#precious orphaned siblings ...

[ibrahimhuss]

Ibrahim Hussein and his wife, Yasmina, were married only three years ago. In January 2023 they welcomed their precious baby Maryam into the world...

Only nine months later, in October 2023, their lives were turned upside down by war and destruction in Gaza, forcing them to flee their beautiful home and to be displaced ever since.

Ibrahim's family has suffered much, even before the war. Ibrahim's father tragically died in 2014 as a result of a traffic accident, leaving Ibrahim responsible as the eldest of 7 siblings. Ibrahim's siblings are Muhammad, Hamza and Zakaria, and Israa, Ghadeer and Hadeel. Sadly, Ibrahim's sister, Ghadeer, and her husband were killed in October, leaving behind their two and a half year old son, Waseem

Waseem is now an orphan, cared for by Ibrahim and his family. Both Waseem and Maryam are infants/toddlers who are now suffering from malnourishment and disease from dirty drinking water. They have no formula, no good food of any kind, no diapers, and they are living in tents under the constant sounds of drones and bombs, and screams.

Yasmina's family members include her father, Abdullah, her mother, Yousra, her brother, Amir, and her sister Samar.

Abdullah and Yousra both need medicine for heart conditions and high blood pressure. Samar has Down's syndrome and needs much assistance with daily living and medical care.

This family has stayed together, hoping and praying every day that they could live to see another day and not see any more of their loved ones killed. They suffer each day from exposure, malnutrition, disease, and the constant threat of being bombed..

Ibrahim pleads for help to save his family from this suffering.

The funds raised by this campaign will help them to buy food, water, medicine, tents for travel when they must flee from bombs. They will also be used to pay for the expensive fees necessary to flee to Egypt.

I met Ibrahim and Yasmina through a social media campaign and project called Pass The Hat that is allied with Operation Olive Branch, a grassroots initiative that has been helping Palestinian families in need of urgent aid. Over several weeks I have gotten to know this family and now consider them some of my dearest friends.

They are in a crisis and every day grows worse for them.

Please donate as much as you can spare to get this family to safety as quickly as possible.

Thank you.

https://gofund.me/47c0705c

[inkykeiji]

are we having fun yet?

characters: todoroki touya, todoroki enji warnings: 18+ minors do not interact, pseudocest (adoptive siblings), rough sex, tw enji, fem!reader, toxic relationships (possessiveness, jealousy, touya’s just very mean) words: 1.7k

From the moment you stepped through the estate door, you’ve always been the princess of the family; babied to the point of patronization, pampered to the point of spoiled brat, rotten right to your sugary core.

The Todoroki family’s cherished little charity case, orphaned by a building Endeavor had failed to catch when you were only five years old, welcomed into his arms and his family and his big, big home. 

His.

Everyone loved you instantly, took to you like a swarm of maggots to a piece of fresh, ripe fruit—swathed you in adoration, gorged themselves on your sweet flesh, consumed your seeds and planted you in their hearts, let you take root, fester, grow.

Except for Touya, who, despite his big age at eleven years old—a whole six years older than you—developed a lifelong penchant for yanking on your pigtails or braids just to hear you yelp out that pretty Touya-nii!, filtered through a cutely scrunched pout. 

Everyone still loves you, even well into adulthood, desperate to aid you, to wait on you hand and foot, to take care of the poor little orphaned girl. 

Except for Touya.

Because Touya loves you even more than everyone else. Touya loves you the most. 

He wouldn’t be so goddamn mean if he didn’t. 

But regardless of how precious you are to all of the Todorokis, you are not perfect. 

And there is one teensy, tiny, slightly distasteful habit you just can’t seem to kick. 

It’s a habit you developed when you were just a child, only a few months into officially being a Todoroki.

It’s a habit you should’ve grown out of by now—any respectable young woman would have, at this point. 

It’s a habit you’ve been spoken to about several times—but, evidently, nothing quite seems to stick. 

It isn’t normal for a fully grown adult to jump into her father’s arms like that, Fuyumi had tried to explain gently, eyes brimming with sympathetic pity. It isn’t entirely appropriate. 

Maybe not. But you’re not entirely sure you care. 

Because you just can’t help it, legs taking off the moment you hear Daddy’s engine cut, bare feet padding down the hallway as Daddy’s boots collide with the cobblestone walkway, rounding the foyer corner just as he’s stepping through the front door, barrelling into his waiting arms with a syrupy sweet squeal of Daddy! sounding in your throat.

“Hey, princess,” he’s saying as he catches you, hoists you up by your armpits and cradles you to his body, large hands strong and secure beneath your bum. “How’s Daddy’s girl?” 

A routine procedure, question murmured out like clockwork, but you never tire of it.

“Better, now that you’re home,” you sigh into him, legs wrapped around his waist and arms twined around his neck, resting your head on his broad shoulder as you stare up at him. 

The familiar scent of sandalwood tickles your nose, infused with notes of dirt and rubble and a hint of sweat, and you breathe it in deeply, desperate to fill your lungs with it, that Dad Aftershave that never seems to fade, no matter how long or ruthless his shift was. 

Your ribs stretch, strain, press into Daddy’s strong chest, and he chuckles, the sound rumbling warmly against you. 

He knows what you’re doing. 

“Trying to inhale me?” he asks, but amusement streaks his tone, crystal eyes melty and lidded as they stare down at you, a small smile on his lips. 

With an embarrassed little squeak, you nod, burrowing your burning face into his shoulder, Enji laughing again; gentle, soft, full of love. 

“Y’jus smell really good, s’all,” you mumble into him. “You smell like home, Daddy.” 

“Even all sweaty and icky from work?”

“Even all sweaty and icky from work,” you confirm with a lethargic nod, thighs tightening around his thick waist, desperate to hug him closer. 

Droplets of exertion still adorn his neck, little beads glittering delicately in the setting sunlight spilling through the front windows in large beams of gold. With content humming in your throat, you nuzzle your cheek into his damp skin, smearing his sweat across your flesh, letting it seep into your tissues, forcefully marking yourself with his scent. 

“That’s gross, dad. I don’t know why you let her do that to you.” A smooth, dark voice sounds behind you, two pairs of eyes snapping to the source. 

Touya.

Leaning against the cased opening, he smirks—a cruel little curl up of his lips, sharp and void of mirth—his arms crossed loosely over his chest in practiced apathy.  

Sapphire eyes skim down your knotted bodies slow and languid, appraising, degrading, before climbing back up to meet your own stare, blue flames licking around his pupils.

“It’s not right,” he continues. He’s talking to Daddy, but his eyes haven’t left your own, the inferno blazing in his irises so bright you’re sure it’ll leave sunspots blooming in your vision.

It hurts, but you won’t bow, you won’t break—not here, not now, not for him. 

With decided defiance, you trail the tip of your nose along the sharp edge of your father’s jaw—slow, soft, sensual—planting a chaste kiss to the strong, defined hinge, steadily holding your eldest brother’s unblinking gaze. 

Oh, Touya knows what you’re doing. 

And, oh, Touya fucking hates it. 

Something sours his face, twists his features into a bitter wince—anger, or heartache, or both, morphing his handsomeness into something ugly, stained with envy.

“Oh, Touya,” Enji dismisses with a grumble and a roll of his eyes. “Can’t a father hug his little girl when he comes home? What’s the issue with that?” 

“Jesus Christ, you can’t be serious,” Touya snorts, and it’s caustic, gnawing through the heavy atmosphere. “Your ‘little girl’ is a grown fucking woman. It’s weird.” 

It’s wrong.  

“Touya’s got a point, Enji,” Rei says as she rounds the corner, lips pressed in a flat, thin line. “Sweetheart,” her eyes find yours, mouth stretching into a small, tight smile, straining beneath the pressure of contrived cordiality. “We talked about this.” 

Brow furrowing, your eyes swap between their faces. “But I’m—I was just—”

But it’s no use trying to explain; they’ve already made up their minds, already sentenced you to damnation, ice and slate scrutinizing, suffocating as their combined stares weigh down on you.

A garbled noise hitches in your throat, something that sounds suspiciously similar to unfair as you untangle yourself from your Daddy, Enji’s large hands aiding in the task, setting you down onto the hardwood floor gently.

A precious moment, smashed to bits by hard jealousy. 

An apologetic ruffle of your hair, his palm so massive it practically encases the entire top of your head—sorry, kiddo—and then he’s off, stalking down the hallway for a much-anticipated shower to wash the grime of the day from his skin, his wife following close to his side, hissing out reproaches, fragments of their conversation—discourage and indulge and shouldn’t—slicing your ears.

“You always ruin everything,” you spit at your brother, the moment both of your parents are out of view.  

“That so?” he gazes down at you with polished impassivity, sapphire lidded but scorching—but you know him better than that, you know him the best. 

“Yeah, that is so,” you seethe. “It’s so unfair that you get to fuck anything that moves but I’m not even allowed to give our father a simple hug.”

Disgust screws up his face, but it’s tinged with desolation, the implication sewn into your words loud and clear—if you could, if Daddy would let you, you’d fuck him, too.

Whether or not that’s true, whether or not it’s just a tactic to hurt him, doesn’t matter. The fact that you’re even making the implication itself is enough. 

And Touya knows better than most that these little quips, razored little insults spit between siblings, always have a glimmer of truth to them. 

“There’s nothing simple about that ‘hug’—if that’s what you want to call it.” The words are acrid, stinging his tongue, but his voice cracks, eroded by emotion. 

“What would you call it?” 

“You should be ashamed,” he continues, ignoring your question. 

“Why? It’s just an innocent—”

“Innocent?” he scoffs, eyebrows raising with sardonic surprise. “It’s indecent. Winding around our father like that, climbing him like he’s a fucking tree—” His face puckers, the thought venom in his mouth, head shaking in disapproval.

“Maybe you’re just jealous,” you say, lifting your nose with a haughty air of superiority, eyes gleaming with the thrill of the kill. “Huh? Jealous that I touch Daddy like that so freely, jealous that I like Daddy better than I like you.” 

Poor Daddy, used as a toy, a tool to wield against your big brother—the only foolproof weapon in your arsenal, the only surefire way to hurt Touya, to guarantee you get what you’re so desperately vying for.

Daddy’s Little Girl always gets what she wants—consciously or not, Daddy makes sure of that. 

Touya smirks in response; nothing more than a lopsided twitching of his lips, the hellfire in his eyes flaring, a spark of terror zipping through your veins. Huffing out the ghost of a laugh through his nostrils—humourless, bleak—his tongue runs along his front teeth, sucking hard, eyes narrowed.

You know what that means, too.

You’ll pay for that remark later tonight, face shoved into your eldest brother’s pillows, cotton wedged between your teeth as his hips smack your ass and his cock pounds your cervix and his fingers tighten around your wrists, yanking back with every plunging thrust forward, using them as leverage, your muscles pulled taut and aching. 

And that’ll just be the start. He won’t stop until his pillow is thoroughly soaked with you—your tears, your spit, your sweat, drying in hard crusts of salt—until you’re sobbing out his honorific, twined so beautifully with messy apologies, the only words your stupid little brain can comprehend, until your cute little cunt has been fucked raw, split open by his thick cock over and over and over again, stuffed so full of your big brother’s cum that it’s oozing past his shaft in dribbles of cream.

He won’t stop until your body is mangled and marred with him, dark splotches of broken blood vessels and scabby molds of his teeth reminding you of who you truly belong to.

And then, he’ll fuck you some more. 

Your Welcome Home ritual won’t be the only thing your big brother is ruining tonight. 

[goodlucktai]

a bigger heart grew back

rise of the tmnt post-movie characters: leo & splinter, raph & splinter word count: 5k title borrowed from no hell by cloud cult

read on ao3

x

Splinter thought he had lived through all of life’s worsts already.

Losing his mother, estranging himself from what was left of his family, moving to the States as an orphan of his own making, falling in what he thought was love and losing his freedom as a direct result—

Years spent underground where he was forced to fight like a dog, an unwanted mutation that guaranteed his exile from society, that first bleak night in the sewers with nothing but the clothes on his back and four infants who depended upon him entirely and the utter conviction that he was going to fail them—

The resurrection of the Shredder, the collapse of Splinter’s home and the exodus of his children, the fear he had become unfortunately intimate with in those fraught hours—that his boys would become orphans, too—

Raphael’s escape pod opening and Leonardo tumbling out, eyes glassy and chest heaving with panic—sweet, sensitive Red covered in a fleshy pink parasite and forced to attack the siblings he loved more than life itself, those little turtles he had fussed over and carried and kept safe since he was just a little turtle himself—

But nothing compared to hearing the voice of his second youngest child as he prepared to end his own life.  

His precious Blue, who could sell water to a fish, bravely trying to convince his siblings that it was right for him to go. Already pulling away, beginning the vanishing act, even as Raphael begged him not to do it. 

All for that tiresome, nebulous greater good. As if any happy ending could possibly exist with Leonardo removed from the narrative. 

Splinter had thought he knew what pain was, but his heart, patchwork, secondhand thing that it was, had never broken like this before. He crumpled to the ground, and listened to Blue’s line on the comms explode into a strange whine and then static and then nothing, and it was over. 

His Blue would never crawl into his armchair for late night Spanish telenovelas again, Splinter realized. Would never wheedle and bribe and coerce him into chess matches, because he didn’t seem to know he could just ask and Splinter would play as many matches with him as there was time in a day for. Would never run from a successfully antagonized sibling and fill the lair with his ringing, infectious laughter. Would never fall asleep at the kitchen table over a medical textbook he pretended to be too cool for in the daylight hours. Would never effortlessly argue his twin out of the lab for dinner, would never lift Orange up on his shoulders to get a hard-to-reach mixing bowl because teamwork makes the dream work, would never painstakingly stitch together a ripped teddy bear for the brother whose fingers were too big to handle needle and thread ever, ever again. 

There is not a word for a parent who has lost a child. There is not a word for that particular flavor of grief that carves you empty at the same time that it fills you to the last hopeless, drowning inch. 

April sobbed openly beside him, her small, strong shoulders shaking. She had always been exactly what Splinter would have wished for in a daughter, and so the Hamato curse didn’t spare her, either. It takes and it takes and it takes. 

And then Michelangelo turned his back on despair and handed his family a miracle. 

Splinter could feel his remaining sons’ ninpo stir and then surge together, and the sheer forceful brilliance of it staggered him from all the way over on the other side of the city. He knew better than to hope—but he also knew that nothing existed in this world or the next that could possibly outstubborn his children, or strong-arm them into abandoning each other, or quite frankly make them do any single thing they adamantly as a group did not want to do. 

“Guys,” April choked out. “Talk to me, what’s going on? Hello?”

Thudding footfalls announced Casey approaching at a run. He jumped over one of the pinned Krang’s flailing tentacles as if he dodged ballistic alien parts every day of his life and skidded to the ground beside them on armored knees.

“I felt it,” Blue’s child from another life gasped, face tacky with half-dried tears. “That’s Uncle Angie opening a door. No one else could do it but him.”

Casey had a familiar katana at his side, blue and gleaming. His fingers seemed like they wanted to linger on the hilt but he handed it over to Splinter agreeably enough. The lingering ninpo in the blade usually welcomed Splinter warmly, eager to be of use, a telling mirror of the way Leonardo himself was so anxious to please and be praised. But this time the tool that Splinter picked up was an innate, lifeless thing. 

He prodded tentatively with his own qi. The runes flickered once, half-hearted, in the manner of a dog waking at the sound of a key in the door, ascertaining the person there was not the one it belonged to, and laying its head back down to sleep. 

Splinter would not be able to follow the whims of his son’s ninpo to create a portal while it lay dormant. His own uselessness crushed him. 

“Raph mentioned Staten Island earlier,” April said, wiping her eyes with the heel of her palm and pushing herself to her feet, business-like and brisk because she couldn’t afford to be anything else. “I doubt the ferry’s running, and the bridge is going to be a gridlock nightmare, so it looks like we’re stealing a boat.”

“If your mother asks, I did not condone this,” Splinter said hoarsely. “That said, the marina is too far to run to, so first we are stealing a car.”

They were halfway across the river in a cruiser that probably wasn’t meant to sustain the sixty miles an hour April was pushing when that startling shout of their family’s ninpo finally started to fade into a soft-spoken susurrus. 

Before it was too quiet to make out clearly, he felt it: that achingly familiar mischievous blue energy, like a playful breeze flying above everything. Much smaller than usual, less spirited—giving more of the impression of a tiny tide pool creature hiding inside its shell than a smartmouthed sixteen year old boy with the whole world in his corner—but present. 

Alive. 

“Sensei,” Casey whispered. 

“They got him,” April said, a ferocious, not-to-be-trifled-with look in her eye, all but daring the universe to try to make her a liar. “They saved him somehow, I know it.”

They were both Hamato enough to feel it as certainly as Splinter did.

But the boys hadn’t thought to include anyone else in their immediate, hard-won victory—and in fact, the call Splinter, April and Casey finally received some ten minutes later was one of outright panic. 

“Dad, dad, are you there?” Orange’s voice warbled. He sounded all of fifteen years old and frightened in a way that set Splinter’s fur on edge instantly. “Dad, Leo’s hurt bad. He was awake a second ago, and talking even, but then he stopped making sense and just—just fell—”

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” Purple added, high-strung and liable to start biting if one more thing went catastrophically wrong within a mile of his person. “I’m scanning him but I don’t—I’m not a doctor I don’t know—”

“Send the readouts to me,” Casey said quickly, pulling his mask down, its lenses glowing green as the interface came to life. “Sensei trained me in field medicine, I can help with anything short of an open-heart surgery.”

“You take after your father,” Donatello replied. “Irredeemable overachievers.”

That faint thread of gratitude in his voice would go unheard by anyone who didn’t know him, but Casey huffed a near-silent exhale, having heard it loud and clear.

What Future Boy had to share with them wasn’t great, but it wasn’t the worst it could have been, either. Leonardo had sustained a number of broken bones and soft tissue damage, the cartilage in his right knee was torn as if the joint had been viciously twisted, one of his cheekbones was fractured, and even his shell had suffered a few hairline cracks. Altogether, he was looking at a long recovery, not unlike what the survivor of a traumatic car accident might have had to look forward to—but he would recover. 

It wasn’t enough to prepare Splinter for actually seeing him. His Baby Blue, a tiny little thing in Raphael’s arms, with a face so beaten it was hard to make out the bright red stripe on one side. 

“Okay,” April said, voice thick with anger and hurt and love. “Okay. Everyone on the boat.”

And finally they were home, after the longest day in history. Casey confirmed his initial diagnosis, with the caveat that they would know more when Leonardo woke up. He insisted to an audience of grim faces that it was a very good sign Leonardo had been awake and coherent in the first place, however briefly. 

So Blue was disinfected and splinted and bandaged and medicated and then tucked safely away in the infirmary bed. Everyone else was seen to in short order. It was an easier task than it usually was, since none of them were remotely willing to leave just yet. 

Splinter made a mental note to call Draxum to double-check that Michelangelo hadn’t pushed himself too far in creating a gateway—the glowing lines on his hands had faded, and beyond an occasional tremor, he promised his family up and down that he was actually fine. Donatello’s shell was a quiet source of concern, but the only person alive who could harass him into a checkup without getting maimed for his trouble was currently very much out of action. Raphael’s eye was definitely infected, and blood vessels had burst when he’d ripped the parasite away, coloring the sclera an alarming red. 

The rest of the clan watched in some unspoken, exhausted wonder as Casey unthinkingly maneuvered around Leonardo’s infirmary as if he’d spent part of every day of his life there, knowing which drawer to find compression gloves for Orange in, locating topical pain reliever for Purple that he could apply himself and medicated eyedrops for Red in quick succession, before ultimately offering a bottle of extra strength Tylenol to April, who accepted it gravely. 

“You’re a weird kid,” she said. From her, it was a declaration of approval. “You better plan on sticking around.”

“Oh,” Casey said at length, surprised. Clearly, he hadn’t thought ahead to what the after of his mission would be shaped like. His gaze lingered on Leo’s little bundled-up figure in the bed, so full of love and grief for a man who didn’t yet exist, and Splinter thought to hell with it. The kid was as good as his grandson if you squinted. 

“We’ll find a bed for you,” Splinter said, some tiny corner of his mind free from screaming worry and bone-deep exhaustion already plotting where to make room for another subway car. “In the meantime, the sofa is yours.”

With that, five out of six children had been packed off to sleep. It took April and Michelangelo combined to pry Donatello’s hand from Leonardo’s, and subsequently his entire person from the infirmary. Raphael pulled a chair up to Leonardo’s bed and Splinter didn’t try to argue him out, knowing when to pick his battles. 

Red had a familiar look on his face, an elephant in the room that often went unacknowledged for both their sakes. That look that said you’re his father but he’s my kid, too.

He had earned the right. No one could argue that. Late night vigils were his wheelhouse and had been ever since he was about nine years old. When Splinter didn’t have to be quite so present—when he started to let the tired gray encroach more and more, when he stopped getting out of bed right away at the sound of a child crying—Red quietly learned how to tend fevers and stomach bugs and bad dreams. 

Soon enough, the boys stopped calling for daddy when they were hurting and started calling for Raphie instead. And their Raphie always came when they called.   

Which was why it must have hurt like a blade piercing clean through his ribs when Leonardo finally stirred at something approaching two o’clock in the morning, blinked muddy gold eyes open slowly, looked up at the familiar shape of his biggest brother beside the bed, and flinched. 

The world hadn’t ended yesterday. It was happening now instead.

Splinter had thought he knew what pain was. But life did not seem to ever run out of brand new lessons to teach. 

“Leo,” Red whispered, heartbreak obvious in every inch of him. His hand was frozen in the air between them, arrested right in the middle of reaching out. 

“No,” Blue managed, twisting around like he would attempt an escape the second he figured out where his limbs were in relation to the bed, IV be damned. The lines on the heart rate monitor started to crest dramatically. 

“Leo it’s okay it’s—it’s me, I’m not—I’m not going to—I would never hurt—” 

His voice strangled itself into silence. After all, at least some of those grisly black and blue marks around Leonardo’s neck were from him. 

“Papa,” Leonardo cried out, the call reaching directly into Splinter’s heart with hooks and yanking him out of his chair. “I want papa, please, please—”

Clambering onto the bed, minding all the hardware, Splinter placed a careful hand on his second-youngest’s feverish head to soothe him. 

He felt like an imposter, especially with Red still frozen like a statue behind him, but that part of his heart that had been smothered once, allowing his children’s cries for him to go unanswered and someone else to pick up the slack, was the loudest part of him now. 

There was physically nothing else he could do but stroke that bruised forehead with the pad of his thumb and tell him, “Hush, Baby Blue, your papa is here. You are safe. You are home.” 

Leonardo turned his face into Splinter’s hand, hiding as much as he was capable of. Raphael took one staggering step back, then another, then turned on his heel and fled the way Splinter had no memory of him ever doing before, infirmary door crashing behind him. 

Torn completely in two, Splinter summoned conviction from those ancient spirits housed in his soul and forced himself at knife point to be strong for his family for once in his goddamn life. 

“What are these tears for, silly turtle?” he murmured, the same way he had when Leonardo still mostly fit in the palm of one hand. Back then, all Leonardo wanted was to be held. He wondered if that was still true. “You are the safest little turtle who ever lived. There is no one left in this world who is stronger than the people who love you, don’t you know that? Your baby brother pulled down the stars for you. Your twin did not let go of your hand even once. And your big brother carried you home. You are safe. You are so loved.”

It was a nonsense litany for the most part, all true things said to someone who clearly was only absorbing every third word or so. But Blue stopped hiding his face at some point, eyes wet with tears he is even now too stubborn to let fall. 

Splinter felt as though he was looking at a childhood memory of himself, trying to be strong when it would have been better—kinder—to allow himself a much-needed moment of weakness. 

“You think you’re too grown-up to cry in front of this old man?” he said, gently pinching Blue’s cheek on the side of his face that hadn’t been crushed beneath a monster’s fist. “Try again in about a hundred years.”

Blue blew a tired raspberry at him. Splinter laughed, surprised at the show of spirit, his heart doing cartwheels at this proof of his irrepressible little boy unchanged by the close brush with tragedy. Winning a laugh from his father was enough to coax the ghost of a smile across Blue’s face. 

“How are you feeling? We have some water for you here. No, don’t sit up. Let me help.”

He really ought to let everyone know Blue was awake, but they had just gone to sleep. His other kids needed their rest, too. It had been a truly terrible day. 

And now that Red was out of the room—that thought dripped with oily, unpleasant guilt—Blue seemed to be in a more solid state of mind. He had winced as he tried to sit up for water, but if he didn’t have whiplash after a psychotic alien flung him around like a terrier would its chew toy, Splinter would eat his tail. There were none of the red flags Casey had warned him to be on the lookout for. The only thing Draxum had done right in his life was develop a mutagen that made these boys all but indestructible. Splinter would have to find the mental fortitude to choke out a thank you to him for that. 

“It has been a long time since a sick little turtle has called for me,” Splinter murmured, stroking Blue’s forehead around the bandages. “Normally you are all ready to fight each other to the death to monopolize Red’s attention.” 

It was only partly a joke. Leonardo gazed up at him, eyes glassy. It was hard to gauge how much of their conversation was sticking the landing and how much was somersaulting straight over his sluggish head. 

Then Leonardo said, “He hates me.”

“Pardon?” Splinter said stupidly. 

His son blinked, and finally fat tears rolled down his cheeks, soaking into bandages on one side, unchecked on the other. 

“He hates me,” Blue insisted. “He’s right. It was my fault.”

“No one hates you,” Splinter said, reeling. He’d been right here the whole time and yet somehow he was suddenly flailing about two miles behind. 

“You didn’t see his face. You didn’t see—and his eye—all because I—I couldn’t—” He sobbed, an awful sound, and turned to press his face into his pillow. Once he started crying he couldn’t seem to stop. The rest of his words stumbled out thick and choked and terribly sincere. “I couldn’t just—be what I was supposed to be. And he—and it was all my fault.”

There were few things Splinter regretted more than his fumbling of the leadership role. He had always known that Blue was too clever for his own good, that he had a head for strategy—as evidenced by his early mastering of chess, entirely outpacing Splinter’s own skill level by the age of eleven. 

Acknowledging that in theory and learning to trust it in practice were two separate beasts, but watching from the front row as his baby outsmarted Big Mama of all people left little room for doubt. 

On the other hand, Red was as solid and dependable as they came, the foundation his siblings built their whole lives on. As far as they were concerned, the sun only rose in the morning because Raphael hung it up there. 

But Splinter’s eldest son was prone to anxiety that tended to fall on him like a guillotine, a kill switch to his rational thought. The twins floated terms like ‘panic disorder’ and the entire family was well-versed in helping him through his episodes, but if even an ounce of the burden on his shoulders could be reduced, that could only help. 

Red would be happier and function better in a support role, where his top priorities would be to protect his little brothers the way he always had protected them, and to smash whatever Leonardo pointed him at. 

Splinter should have sat them both down and explained it. He shouldn’t have left Red to feel as though he had done something wrong, that he had failed somehow. And he shouldn’t have let Blue believe he would be shoved into the deep end and left to sink or swim.

His boys were little gremlins who thrived in chaos and learned best on the fly. Splinter had thought the surprise announcement would have been an utter shock at first and the new normal by dinnertime. They were always so much on the same page, so in tune with one another, that he couldn’t have guessed it would turn into the tangled mess of hurt and frustration and miscommunication and blame that it did. 

He should have stepped in the first time Red punched through a wall in a fit of anger and Blue laughed as though his biggest brother’s good opinion of him didn’t matter in the slightest. Instead he was a coward, unable to face them and admit his wrongs. He left his children to resolve it themselves and suffer in the meantime. 

He should have done better. Maybe one day he would learn. 

For now Splinter held Blue’s face in one hand and wiped it clean with a cloth in the other, patient with every new flood of tears. The last time he had seen Blue cry was the night the Shredder destroyed their home and killed Karai. There had been no time to comfort him then. 

He takes after his Gram-gram, Splinter thought, and tried not to resent her for it. 

“No one hates my sweet Baby Blue,” he said, willing the stubborn child to hear him. “Especially not my other sweet baby Red. You are a very confused turtle, that’s all. You will see. No one hates you.”

“You don’t,” Leonardo mumbled. “You’re not allowed to. You’re my dad. You don’t have to like me, but you’re not allowed to hate me. S’in the—the contract. You signed it. Legally binding. No arbi-arbi—”

“Arbitration. I would like to study your mind under a microscope. Maybe then I will have a hope of understanding these twists and turns it takes.” 

Splinter’s voice sounded nothing but fond even to his own ears. 

His children were all incredible people worth knowing, worth living for, and it was a very special joy to still be surprised after all these years by how much more he loved them today than he did the day before. To think about how much more he would love them tomorrow, even though it felt impossible to love anyone more than he loved them right now. 

“You are so important, Leonardo,” Splinter said gently. “To me, and to your siblings, and to your friends. We would miss you so much if you weren’t here. We all want to see you get well.”

“It’s not about me,” Blue said, wobbly and miserable and matter-of-fact. “I know it’s not. I have to make up for it. I’ll prove—prove—”

“You have nothing to prove. It was not your fault.” Splinter pressed Leonardo’s chin gently to close his mouth when he inevitably opened it to argue. “Hush. You did not steal the key. You did not open the door. It was not even your responsibility to stop either of those things from happening. You are a child. It cannot be any one person’s duty to save this planet on their own. That doesn’t even make sense.” 

Blue’s expression was becoming thunderous, which was silly and endearing, because his cheeks were still tacky with the remnants of his tears and half of his face was a swathe of bandages and without his mask he looked years younger than he already was. Splinter felt affection unfold in his heart like one of those absurdly big tropical flowers with petals the size of dinner plates, taking up more room than it was allowed and spilling out the sides and going on forever. 

“Can I tell you something else? Your brothers aren’t allowed to hate you either. It’s in the contract as well.”

“They do,” Blue said tearfully, face still screwed up beneath Splinter’s hand. But his eyes drifted in the direction of the door, and the wanting in them was plain to see. Splinter took matters into his own hands. 

“If I’m right, you must finish watching The Strange Return of Diana Salazar with me.”

His son took a moment to digest that, slower on the uptake than usual. Finally, he asked, “Don’t we have like a hundred episodes left?”

“I said what I said,” Splinter said sagely, then patted his cheek and hopped down from the bed. 

He found Raphael exactly where he expected to find him, sitting just outside the cracked infirmary door, a hunched over shape that seemed unwilling to take up a single unnecessary inch of space. 

Red stared up at him, unbandaged eye wide. 

“I don’t hate him,” he blurted. “I could never—I wouldn’t even know how.”

“I know, my dear.”

“Even if he’d done it on purpose,” Red went on. “Even if he stole the key and took it to the Foot and opened the door with his own two hands, I wouldn’t have done a single thing differently.”

Splinter had worried when the turtles were very young that Raphael would frighten one of his siblings accidentally. He was so much bigger than them and toddlers were not well known for their self control or emotional regulation. It was a lingering fear that Red would say or do something he did not mean in the heat of the moment, and alienate himself. That something would happen in a split second that would cause his brothers to grow up wary of him. 

It was an unfounded worry. Raphael was a quiet little boy, the last of the four to start talking, and as sweet as an American dessert. Splinter’s little apple pie. Even as he got older and started playing rougher, testing his strength and raising his voice, he never forgot when he needed to be gentle. 

His brothers never ran from him unless they were avoiding bedtime or a well-deserved grounding or really did not want to go watch wrestling, Raph, it was boring. Otherwise he was their North star. 

Even now, Leonardo would rather hide himself away than face a world in which he no longer had a Raphael to run to. 

“How could he think that?” Red asked desperately. “He was going to die back there and he thought that’s what I wanted.”

Splinter cupped Red’s face in his hands and told him, “Blue was trying to do what his hero would have done. All of my children are so quick to sacrifice for each other. It is a wonderful thing to love someone so much, but consider the example you are setting.” Red’s good eye filled with tears, and Splinter was powerless to do anything but kiss him firmly on the forehead. “As empty as our lives would have been without him, they would have been just as empty without you. You are fundamental to us. Please remember that.”

“I know, pops,” Raphael whispered. “I’ll remember.”

“It is not always possible to win without losing but we must fight tooth and nail anyway. Abandon honor and heroism. Do what it takes to bring yourself and your brothers home. I would much sooner tell the great Hamato clan where they can stick it then let you join them before your time.”

It coaxed a shy smile from his eldest son, the barest exhale of a laugh. Still his sweet apple pie, no matter how big he got. 

“I’m gonna go see him,” Red said bravely. “I’m missing out on premium Leo time while the gremlins are asleep.”

“Very wise,” Splinter said, patting his cheeks in approval.

Leonardo had managed to drag the blanket up over his head while no one was around to stop him, and only one golden eye peered out at them from his makeshift shell. 

Raphael snorted and leaned over to peel it back down, heedless of his smaller brother’s protests. He let one hand linger on Leonardo’s scuffed plastron, and the other cupped the back of his bruised head. 

“You’re so dumb,” Red said. “I love you more than anything. If you ever try to go anywhere without me ever again, I’ll make your life a living hell. Capiche?”

Blue stared up at him. It’s very possible he didn’t understand every word of that. But the tone seemed to get through. 

His hand drifted up slowly, as if it weighed a thousand pounds, to cover the one planted on his chest. When the world didn’t end and his big brother continued to smile down at him like nothing between the two of them was any different than it used to be, Blue risked a smile back. 

“I capiche.”

“You’re not alone, okay?” Red went on, playfulness gentling into sincerity. “We’ll figure it out. I’m in your corner, right where I’ve always been. But for now let’s get some sleep, big man.”

He didn’t move his hands even after Leonardo had dozed off. He just hooked his foot around the leg of his chair and scooted it closer to the bed before sinking into it. 

Splinter joined him, and felt both aged by the last hour and rejuvenated. He needed a good pair of running shoes to keep up with these kids.     

“He never asks to play chess with anyone else you know,” Red said suddenly. 

Thrown by the non sequitur, Splinter could only offer an intelligent, “Huh?”

“Leo only learned how to play because of a comment you made once about—I don’t even remember what you said. But it stuck with him. He wanted to impress you. And he started learning Spanish because of those weird soaps you guys watch. He drove us crazy practicing every day but he never let up.

“I know that it seems like he does whatever he wants without rhyme or reason, but I think he just tries really hard to make it seem that way. Otherwise we’d all clue in to the fact that every single thing he does is just—him trying to get closer to us somehow. And then his cool guy cover would be blown. And god forbid that.” 

Raphael brushed his thumb over the crown of Leonardo’s head, much like the way Splinter had earlier. 

“He doesn’t love you for no reason, pops,” Red went on, not looking at him. “None of us do. Even when getting out of bed was the hardest thing in the world, you came running when I needed you. Every time I needed you. I learned all my moves from the best.”

Splinter had seen the worst of the world. He was no stranger to pain. 

It was only occurring to him now that the opposite was also true. 

His life was so full of impossibly good, underserved things; every day a little brighter, every night a little richer. 

Four little creatures tumbled into his world by chance and then filled it to the brim with mayhem and color and laughter and pride, and he would not take a second of it back. He would not change a single painful part. 

If only he had known as a young man where he would end up someday. It would have made those earlier years so much easier to survive. 

Pretending his own eyes weren’t wet, Splinter said, “It will be hell on earth in the morning when Orange discovers we let him sleep through Blue waking up. You had better rest while you can.”

Smiling to himself, Red folded his arms on the side of the bed and rested his head in them, tilted so that his brother was within line of sight of his good eye. He had capitulated to the changing of the guard without complaint, but he was still tense. Primed for danger. Anxiety no doubt at play. 

But Splinter was not without his tricks. He stroked Red’s carapace between the spikes, humming an old TV theme song under his breath. He did this for upwards of an hour once, back when Red was still small enough to be held in his lap, fussy and clingy after a bad dream. 

Sure enough, with a great, shuddering sigh, Raphael’s shoulders went slack, and his breathing evened out—asleep within moments after the day he’d had.  

“I’ve still got it,” Splinter murmured, and let himself have the win, as small as it was. If nothing else, he could give his children a safe place to rest. 

And that really was no small thing at all. 

[y2kas13]

It’s insane you guys are more concerned about stupid fanfics about a stupid Zionist games and their Zionist characters then children now becoming orphans and having to figure a way for themselves to eat or feed their baby siblings. Or mothers whose whole world revolved around her children having to look at rubble knowing her precious babies are crushed under it. You guys make me sick

[staytinyville]

OUTLAW (41)

ATEEZ poly!ot8 x Reader

Cowboy AU / Wild West

Series Masterlist

Warning: none (No taglist next chapter)

A/N BETA READ (@mariana-mmtz). YOU GUYS! Sorry for not updating last thursday. I was on vacation so I wasn't really on here. But we are back to regularly scheduled updating. There are only 8 chapters left for Arc one by the way!

Staytinyville Permanent Taglist

There was something about the atmosphere that made everything feel tense. At least to your father it felt that way. He had patrons already waiting in the saloon for the afternoon, all talking in hushed whispers as they gossiped about something having to do with city hall. Your father frowned, opening the door to allow them all in for an afternoon drink.

“What's going on?” Your mother asked, watching as the men cheered about some things while others ordered drinks they normally wouldn’t. 

“I don't know.” Your father shrugged. “A lot of people started coming in all happy and talking about something that happened.”

“A miracle is what it was.” Someone overheard your parents, inserting themselves into the conversation. 

“It wasn't some miracle!” Someone else scoffed. “It was the work of the mayor! Always knew that Klein didn't do anything for selfish reasons.” He turned to your parents grin on his face as he thought about their precious mayor.

“You haven't heard? He returned all the money from the extra taxes he's been adding. At least to the less fortunate.” He explained. 

Your mother’s eyebrows rose, quickly pulling together as she thought about the small pouch she had found in the back office. Looking over at your father, she pulled him along. “Excuse me.” She said to the customers. 

“(F/N) where did we get all that extra cash from?” She quietly asked.

“I honestly don't know.” Your father shrugged. “It was just left in a bag in the mail.” He looked at the men who were talking. “Should I return it? We aren't in desperate need of it.”

“I think you should give it to the hospital. I'm sure they need it more.” Your mother spoke up after a moment.

Your father hummed a bit, thinking about how you were fairing. “Do you think (Y/N) needs it? Maybe we can give her money for her new home.” He told your mother. 

“Maybe just a little.” Your mother smiled softly. She suddenly frowned as she thought about where she would have to take the money though. “She never told us where she lived.”

“Maybe (S/N) knows.” Your father told her, causing her to nod. They went back to their work positions, your mother quickly finding your sister doing some laundry out back while you little brother watched.

“Do you know where (Y/N) and Yeosang live?” Your mother asked her, causing her to look up with wide eyes. “We were going to give them some money for their home.” 

Your sister didn’t really think your parents would approve of you living in tents in the middle of the woods. She kind of hoped you would have found something by then but knowing what it was the boys did she was sure you wouldn’t have a stable home for a while. At least not here in Cromer for the time being. 

“They live in the wood-”

“Some wooden cabin a bit ways from here.” She cut off your brother, wiping her hands off on her skirts. Glancing at the small pouch in her mother’s hands, she gave the woman a smile. “I can take it to them.”

“It's alright!” Your mother waved her off. “We'll all go.”

“No, mom really.” She shook her head again. “I should do it!”

Before they got the chance to argue more, commotion in the distance stopped them. A crowd was forming at the church they would go to every Sunday. It was at the end of the street, with a long driveway that doubled as a lawn where gatherings were held. 

“What's going on?” Your mother frowned, beginning to make her way over. 

Your siblings followed along, eyes casting over the mob that was taking up the church’s driveway. There were confused people as well as angry. The orphans who were being taken care of by the nuns were all huddled behind them, trying to hide from the people yelling. 

Some men had tried to reach the children, one succeeding in grabbing a hold of a little boy's arm. 

“Stop!” Your mother screamed. “Leave them alone!” She rushed forward and quickly shoved the man away. 

“Can't you see they're just children.” She screamed at him.

Your father had rushed forward, pulling your mother back to keep from having the aggressive man do something to her. Your eldest brother held back your siblings, trying to keep them from harm. It was clear where it was you got your heroic spirit from, your sense of justice coming out when there were people in need. 

“Children to criminals!” The man sneered. “They took our money to keep for themselves! All of them!” He screamed. 

A few of the people murmured to themselves over the speculation while less agreed with the man. Your father looked over the people who lived in the church, frowning his eyebrows as he took in the three nuns and 6 children. The father of the church made sure to huddle them all behind him, pulling the little boy who had gotten grabbed into his side. 

“They are children!” The father scoffed. “How dare you think that of them!?”

“They were found with the money taken from the vault.” Someone shouted out. “These nuns are not as innocent as they claim.”

“God will strike you down for the lies you tell.” One of the nuns yelled back. 

“And for your sins, sister?” They continued to argue. 

“Do not speak to her that way!” Your father walked over to the church people, sticking an arm out to defend them. 

“Where could they have possibly gotten all that money? It's an orphanage!” 

Some of the town’s police had turned up, moving people away from the crowd to come up at the front. Our sister noticed the sheriff hiding amongst the people, watching the arguments go down with a harsh stare. She furrowed her eyebrows, before turning to look at her dad.

“And where did you get it? Cheating your way through gambling?” Your father sneered back, looking at the man with a harsh glare. 

“They're probably hanging around the wrong kind of people. Probably have to do with those boys working at your hotel.” The man retorted, turning everyone’s attention onto your family. 

They began to murmur again, this time the sheriff looking at your father with an upturned nose. Your sister swallowed her spit to relieve the dryness in her throat. She had a bad feeling about all of this and had no idea how to solve it. The only one she thought of was you. 

“I hear they are friends with those officers from the capital. They're probably crooked cops.” The man continued.

“That is my son in law you're talking about.” Your father looked angry, walking up chest to chest with the man. “You better watch yourself.” He added.

“You defending them?” He asked your father. “Don't tell me you're involved.” He scoffed. 

“I wouldn't open my mouth if I were you. I know things that can ruin you.” Your father threatened. 

“Threatening me now?” He huffed. The man turned around to face the crowd, eyes catching sight of the sheriff. They gave each other nods of their heads, understanding where things were gonna go.

“We'll see how that ends for you, (L/N).” He told your father. 

Your father gave the sheriff a look before calmly walking over to your siblings and mother. Your mother pulled him into a tight hug. As your sister watched the sheriff talk with the man who was arguing, she turned to look at her parents. 

“Dad.” Your sister called out, her tone full of worry.

“Give all the money to (Y/N).” He whispered over your mom’s shoulder and towards your sister. “She'll know where to hide it.”

Series Masterlist

@thefrog3223 , @iarayara , @0rangemilk , @explorewithd , @detectivedoodle , @bangtanxberm , @a1i33a , @loveforred , @drunken-deitence , @0325tiny , @the-ghostest-with-the-mostest , @atinyreads , @atinytinaa , @lexiigom , @smilingtokki , @mismatchfluffysocks , @brain-empty-only-draken , @sousydive , @alex-tinyy , @h3arteyes4mingi , @onedumbho3 , @popcatx0 , @blue1amory , @mommahwa1117 , @sunnyhokyu , @cloudieclair , @puppyminnnie

[krysmcscience]

Aww, look at these cute lil kiddos, they couldn't possibly be-

-oh, wait, no, never mind. They're evil.

I'll clean up and color these sketches eventually. Also, goofy headcanon stuff under the readmore if anyone cares. XD;

The Mystic Seller's mention of Leshy's ascension to godhood got me wondering what sort of mortals the Bishops used to be before they were gods, and how the five of them are even siblings. Unless some Real Weird Genetic Fuckery is going on, I have severe doubts they're related by blood, so...Found Family...? Yes, please~ OuO

So now in my brainspace they start out as a bunch of wretched orphan kids, relying on each other to survive with their own unique skillsets, which they utilize with Extreme Prejudice against anyone who happens to be unfortunate enough to have what they need (food/gold, generally).

Shamura is the leader and tactician (and has some spellcasting know-how as a treat), Kallamar is the lookout and stealth killer (with poisons, though he'll resort to Weaponry Panic if things get dicey), Heket is the thief and explosives fanatic (watch out - she'll steal all your food and then go scorched earth on your crops to make sure you STARVE), and Leshy is the distraction master and trap-digger (and general menace who will bite people's faces). Meanwhile, Narinder gets the short end of the stick as usual, in that his only real skill is Kill People Dead - a silent assassin most times, following Shamura's lead to avoid putting him or his siblings in danger, but if he has to, he's equally fine with just rushing in and going ham with whatever weapons he can get his rude little hands on.

I haven't put much thought into most of their meetings - mainly just that (as the seemingly perpetual outlier of the five) Narinder was the last to be brought into their little family. He was already pretty decent at killing to survive, unwittingly massacred a camp of the quartet's latest targets on his own, fell into one of Leshy's pit traps on the way out, and was later found by both Leshy and Heket, who only resisted firebombing Narinder's fun new pit-home when Kallamar found their targets already dead, after which Shamura saw the value in offering Narinder a place in the family. Naturally, he accepted, since the choice was a logical one for survival's sake, but inwardly, he latched onto Shamura pretty hard as a source of guidance and companionship - and, eventually, comfort. Because I gotta add that lovely source of OOF.

The biggest OOF this headcanon creates, though, is that Narinder used to be the one protecting his siblings. :3c Until...ya know. They needed protecting from him. >:3c I do tend to headcanon the whole betrayal thing to be rather less unprovoked on his part, though, because I read too much into the few details canon gives us on that front, and this fucker has become my precious little meow meow, okay??? >:[

I needed to be in bed hours ago lol, why do I do this

[babbletaels]

People are seriously putting all the blame on Koril for this just because you don't want your precious little jedi to ever be at fault for anything.

Koril has EVERY right to defend her children from abducters

She has EVERY right to believe in the religion she believes in (there's this thing called religious freedom don't know if you've heard of it)

She is RIGHT to not let 8 year old children make major life decisions

She is RIGHT to not let her children go outside alone when there are potentially dangerous animals and plants there

She is also right that if she has told them prior to not go outside alone, she shouldn't let them be outside alone as a principle as children need to learn to listen to their parents

Kids should not play next to a tree that has leaves that will KILL YOU if you eat them

The ascension ritual is probably not that bad, it seems to be no different from being christened as a baby or any other things we make our kids go through whether they want to or not in real life

Korils parenting is being bulldozed over by Aniseya just because Aniseya is the leader of the coven, so Koril likely feels a need to be stricter to counteract Aniseyas lacking

Telling your kid who didn't listen in class that you expect more from them isn't evil

Again protecting your kids from being abducted at the age of 8 is not evil

Yes she was rough with Mae and telling her to get mad and stop Osha from leaving is BAD but not because it's bad for Osha to stay, but because of the way she presented the issue to Mae, putting siblings against eachother is not good. However, everyone makes mistakes and in Korils eyes this is a dire situation. Actually, it IS a dire situation as she is about to lose one of her very young children, as we see Aniseya has already decided to let the jedi take their child.

She had no way of knowing what Mae would do, that Mae would have the idea to burn the book, and that Mae would drop the book and accidentally cause a fire. Maybe they should've had a fire alarm in their home though, but that's not Korils fault. Since Aniseya is the leader she should be the one to order fire alarms, obviously.

Again 8 year olds are not mature enough to make the decision to leave their family behind. Maybe if they were abused but it didn't seem like it and the narrative opposes that idea too.

Koril has every right to think the jedi's parenting is bad. They're all orphans who were abducted as children and now have been groomed to keep abducting children, would you trust them with your 8 year old child?

How much does the individual person who's not a jedi even know about the jedi order? How could Koril possibly know if they will treat her daughter badly or not? How could she possibly know they're not there to kill everyone?

Sol stabs Aniseya, heavily implied to be in a relationship with Koril, right in front of her eyes. If the jedi weren't a threat before, they definitely are now, and she wants them to get the fuck out of there or die

Yes, she should have gone to check on her kids before killing the intruders but then she could likely be killed before getting to the kids, since she now thinks that the jedi are there to harm them

No, it's not a cult just because you think it looks different and scary, there's bound to be a lot of different religions and beliefs in a show where PEOPLE ARE LIVING ON DIFFERENT PLANETS AND TRAVELLING THROUGH SPACE TO DIFFERENT PLANETS

If you think that an entirely different planet should not have different beliefs than you, you sound like a colonizer

[raayllum]

So what's the Mirrored Trio Theory?

The Mirrored Trio theory is, for lack of a better explanation, a two pronged theory regarding the way the main trio will parallel both the generation that led to / immediately received Aaravos upon his fall (himself, Leola, and a speculative human who may or may not have been a mage / helped to found Elarion) and how they may also parallel the Orphan Queen, Jailer, and Aaravos yet again. So put your tinfoil hats on and strap in because it's going to be a speculation heavy one, lads! We're going to get deep in the weeds.

Fallen Trio

So the first trio we want to talk about is what I'm going to, for lack of a better term / meta simplicity, refer to as the Fallen Trio, consisting of Aaravos, Leola, and 'Elarion' — our stand-in for a potential human Aaravos had a close dynamic with that may be intertwined with the human city of Elarion.

First, I want to talk about Aaravos and Leola. We get our first mention of Leola in S5, specifically with Leola's Last wish being a star for both Xadians and for humans, who use it to navigate and "to find their way in the endless darkness of the night." This is fitting given that what we know of unicorns from the book one novelization — that they gave primal magic and stones to humanity out of mercy and compassion — and that Tales of Xadia singles her out further as the specific unicorn to do so, although it omits primal stones from the equation:

This is, of course, a big parallel between Leola and some details we know from Aaravos as well, who also gave gifts to humanity: the relic staff that Ibis identifies as truly belonging to Aaravos ("It was a gift from one of the Great ones" / "If you seek to return that staff to its true owner...") and, as Claudia says, dark magic:

However, there's also been indications that Leola might've been a Startouch elf (tweet from Aaron Ehasz identifying her as the Startouch child + the star on the star chart map, although it's not entirely clear), that star magic can be reality altering, that Startouch elf designs had unicorn like horns protruding from their foreheads, and that history can change and shape things differently than they necessarily were.

Either way, unicorns are one of the few creatures we know to also possess the Star arcanum and, seemingly like the Startouch elves, are all but gone from Xadia (+ the Pentarchy)'s physical plain. And that she, like Aaravos, were two Star(touch) beings who both wanted to help humanity and help them develop magic, but did so in very different ways. Whether they are literally related or the same species, I think this parallel between them means they're set up to have an almost sibling-esque bond — one that existed, and one that accordingly fell apart under the brunt of dark magic and other disagreements, as TDP is prone to do.

(Put a pin in Callum and Ezran for now, cause we're going to circle back to them shortly.)

Bare minimum, Leola and Aaravos will have to be foils if not contemporaries of each other, given the closeness of their original goals in manifestation, regardless of motivation. This is particularly true given that Aaravos preys on mages in particular and that dark magic (plus a little Star magic, maybe?) allows him to literally possess people who have done dark magic, which can be no happy accident.

Given that Leola seemed dead set on giving humans primal magic, it seems unlikely she might've been too keen on a dark magic, alternative development either, which we know came after, thanks to Ripples.

It happened long ago, when humans had only just learned to hold fire in their hands without burning. They nurtured their precious primal flames secretly—in the dark of night, beneath shadows and shrouds—as cultivating its glow drew the eyes and ire of monsters. Eventually, for the audacity of their fire, they were hunted, and—though they looked to the stars for salvation—the stars, too, looked down upon them with disdain. Humanity had been given something it was never meant to have.

So again, you have two characters with very similar goals/desires, but very different ideas of how to achieve said goals. This one of the reasons why, I think, that TDP loves to have siblings disagree, as it's an effective way of having more worldviews on display with some hope for reconciliation or the tragedy of deterioration, or both. Callum and Ezran stand alone as the one sibling pair that hasn't been terribly wrenched apart by political or ideological disagreements thus far, save for Sarai and Amaya, who were torn apart by Sarai's death.

Which brings me to my next point: if Aaravos and Leola had a sibling like bond, did he lose her to their potential ideological disagreements, or did those disagreements actually cost her life?

Whether Leola just walked away and likewise abandoned him (like Soren), became too distant in disagreement to continue having some sort of bond (like Harrow and Viren, and Janai and Karim), flat out died (like Khessa, Harrow, and Sarai), or all three, that could be one of the many cogs motivating Aaravos to keep turning the wheel of the cycle, as grief has often been the primary motivator throughout history, even amongst the 'villains'. A "song of love that loss" that Aaravos has chosen handpicked "instruments" for, after all (4x03, 4x04).

And like I said, Callum and Ezran are long over due to have a disagreement, given that they haven't had a substantial one since season one, and given that Ezran has grown to only be more assertive than he was since then, not less. This could easily be over Runaan (Callum, having already sworn himself to helping Rayla free her parents, and Ezran, understandably holding onto anger and grief concerning Harrow's death). I'm sure there are also plenty of other things they could heavily disagree over in the future, like military aid or action or how to approach trying to defeat Aaravos, etc.

The point to all of this is that I think Ezran could be a very good stand in for Leola — at least in terms of being selfless, deeply compassionate, uncomplicated, and adamant about giving people their freedom even at the cost of themselves and even if that gift can be misused or discarded (3x04) — which means Aaravos could offer a potential parallel to Callum in the sibling split. Aaravos, who turned to dark magic as an option regardless of or precisely because of the potential violence, and Callum, who argues for the Nova Blade whereas his brother still always champions a non-violent route thus far.

After all, TDP loves to have their "person A is estranged from their sibling and is determined not to lose their lover" parallel, given that it's happened four times (Harrow, Viren, Sarai; Viren, Harrow, Lissa; Claudia, Soren, Terry; Janai, Karim, Amaya) already.

Now, this could be wildly off base as we know very little about Leola and even less about her potential dynamic with Aaravos, but if we follow along with the idea that Ezran could parallel her and Callum could parallel Aaravos, I think now maybe we can talk about Elarion and Rayla.

Years ago we learned that there was a place on Xadia's map (both sides) that was named after someone who had a deep connection to him, and that many of his choices are based around this relationship. Given the Midnight Star poem, people defaulted to Elarion ("Elarion, black-eyed child / her twisted roots spread deep and far / The humans’ might sparked by the light / of Aaravos, her midnight star") although I've also considered Kalik.

And while I'm still not unconvinced that Elarion isn't just a name like Elara and Laurelion, before Aaravos changed his name, combined, I do think Elarion has to be important in Aaravos' backstory, and that it's more than likely that a founder of Elarion / a human involved with Elarion for a variety of reasons.

For starters, while we can be told that Aaravos had a soft spot for humans at one point, giving us a specific person or dynamic to think of is helpful in regards to emotional investment, and in helping to explain why he may have developed said soft spot. We also know, thanks to a birthday post years ago, that a human once gave him a gift:

He thinks that if he cared for the idea [of birthdays], he’d like to remember the taste of a smooth red fruit a human had plucked from a tree for him, once. It had been so crisp, and so sweet.

While this could've been the Orphan Queen (we do know, thanks to 1x01, that there's a tree planted in the castle courtyards 300 years ago, but we don't know it was an apple tree), an apple transfer like this one feels far more "Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden and knowledge isn't always a Good thing" type schtick. Not only does it seem to indicate a more intimate bond, it also might foreshadow the reason Aaravos Fell.

One of the most interesting, but perhaps more discreet, reasons I think there's a connection between 'Elarion' as a person and Aaravos is because of the nature motif running between what little we know of Elarion and to do with Aaravos' mirror and appearance motifs. The Midnight Star is riddled with flower and nature symbolism, referring to it as a "trembling seed" and "fading bloom," that "her roots took hold" and later became "twisted," and that before the gift of Aaravos, she was "wilting" with "bone-white branches". And Aaravos' mirror and the box that held his matching key have blooming flowers on it.

See the flowers along the bottom on the actual frame of the mirror, then sculpted along the sides, and the top? Yeah. We also know that flowers themselves, thanks to Tales of Xadia, are featured in a story told both in Katolis and amongst the Moonshadow elves in particular, featuring an elven thief who steals what you value most, leaving only flowers in their wake. This is the only story in all of Tales of Xadia that we see two cultures share, even if they interpret it wildly differently.

Flowers that were always gone by morning, and gifts that couldn't be accepted or understood ("I’ve got one more gift for you, Callum: I'm going to keep you safe. I have to. I love you too much not too [...] Taking on hard choices and going to dark places is an act of love. It’s a gift. So, please let me give you this gift, Callum. Stay safe, and stay in the light").

We also know that whoever Aaravos loved, he inevitably lost whether due to time or tragedy. While this form of grief is one the show has explored, it was previously largely only through Harrow, who mourned Sarai for 9 years upon losing her, and who avenged her by slaying Avizandum, and more briefly through Ethari believing Runaan was dead.

That was, until season four, where Callum grieving Rayla and dealing with the fallout of that grief and distance turned it into more of an accentuated plot point, both before and even after her return.

Before, losing your partner in this manner would've been something Callum had witnessed, but not experienced. Now, whether the show wants Callum to sympathize with Aaravos or not, it is an experience that they could both understand, particularly if it is going to be one of Aaravos' main motivators.

Thus, we have a disagreement set up between 'siblings' (Leola, Aaravos; Ezran, Callum) as well as lost love (Elarion, Aaravos; Rayla, Callum) as a big motivator for choices, grief, and what possibly led to the fall. That Aaravos, at least in practice / thematic lineups, being a Callum who lost his Rayla and his Ezran*, and then lost himself.

Therefore:

Aaravos — Callum

Leola — Ezran

Elarion — Rayla

[ * This is not to say that Callum would pull an Aaravos and go on a hellbent 1000+ year revenge scheme, because he's not like that, but I do think it could be a very poignant and apt parallel of giving him and Aaravos more in common than they currently have, which is about nothing but magical curiosity and connection. ]

However, 90% of this is all speculation of things that have been kept supremely under wraps. For something a little more tangible simply because we have slightly more information, let's talk about the

Imprisonment Trio

The Imprisonment Trio, as the name implies, refers to the two humans who seemed to directly (the Jailer) and potentially indirectly (the Orphan Queen) be involved in imprisoning Aaravos (the third in this trio). This time, however, I'm going to argue that Aaravos — in terms of his imprisonment — is going to parallel someone other than Callum, but we shall see.

To start, I want to look at the Jailer and the Orphan Queen, since their parallels to Callum and Ezran respectively are the most obvious.

We don't know for sure whether the Jailer came from Katolis, but we know that the Orphan Queen did, eventually taking on the throne from the previous royal family and starting Harrow and Ezran's royal line, first hinted at in 3x05 with "Only orphans can ascend to the throne". Ezran has been directly compared to her in both role and appearance by the show's framing and by characters like Rex Igneous in 4x08: "I should have seen it before. Long ago, it was a human who saw through the Fallen Star's schemes and helped Xadia put an end to them. You look so much like her." This plays well into Ezran's tendency to discover or unearth long lost things, most notably Zym's egg, just as the Orphan Queen became the Truthteller of Aaravos' treachery.

Callum, for his part, is a human mage, just like the Jailer. He's clever, very talented with magic, and despite being Aaravos' preferred prey as a mage will ultimately — like the Jailer — play a role in his defeat. He will also work with and for the archdragons and their wills, but has no problem being disobedient either, in the name of concern or mercy, much like how the Jailer kept Akiyu alive rather than tell the archdragons the truth. And like the Jailer, he understands the potential danger of knowledge: "The entire world would be in danger if she let him live with this knowledge" / "I need you to kill me."

Like the brothers, they were a (future) royal and mage working together, starting off what perhaps was a long tradition of Katolian monarchs having high mages. If, as often theorized due to having an Aaravos-y twin box (S2 novelization) and his love of puzzles, Kpp'Ar is indeed descended from the Jailer, that adds another layer onto Kpp'Ar being one of Callum's predecessors as High Mage. While Ezran has the job and the bloodline of the Orphan Queen, Callum would've more directly inherited the position of (high) mage from the Jailer's thematic and occupational line.

Granted, there are differences. Most notably, the Key of Aaravos was given to Callum, not to Ezran, although there could be potential future parallels between the brothers and the Sunfire siblings, with Karim unable to undo Kim'Dael's chains because his sister is still queen, and the brothers needing to work together to fully use the cube. I wouldn't be surprised if Ezran learns more about the cube and the Orphan Queen in S6 while Callum still has some unknowns to its true meaning, leading to some delicious dread and dramatic irony. But I digress.

The point is that the Jailer and the Orphan Queen both had their roles to play in imprisoning Aaravos, and that Callum and Ezran, respectively, will both have their roles to play in trying to keep Aaravos contained, only to inevitably somehow fail in a way that allows him to escape, if by another's hand. We do know the brothers will be going to weird ruins in a future season thanks to some out-of-context spoilers that have yet to pass, and the Ruins of Elarion would certainly fit:

Which, just like the out-of-context spoiler card, you might've noticed that I haven't mentioned Rayla and who she's going to be paralleling yet. Well, that's because this time / generational pass around, I think she's going to be the primary foil to Aaravos.

Now, this train of thought isn't new by any means. I've thought Rayla paralleled Aaravos reasonably well since S3 aired largely due to their status as ghosted/banished elves, a compassion for humans (at least implied for Aaravos) that other elves disapproved of, and their dynamics with Callum and Viren, respectively.

Both Rayla and Aaravos have to work to earn their high mage's trust ("And should we trust you? Have you told us the truth about everything?" / "And why should I trust you?") over the course of season one for Rayla and season two for Aaravos, ending in promises of allegiance and togetherness: "You've got to stay with me" / "I will stay with you" (2x09). Aaravos leads Viren to his doom in being tackled off the Pinnacle, and Callum throws himself off the Pinnacle after Rayla.

You can imagine my delighted surprise, then, when S4 simply cranked it up even further: Rayla was hunting Aaravos' mage ("I spent two years hunting"), and Aaravos was hunting Rayla's mage ("Yes, mages were his prey"). Rayla wants to protect Callum and kill Viren, and Aaravos had promised to save Viren and use Callum. Even for Callum himself, 4x04 and 4x07 seemed like clear set up for Rayla symbolizing agency in Callum breaking free from Aaravos' control someday, putting the two in literal opposition to each other. Two potential paths (although picking Rayla, at least at first, may not be mutually exclusive from picking Aaravos).

Rayla, who was also harshly punished by Xadia with no trial.

This isn't to say that Aaravos didn't do anything wrong and is being unjustly punished — far from it — or that Aaravos' imprisonment and subsequent freedom won't have parallels to anyone else like say, Callum, who will likely be imprisoned by Aaravos through possession in S6 and ultimately freed by Rayla. More so that imprisonment of different sorts has been a running theme throughout Rayla's arc, and that Callum — who is primed to be Aaravos' chain breaker, whether through possession or not — could also be hers (if not just her parents') the way he has routinely been in the past, whether it was from instigating the events that eventually led to her binding (chain) coming off or saving her from being emotionally stuck (3x08) or from doing anything for her freedom (5x01, 5x08). He's primarily been someone who is tethered to freedom when it comes to recognizing and breaking cycles (chains of history) or literal restraints, and it's only in season four and season five that he's shifted to being both tied to freedom and having himself restrained.

I've speculated in the past this may result in Callum (and Ezran) leading to Aaravos' release in order to save/free Rayla; however, the show may not want as much of a repeat from 5x08, and freeing the Moon fam from the coins also resulting in Aaravos' freedom through an escalation of events would also keep that ironic thread, so it could really go anywhere.

Two humans, one elf, and endless tragedy, repeating and breaking cycles all at the same time. Ezran, discovering important info about his ancestor and possibly the Key; Callum, following in the Jailer's footsteps and unravelling the final puzzles of the prison and figuring out how to undo it; and Rayla, ghosted, banished, vying against Aaravos for the control and agency of his latest pawn who also happens to be the love of her life.

So for the Imprisonment Trio:

The Orphan Queen — Ezran

The Jailer — Callum

Aaravos — Rayla

In Conclusion

Is any of this something? I don't know, honestly. I think it's plausible, at least partially. I think it'd be neat. We know TDP likes varying intergenerational parallels and looking at how history repeats, whether that's directly through family (blood or not) lines, or by having repeating plot points (the dragon quartet, or Rayla being immobilized) and trials (Rayllum facing Sol Regem, much like Ziard, etc). We know there was someone Aaravos loved and lost, we know he's not above using what people want against them, and the connections between Ezran and the Orphan Queen are just Text at this point, although how they may manifest further, we don't know.

This is just one particular stab at it, and an examination of three of the series' most interesting (potential) trios. We'll simply have to see if anything here hit the nail on the head.

As always, thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed!

—Dragons Out

[desultory-novice]

"Apologies AU" Summary Part 1

-

Long, long ago, Earth experienced a radical climate shift that meant within as little as two generations, the planet would no longer be habitable for humans. A desperate humanity sought a new home for themselves and their progeny, eventually discovering the perfect place to start over, a planet they dubbed "The New World."

The New World was to be more than humanity's second chance at life. It would be an ideal society: all of humankind's greatness and triumph built side by side with nature, so the problems of the old world would not follow. Humanity began migrating in waves, the most privileged and wealthy and their loyalists first, of course.

Eventually, everyone would get a new lease on life.

Yes... surely...

One day, upon this fresh new world an alien life form crashed. Mysterious. Powerful. Dangerous. Also weak. Too weak to evade capture. And soon...life began to change. The people of The New World slowly turned their eyes away from those they'd left behind in their ugly past, their gaze fixed on a dream-like future. Advancement. Progress. Technology akin-to-magic. A galaxy of possibilities.

It could be theirs. It would be theirs. At any cost. Those in power would make sure of it.

Animal experiments... Human experiments...

Among these experiments was a woman with a voice so beautiful hearing her was to feel like your greatest Dream had come true...  She would fall in love with a man with a Heart so great he left his home to try and return this troubled species to the right path...

...From their union, two children would be born. 

The eldest, a boy, bore great Darkness within him. The abstract nature of his gifts proved of small interest to Lab Discovera at first, and he was tentatively returned to the care of his parents.

The second, a little girl, was a powerful vessel for Soul matter. The ability to create life, not just manipulate it. To bring something into being from nothing.

She, they wanted desperately! For they did not see a child or even a living creature, but a tool from which they could wrest their desired future of absolute control. The wielders of Dream and Heart would not hear of sacrificing their progeny for these twisted goals!

Considered fugitives from The New World for fleeing with precious "experimental equipment" they hid themselves the only place they thought safe: Old Earth, now little more than a dumping ground for exiles and failed or "disappointing" experiments, often sent down as trinkets to pacify the urban warlords who ruled over the depressed, powerless survivors of this slowly collapsing society.

The family of four lived as best as they could in the increasingly cold and harsh modern wasteland, seen as traitors to their neighbors for having worked closely with Old Earth's privileged oppressors. The children were able to avoid capture, at least.

But their parents would not live to see them grow up...

--

It is the beginning of summer, the only time of the year on "Shiver Star" where it is warm enough to be outdoors for most of the day. The planet awakens from another three season long hibernation...

Adeleine and Noir Fontaine are orphaned siblings, two young kids in their early and mid-teens just trying to survive amongst a tired and deeply bitter populace who knows that they, for one reason or another, are the ones humanity has chosen to die while the rest migrated to the bounteous and rich future of The New World.

Only Noir is old enough and wise enough to fully grasp that no matter how hard they pretend otherwise, there's no long-term survival for the two of them. And god knows, the day-to-day is hard enough.

Still, the two make it work. They thrive, even, due to Noir's endless tenacity and strong desire to save his little sister from the crushing despair he feels, even if he can save her no other way.

With society opening up again, the two quickly find themselves reunited with their childhood friend of several years. It is a happy reunion for Adeleine and an awkward one for Noir. Though even he can't help but admit, having Raquelle around makes the weight on his shoulders feel a little more bearable. Even if the slightly older girl's good-natured teasing flusters him in a complex way...

Still, they could have gone on like this together for many years, the three of them. Until the snow forgot how to melt and all life fell into a gentle sleep, buried under the white drifts. They could have.

...They could have but...

One fateful day, Adeleine's art supplies, her only personal treasure, are ruined beyond repair by people who did not care for their warm-hearted escapism. Alone, Noir follows a secret hunch and sneaks into the Museum of New World Technology, a wrecked and abandoned building formerly used to host hundreds of the broken and often dangerous tchotchkes left behind by the New World.

He finds just what he was looking for amongst the looted remains of this experimental display of new world glitz – the perfect gift for his sister. A "magical" paintbrush that ensures she will always have the tools to do what she loves. Adeleine now finds herself slowly able to bring her yet unrefined art to a fantastical new level!

While they start out as little more than animated sketches, she will in time learn to tap into powers deep within herself, powers as natural to her as breathing, to bring real items, even food, into being.

Noir finds a gift for himself as well. A sword with a strange dark aura. It speaks to him. To his soul. Anxiety. Dread. Anger. Negative emotions that Noir had been able to push aside for most of his troubled life with seemingly endless patience and resilience.

It tempts him: a weapon that does not require strength nor training to use, and effortlessly concealable as something no more noticeable than a chain necklace he can hide beneath the scarf he always has on him. Before he knows what he is doing, he has donned it.

Their summer takes a dramatic turn for the better. Long days of magic-fueled safety and silliness sponsored by "dream-like" technology. Adeleine continues to hone her skills. Noir trains with his gift as well and the inexplicable powers it grants him. He plays with being a hero, disappearing night after night to hunt "monsters."

...But this isn't a story about a hero...

Noir is disappearing more and more lately. He's tense. Frightened of something lurking just over his shoulder. He never takes his scarf off now, and he's begun to wear gloves over his hands, even inside.

One day, he reports to Adeleine that he and Raquelle had a bad fight; that she said she never wants to see him again. Adeleine, seeing the changes in her brother as a sign Noir's been deeply hurt by this experience, loyally sides with him and gives up her oldest friendship...

And so, things go back to normal for the two Adeleine...

What she cannot see is that Noir's hands and neck have begun to turn dark and withered; it is almost as if something other than blood is starting to run through his veins. Underneath his scarf, the chain necklace that gave him control over the dark sword has transformed into a collar he can neither remove nor destroy. His attempts to do so cause the sword under "his" control to attack him, violently.

Frightened, he manages to contact an exiled New World scientist, a man with a shattered mind who informs Noir of the horrible secret behind The New World's precious "miracle." That their wondrous advancements all stemmed from the extensive torture of an alien life form, a powerful psychic who even now, a planet away, is able to toy with the fates of those who gorged themselves on Forgo's pain.

Worse than the knowledge of what this information might mean for him is the realization that he has cursed his little sister to the same terrible end as he. Noir runs to her, frantic! Perhaps it is not too late! There may still be time to take it back!

Please!! Not Adeleine too...!!

And yet...

...She is fine! To his great relief! Adeleine shows no signs of the frightening, irreversible transformation he is seemingly undergoing!

Indeed, she hasn't changed one bit since her gift...

Time passes for the siblings. Slowly and quickly. Noir becomes desperate to continue to conceal and somehow free himself of his "gift." For if he were to die now, what would happen to his sister? She has no one left. But her joy at her growing abilities only makes his guilt worse. And negativity speeds along the change...

Realizing at long last that the fragile life he wishes he could return to is now forever out of reach, that he was the one who destroyed it, and that the monstrous transformation he is going through can only end in harming Adeleine as well, Noir makes a decision...

There is no escape for him. But Adeleine will be free.

At any cost.

Noir touches his sleeping sister's cheek with a hand she would recoil from if she knew what her "hero" has done and disappears into the night one last time...

Days later, Noir and Adeleine arrive at the spaceport. He has come along to bid her goodbye. He tells her not to worry. That he will follow once his paperwork is all sorted out. Unable to fully disguise his intentions, he smiles with tears in his eyes and begs her to be happy.

Happy enough...for the both of them...

Only he knows this is the last time they will meet in this form.

After she departs, Noir walks out into the snow, alone. The distant eye that had been closely watching the child born to Darkness from afar for years, that had begun to lurk inside him since he took the Dark Matter Blade, that sunk its claws into its prey for good the moment his unstoppable resilience finally slipped and he allowed himself, in his fear, to murder his best friend and consign her soul - along with the others he killed - to be enslaved to the darkness too, bursts forth, consuming his physical body.

His last thoughts are not for his own fate. He knows what he deserves.

No. They are for she whom he always thought of first. To the one he had given up everything for and knew, deep inside, he would give up his life for as well, the moment she gave him that scarf...

-

"Was I a good brother... Adeleine...?"

-

[Apologies AU Masterpost] [Noir's Field Trip Masterpost]

[saffron0v0]

YUANNNNNN !!!!! I LOVE HER SMILE !!!

Note: the poll is just for fun, i'm not hinting at a pt 2 so if you want to see this drawn... what can I say except: I'm sorry, chances i'll do it are far too low. I def won't mind if anyone decides to do it with whichever option.

[sirenjose]

Analysis of White Sand Street Asylum - Part 1

Includes Full Character Analyses for: Freddy, Kreacher, Emma, Emily, Leo, Robbie and Dolores, Kurt, Ada and Emil, and Alice.

I have been forced to split this into 3 parts due to the length and number of images I've used for this. To prevent tumblr from forcing me to make this any more than 3 parts, I have cut back on the original number of images (mostly I just cut out the images of the deductions). Apologies in advance, but I hope this is still ok either way. If anything doesn't make sense, let me know.

Anyways, please enjoy~!

Robbie and Dolores were born to a “wealthy family” according to the post from Robbie’s release (https://twitter.com/IdentityVJP/status/1120251010042040320).

Their parents loved them based on Dolores’ recollection in Robbie’s 3rd letter, where they would “always give each of us a goodnight kiss before they tucked us in. And you would kiss on my cheek to wake me up in the morning”. Dolores also described their parents as “kind”, and implied their life was happy back then.

Unfortunately, this didn’t last forever. We don’t know what happened, but the White siblings lost everything, their home and their parents, in one night.

Robbie doesn’t understand what happened, though Dolores seems to, yet she is unable to explain the truth to Robbie, likely due to his young age. Dolores cares about Robbie more than anything else, who she sees as her “Precious Treasure”, but she is also hard on herself as a result and sees her inability to tell him what happened to their parents as a “failure” on her part.

As they lost both parents in 1 night, I doubt the cause of their deaths was natural. Maybe it was murder? That could match with Dolores being unable to explain that sort of concept to someone young like Robbie.

Though the fact they lost their house and seemingly all their possession and money, I wonder if there was a fire. Unless they only lost their house and possessions due to their parents’ deaths, but it could be seen as odd that their parents didn’t leave anything behind for them after their deaths or a will or anything. If they lost it all in a fire, that could be an explanation. (Though next question I wonder is if the fire was caused on purpose or accidental. Though an accidental fire could fit well enough on its own as it would provide an explanation for their parents not dying due to natural causes, dying at the same time, and how they could lose everything to become penniless orphans by the end).

After losing their parents, they are placed in White Sand Street Orphanage. This orphanage is run by Kreacher Pierson (who refers to the orphanage as “Sweet Home” or “Home, sweet home”).

Kreacher is someone who (based on his 1st letter and deduction summaries) grew up on the streets as an orphan, all on his own, from a young age. He was someone who was never “treated with sincerity and kindness”, especially not by the upper class, who were only ever disgusted by “rats” such as him. So Kreacher grew up without ever knowing love. Only hatred and disdain, causing him to learn that the only way he’d be able to survive was by relying on himself. It was a dog-eat-dog world that revolved around having enough money. He grew up learning that everyone was only ever out for themself. This is how he developed his hatred for the rich, and he decided, if they weren’t going to share any of their coins with a penniless orphan like himself, then he’d just have to take it for himself. It’s not like they needed it anyways. He saw plenty of people swimming in luxury that he’d never have. They could afford to share some with him, right?

This was how Kreacher became a thief. As a way to survive.

As we learn in his beta backstory: “Kreacher grew up in this cruel and realistic world, he followed the leader of thieves and endured various difficulties, training for a way to make a living”. He developed his skills in theft, all while becoming exceptionally “street-smart” with exceptional “survival instincts”.

No one would just give him their coin, even if he were to ask, and barely any if he begged. So, he learned to rely on deception as his only “way of survival”. No, what he was doing wasn’t good, but it was his only way at the time to keep himself from “dying from starvation or sickness on the streets”. And as he had to rely on this from quite a young age, it became the only life he knew.

Kreacher was managing to get by, though he had been caught and arrested for theft in the past.

Not wanting to go back to prison, Kreacher decides to change his methods. After earning people’s trust by making himself seem to be a “philanthropist”, he specifically adopts disabled orphans. He planned to use the kids’ disabilities “to gain sympathy” in order to profit even more than he’d been able to before via begging and stealing alone, while at the same time using the money to provide shelter and sustenance to the kids he’d adopted.

But Kreacher was a realistic person. He was someone who just did whatever he had to do in order to survive. As a result, he could be tough with the kids, and was implied to sometimes hit some kids that didn’t make enough money. This was likely the only way Kreacher knew how to ensure the kids did better next time. He knew the world was a cruel place, something they wouldn’t be able to survive unless they toughened up. He needed to develop their survival instincts as well as teach them how to be street smart. (Maybe Kreacher is the reason the kid in Robbie’s 2nd letter knew how to pry open a locked window with a knife. Maybe Kreacher taught them other skills like that.) Though at the same time, his actions were also due to a lack of any experience with love or kindness. He’s never had an easy life. He’s likely treating them that way because that’s how he was always treated and how he’s always had to live, and as a result, he doesn’t really know how to be gentle. As we’ve said, he’s had to learn to prioritize himself above everyone to survive. He’s never had to care for someone else, and so he doesn’t know how to do so with the kids. Even if did have concern for the kids, he likely wouldn’t even understand what those feelings were. What he does understand is survival and money, and he sees Dolores as a chance to make a ”fortune” due to her disability.

Robbie’s deduction 2 describes Dolores as “a girl who lost an arm”. Losing an arm is different than being born without one, so I wonder if Dolores lost it during whatever incident killed their parents?

There are instances where burn victims can require amputation if the damage goes deep enough, if the injury becomes infected, or if the limb was crushed in some examples.

(It is possible she was simply born that way. I just find the term “lost” odd if so.)

In the photo of Kreacher with the orphan kids, we can (most likely) identify Dolores, as she is the sole girl with a missing right arm. Since Dolores came with Robbie, it’d make sense for 1 of the children in the photo with her to be Robbie. We know Robbie is younger than Dolores, so a good guess would be either the kid with the missing ear next to her or the small child sitting on the ground. It’s hard to tell with this 2nd kid, but it looks like he has both hands but is missing at least 1 leg?

Robbie (looking at his default appearance) seems to only be missing his head, while all his limbs look intact. Considering when Robbie came back, his head was still missing, I imagine his default should be accurate to showing how his body was before his death. Otherwise, if coming back did supposedly restore any missing limbs he had previously, why not also restore his head somehow (rather than leave him headless)?

In which case, my best guess is that Robbie is the kid with the missing ear. The height would also match better with Robbie’s default compared to the smaller child.

(And if Robbie was only missing an ear, that would also fit with how we don’t see anything wrong with Robbie as we wouldn’t notice a missing ear with his whole head missing.)

Also, this kid with the missing ear is standing right next to Dolores. I know this same kid isn’t directly next to her in the other photo we have of Kreacher with the orphanage kids, but he is directly opposite her, on the other side of Kreacher and Father Duke, so it’s at least close.

This kid also looks similar, even though not the exact same (the kid has both ears), as the kid on the Milk Carton accessory that came from the charity event that Robbie’s Wail skin came from.

(Nothing says this kid is definitely Robbie, I’m just suggesting every potential theory/option.)

While at White Sand Street Orphanage, Robbie and Dolores are given no choice but to work. This is in part because Kreacher, even though he is the owner, is only a poor street orphan himself.

As Dolores was missing an arm, she was made to beg because that would make it “easier to pull on the heartstrings”.

Robbie though, despite being “such a crybaby” had “nothing wrong” with him. This does make me wonder if Robbie didn’t actually have any disabilities or missing limbs or anything, and could’ve been similar to the boy in the photo on the milk carton. If he didn’t have any issues like that, it could explain the comment about Dolores being able to pull on heartstrings but not Robbie. Unless the comment was just saying there basically wasn’t enough wrong with Robbie, not enough to make him as sad of a case as Dolores, and thus he could’ve still had an issue like a missing ear?

Robbie wasn’t assigned to beg. Instead he was tasked to “work in the yard”, where “gardening became his new hobby”.

In the Christmas Nocturne event, Robbie implies he chopped down trees for firewood, using an axe that was “even bigger than Robbie”. His backstory says Dolores helped Robbie get used to his tasks in the yard. I wonder if the axe was originally hers, or if it was just an axe that Robbie was given but Dolores taught him how to use. Though Robbie’s 4th letter does describe it as “her axe”, it may have only been described that way1 as she kept and used it after Robbie’s death.

If Robbie was too young to understand what happened to his parents, I question how good he really was chopping down an entire tree. It’s possible he just chopped branches off, or maybe only chopped down small enough trees. Or they already had small enough logs and Robbie just chopped it up into firewood.

Whatever the case, Dolores always told Robbie that he did a good job, which made Robbie happy. And as we know from Robbie’s 1st deduction, Dolores basically says that Robbie’s happiness “is the suffering I longed for”. She did anything she could to make Robbie happy, her “adorable brother”.

Life at the orphanage continued until the Church decided it wanted to be involved (likely due to the desire to also profit if not for the value of the kids for their experiments). Kreacher cooperated, likely in part because they pressured him but also in part probably because they offered some kind of benefit or financial compensation if he agreed.

This continues for a time, with the church partnering with him to hold events to raise money for the kids and the orphanage. The one he often works with from the church is Father Duke.

Eventually the church decides they wanted more and had Kreacher send over kids that were “diagnosed with mental illnesses” to their “mental institution” for “comprehensive treatment”. The reasoning stated in the letter they sent to Kreacher for why they did this was “Based on the need for cooperation with the government”. Whether or not the kids actually had any mental illness didn’t matter, the church got what they wanted.

“Letter to Mr. Kreacher Pierson:

Based on the need for cooperation with the government, the orphans who have been diagnosed as mentally handicapped should be sent to the Catholic Church’s Office of Ministries for unified care. For the well-being of the children, please be sure to send them to the abandoned church at 673 White Sand Street before May 5 to confirm their mental status.

Father Duke”

Despite several deductions using the term “mental institution” before we know the church created White Sand Street Asylum, it is likely this wasn’t actually a “mental institution” back then. The beta letter to Kreacher states the kids should be sent “to the catholic church’s Office of Ministries for unified care”, with the location being “the abandoned church at 673 White Sand Street”. Another of Kreacher’s later deductions uses the term “church clinic”, and this is likely the more appropriate description.

One of the children in the care of the church’s clinic that partnered with Kreacher’s orphanage was Emma. Back then, she was still using her original name: Lisa Beck.

Leo Beck, the owner of a small textile factory, and Martha Remington (aka Martha Beck) married on March 14th, 1874 in Devonshire and gave birth to Lisa on December 21st, 1876.

Freddy is a lawyer and financial advisor specializing in “non-performing assets disposal, mergers, and acquisitions” that Leo became business partners with. Due to working with Leo, Freddy encounters Martha, who he falls in love with. Leo, still unaware of Freddy’s feelings for Martha, invites Freddy to Lisa’s 1st birthday because of their partnership that eventually becomes friendship. Once Lisa is older, she mentions Leo invited Freddy over more than once, with Freddy “always bringing flowers”.

Freddy, being part of the middle-class, was likely born into a not too badly off family, though not a rich one. Likely enough to live at least semi-comfortably compared to the lower classes. That’s likely why he was able to pay to attend school to become a lawyer. Despite this, none of his family are ever mentioned, which makes me wonder if they were a bit distant, potentially focusing on themselves or their own work rather than caring or showing much meaningful love to Freddy. In any case, Freddy still had high hopes. His social status and education had given him confidence, and he had high hopes for his future, with his goal always being to earn money and wealth (he was a “gold digger”). He might’ve thought things would be easy since his deduction 4 says “People tend to trust hard-workers. You need to seem hard working, at least”.

Despite his friendship with Leo, Freddy had fallen hard for Martha, who he saw as completely perfect and someone he couldn’t live without.

We know he wrote love letters to her frequently, including one in 1878 that shows just how head over heels he was for her. His desire to be with her despite the fact she was already with Leo was already very strong back then.

“Martha:

You said that you fear I can’t give you the sort of love you hope for? My beloved lady, I swear on Gowd’s name that my love for you has no reservations.

My love for you burns so brightly that day and night, I am unable to sleep. When I think about your family, my heart suffers from the flames of envy. When will you be able to reciprocate my feelings?

Loving you

Freddy Riley

1878”

This love doesn’t go away. His desire only burned brighter over time. Especially as Martha likely did return some of it, and if Freddy did grow up without being shown much love, he likely latched onto it like a starving man to food. This could be backed up by how Freddy in his diaries says “What do people do for love? Fresh flowers, love letters, vows, marriage. I made fun of it all in the past. Until I met you, Martha. After which, all of my principles, all my dignity, completely vanished.” This seems to imply Freddy looked down on and didn’t believe in the concept of “love”, which likely has several implications about his own family and how he grew up.

It makes me wonder if Freddy’s initial disregard towards love was because of his parents. Maybe his parents had a falling out, maybe they didn’t truly love each other, or maybe even 1 of them cheated on the other, which could explain why Freddy would mock even concepts like “vows” and marriage. Maybe his parents even divorced.

In any case, any of these sort of ideas would explain why Freddy’s parents are non-existent in his backstory as well as why he felt the way he did about love initially, not to mention if his parents weren’t happy with each other, or if they did cheat or at least didn’t have a happy marriage, that could imply Freddy wasn’t shown much love, and thus why when he did finally encounter someone he loved, why he might fall so far for that person.

Freddy was blinded by love as well as jealousy over Leo, someone he saw as beneath him due to Freddy’s feelings of “class superiority” (according to Freddy’s 3rd letter). Yet despite this, Leo had a more successful and happier life than Freddy, which leads to him developing deep resentment towards Leo and eventually to begin planning a way to have Martha all to himself.

I wonder if it’s possible the reason why Freddy might see what he’s doing as ok could have been because of his own parents, as in if they really did break their marriage vows or even cheat on each other despite their marriage. Maybe that could be partially why Freddy didn’t care as much that Martha was already married.

We know Freddy continued to woo Martha, before eventually proposing to her. This happened some time before Lisa had even turned 8 or 9 years old. We know Freddy didn’t force Martha, only tried to win her over. Martha obviously was tempted, which leads to her and Leo arguing more and more. Lisa said that her mother told Leo that his “clothes were always dirty”, while Freddy was always a clean looking “young gentleman with a suit and shiny hair”. Leo was the owner of a small factory, while Freddy was a financial advisor (and potentially of a higher class based on Freddy’s 3rd letter mentioning his feelings of class superiority). Considering Freddy saw himself as part of a “superior” class, I wonder if him being part of a higher class was partially why Martha was temped (why else call Leo “dirty”, especially when she’d been living with him for some time and knew why he was “always dirty”).

Leo doesn’t comment though. He knew just as well as Martha that this wasn’t something he could help since he had to work at his textile factory. It never bothered him though. All that mattered was taking care of his family. So he let Martha criticize him without saying any such harsh words back at her.

According to the Christmas event, Emma didn’t really understand who Freddy was, referring to him as “that man” that she “didn’t like”, as well as “an uncle who wore glasses” that her mother took her with one time to see a play. Freddy was likely the one to take Martha to see the play as part of him trying to be with Martha. Emma said she “didn’t really get it and I wasn’t in the mood anyway”, with her main concern that she wishes Leo had been there with her.

Considering Leo’s failure to attend, it is possible he knew Martha was spending more and more time with Freddy. Leo was a trusting man, so I don’t think he even allowed the thought that Freddy was doing this to win Martha over from him. He didn’t like it, but I don’t think he could ever tell her no. Even though they were arguing at this time, I believe he still wanted her to be happy, and hoped with some time apart after their argument, things would get better.

Some time before the proposal, Freddy (as a financial advisor partnered with Leo) suggests to Leo that he invest in Minerva Arms Factory. Martha was concerned and asked for Freddy to be honest regarding whether this was a “good investment plan”, to which Freddy responds by saying “if the investor had sufficient experience and capital, this would bring him immense wealth”. Martha initially trusts him (though still believes it would be better Leo didn’t invest in the arms factory).

It's at this point that Martha leaves Leo and Lisa. It is also described as a “secret departure” with the description “Leave before they notice and maybe then you can avoid heartbreak”. Before leaving, the last word she says to Lisa is “sorry” (she likely saw her mother before she could completely sneak away, probably when Leo was working before he could return). This to me, combined with her actions, shows us that Martha didn’t love Lisa nearly as much as Leo did (or rather that there were other things she loved more).

She does leave a letter for Leo, informing him of what she was doing even though “I know I'm about to do something really bad”.

In her goodbye letter to Leo, she says “For the sake of Lisa, however, please consider carefully the investment we debated” and tells him she hopes “you will make a wise decision”. If they “debated” this topic before, and Martha is saying to consider it carefully for Lisa’s sake, I wonder if that was part of the reason why Leo and Martha were “quarreling”. Maybe Leo was arguing that he believed he should invest in the factory while Martha tried to argue against it, and their arguing over it was part of the reason Martha decided to say yes to Freddy.

Near the end of her letter, she tells Leo “Take care of Lisa, and find a more suitable woman for yourself” (find a “more suitable woman for yourself” makes me wonder as to the meaning of these words. Considering Freddy sees himself as of a “superior” class, maybe she means “suitable” as in someone of a more appropriate class for Leo, while she wanted to be with the higher class. Or maybe she’s saying suitable because, just like how she’s doing something bad, she wants him to find a woman who is more faithful than she is). Then, just like with Lisa, she tells him “I’m really sorry” (I wonder how sorry she really is because, if she truly meant those words, would she still have left them?).

Even more symbolic is how she closes the letter with “Martha Remington” instead of “Martha Beck”.

In any case, Martha is gone, leaving Leo and Lisa to fend for themselves.

Based on how Martha describes Leo as someone who “wasn’t smart” and “didn’t have any investment experience, not to mention capital”, I wonder if Leo was someone who grew up without a formal education like Freddy had. Leo may have been more of a self-made man, someone who might’ve come from a poorer, simpler background but managed to make a living due to his personal characteristics and hard work. He wasn’t a rich man, only the owner of a small textile factory, but he was happy and made the most of it.

We know from Emma during the Christmas Nocturne (2020) event that Leo was good with his hands, as we learn he used fabric from his textile factory to make her dolls (including 1 of Emma herself). He’d made 2 “bodyguards” for her doll, but Emma says she was never able to see them (likely the 2 dolls Leo uses in game, and Emma likely didn’t see them because that may have been when she was sent to the orphanage or when Leo died).

We can see from Leo’s accessories that he’s made her other toys as well (including a slingshot and a hot air balloon model). The descriptions for these accessories tell us that Leo loved Emma. She was his world, and he’d do anything for her.

The Christmas event informs us of the same thing. Emma tells us that she’d always get 2 presents from him on Christmas. 1 was her birthday present, on December 21st, and another was a Christmas present, but he’d hide her birthday present until Christmas, and put both of them under the tree for her.

For the last Christmas Emma had with her father, he told her “this little tree of yours will be filled with so many presents next year that I won’t be able to see your little face”, which shows how much he wanted to do for her (if he’d been able).

We don’t know how long Leo and Lisa lived on their own, but we do know Leo did end up buying the Arms factory, and it was some time after doing so he learned that the factory had an over “4-figure debt”. Even Martha in her letter to Freddy says, despite how “Leo wasn’t smart”, she states “Yet even the dumbest person knows not to spend money to take on extra debts”, which tells us Freddy, who knew about the factory’s debt, purposefully hid this fact from Leo. This is evident as Freddy, in his deduction “Covert Jealousy” mentioning how he cut Leo out of the picture of him with Martha and Lisa, states “He should disappear from here or not appear before my eyes again”, while the very next deduction about the Factory and its debt is titled “False Affection”, with the description including “Lend a helping hand for greater profit, not brotherhood.”

We know Leo did what he could despite the debts, as Emma during the Christmas event says he sometimes came back with a “semi-finished gun made in his factory”. Emma didn’t like the guns, instead preferring the dolls Leo used to make, which he likely stopped doing once he’d incurred the debt from the factory (I wonder if he had to sell the textile factory to try to help pay off the debt for the arms factory).

Lisa seems to have occasionally gone with him to the arms factory, potentially because he couldn’t leave her at home by herself or because he had to work extra long in an attempt to pay off the debt.

This debt puts an incredible strain on Leo, which causes him to begin to change from the person Lisa originally remembered him as. He starts drinking (to forget the pain and sorrows of reality) as well as selling items from their home (to help pay off the debt. He also might’ve “destroyed” items that used to belong to Martha in drunken fits of rage). Lisa describes her emotions at that time as “I don't know what has happened, but this feeling is awful”.

Unfortunately, Leo is no longer capable of caring for Lisa due to the fact he is drowning in debt, especially now that he’s begun spending some of their money on drink. As a result, he’s forced to send her to an orphanage while she’s around 8 years old.

We know Leo married Martha in “Devonshire”, meaning that’s also where they likely lived. Freddy’s business was also in Devonshire, with the specific stress being “583 White Sand Street, Devonshire”.

This means Leo and Freddy lived close by (and I imagine Leo’s textile factory wasn’t too far away either). It also means that they lived on the same street as Kreacher’s orphanage, which was “13 White Sand Street”. Kreacher’s advertisement says this is the “first orphanage on White Sand Street”, and if he was the first and thus only one on the street, it’d make sense that Emma wouldn’t have much choice but to be sent to his.

Sometime after Lisa was sent to the orphanage, Leo sets the Arms Factory on fire. Based on the fact that Leo’s 3rd letter takes place on December 21, 1897 and the fact it says Leo has been experimented on for 10 years, with the experiments on Leo likely starting right after the factory fire, the fire itself had to have started on December 21, 1887, on Emma’s 11th birthday.

According to a letter he sent to Lisa before this (Leo’s 2nd Letter), we know Leo intended to have Lisa receive the insurance money from the factory fire, as she is listed as the “beneficiary of compensation”. He basically explains in the letter his desperation to find “another way to make money”, as nothing he’s been able to do as been enough to settle the debts. Though as we never hear about Emma receiving this money, it’s possible there was an issue (such as she wasn’t of age yet).

Despite what he’s about to do, we can see once again that Leo is doing everything for her. He still worries about Lisa being fed enough and being kept warm. He also reassured Lisa so she didn’t think that she was “unwanted”, and informed her that her mother leaving had nothing to do with Lisa herself. He ends by warning her “not to trust people too easily. Live for yourself. You won’t get lucky by being nice. It took Father too long to learn this lesson”. This seems to show Leo has realized that Freddy tricked him, as well as show Leo changing further to no longer be the kind, trusting person he once was. Considering he calls himself a “useless Father”, this tells us how Leo feels about himself regarding his inability to sufficiently care for his daughter, as well as proves what his primary concern has always been.

Despite the fire, Leo survives but hides while he recuperates, making everyone think he’s dead. Due to the fact one of the walls says “I will find you” as well as based on Leo’s deduction summary stating he “brewed his own revenge plan”, we know Leo’s focus right now is to get revenge on Freddy.

At some point before he can do so, he was taken to Sacred Heart Hospital and used as an experiment. These experiments included memory erasure, forcing him to forget so Leo would stop getting “uncontrollably excited” on Emma’s birthday to ensure the “daily experiments” went more “easily”. Leo’s 3rd letter states that the experiments went on for 10 years. Whether Orpheus was the one to take Leo or not, we know Leo was definitely used by Orpheus during Emma’s game to punish those who broke the rules, as well as used as the hunter for Emma’s game. And considering some “mysterious man learned that ‘Cinder’ is alive and where he can be found”, someone that has been “writing more frequently these days”, a someone that is male based on “his probing”, it is more likely Orpheus is this other person that found out Leo was alive and likely blackmails the one who does currently have Leo to have him handed over (to Orpheus and the manor). Which just leaves the question of who is the author of Leo’s 3rd letter and the one who’s been experimenting on him for 10 years, which I’ll get into shortly.

Next: Asylum Analysis Part 2

(End: Asylum Analysis Part 3)

[manicpixiefelix]

*crashes my imaginary car into your inbox*

OLLIE WHO WAS ADOPTED BY READER'S FAMILY!!!!!

I know this is a major shift in established dynamics but hear me out!!!

What if Oliver's tales about his home life were actually true, worse even so he ended up an orphan? He gets adopted by Reader's parents for the optics mainly because it makes them look good and they figure it'll provide their heir with a companion.

So they become this peculiar little duo, both very observant of the world and people around them. Ollie is a stranger to this world of the ultra rich and endures etiquette classes.

Oliver Quick becomes Oliver L/N, the boy uplifted from squalor by the heroic family *eye roll*

Reader is fiercely protective of their brother and will ruin anyone that insinuates he's not ~really~ family

I know we've never really discussed the ancestral home of Reader but I imagine it is every bit as grand and impressive as Saltburn. Ollie's favorite room is definitely the massive library.

BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS A LOT OF COURSE I LOVE HOW YOUR MIND WORKS!!!!

Of course your parents love the optics of it all.

You're six when they adopt Oliver, and he's five; this mousy little thing who doesn't smile often and barely speaks and can't look you in the eyes. He shys away from your overbearing, performative parents, but you seem to be able to see how overwhelmed he's getting. There's no words in your first interaction, only gestures, taking and keeping Oliver's focus as best you can to ground him in the moment; you teach him a simple game, and he returns the favour. Not a word between you two. By the end of the visit, you realise the adults have gone quiet; your parents and Oliver's case worker are just watching you both, marvelling. As you're looking away, Oliver himself finally steps towards you, taking your hand carefully and half hiding himself from them behind you, as if already deciding to trust you. You and Oliver had begun the day as strangers, and ended as siblings.

Your parents love to tell anyone who will listen about how when you first met Oliver you 'practically fixed yourself to his side and haven't moved since'. You look like the perfect family in photos, and the press is quick to forget how little research your parents did on the last charity they very publicly supported, and it's less than ideal history. Oliver learns to smile on command the way you feel like you've always known, but at least they don't make the two of you seperate in these moments.

Oliver says your house is like a fairy tale. At first he sticks close by you, overwhelmed by it all, but as the days turn to weeks and then months, you start to lose him as he goes exploring amongst the estate's many rooms and corridors. No-one knows the old house better then you, but Oliver is a close second; Nan says Mother used to scurry around just like you did, used to know every trick the old house had, but that was a lifetime ago.

Mother's study locks from the inside and Father works long hours in the city, so it's up to you to help Oliver settle in with the nannys and the tutors and the rest of the staff. Your parents like to buck tradition, so they're not precious enough to hire anyone to teach Oliver the etiquette that usually comes with wealth and a house like this, so long as he was polite and respectful and sweet faced in public, they couldn't care less which fork he used for salad. Honestly adults at events found his lack of grace and understanding of their unspoken rules charming in its sincerity. You, however, know that their condescending adoration grates on your brother's nerves as they talk to him like he was some kind of pet.

On the weekends Nan comes over, and it's clear that Oliver likes her the best of all the adults in your lives. Like you she doesn't pressure him to talk, always taking his silence in stride, but also taking the time and putting in the effort to understand him when he does try and communicate, however that may be.

In public - not that you're in public a lot - you and Oliver tend to cling to each other. As you grow older, even as you stop physically holding on to each other, you barely seem to stray from each other's shadow. Of the two of you, Oliver still is the far more reserved one, happy to let you do the talking most of the time, often only sharing his thoughts as quiet asides to you alone.

Considering your parents had no choice but to publicly acknowledge you in this universe, you and Oliver very much grow up in the public eye. The strange, observant duo who seemed to have the uncanny ability to wrap rooms full of adults, the upper echelons of society, around their little fingers, grow into beautiful and bitchy socialites.

Considering you're both getting privately tutored instead of going to a proper school, most of your time is spent travelling and attending events. Following the various Fashion Weeks around the world is a yearly tradition since you were teens, you go to concerts and film festivals and galas, always together, always inseperable. Or at least, inseperable when being seen by people who might matter. Oliver's confidence grows, he's far more open and even talkative in public than when he was a kid, but there's comfort in your established dynamic too. It returns most often at formal events, with Oliver half a step behind you, murmuring his commentary and amusing aside to you throughout the night.

A few of the independent tabloids your family didn't own print unsavoury rumours about your closeness, but those get pulled from news stands within the day, and a few threats of defamation lawsuits make them think twice before printing those kinds of articles again.

Everyone in the Western world knows who you both are, or has at least heard of you. But thankfully it's been years since anyone had tried to tie Oliver back to the Poor Orphan Boy he was when he'd first been adopted. By the time you both get to Oxford, he's been your brother for so long that it's like the world has thankfully forgotten that it's not by blood.

[mysticstarlightduck]

OC Picrew Tag!

I found this really cool Picrew and decided to make some of my OCs using it! I think you guys might like giving it a try as well, so I'm tagging a few people in this post (:

Here we go!

Rules: Use the provided Picrew to make one of your WIPs OCs, then provide a quick description of the character, and (optionally) a "funny/bad" version of a summary

SUPERNOVA INITIATIVE

Deimos Soll

About: An infamously silver-tongued assassin, sniper, and mercenary known for being unpredictable and always having hidden intentions, Deimos is Jack and Cassie's former crewmate and first childhood friend, turned rival, turned begrudging-friend-again. Deimos is the most successful and deadly sniper in the whole galaxy, feared even by the Junction at his full potential.

Badly/Funny Summarization: Essentially a young, alien, 'space opera' version of John Wick with extra angst and a very questionable moral compass

Lyorna Alyrii

About: A young and optimistic freedom fighter from a water folk of a faraway planet in the Khosmonian galaxies who believes in a freer future for her people and an end to the oppressive regime of the Junction. Focused and brilliant, Lyorna wants to uphold her father's legacy and bring peace to the galaxy. She becomes friends with Jack Tithus during his crew's mission on the Khosmonian galaxy and later on they become each other's love interest.

Bad Summarization: An overly optimistic, too-precious young adult who should be protected at all costs and has almost no plan for anything at any given moment in time and should not be left unsupervised.

Noctus

About: Though his full name is classified and unknown to the cast, his reputation precedes him. He is the single most successful special forces secret agent currently in the employ of the Junction - he has never failed a mission, never missed a target. And he always follows orders, always obeys the rules. However, is everything about him what it seems? A forgotten and suppressed part of his memory may prove that the system he fought so dearly to uphold may have actually made him into their perfect living weapon, and there may be many other lies yet to be uncovered

Bad Summarization: Twenty-something secret agent done with everything and everyone who only wanted to have a simple mission and ends up 'adopted' by the gang of misfits he was sent to supervise.

SONG OF THORNS

Tullieh Aerlys

About: The undefeated and steadfast commander of the Guardians, who protect the Mountain Elves' hidden kingdom and keep outsiders from discovering their land. Tullieh is a serious, no-nonsense young man to whom duty and honor mean everything, due to a personal grudge against humans, especially those who hunt mythical beings, he will do anything to honor his vow and keep his people - especially his younger siblings - from being found by outsiders, even if it means being ruthless and unforgiving to a questionable degree.

Bad Summarization: Traumatized ancient teenager who grew up way too fast and should never have been given a gun and a sword under any circumstances, but has both of those things and a lack of self-preservation instincts to make everything worse.

Renn Atrius

About: A foreign noble from beyond the royal lands, he was forced into the lifestyle of a thief from a young age, after being orphaned when his father, a Vampyr, was murdered for refusing to obey their neighboring kingdom's crown. Learning the art of disappearing into the night and taking valuables from the land that took everything from him and colonized his nation, Renn quickly became quite the nuisance for the King. But thankfully to his connection to raw blood magic, his slight vampiric abilities ensure no human soldier ever proves a real threat to him. He starts to fall in love with Roselyn, having become friends with her after trying to steal her coin purse (having mistaken her for a tourist from the capital).

Bad Summarization: Goth dhampyr way too reckless for his own good chooses to be a menace to the System while also refusing to deal with his very much unresolved childhood trauma.

Cadenza Narellie

About: A young faery noble, Cadenza is the only child of a once-powerful, now defamed, High House. After rumors about her father's supposed alliance with their nation's enemies, the human royals from the neighboring kingdom, their reputation came crashing down, and so did the bond they once shared, as her father grew mysteriously distant from her. Realizing something is seriously amiss, Cadenza takes it upon herself to investigate and find out the truth about what is truly happening, even if it gets her accused of treason herself.

Bad Summarization: Local faery with way too much time on her hands and no friends decides to dive into a conspiracy and is surprised when that decision has consequences.

Tagging (gently): @sleepy-night-child, @kaylinalexanderbooks, @smol-feralgremlin, @oh-no-another-idea, @littleladymab,

@winterandwords, @cowboybrunch, @eccaiia, @sarahlizziewrites, @illarian-rambling

@agirlandherquill, @anoelleart

@leave-her-a-tome, @writernopal, @anyablackwood, @unstablewifiaccess, @forthesanityofstorytellers

@i-can-even-burn-salad, @cakeinthevoid

@lassiesandiego, @thepeculiarbird, @clairelsonao3, @memento-morri-writes, @starlit-hopes-and-dreams and OPEN TAG

[viaviv124]

Cotl Unity AU

Okay because we all know i will never start, let alone finish, writing this we'll do the same i did with the orphan AU and give a plot summary. I won't go too much into the politcs of shit here, many outside relationships that arent crucial or make time to explain small easter eggs/gags i put in so feel free to ask if you wanna know! I'd love to yap more! Same goes for questions in general!

Alright lets start!

So there's this country/kingdom called Dagas and the royal family, currently consisting of 5 siblings, the oldest taking the crown as the monarch/ruler, are viewed as gods and worshipped by the church. Narinder is the 3rd prince and 23 years old. He's pretty invested in the military and handles a lot of politics having to do with fighting, earning him the title God/Prince of death (allthough this also comes from his ruthlessness and cold demeanor). One day Shamura tells him he's betrothed and that his fiance will arrive in two weeks, that day being a royal ball to publically announce it. Narinder tries to fight this arrangement but fails, much to his dismay. The decision is final. He knows nothing about his fiance, only that they're slightly younger than him, allthough still an adult.

The ball comes, Narinder is not amused and keeps ranting to his siblings, and around an hour or two in a carriage arrives and the guards escort the fiance inside, a lamb in precious, simple white robes and a red camelia in their wool. They bow in front of Narinder, introducing themself as Nanda from Venzor, a rather small village. They're a commoner, Narinder is less than thrilled, allthough for appearances he gives himself as charming and interested, allthough his face is deadpan for the crowd cannot see it. He extends a hand and Nanda kisses it, not recieving the same courtesy back allthough he should've. Narinder tells them to rise and despite eye-ing Narinder for a split moment, Nanda smiles politely and says how much of an honor it is for them to stand in front of him like this, allthough lowkey passive agressively. Narinder takes that personal and decides he doesn't like them even more. They have a dance because, again, appearances, and allthough Nanda cannot dance they manage to keep up impressively well. During dinner with the rest of the royal siblings it is revealed that the reason for this engagement is that Nanda is indirectly from the church. Allthough not officially a priest, they've caused a small, abandoned church in their village to blossom and bloom, causing even a lot of travelers to move to this village in order to devote themselves to faith. Nanda's talent/achievements within the church, which is lowkey controlling the loyalty of the commoners torwards the royals hence why it's so important, combined with their sharp wit it would be a good match with Narinder's military upbringing. Narinder doesn't protest but silently hopes that Nanda will just be an obedient believer who won't get in his way.

And that works, for the first week or so they do as they're told, work wise, and everything seems fine. Until Nanda realized/learned they can be casual around the royals, they cannot get rid of them or harm them unless they commit a respective crime, so they start relaxing and showing it in their attitude. What pushes it over the edge for Narinder is that Nands dared ordering him around. Well actually they just asked him if he could get something for them he was closer to but alas, who is to understand the mind of that prideful cat? (Nandas words) From that day on none of them held back. They bicker and bicker with no end, every so often it'd escalate into a fistfight too. They can barely sit in room together without one deciding to provocate the other for absolutely no reason. And hence their dynamic is born.

Around a month since Nanda arrived Narinder has to leave for a week or two. When he comes back and steps out of the carriage or leaves the ship or something everywhere around them are screams of pain and agony. It is caused by Nandas hand, ss they've killed people that seemed previously hidden. Once the acts are committed Nanda goes blank with this horrifyingly odd look in their eyes, making everone believe they lost it. They didnt hurt anyone else though and they didn't resist arrest. Narinder, accompanied by a guard for safety, decided to interrogate Nands himself. They reveal that these people were plotting to kill Narinder the moment he came back, providing a few letters exchanged in secret by the perpetrators they managed to steal as evidence. They never intended to kill them, but they couldn't help but see red. If they should be executed for their crimes they won't resist. Narinder believes their story and demands Nanda free. When asked for his reasoning he says that these letters were the real deal, for he knows Nandas handwriting enough to say so. Nanda saved his life so they get pardoned. Narinder doesn't understand why this drove Nanda so far they could only see red, this starts changing his view of them ever so slightly positively, allthough this doesnt stop their constant fighting.

Their normal life goes on until 2 months later they have to go to Venzor, Nanda's hometown, for various reasons. There Narinder meets Ratau, Nandas mentor and the one who arranged the engagement together with Shamura, allthough Nanda didn't find out until the day they had to leave. In general Narinder meets a huge culture shock, for as the common folk seem to greatly respect Nanda, calling them leader (which they've only seen Corey do sometimes) and in turn treating Narinder all casually despite being aware of his Status. During their stay he sees a very kind and mature side of Nanda, also seeing their skill in delivering sermons and in general doing work preists usually learn their whole lifes to do. On their trip they also need to clear out a nearby forest of monsters, creatures that greatly plague Dagas' safety and that Narinder frequently goes fight for a hobby. There he learns that Nanda is not only skilled with swords and daggers but also posesses black magic, making him re-evaluate each time they fought and in theory they could've just ended him right there.

In general both of them they realize they make a great team and work greatly together, be it about their actual work or fighting together. Especially after their visit to Venzor they also fight less. (allthough still very frequently, this is just their thing. Most of the malice is gone.)

Narinder learns Nanda is plagued by nightmares around two weeks after they return home. He found that out because he demands small cuddle sessions every now and then (obviously totally not romantic at all or anything, the grumpy kitty just needs his big plushy). Surprisingly the nightterrors become less when Nanda's with him so they end up sharing his bed. Over the span of the next 2 or 3 months the two of them (allthough mainly nanda) open up more in general, telling the other personal things and things that trouble them. For Nanda this includes telling Narinder their nightmares and that their birth family is dead. Over that time the two of them also begin sleeping with eachother on a regular basis.

For the next bit i have a semi-written out scene, with that i mean dialogue, so here you go:

It's late at night. Nanda is prone to overworking themself, especially just working deep into the night, and this day is no other. Narinder enters their office, leaning at the doorframe. "Come to bed." Nanda shakes their head "I need to finish this." Irritation starts filling the prince's voice, allthough with no real heat "I am not repeating myself, lamb." "What, can't sleep without me?" "I've no use for someone sleep deprived." A scoff "I don't need to be useful to you." "As a commoner thats your purpose, even more as a religious figure. You’re supposed to devote yourself to me." "Baah, i never did that. It’s dumb. I just use the scriptures as my own and take from it what i want and need. Now be quiet and follow your own advice and go to bed, prideful cat." "Excuse me?" "You heard me." Despite the bickering Narinder's interest was piqued. After a bit back and forth he gets Nanda to elaborate, who proceeds to tell him their story. Nanda grew up in a small village, not Venzor, with their family. However, that place was pillaged when they were around 12. From their family they are the only survivor and had to flee. In order to survive they had to resort to theft and violence, also getting with some very bad people i won't get into here. This went on for around 3 years when they met Ratau. He took them in and brought them the holy scriptures closer, saying that he himself also doesn't believe in the gods but that the morals and allthat are good to follow if you have nothing else to believe in. Surprisingly this worked for Nanda too and they got a lot better, the traveling with someone trusted who wouldn't hurt them also helped. Eventually they came across Venzor, a small miserable village. Nanda decided to teach the people what Ratau taught them, that even if they don't believe in the gods they could take whenever they need for courage, comfort and guidance from the scriptures. The people found hope in that and the rest is history. As Nanda was talking Narinder moved to the chair himself, keeping the lamb on his lap. They kept talking, telling stories of their travels or telling anecdotes from the villagers etc. As they were talking they finally fell asleep. Carefully Narinder took them to bed, holding them especially close that night.

From then it only took like a month before the two of them finally admit their feelings. They're on the balcony of Naridners (by extension Nandas, they barely use their own room anymore) chambers on a beautiful, moonlit night. Nanda is very deeply in love with Narinder, but still believes Narinder dislikes theme so they keep quiet, the prideful prince however has run out of patience and decides to do it right then and there. He kisses Nanda tenderly, saying "There is no need for me to proclaim my love, as you are already destined to be mine to wed." Nanda tears up and hugs Narinder tightly. They kiss once more, then Nanda sobs in Naridners shoulder, then they kiss again. It was a very happy and tender night for both of them and the first day or two they full on embraced the honeymoon phase, actually going without bickering. However, they very quickly return to the status quo because that's just their thing and how they're the most comfortable.

Around 3 weeks later the two of them go to yet another crusade, that's how they call their monster hunting, and they come across a small, dilapidated village. They're on guard as they look around, allthough no soul is to be seen. Not until a man comes to them with painful cries. His soul is damned and incased in darkness. He begs for help and mercy. Narinder is ready to strike, as this old man is about to turn into a monster sooner or later, but Nanda stops him. They turn to the man and extend a hand, cleansing his soul with their magic. He thanks them very much before quickly leaving this damned place. Not long after a bigger crowd of damned people drag torwards Nanda, begging to be healed to. Selflessly they do so. By the end of it around 200 people are cleansed and went on their way, meanwhile Nanda's own light left their body, leaving their body slowly blackening as they collapse. Alarmed Narinder catches them in time and rushes back to the palace. They won't wake up and each healer, each cleric, declares they cannot be saved. They had sold their soul for black magic, this is the consequence for the magic kept gnawing at Nanda's soul and this overexersion made their fate final. They won't survive this. Narinder is heartbroken and doesnt leave their side. He barely eats, won't talk to anyone, he just stays as Nanda'a side, holding their cold hand or body tightly. On the fourth night Narinder recieves an anonymous letter. The letter talks about how there is a cure, but people using light magic deem it as unethical, as it requires a new soul, be it through sacrifice or a shared one. It requires the soul of someone very close to the afflicted, like family, very close friends or a lover, as a stronger connection will increase the success rate. Unless an entire soul is given no one will die. If Narinder is willing to do this, all he has to do is break the tooth in the envelope. The letter is signed with "the teeth in the darkness". Without much hesitation Narinder breaks the tooth. The next day he wakes up next to Nanda, they still show no sign of waking up but their body feels warmer and the blackening went back. Sorrowfully he whispers “how dare you leave me after i’ve finally made you mine? You promised to stay, yet you’re a liar.”, words he has said multiple times since Nanda fell ill, that now feel even heavier. Around an hour goes by, Narinder lets no one inside as he mourns his lover, when suddenly their breath slowly speeds up again. They move. Slowly they wake up. Narinder embraces them tightly. Both cry. It is a very overwhelming and emotionally raw moment.

Nanda makes a full recovery and the wedding is held a few months after.

And that's pretty much it! Again, in the background is a lot more going on but this is already long enough. If you have any questions feel free to ask!

[ao3feed-irondadspiderson]

You're My Kid Too

https://archiveofourown.org/works/53793676 by noonecaneverknowwhoiam “Morgan calls you her big brother,” Tony picks up. “And Peter, you’re not just a stray orphan I picked up because they had radioactive spider powers. Sure, that’s the reason we met, but that’s not the reason I kept you around. I offered you the internship because I liked you. I bring you up to the cabin because I love you.” Tony’s breath catches. “When - when you were dusted, we had a mini memorial stone made for you,” he says. Pepper takes his hand. “We never told you this because it’s not something we like thinking about. But May was with us and she agreed that the name that would go on the stone was Peter Benjamin Parker-Stark. Parker-Stark, you hear that?” “Why?” Peter whimpers. “Because Peter,” Tony says easily, “you’re my kid too.” or Peter gets sick at the cabin and is ~insecure~ Words: 2843, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English Fandoms: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply Categories: F/M Characters: Peter Parker, Tony Stark, Pepper Potts, Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Happy Hogan Relationships: Peter Parker & Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Pepper Potts, Peter Parker & Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Pepper Potts & Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe) & Tony Stark Additional Tags: Sickfic, Sick Character, Sick Peter Parker, Emetophobia, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Precious Peter Parker, Hurt Peter Parker, Peter Parker is a Mess, Peter Parker Whump, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Parent Tony Stark, Good Parent Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Morgan Stark are Siblings (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Febuwhump, Sicktember, Whumptober, Whump read it on AO3 at https://archiveofourown.org/works/53793676

[sunny-mercya]

Calm before the storm

Trafalgar Law x Male Reader

Fandom -> One Piece

Masterlist

Hearing one of the orphans giggling gleefully, Law looked up from the newspapers he was reading, taking a glance at you and the children —which you were feeding thoughtfully, with the bit of rice and bread you had managed to scrape up.

Law never had asked and you never spoke of it, how you got the bit of money every week to buy enough food for all of them and in all honestly, Law wouldn't ask.

He knew it was only a handful of options, which kind of job you did to earn the money. Something you didn't seem to enjoy to do, but still practicing in it, to survive on the bare minimum of necessities.

Waking up every morning to see your tired and pained face, having come back from your nightly trip and laying down next to Law, cuddling into him—a sign that it drains you, leaving you mentally exhausted.

So no. Law wasn't going to ask you about your job.

It was still a strange sight for Law, even after being a whole month here, to see you so fatherly, brotherly caring for the Orphans. He knew, could tell it by the way your face would lit up with happiness when you took care of the children, that you had begun to love them. Unofficially and indirectly adopting them.

And Law's wonders, how you would feel when the both of you leaving Wano again, after Kaido being finally defeated. Would you be sad? Would you decide to stay here and continue to care for them? Would you perhaps even considering to either break up with him or ask him to stay with you?

When coming to Wano, searching for a hideout, a base of operation and waiting till your arrival from Cake-Island. Law hadn't thought about such questions before, not when he had started dating you and neither when he had finally proposed to you weeks before—though their could've been a better time to do it.

«Tratra, eat too!» one of the smaller children said, having walked up to Law and excitedly holding up a bowl of rice to him. Law had stopped to correct them about his name, knowing well that all of the children here can't pronounce or speak properly correctly.

«Mimi, Law has already eaten. Eat up and later we can play some with the cards,» you told her, standing up from the ground, holding one of the babies in your arms and coaxing Mimi back to her siblings.

Taking a place next to Law now, you laid your head onto his shoulder, closing your eyes for a few minutes. Enjoying these moments of twosomeness the most.

How long could you go on like this?

«Aren't they adorable Law? They're all so precious,»

Law only hummed, concentrating back on the newspapers, or at least trying to do. You're Yukata was rather revealing today, a pure distraction for his rational logical mind. If it weren't for the children, Law would have taken you right away at this moment and fucking you till morning.

«I guess they are.» Law wasn't much a fan of Children, they were loud, annoying and only troublesome. Though if you really wanted some children of your own, Law wouldn't mind adopting one or two then. But only for you.

There was another thought, more like question, which crossed Law mind. Something which makes his mood sour.

What would happen when the Alliance comes to an end? Would you stay with the Strawhat, your captain or, if Law decides to ask you, join his crew and be with him?

Putting his newspapers away, Law put an arm around your shoulders. Gently pulling you with him, to lay down onto the tatami floor. Mindful of the baby, which now lays between the two of you.

«Law, I have work to do and I have to watch over the Children.»

«Later, lets take a nap, you clearly need one. Oi! Children it's nap time.»

The Children discarding their empty bowl and almost came running towards you both. Small feet trampling echoed throughout the room. They cuddled against Law and you, the second baby gently placed next to his brother by one of his other siblings.

With a wisp of air you brought a blanket over, covering you all with it. Pecking Law's cheek and then his lips, before nuzzling into his neck. Eyes dropping ever so slightly and it wasn't long till sleep overcomes you.

Law drove through your hair with his hand, returning the kisses, once he was certain you and the kids were fast asleep.

Perhaps, Law mused to himself—when he begun to doze off too—settling down with you on a Island, in the far future, does sounds more nicely than he would've thought it would.

~~~

When Law came back from a two days trip, he hadn't expected to see something like this.

The amount of blood, body parts and organs, a disturbing sight honestly even for Law himself, who does has seen far more gruesome things, was astonished and confused by it at the same time.

And in between all this mess, was you. Sitting there all bloody and staring into nothing. Face void of emotion to read for Law.

Taking small steps towards you and upon inspecting you further, Law has noticed something else.

Besides the wounds, which lingered and scattered over your body, was the disfigured, deformed and dismantled body of one of the babies, Esu—he believes the name was, in your arms.

Law crouched down in front you, placing his hand over yours.

«[Name]-ya, what happen?»