, baby" he holds the door open for you while handing you the bag.

you pause by the doorway, giving him a grateful look. "thank you. again. you're the best you know, that right? all the things you do for me, it's just..." you let out a breath. "i love you so much"

he gives you a lingering kiss. "i love you too" he murmurs against your lips. "and i know you'd to the same for me"

he’s right. when he’s had a bad day, you’re at his place in no time, ready to listen if he wants to talk or to put on one of his favorite movies if he doesn’t. when he's craving it, you cook him his favorite meal. when your schedule allows, you ride with his driver to pick him up from training, just because you know he loves seeing you waiting for him. all the little things you do for each other, all the everyday acts of service. the sum of which is the way you show each other that you care, that you love one another. and isn't that the point of a partnership?

"i'll text you after i get out okay?" you murmur, giving him one last peck on the lips.

you pull your backpack over your shoulder and head out into the day, feeling ready as ever.

[starryeyedwolves]

The Gravity of Them

Sirius was a force of nature. Not the kind you could predict, but the kind that rolled in out of nowhere, changing the very air around him. He walked into a room, and heads turned—sometimes because of his careless charm, sometimes because of his reputation, but always because he was Sirius Black.

And, of course, the girls adored him.

It wasn’t just that he was absurdly handsome in a way that seemed completely effortless, though that certainly didn’t hurt. It was the way he carried himself—like he was above caring, like he was perfectly aware of the effect he had on people but didn’t quite take it seriously. He’d flash a smirk, twirl a quill between his fingers during class, lean back in his chair like the world was made for his amusement.

And then he’d hold open a door for a first-year Hufflepuff girl struggling with her books and wink when she stammered out a thank you. Or he’d pull out a chair for a Slytherin girl in the library just to see her do a double-take. Or he’d call a Ravenclaw by name when he complimented her new haircut, because of course he noticed.

But no matter how many heads turned when he walked in, Sirius always seemed to end up looking for just one person.

Remus, on the other hand, was a different kind of magnetic. Where Sirius was a storm, Remus was steady ground. The kind of place you’d want to sit and rest for a while.

He didn’t try to attract people—if anything, he seemed faintly confused when it happened. But something about the way he carried himself made him impossible to resist. He laughed at the right moments, nodded at the right times, and always seemed to know when someone needed a reassuring hand on their shoulder or a quiet, I get it.

And he had that energy—the one that made people feel safe. Girls sat beside him at lunch, stole his jumpers, looped their arms through his on the way to class. He never protested. If anything, he seemed quietly delighted.

Sirius noticed.

Of course he noticed. He always noticed Remus.

"Moony," he groaned one afternoon, sprawled dramatically across the common room sofa, one arm flung over his eyes like a dying poet. "I don’t understand it."

Remus didn’t look up from his book. "Hmm?"

"How is it that I’m the devastatingly handsome one, but you’re the one they all flock to like you’re the bloody sun?"

Remus sighed, tilting his head toward the gaggle of girls across the room. "I think they like that I’m not flirting with them."

Sirius let out a tragic noise. "But that’s my whole thing."

Remus smirked. "Maybe that’s the problem."

Sirius peeked at him from under his arm. “You’re saying I should play hard to get?”

“I’m saying you’re not very hard to get,” Remus murmured, a bit too casually.

Sirius raised an eyebrow, intrigued. “And you are?”

Remus didn’t respond. Just turned a page, lips twitching.

Before Sirius could press the point, Marlene strolled over and plopped herself on the armrest beside Remus, tossing a wink at Sirius. "Lupin, you coming to Hogsmeade this weekend?"

Remus blinked up at her, distracted. "I—yeah, probably."

"Good. We’re dragging you to Gladrags. You have exactly one jumper that doesn’t have holes in it, and it’s Sirius’."

Remus flushed, and Sirius perked up.

"Wait—my jumper?"

"You left it in the library last week," Remus muttered.

"And you just took it?" Sirius grinned. “How scandalous.”

Remus opened his mouth to reply, but Marlene ruffled his hair before he could.

"Good lad. See you there."

She was halfway across the room before Sirius turned to him with a smirk that was entirely too pleased. "Merlin, Moony. You’re like a bloody lighthouse.”

Remus rolled his eyes and went back to his book. “Oh, shut up, Sirius.”

But Sirius didn’t. Instead, he scooted closer on the sofa, until their knees touched.

"You know," he said, quieter now, almost serious, "I don’t really care if they’re all drawn to you."

Remus glanced at him, brows raised. "No?"

Sirius shook his head, voice softer. "Nah. As long as you are."

Remus froze.

Sirius shrugged, suddenly bashful. “Drawn to me, I mean.”

There was a long pause. Then Remus closed his book slowly, turned fully to face him, and said, voice just as low, “Maybe I am.”

And Sirius, for once, didn’t have a quip.

He just smiled, wide and real and a little stunned, like he’d found something he hadn’t known he was looking for.

And Remus smiled back, because he had.

Sirius didn't say anything. He just kept smiling at Remus like he’d said the last thing in the world he'd expected to hear—and maybe it was.

Remus, for his part, wasn’t sure why he’d said it. He just knew it was true.

“You meant that?” Sirius asked finally, voice low.

Remus didn’t look away. “I did.”

There was something raw in Sirius’ expression—something that had nothing to do with the easy confidence he wore like armor. “You’re not just taking the piss?”

Remus shook his head. “I wouldn’t joke about this.”

Another pause. Sirius’ knee was still pressed against his. His hand was on the cushion between them now, fingers brushing close to Remus’, like he wasn’t sure if he was allowed to reach further.

“I always thought…” Sirius trailed off, swallowing. “You’d never feel the same.”

“I always thought you wouldn’t,” Remus said, with a huff of something that might’ve been laughter if it weren’t so soft. “You flirt with everyone.”

“Yeah,” Sirius said, and this time his smile was more of a grimace, “but it never means anything. Not really.”

Remus looked down, then back up. “And this does?”

Sirius hesitated just long enough for Remus’ heart to stutter.

Then he reached out—tentative at first, then decisive—and slipped his hand over Remus’. Their fingers tangled easily, like they’d done this a thousand times before. Like they were made to fit there.

“Yeah,” Sirius said, thumb brushing the side of Remus’ hand, “this really does.”

Remus exhaled a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.

“I don’t need everyone to look at me,” Sirius said, more to the fire than to Remus. “I just… want you to.”

Remus smiled, small and a little sad. “I always have, Sirius.”

Something in Sirius’ face cracked open then—some dam held too long, some truth he’d never let himself believe. He leaned in without quite realizing it, and Remus did too, and suddenly they were close enough to count eyelashes.

Neither of them asked for permission. They didn’t need to.

The kiss was brief. Soft. The kind of thing that said we’ve been circling this forever, but not rushed—not desperate. Just right.

When they pulled apart, Sirius didn’t let go of his hand.

“Still think I’m a lighthouse?” Remus murmured, lips barely curved.

Sirius leaned his head against his shoulder with a grin. “Yeah. But I’m not so lost anymore.”

[rawenbeau]

Comfort Crowd

Chapter 4: Slytherin vs Gryffindor

Sneak peak:

Remus was freezing his ass off in the quidditch stands. Not by choice. He had promised Peter he’d go watch quidditch practice with him once a month if he didn’t have any assignments, and for once, he didn’t.

“I’m not sure if Prongs will have perfected the loop by Saturday,” Peter signed.

Remus glared at him. “You can’t both make me watch quidditch and talk about it.” Perhaps a little salty, but that was what happened when his ass had gone numb because of the cold, and yet he had to stay to keep Peter company.

“But I can’t talk about it with James. I don’t want to worry him.”

“Alright then.” Remus sighed. The match had already been moved once due to bad weather, which had James worried because it had thrown off their rhythm. He didn’t understand what that meant, but that didn’t matter. “But we can still win against Slytherin without the loop, right?”

“Yes, but it’s not always about winning.”

Remus really didn’t understand quidditch then. All of James’ rants about quidditch were about how they could win the game, and which techniques and plays would prove useful, so why wasn’t winning important?

He was about to ask, when he noticed Peter looking at something behind him.

Or someone, as it turned out.

Remus couldn’t help the smile that formed on his lips when he saw Sirius walking towards them. His heart rate picked up, and he felt warmer as well – Sirius’ presence just had that effect on him. Sirius sat down so close their knees bumped together, and Remus was brought right back to their recent study session in the library.

[angstylittleguy]

Day 94

Bennett is still trapped in a time loop, one where Dalton experiences a growth spurt that exposes his powers, leaving Bennett to scramble to try to prevent it. // Part 1

tw: violence (implied), blood, trauma

character context: Bennett frequently gets stuck in time loops and the only way to get the loop to end is for him to survive the day. Dalton is a size-shifter whose height is affected by his emotions. Meiling is able to to move as quick as lightning, but the effects it has on her muscles and joints has long-term effects.

word count: 3.6k

-> In Which Everything Goes Wonderfully Wrong masterpost link: Here

-> character introductions and moodboards: Here

Bennett’s eyes snapped open and he involuntarily took a big gulp of air, breath spilling into his lungs. The clock on his bedside table flashed 4:28 am, its relentless, looping certainty mocking him. Day 94. Ninety-four times he had woken up in this room, to this exact moment, and the crushing weight of his task pressed heavier on his chest with every repetition.

He sat up, the springs of the mattress groaning under his shifting weight. His room was exactly as it always was—the corner of his favorite band poster was still peeling off the wall, notebook paper was still scattered across his desk, and Josiah’s bedroom was still painfully vacant—all frozen in place, like actors who never tired of performing the same scene. 

But today felt different. Not because anything around him had changed, but because Bennett himself had. The frustration, the weariness, the endless strain of trying to fix a world that refused to stay fixed—it was all boiling over.

He stalked to the bathroom, flipping the light switch with his elbow. Bennett drew another tally mark on his skin with the sharpie marker. He couldn’t bear the sight of his reflection. He was unscarred. No scrapes, scratches, or bruises to show what he had been through. Bennett didn’t even have bags under his eyes. 

He pulled on his hoodie and jeans with mechanical efficiency, his mind already racing. Focus, Bennett. No time to wallow. You need to try something new.

Everything he’d tried had failed. Talking to Dalton hadn’t worked. Calming him hadn’t worked. Fighting him hadn’t worked. It was like the loop itself was conspiring to unravel their lives, no matter what he did. Well, fuck you too, universe.

Bennett slipped out of his dorm room quietly. The hallways were dead silent, no one in their right minds awake this early. He pulled his hood over his head, yanking on the strings. Bennett went through everything from previous days—strategies, dead ends, desperate theories—but none of it had gotten him anywhere. 

Bennett left his dorm building, the chilly, November morning air biting at his nose. His eyes were focused on his feet as he walked, listening to the sound of his shoes on asphalt. He didn’t need to know where he was going, his feet carried him on muscle memory now. They knew the way to Dalton’s house even if Bennett was sleep-walking. He had made the trek for nearly eighty days now. 

The thought made him slow to stop. 

He couldn’t stop Dalton if he didn’t understand what was happening.

Bennett was done winging it. He’d treated the loop like a puzzle to solve with brute force: fix Dalton, stop the chaos, and the loop ends. But ninety-four days of failure said otherwise. Maybe there was something he missed.

Bennett changed course. The library wouldn’t open for hours, but Bennett knew how to get in. He’d done it before, back when he thought the loop was just a weird fluke that would fix itself after a few days. 

The main doors were locked, as expected. Bennett ducked around to the back, where the staff entrance was. The lock was old, and he jimmied it open with practiced ease.

The library’s faint, musty smell hit him as he stepped inside, the dim glow from the emergency lights casting long shadows across the rows of bookshelves. 

His fingers brushed over the spines of books he hadn’t thought to look at before: physics, philosophy, mythology. He didn’t know what he was looking for, exactly, but maybe that was the point.

He pulled a stack of books off the shelves and carried them to a table, dropping into a chair. The first book he opened was dense and filled with diagrams he barely understood, but he forced himself to read.

He found a sketch of a brain surrounded by looping arrows, annotated with theories about subconscious imprinting and emotional residue.

“Subconscious...” he muttered, tapping the paper with his index finger. He’d read the word a dozen times, but it hadn’t clicked. If the loop reset physical states and erased conscious memory, then what wasn’t being reset? 

“The hippocampus processes emotional stimuli... subconscious responses to trauma can persist despite amnesia…”

His breath hitched. Trauma. That was it. The loop was only designed to reset surface-level states—bruises healed, memories vanished—but emotions, instincts, and stress responses weren’t so easily erased. They were scars on the soul, not the skin.

Bennett’s pulse raced. It wasn’t just the loop causing this—it was the feedback cycle. Every loop compounded the emotional residue left behind, a snowball growing larger and larger until it was impossible to stop.

Dalton’s powers—triggered by emotion—were accelerating the effect.

He raced to the front desk of the library and searched for a pen. Bennett pulled up his hoodie and scribbled notes upside down on his stomach:

Subconscious retains residue → emotional imprint amplifies.

Dalton’s powers tied to fear/guilt → loop resets physical but not emotional.

Every reset = bigger snowball.

“Which means...” Bennett’s voice trembled as he traced the chain of logic. “Every loop makes Dalton more unstable. If this keeps going, I won’t be able to stop him.”

The thought made his chest tighten. He ran a hand through his hair, forcing himself to focus. If this memory glitch was amplifying the emotional residue, then reversing that process might stabilize Dalton. But how?

The faint sound of footsteps snapped him out of his thoughts. He froze, listening intently as the sound grew louder, then stopped. A figure stepped out from behind a shelf, and Bennett’s heart skipped a beat.

It was a girl, probably his age, with shoulder-length dark hair tucked behind her ears. She wore an oversized jacket and sneakers, her hands stuffed casually into her pockets. Her gaze landed on him, curious but unafraid.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, tilting her head. “The library’s closed.

Bennett stared at her for a moment, the pen still clutched in his hand. He lowered his shirt. His first instinct was to lie or make an excuse. But then, he thought, Why bother? She wouldn’t remember this tomorrow. None of them ever did.

“I’m stuck in a time loop,” he said bluntly, dropping the pen onto the desk. “Day ninety-four.”

Instead of the confusion or disbelief he expected, the girl just nodded, as if he’d told her something as ordinary as the weather forecast. “That’s rough,” she responded.

Bennett blinked. “And why have you broken into the library at five in the morning?”

The girl just shrugged. “Wanted to see if I could.”

An awkward beat passed.

“So,” the girl finally said, “do you want any help?”

“Help?”

“With the whole time loop thing.”

Bennett frowned, suspicious. “You believe me? Just like that?”

“Yeah, why not? If you’re lying, whatever. If you’re telling the truth, helping you get out of a time loop is probably the coolest thing I’ve done in a while.”

Her logic was unsettlingly calm, but Bennett couldn’t deny the flicker of relief he felt at her offer. Ninety-four days of carrying this alone had frayed his nerves, and though he didn’t trust her yet, it was tempting to let someone else share the load for once.

Bennett studied her. The faint emergency lighting cast long shadows across her face, but her expression was relaxed, even playful. She looked as if she were discussing a movie plot, not the unraveling of reality.

“What’s your name?” he asked cautiously.

“Meiling,” she replied. “And yours?”

“Bennett.” He took a deep breath. “Well, Meiling, if you’re serious about helping, I don’t know how much use you’ll be. I’ve been at this for three months, and nothing’s worked. Unless you’ve got a PhD in physics or magic tricks, I’m not holding my breath.”

“Wow, three months?” She whistled low. “That’s a long time to be stuck in one day. What’s the deal? You have to save the world or something?”

“Something like that.”

Meiling tapped a finger on her chin. “Alright, hit me with it. What’s the situation?”

Bennett hesitated. The idea of explaining everything felt exhausting, but her easy acceptance of his predicament was oddly comforting. Maybe talking it through with someone new could help.

“Fine. Long story short: there’s this guy. He’s… unstable. Every time the day resets, it gets worse. I’ve tried talking him down, restraining him, everything. Nothing sticks because the loop resets it all.”

“Sounds like a tough gig,” she said. “So, what’s your next move?”

Bennett frowned. “That’s the problem. I don’t have one. I was hoping to figure something out here.” He lifted his shirt, showing off the notes he scrawled on his stomach with the pen. “But so far, all I’ve got is a theory that emotional residue doesn’t reset like everything else.”

“Sorry, I’m not trying to change the subject, but why are you writing all over yourself?”

“The ink on my skin doesn’t reset with the loop. If I wrote this down on paper, I’d just lose it tomorrow.”

Meiling raised her eyebrows. “Smart. A little weird, but smart.” She put her hands on her hips. “Alright, Bennett. You’ve got emotional residue, an unstable friend, and ninety-four failures under your belt. Let’s make sure the number doesn’t keep adding up.”

Bennett snorted. “Easy for you to say. I’ve tried almost everything.”

“Well, surely not everything. Explain it to me. What do we know so far?”

He let out a long breath. “Alright, I’ll explain, but you’re probably going to think I’m insane.”

Meiling leaned against the edge of the desk, crossing her arms. “Try me.”

“Every day, I wake up at 4:28. No matter what happens during the day—no matter what I do, or what I try—it always ends the same way.”

Meiling tilted her head. “The same how?”

“I die,” Bennett said flatly. His voice didn’t waver, but he shoved his hands in his hoodie pocket. “Every single day. Sometimes it’s quick. Sometimes it’s… not. But no matter what, the loop resets the moment I die, and I wake up in my room like none of it ever happened.”

Meiling’s brows furrowed slightly, but she didn’t interrupt.

“It’s been ninety-four days,” Bennett continued, his tone bitter. “Ninety-four times I’ve watched everything fall apart. Ninety-four times I’ve tried to stop it, to fix things, and every time I fail. I keep dying, and the world keeps spinning like it doesn’t even care.”

He looked up at her, waiting for the skepticism, the pity, the disbelief. But Meiling just nodded thoughtfully, her lips pressing into a thin line. 

“You die every day?”

“Yeah.” Bennett said, his voice edged with bitterness. “Every time I bite it, the loop starts over. It’s like the universe has decided my death is some kind of checkpoint.”

“That sounds like absolute hell,” she said.

“Tell me about it.”

Meiling frowned, leaning forward slightly. “So, if you stayed alive—”

“—The loop wouldn’t reset,” Bennett finished. 

“But if you know you’re going to die, why don’t you just… not leave your room? Stay put, ride it out.”

Bennett shook his head, a harsh laugh escaping him. “Believe me, I’ve tried. But I can’t bring myself to do it. That’s not an option right now. Not with Dalton getting worse every day. If someone finds out about him, or if he hurts someone... I can’t let that happen.”

“Dalton?”

He nodded. “He’s my friend.”

Meiling hummed. “What happens?”

Bennett hesitated. “It’s complicated. I don’t even fully understand it myself, but it’s bad. And the longer this loop goes on, the worse it gets. I’ve seen it spiral out of control too many times already. I have to stop him, but every time I try, I die before I can make it work.”

Meiling was quiet for a moment, her fingers drumming idly against her arm. Then she straightened up. “Okay,” she said, her tone brisk and decisive. “So, here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to stop Dalton from doing whatever this terrible thing is, and we’re going to make sure you don’t die in the process. Deal?”

Bennett blinked at her. “That’s what I’ve been doing for the past ninety-four days.”

“But now you have me.”

Bennett didn’t know whether to feel relieved or uneasy. Meiling’s confidence was infectious, but her involvement complicated everything. People finding out about Dalton’s abilities is exactly what Bennett has been trying to prevent for the past ninety-four days. Telling Meiling what was going on seemed like another problem he’d have to figure out later. 

“Right,” Bennett muttered, glancing at her. “You’re all in, huh?”

Meiling shrugged. “You’ve been stuck in some twisted time prison for three months, fighting to stop a catastrophe. Someone’s gotta have your back.” She tilted her head, studying him. “Unless you think I’m just going to get in your way.”

 “I don’t know. It’s not that simple.”

“Then make it simple,” Meiling said. “You trust me enough to explain the whole you-die-every-day thing, but not enough to tell me what we’re walking into?”

Bennett chewed on his lip.

“You said Dalton’s your friend,” Meiling added. “If he’s in trouble, wouldn’t he want help?”

Bennett laughed bitterly. “You don’t know Dalton.”

Meiling folded her arms. “Then introduce me.”

“It’s not that easy. He… he doesn’t trust people. Especially strangers.”

“I don’t need him to trust me,” Meiling said, her voice calm but firm. “I just need him to trust you.”

Bennett swallowed the lump in his throat. Finally, he nodded. “Alright, let’s go.”

...

They reached the corner where Dalton’s house came into view. Bennett stopped, glancing over at Meiling.

“This is it?” she asked, her voice light but her eyes scanning the house warily.

“Yeah.”

They approached the door, Bennett already preparing himself for a disaster. He knocked.

Dalton’s footsteps could be heard from outside. Each pounding step made Bennett’s heart sink lower and lower into his stomach. The door opened; Dalton stood in the frame with a confused expression. He already looked a couple inches taller than usual. 

“Bennett?” He asked, eyeing him suspiciously. “What are you doing here?” 

Dalton’s eyes cut to Meiling. “And who’s your friend?”

“This is Meiling,” Bennett told him, already uncertain. “We, uh—”

Dalton cut him off. “Come inside, I’m kind of in a rush. I’ve got somewhere to be.”

Bennett exchanged a look with Meiling, then took a breath. “That’s actually why we’re here. I really think you shouldn’t go to your showcase.”

Dalton paused. Bennett could see the confusion turning in his eyes. “Why not?”

“Just trust me on this,” Bennett said, trying to sound confident. “Something isn't right. If you go—”

“I can’t just not go. It’s worth half my grade.”

“I really think you should skip.”

Dalton’s lips twitched into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “It’s not just about me. My group and I have been working on this project for months. They’re counting on me to be there. If I don’t show up, I screw over everyone else, too.”

Meiling leaned against the wall, arms folded. “It’s not screwing them over if it’s for a good reason.”

“And what reason would that be?” Dalton asked, his eyes narrowing.

Bennett glanced over at Meiling. He couldn’t mention Dalton’s powers in front of her, that would send him over the edge for sure.

“Just listen to me,” Bennett pleased. “You don’t understand how serious this is.”

“You show up with some random girl to tell me—what? That I’m supposed to ditch the showcase I’ve been killing myself over? Come on.”

Meiling leaned against the wall, watching them carefully. “No one’s saying you have to drop the ball. Just—can’t you postpone for a few hours? Something’s off, and it’s safer if you stay here.”

Dalton paused, his bag slung over one shoulder. His brow furrowed as he glanced between them. “Safer? What’s going on, Bennett? You’re acting weird. And who even is she?”

“She’s… helping me,” Bennett said quickly, though the vagueness didn’t seem to ease Dalton’s suspicion. “You’ve just got to trust me, okay? If you leave, something bad will happen.”

Dalton hesitated, his grip tightening on the strap of his bag. “Bennett, I do trust you. But this—this doesn’t make sense.”

Before Bennett could respond, Dalton winced and staggered, grabbing at his chest. His entire body twitched as if something deep inside him had suddenly shifted.

“Dalton?” Bennett’s voice rose, alarmed. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t… I don’t know.” Dalton clutched at the doorframe, his fingers leaving faint indentations in the wood. His shoulders seemed broader, his posture subtly changing. Then his frame started to expand—gradual at first, but quickly gaining momentum. His height surged upward, his arms stretching unnaturally long, muscles swelling beneath his skin.

“Dalton!” Bennett shouted, stepping forward. “You need to stop it.”

“I’m trying!” Dalton’s voice cracked, deeper than before. His knees buckled as he tried to crouch, but his growing limbs collided with the walls and ceiling, splintering wood and drywall.

“Bennett, what’s happening?” Meiling’s voice was sharp, panic creeping in.

“Just stay back!” Bennett shouted, his focus fixed on Dalton. “Dalton, you have to calm down!”

“I—I can’t!” Dalton’s arms flailed as he tried to brace himself, one of his massive hands knocking over a side table and sending it skittering across the room. His legs stretched awkwardly, one knee slamming into the wall and leaving a deep dent. The house groaned under the strain of his ever-expanding form.

“Bennett, what do we do?” Meiling’s voice was high and tight, barely masking her panic. She dodged another one of Dalton’s flailing limbs as it crashed into a lamp, sending shards of glass scattering across the floor.

Bennett’s mind raced. “Dalton, listen to me!” he shouted, stepping closer despite the chaos. “You need to focus. Breathe. Try to stop yourself!”

“I don’t know how!” Dalton cried, his voice booming now, full of raw fear. His enormous frame hunched awkwardly in the cramped room, limbs jerking in desperate, uncoordinated movements. One arm swung wide, knocking into the wall and tearing it open like paper.

The ground trembled beneath their feet as Dalton grew larger still, his back pressing against the ceiling. The room itself seemed to shrink around him.

“We need to get out of here,” Meiling yelled, grabbing Bennett’s arm, but Dalton’s rapidly expanding leg slammed into the floor, blocking the exit.

“Dalton!” Bennett yelled again, but his voice cracked with the strain. He could barely hear himself over the groaning of the structure. Dalton’s head tilted toward him, his massive, terrified eyes locking on Bennett’s face.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Dalton said, his voice trembling with desperation. “I don’t… I can’t control this!”

The words had barely left his mouth when a massive piece of ceiling collapsed, hurtling straight toward Bennett.

“Bennett, move!” Meiling shouted. In a blur of motion, she darted forward faster than humanly possible. One moment she was across the room, and the next she was at Bennett’s side, pulling him out of harm’s way just as the debris slammed into the ground where he’d stood.

The two tumbled to the floor, Bennett gasping for breath as his mind struggled to process what had just happened. “What the fuck?” he wheezed, staring at Meiling with wide eyes. “How did you—what—what was that?”

Meiling didn’t answer. She didn’t have time. Dalton’s leg shifted again, the massive limb sweeping toward them like a wrecking ball. She grabbed Bennett, hauling him to his feet, but her own movement was too quick and disjointed. One of Dalton’s enormous arms crashed down, pinning her against the wall. She struggled, useless against the sheer size of him.

“Meiling!” Bennett shouted, scrambling toward her, but Dalton’s foot shifted again, and the ground beneath Bennett gave way. He stumbled, landing hard on his back as a massive chunk of debris splintered from above and came crashing down.

“Bennett, no!” Meiling screamed, her voice raw as she strained against the massive limb trapping her. She pushed with everything she had, but Dalton’s weight was too much. She was stuck, helpless to move as the wreckage crushed Bennett beneath its weight.

Dalton froze, his massive form trembling as he realized what had happened. “No… no…” His voice was a whisper, full of horror, though it echoed like a thunderclap through the ruined room. “I didn’t mean to…”

Meiling’s breath hitched, and for a moment, the world seemed to go silent except for the sound of Dalton’s ragged breathing.

Bennett lay there, unmoving, the world pressing in on him from all sides. His vision blurred at the edges, darkness creeping in as the sound of Dalton’s sobs became distant. Everything felt muffled, like the chaos unfolding around him was happening underwater, the weight of his own body sinking him deeper into nothingness. The pain in his chest was overwhelming, suffocating. He couldn’t hold on anymore.

And then, everything stopped.

It was as if the universe itself had decided to freeze, to hold its breath. The weight of the debris pressing down on him seemed to fade, the pain dulling into something almost unbearable, yet distant. Time warped, stretched like taffy, and for a moment, Bennett felt as if he were drifting, floating in a space without up or down.

And then...

Bennett’s chest heaved, a sharp, jagged inhale ripping through him. Oxygen burned as it filled his lungs, the rawness of it grounding him back into reality. 

The room was still. The weight of his body sank into the softness of the bed, the quiet of the early morning settling around him like a blanket.

His eyes fluttered open. The sun had not yet risen, the day still untouched by the nightmare that had just passed. Bennett was alive. But somehow, everything had changed.

tag list: @sandwichtheuhh / @gt-daboss / @kazuyumi1412 / @ewmoodboardblorbo / @isumietokyo / @litenmyra / @smol-n-smol / @thesillygoofygoober / @lady-bee-fechin/ @werifesteria20/ @liconich / @wadling-of-wadlimar / @chuuyas-height / @r0bi-n / @abygails / @pinapok / @cryingbreaskfastfriends

[denamelesshuman]

Goyuu Hanahaki disease AU with a twist, so instead of hana (flower) it's baby so it's Babyhaki disease, where instead of flowers grow inside your lungs when you have a crush on someone, you grow a baby in your belly instead. If the love is requited, the baby will look like the one who is crushed on, and the bigger and deeper the feelings involved, the more the baby will take after the 'father', but if the love is unrequited, the baby will either be miscarriaged, a stillborn, or in a rare chance continue to live, they'll look exactly like the one crushing on or the 'mother'. So when peace finally comes down to Jujutsu and Gojo-sensei is saved like the others, Choso, Higuruma, Nanami. And out of nowhere Yuji starts showing symptoms of morning sickness with a slight bump on his belly that keeps growing by the weeks, throwing everyone out of the loop of discovery.

They begin speculating, from Yuji got another curse he ingested (to which Yuji swore he didn't, the last time was his big brothers the Kusouzu but Choso confirmed they had all dissolved within Yuji's soul fully), to Yuji was conceiving a cursed womb after unknowingly got impregnated by an unregistered curse (which is unlikely because Yuji would've known unless he was taken while being unconscious. In that case, Choso who was monitoring him would've also know). So none of the speculations were likely to happen.

As Yuji's condition can only be explained as extraordinary pregnancy and everyone is at their wits' end with his belly getting bigger.

Yuji who (despite trying hard to pretend, saying he'll be fine and doesn't want to abort the baby, wanting to keep them at least until the day they should be born because doesn't want to object whatever it is growing inside him as another case of aborted fetus, just like all his other big brothers) begins to show signs of demotivation, is sapped of his usual bright energy, and is getting sickly every other day. Until one day Nanami comes back from the library, showing him a ripped part of an old scroll, which explains a rare ancient curse that caused the phenomeneon called the babyhaki disease, and that whatever illness is eating away at Yuji's body and soul will be cured once the fetus is out of his system, alive or not.

"Perhaps, this is the one," Nanami explains, "it could be due to the effect of last time ancient curses and incarnations alike surged after the CG and disappeared along with Sukuna's parting, but maybe this ancient curse lingered and infiltrated the very person whose body attracted and was conducive to host it. Itadori-kun's body constitution as an innate vessel which had hosted a dormant curse for a long time before, ever since he was born without himself knowing, now said curse was gone, leaving his body void, it was plausible if something like this were to happen."

All the people in the room stared hard at Yuji, still reeling from the shock of the only plausible explanation of what could be the 1st time they ever encountered in his lifetime. But then again, the case of Sukuna's vessel was also the only time they had ever witnessed and it was all tied to Yuji, so this being another case w/ the boy is far from impossible.

Yuji could only shrink under all the hard and questioning stares directed at him. Just like the others, he'd never heard about that ancient curse and it was true, that he had never realized he was born with a curse residing within him before, until he got acquainted by jujutsu. Perhaps after Sukuna, it made his soul and body just sensitize and is prone to other curses to keep residing inside him.

"It says if both parties are human then the fetus will be human, not a cursed womb," Nanami continues, still not making any of them relieved, except for Yuji, yet he tries to hide it by avoiding everyone's stare.

"Who is it, Yuji?" Gojo suddenly asks, his voice cold and detached of any emotion.

"What do you mean, Sensei?"

"If this is the only plausible explanation for this rare phenomenon than it could only be what really happened, surely you would know who the other person is?"

Yuji goes silent and at that point, everyone gets the message. Yuji doesn't want anyone to know who the other party is. Most likely because it's unrequited.

Even after weeks of being coaxed, Yuji still refuses to say anything, opting to just avoid everyone's entirely, much to everyone's dismay bcs his health gets deteriorated further, so they all agree to leave it for now and focus on keeping Yuji and the fetus healthy till the day of delivery. Because stillborn or not, that's the only way to get the sickness out of Yuji's system entirely.

Yuji of course knows who it is, it's none other than Sensei...

But, if the curse is true, then it'd be better to just keep it himself. If the baby is alive, he'll look exactly like Yuji himself, he's 100% sure of it, so no one is gonna be the wiser and he won't cause any trouble to his Sensei by forcing him this burden.

This is Yuji's one-sided feelings, so he's the one gonna be responsible for it, not the other. He doesn't want to tie Sensei to him out of obligation that none of them thought was even possible if not for this shitty curse that came out of nowhere and due to his weird body constitution of being a vessel. No, his Sensei is too important for this world and the others. It won't do him any good if Sensei has to have another responsibility under him when he already got too many in his hands, Yuji thought, especially since Gojo-sensei wouldn't have wanted it in the first place but will be forced to take the responsibility as an adult.

So when the day the baby is due, after 1 hour of difficult surgery and another half an hour of recovery, where after Yuji finally awakes to the sight of everyone having another shock of their life, himself included, as he's face to face with the sight of tiny Gojo Satoru swaddled in cotton blanket and put on his bare chest.

Yuji, unable to comprehend the situation still, moves his eyes to a rare sight of (Yuji has to rub his eyes once because he thinks he must be dreaming), Gojo-sensei's face with a drying tear tracks on his cheeks, holding his hand tightly

"S-Sensei..." Yuji whispers hoarsely but soon clams up, not able to form another word.

The room goes into pregnant silence, until Shoko is the one breaking the ice.

"It's alright, Itadori, this is also the 1st time for all of us to see Gojo crying, some of us thought he didn't even have tear ducts..."

"But..."

"Honestly, I'm not surprised this is how the baby turns out. Now, if you'll excuse me, anyone can stay, but I need to take the baby."

"What? Why??" Yuji begins to feel anxious and moves his free hand that isn't held by Gojo to hold his baby but Shoko is faster.

"Your baby is small, and he didn't breath simultaneously upon delivery. And yes, it's a boy, Itadori, so congrats to the Gojo family I guess. We all actually thought the Gojo bloodline will end with this idiot, he himself thinks so."

"But for now, the baby needs to be put into the incubator and observed for a while.

"Don't worry Yuji, the machine is right beside you here, see?" Choso is sitting on his other side, smiling and stroking Yuji's hair gently and pointing to a glass box behind him where Shoko puts the baby inside and deftly attaches all kinds of tubes and wires, including a pediatric CPAP ( mechanical oxygen supply) to cover his tiny nose and mouth. Only now Yuji realizes how small and pale the baby looks. Tears well up in his eyes in an instant, seeing his baby conditions.

It's because he wasn't healthy during his pregnancy, he was restless, and despite hiding it, he was heartbroken, thinking his baby won't even get the chance to know who his father is. So it affects him because the baby is human. The guilt starts eating away inside his chest.

"Yuji..." Gojo softly calls, he rubs his moist eyes several times and drags a palm down his face. His tone somewhat heavy with regrets

"Yuji...yuji..yuji..."

Yuji pushes over the lump in his throat and croaks, "Sensei, so-sorry...I-"

"Yuji, why did you never say anything to me? Even when I asked you who the other is? We could've saved so much time..." Gojo was looking at him square in the eyes, there's no blaming in his eyes, only sadness and regrets.

"You shouldnt try bearing the pregnancy alone, if I had known, I would've been around you more, but I was worried I would be annoying you."

"But...I never thought, I never thought you would feel the same way about me, Sensei..."

"Why not? did you ever ask me before?"

"No...but, you told me about how you got sealed back then and it was because you thought of that man, right? I asked Ieiri-san about him, and I, I just assumed from the stories..."

"But did you ever ask me directly?"

Yuji lowers his eyes and says nothing.

"Suguru is my best friend, a comrade, at one point in my life I considered him a confidant, a family, the way I felt about him is the way Yuji feels about Megumi and Nobara. It's not the same way I feel about Yuji." Gojo squeezes his hand tighter.

Yuji looks up at him and gasps, "R-really?" unable to hide the hope and warm beginning to seep inside all the pores in his body and voice.

"Truly." Gojo nods, nothing but sincerity in his voice. He brings Yuji's hand to his lips and pecks it gently, raising the blush on Yuji's cheeks.

Choso clears his throat loudly and glares at Gojo, but it goes ignored by the other sorcerer.

Yuji is at loss for words, and Megumi chimes in. "Tbh, Itadori, Gojo-sensei was not being subtle at all, though I know he tries hard to."

"Huh? Seriously? I didn't know that?"

"It's true though..." Gojo confirms.

"Then, Sensei! Shouldn't you also say something to me?" Suddenly Yuji feels they are both in the wrong for wasting so much time when they can actually be together.

"But Yuji! Think about it from my perspective Yuji, I'm your teacher and an adult, you're my student and still a minor, even if the Great Teacher Gojo Satoru, the strongest sorcerer of modern era, lives by his own rule, I'm still concern about what's right or wrong for the people I care about!

"Plus, I thought Yuji have always had eyes for Nanamin, so I don't want to interfere your feelings unless I'm sure, if not for this curse...no maybe it's not a curse, but actually a blessing??"

Nanami groans, "Whatever it is, don't bring me into this," he sighs, "Gojo-san was just doing what adults should've done at this situation, Itadori. What's important is now everything is finally out in the clear and hopefully the sickness is cured now the baby is born."

"Oniichan thinks Nanami or Fushiguro is the better option, Yuji." Choso comments randomly.

"Hush you! I'm your brother-in-law now, so be nice to me from now on, big brother."

"Same goes to you, it means I'm your elder now so you should obey me. Don't you even think of hurting Yuji or breaking his heart or I'll k!ll you when you sleep and kidnap Yuji and his baby."

"CHOSO!" Yuji yells.

"Let him try, Yuji, he won't be able to do it anyway. Besides, I don't plan on leaving Yuji ever again let alone hurt him!"

"Good, then I dare you to make a binding vow for that with Yuji, so if you so much as accidentally violate it, you'll get repercussions."

"I don't want that!" Yuji says.

"Maybe what you mean is a vow of marriage, Choso-san," Nanami supplies, "but that's gonna have to wait until Yuji is 18."

"Technically, Japan's laws can allow under 18 as long as the parents' give permission," Higuruma adds, seeing as Yuji's guardian is now Choso-"

"Then, oniichan, thank you for your help! I owe you big one this time," Gojo bows slightly.

"Hmph, if Yuji wants it, I'll think abt it after you make that binding vow."

"No problem!" Gojo finally backs to his cheery self.

"What? Wait, Sensei!"

"Don't worry, Yuji, I mean what I said before, I won't break it no matter what."

"But the baby, the baby is sick...will he...survive?"

"Of course he will! He's our baby, isn't he? So he must be also The strongest baby! Just so you know, Yuji, Sensei was also born prematurely, weighed only 2,4 kg, and length 46 cm, and look how tall and healthy I am now! So don't worry he'll pull through and grow big and strong like us too, hell, he may even surpass me in height!"

Yuji chuckles.

"Hmm I prefer he'll be cute like Yuji, though," Choso says. "But since he has your face, he's not gonna be cute. Yuji, make sure your next baby looks like you, okay? So oniichan can play with little Yuji to his heart's content."

"Oi, choso, don't be weird," Yuji sighs. "In the first place, I can conceive due to a curse, is it possible for me to conceive again after this, I mean, now that Gojo-sensei and I know about our feelings-" He stops himself, suddenly it dawns on him and everything still feels so surreal.

To know that his unrequited love he had hid since forever, determined to bring it to his grave with him, is somehow not just reciprocated but is given back stronger, if the fact that his baby's face looks nothing short of Gojo Satoru's carbon copy, albeit a tiny version of him. Unable to hide his shyness, Yuji buries his face in his hands.

"Oh, we'll never know till we try, don't we?" Gojo singsongs with a sly tone in his voice, "I'll make sure we'll try many times to make lots of babies after this, Yuji~"

Yuji buries his face further, pulling his blankets through his head so only charming sight of his red ears and nape are showing.

"Binding vow first!" Choso shouts again, to which Gojo only laughs heartily.

Looking at both the adorable sight of his beloved Yuji and the baby secured within a blanket inside the incubator beside them, a sudden tranquility and warmth wash over his whole being.

Satoru always thinks himself belongs to no one but his own. And that the world should bow to him in exchange of him being responsible to maintain its peace

And that he's the only one should carry that burden, without relying to anyone or do it for anyone.

But now there are two other most important things in his life, that he would prioritize over everything in

This world, over everyone else first. And suddenly he doesn't feel very alone anymore.

The thought only brings calm and serenity.

He now has a family to take care of.

Ah, maybe this is what those people talk about, how it feels.

The feeling of finally settling down.

His indomitable spirit with strongest ego finally being tamed by something as domestic as having two babies he love over everything else.

For once and the first time in his life, he starts envisioning to grow old and live a long peaceful life, away from the monster inside him.

• • •

(And so after Yuji's recovery, out of being bitter that their relationship started backwards in process, Goyuu gives it their all to make up for their lost time together and tries to make babies day and night)

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #55 – The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

Introduction

The Spear Cuts Through Water was one of my favorite reads of last year, and I’ve been meaning to get around to Jimenez’ other work basically since I finished it. Months and months later, my TBR pile and the library’s hold queue cooperated and I finally got around to it. Of the two, you can definitely tell Birds is the debut novel, but despite the roughness I can’t help feeling like it's also the one I prefer. I do have complaints (of which, more below), and the story certainly has issues with structure and allocation of wordcount, but this really is the rare book where I feel no compunctions whatsoever giving five stars.

Knowing myself, this isn’t entirely unrelated to how fucking heartbreaking it is at points.

Synopsis

To brutally over-summarize, the book follows Nia, a starship captain hauling crops on a freight route from a ‘resource world’ to Pelican Station, one of the great centers of human civilization and Allied Space. Due to the peculiarities of faster than light travel, the round trip that is for her and her crew experienced as a span of months is for the people at both endpoints an absence of fifteen years – a convenient way for her to keep making the same mistakes as far as personal connections and relationships go. On the last loop of the route before her contract is completed, she finds herself taking care of a mute, deeply traumatized young boy discovered miraculously unharmed by the locals in what seemed like a fiery wreck. The boy – at first nonverbal, inexplicably a musical savant, deeply traumatized and mysterious in a hundred different ways – finds his way into her heart to the point that even after they return to Pelican and he’s been turned over to the security services, she can’t stop trying to find out what happened to him and making sure he’s alright.

It’s at this point that the two of them come to the attention of Fumiko Nakajima, the Millennium Woman – designer of the five great stations at the heart of Allied Space, and (thanks to the magic of cryo-sleep and FTL time differentials) one of the last survivors of long-dead Earth. She sees in the boy the possibility of something miraculous – truly instant interstellar travel – and so hires Nia and a few reliable agents to take him into Fringe Space, safely out of view of any of her ‘friends and colleagues’ who might take a similar interest in him. For fifteen years. The story then reveals itself to be one of, basically, child-rearing and coming of age – at least until the moment where the child’s miraculous abilities really do reveal themselves, and all at once things get much, much deadlier.

Structure

The book is – not quite incoherent (the thesis is very clear), but certainly unfocused. At first I thought that was rather the point – the first three chapters are each incredibly effective, melancholic short stories in their own rights'; each leapfrogging into the perspective of a character whose actions or legacy shaped the previous, but with dramatically different casts, setting and plots. These are almost certainly the most aesthetically successful and artistically disciplined sections of the book, and as I read them I assumed it would continue in the same vein for the entire book.

It does not – the book settles very firmly into being the story of Nia and the boy who is later named Ahro. The middle of the book is an almost light-hearted coming of age story, spread across the years Ahro spends growing up in the Galactic fringe with his ragtag accidental family. The final act then dramatically shifts tone again, becoming largely about recovering from betrayal and the destruction of your life, and of striving in defiance of all sense and reason to reconnect with someone you love.

There are, then, three very different vibes here, and I can’t say the shifts between them are handled with the most grace in the world. The book absolutely never stops experimenting with style either, shifting voice, perspective, level of detail, and even format (several chapters are relayed as diary entries) basically whenever the mood strikes it. It absolutely feels like an incredibly talented author showing off a bit beyond their limits – you can see the seams, the allocation of effort between the parts is...questionable, and there are a couple vital characters/subplots who just needed another chapter or two of focus – but it’s the sort of messiness that leaves me incredibly endeared.

Love, and its Discontents

Those first three chapters are essentially short stories connected by setting and a character or two – but most of all they’re connected by theme. Each is, one way or another, the story of the protagonist falling in love – the sort of love that defines a life, that cuts you to the core whenever you remember it – and then having that love fail, leaving the lover damaged or lessened in a way that never quite heals.

Things do not stay quite so melancholic, but for a story whose whole climax is centered around the quite literally metaphysical and reality-shaking power of pure love this book has a bracingly tragic sensibility of it. Love is hopelessly one-sided, or turns rancid with resentment for just long enough to make sure it can never be restored again. Romances end in betrayal and murder, bonds both sororial and paternal in half-thoughtless abandonment, soul-deep friendships in vicious arguments and a severing of ties. Love, the book says, is deeply contingent and often more transitory than it seems – and if it isn’t, that can do far more harm than good.

Nia as a protagonist has plenty of baggage about this. She’s introduced as a woman with deep abandonment issues – that is, she keeps abandoning people and then feeling bad about it (her ship is the Debby, after the kid sister who lived and died seeing her for a few days every fifteen years due to the time lag of interstellar shipping). She latches onto protecting and caring for Ahro almost more as an attempt at redemption for herself as anything about the boy himself, it’s only over time she really grows to love him as more than a talisman.

I can’t say it was particularly well-spent time, but the book does something I love at least the idea of. Nia’s crew is introduced in the second chapter with a fair amount of detail and personality, each of them having little idiosyncrasies and distinguishing habits and virtues; one is a best friend she found stranded on a wrecked hulk and nursed back to health. The whole dynamic is that of the grumbling and bickering but affectionate found family crew you’ve seen in a thousand other stories. So when she commits to spend up to fifteen years of her life taking care of Ahro on the galactic fringe in exchange for truly unbelievable amounts of money, she sits down with them, tells them the score, and asks them if they trust her enough to come with her.

And all but one of them say no, and never show up in the story again. Which is possibly the first time I have ever seen that kind of scene not end with re-commitment and affirmations of trust from at least most of the real characters that were asked.

This makes the whole found family situation with Nia, Ahro and (most of) the second crew that do spend years in the outskirts of ‘civilized’ space with them works for me far, far better than these things usually do. Because, unlike functionally every piece of fiction I can think of that’s ever been promoted as being about found families, this one really does sell it as something precious and exceptional, rare and worth fighting to preserve.

It also gets all but three of the people involved killed, of course, and of those three one’s permanently crippled and death would probably have been kinder for the second. The book’s really big on stretching ‘better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’ to the absolute breaking point – right up to someone choosing not to die despite an existence of nothing but torture and pain just for the infinitesimal bit of hope and connection of a loved one singing through the prison bars.

The Banality of Evil

The villain of the piece is, without question, the monolithic and monopolistic Umbai Corporation, something between a neocolonialist conglomerate and a sovereign, expansionist empire in the classic sense with a few affectations from its earthborn roots (the specifics of the politics of Allied Space are vague and in any case more impressionistic than anything like a detailed speculative political economy). Which is kind of fascinating, in that it is specifically the Corporation as a corporate body that is the villain – agency and responsibility are spread across whole bodies of Allied nobility and corporate Judiciary officials, armored Yellowjacket thugs and career-minded techs and surgeons. There’s no CEO or President, no Board of Directors who set the agenda and bear ultimate responsibility – there’s no face to it at all, really. I’m fairly sure no agent of the company ever even appears twice. Which is just interesting on its own terms, given Umbai as an entity defines both the setting and the plot to dramatic degrees.

The world of the Vanished Birds is a horrifying dystopia in a hundred different ways, but until the very end of the book this just isn’t really something any of the characters particularly care about. It’s in the incidental details and the little asides in the exposition – that there is a great apparatus of censorship on every Allied world dedicated to controlling and slowing the rate of linguistic drift to ease the flow of time-shifted commerce, that the culture and economy of Umbai ‘Resource Worlds’ are societies deliberately starved of information and culturally engineered to be easily managed and quiescent single-commodity resource exporters. Even in the distant past, Umbai and institutions like it used their control over the Ark Ships escaping earth to filter the species – denying berths to (among a great many other things) anyone of ‘problematic’ politics or who seemed likely to be an economic burden.

It’s a universe where this system seems to spread inevitably and irresistibly, everything valuable bought up and parceled out for the benefit of the system’s functionaries diligent enough to save for occasional vacations, and the nobles and officials in the vaunted heights of far-off stations and City-Planets (the allegorical applicability is left as an exercise for the reader, a bit of restraint I did appreciate).

It is, again, not a system that’s worth analyzing as a speculative political economy or technical exploration of neocolonialism either present or future – but it’s not trying to be, either. And it works very well at seeming like a real, functioning world that the characters are just trying to live in.

The Anthropocene

Going off where most of its wordcount is spent, I’m not sure you could really call Birds climate fiction. But if someone was making that argument, I’m not sure you have too much ground to stand on arguing you shouldn’t either.

Fumiko’s first chapter, read as a stand-alone short story, absolutely is – the story of a love affair between genius savant designing the great orbital habitats which will sustain a lucky slice of humanity in the stars, and a talented but less world-shaping scientist doing what she can to lighten the burden of the remaining four fifths of the species being left behind upon the increasingly uninhabitable earth. This is where the book’s title comes from – the gradual disappearance of the birds Fumiko loved as a child, even from the sanctuary trying so ferociously to preserve them.

The world presented in that chapter feels just barely familiar enough to be unsettling, a scarred and fortified world that’s still on a clear and irreversible decline – which might be either chicken or egg to the fact that the commanding heights of government and industry have given up trying to save it entirely to focus on an escape to the stars.

For the rest of the book, environmental collapse isn’t really a topic that much comes up – though the human shaping of and impact on the environment certainly does. It’s just largely a matter of deliberate engineering.

There is, however, a very easy allegorical reading of the fact that on discovery of a way to travel instantaneously between stars, Umbai ruthlessly exploits and monopolizes it to attain unprecedented degrees of power and wealth as they reshape the entire galactic economy – all of galactic civilization, really – around the new technology. All without the slightest thought or care that this new technology is based on harvesting a specific and finite resource and their brave new world will collapse entirely without it. Omelas-child instead of oil but still – not exactly subtle, but I do appreciate the book restraining itself from directly and explicitly pointing it out.

Fumiko

The ‘millennium woman’ is probably the most interesting single character in the book, and also almost certainly the biggest structural weakness in the whole thing. Which is annoying to me, personally. She simultaneously has some of the best chapters of the book and also ends up feeling like a ball being tossed around as the plot requires.

Her Methuselah existence is only vaguely justified and explained, and it’s entirely unclear just how exceptional she is (beyond the fact she isn’t unique, anyway) – the story never even gestures to the existence of any of her peers beyond vague mentions of the Umbai executive class or Allied nobility. She’s an oligarch-savant with nigh-infinite resources and cadres of loyalists installed in every institution worth owning – until a single mistake is made and the powers that be unite in a perfectly coordinated strike to kill them all and leave her stranded in the torn up ruins of her private research colonies among the corpses of two thousand executed minions.

A character being ruthlessly crushed without warning or chance of contesting it by the powers that be rings more true when the character isn’t one of them, I suppose? As it was, it felt like being dropped into the climax of a story without any of the rising action.

The effect is, I think, at least mostly intentional. The entire chapter is about Fumiko being so distracted with the failures of her memory and a complete preoccupation with her latest project (Ahro) that she cannot even pretend to remember or care about this whole vast infrastructure she has built up for her own advancement and curiosity, or the hundreds of followers who treat her as a living saint (to the point of not even remembering her friend, confidant and second in command until the moment before he’s executed for, in essence, her failing to consider the consequences of breaking a minion’s heart). The fact that there’s a battlecruiser en route to bury everything she’s built in napalm and she just forgot to do anything to prepare is actually very plausible. In which case, I just wish it had been ore dwelt upon and made a point of. Or just – it felt like she really needed another chapter or two from her POV before things go horribly wrong, I suppose?

Her chapters are very well-done and affecting, to be clear. And her mirrored character arc with Nia – both women who get a certain pleasure out of other people caring about and being more invested in them than they are in return, both dealing cosmically poorly with rejection, both forever decorating their life in half-conscious memory of someone they left behind – is both well done and compelling (Nia gets better, Fumiko’s story in an elaborate murder-suicide/terrorist attack).

Too Long; Didn’t Read

Beautiful, emotionally affecting book. Very much a debut work from a talented author – experimenting and showing off a bit more than be supported, some fundamental structural weaknesses – but nothing I found detracted from the experience. Actually one of the quite rare books where sitting down and writing out a review has made me like it more rather than less.

[cyten0]

A Symphony In Crimson

Act 1: A Movement in Black

Chapter 9

The house has been much nicer this time around. It feels like everyone is working together a bit better, there’s a closer bond of trust. The others were quite surprised by Bonnie’s marksmanship! But honestly, all of them seem a little stronger.

The first floor has been a breeze really. Which is good, since it means you haven’t had to take any hits really. Nothing to try and cover up. Plus, the party has taken less hits, which means less temptation. Stars you’re hungry.

You’re sitting down for snacks when Odile does their coinflip thing with Isa. Looks like they lost this time.

▲ “What was that about, madam?”

◆ “Ah well. I asked the Favor tree to win my next coin flip.”

✿ “Huh?”

◉ “Such a silly favor.”

◆ “Purely for scientific reasons. I wanted to see if there was anything to this Favor tree business. As we can see, apparently not much.”

The others look a little disappointed by that, and you’re just a little hurt for some reason, as usual.

▲ “��� Well you didn’t put any belief into it, so of course nothing happened! Sif actually told me a bit about that!”

Huh! Oh right! You did!

◆ “Really? Tell me more.”

Oh STARS yes, you get to talk more about this, it’s so cool! It still hurts your head to talk about, but it’s SO WORTH IT!!!!

✦ “Using favor trees, and the right steps, you can call energy from the stars! The trees aren’t the only way, but its certainly one of them! But in order to do so, you have to care about what you’re wishing for, otherwise they won’t feel compelled to answer you. You can do all the steps perfectly right, and not get a thing! But if you care enough, you can get something even if you do nearly every step wrong.”

✿ “Woah! That’s so cool!”

◆ “I’ve never heard this before…... Oh, Is this a field of study from your homeland?”

Oh, they remembered! They must have spent some effort doing that. You nod.

◆ “Fascinating. How effective is this method?”

Heh, time to shock them all.

✦ “Well, it might not have been a favor tree, but. I bet the king used a similar method to get Timecraft!”

◉ “WHAT!!!”

▲ “Oh Crab!”

◆ “You’re Certain?”

✦ “Like I said, That power comes from the stars. It’s no coincidence his armor is decorated with them.”

✿ “Oh yeah! The poster!”

◉ “Does that mean ANYONE could do that? And be just as dangerous?”

No it’s not that good but… Hm… It hurts your head but...

✦ “No. Getting that much power would not only require an insane commitment, but would require really lengthy, costly, and complicated rituals that would take months in order to draw from enough stars.”

◉ “Oh thank change.”

▲ “Makes you wonder about his motive though…”

Huh. Isa’s right, it does mean the king is awfully dedicated. Big wishes like that take effort…

A wish like that is probably why your here, right? But you still need more information. This gives information as to what it is, but it doesn’t make sense why you’d be here. Your wish was way too small, can’t be that. If only you could read that book in the storage room, the picture on the cover makes you think it might be about wishcraft.

But trying to remember a language from barricaded memories of memories is a few steps of separation too many. And your head still hurts a TON from yesterday.

Ah well. You’ll figure out, bit by bit. Your making progress! It’s only been… Hm. You haven't kept track how many times you’ve looped. Might want to ask loop about that. Anyways, it’s time for snacks, and you’re super hungry! You’ll try and cut down just a little bit, but that’s gonna be a tall order.

>>>

You’re in the library. Your eyes got caught by the diary again, and Mirabelle is reading it out again. Then the others start talking about the country. It’s hard to listen to it again.

✿ “Still…. The name of that country…. What was it again?”

▲ “Oh, I think it was something like A-”

You all suddenly get a massive headache as Isa tries to say it! Your head feels like it’s going to split open it hurts so blinding much! It hurts so much you can only see red! You cover your eyes so they don’t notice. It hurts it hurts it hurts!!!!

But…. Then… The pain…. Subsides…..

You look up. That. Didn’t happen last time. What… Odile. She stopped Mira from interrupting?

✿ “Ow. Crab, that hurt way more then I thought.”

◉ “Ow ow ow… Madam, why did you let that happen?”

◆ “Gems, that hurt…. Siffrin?”

She… She did that for you…? Just so you’d have a chance to? You really don’t deserve that. Others shouldn’t have to hurt for your needs. But….

✦ “….. Starts with an A. Heh. It’s something!”

The others give puzzled looks, as you slot the diary back into the bookshelf. That one. That helps a lot more then just Siffrin. That’s for all of them.

>>>

You’re on the third floor, in the room with the person doing bodycraft again. Key is obtained, but you’re a little bored, so you decide to take a look at the closet.

▲ “Oh, look at this shirt! It’s the same material as your cloak, right Sif?”

◆ “It looks very warm. I’m surprised you managed to wear it all through summer.”

Right. This cloak was one of the first things you ever had. You never questioned it much.

✦ “It’s actually quite cool? Never get hot in it really.”

◉ “Really?”

▲ “...Sif, mind if I take a look real quick?”

Huh! You're a little nervous to have him so close, but… Okay. The only wounds you’ve taken are covered up well enough, so it… Should be fine, right?

You nod. Isabeau kneels and takes a hold of your cloak lifting it up and examining. it. You can feel his breath against your body, feel the warmth exude from him, hear his heartbeat so keenly, smell his body and it’s taste, feel the slight tugs and motions as he handles the fabric... It’s hard to focus.

▲ “… Holy Crab… This is some impressive work.”

✦ “Huh? What do you mean?”

▲ “Okay, starting on the simple side, It’s got a very interesting stitching style. Not very Vaugardian at all, and seems to focus on being highly durable. Like, borderline armor durable. It’s even fireproof. Difficult to pull off. Plus it’s been treated to be stainless as well.”

◉ “Huh! That’s some good traveling cloths.”

▲ “Oh that’s just the beginning. Someone decided to take this already impressive cloak, and literally stitch craft into the fabric. And not just a little, there’s a bunch! Self repair, temperature regulation, it even adjusts to your size! And to top it off, while you can’t tell normally, some of the fabric inside glows a little in dark places, showing some interesting patterns!... Hey, they even sewed a little butterfly emblem on the inseam!”

✿ “Woah! That sounds REALLY fancy!”

▲ “Honestly Sif, this cloak alone is practically worth an entire village?!? Where did you even get this?”

… You don’t speak. You remember Siffrin was important in his homeland. Guess you got an idea how important.

▲ “… Oh. Hey, it’s alright! I’m sure they’d be happy with how you’ve used it.”

✦ “… Yeah.”

The others are confused, but you move on. It’s fine.

>>>

Got the third floor handled, and got food at the bathrooms. Odile didn’t interupt this time, even though you ate a lot during the snack breaks, maybe because of the increased trust? And now you’ve obtained the Keyknife! And are back at the entrance…

Hm. You wonder. You’re curious about that statue. You remember Mira mentioning that these statues are connections to the Change god. Who’s is the one that blessed you?

✦ “Hey, Before we go ahead, I want to check something”

◉ “Huh? Okay, let’s go!”

>>>

You’re back in the statue room. You’re not expecting anything, but you ARE curious about it. You take a closer look.

Hm. Not to judge but… Oh, Looks like the others are judging instead.

✿ “Can noses look like that?”

▲ “Wow, it’s left eye is somehow above the right brow.”

◆ “I can’t tell if it’s smiling or frowning.

You notice Mirabelle is oddly quiet. You had suspicions but...

✦ “...Mirabelle?”

◉ “I… I was trying to make it look nice and gentle…”

▲ “CRAB, MIRA WE’RE SO SORRY!!!!”

✿ “SORRY WE SAID YOUR STATUE SUCKED!!!!”

◉ “It’s alright…. I’ll get my revenge on you all someday.”

The others shudder, and you smile a bit.

Hm. So this is Mirabelle's statue, huh? A connection between her and the change god, the only one unharmed in the house, and the one that gives you this blessing each time...

✦ “Mira, can you put your hand on the statue?”

◉ “Um? Okay, sure?”

She puts her hand on the statue, and suddenly, the room shifts!

You’re both pulled into that strange realm again! But. You’re still here? You havn’t been teleported, you’ve been brought…. Elsewhere.

You look around. It’s nothing but pure white as far as you can see. There’s a faint humming, in that sound only you can hear.

There’s a figure approaching. You don’t know what to do! Wait is that?

◉ “Euphrasie?”

Is that the name of the Head Housemaiden? They seem a little surprised, but then…

❍✿ Incorrect buzzer

❍✿ “mirabelle!!! i can't believe u can't recognize me ಠ_ಠ"

They’re wearing Bonnies face now?

◉ “Wait you changed shapes?!? Are-”

❍◉ “yay!!! o(≧▽≦)o got it so fast! it’s me! The Change God ＠＾▽＾＠”

You’re stunned. You can’t move. Wait, Mirabelle’s crying!

❍◎ “oh no don’t cry! i didn’t want to make you cry (╥﹏╥)”

◉ “I’m so sorry!!!! For not changing enough, for being useless, for lying and making everyone think you blessed me, for-”

❍▲ “nonono you’re all good! ( : ౦ ‸ ౦ : ) i’m not worried about any of that. you’re a-okay!(≧◡≦) “

◉ “Huh?

❍✿ “if I was upset, i wouldn’t have helped you all earlier! (⁀ᗢ⁀) but I did because I’m rooting for you. both of you!”

H-huh! They… they are?… Mirabelle dries her tears, and seems happier.

❍◆ “i’m about to tell you something, that you won’t remember for a lot of reasons. well, your brain won’t, but your heart will!!!”

❍▲ “it’s true that, as the Change God, i can’t do much to help you all. but i feel okay with that, because you all have the real power! you’re really strong mirabelle! ლ(ಠ益ಠ)ლ”

❍◎ “just the will to change things is enough to do anything! and look how far you’ve gotten without my help!o(>ω<)o but if that’s not enough…”

The figure’s form dissipates, revealing a single, small, cloaked figure, with the face of the statue from earlier. For a brief second, their voice feels different.

❍ “You are loved, mirabelle. i see you changing, even if you do not. you are always changing, evolving, growing. and even if you’re not, that’s ok. Because life might be about changes, but sometimes it’s about staying right where you are, sometimes. i’m proud of you, and i love you!”

She looks at them not sure what to say. You’re just happy to see her happy at this point.

❍ “and i love this stupid face you made me and i’m never letting anyone destroy it!!! got it?”

Mirabelle gives them a hug. The figure seems surprised! But allows it.

◉ “….Thank you. You’re not what I was expecting, but I’d expect nothing less. Thank you so much…”

❍◎ “hehehe…. euphie is right, you’re super stinking cute!”

Mirabelle lets go, and wipes away her tears.

❍✿ “okay! that’s your special god call! i’ll send you back now, but i’ma chat with your friend here a little more!”

◉ “Huh? WAH-”

In a blink, Mirabelle is gone. It’s just you and the change god now…

Their disguise melts. Their form shifts. Their cloak billows out and grows to tower over you. Their face pure shadow. As they speak, their demeanor shifts, ever so slightly. Their voice echoes in the unheard sound only you hear. The space fills with twirling shapes.

❍ “Sorry to keep you waiting. But I wanted to talk to her first. She needs those words desperately, and has been waiting for them from me for a while now!”

✦ “I-I um!”

❍ “It’s alright!!! I know. I know. About the island, about the timeloops, about who you are and... It’s okay…. I-I’m sorry I can’t help you much! It made me very happy to see my little gift helped make you happy!!! Y-You’ve been through a lot.”

You… They care. They care? And they did know? They know and… and you’re crying. You’ve stopped holding your eyes in shape, your horn is out, your heart glows, you just collapse. And you’re crying.

❍ “I um!! okay, maybe you just need a second to let it out a bit? Oh, I’m not very good at this….”

They give you a hug. You can barely breathe through the tears. They know what you did, this being that cares so much for life, and yet… Hearing them say it, hearing them tell you they care even despite everything...

❍ “...You know, for a lot of people, I’d be kinda upset at the whole ‘locking a major place of change in time’ thing, but I know you’re trying, and you don’t want to do that. Just like you didn’t want to hurt those on the island… I’m sure you’ll find a way to fix it, and you’ll make good use of the time. I’m rooting for you.”

✦ “I-I!!… thank you…I don’t know if I deserve it though….”

❍ “…. I have a message from my partner. A patron of your home.”

Huh?!!!

They pull back a bit, still holding you, looking you head on with their void of a face. And sing, in the voice of the stars:

Oh dear and precious fallen star

We’ve seen you travel, long and far.

Through trials filled with pain and fear

We know you’ll hold to all that’s dear

So sing your song, o mournful Dove

But know that you have always been Loved.

You… You feel hands. Hugging you. Not the change gods, but ones that feel… familiar… Feel kind. Feel like…

You see tears drip down from the Change Gods hood. They’re crying? Why are they crying for you? You killed so many… you don’t deserve it...

❍ “You have always been loved. Not as Siffrin, but as you….”

They pull you close again. Your tears mix with theirs as they pool into the space below you.

❍ “Y-Your cloak was made so you could wander the streets... Your tinkers tools so you could make things yourself…. That device in your pocket to show you the world when it wasn’t safe for you to be out... That gun so you could defend yourself even when you didn’t trust yourself up close... Your skill with music was taught because it helped you talk and they wanted to hear your voice… and…. And….”

You can’t… You can’t stop crying…. They… were for you? All along? But…. But…

❍ “And I wish I could have done something!!! You shouldn’t have had to deal with any of this!!! So please, please!!! Don’t forget that!!! Don’t forget that people have loved you always, no matter what!!!”

❍ “…You’re so young. So young for what you are. You shouldn’t have to suffer like this.”

You… you hug them back. Stars, you need to hug them. You need to hold them close. You wish you could hug these figures you barely remember, tell them you’re sorry, wish you could remember who they were. Wish you could remember why they cared for you. And… at the very least, you’ll hold close someone. You need to hug SOMEONE. The Change God hugs you tighter.

❍ “...I… Can’t keep you here for much longer. So. Don’t worry, I’ll give you the keyknife as many times as you need it, I’ll wait for you to get out of this, and… I’ll be rooting for you. Okay? Just promise me, you’ll remember what I said?”

You struggle to speak through your tears. You… really were loved…

✦ “…Yeah. I will. T-Thank you…”

You feel them fade away, as the room starts to form.

You put yourself back together as it does. Physically at least. But the tears aren’t stopping. You turn towards Mira. She’s crying a little too.

✿ “HEY!!!!”

▲ “Mira, Sif! Are you both alright?!”

◉ “What… just happened? I can’t… Siffrin?”

You can’t speak. You can’t stop crying.

▲ “SIF?!? Are you okay? Say something!!”

✦ “S̴̯̕orry! I just… I…”

You can’t help but laugh. You… You feel a bittersweet mixture of joy and sorrow. You don’t know how to process it at all.

◉ “I think we experienced something… Incredible? But I can’t remember it anymore.”

You do. You’ll never forget. You won’t let yourself. You take a deep breath, and dry your tears.

◆ “Are you alright now Siffrin?”

✦ “I… Yeah. Come on. We have a king to beat.”

You smile. It’s bittersweet… You want to remember them. So badly now. They loved you, they cared for you. And you can’t even remember a thing about them…

No. One more memory surfaces. They said… they said…

It takes strength to see what you want from the world. Don’t give up on it ever.

You HAVE to find a way to remember them. You can’t let them be forgotten, not a second longer, not when you’ve gotten so close… But… You’ll need help… and there’s only one person who’d try. Who COULD help.

It’s time to meet the king.

✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸✸

...There’s a look in Stardust's eye.

This loop was doing so good. They’re all happy. They deserve that. They’ve been at this for a while, even if they aren’t aware of it. And the change god was very kind to say that. But…

Stardust isn’t thinking clearly. They haven't been for a while. The last two they remembered clearer because you fed them proper food, but it’s not easy to get that. And you have this sinking feeling things are going to take a turn for the worse. Very fast.

You hope you are wrong.

[blazehedgehog]

It's interesting that you've run into more Sonic '06 defenders as of late, because I think I've noticed the same thing. I've been thinking about why that is for a hot minute, and I wonder if it has to do with just how awful the video game industry is at the moment.

Games come out polished sometimes nowadays, but normally they're catastrophically broken on release and take months of post-launch patches to become somewhat playable, if they get those patches at all. Perhaps younger fans of the Sonic series, having grown up in this environment, go back to play Sonic 06', see all of its bugs and bad game design decisions, and think "Wait, that's it? That's not even the worst game I've played this week."

That is, it's less that Sonic '06 is suddenly good now, it absolutely is not, but more that the bar has sunken so deep into hell that even a blatantly broken game like Sonic '06 doesn't look particularly bad in comparison to what comes out now, so they miss the context of why it was so controversial on release.

This is an old ask that got buried, but I think it's still relevant, and to me it's just...

Liking something ironically is the path to liking it unironically. Maybe that means you're being honest with yourself, or maybe it's just familiarity. That happens with music -- so much so that there's an article from the National Library of Medicine about it. The more familiar you are with music, even if it's a song you hate, the more you eventually begin to enjoy it. It's a scientific fact.

And Sonic 06 became something of a rite of passage. Everyone knows about it, either because they've played it for themselves or they've watched someone else play some (or all) of it. Everyone has their favorite moments. Whether it's

The Winder of a Shoemaker typo (it should be "Wonder")

The inevitable realization you have to save manually after getting your first game over in Wave Ocean

Having to reload the entire world every time the state of anything changes

Sonic's boss fight with Silver, and "It's no use!"

Followers reappearing in the town stages only to instantly fall over dead.

Meeting Sonic Man

Meeting the Soleanna Boys

Meeting Pele the Dog

Sonic flicking the card at Knuckles who fumbles the catch

Riding the metal crate into space

Seeing Eggman's Real Human Eyes behind his sunglasses

Eggman's keyboard mashing "typing" animation

Realizing Sonic's head is 3/4ths the size of Princess Else's entire body

The constant back and forth of rescuing Elise only to have her get kidnapped again only to rescue her again only to have her get kidnapped again

The Windows XP background FMV

Elise's attempted suicide

Luppy Luppy

Which one is the Captain?

That tornado is carrying a car!

Elise's Train is... Uh oh, gotta speed up!

Don't be late.

Long time no see.

Amy and Elise's girltalk moment

The Test of Love

Anna, the Lady in Waiting

Eggman comically going "bonk" off the shrapnel after beating the last boss of Sonic's story

The Iblis Trigger™

The Scepter of Darkness vs. The Book of Darkness

Shadow the Hedgehog using Chaos Control to roundhouse kick Silver in the back of the head

Showing a crucified Shadow the Hedgehog in the future

The "Head to Wave Ocean" line flub still existing in the game

Mephiles is literally Shadow's shadow

THEN I'LL FIGHT... LIKE I ALWAYS HAVE

Having the ability to time travel to literally any point in history and never just going back to before Eggman arrived

The blue chaos emerald paradox loop

Watching someone's soul leave their body when they have to do Silver's billiard ball puzzle

Using the cyan gem to turn collision detection into a suggestion

Using the purple gem to go out of bounds

Spamming Omega's hover to fly anywhere

The death and return of Sonic the Hedgehog

etc. etc. etc.

I'll say it again and again and again, but it's the Rocky Horror Picture Show effect. When that movie came out, it was not beloved by the mainstream! But it became notorious as a midnight movie where the rowdy graveyard shift audience would heckle the picture, transforming it into something that was fun to watch (and participate in).

And the more they watched it, the more they heckled it, the more people realized that maybe they actually love the movie. And now it's this big, important cultural touchstone.

That's Sonic 06. Let's do the time warp again.

[aluria-sevhex]

posting's been more infrequent because i feel like i've hit a bit of a harder spot with figuring shit out and also have had less mental energy ig :P

update: fuck man it's been like over a week since i intended to post this and i also feel bad for not doing art fight stuffs or working on other projects... what not leaving the house much for a few weeks does to an mf apparently:

[Hi stardust!~ All of the posts in this series can be found in this masterpost and are tagged as #Aluria plays ISAT for the first time (please don't spoil)]

notes:

-i'm back bitch :3

-waiting for it to load and the sweet sweet title theme to hit my ears

-YEAHHHHHHHH

-i always let it finish :3

-time to help everybody

-this time i decided to ask Charline for the book. Odile now thinks Sif is sus! which. yeah.

-"You don't have to remember to yell" :(

-hehe Sif is now asking Loop if they have any theories on the loops

-"Your name is LITERALLY 'Loop'."

-"Don't you 'teehee' me."

-yeah! why don't time freeze skills count as death!

-"what if you loop when something keeps you from advancing?" good theory, but what about the loops where i got stuck in the house on floor 3? i didn't immediately loop back... then again there are the small few-minute loops...

-O_O. HANG OUT WITH LOOP???

-yeah sure i didn't really have any plans for this loop

-i climbed the tree and uh. this music is kinda ominous

-how did Loop 'kind of' know about Sif before they met?

-why did Loop choose to help Sif?

-Loop is stuck with Siffrin... and seems to have been in a time loop before?

-guys i don't think Loop is fine

-yeah Loop tell me about YOU

- >:P

-what'll happen- OH. LOOP. BRUH.

-"it makes you see something, doesn't it?" yeah. "you see a vision of the future"

-Sif is breaking down :(

-SIFFRIN JUST PULLED OUT THEIR DAGGER

-hm. why did i loop if i didn't die?

-aight time to talk to Isabeau

-i love this scene

-...everybody is suspicious of my apparent grace and good attacking skills ._.

-"I'm as tall as you, Mira..."

Mira: looks at their shoes

-funny how Isa's 'worst-case scenario' for uses of Time Craft is... exactly what Siffrin is doing

-inverted Six of Pentacles?

-ah yes. a pit-iful experience

-after i checked the gardening closet, Odile said something's weird...

-checked the book and Isa noticed something off

-i've been trying to make things as suspicious as possible

-hm... what *is* the deal with the book in the secret library? with the tree on the cover and it's in the headache language

-...the book on shields has the weird sugar smell?

-i feel like shields that reflect attacks will become important later

-what if things that have been tampered with all smell like Time Craft? like the various equipment that you can pick up? and that's part of the weirdness?

-sheesh, Tear You Apart is really effective

-bathroom again

-Sif is once again claiming they're fine

-huh. i didn't see the ghost this time

-tried to sharpen the keyknife. Isa made a comment about Sif usually saying something when he sharpens things, but he can't remember

-hm... where would i find carving tools

-"In this moment, you are loved."

"(Because you forced them to.)" FUCK THAT'S. OOF.

-*sighs* time to talk to Euphrasie again

-the others noticed me again...

-"in this moment, she loves you!"

"in this moment, he loves you!"

"in this moment, they love you!"

"in this moment, she loves you!"

FUCK.

-Sif's sad hollow smile and big eye...

-"they all love you!"

"isn't it wonderful"

"you could do this forever!!!"

-"you're happy to have helped everyone become the best versions of themselves again!"

-lol Sif called Loop awkward

-"because you're what's left" of what???

-Sif is level 75 now...

-stopping for now

[leonawriter]

Netsod soulmates... and neither of them realising for the longest time, because it's just a steady current under the surface all the time.

Gabriel's state of mind being made worse by the feedback from Giovanni being part of the Cogito tests. Giovanni finding Gabriel's presence grounding and bringing him back to reality each time he's there.

Giovanni feeling it, when Ayin forces the examination onto Gabriel, but figures it's just more side effects of the Cogito. And then he feels sick, and then he feels like something's been ripped away from him (because Gabriel's died in some hidden, closed-off corner of the lab, with no one finding him for days).

Ayin realises partway into the loops, because of too many things adding up, and he spends the rest of the day with his head in his hands. Knowing that they still don't know. Unless they have figured it out at some point - but he doesn't think so. He's not sure which is worse.

Ayin's own is Ben, of course. Ben, who's always known and never hidden it. Ayin never understands why there's a moment nearly two weeks in where he feels like he's having a heart attack each loop; he remembers it happening, and figures it's just a glitch in the script he'd set up, something that loops along with everything else.

He realises, finally, in the end - when Abel shows him the recording that matches up a little too well. When he's already come to understand who Hokma is, and why he'd wanted Ayin to stay, so badly. When it's already too late.

Yesod wakes up in the Library, and has to wait for Netzach, who understandably doesn't want to face the work they have to do to get to where Angela needs to be, in order for her to realise that it isn't what she actually wants.

But once they're back together, they slot back into place as though they'd never left, just like in Lobotomy.

Hokma mourns. Netzach sees the emptiness in his eyes, and sometimes wonders why it seems so familiar, like he can understand it if he just thinks hard enough, pokes somewhere deep enough down- and then he wisely decides not to, and reaches for a bottle or a paintbrush instead.