#then again one thing's the act and the other my ability to write it successfully

[satyricplotter]

i'll just say this one thing bc i don't wanna meddle but i rlly thought the excerpts would help beta!dick the most shhfjsg

[venerable-sun]

Call My Name (Nuada x Reader)

Nuada Silverlance (Hellboy) x Reader

TW: Some slight violence (as to be expected), but otherwise just Nuada being an emotionally-constipated ass

Word Count: ~5400 words

Prompt: I always call you by your title except the one time when you’re in trouble, enemies to lovers, slight hurt-comfort

I stayed up until 3 am writing this, so if you see a typo... no you didn't. Just a reminder that my requests are open so please send them in!

Your ability to get along with just about everyone is something you take a lot of pride in. When you first came under the protection of the BPRD with Red, you had quickly formed many valuable connections, even if you couldn’t call many of them true friends. And when Liz later joined the team, the two of you got on like wildfire (pun intended) almost instantly. Hell, even Manning acts agreeable towards you. You’ve always thought of yourself as a charming person, despite your somewhat off-putting appearance, and your skills in negotiation and peacemaking are unmatched.

That is, until a certain elf-prince came into the BPRD’s custody and put that to the test.

You hadn’t been part of the task team that fought in the Battle of the Golden Army, your… special skills pulling you away from the conflict to mediate between two warring tribes of giants in the Himalayas. 

You are an Avian, a mutated human with wings and the ability to speak every language, both human and supernatural, on the planet. Had the two tribes gone to war, it would have been devastating for the entire Asian continent and would have exposed the entire supernatural world. Being deep into the world’s tallest mountains and in the throes of complicated negotiations meant that you had little to no communication to the outside world for weeks, so to say you were shocked to find out that the world had been incredibly close to being destroyed by an ancient army would be an understatement. 

Even more shocking was finding out that the BPRD had taken the culprit into custody. 

The compound was bustling with activity as you made your way through the long corridors to Manning’s office for your debrief. Familiar faces greeted you as you walked past, some stopping for a moment to ask you about your mission. There were a few who gave you a wide berth, eyeing your wings warily. You had grown used to such looks, knowing that your wings were far from the prettiest things to gaze upon. Avians are an incredibly rare type of mutation, but your specific type even more so. While most had beautiful feathered wings like that of an angel, yours more closely resembled a bat’s. 

You unconsciously tuck your wings closer against your back, wishing that there was more room underground to stretch out to your full wingspan more often. 

You knock on Manning’s door once before pushing your way in, too tired from your trip to wait for him to call you in. All you want to do is take a long, hot shower and sleep for days. 

You’re surprised someone is already sitting there across from the director of the BRPD, and from the tension in his shoulders he isn’t very happy. His head snaps towards you the moment you step into the room, his golden eyes finding yours instantly. His mouth is pulled back into a sneer as he regards you coolly, eyes flicking up and down your form before settling on your wings. Something hardens in his gaze, and he quickly turns his body away from you as if you were not even there. 

“Ah, you’ve returned!” Manning greets. “Well?” 

“The conflict between the giants has successfully been resolved,” you report, trying hard to ignore the disdain that seems to be radiating from the golden-eyed man. “I doubt they will be so quick to go to arms with each other again.” 

Manning hums in approval, settling back into his seat. “I want a full report typed up on my desk tomorrow.”  You nod, turning to leave. “Wait, there’s one more thing.”

You eye him warily, your hopes of a quick escape dashed. Manning gestures to the stranger in the room. “This is Nuada Silverlance, Prince of the Bethmoora Clan. He is in our charge for the foreseeable future.” You notice Nuada’s hands tightening into fists at his words. “I’ve assigned you to be his personal guide and companion while he settles into life here.” 

“I do not need a guide.” The prince speaks for the first time. His voice is deep and smooth like honey, and you would find it strangely attractive if it weren’t for the fact that he was glaring at you as he spoke. “And I certainly do not want companionship from the likes of her. If I am to be forced to live in this insufferable human prison, then I wish to at least be left alone.” 

“You will escort Nuada around the compound,” Manning ignores the silver-haired elf. “And you will help him with anything he needs as well as teach him about human culture.” 

Nuada growls, getting to his feet abruptly. “Absolutely not!”

Manning eyes him coolly. “Need I remind you of the reason you're here in the first place. And if you have any hopes of repairing your relationship with your sister, I would recommend you behave and do as we say.” 

You stifle a yawn as Nuada growls again, your jet lag really starting to make itself known. The elf turns his angry gaze towards you, rage sparking like molten gold in his eyes. “Am I boring you, human? Maybe a knife to your throat will wake you up.” He threatens. 

“Really? Because I don’t see any weapons on you.” You gesture to his empty belt and  exaggeratedly look around the office. “Unless you’ve hidden one somewhere. Is the knife here in the room with us?” 

Nuada looks like a volcano about to erupt, and you have to stifle a laugh. “That’s enough, (Name).” Manning says. “If you would be so kind as to show Nuada to his room. It’ll be right across from yours.” 

Great.

You and the elf-prince exit Manning’s office in silence and stand awkwardly in the hallway. “Okay,” you clear your throat. “It’s this way.”

You walk a few paces before you realize Nuada isn’t following. You sigh, mustering up the last of your remaining energy as you face the still-glaring prince. “Look, I know you don’t want to be here. Hell, I wouldn’t either. But you are, and from what I’ve heard about what happened, there’s much worse places you could be.” You hold up your hand to stop him as he takes an angry step forward. “We can fight about this tomorrow, but I have had a very long day. And I can promise you that of all the people to get assigned to be your chaperone, you could do a whole lot worse than me. So unless you want me to go get Red to be your buddy, I recommend that you follow me to your room.” 

With that, you turn and begin walking away again, a small smile pulling at your lips when you hear light, almost-silent footsteps following behind you. 

By the time you reach your rooms, your wings are dragging against the ground with exhaustion. “That’s yours, I guess.” You gesture vaguely at the door across from yours. “If you need anything, just knock or find one of the guards. I’m sure they won’t be far.” 

Nuada nods stiffly and enters into his room, closing the door solidly behind him. “Good talk,” you sigh. You spend the rest of the evening decompressing from your trip, taking a hot bath and relaxing in bed with a cup of tea, and most importantly, keeping your mind off of the intriguing elf-prince just across the hall from you.

~~~

You’re shockingly unbothered for the entire night, managing to sleep well into the next day. By the time you drag yourself out of bed, it’s shortly before noon and your stomach is making its hunger known. 

You dress quickly and go to knock on Nuada’s door. You wait several moments with no response and knock again, louder this time. 

“What do you want, human?” Nuada growls, opening the door half-way. 

“I thought you might be hungry and figured I could show you to the dining hall.” 

The elf narrows his eyes but reluctantly steps out. “If you must.” 

You struggle to hide your amusement at the sight of his disgusted face when you get to the bustling cafeteria. Agents roam between full tables and a clamor of voices and cutlery scraping against plates fills the air. Your smile fades when Nuada suddenly goes rigid. You follow his gaze to see Nuala sitting at a table with Abe. Their bodies are angled towards each other, knees knocking together as Abe leans forward to brush a stray hair behind her ear. 

Before you can stop him, Nuada is stalking forward, and you struggle to keep up behind him without knocking into anyone with your wings. Nuala gazes up at her brother with a face devoid of emotion while Abe pulls back awkwardly. “Sister, I wish to speak with you privately.”

“Whatever you have to say can be said to the both of us, brother.” She replies evenly. You hang back, unsure of if you should redirect this before the elf-prince causes a scene. 

“You really stoop so low as to openly fraternize with a traitor? You would truly embarrass your people this way?” Nuada shoots Abe a withering glare. The fish-man blinks in surprise. “Uhm, excuse me, but-” 

“I love Abe, brother. I expect you to respect my choice.” Nuala reaches over and clasps his hand in her own. “And he is far from a traitor.”

“He helps the enemy! He lives amongst them as if they are family!” Nuada hisses. 

“They are my family,” Abe replies smoothly. “If you were to let go of your hate, you could see all the good that they do.” 

Nuada growls, taking a menacing step forward. “Hey, let’s maybe not do this here, yeah?” You finally butt in, acutely aware that the dining hall has gone completely quiet and everyone’s attention in on you.

The elf-prince turns and stalks away without a word, leaving you struggling to keep up with him once again. He’s already half-way down the hall when you catch up to him, and you reach forward to grab at his wrist. “Nuada, hold on a second-” 

“Don’t you dare touch me, you filth!” 

You reel back for a moment, shocked at his outburst in one second and enraged in the next. 

“And don’t you dare talk to me like that, your highness.” You square up to the prince, matching his angry gaze with your own. “You may be royalty amongst your kind, but that doesn’t give you any right to speak to me in such a manner. I have done nothing but try to help you.” 

“I never asked for your help.” Nuada hisses, looming over you in a certain way that you try very hard not to pay attention to. “If you haven’t noticed, I am being held here against my will.” 

You soften slightly, feeling slightly bad for him despite yourself. “I know you are. But you tried to wipe out the entire human race- what did you expect to happen? The best you can do now is try and make the most of being here. It really isn’t so bad once you get used to it.” 

“I will never accept being a prisoner here.” Nuada growls, whipping around and stalking off in the direction of his room. 

You watch him go with a frown, deciding to give him some time to cool off. 

“I apologize for my brother,” a soft voice speaks from behind you. 

Nuala stands there with Abe standing slightly behind her, a sympathetic look on her face. “He has always been quick to anger, even when we were elflings.” 

You give her a lopsided smile, reaching out a hand to introduce yourself formally. “I appreciate the apology, but none is needed, at least not from you.” 

You cast a glance in the direction the elf in question disappeared off to. “I feel bad for him, in a way. Even though he tried to commit mass genocide and all.” 

“My brother is very passionate when it comes to the preservation of our people.” Nuala sighs. “Unfortunately, his means of acting on them are grossly misguided.” 

You leave the two of them to go on their way, heading back into the dining hall to actually eat this time. After making a quick sandwich, you leave with some fruit and bread wrapped in a napkin. You place it in front of Nuada’s door, knocking sharply twice before heading to the training room for some practice. 

Only once he’s certain you’ve left does Nuada open his door, stamping down the small twinge of guilt he feels as he picks up the food you’ve left for him. 

~~~

Nuada doesn’t leave his room once for the next three days. The only indication you have that he’s still in there is the faint light from beneath the door and the fact that the food you leave for him always quickly disappears. 

On the third day, you grow tired of awkwardly hanging around in the hallway debating on knocking on his door and finally do so. 

You wait a few moments before knocking again, louder this time. 

“You humans are so impatient. I was going to answer.” Nuada gives as way of greeting. “What do you want?”

“I was wondering if you wanted to come with me to the training room.” You offer with what you hope is a convincing smile. “It’s always empty at this time of day and I figured you might enjoy a change of scenery.” 

The prince quirks an eyebrow at you suspiciously but begrudgingly gestures for you to lead the way. 

You ask him about his preferred weapon, surprised that he answers your question without malice. He tells you of his prized spear, indulging you in a tale of how it was forged. 

You hum in thought before the weapon wall, grabbing a bo staff and handing it to him. “It’s not elven-made, but it’s the closest training weapon we have to what you’re used to.” 

Nuada gives it a few test swings, getting used to its weight. While he does so, you unsheath your personal dual swords from their scabbards, examining them closely before deeming them acceptable for the training session. 

You settle into a loose fighting stance, shooting the elf a wicked grin. “Ready when you are, princeling.” 

He surges forward without warning, immediately going on the offense. You parry his blow easily, following it with a lunge of your own. The sound of metal on metal begins to fill the room as you match each other blow for blow, both of you unable to land a hit on the other. You blink at the sweat threatening to drip into your eyes, searching for any chink in the prince’s otherwise impenetrable stance. 

He takes a small step back, presumably to gain momentum for his next attack, but in that moment you spot his weakness. He shifts too much weight into that one foot, and before he can pivot towards you, you’re darting forward with a well-aimed strike to his knee. 

He wobbles, off-balanced for a second. That second is all you need, and before he can comprehend it, he’s knocked onto his back with one of your blades pointed at his throat. 

He ignores the hand you offer to him, pushing himself to his feet without a word. He can’t help the glimmer of respect he feels for you as you smile at him, finally wiping the sweat from your brow. 

You stretch your arms languidly above your head, and he averts his eyes from the sliver of soft skin that becomes visible as your top rides up slightly. 

“I haven’t had to work so hard to win against someone in forever.” You say. “We’ll have to do this again sometime.” 

“That would be… amenable.” 

You grin in victory, pleased at having won two battles today. “Come on, there’s one more place I want to show you while we’re over on this side of the building.” 

You lead him to the library, which is almost always virtually devoid of anyone else. The prince can’t completely keep the look of pleasure off his space as he explores the countless titles, pulling some of them to take back to his room with him. 

As you bid him goodbye to take a shower, you could swear his gaze lingers on you slightly longer as you turn toward your own chambers. 

~~~

Things are slightly different after that day. 

Nuada still makes his displeasure at being the BPRD’s prisoner apparent, and he is often cold and grumpy in his demeanor, but he does not direct such harsh words at you again. You continue to train together, slowly learning each other’s fighting styles and testing them with a variety of different weapons. You know Manning isn’t very pleased that you’re allowing the prince to wield a weapon, but the way you see it, it allows him to blow off some steam and that’s a win in your book. 

You also begin to spend time in the library together, most of the time just reading your separate books in silence. There’s something oddly… domestic about it, if you would allow yourself to think of it in that way. 

Thoughts like these are dangerous though, for as the weeks go by, you begin to find yourself attracted to the silver-haired elf. 

You realize the true depth of these feelings with startling clarity one night after you see Nuada smile for the first time. It is small and barely-there, pulling at his lips after he finds a book of elven fairy-tales on a shelf tucked in the very back of the library, but the sight of it nearly knocks the air out of your lungs.

There’s no denying the elf is incredibly handsome, but his smile completely transforms his face from alluring to ethereal. You avert your gaze before he can notice, and resolve to never let your feelings become apartment to him. 

Because at the end of the day, you’re still just a human, wings or not. 

You struggle particularly hard one evening in the library to focus on the book you’ve chosen, stealing quick glimpses at the elf sitting across from you through your hair. 

“You’re staring,” He hums, long fingers flicking to the next page without looking up at you.

“Just thinking.” You say, forcing your attention back to the page in front of you. You read the same sentence four times before getting to your feet, carefully marking your place before setting the book down. “I can’t stand being inside one moment longer,” You announce. 

Nuada raises an eyebrow. “I do not believe I am ‘allowed’ to leave the premises, if you weren’t aware.” He comments drily, and you scoff. 

“Who said anything about leaving?

Cool wind whips at you as you push open the door to the roof, and you sigh in relief at the open air. Stars twinkle overhead, the compound being far enough from the city lights to be able to see a faint haze of the galaxy spread across the sky. 

You allow your wings to stretch to their full span for what feels like the first time in ages, giving a small flap that lifts your feet slightly above the ground for a moment.

You can feel the prince’s eyes on you, and you extend one of your wings towards him. “You can touch it, if you want. Most people are curious.” 

You suppress a shiver as his calloused hand swipes experimentally over the skin, not expecting your wings to be so sensitive to his touch. He drags his fingertips over the back, marveling at how a limb so strong could feel so soft. “Have you always been like this?” He asks softly. 

“I was born with them, yes.” You say, directing your attention to the stars above your head. “Gave my parents quite a shock, I suppose, seeing as they put me up for adoption immediately after I was born. I was taken in by Professor Bruttenholm, who raised me alongside Red. He taught me that my wings are a gift, a way to do good despite what others may see them as.” 

You turn to see Nuada is gazing at you intently. “Others have treated you horribly for your appearance.” He doesn’t say it as a question.

“That’s true,” you smile wryly. “People can definitely be cruel. But they can also be incredibly kind, and while there may be a couple here who will avoid me in the hallways, for the most part the BPRD is my family.” 

You meet the prince’s gaze imploringly. “I know you hold significant anger for humanity. And I even understand why. But don’t punish an entire race for the sins of a few. There are many who care a whole lot… like me.” For you. 

You don’t say that last part, but you know he understands its implication. Over the course of you speaking, the two of you have somehow gravitated closer to each other. You stare into the elf’s golden eyes, now inches from your own. 

Your hands brush together as he draws even closer, and your breath hitches slightly at the electricity that the touch elicits. 

“I must admit I have grown rather fond of you,” Nuada murmurs, almost as if he doesn’t even realize. “You have made being here slightly more bearable.” 

You huff out a laugh as his warm breath fans across your cheeks. Your eyelids begin to flutter closed as his lips just barely brush against yours. All of the sudden, he yanks himself away, his face a mixture of disbelief and fury. 

“You have bewitched me,” the prince hisses, eyes devoid of the warmth they had held just moments ago. “I see your ploy now, witch. You would make me a traitor to my own kind, complacent to stay here forever and allow humanity to corrupt what little of the natural world there is left.” 

“Nuada, I-” you stumble in disbelief, reeling from the complete change in his attitude. 

“Silence!” He roars, causing you to take an involuntary step back. Gone is any of the tenderness he had directed towards you, replaced with cold, simmering rage. For the first time, you find yourself slightly afraid of him. 

"You are nothing but a filthy human with extra appendages,” he spits viciously, and you rear back as if he had slapped you. “And I will always hate you just like the rest of your despicable kind.” 

He leaves you on the roof, slamming the door behind him with a bang. 

You don’t know how long you stand in the cold, completely dumbfounded by Nuada’s actions. All the progress you’d made with him had vanished in an instant, any hope of him possibly returning your feelings snatched away in the cruelest way possible. 

You finally shake yourself out of your shock, reaching up to wipe the silent tears off your cheeks. You suppose that you should have expected this. You’d been foolish to think that you and the elvish prince could even remotely be friends, much less anything more. 

You bury your hurt deep, deciding that from now on that you would avoid Nuada at all costs. Manning would just have to find someone else to accompany him around. 

You make your way back to your room in a daze, heart twisting as you briefly glance at the door across from yours. 

You don’t sleep at all that night, wrapping your wings comfortingly around yourself and shivering from the cold that has seemed to settle itself right against your bones. 

~~~

You and Nuada do not speak for a month. 

You deliberately avoid his gaze every time you pass each other in the halls, and if he happens to be in the training room or library whenever you are, you leave until he is finished. 

By some twisted form of masochism, you spend a lot of time on the rooftop, staring blankly at the horizon.

Life without the elvish prince is boring and monotonous, and you have no idea how you carried out your days before he was there to occupy all your time. It doesn’t help that you’ve barely been given any missions, the few you’re called on only pulling you away from the compound for a few days at a time.

If anyone notices the change in either of your attitudes, they don’t say anything. Nuala often looks at you with sympathy and Liz seems to hang around more despite being constantly busy with the twins, but neither of them address your listlessness. 

You’re sitting in the library pretending to read when a lower agent approaches you. “Manning wants to see you in his office.”

You get up with a sigh, already not looking forward to this conversation. 

You struggle to keep any emotion from showing on your face when you see Nuada is sitting across from Manning’s desk. A strong sense of deja vu hits you as his gaze meets yours and flicks away just as quickly before you can read anything there. The director of the BPRD clears his throat, obviously having caught the brief exchange. 

“There has been a troll sighting not far from here,” Manning directs towards you. “They’re bold, amassing forces so close to our base. I’m sending a large team to go deal with the problem.” He gestures to the elf who is pointedly not looking at you. “Nuada will be accompanying you.” 

You immediately open your mouth to protest, your refusal dying on your tongue as Manning holds up a hand to silence you. “The prince has not caused any problems during his stay here and I believe it is time for him to start becoming more involved with our operations. He will be your responsibility while out on the field.” 

You grind your teeth so hard you fear they might crack as Manning dismisses you both. You speed-walk out of the office before Nuada can get to his feet, trying to put as much distance between the two of you as possibly. 

It’s a little hard to do that while in the back of a transport van, which you find yourself seated in the next morning. You do your best to ignore the elf sitting across the aisle from you as you’re jostled along. You grip your dual swords sitting across your lap, trying to keep your mind on the mission ahead. 

You’re the first out of the van when it stops, immediately beginning to scan your surroundings. Your group has been dropped off right in front of a dense part of the forest, the trees so close together it's impossible to see between them. 

As the rest of the team assembles on the grass, you strap your swords to your back and launch yourself into the air, trying to get a better glimpse into the thicket. You swoop closer to the treetops, but the branches are too thick to see through, and you return to the clearing with no luck. 

“I can barely see into there,” you report. “They’ve chosen their hideout well.”

Red claps his hands together, calling everyone closer to him. “We’ll have to split up to cover more ground. Me and Liz will head north-west into the forest. (Name), you and Nuada will go north-east. The rest of you fan out in between.” 

Ice settles into your heart as the group disperses, leaving you and Nuada alone. “We’d better get going,” you address the elf for the first time in weeks, not waiting for him to reply before you start walking into the trees. 

The two of you hike in silence for some minutes, pushing aside branches and foliage with every step. You grumble quietly to yourself, wishing you could stretch your wings. Nuada stops suddenly, his hand on your wrist and a slender finger pressed to his lips to keep you quiet. 

Warmth begins to creep up your arm from where his skin touches yours, but the hair standing up at the back of your head distracts you from it. The sounds of the forest have gone completely silent, leaving behind an eerie ringing that you don’t know is in your head or not. 

Nuada pulls you down suddenly, wide eyes meeting your own as an arrow embeds itself in the wood right behind where your head had just been. 

“Run,” he growls, and then you’re both taking off through the trees. 

Branches whip at your face as you race through the thicket, knobby roots seeming to reach up to try and trip you with every stride. 

You scramble to a halt as a troll seems to materialize out of the branches before you, his sharp teeth and red eyes gleaming in the dappled sunlight that manages to filter through the leaves. You draw your swords, preparing for a fight. Your swords meet his in a clash of metal on metal, and you grunt from the exertion. The troll is strong, and your stomach rolls at the stench of his breath as he grins wickedly at you.

“(Name)!” A scream of your name steals your attention just enough to notice the troll that has also been creeping up behind you, but it is already too late.

A hard blow strikes you across the back of the head, and you crumple immediately. An enraged roar and a high-pitched squeal of pain that is suddenly cut off is the last thing you hear before your world completely goes black. 

~~~

You wake slowly, head pounding with every beat of your heart. 

You blink blearily, the sight of one of the BPRD’s hospital rooms coming into focus. Movement from beside you shifts your attention, and you’re shocked to see Nuada sitting uncomfortably in one of the metal chairs by your bedside. 

He is dressed in fresh robes, his silver hair pulled back and a somber look on his face. You gaze at him silently, not trusting yourself to speak for multiple reasons. 

“I owe you numerous apologies,” he begins without ceremony. “I was cruel and incredibly unkind. I have no excuse other than my own bigotry and confusion. I did not know how to handle my emotions and lashed out at you as a result.” 

You allow him to grab your hand, the same warmth beginning to creep up your arm. You can’t deny that it feels nice, but you don’t exactly want to forgive him just yet. 

“I feel… very strong emotions for you.” Nuada says, his face sincere as he looks at you. For once, there is no anger lurking in his sight, and his eyes are golden pools of sunlight. “I did not want to admit to myself what they were at the time, but seeing you hurt proves that I can fight it no longer.” The prince takes a deep breath. “I love you, (Name). And I will spend every day for the rest of our lives making up for the hurt I have caused you, if you would allow me to court you.” 

You press your lips to his, the kiss soft and hopeful. He responds immediately, carefully bringing his hand up to caress your cheek and hold you to him. This kiss is everything that your first one should have been, and you pull away reluctantly despite yourself. 

“You have a lot of making up to do,” you say with a smile. Nuada smiles back, his entire face lighting up with joy. 

“I will make you my queen,” he vows. “You will never want for anything from this day forward.” 

You can’t help the laugh that escapes at how serious he’s being, reaching forward to intertwine your fingers with his.

“Let’s maybe start with dinner, hm?”

[hobiebrownismygod]

OC/Spider-Sona Backstory: The Widow

Maitreyi Jokhar (she/her), Earth-20262, Present day, Spider-man/Black Widow variant

Part 1!

I'm planning on making this a series instead of one extremely long post, so her entire backstory up to her introduction to the Spider Society is probably going to be around two to three parts depending on how in-depth I decide to make it! Let me know if you have any feedback on my writing style or how I can make her as accurate as possible <3

Backstory & Powers:

Born in Andrapradesh, South India, she was kidnapped from her family at the age of 5 years old and never saw them again. Forced into a human-trafficking scheme, she was eventually taken into the Red Room program, better known as the Black Widow program, the same program that the MCU Black Widow was a part of before working for S.H.I.E.L.D. In this universe, the Red Room Program is an extension of H.Y.D.R.A., a Russian spy organization. From the ages of 7-14, she was trained alongside hundreds of other child soldiers to fight, kill and engage in acts of espionage and sabotage, eventually to join the army of mind-controlled Black Widows the Red Room program produced.

When she turned 15, she, along with 9 other young teenage girls, were chosen for H.Y.D.R.A's new adaptation program, where they experimented on some of their best soldiers/recruits to create a new kind of Super-soldier, after their hundreds of failed attempts to replicate the same serum used on Red Skull during WWII. Each girl experienced a different experiment, some being injected with powerful steroids, others having their DNA spliced and combined with others, etc... Understandably, none of these experiments worked. Except for one.

Maitreyi was placed into a leather chair and strapped down, quickly being injected with multiple paralyzers before being told to close her eyes and relax her arm. Doctor Hans Zola, grandson of Doctor Arnim Zola (Arnim Zola worked for the Nazis during WWII, which could be seen in the first Captain America movie), proceeded to inject her with a serum derived from the venom of a radioactive black widow spider, whom's DNA he had spent months perfecting to be able to link to hers accurately. 24 hours later, the process was completed and H.Y.D.R.A. had successfully created a super-soldier. However, this super-soldier wasn't the same kind as what they'd made during WWII with Red Skull.

Maitreyi did receive similar, but not the same abilities as the average Spider-person. She was unable to produce enough web for the daily, so she would use it limitedly, and only if completely necessary. She was flexible, fast and even acrobatic, as a result of years of Red Room training, but she did not gain the abilities of super-strength. She had to hone her strength herself after assimilating to the injection, through more time being trained by H.Y.D.R.A.'s best agents, specifically employed to morph Maitreyi into a super-weapon. One ability which was extremely beneficial for her future endeavors was her newfound intelligence and instincts. After being injected, she was able to better respond to threats, through enhanced reflexes (Spider-sense) and found that her problem-solving skills, especially those mechanical related (robots, machines, gizmos, etc...) were also amplified.

Only a few weeks later, she met Alexander Pierce. The man who took over Hydra after Red Skull's death. The man who's idea it was to turn her into a weapon. The man who was going to use her brainwashed, inhuman self to murder his own enemies until she was either captured or dead.

The missions started off small. Assassinating political leaders of minuscule movements in insignificant cities and towns. Kidnapping the children of runaway H.Y.D.R.A agents, destroying their lives, sparking fear into the hearts of the organization's enemies and even their allies. It wasn't until a few months later that Pierce sent her to the United States. He didn't disclose why she was going there. The only thing she had been given was a picture of an older man with an eye patch who Pierce claimed had something that "belonged to him." He told her that her job was to kill him. Not having a choice, not knowing that there was any other option besides compliance, she obliged. She wasn't even 16 years old.

____________________________________________________________

A/N

Guys idk if any of this makes sense but I'm trying to create a storyline for her so its not like I just threw a random spider-person into the ATSV fandom and started shipping her with characters 😭. I want her to have her own backstory and reasons for her personality and stuff yk

taglist:

@mollyollypuddingpolly

@s6onder

[loopy777]

I apologize if you've answered this question before, but what are your general opinions on Faith Erin Hicks's writing vs. Gene Yang's for the Avatar Comics? Hick's seems to be significantly more faithful to the characters from my perspective, but I've only read a couple of her works(Suki Alone and Azula in the Spirit Temple). On the other hand, I'm not blown away with ideas behind these comics, with Suki Alone particularly failing to do anything remotely interesting with Suki's character.

You know, I don't think I've ever posted anything on Hicks's comics in general. I've 'reviewed' individual comics of hers, but never spoke on her overall level of writing, characterization, and/or style.

Basically, I think her work is infinitely superior to Gene Yang's in every way while never quite hitting a home run.

What's become an outlier to her overall body of Avatar work is the first thing she got to write for the franchise (although she'd previously drawn a short story that Yang wrote), the Imbalance trilogy. I think she absolutely nailed the characterization of the gAang, created intriguing original characters, wrote dialogue that sounds like something human beings would say while also capturing individual character voices, and successfully depicted a world that has progressed beyond the cartoon's finale. I also think it's the only thing in the franchise that successfully engages with the idea of Aang's ability to take away bending.

But that story was also hobbled by being an explicit prequel to LoK, saddled with that nonsensical Bender Vs NonBender conflict. Hicks did a fair job trying to explain it and manifest it, but it's still mostly nonsense if you stop and think about it for a second. We also have an eye-rolling moment where Toph discovers how great it is to fight with metal cables, but at least it's a quick moment that wouldn't have stuck out if the narrative hadn't stopped to call it out.

I also think the final act of the comic was a bit of a fizzle. I can't say anything is really wrong with it, and it doesn't try to resolve things by claiming all the problems are solved forever, but it still feels like it doesn't quite live up to the questions and conflicts it raises in the first two parts and ultimately ends in a non-surprising way. It's not bad, just a bit underwhelming. I never got around to reading the final part of Hicks's Nameless City trilogy, so I don't know if that's common for her. But, you know, it's far from the worst thing in the world to be a storyteller whose worst trait are endings that merely satisfy instead of wow.

Unfortunately, this is around the time the franchise decided that new cartoons are back on the menu and Avatar Studios is a thing, so all of Hicks's other work has been hit hard by the company mandate that Absolutely Nothing Matters Unless It Is Animated. So I can quickly zoom through the rest of her oeuvre with a + and - for each:

Katara and the Pirate's Silver + A cute little adventure that nails Katara's character. - There's not enough material here for the full pagecount, so a separate and very stupid subplot with the rest of the gAang is thrown in to absolutely no consequence.

Toph Beifong's Metalbending Academy + There are some amusing gags here. - This is hit hard by the one-two punch of being saddled with a lot of characters created by Gene Yang and also dealing with lore created by LoK.

Suki, Alone + A great little character study of Suki. - Utterly pointless and even goes out of its way to provide absolutely no confirmed details about Suki's family.

Azula in the Spirit Temple + Exactly the story Azula needs at this phase in her arc with delightfully solid characterization. - So open-ended that the next Azula story can easily ruin her character again, thus it feels more like we're poised to take the next step rather than actually taking it.

When all we're getting is stuff designed to be as inconsequential as possible, not matter how well-characterized, it's hard for the stories to feel like they have an impact. Now, I'm not saying I'm against the concept of 'filler,' as they can be great episodes, but the problem is that these comics are dealing with characters whose arcs have already been fully detailed for us, the audience, and we've already seen the characters' best stories. We're treading ground that's already been covered, and it takes a very clever storyteller to really wow with that kind of setup. Hicks, while a good storyteller who gets the characters and franchise, has never shown (at least in what I've read of hers) that snappy kind of cleverness.

Ironically, Gene Yang has -- consistently -- in his original graphics novels that I've read. But he really did not bring it to his Avatar stuff.

So, overall, I like Hicks, and while her comics don't excite me in the way the novels do, I'm so traumatized by Gene Yang that I relish getting stories about the gAang with good dialogue and no stupidity like expecting me to believe that the Rough Rhinos pose a threat to post-finale Aang.

[mara-xx217]

A Brief Overview of Fear & Hunger

I made an earlier post about it here but I wanted to put it out in a long form just in case it would be easier to view.

I'll touch on the game's over all aspects and what it's about in this post.

If anyone is interested in hearing more about this game (or its sequel) feel free to let me know and I can go into greater depth!

FEAR & HUNGER

I love this game enough that I wanted to talk about it and show it off. As much as I do love it, I know full well that this is definitely not a game for most people. It’s unkind and unforgiving to beginners- even to veteran players- and it has a LOT of themes that center around things of a SENSITIVE and UNCOMFORTABLE nature. The content warnings in the opening screen isn’t simply for show and should be taken very seriously. With this in mind, I’ll be giving a basic look into the game so people that are curious about it, wanting to play it, or uncertain that it’s something they would be interested in will get a better feel for the game. That being said, as someone that has sunk a good amount of time into this game, I’ll say this:

It’s the meanest goddamn game I’ve ever played and I absolutely love the pain.

Warnings

There’s plain warnings for *extreme* violence, gore, sexual violence and drug use. They AREN’T kidding! I write horror erotica for a living. I’ve written some crazy shit in my time, and even I was left taken aback and surprised/shocked at some of the things that happened in the game. It doesn’t sugar coat anything and there’s definitely no room for weakness in the dungeon of Fear & Hunger, so take these warnings to heart. If you need some brief examples so you don’t waste your time:

First enemy in the game has a stinger dick and yes- he WILL use it for its intended purpose. 

Human sacrifice is okay!

Cannibalism is okay!

Blood orgies are a thing and it’s probably exactly what you’re expecting.

Child abuse! 

Pocket Cat (ew)

And one of my favorites (/s)- genital mutilation!

All of these are (pretty much) graphically displayed and not censored, so if anything of this is a major hard ew fuck NO for you, it’s definitely not a game for you. Which is fine, cause damn this game is fucking mean, as I stated before. But if you are still interested (or curious) then we’ll get into the very basics of what the game is, the playable characters, and the general feel for what an average (not Hardmode) run would look like. 

Playable Characters 

There are a total of four playable characters in the game, all of which act as a sort of separate “class” system, if you will. They all have their own abilities but every single teachable skill can be learned by any of the characters… IF the correct requirements are met. There’s lots of small, specific details when dealing with creating the character you want to play as (both as you start the game in the “backgrounds” section and in the game, itself, as you progress) but I just want to give a feel for exactly what they have to offer instead of the little things that will complicate things unnecessarily. For the moment, we’ll just see what (or who) we can play as in Fear & Hunger. 

Mercenary (Cahara) 

First of the four listed. He is the “rogue/thief” class, if you will. I highly recommend him for beginning players, as his perks are some of the most useful early on that remain relevant throughout the entire game. He can use any weapon type or any armour kind.

The Mercenary’s perks are as follows: Lockpick, Steal, Escape Plan, En Garde and Dash.

Lockpick: Exactly what it advertises- you can pick *MOST locks in the game (if it requires a Small Key, it can be picked, however some doors are “locked from the other side” and thus cannot be picked.)

Steal: Again, you get what you see. This is a skill you use in combat, which can award you with some pretty decent loot at the cost of a precious turn. 

Escape Plan: Pretty much as it states, it gives you a far greater chance of successfully running from/escaping a battle. Extremely useful, as you will be doing this… A LOT, regardless of how well equipped you are throughout the entire game. 

En Garde: Hold the skill button (SHIFT on keyboard) before an encounter gives you an extra move in battle. An excellent skill, as the only other way to get such an opportunity is through item/accessory/in battle skill usage. 

Dash: A special one, as this is something ALL characters are capable of starting with, as long as you choose the right options when creating a backstory for your character. Another perk I recommend for ANY player, regardless of their familiarity with the game. It’s something I, personally, cannot play with because you outrun most enemies with this bad boy in your arsenal. 

Decent starting equipment: a scimitar that does slash damage (great for early enemies) and a leather vest with okay defense.

Knight (D’arce Cataliss) 

Second of the four listed. She is the “warrior/knight” class, if you can believe it. She’s definitely a lot harder than the Mercenary in terms of not having a lot of perks to access different areas/items, but she makes up for this in her starting kit. She can equip any armour and wield any weapon.

The Knight’s perks are: Fast Attack, Defense Stance, Leg Sweep, Counter and Dash. Important to note: the ONLY perks you can choose for the Knight in the beginning are Fast Attack, Defense Stance or Dash. Leg Sweep and/or Counter can only be learned through special means in game, which I’ll explain when I go into depth about the Knight.

Fast Attack: Skill used in battle. Make enemy attacks more likely to miss and you gain an extra turn. Very good and likely a skill that would get you out of a bind if you have no choice but to fight.

Defense Stance: Skill used in battle. Prevents critical damage and greatly reduces the melee hit rate of enemies. It uses a valuable turn but the boons you receive will likely outweigh the risks of missing a damaging turn. 

Leg Sweep: There is a surprising use for this skill that you probably wouldn’t expect. (I sure didn’t.) It’s a skill used in battle that targets the legs that does damage. Obvious, right? Well… if you initiate a “fight” with a wooden door (just hear me out) it will break down the door. I don’t know what else to say other than it’s super useful but could be inconvenient to come by.

Counter: This is an unusual one. It’s a skill used in battle that causes your character to “brace for oncoming damage”, or guard (the in game option of a similar functionality), only with this skill, if any damage is inflicted on the character, a portion is directed back to the enemy. Definitely has its uses, though highly situational and likely something you would use if D’arce was a party member rather than the player character.

Something that makes the Knight highly attractive is her potential starting gear. She can start with either: Iron Spear (two handed), Iron Cuirass (very good defense), and Arm Guards (protects against limb loss), or Long Sword (good attack), Eagle Crest Shield (good defense), Plate Mail (excellent defense) and Leg Guards (protects against limb loss), all of which are EXCELLENT throughout the entirety of the game!

Dark Priest (Enki Ankarian) 

Third of the four listed. He’s the “mage/dark mage” class and pretty much a glass canon (a character with low health but has the potential for high damage output). Pretty tricky for first time players, as you need a pretty decent understanding of how magic works in the game as well as how to LEARN new spells.

The Dark Priest’s perks are: Counter Magic, Greater Blood Magic, Blood Sacrifice Pray, Necromancy, Mastery Over Insects, Pyromancy Trick, and Dash. 

It’s important to remember that perks are determined by the character’s backstory, though all can be learned later. The Dark Priest is especially tricky, as all of his skills rely on the Gods, which I will get into at a later time. 

Counter Magic: A skill that can be used both inside and out of combat. It improves resistances to different magic forms or even cancels some types out completely.

Greater Blood Magic: Increases the potential of all spells. It requires a greater in depth look, but think of every spell you learn getting an upgrade.

Blood Sacrifice: Remember when I said human sacrifice is okay? Yeah, there 

you go. Kill some unwitting bastard in a special place for a pat on the back by a specific God. 

Pray: This is something ALL characters can do immediately in game. It is done in specific places and increases affinity with a chosen God. 

Necromancy: Used to raise the dead. But only specific kinds of dead things. Cross your fingers and pray to Gro-Goroth. 

Mastery Over Insects: A passive ability that has a surprising amount of uses. You can talk to bugs. Yay! They give you hints and you can talk your way out of a few different scenarios…

Pyromancy Trick: Used in combat. Set someone on fire. Do it. You know you want to. 

Dark Priest has a lot of great potential, but he is weak physically. He has a low health pool and is unable to wield heavy armours or weapons. Again makes up for this with his magic abilities right at the beginning, but he’s tricky to plan out. Not great for beginners. 

Outlander (Ragnvaldr) 

Fourth of the four playable characters. He’s a sort of “ranger/tank” class. The Outlander has an interesting set of perks and possible starting equipment, making him close to the Knight in his usefulness. 

His perks are: Devour, Bloodlust, Marksmanship, and Warcry. 

Devour: Pretty much what you think. You can eat dead enemies. Well… some of them. Sometimes it’s not always a good idea…

Bloodlust: Used in combat. Your attack is increased but you no longer control when or how you attack. More useful if you have party members. 

Marksmanship: Passive that gives you the ability to shoot targets OUTSIDE of combat! Extremely useful, as it can save you a lot of heartache and stress if you’re unable to sneak around an enemy. Requires bow and arrows (duh). Activate on overworld with SHIFT.

Warcry: Used in combat. It directs all enemy attention onto you, giving your other party members a break and a chance to deal good damage. Dangerous to have all that attention on one character but has great use if your build supports this skill.

For his Marksmanship perk alone, the Outlander could be a good choice for a beginner. Some of his other perks require some set up and likely other party members, but it’s likely you would find at least one or two along the way in your trek through the dungeon of Fear & Hunger. 

It’s difficult to say which of the four would be the BEST for someone ill acquainted with the game, but my personal choice is the Mercenary. His perks are some of the best in the entire game and can make the experience much less painless given your expanded ability to access different items and areas. The Knight and Outlander are tied, depending on what kind of play style you prefer. The Dark Priest, though, is the hardest one to play for, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s mostly up to personal preference, though, as either way you’re probably gonna get fucked in the ass. (Metaphorically and literally speaking.)

Basic Hazards/Mechanics

There’s a lot of different moving parts in this game, but here’s a few basic ones you’ll be contending with throughout the entirety of the game:

Sanity

You’ll be immediately notified of this upon first entering the dungeon. Steadily over time, the player character and all party members will have their Mind drain when either in the dark or seeing things that are upsetting to them. Mind is what is used when either practicing magic or using character perks. There are different stages of fear, usually announced with some flavour text at the bottom of the screen describing what your character is feeling at the moment. The higher their fear, the less their attack rating will be and the more damage they will receive. It will also be clear on the Status Screen when the menu is brought up. If it gets low enough, it’s Game Over. The best way to restore it is through the use of Spirits, though you can also use a Pipe to smoke various… things. You can also restore it through less than conventional means, but a girl will never kiss and tell. And if your Sanity gets low enough… you can access a special “skill”, which could come in handy in some very, very special circumstances…

Hunger

This is the second thing you will be notified of when entering the dungeon for the first time. Like Sanity, it drains over time. Hunger has different stages, announced with some flavour text at the bottom of the screen, and will affect a character’s base health until treated. At the highest levels of Hunger, a character will be unable to walk and thus can only crawl. Feeding them will rectify this but the effects will linger for several minutes. When Hunger reaches zero, it’s Game Over. There are a variety of food things in game that can solve this status and even a perk dedicated to providing you with an easy food source… if you have the stomach for it. 

Enemies

There are a lot of enemies in the game. A lot… All of them can and WILL kill you in a manner of terrible ways, so be wary when thinking of initiating combat. Running away is always an option… though not always do you succeed. Most enemies don’t have to be engaged at all to make progress, so keep this in mind as you go deeper into the dungeon. A lot of the enemies are of an… upsetting nature as well, so be aware of that. You will see dick, tiddies and vagine, so yeah-

Traps

They are everywhere and nowhere where you expect to see them. You can:

Fall through the floor

Step on a pressure plate (and take an arrow to the knee)

Get sniped from a distance

And one of my favorites (/sss) stepping on a fucking rusty NAIL-

Watch where you are going for the sake of your tootsies. You can get some nasty status effects that will kill you if you don’t deal with them over a certain amount of time.

Status Effects

There are many status effects in this game, many that are situational and rare and some that are fairly common. A few that you will encounter often are: 

Bleed: Some weapons/attacks leave it behind. Can be healed with a Cloth Fragment.

Infection: A game ending effect that is all too common. Caused by certain enemy attacks or by the dreaded rusty nail. Can be healed by using a Green Herb.

Parasitic Worms: Yeah, that’s disgusting. Can be caused by some enemies or by eating Rotten Meat. Cured by drinking Worm Juice. (Sounds absolutely terrible but it is a cure not a cause.)

Poison: Some enemies can cause it or can be contracted by eating something you had no business putting into your mouth. Cured by using a White Vial or a Mix of Green and Red Herbs.

And this is only a few of the common ones. There are many more and some that are… just awful if I’m honest. They will be discussed more later.

What are you even doing in the dungeon of Fear & Hunger?

Every character has different reasons as to why they began their journey to the greatest shithole of Rondon, but they are all united under one, singular, unifying factor: Le’garde. He’s at the center of each character’s goal and it’s clear he’s meant for a greater purpose. What that purpose is, however, would be revealed as you uncover the secrets of Fear & Hunger. 

There are several different endings to the game, from one you can get right at the start of the game to ones that require a lot of planning and specific in game sequences to ones only accessible through specific difficulty modes. Most don’t end as you would expect them too and pretty much all of them end in some amount of tragedy or long standing dread. There aren’t many happy endings to be had here…

Depending on your knowledge of the game, it can take you hours to figure out what you’re doing or where you're going… Or it can take minutes if you are in the know. It also depends on if you are in the RNG (random number generator) gods’ good graces that day or not, because a BIG part of this game is… a coin toss! We’ll get into that more later, but know that one bad roll can doom your run, which is… fun. (/s) 

I recommend going into this game completely blind and see what you can figure out on your own. There’s a lot of little details hidden around that can help you on your journey and it makes the experience very enjoyable (in a sort of twisted, morbid curiosity and masochistic way) and it’s how the game is meant to be experienced at least on a first time basis. 

Death is common and you will die. A lot. There’s no shortage of ways you can die, many containing neat little animations (or traumatizing, depending on your definition) that are unique to various different coin toss “failures”. And sometimes, if you’re lucky (or not, again depending on your definition), a certain “Game Over” would simply be a change of scenery… and other things, but that’s only some of the time…

Wrap Up 

There is so much to cover in this game that it would take many different sections to do so. Different skills, different Gods to worship, different NPCs to interact with and different equipment options plus many, many different secrets you likely wouldn’t know unless you’ve been around in the fandom for some time… It’s got a great world that has been built upon a strong foundation and there is a metric fuck load of lore if you’re willing to slow down and enjoy the environment around you. If it’s not something you’d play, I highly recommend looking into it regardless. 

There is also a second game that further builds on the in game universe and I am thoroughly impressed with it. Both games are something I recommend lovingly with full knowledge that this game will cause pain and suffering to those that would dare to play it. I would like to go even further into detail about both these games because there is just so much to talk about and gush over and to bitch about. 

I really hope that this little rant piqued some interest in the games. Truly, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever played before and I can’t state enough how hard I fell in love with them.

@prettycutebunny, @infinitewhore, @kennbb, @slutwithadegree, @dead-bxxxtch-walking, @space-arsonist, @pink-soft-shadow, @sinlessdesire, @hoemine, @memoryofheather

[gust-jar-simulator]

Okay time for unhinged crossover logic.

There are two Links I like to subject to vampire drama: Four (I really need to invent a tag for those rambles) and Wild. To sum up the way I write them fast and dirty, the methods are as follows:

Four: In Four Swords Adventures, the split Links explode into force gems (crystallized life that is also money) when they die, and in either that game or Four Swords can be resurrected by sacrificing force gems. In addition, the Four Sword itself feeds on/must be powered up by force gems. Therefore, considering how closely tied his existence is to the sword by this point, Four must feed it (and by extension himself) life force or suffer consequences. He can improvise to a limited extent by feeding on elemental magic, or living blood, but none of it is as efficient as force gems.

Wild: After being killed by magic lasers that may or may not have been able to infect his body with Malice like a horrible STD, his brain got completely rewired by Sheikah tech. An argument could be made that he's a cyborg on some level, the Shrine of Resurrection flooding his veins with nanobots or any other sci fi method of keeping a corpse breathing. As such, like other forms of Sheikah tech, he is vulnerable to infection by Malice and the call of the Blood Moon, and might be able to literally cannibalize Guardians to repair himself as well as drain energy from shrines and towers.

(Also as a side note, considering the horrors of teleportation tech, the Sheikah database has likely memorized what makes Wild and how he was put together, and could theoretically generate another one of him if he dies again.)

Where am I inputting my crossover logic?

I've been sitting here for the past hour thinking about the concept of diablerie from Vampire: The Masquerade. To distill it to the essentials, diablerie is the act of a vampire drinking another vampire's blood to the point of final death, consuming even the soul. This has advantages in that you obtain their power level and abilities. A major disadvantage, however, involves the "consuming the soul" bit- if you're not strong enough, the vampire you ate could overwhelm your consciousness. Uno reverse is a bitch.

Diablerie also happens to be addicting, because getting a little sippy of life force is nothing compared to the pleasure of completely consuming a soul.

I started my idea of vampire!Wild with a singular image in my head: Wild's face and arms smeared with bluish fluids, sucking on a broken hose yanked from the undercarriage of an upturned guardian.

The thing is, most every guardian in the game has been infected by Malice. Wild is absolutely the type to investigate new things via biting and ask questions later, and he can successfully eat monster parts (as well as monster essence) without many complications. We've all tried to cook guardian parts into an elixir at least once. But I can't help wondering if it's like the difference between mineral iron and organic iron- chewing on metal won't give a human any nutrition, but we can get the iron we need from meat. Maybe Wild's augmentations can filter out the consequences of eating raw hinox liver, but they might be vulnerable to Malice that has adapted to the shape of a magitech electronic virus.

I love the idea of his normal instincts (food heals) getting influenced by magitech input (cannibalize broken tech), and it's not like he has commendable impulse control that would second-guess the urge to drink robot coolant. Stuck in the middle of Hyrule Field with the last of his kebabs gone, why not try it?

Have you ever been so thirsty that you go for a sip and then start chugging because the water feels much better going down than you expected, jaws practically latching onto it like a stubborn wolf?

I keep thinking about it. I keep thinking about the idea that if Wild feeds on guardians to fuel his own internal systems, he's insanely vulnerable. And if he goes too far, is the infection something that would burn out? Would he just have his own private Blood Moon event, ripping through the countryside until he finally blacked out, or would the virus puppet him past the point of consciousness? I don't think the Sheikah really understood the concept of firewalls or antiviruses. Why would they need any?

Four, by contrast, is less vulnerable to any kind of corruption (barring, perhaps, dark magic) but much more vulnerable to the pitfalls of being a well-adjusted civilized human faced with the urge to devour life energy. Starving even though he's eaten a three course meal. Thirsty even though he's drank an entire bucket, or tried to. The human body doesn't have the signals necessary to covey your sword is starved for energy, wires are bound to cross in confusing and ugly ways. Headaches, weird cramps, until finally the sword he reshaped starts altering him in turn.

Hylians eat with their mouths and kill with their hands. A sword eats and kills with the same organ, but the base instinct of magic could get the point across well enough. If he won't eat by stabbing, maybe he'll eat if the magic makes his Hylian body more effective- steel claws and steel fangs, the better to gut monsters with. Or people. It's not like the sword has preferences, it just has hunger. Symbiosis is a two way street: Four made the sword, infused it, empowered it. The sword, in turn, broke him down and remade him. They're the same creature with the same needs, now. He just needs to realize it before the hunger gets out of control.

The thing is, he's used to fighting dark magic. Depending on your take, and if you utilize the manga, he could find a lot of comfort in the presence of dark magic. If they suspect they're becoming some kind of demon, or infected with some demon urge, Shadow would be their first thought. If they were to confide in anyone about dark urges, who better than the demon who asked them to indulge those in the first place? They miss him. He'd comfort them. He'd soothe whatever burning need this is.

If you don't want to use the manga, dark magic is still a comfort in that it's a preferred target, uncomplicated and simple. You don't have to worry about the morality of attacking a creature made of shadow. It's fine. It's quite possibly the only fine target to have.

Whenever I think about the possibility of vampire!Four losing control, I come down to two options. He's an extremely controlled person by necessity, considering the state of his brain. He thinks twice about literally everything he does. It would take quite a lot of pressure for him to drop that control, past the point of manageable and straight into "you cannot afford to be afraid to injure him, because he's Ruthless and Not Listening". With Wild, preferred prey would be Sheikah tech followed up by whatever the Malice wants dead. With Four?

He's going to find the nearest source of dark magic and bite the fuck out of it, either because Shadow is safety Shadow can fix this, or it's okay to rip and tear a thing this dark, I can let go and be a monster to a thing like this.

In other words, Twilight is in danger. Dark is also in danger, he's just not typically close enough to bite.

I'll come back to this at some point, but I wanted it out here.

[angelsandarsenic]

Not about a current story but you should share a draft you like/abandoned story

YAY ok ok!

Remember the necromancy au??? This one

I started writing a whole story for it and was going to be three whole books, centered around Tommy and Phil. (I'll add what I have in my drafts in the reblog of this)

First off, some world building: the supernatural like the undead and necromancers as well as creatures like unicorns, fae, some witchcraft and spells, wards etc., but it's all pretty hidden/rare to come across, and a lot of it depends on how much you believe (not that that stops them from existing). The government has a Supernatural Police Force that enforces supernatural law, but also, specifically hunts down necromancers and anything related to the undead. Highly illegal. Anything in that category--necromancers especially--are considered taboo, subversions of nature and incredibly dangerous. Unfortunately, necromancy is an ability you're born with, it doesn't work well to try and force it. Anyway, the world is about 60/40 split for belief, of course with tons of people on an "unsure" scale in between.

Tommy is in denial.

After the death of his mother, he's just gotten settled in a new town and is simply doing his best as an 18 year old all on his own. A lot of people have a hard time believing that his last name is actually "Innit", not to mention he doesn't have a driver's licence or much work history, but Puffy and Niki make sure he gets a good job in their shop. Unfortunately, he unwittingly closes up one night without the wards in place on the shop and some...visitors get in. It's not his fault, Tommy never learned anything about this supernatural crap, but now Puffy is calling "exterminators" and whispers of ghost sightings and necromancers on the run are going around. Blonde haired, blue eyed necromancers, supposedly from Tommy's home town.

Tommy panics, but in self fulfilling prophecy, he only acts more suspicious and finds himself literally running from the SPF, when he meets Philza and realizes that this is the necromancer they're looking for.

Philza wants absolutely nothing to do with this; the last thing he needs is a kid. Things were going well in this town, he doesn't understand what suddenly went wrong! Now he has to leave again, but whatever, that's routine by now. Thankfully, Tommy seems just as eager to stay away from him as Phil is and he escapes successfully.

...until Tommy somehow ends up backed into a corner with him once again, in the new town, and he can't just leave a kid to fend for himself against the SPF, so they make a temporary truce.

From there it's not hard for Phil to figure out that Tommy is a necromancer, he isn't exactly great at hiding it. Those powers are dangerous left unchecked, so Phil can't just not teach him. It's only until he's good enough to go off on his own, Phil promises himself. Even if Tommy is weirdly endearing, despite getting into trouble and bringing home a random stranger who, thank the gods, doesn't seem phased by death magic. Even if he rather painfully reminds Phil of the kid he left behind all those years ago.

Necromancy adventures ensue; found family with an ancient undead warrior, Some Guy, and a couple ghostly other friends. At last, it all comes to a head when their backstories collide, the long-lost father-son realization it's been skirting around for some time is officially revealed and once again, the SPF are hot on their tails and Phil can't let go this time.

But yeah, that never got very far. I still adore it, I just know I'm never gonna finish it. Thank you so much for asking! I love sharing my drafts and abandoned stories. If you want to hear more, I made the Library of Alexandria (Angel's lost/unfinished works) on Ao3 for everything that I couldn't bear to let collect dust in my drafts ☆

[starrbar]

Okay so Yin Yang Yo! was my absolute FAVORITE fucking show when I was a young kid, like I dunno, 10 to 13 years old. I recently revisited the show and well, I've outgrown the writing QUITE a bit. I'm in my late twenties now. But it's still very nostalgic to me, and I figured hey, I got a few light-hearted ideas, so I'll scribble em down and post em somewhere.

One of my favorite characters from YYY was Yuck because he was cute and scruffy. I like scruffy. And I probably enjoyed his voice acting too.

Anyway, I spat out some ideas for how I might rewrite the episode "Yin Yang Yuck" for a fanfic or something, but I'm too busy to write a whole fanfic, so here's the raw juices.

So first, I don't like how flippant the beginning is. Yin and Yang fight daily, and often physically, so it seems silly that this one time only, they would create life. What's a specific thing Yin and Yang would do in this fight that's different from others?

Let's say they've both been learning a new move that's high level. Master Yo taught them the basics, but neither of them can successfully use it. Hell, Woo Foo Aura might be good for this? Putting aside Aura Or Not cause I'm just having fun here.

Yin has a partial grasp on the idea of it because she'll happily express love and passion, but Yang is too embarrassed to express himself and he tries not to feel those vulnerable emotions. So let's say Yin gets REALLY pissed at Yang one day (hopefully over something much less dumb than what started their fight in canon) and she gives in to using her anger for her aura instead, and Yang does the same, even though his anger is normally performative and light-hearted. The two of them genuinely set out to hurt each other in some way, which is what flares up their worst traits—traits they're directly channeling into physical Woo Foo energy.

Their auras reject them because of their misuse of their emotions to fuel the power, and instead they clash and combine. The sheer power creates a new being made of both of their worst qualities, topped off with hatred for each of those qualities and their good ones as well, because well, they were feeling some level of hatred for each other in those moments.

He calls himself Yuck because he is full of self-loathing and awful contradictions, and because the parts of Yin and Yang that love one another despite their differences did not get transferred to him. Yin and Yang are left without the ability to feel any negative hateful emotions. Maybe sadness? But not anger. Not the desire to harm.

I also just realized that yeah, I'd make Yuck nonbinary because he was made from a boy and girl who perform their genders in such AGGRESSIVELY normative ways, but I could buy that he uses he/him because nobody in this family knows what nonbinary is and Yuck isn't really concerned with it, but he still finds that he's completely being perceived either way. He doesn't care about his pronouns, etc.

He's also not really in a position to figure out what identity makes him feel right? Because again, he's just made out of awful traits. He's ashamed of ALL his interests and all his circumstances (and Yin and Yang's circumstances), so he lashes out any time someone tries to be nice and understanding towards him. He's disgusted by Yin and Yang's sugary sweet kindness. He's driven to violent rage when someone so much as steps in his way. He snaps at people when they seem to "have a tone" or look at him grumpily or don't respond to him quickly enough. He perceives every action someone takes in the worst possible light. He's miserable.

Master Yo is alarmed at what Yin and Yang did, and especially that it resulted in a new living person being made. He decides that it would be the most humane to split him back up and send his traits back to the twins, because they're incomplete without being able to work through them naturally, and Yuck is a being created purely to hate and hurt. However, Yuck doesn't want to die, of course. So he attacks.

Master Yo can easily kick his ass tbh. There's no reason little level 2 Yuck should be able to beat a Woo Foo master. But maybe Yuck has hostages. He doesn't attack Master Yo directly, he keeps him away by threatening others. Yin and Yang have to come up behind him and try to take him by surprise, and then they have to "kill" him to his face when their surprise attack fails. It pains them both to do this, but they have to be whole again.

After the fight, they're back to their normal selves and Yuck is gone, and they still feel like they just did something cruel....

[sanemistar]

acts of service | giyuu tomioka

genre: fluff, domestic bf!giyuu x hashira fem!reader

wc: 667

warnings: maybe a little too much fluff

note: this was a quick thought that i had and decided to write during my soft for giyuu moments so pls enjoy !!

synopsis: your boyfriend had arranged a self-care day for you after coming back from a tough mission fighting an upper moon demon.

likes and reblogs are always appreciated

giyuu loved taking care of you, especially when you came back from long missions. he had waited for you in your estate so he could be the first one to see you. once you came back, he greeted you lovingly as he placed a soft kiss on your forehead before you went to your room and changed your clothes into something more comfortable. once you were done with that you threw yourself on the couch and sighed heavily, your body feeling tense and sore from fighting.

“had another tough fight?” giyuu asked you in a concerned tone. you were one of the strongest hashira members, so obviously he had confidence in your abilities, but from time to time he couldn’t help himself but worry about your safety when he wasn’t accompanying you.

“yeah.” you faintly said, and that was the only word that managed to escape your lips. you were too exhausted to think of anything else to add afterwards.

the upper moon demon you fought wasn’t an easy one to defeat and giyuu knew how tough that mission in particular was, so he wanted to make his beloved girlfriend feel pampered for the day.

“i prepared a self-care day for you today as a reward for successfully completing your mission.” he announced proudly, and at times like that you were extremely grateful to have giyuu as your boyfriend. his acts of service towards you were nothing but top notch, he never failed to make you feel loved and cared for, not even once. he gave you a gentle head pat and left you on the couch still before heading to the kitchen.

the first thing on the list was preparing the dinner for you. he cooked you your favorite food (had to ask mitsuri for the recipe first) and since it was his first time cooking something, he was feeling a bit anxious. but then relaxed when you praised him for the delicious meal, signaling your approval of it.

“that was delicious. thanks, love.” you pressed a soft kiss on his cheek and he flushed momentarily at the endearing nickname that left your sweet lips. your tiniest acts of affection always manage to catch him off guard and make him fall head over heels for you all over again.

up next was giving you a nice massage to help relax your tensed muscles. he sat down on the couch and guided you to sit in between his legs as you let his hands do their magic. you felt your body relax instantly under giyuu’s touch, and all the tiredness that wore you out had left your body.

he lifted you up and carried you in his muscular arms to your shared bedroom—that you prepared for the two of you in your estate—and placed you gently on the bed before laying down next to you. your faces were inches apart, which allowed you to have a closer look at your boyfriend’s handsome face that you dearly missed. he wrapped an arm around your waist tightly, his fingertips sensationally exploring all your beautiful curves, while his other free arm softly caressed your hair. you let yourself melt into his touch as you wrapped both arms around giyuu’s torso, pulling him closer as you rested your head on top of his chest. feeling his scent hugging your nostrils and his steady heartbeat that felt like a melody against your ear, bringing a familiar sense of comfort and calmness into your heart.

“i love you, y/n. thank you for coming back to me safely.” he hummed softly as he placed a trail of loving kisses on the top of your head.

“i love you too, giyuu.” you replied back as you held him tighter.

intimate moments like this with the man you loved more than anyone else, even more than yourself, that made you feel so happy as if you were on cloud nine, in the small beautiful world that both you and giyuu created just for the two of you.

[centerforhci]

Learn This Efficient Model for Building High Performing Teams

No matter what industry you work in, productive and efficient teams are a must for success. Yet it’s not always easy to create and maintain a well-oiled team. That’s why I love the Drexler-Sibbet Team Performance Model—it provides a simple, step-by-step framework for understanding team development.

If you didn’t read my first post on the Drexler-Sibbet (DS) model, start here. There are seven steps in the framework; this post covers steps four through seven. You can also learn how the DS model can be used as a diagnostic tool, and as a way to build teams from scratch. Trust me, you don’t want to miss it.

Basic Structure of the DS Model

For a quick review, here are the seven sequential steps of the DS model:

Orientation

Trust Building

Goal Clarification

Commitment

Implementation

High Performance

Renewal

Each step has:

A question in the circle, which is the question someone on the team is likely to ask.

Resolved and Unresolved Traits on either side of the circle. If the resolved traits are demonstrated by the team, then the team can move to the next step. If the unresolved traits are demonstrated, it’s not yet time to move to the next step.

Arrows that point to other steps. If a team is facing challenges on a certain step, the arrows will tell the team which step to move to. For example, if a team is challenged on step 4, they would go back to step 3. However, if a team is challenged on step 5, they would go back to step 3, because the arrow from step 5 points to step 3.

Today, we will be looking specifically at steps four (commitment) to seven (renewal). This will round out your understanding of the DS model and enable you to successfully put it into effect for your new or existing teams.

The following graphic can be used for reference, to see the basic model and structure of the DS model. (Zoom in for details or read below.)

STEP 4

Commitment – How will we do it?

When goals are clear, your team is probably eager to act. Attention moves to step 4 and the question, “How will we do it?”. In other words, how committed are we to reaching the specific goal? There are two things that build someone’s commitment: their role and the decision-making process. So let’s look at those two aspects:

Role

When someone is crystal clear on their role, they know what to do and their level of authority to take action. Yet how many times do we hear team members say, “I thought you were doing that.” or “I thought my job is just to do this”. This uncertainty creates confusion, frustration and wasted time. So get specific about who is doing what for each task; if the task is complex, break it into smaller roles.

You may have considered roles during stage three planning, but now need to commit to what the function, authority, and responsibilities will be in practice. Role definitions have to be complete enough to cover all the tasks that must be done to accomplish your team goals while also minimizing overlaps and role conflicts. A big part of a team lead’s job is to help match goals to competencies, and help people step into roles that will develop their abilities and improve results for the team.

Decision-Making

Who makes what decision is vital to creating individual and team commitment. For example, let’s say you ask me to do some research for the team. I’m excited and spend time researching, writing my recommendations, and prepping my briefing. Yet during the meeting, you cut me off and say you’ll review my information and make the final decision, which irritates me and causes me to grumble, “I’m not doing that again.” Why? Because I thought I was going to have a say in the decision-making process.

So be clear on the decision-making process for each key decision. Will it be a democracy, with equal votes? A consensus? A dictatorship? While the team member may not agree with the decision-making process, she at least understands the process ahead of time.

Tool: RACI- Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed

One tool to do this is called RACI, which stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed in the below chart.

To use RACI, match RACI with the tasks before the team starts executing on the tasks, as in the below diagram. This will help everyone clearly know their roles up front.

Step 4 represents the turn of the Drexler-Sibbet model. Remember that the initial stages of team performance involve a good bit of trial-and-error. Embracing these questions might require backtracking to goals, investing more in trust development, and revisiting initial purpose before you can fully resolve commitment issues.

How do you know when Commitment challenges are resolved? You will see:

Assigned roles

Clear integrated goals

Shared vision

How do you know when the team is blocked at Commitment? You will see:

Dependence

Resistance

STEP 5

Implementation – Who does what, when, where?

Conflicts and confusion arise when there is commitment but no clear way forward. A good tip to remember at this stage is the “5 W’s”: Who, what, where, when, why (and how):

Who will do it?

What will they specifically do?

Where will it be done?

When will it be done?

Why is the work being done in this sequence?

How will we evaluate the quality of the work?

Implementation involves scheduling and sequencing work over time. A visible schedule (e.g. a chart), strategy, and / or process liberates the team to move into action confidently. So spend time specifically answering the above question before the team moves to action.

How do you know when Implementation challenges are resolved? You will see:

Clear processes

Alignment

Disciplined execution

How do you know when the team is blocked at Implementation? You will see:

Conflict

Non-alignment

Missed deadlines

STEP 6

High Performance – WOW!

High performance is a WOW state, as a team masters its processes and begins to experience the ability to change goals, as well as achieve them. You can feel when it happens and observe its effects as teams achieve a flow state when trust is high, and people have mastered their roles. In a state of high performance, boundaries and individual limits soften, everything moves together, and everyone responds as if they are part of the whole. The indicators of that having happened are spontaneous interaction, synergy, and a team that is surpassing their expectation on results. WOW symbolizes how high-performance teams transcend rational processes by working with all the human faculties – spirit, soul, mind, and body.

How do you know when High Performance challenges are resolved? You will see:

Spontaneous interaction

Synergy

Surpassing results

How do you know when the team is blocked at High Performance? You will see:

Overload

Disharmony

STEP 7

Renewal – Why continue?

Over time the conditions that initially set your team in motion will change. High performance is demanding. Don’t be surprised if people ask, “Why continue?” This key question reminds us that team performance is an ongoing process, and must be renewed by returning to Stage 1 and reassessing if the work is still needed, worthwhile, and has some personal value and meaning.

Tool: AAR- The After-Action Review

One tool to use in this step is the After-Action Review, or AAR, which addresses four key questions:

What were our intended results?

What were our actual results?

What caused our results?

And what will we sustain or improve?

Of course, other questions can be asked during an AAR. Here are sample ground rules for an AAR meeting:

Active participation: it is important for everyone to participate since everyone’s views have equal value

No blame

There are no right or wrong answers

Be open to new ideas

Be creative in proposing solutions to barriers

Use “Yes….and” rather than “either/or” thinking

Consensus where possible, clarification where not

Commitment to identifying opportunities for improvement and recommending possible improvement approaches

No record of the discussion will be distributed without the agreement of all participants

Quotes will not be attributed to individuals without permission

To close the AAR session, summarize key points identified during the discussion. The session should end on a positive note, linking observations to recommendations for future improvements. Let the team know what the plans are for reporting and sharing the lessons learned during the AAR.

Whether or not you do the AAR as listed above, spending time on renewal puts your team back in touch with purpose and refreshes everyone’s commitment to keep going. It also includes learning from what you have accomplished, and building a repertoire of best practices for the next journey on this or other teams. If your team’s work is complete, Renewal is the time to wrap things up, freeing members to move on to new challenges.

How do you know when Renewal challenges are resolved? You will see:

Recognition

Change mastery

Staying power

How do you know when the team is blocked at Renewal? You will see:

Boredom

Burnout

If you reach stage seven and your team is blocked, it’s time to head back to stage one!

There you have it—the Drexler-Sibbet Team Performance Model. Don’t forget to learn about steps one through three on my previous post, before giving it a spin.

Leave a comment below, send me an email, or find me on Twitter.

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[cookinguptales]

God, I have been thinking about this forbidden love angle so much, and one thing I keep coming back to is the reduced sense of danger in s3. It’s ironic that as Guillermo was promoted to bodyguard, he also suddenly had a lot less to protect them from. (Other than themselves, I guess.)

The exact same act that got him promoted was what saved them from future council assassins! He killed a ton of very powerful vampires, which proved both his own powers and his vampires’ very hazy ability to get things done. And after that, they didn’t actually run into that much mortal danger in s3, and the few times they did were usually their own fault. (The ancestral soil, the Sire getting loose, Nandor joining a cult, Colin Robinson turning 100, etc.) The only time they were actually in serious danger from an outside supernatural force, the siren, Guillermo wasn’t even there. The only time Guillermo actually protected anyone from vampires was at the wellness center (again, Nandor’s decision) and when The Guide came (and she wasn’t trying to hurt them.)

It’s something that’s actually caused a puzzle in my own writing enough times that I’m sure it’s also doing it to the actual writers of the show. I want to write Guillermo protecting Nandor and the others! But from what?

The most obvious answer is probably other slayers, especially if Guillermo’s family becomes a big part of this season, but Guillermo’s not really equipped to kill other slayers, nor do I think he’d want to. His abilities are designed to kill vampires. He is killing vampires to protect vampires. That’s his whole thing. But what to do when there are no more vampiric assassins?

Before s4 started, I thought that Nadja’s appointment in the UK would be a trap. That seemed like the most logical way to reintroduce vampiric danger to their lives. She was walking into a trap being sprung because she’d lied about killing Nandor or whatever. Who knows. Something. But obviously, that didn’t pan out at all!

So... what then is going to reintroduce a sense of vampiric danger? I wouldn’t be surprised if Guillermo ends up having to protect Nandor from the djinn or even Marwa, based on some of the hints coming out of early reviews, but that’s still not vampiric danger, as far as we know. But you know what would be? If Nandor falls in love with Guillermo, which is apparently one of the biggest no-nos in the entire vampiric world. It’s so bad that the vampiric government immediately gets involved. It’s so bad that they don’t even kill you. They torture you for hundreds of years.

But, and this is key, the stated punishment is one that we now see is reversible. They erased The Guide’s memories and personality and put her to work, but Laszlo was able to bring her back.

So what we now have is a stated danger that could potentially force Guillermo to protect both Nandor and the others, if Guillermo and Nandor cannot successfully keep their relationship a secret. (And historically, they have both been very bad at that.) And if he is eventually not able to protect Nandor from getting mind-wiped, we have an assurance that he could definitely find a way to reverse it.

like BRO if the writers don’t write it, I will, and that is a THREAT.

[persephones-wren]

Hi, so I had this idea for a Kaz Brekker x reader one shot were kaz is have trouble sleep and is becoming tired and grumpy during the day. So, the reader starts secretly putting lavender in his room and clothes (lavender is a good herb to aid sleeping). He starts sleeping better and doesn’t know why until he finds the reader in his room and then they can have a bit of fluff at the end of something. Idk hope you find this useful <3. Have a nice day/night!

Lavender (Kaz Brekker x Reader)

First request! Thank you for the idea anon <3 sorry this took a bit long, but I really enjoyed writing it and I think it turned out alright! I hope you like it as well :)

Warnings: spoilers for Kaz’s backstory

Genre: Angst to Fluff (?) 

Word Count: 2082

He thought he had outrun the nightmare of his past.

The gloves had protected him, becoming his weapon, and the reputation that followed him had been another impenetrable fortress. How ironic that the one who led him back to his past was himself.

...

It was on a mission gone wrong, where the only way of escape was down, back in the cold harbors of Ketterdam. The frigid waters had brought his brother’s bloated and ice-cold corpse underneath his hands, fighting to keep his vision from blurring, fighting to keep himself alive.

“...Kaz!” 

You were treading the water lightly, trying to stay afloat while supporting him. He tried to say something, anything, but he felt as if he were drowning as you half-hazardly pulled him onto the dock, your breath ragged and your shoulders sagging. He seemed to see right through you, and he was pale and shaking slightly, not just from the cold- something there had haunted him, though. It was obviously more than just the cool waters.

“Kaz, are you alright?” Your inquiry went unanswered, and you waited patiently, before he somewhat snapped to attention, roughly pushing himself off of you, probably bruising your shoulder as he stood and backed away furiously.

“Don’t touch me, get off of me-” he forced a shuddery breath in- “I’m fine.”

Your eyes were wide as you stared at him, and he cleared his throat and refused to look at you. He didn’t apologize, nothing of the sort, because Kaz Brekker never apologized, even rare and brief moments of weakness.

Kaz Rietveld might’ve apologized to you.

“Right, okay,” your voice was soft, but firm. “We should find the others, they’ll probably be at the meeting spot.”

You both got up slowly, muscles sore and stiff from hitting icy waters, but you swiftly and quietly towards the carriages Jesper had prepared. Neither of you said a word on the way back. Upon your arrival, both Inej and Jesper grew increasingly concerned at your condition.

“What the hell happened to you two?” Jesper had asked.

“Are you two alright?” Inej echoed.

“We survived,” you muttered, sparing a small glance at Kaz, who still wasn’t saying much. “It’s a long story.”

...

Long story indeed.

Kaz had presumed that you had told them what had happened, but he was almost praying to the Saints that you had left out the details of his condition. It wasn’t that he would necessarily be too ashamed to ever tell Jesper or Inej- but they needed him for his reliability, and any moment of weakness could be used against him, both by friends and enemies. He’d prefer that Jordie be kept with him only. After all, it only took a couple shots for Jesper to reveal almost anything.

He didn’t sleep well that night, hell, he didn’t think he’d sleep right for at least a month. His normal sleep schedule was one that could barely keep a normal person running, but with his brother lurking in every corner of his unconsciousness, it was better to stay awake, where he could be in control.

It was affecting his mood, he knew that. He had to heavily restrain himself not to snap at people, but even without snapping, his words were still scathing. He’d find more to criticize, more to hate, and he’d probably scolded every member of the Dregs in the last week. Everyone, except you. Whether it was because you were there with him or it was something more, that wasn’t something he wanted to think about.

Then suddenly, the insomnia stopped.

It had only been a week, before his sleeping schedule reverted back. Jordie was there, but it was more of what he could remember in life than death, smiles and sunshine rather than plague and death. It was a bittersweet sadness, but it had been one he’d grown used to, one he could get past quicker. He fixed himself back into his office, working on another plan rather than hovering over everyone just to find something to criticize. 

What had changed?

It might’ve been the light smell of herbs, was that lavender? that permeated his office now, but he’d never caught the culprit of who had done it. And despite his ability to find cracks in any facade, he had caught no lies in any members of the Dregs. 

His first thought had been you, admittedly. He knew you knew something the others didn’t, you saw him panic on the docks, and he knew you could act your way through nearly anything. It didn’t seem hard to put two and two together.

But you seemed honest enough, when he had asked you. Perhaps it was his like of you that clouded his judgement, but you genuinely didn’t seem to know anything.

…

“Stop that.”

“Huh?” you whirled around, and Kaz was there, cane in hand, glare piercing through you.

“Stop putting whatever herbs in my room.”

You stared at him, confused, before you burst out laughing. “Is someone putting herbs in your room? That’s why your office always smells like lavender now...I’m sorry, Kaz, but that isn’t me, although it would be funny if it was. Ha...I don’t think I could get away with sneaking in your office if I tried.”

“Any ideas who it could be, then?” He asked impatiently.

“I’m sorry, I have no idea. It could be anyone, really. Even though I-” was the one who saw you at the docks, the words hung unspoken, “um, yeah, everyone’s noticed you’ve been different. Truthfully though, I think they just think it’s because a mission went wrong.”

“Fine.” He nodded at you, and then he’d went to go find Jesper at the Crow Club.

It was a truth, in a way. You couldn’t go around sneaking herbs in his room. You weren’t silent enough for that, you were an actress, not a shadow. Inej, however, was the Wraith, and if anyone could get away with it, it’d be her. 

So you’d ask for her help, whether it was distracting him or asking her to put the herbs in herself.

And you’d both play dumb until he was back to the person you knew.

…

It had only been one unfortunate night, where you were finally caught putting the lavender on his desk.

You had gotten better at just sneaking in and doing it yourself without Inej’s help, as you’d successfully done it for at least three nights in the past month. Tonight, though, Inej had been running some other task, probably nightly reports for Kaz, and luck had finally run out without her assistance.

“Y/N.”

You froze, and a chill ran down your spine. Though Kaz Brekker was never exactly friendly by any means, the slight warmth of his tone towards you had withered into frost. You were completely fucked. If he was lucky, maybe he’d let you out of the Crows alive. He doesn’t think you’re the one putting lavender in this room- he probably thinks you’re a traitor. Have fun talking yourself out of this one without admitting to it, you berated yourself. Saints know you’ll need the luck.

“If you’re here to steal plans and distribute them, then it’s certainly a pity that I liked you,” he muttered. “And I suppose even more impressive that you had me fooled.” He advanced forward, and his slammed his cane into the ground next to you, making you flinch. “How did you do it, then?”

“I- um, well, it’s,” you tripped, frantically trying to find the words, “it’s nothing like that. I’m not taking your plans. They have no use to me. I dislike Pekka just as much as you do. Do you think missions I’ve done with you would’ve gone successfully if I was working with him?”

“If you aren’t, then why are you in my office?”

“I’m just trying to-” you cut yourself off and sighed. Help was not going to be a good word to use. Kaz didn’t need help, and he’d probably just be more furious it you stated it for how it was. “Lavender is good for sleeping.”

He had long forgotten that someone actually had to be putting the lavender there. It just showed up now, for a month. He’d just accepted it.

“So it’s you, then?”

“Yeah,” you say sheepishly. “I’m sorry I lied to you, earlier. I don’t like seeing you in pain, though. People rely on you, they need you, Kaz, and well, I thought- never mind what I thought. I just hoped you would rest better, after...”

“You didn’t tell them what happened?”

There’s an odd vulnerability in his words, but you don’t remark on them. “No.” A faint smile is etched on your lips at the thought of your lie. “I told them that you were upset that the mission had gone wrong, and that it was mostly my fault. You scolded me on the docks and gave me the silent treatment in the carriage, that’s all it was to them. If you want to talk- I mean- what happened there?”

You know you’re seconds away from breaking the ice you’d been treading on lightly, but curiosity takes the better of you for a second before you’re rapidly apologizing, getting ready to leave the office before he kills you.

He found you in his office, he thought you stole plans, and then you admit you’ve been there more than once because you’re the girl who put lavender in his room. You really need to think things through more. 

“Good that you didn’t tell them. Stop apologizing. Take a seat, for a second.”

You do so, keeping your questions to yourself. He stares at you for a long moment, conflicted, before he gathers himself again. “What happened at the harbors. I had a brother, Jordie Rietveld. He died during the plague. We both got thrown in the harbor. He was dead. I was alive, surrounded by death.” He’s quiet for a bit, but when he glances at your expression, there’s no pity, no horror on your face, you don’t believe he’s weak. You’re quietly waiting for him to continue. So he does. 

“I needed to get back onto land. I got there using my brother to hold onto.”

“You wear gloves because of that now,” you point out quietly. 

He takes a shuddering breath in. “Yes.”

“When we had to dive, it came back to you. Kaz,” you whisper, “thank you for telling me.”

 “Thank you,” he echoes your words. He’s shaking and vulnerable, even though he hasn’t said much. Even then, there’s no look of fear or judgement of anything he’s done in your expression. The respect he has worked to earn is still there, and he could sigh in relief.

He’s twisting at his hands, before you realize he’s slowly slipping off his gloves. Your voice cuts through the air, talking frantically again. “No, no- Kaz, we don’t have to do this. I don’t want you to do this if you’re not ready- you don’t have to-”

“I want to.”

His voice is quiet, but full of resolve.

“Okay.”

His hands are normal. They’re not ugly, or disfigured, or strange. They fit him.

“Your hands are pretty.” The words slip out of you before you realize.

He laughs, a little breathless, and the tension eases a little. “My hands are pretty?” 

“Yeah.”

You outstretch your hand, and he waits a couple of moments before slowly interlocking it with yours. It’s sickening and he has to will himself to hold on, but he does. He feels content, content that you’re here, content that you’re willing to help him.

“You can let go if you need to.” Your voice sounds far away.

“I’m alright.” He’s not, but you’re warm. You’re alive, you’re not Jordie. He’s in his office, with the girl who put lavender in his room, not in the cold harbor with death.

You both stay for a long while, before he lets go.

“Thank you,” he repeats, before he slips on his gloves again.

“It’s nothing,” you answer, but you both know it’s everything, everything to you, everything to him. 

You start to walk towards the door, before his voice calls out again. “Tomorrow. I can’t promise I’ll-” be a good person, be the person you want, be there for you-

“Tomorrow,” you agree. “Goodnight, Kaz.”

“Goodnight, Y/N.”

The smell of lavender lingers in his room. He picks up the flower you had left on his desk, and an uncharacteristic smile blooms on his face.

Tomorrow.

[robininthelabyrinth]

"The Untamed", but Jiggy has a white cat whom he tells everything.- May or may not be sentient or 'spiritual' like Fairy in the book. (From an idea I've thrown around with my friend @yraelviii)

ao3

He found the cat in Qinghe.

“What are you doing here?” Meng Yao said, crouching down to try to scoop out the little handful of white fluff underneath his cabinet only for it to bare its infantile fangs and him and hiss, moving its butt around as if it thought his fingers ought to be running in fear from its fearsome pounce. “How did you even get in here?”

The cat – a kitten, really, small and scrawny, dirty and covered in ashes as if it had just run out of a forge, but no less passionate for it – squirmed in his hand as he picked it up.

“Who owns you?” Meng Yao asked, and the cat hissed viciously as if to shout no one owns me!

Something about that echoed in Meng Yao’s heart – no one owns me, he thought – and so he fished up some extra meat from his plate, filled a small platter with water, and used the sleeve of an old outfit that needed to be taken to be laundered anyway to wipe the grey ash off of the cat’s white fur while it was distracted by sniffing suspiciously at the food and water that it ultimately declined to consume.

“Just this once,” he told it.

-

Doing good work will often only bring you more work, Meng Yao reflected, and so it was with the cat as much as with anything else. He still didn’t know how the cat managed to get into his rooms, and he sometimes dwelled on paranoid suspicions that there were hiding-holes in his chambers designed to allow others to spy on him, just as there had been in certain rooms in the brothel – though even at his worst moment of uncertainty and doubt he didn’t really think so. He knew that it wasn’t Nie Mingjue’s style even if Meng Yao had been someone important enough to care about, and anyway he didn’t question his own ability to discovery such a thing if it had really existed. He’d checked.

At any rate, however it kept getting into his rooms, the cat was now a regular presence there, lurking around.

It didn’t want to be petted and greeted all attempts to feed it with utter disdain, but despite its general standoffishness it seemed to like being in the same vicinity as Meng Yao, enjoying nothing more than to settle haughtily by the window in his room and watch over Meng Yao as if it thought he might get lost without its supervision.

Meng Yao thought it was probably someone’s pet gotten lost, or maybe even just a feral cat from outside (Qinghe had a fair number of them) that had figured out that it could access the good life by going inside, but it was very hard to sincerely worry over the ill-intentions of a cat, and he was already very busy.

If he didn’t need to care for it, then it wasn’t adding to his troubles. Let the cat sit where it liked!

Meng Yao had found that life in Qinghe was both different and similar to life in Yunping, the only life he had to compare it to, and it amused him to think of the great and righteous Nie sect as an overly large brothel, with the main difference being that they sold their strength where women sold their bodies. In both places there needed to be order, someone to sort things out and tell people where to put things and what to do; in both places Meng Yao, with his quick mind and excellent memory, his sense of understanding people and anticipating their needs, was utterly invaluable in arranging such things.

He had, admittedly, expected it to take a little more time to climb up to the top – the only person he couldn’t understand in this place was Nie Mingjue, who was far too easy to deceive and smiled at him like he really thought they were friends instead of just being master and servant, who appreciated his talents and told him so, who shrugged off his mistakes and had faith that he would do better, who ignored his status instead of lording it over him the way Meng Yao had expected him to. Even when he was angry, when he shouted and slammed his hands against things, Nie Mingjue never once mentioned Meng Yao’s background, and the only things he seemed to hold against him were his own mistakes.

Meng Yao still didn’t know why Nie Mingjue would act so rashly as to promote someone he had just met to a position as high as viceroy, much less actually trust him, but it didn’t really matter. However quixotic his method of reaching a place of power, he was here and his next task was to keep his place until he’d made a reputation for himself.

Part of that he did through his work, good critical work that people needed and which had always won him gratitude even if not respect, but the other part of it was in cultivation. That was the way in which the Nie sect was not like a brothel: you couldn’t just be clever, you couldn’t even just be beautiful - to be respected, you had to cultivate.

Not that wanting to cultivate was a problem for Meng Yao.

He’d always had a memory like a sponge and a body that obeyed his every wish, his childhood of mimicking the beautiful dances of his mother and her ‘sisters’ serving him well in transitioning to learning the sword even if he was years behind everyone else; his mother had bought a thousand fake cultivation manuals for him and he’d learned them all, each one of them more useless than the next, and now that he was here in the cultivation world at long last, he was finally, finally, finally able to cultivate for real.

Using Nie sect methods, of course, even if that wasn’t what he really wanted.  

He’d started as soon as he could when he arrived, endlessly grateful that the Nie sect provided training sabers without cost, and he’d snuck one away back to his room so that he could practice on his own time, knowing it would take a long time to form his golden core. He’d debated with himself for a long time as to whether or not it was worth it to invest in a real one – if the training sabers were free, then real proper Nie sabers were somehow three times as expensive as the swords you could buy in the marketplace, and you could only put in a deposit without any notion of when you’d actually get the saber, apparently subject to the contrary dispositions of the spiritual weaponsmiths that made them.

In the end he decided to go for it more or less on a whim, emptying out his hard-built savings to place the order, even though he knew he would one day need to discard whatever they made for him in favor of a sword.

The Jin sect would accept him one day. He would make them.

(If the Nie sect cultivation style was good for one thing, he thought as he went through endless drills of slashing and thrusting, it was that you could work out your anger while you were doing it. There was nothing quite like imagining the face of someone you hated and then bringing down the practice saber in a vicious slash, and oh, but Meng Yao hated so very many people.)

The cat liked watching him train most of all, although Meng Yao suspected it was because seeing him jump around panting was funnier than watching him sit at his desk and gracefully write out letters. It would occasionally start purring, a sound a little like a crackling fire, and eventually Meng Yao got into the habit of going to run his fingers through its fur as a reward for himself when he successfully completed a training sequence.

After a while, he started talking to it, too.

“That commander,” Meng Yao said as he brought the training saber down. His real saber was still on the order, probably stalled purposefully; the smith assigned the task was probably one of the people that thought they were too good to deal with him because of who his mother was, and it’d all been a waste of money in the end. Completely a waste, even if Nie Mingjue had smiled so happily at him when he’d heard about Meng Yao placing the order, his eyes warm and soft and how had that man survived so long in this wretched world of politics and pain, didn’t he know he would always be deceived and betrayed?

Why should he be the exception to the rule, when everyone else had to suffer?

Meng Yao threw away the unhelpful thoughts and thrust the saber forward, as if piercing his invisible opponent straight through the chest.

“That commander.” He minutely corrected his form and stabbed again, this time as if piercing through the belly: a gut wound, a slow and awful way to die. “He’ll regret what he said to me.”

The cat’s purring intensified.

Meng Yao briefly had the wild thought that it approved.

“I just –” Another thrust. “– need to figure out –” An overhead slash. “– how.”

-

Meng Yao ended up taking the cat with him when he left Qinghe.

It probably was someone’s pet and he was opening himself up to a charge of stealing, a charge he wouldn’t be able to defend himself against now that he no longer had Nie Mingjue’s protection –

(Nie Mingjue who had wept tears and blood at what Meng Yao had done, betrayed at last after having finally encountered a deception he could not swallow, who had banished him from the Unclean Realm even after everything Meng Yao had done for him – who had, despite it all, still hidden an entire bag of gold and Meng Yao’s favorite Qinghe snacks in Meng Yao’s things with a short note claiming that it was for unpaid wages. As if Meng Yao had ever let a single pay period go by without claiming exactly what he was due. As if Nie Mingjue still cared despite throwing him out, as if he worried about how Meng Yao might live, as if he hadn’t given up the privilege of caring about things like that – )

He didn’t really care.

He wanted the cat, so he took it. It was the least Qinghe could do for him.

The cat spent all its time in his new rooms in the hotels he stayed out as he traveled: in his bedroom and study, the little gardens that, when available, he liked to use to train in the mornings and evenings. It would even follow him when he took a bath (although that was with great reluctance on the part of the cat, and only if Meng Yao were taking an especially long time in the bath and the cat was worried he’d drowned, yowling angrily as if it could revive him through the power of its voice). If it had once belonged to someone else, it now belonged to Meng Yao, and Meng Yao didn’t give away anything that was his.

“I’ve made worse mistakes,” he said defiantly to the cat, which blinked at him from its side of the carriage he’d used some of the gold to rent. “It’s only that I don’t want to review them in order to think of which ones those might be.”

The cat got up, stretched its back, and walked over to butt its head against Meng Yao’s hand before turning and going back to its spot by the window.

Meng Yao wasn’t sure if that was a sign of agreement or if the cat just thought there was a treat in his hand. Not that the cat had ever accepted treats from his hand.

He still wasn’t sure what the cat ate, actually, but he was sure the cat would make its feelings known now that they weren’t somewhere with a dependable kitchen, though he supposed there was always the possibility that it would start picking up hunting.

“Wen Chao said that they’d aimed at the Cloud Recesses,” Meng Yao said, deciding not to dwell on the things of the past. There was nothing he could do about it. Nothing he could do about Nie Mingjue’s betrayed eyes or the snacks he hadn’t even known Nie Mingjue had known he’d liked, about the hand-me-down guans and trinkets that Nie Huaisang had insisted were part of his wardrobe when he’d helped him pack even though he knew Nie Huaisang still wore them sometimes, about the fact that he should have been ordered to take the Nie sect’s braids out of his hair when he passed by the gates for the final time since he didn’t deserve them anymore but the two disciples there had just nodded at him and let him pass without a word – nothing to do about the saber he’d ordered, still on the list to be made, and maybe if he made something of himself out in the world alone he would one day come back to claim it at last. “That’s where we’re going now. Lan Xichen might be in danger. I have to help him.”

The cat made a sound like it was considering hacking up a hairball.

“He was kind to me,” Meng Yao said, feeling defensive. “The only one who never judged me –”

Since he’d decided to forget about Nie Mingjue and Nie Huaisang, wiping it out of his mind as if it had never been, that was even true.

“– and he’s a proper gentleman, a good man. I’ll help him.”

That Lan Xichen was also a powerful man was something he wished he didn’t think of, but he couldn’t help the way he was.

“After I help him, I’ll figure out what to do next,” Meng Yao said, like a liar, and the cat looked at him like he was stupid – which he was being, because of course he’d already planned out what to do next, figured out his next move, and there was no point in lying to a cat about it. Meng Yao had skills that were only useful in management, not labor, and the only thing he left to sell was information about the sect from which he’d just been ejected. “No one owns me, right? Let it be the Wen sect.”

The cat did not purr, but it didn’t condemn him, either.

That would have to do.

-

It was a good thing that Meng Yao’s cat was self-sufficient, he thought, because he had neither the time nor the stomach to feed it during his time at the Wen sect.

If he had thought he had worked hard at the Nie sect, he now knew differently: at least there the worst he had faced from his colleagues had been disdain and not outright murder attempts, back-stabbing and undercutting to try to show off to Wen Ruohan, and all the while the man himself demanded more and more from him without the slightest care for his own well-being. He was grist to the mill for Wen Ruohan, no matter how much the Chief Cultivator enjoyed having another man’s prized deputy as his own – Wen Ruohan might had been very nearly driven insane by the Yin Metal, but he still remembered old grudges – and it was night and day away from Nie Mingjue’s reliance on him that was based on trust, rather than reluctantly satisfied suspicion and paranoia.

Meng Yao had hidden the cat as best as he could from the start, thinking rightfully that people would try to use it against him, and to his relief it seemed that no one else had yet laid eyes on it and identified it as his own, despite its white fur standing out like a beacon to his sight. Unfortunately there were some people that had managed to figure out that he had a cat, even if they didn’t lay eyes on it themselves, and he’d had more than a few incidents in which someone had left poisoned meat out on the floor by his room in order to catch it.

The cat seemed as unimpressed with that as anything else.

Instead, the cat seemed to have taken up hunting as its pastime. It brought back the corpses of small birds, the Yin Metal-infused little spies, full of resentful energy, that Wen Ruohan had developed for his sons to use. At first Meng Yao worried about the cat getting somehow poisoned by them, but time went on and it seemed to be fine, even thriving. It had grown into a proper cat now, no longer a kitten, and it enjoyed licking its white and shining fur until it was gleaming.

It didn’t like Meng Yao’s training sessions as much – he trained with a sword now, two-faced just like him, and in a dozen different styles, Wen and Jiang and Jin, always Jin – so sometimes Meng Yao would go back to doing the old Nie sect style again, knowing the cat would recognize the familiar movements, and it was a surefire way to get the cat to purr.

The Nie sect style was also still the best for getting out anger, all aggression and sharp movements, and Meng Yao still had a lot of anger inside of him. He was starting to think he always would.

At least here in the Nightless City he could kill the people he hated, as long as he did so in low and dirty ways that didn’t trouble Wen Ruohan or interfere with his plans, and yet every time he did it, he felt no relief, only a vile and wretched stickiness that came, perhaps, from that awful Yin Metal that he had schemed over yet couldn’t seem to escape.

The cat didn’t like the Yin Metal one bit. It hissed and scratched, and in one notable incident seemed like it was going to pounce on it directly if Meng Yao hadn’t caught it mid-leap and shoved it into his sleeve before anyone had noticed it.

“You’re going to get me into trouble,” Meng Yao told the cat next time he trained, using the soft sword he’d hidden away for a time of need to hack and slash in the Nie way, which didn’t work with a soft sword at all but which made him feel strangely better. He was currently imagining Wen Ruohan’s head underneath a saber, his head and the heads of all those corpse puppets he’d created. “I will cut you loose if you do that.”

The cat rolled onto its back and showed its soft and fluffy belly, which only the truly unwise would seek to lay a hand on – Meng Yao still had scars – and Meng Yao rolled his eyes. “Yes, yes, I know,” he said. “No one owns you, not even me. But do me a favor and don’t screw this up for me. Not when I’m so close.”

Lan Xichen had been accepting his letters and feeding them to Nie Mingjue, who trusted as blindly as he ever did. Meng Yao wished sometimes that he didn’t, that he would learn, that he would put some defenses up on that stupid reckless heart of his, but on the other hand it suited his plans very well that he didn’t.

Soon, he thought. Soon.

Soon he’d know what he needed to do.

-

“Now he chooses not to trust people,” Meng Yao complained to his cat. “Now. Now!”

The cat purred.

It wasn’t that Meng Yao (damnit, Jin Guangyao, he had a new name, he was Jin Guangyao now) couldn’t understand Nie Mingjue’s reluctance to trust him – fool me once, fool me twice, but three times seemed to be the other man’s breaking point – and in some ways he understood it more than ever now that he had been accepted back by the Jin sect, clothed in the gold he’d always deserved to wear.

Jin Guangshan hadn’t lost much in the war, not like the other sects, and the second it was over he was already scheming. Meng Yao – Jin Guangyao – was pulled right into the thick of it at once, less for his spying capability than for his sheer disposability, the fact that Jin Guangshan wasn’t willing to burden his pure and righteous heir with black matters that he was more than happy to taint the son of his whore with. With Nie Mingjue, general and hero of the Sunshot Campaign, representing the only real threat to the Jin sect’s domination, even if he didn’t want to be, Jin Guangyao was bound to be in opposition to him.

It made sense for Nie Mingjue not to trust him.

It irritated him regardless.

Still, lack of trust or no, Nie Mingjue had succumbed to Lan Xichen’s impassioned arguments and had agreed to swear brotherhood with him, even if Jin Guangyao suspected that Nie Mingjue’s primary motivation was to keep a better eye on him and scold him the way he did Nie Huaisang. It would be politically beneficial to Jin Guangyao to be tied in such a way to Nie Mingjue – it would suit his own desires as well, though that was less important – and so he had of course agreed as well, and he was planning on going to their oath ceremony in the outfit he had chosen for himself, gold from neck to foot, a sword he’d taken from the treasury since no one would order him one of his own, and a hat on his head like the ones his mother so admired to make up for his lack of height and to hide the Nie sect braids he still habitually wore underneath.

An old habit, and one he really ought to break, really. Ideally before Nie Mingjue figured it out and told him to cut it out.

There was a knock on the door, a familiar pounding, and the cat looked up, intrigued, even as Jin Guangyao sighed voicelessly to himself. Perhaps he had waited too long.

Perhaps it would be better to make a clean cut in this way, too.

He opened the door.

“Sect Leader Nie,” he greeted, thinking to himself that it would only be a few more hours before he was entitled to call the man da-ge as if they were nearly equals and how strange that would be. “Can this humble one help you?”

“Can I come in?” Nie Mingjue asked gruffly, his eyes lingering on Jin Guangyao’s uncovered and Nie-braided hair, just as he might have expected. Had expected.

Jin Guangyao nodded and stepped back, allowing him in, and closed the door behind him. “Could I get the sect leader some refreshments?” he asked politely, but Nie Mingjue seemed to have come to a stop right in the entranceway, surprise written all over his features. “Sect Leader Nie?”

Nie Mingjue was staring at Jin Guangyao’s cat.

“…Sect Leader Nie?”

Did Nie Mingjue not like cats? There were an endless number of feral cats in Qinghe, so it seemed implausible, and yet, here Nie Mingjue was, looking at the cat like he’d never seen such a thing before in its life.

Of course, at that exact moment, Jin Guangyao’s cat, the traitor, hopped off its pillow and went straight to rub itself against Nie Mingjue’s leg, purring like a little maniac.

Jin Guangyao stared at it, feeling thoroughly betrayed by what he would have previously said was his thoroughly unsociable cat, who had taken years to warm up to him enough to give him half the attention it was now bestowing freely on Nie Mingjue. Was this the heavens deciding to mock him for his earlier betrayals?

Alternatively, Nie Mingjue might just be very good with cats, which Jin Guangyao could believe. Perhaps he even carried in his pockets some of the Qinghe vine that cats were said to be so enamored of, although certainly Meng Yao’s cat had never once before shown an interest in such things before.

“…what’s its name?” Nie Mingjue croaked, voice hoarse. He was still staring fixedly at the cat, looking as though his entire world had shattered around him. He hadn’t even looked so unsettled when Jin Guangyao had so viciously mocked him at the Nightless City, and at the time he’d thought he was going to die and be turned into a corpse puppet to murder all his loved ones.

Jin Guangyao was tempted to say something rude or facetious, something like ‘I just call it Cat, why, do you name random cats?’, but the cat had been a good companion of his for a long time now and he couldn’t do that to it, even if he was currently planning on taking an extra long bath to force the cat to miserably linger by the door to the bathing room, screeching in unhappiness at the wet, but bravely (if grumpily) supervising him to make sure he didn’t drown.

“Hensheng,” he said, because that was in fact what he’d named it – it meant hatred for life, which was not exactly an auspicious name but which had stuck from the very moment he had thought it up – and waited to hear Nie Mingjue’s judgment. “It’s not normally quite so sticky,” he added in an attempt to save some face. “With most people.”

“Well, it’s me, that’s different,” Nie Mingjue said, and maybe the man really was just the human incarnation of the plant cats liked so much. Meng Yao really wouldn’t put it past him. “You...you cultivate in the Nie sect style? Still?”

Jin Guangyao blinked, surprised by the change in subject.

“Yes,” he said, a little hesitantly. He cultivated many styles now, although it was always the Jin sect style when he was in public. But he still had all the anger in his belly to vent – even more so now than before, anger at his father, anger at Madame Jin, anger at his brother born to a blessed life, anger at all those disciples that sneered at him even after he’d been legitimized, anger, anger, anger – and the Nie sect style had always been the best for that.

And anyway, it made the cat purr.

“Is that a problem, Sect Leader Nie?” he asked.

“Not at all,” Nie Mingjue said, and when he turned to look at him his eyes were warm and soft the way they’d been all the way before the fiasco with Xue Yang, shimmering with tears of joy and a smile that seemed to come straight from his heart, the foolish easily deceived man. It was so unexpected that Jin Guangyao actually took a full two steps back, his jaw dropping a little. “I’m happy for you. Very happy.”

He actually wiped at his eyes with his sleeve, dashing away the tears.

“You should come back to the Unclean Realm to pick it up when the brotherhood ceremony is done,” he added nonsensically. “I can’t imagine how long it’s been waiting for you.”

“…what?” Jin Guangyao said. “Pick up what?”

“Hensheng,” Nie Mingjue said, which – what? “Your saber. Hensheng.”

His saber?

The saber he’d never gotten, having been banished from the Unclean Realm before the order was finished, the one he’d spent all his savings on just in putting in the deposit, the one he’d never actually finished paying off? He remembered it, of course, and sometimes it still itched under his skin that he’d never gotten what he was owed because everything that was owed to him he deserved to get in the end. But…

“Hensheng is my cat,” he said.

Nie Mingjue blinked at him. “That’s not a cat,” he said. “That’s a saber spirit.”

Jin Guangyao’s gaze dropped down to the cat.

The cat that never seemed to eat anything or drink anything, that never once fell for the poisoned meat or accepted his offers of treats, that no one in the Nightless City had ever seen with their own eyes; the cat that could consistently get into his rooms despite there being no holes for it to enter, as if it had simply passed through the walls like a ghost.

Like a spirit.

The cat, which purred whenever Jin Guangyao practiced the Nie sect forms, swinging a saber with rage in his heart.

The cat to which he had confessed all his anger, all his frustration, all his rage, all the feelings he never gave to any human being around him – the sabers of the Nie sect thrived on such emotions, those feelings that encouraged them and strengthened them, developing the saber spirits that made each one of them a spiritual weapon unlike any other, with power and rage infused into the very blade.

Saber spirits, which only those born into the Nie sect or adopted early, raised in their ways, one of them, could form.

“A saber spirit?” Jin Guangyao said weakly, and his knees suddenly didn’t seem strong enough to hold him; he swayed and Nie Mingjue stepped forward quickly, catching him by the shoulders to steady him. “I cultivated a saber spirit?”

“The saber is back in the Unclean Realm,” Nie Mingjue said, not without kindness. “It was only ever waiting for you to pick it up once you developed the spirit, so that you could introduce the two.”

“It hasn’t been – I would have thought it would have been thrown away, or repurposed –”

“It’s a Nie saber, Meng Yao. It won’t obey anyone else ever again, not in this life; it is yours, yours alone. When one day you die, it will be buried with honor in our saber halls, just like all the others.”

The cat looked up at him and purred.

No one owns me, Jin Guangyao thought – the first thing the cat had said to him, and he’d always had a good understanding of what the cat wanted from the very first. No one had owned that wild spirit then, but it had stayed by his side, at first from curiosity and later from habit, and it was his now.

His, and no one else’s.

“Will you come pick it up?” Nie Mingjue asked, hope in his eyes. “Will you come home, if only for a little while?”

“Yes,” Jin Guangyao said. “Yes, I will.”

-

Later, Jin Guangshan told his son to kill Nie Mingjue, that fool who trusted too much and didn’t know when he was being deceived, finding him in his rigidity and righteousness too much of a burden on the power he planned to wield.

Jin Guangyao bowed as deep as he could, a smile on his lips, saying nothing, and the next day, when Jin Guangshan went to the brothel as he always did, drinking tea served by his son the way he always did, he never did figure out why his heart had stopped.

(The saber Jin Guangyao began to wear openly after the funeral – a gift from his sworn brother, he said with a smile, in remembrance of his time at the Nie sect – purred in pure satisfaction.)

[yanderecrazysie]

If you don’t mind could I please request the yandere alphabet with Ushijima 🥺? Thank you 💜💜

OOOH Wonder Boy Ushiwaka! I swear I'm the worst with writing him- he's like simple and complicated at the same time-

Thank you so much for requesting!!! I'll do my very best!

Ushijima Wakatoshi (Haikyuu) -The Yandere Alphabet

🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅

Warnings: yandere themes,

A is for Affection: How do they show their affection for their darling? How often do they show it?

💖 Ushijima isn't the most affectionate type to be 100% honest. It's not that he won't ever show you affection, it's just that he doesn't quite know HOW to.

💖 Physical affection will pretty much have to be something you directly ask for if you want it. He won't pick up on hints well and he's not the type to randomly want to cuddle.

💖 He can be kinda protective/possessive though, so he may wrap you into an embrace or hold you close. That's not so much out of affection though-

💖 Basically: Ushijima's way of showing affection is his ever-constant presence, over-protectiveness, and gentle way of treating you.

B is for Blood: How messy are they willing to get for their darling? Why?

🔪 I don't think Ushijima sees the need to kill for you. It's not that he doesn't want to kill- I honestly don't think it'd bother him if he had to- it's that he doesn't see any real threats to you.

🔪 This guy looks terrifying and he wants to be around you 24/7. Do you really think anyone's going to try something on you with that giant, intimidating man hovering behind you?

🔪 If someone was stupid/drunk enough to try something, Ushijima would just casually toss him across the street. If that guy was strong/big too, you better believe Ushijima will fight as hard as it takes to get the guy to back down/become unconscious.

🔪 If someone tried something on you while he wasn't there, it just means he has to work harder to protect you. Which means being around you even more. Always...

C is for Care or Cruelty: How would they treat their darling when they kidnap them? Would they mock them?

💔 Ushijima wouldn't mock you in the slightest. In fact, he'd be genuinely confused if you tried to run away or were upset that he kidnapped you. He seriously just won't understand why you're scared.

💔 He'll take good care of you though. Honestly, he'll probably baby you a little. He'll want to be the one to feed you, he'll check in on you every 5 minutes, he'll make sure you're in his line of sight at all times...

D is for Delusion: How delusional are they when it comes to their darling? Do they believe their darling loves them?

💭 It's difficult to say with Ushijima. He isn't exactly good with social skills and he's a little awkward, to put it lightly. So, he does kind of expect you to love him back and will think you're confused if you say you don't.

💭 But I don't know if that's considered delusion because that's just Ushijima being Ushijima. Yeah, he thinks you love him. No, it's not any different than him being 100% sure he's going to win a volleyball match.

E is for Expose: How much of their heart do they bear to their darling? How vulnerable are they when it comes to their darling? How much time will it take to trust them?

💧 Uh... Ushijima will flat-out tell you what he's thinking and if you say "bear his heart" he'll think that you're trying to skin him down to his organs or something. He's kinda blunt, basically.

💧 Trust though? I mean, Ushijima trusts you in a way, but in a way, he doesn't. He doesn't trust that you can take care of yourself but he trusts you to be honest.

💧 Like I said, he's complicated. Best way I can explain it is: he trusts you completely but he kind of underestimates your abilities. He has no doubts in his mind that you won't try to run away but he'll also lock up all the exits tight because he worries that you'll get outside and get hurt. Contradictory, I know.

F is for Fight: How would they react if their darling fought back?

👊 Picture a confused puppy that you just pushed off your lap. Like this boy has literally no clue why on earth you're fighting back and he's going to stare at you like you've got a second head growing out of your shoulder.

👊 Ushijima's secretly wondering if you've caught some sort of illness that's making you delirious as he calmly picks you up and tucks you into bed. Your flailing fists and clawing nails are nothing compared to this hulk of a man carrying you away.

G is for Guilt: What would it take for them to feel guilty about their actions? Or do they feel guilty from the start?

😔 Ushijima truly, honestly doesn't see the wrong in what he's doing. Like, I don't think he can comprehend that he's doing something very bad. He's doing what's best for you! That's good, right?

H is for Hell: What would be their darling’s worst experience with them?

🔥 Ushijima would NEVER hurt you and he doesn't really get angry either. I guess the worst experience would be the struggle of trying to gain freedom or even get the point across that you aren't happy about something. It's like talking to a brick wall. A very confused brick wall.

I is for Ideals: What kind of future do they have in mind for/with their darling?

👩‍❤️‍👨 I don't think Ushijima's really thought too far ahead, to be honest. He loves you and that's all that matters to him. As long as you don't leave (which he's positive you won't) life is happy.

👩‍❤️‍👨 He'd probably want kids one day. Only one or two, but he'd be fine if you had more. He'd take good care of them and teach them to act just like him...

J is for Jealousy: How easily do they get jealous? Do they lash out or find a way to cope?

💢 Ushijima doesn't get the concept of jealousy. Worrying about your safety when another guy talks to you? Sure, he does that. But jealous about it? Not really.

K is for Kidnap: How would they go about kidnapping their darling? How much do they plan it out?

🔒 You're just walking home and suddenly you're waking up in a bedroom that you don't recognize. Don't worry, you're not alone! Ushijima's sitting in a chair next to the bed, making sure you wake up.

🔒 Ushijima would plan just far enough to buy all the things you'd need to be "happy" with him. Medication, hygiene products- nothing will go unaccounted for. This man will have a shopping list longer than a roll of toilet paper dedicated to you.

L is for Love Letters: How would they go about courting or approaching their darling?

💌 I think he'd try to walk right up to you and he'd be very disappointed that you're kind of nervous around him. He can't really blame you, considering he looks kinda scary- from his stature to his expression.

💌 Okay, so trying to talk to you didn't work either. Ushijima's a little socially awkward. But that's fine! He'll just bring you back to his place and keep you there until you understand that he loves you. Flawless plan, right?

M is for Mask: Are their true colors drastically different from the way they acted before?

🎭 Other than being a little softer and gentler towards you, Ushijima doesn't change in the least. Like, I'm not sure anyone would notice "odd behavior" because he doesn't find it strange or out of the ordinary himself. He's still the stoic guy we all know him as.

N is for Naughty: How would they punish their darling?

🚓 Ushijima really wouldn't punish you. If you're freaking out, he'll just calmly tuck you into bed and check your temperature because, surely, you're ill if you're acting like that.

🚓 In Ushijima's eyes, you can do no wrong. So, you're honestly safe around this giant of a man. Congrats?

O is for Oppression: How many rights would they take away from their darling? What rights can be earned with time and trust?

📜 You may be able to wander around his house, but you aren't leaving it. But you're kind of... babied. Anything remotely sharp will be tucked away and locked up, you'll have a set bedtime, and you'll probably feel like a kid again.

P is for Patience: How patient are they with their darling?

🕊️ Since Ushijima doesn't think you're doing anything wrong and, when you fight back, he thinks that you're having a hard time or you're sick or something, he'll be extremely patient. He could never get frustrated with you!

Q is for Quit: If their darling dies, leaves, or successfully escapes, would they ever be able to move on?

🏃‍♀️ If you died, Ushijima would probably just turn to volleyball x100. He wouldn't want to think about it and would just try to distract himself from it all.

🏃‍♀️ If you escaped, Ushijima would just keep searching until he found you. You poor thing, you must be so scared and lonely out there, without him to protect you. Hold on, he'll find you and bring you back home again.

R is for Rage: How do they act when angry? How do they calm down?

👿 He doesn't get angry at you. I'm serious. He rarely gets angry in general but he could NEVER get angry at you.

S is for Soulmate: What made them fall in love with their darling? How did they first meet? When did they realize they loved their darling?

💍 You showed up at one of his volleyball games and he immediately noticed you. He's not sure what drew him to you, only that you were the most beautiful thing in the world to him. It really was love at first sight for him.

T is for Tears: How do they feel about seeing their darling scream, cry, and/or isolate themselves?

😭 Ushijima would be so confused. Why are you crying? Are you injured? Where are you? Oh, are you trying to play hide and seek?

😭 You're honestly digging your own grave because you're making him concerned and his protective instinct levels are off the charts. He's not going to give you time alone to cool down because he's pretty sure you need him by your side- even though he's the thing that's scaring you.

U is for Unique: Would they do anything different from the classic yandere?

👌 Like I've said, Ushijima honestly doesn't understand your reservations about being kidnapped and forced into a relationship with him. You have no chance of reasoning with him- you'll have more luck trying to convince the walls of your new home.

V is for Visit: Would they allow anyone else to visit their darling? Do they trust their darling to talk to their loved ones (in person, on the phone, etc.) or not at all?

🧳 Ushijima doesn't trust anyone with your safety. No one can come over to visit you under any circumstances. It's not so much "hiding the evidence" as it is "protecting you from his insane buddies".

W is for Weakness: What weakness can their darling exploit in order to escape?

❌ I think some affection and some tactful persuasion is your best chance. Especially the persuasion.

❌ "Wakatoshi, did you know that direct sunlight is better for you? Not just through the windows, I mean. I miss the fresh air too, you know..."

X is for Xoanon: How much would they revere or worship their darling? To what length would they go to win their darling over?

🛐 Ushijima doesn't worship you, but he prioritizes your safety over everything in his life, even volleyball. He doesn't care so much about trying to win you over- he sees no need to wait for you to realize what he already knows.

Y is for Yearning: How long do they pine after their darling before they snap?

😍 When Ushijima kidnaps you, you're going to be VERY taken aback. You won't even know him personally- you're lucky if you even know his name. And even that's likely just by word-of-mouth, considering he's pretty famous.

😍 This man saw you and knew he had to have you. He doesn't wait long, trust me.

Z is for Zero Tolerance: What is the thing that always makes them snap? What things will they not allow their darling to do under any circumstances?

0️⃣ I mean, he won't let you leave. But like, even if you try to escape, he's just going to assume you're confused about where the bathroom is located or something. You cannot make this man mad.

0️⃣ Ushijima probably would be very hurt if you called him names. Even if he chalked it up to you being sick or confused or something, it still stings worse than any volleyball injury. His expression won't even change though...

🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅

HOLY CRAP THAT TOOK A WHILE-

I really hope you enjoy! Ushiwaka's so hard to write for, in my opinion! The wiki's description of his personality makes me laugh so hard-

[thelovelylolly]

Perfect

Summary : You were the perfect padawan and jedi knight. You had everything in line and under control, which may or may not have caused you to catch Obi-Wan Kenobi’s eye.

Warnings : None :) the only thing is the reader is depicted with having longer hair, or long enough hair to pull into a bun. (also not proofread bc im lazy)

Notes : instead of us simping, how about he simps for us? am i right guys? also the start isn’t my favorite and a lil weak. also pt 2, sorry i’ve been dead for over a month now, i havent had motivation to write that much and school is ending which meant testing :) hopefully ill get my motivation back so i can pump out more fics

Ever since you were a youngling and padawan, your master and other jedi praised you for being the perfect example of a new jedi. You got all the training forms down quickly, you were in control of your force abilities and you were always on time to everything.

It wasn’t even hard for you to do so, it was just natural for you. So that’s what stood out Obi-Wan Kenobi the most. You and him had classes together, bunked near each other and advanced around the same pace. You two were knighted around the same time as well.  

You even helped Obi-Wan out when his padawan, Anakin, caused him stress and trouble. Especially during the Clone Wars. You were a very put together general and your clone squadron was highly renowned, so you were ready to go help 501st and, if needed, the 212th. In Obi-Wan’s eyes, you were perfect 

Now, here you two were, working together again. You were on Obi-Wan’s star destroyer and the two of you, along with both of your clone squadrons, were tasked to go check in on a planet. The Republic had gotten reports of Separatist forces trying to turn the planet against the Republic. You and Obi-Wan were standing around a hologram of the planet with points highlighted where there were attacks.

“I saw we spread our forces out in order to reach all those areas quicker,” Obi-Wan commented, crossing his arms in front of his chest. 

You put your hands on your hips. “I agree with General Kenobi. Cody, go tell the men our plan. Once we get on planet, we’ll split into groups then and spread out,” you replied.

Cody saluted you and left, leaving you and Obi-Wan alone. Your gaze fell on Obi-Wan, who was avoiding it. “General Kenobi,” you said, breaking the silence.

His head flicked towards yours, a little bit of blush forming on his cheeks. “Yes General L/N?”

“I’ve been sensing your emotions shifting a lot lately, is everything alright?” You asked, your head titling to the side ever so slightly. Your question made Obi-Wan’s blush increase. 

“Uh,” he paused to clear his throat and think of a excuse, “it’s nothing, just some stress with Anakin is all.”

You hummed as a reply and nodded. “Well, we should go get to the transport ships.”

-----

The trip to planet was easy and so was splitting up. Your men, along with the 212th, were assigned a area of the planet to patrol. Once everything was evenly divided, there was still a little bit of land to cover. It was a flat plain of tall grass with a few tall mountain formations in it. You and Obi-Wan both volunteered to cover it with land speeders.

A transport ship dropped you and Obi-Wan off with two land speeders, once again leaving you two alone. You two prepped your bikes and small amount of supplies you had. The sun was close to setting on the planet and you two planned on only taking a few hours. You pulled your hair into a neat bun so it wouldn’t become a mess from riding your speeder. Obi-Wan watched you and how the late day sunlight made you look as if you were a golden goddess.

“Are you ready to go?” You asked, snapping him out of his thoughts as you mounted your speeder.

“Oh, yes,” he quickly replied, following your actions. The two of you set off towards the setting sun, scanners ready and eyes peeled for any separatist action.

A little while into your patrol, you were getting tired of being quiet. Twilight was setting in at that point. “Do you wanna talk about your stress with Anakin? I know you mentioned it earlier and it seems intense, at least from what I can sense,” you said louder than usual, since you were speeding through tall grass.

“Well, um,” Obi-Wan paused to think of a excuse again, “I think him and his padawan are pulling risky moves in their missions.”

“Don’t they complete their missions successfully?”

Obi-Wan mentally slapped himself. Anakin and Ahsoka were very successful their missions, of course you’ve heard about them. “Uh, yeah, well-”

“Bandits.”

“What?”

“Bandits, coming our way on speeders,” you said, switching the gears on your speeder so you could speed away. You turned right and Obi-Wan followed you. After a few moments, you two saw the bandits still on your tail. “We have to shake them!”

“Let’s split up! I see four, we can each take two,” Obi-Wan replied. You nodded and turned right again while Obi-Wan turned left.

You were doing fine until you looked behind you and saw one of the two bandits following had their blaster rifle out and aiming at your speeder. You gasped as they shot. You jumped right as your speeder exploded. Luckily there was tall grass beside you so you weren’t that hurt from the fall. You had to act dead though, you sensed the bandits coming to check that you were.

Obi-Wan heard an explosion behind him and looked, seeing your speeder blow up. His eyes widened as he thought he worse. He quickly made a sharp turn with his speeder and turned around, causing the two bandits following him to crash into each other in confusion. 

Obi-Wan sped over to where you were, seeing the two other bandits speeding over to him. He jumped off his speeder and grabbed his lightsaber, activating it. As the two speeders were barreling towards him, Obi-Wan simply inhaled and exhaled. Then raced towards them, slicing through both of them. The bandits jumped off their destroyed speeders and hopped onto Obi-Wan’s, stealing it and riding off. Obi-Wan stood their for a moment before deactivating his lightsaber and running to find you. 

You sat yourself up and rubbed your head. Obi-Wan quickly made his way over to you and crouched beside you. “Did they take your speeder?” You asked.

“Yes, come on. I think I see a cave not to far from here. We can stay there for the night and you can contact Cody. My comm link was on my speeder,” Obi-Wan answered, helping you up. Your hair was messy now from the fight and your clothes were dirty from falling on the ground.

“My comm link is a little bit busted, but I think the tracker still works on it. We can activate that once we’re safe,” you replied, following Obi-Wan as he lead you to the cave that he had seen.

--

Obi-Wan was able to make a fire while you tried to fix your comm link’s tracker. You two sat in silence, the fire crackling every once in a while. Obi-Wan watched as you worked, so focused on what you were doing. Some of your hair had fallen out of it’s bun, framing your face. Obi-Wan smiled to himself.

“There, I think I fixed it,” you said, breaking Obi-Wan out of his trance. You pressed a button and moved over to the opening of the cave. “It may take a while to reach the ship since the signal isn’t that strong. I think setting it over here will give it a better chance to reach.”

You sighed and leaned your head against the cave wall, a wave of tiredness washing over you. 

“If you want, you can get some rest. I’ll take first watch,” Obi-Wan said, moving over to where you were so he could see outside. You smiled as a thank you then closed your eyes. 

You were making it harder for Obi-Wan to ignore his feelings for you. Attachments were forbidden by the jedi. With you being the perfect jedi, he didn’t want to be the reason you messed up. No matter how much a struggle it was for him.

Only a little bit in his watch, he felt something heavy fall on his shoulder. He looked over and saw your head there as quiet snores escaped your mouth. Obi-Wan smiled then went back to watching outside. Though, it wouldn’t be long until he got tired and leaned his against yours as he fell asleep.

--

The morning light shined through the cave entrance and woke you and Obi-Wan up. Your fire had died out a while ago, only the ashes and burnt ground left behind. Your comm link was right where you left it. You got up tiredly and picked it up to check on it. 

Obi-Wan stretched a little while you looked around outside. Moments later, you went back into the cave. “There’s a transport ship landing right now,” you said, taking Obi-Wan’s hand and leading him out.

He felt his face heat up at your touch. You didn’t let go of his hand as you two watched the transport ship land in the field below. “Obi-Wan, one last thing,” you started to say.

“What is it?” Obi-Wan replied.

You pressed a kiss to his cheek before letting go of his hand and making your way down to the transport ship. Obi-Wan smiled and touched where you kissed on his cheek. He watched as you met up with Cody in the field and started to explain what happened on your patrol together. Obi-Wan sighed happily before making his way down to you. You were so perfect to him.

[violettelueur]

ITADORI YUJI + FUSHIGURO MEGUMI + GOJO SATORU + INUMAKI TOGE || WITH A MUTE S/O

| featuring : itadori yuji + fushiguro megumi + gojo satoru + inumaki toge from jujutsu kaisen

| warnings : grammar errors and a lot of my side comments

| form : headcanons

| published : 25 november

| request : i really really like your writing, it literally makes me so giddy ngl. i’d like to recommend, if you can, a headcanon with toge, gojo, megumi and yuji where the reader is either blind or deaf or mute. you honestly don’t have to, but i think it be pretty neat if you did

| barista’s notes : hello guys! guess who is probably going back to school tomorrow after being in isolation? probably me~ ʕ ﾟ ● ﾟʔ also i can’t really lie, this piece was a bit difficult for me to write that i had to do some quick research about the topic that is related to this headcanons ʕᴥ·　ʔ other than that, i hope you enjoy your cup of classic black coffee (jujutsu kaisen request!) and have a wonderful day/night ʕ •ᴥ•ʔゝ☆

ITADORI YUJI:

Itadori would be confused at first since you weren’t mute due to you having cursed speech as a cursed technique as Inumaki does.

It would be a bit strange to him at first since he is so used to people talking to him through speech due to his energetic personality, but over time he really does try to learn how to communicate to you.

You would at first write to him with a pen and notepad or maybe a whiteboard to make the writing process a bit quicker and easier.

“Wow babe, you have really nice handwriting”

Then there is you replying with the board covering your blushing face - this action will confuse him as he wonders if he said anything wrong only for you to smile at him to ease his worry

He would slowly learn to read you expressions - though not very well, he is trying very hard.

The gestures that he knows you are trying to convey to him within a second are ‘I’m hungry’, ‘I’m tired’ and ‘I love you’ - because I love you is basically you shaping your hands into a heart (girl, that is so cute~)

Itadori will usually ramble a lot, filling the room with his words which makes you really happy since he seems really happy ranting about the movies that Gojo-sensei made him watch for his training or missions that he had gone to.

Even when you are mute, that’s okay because Itadori’s love language is physical touch - so prepare to receive many hugs and energetic kisses.

And due to that, expressing your love to each other is quite easy since the both of you could just physically inform each other - lowkey I feel like Itadori would give the best hugs, he’s like the sun.

In conclusion, he really is trying to understand you and learn as quickly as possible - even then you wrote to him that it was okay and he should take his time - he really wants to be the best boyfriend possible - even though he is the best boyfriend affection wise.

FUSHIGURO MEGUMI:

Fushiguro is the master of reading your expression and what’s going on in your mind.

Sometimes it really scares you because you wonder if he can read your mind since what he ‘guesses’ were just too accurate and precise.

“You seem like you want to eat Udon today, do you want to go to our favourite noodle place?”

You looked at him with widened eyes with the thoughts of: How the hell did he know what I was thinking? Can he read my mind? 

“Y/N I can’t read your mind”

I......what a liar~

When it comes to your expression, he notices the smallest changes from the smallest crease that is formed on your forehead when you’re either annoyed or stressed to the smallest curve that your lips make you smile.

So when you are annoyed, he would gently take your hand in his and grip it tightly to tell you that he was right beside you and that everything was going to be okay.

He really takes in your expression and keeps them into memory, so it’s easier for him and you to communicate - or he just really likes to see you smile and would do anything to keep you smiling.

Fushiguro is really patient with you when it comes to communication, if you have to write a really long response, he would just patiently wait while either looking down onto the board/notepad to admire your handwriting or look at you and admire your face due to you looking so concentrated to finishing your answer - he thinks it’s a really cute sight.

Sometimes out of nowhere, he would kiss your forehead before giving you a soft smile when you look up - girl once again, I’m blushingggggg~

I don’t know but I imagined that little scenario with him sitting down in front of you with his hands in his pockets, while you’re standing in front of him as you write down something - I don’t know after many K-dramas and romance animes this is what is on my mind.

Unlike Itadori, Fushiguro isn’t that affectionate as his classmate but he would do things for you if you didn’t like doing them like washing the dishes or doing the laundry - basically acts of service.

In conclusion; Fushiguro is someone that lets you take your time and is really patient with you, he wants you to be comfortable and allows you to express what you are feeling in any way possible for you to communicate with him - don’t worry he knows what you’re trying to say/suggest.

GOJO SATORU:

Mr Gojo Satoru. The strongest jujutsu sorcerer will probably have a whiteboard himself like you so you didn’t feel alone.

Or maybe it was for him to proudly show you his drawing, just like he did with Fushiguro that one time.

To be honest, this really does light up your mood and sometimes make you forget that you’re mute to begin with because he just has that power.

There are times where he would write cute messages on the board and lift it up for you to see if you are at a faraway distance.

‘You look beautiful today ♡’ to ‘I love you honey~’

You can’t lie, sometimes it is embarrassing when it is shown in front of his students or when you are talking to someone - he’s basically teasing you at this point.

Also about his teasing, even though you can’t verbally respond to his playful comments, your face just expresses it all making it more fun for him to tease you even further.

Prepare for like 1000 flashes because he is going to take a lot of pictures of you - and you can’t even tell him to stop. Also, don’t try to jump around to get his phone, remember he is over 190cm.

On top of that, expect a lot of cute messaged from him during work or when he is on a mission like ‘I miss you’ or ‘I have some souvenirs for you’.

Sometimes he just texts you when you are standing next to him.

But once again, the blue-eyed jujutsu sorcerer really knows how to keep you happy and motivated even with your inability to speak.

There are times where Gojo is worried about your ability to fight for some reason - maybe he was just overprotective of you - but comes to the realisation that talking and fighting are not the same thing.

You are capable of defending and protecting yourself on your own, it’s just that he forgets sometimes.

Or maybe he uses it as a useless excuse to protect you because who knows, you can’t call for help when you might need it - spoiler alert, you bloody don’t.

But does he care?

Noooooooo~

He just wants you safe in his arms so he can come home with you - or maybe just to tease you even more.

In conclusion; expect a lot of cute drawings from him to lift up your mood as well as a lot of teasing here and there because he is Gojo Satoru…..what in the world did you expect?

INUMAKI TOGE:

Inumaki can really relate to you on the fact that you had an inability to speak, even though he can technically talk, it was still limited to ingredients of rice balls in a normal conversation.

Both of you would learn how to communicate with each other since both of you were hard to understand to other people that were around you.

Your friends would be so confused about how you both would understand each other even when there was just little to no words exchanged.

Sometimes you and Inumaki would smile at each other randomly and that other people around you would wonder what on earth the both of you were talking about.

Lowkey you two were gossiping about the second years.

Yes, you two were the perfect gossip couple - no one will ever know what you’re talking about.

Like Fushiguro, he is also very good at reading your expression and would ask if you were okay if he saw you looking upset or irritated.

“Salmon roe?”

You would then give him a thumbs-up before writing down what was making you irritated like “just a bit hungry” or “I really wanna go home, I’m too tired for this”

Since you and Inumaki couldn’t profess your love for each other verbally, you both would either text each other or just physically express it.

Mostly, forehead kisses and maybe some kunik kisses here and there.

Nothing too heated, but mostly sweet and gentle gestures.

Let’s just say you were the IT couple within the second years.

In conclusion; there would be a lot of lowkey gossiping since you two were basically the masters of keeping secrets and gaining new information and light gentle expression of love, even though the both of you struggled with the verbal aspect of your relationship, it really didn’t affect it at all since you two successfully climb over that issue.