#they’ve lived so many lives that time has melded together into one….

[chryzure-archive]

maybe i’m in the minority w this (or not, idk), but i think i love the mishmash of time periods that shouldn’t be mishmashed. love time being a fake concept. yes, piano man by billy joel would play in the 1910s. in the 1820s. time doesn’t matter. yes, these women will wear skirts with their trains and bustles, and yes, they’ll also wear trousers and men’s shirts and it’s not scandalous. this is all fake, it’s pulling from all time periods in our universe and it’s anchored by all these different time period reference points, and it makes a new universe. it’s not fantasy, but it’s not realistic.

[couldnt-think-of-a-funny-name]

Hi! What is your very specific Twilight AU?

okay, so. New Moon.

party disaster, dumping her and dipping, all happens normally.

but THEN. Bella finds out she’s pregnant.

(and I know you’re thinking- pre-marital sex?!?! Edward would NEVER! but listen. I am the author now. I’ve been around Christians my whole life. shut up!)

so anyway after a million pregnancy tests and a lot of googling about vampire baby legends, Bella’s like...well this is probably gonna be a situation,

Nessie doesn’t have an insane growth rate here because I hate that, so she has a normal amount of time to prepare, and she’s very...aware that the birth is gonna be Rough at best. So she goes to Jacob

who is NOT a wolf yet but Is aware of the pack and the treaty, and they are closer friends already, and she’s like ‘hey. paranormal emergency. you’re the only person in this town who enables me. help.’

 and Jacob’s like I’m Fucking Fifteen and goes and gets Leah, since she’s technically an adult and a girl

(ms. meyer How did you make one of leah’s only 3 character traits ‘upset she’s infertile’ and then not have her support bella’s choices in breaking dawn please make it make sense)

 so they start brainstorming solutions and the best they can work with is. Bella’s gotta ride out the pregnancy in hiding. they have no way of knowing whether she can survive the pregnancy and the only clue they have about whether the baby will be a monster or not is from google searches, but they also can’t exactly take her to an obgyn when her uterus feels like it’s calcified and her ribs are getting broken and she seems to be craving blood

So, Leah’s got her own little place. Bella moves in there, telling Charlie she wants to move back in with Renee (she knows her parents would never willingly call each other so as long as she keeps up communicating with both of them they should be none the wiser of her growing a little dracula in Leah Clearwater’s basement).

Leah has already defected from the wolf pack at this point (because...the Cullen’s left and she didn’t really like any of the guys anyway lmao) so they don’t run the risk of them hearing her thoughts while she’s in wolf form. She goes out and hunts animals, brings them back and her and Jake drain the blood from them so Bella can drink it. All three of them find this extremely disgusting obviously but Jake’s loyal and a little bit lovestruck, Leah’s a supportive friend and queen, and Bella’s just trying to keep her and her baby alive, and none of them feel like trying to rob a blood bank

Bella is 100% certain the baby will just be a baby who happens to like blood, like she was in bd, but the tentative plan is that if a crazy soulless monster comes out of her Leah will...handle that...

Which neither are thrilled about, so Bella’s just trying to focus on staying positive. And between that, trying to survive and stay hidden, Bella doesn’t really have time to...Check Out the way she did in new moon. Like, she’s absolutely still depressed, and she’s still getting an occasional Edward hallucination because carrying a vampire baby counts as reckless in many books, but she’s just more...resigned and pissed than anything. She’ll have days like the ‘possibilities’ scene, but more often than not she’s just telling the Edward hallucination to go fuck himself when he’s begging her to find the real him so they can have Carlisle deal with the pregnancy 

at some point, Seth gets roped into the whole mess (he’s prone to just breaking into his sister’s house) but since he’s like, 13 and The Best Baby Boy he’s immediately supportive. He didn’t even fucking know about the wolves and the vampires until he walked in on a six months pregnant Bella drinking blood while his sister and Jacob are hacking away at a dead deer, but he’s like...you know when you were 13 and sneaking around about Anything made you feel like the coolest person alive? point is he’s helpful

AND he can get away with spending a lot of time at Leah’s house without anyone finding it weird, unlike Jacob, so he starts spending most of his free time there keeping Bella company and brightening her day up

HE is the one who enables her when she comes up with the name Renesmee lmao

(just because she hates Edward doesn’t mean Esme ever did anything wrong!)

“bella I’ll throw you out of this house if you don’t come up with a real name” “leah she’s white you can’t just disrespect her culture like this omg”

anyway these four become the DORKIEST and WEIRDEST little family it’s cute

so then. labor.

it’s less...graphic than in bd because Bella hasn’t been actively dying the whole pregnancy and she doesn’t snap her spine in half, but it’s still. bad.

she essentially delivers a rock that Nessie then begins chewing her way out of. she’s actively bleeding out. Jacob’s having a panic attack. Leah made Seth watch so he would never have unprotected sex and the scare tactic is working. Leah’s covered in Bella’s blood which is not great considering she’s Holding A Rock That A Vampire Is Emerging From

Leah’s been taking classes and researching deliveries so she needs to stitch Bella up and see what else is wrong but Seth is rocking back and forth on the floor crying and Jacob’s screaming and pacing too fast to grab so she’s like. Bella babe I know you’re dying but you need to hold this thing for me ksjdfllksf

so while she’s handling That, Bella’s got this weird little rock in her arms and is watching the baby slowly fight it’s way out like this is a very fucked up egg or something and she’s just. overwhelmed. maybe it’s the blood loss but she’s looking at the messy, scrunchy little face and she’s already in love and envisioning their lives together.

and then, you know, the baby bites her,

she has just enough time to think ‘how did we not think to prepare for that’ before she can feel the venom coursing through her. it’s just as bad as she remembers from James’ bite but somehow...easier to tolerate. she blacks out pretty quickly

the other 3 notice and are like : 👁👄👁

Jacob...literally explodes into a wolf On Spot

Seth darts out the fucking door he’s seen enough for one day

Leah, sole holder of the braincell, realizes Nessie just bit and isn’t drinking from Bella, and deduces this is like...a survival instinct or something. the baby instinctively changes it’s mother first thing. weirdly...touching? 

So she gets the baby and checks that everything is physically okay with Bella (apart from you know. changing species) and is like...guess this is an issue for 3 days from now Leah

more immediate pressing issues: screaming new born baby and oh, yeah, the giant red wolf in the basement,

“Jacob I know this is disorienting but if you break anything in my house I’ll fucking kill you”

she really just leaves the poor boy to go get the baby cleaned up and warm up some of the frozen blood they’ve got in her fridge (RUINING HER TUPPERWARE, BELLA)

she’s not worried about the wolf pack mind meld yet because she knows Sam took the guys on a mission way farther up the coast for a few days and they’ll be too far away to hear Jake. hopefully, by the time they get back, Bella will be awake and they’ll have made an escape plan by then

and as she’s bottle feeding blood to the baby she’s thrilled that it seems to be like...relatively normal and not s horrific monster or anything. mission: unwillingly murder my best friend’s baby has been successfully canceled 

“Oh Goddamn it....Renesmee DOES fit you...”

Seth, from where he’s cowering behind the couch: “told you”

so, Jake eventually calms down, they spend the next few days cooing over Nessie and brainstorming how to handle Bella when she wakes up a vampire, and also nicknaming Nessie ‘Nessie’ because they know Bella will find that intolerable and they feel she deserves karmic punishment for stressing them out so much lmao

so, three days are up. Seth’s upstairs putting on a way-too-elaborate puppet show for the baby with not a care in the world. Leah and Jake are in the basement because they know Bella probably won’t want their wolf blood and their ready to phase in case she gets a little aggressive

but she just wakes up and is like. hey! how’s it going? where’s my baby?

sjdhfksdj they were expecting feral but Bella still has her super self-control. she didn’t even realize she’d changed into a vampire until they told her lmao

Bella’s a little too freaked out to try hunting yet so they give her some of the stored blood they’ve been feeding Ness and she’s like. good to go. Leah’s about to scream like have the elders been exaggerating this whole time or is Bella truly a freak??? lol

So, they spend a couple days just...relaxing, Bella and Renesmee bonding, they’re trying to come up with fun places Bella can move to with the baby so no one she knows finds out, and every now and then Leah and Jake go out and she tries to help him get the wolf thing under control

and then,,,,the pack get back from their mission early

and immediately are able to read Jacob’s mind

so they head over to Start Shit because there’s two bloodsuckers on their land but,

the pack not attacking because Jake imprinted on Renesmee? tired. the pack not attacking because Jake’s Alpha Genes have taken over and declared Nessie and Bella as part of his Pack and attacking would literally start a war? inspired

so they hash the whole thing out....ultimately Sam decides Bella is more of a victim than a threat, and since neither her or Nessie seem to be going on a bloodlust rampage any time soon...he decides to grant them immunity from the whole ‘kill the vampires’ rule. He’ll let her and her daughter stay in La Push as long as they agree to stick to animals and only hunt out of town. PLUS from what little Bella knows about the Volturi, she’s worried about them finding out about Nessie, so they’ll offer protection if that does happen, in exchange for her being able to help them with intel on any other vampire threats in the area (you know like. if a nomad is fucking stuff up in a nearby city, they’ll send her to talk to them first before deciding if they need to intervene. Sam has become acutely aware he has a lot of teens and kids in his pack, so he’s trying to keep them out of fights as much as possible)  

anyway that’s the story of Nessie gaining like 17 chaotic as hell ride or die uncles,

let’s fast forward a bit

it’s like 15 years later. Bella’s not living with Leah anymore, but she’s got a cute apartment in a nearby town, and owns and runs a bookstore on the first floor of it. she got her ged and did college online and teaches night classes at a community college. She’s still in contact with her parents, who Adore the life out of Nessie. She still helps the pack out and they’re all close. Nessie is a handful but in a fun and lovable way. They go on little weekend trips whenever they have time. Bella’s happy.

but then a. Situation. arises.

basically, the Volturi have been made aware of some unknown vampire chasing others out of the pacific northwest and conspiring with shapeshifters. and you know when Aro gets curious he tends to spin things dramatically. who’s to say this vampire isn’t conspiring against all vampires? against them? why has no one’s special talents worked on her? he simply must find out.

Bella and the Pack get word and decide their best course of action for now is to go on the run. they’re not gonna be able to take on a whole army but if they can bide some time and lay low they might be able to figure something out

except Bella is like....I have a teenage hybrid that the Volturi don’t know about yet...it would be EXTREMELY irresponsible to take her with me

but she can’t send Nessie to Charlie or Renee because they don’t know about her...dietary restrictions. She can’t stay with Billy or anyone else in La Push because the Volturi might trace the pack’s scent there and discover her. She’s panicking, they have to leave in a few days max and she can’t find a safe place for her daughter

and then she’s like.....fuck.

she had run into Jasper a couple of years ago- they have the same forgery guy and were heading to his building around the same time as a coincidence. She promised to forgive him for the party incident if he promised not to tell Edward he saw her and that she’s a vampire now. He agreed, but then told her Edward’s been living on his own for a while now and insisted on giving her his number...she never could bring herself to call it or delete it...but now...if she wants to be 100% Nessie is safe and protected...

fuck

So, the past 15 years have been fairly rough for Edward

he’s still convinced leaving in order to save Bella was the best course of action, but like...the vampires canonically mate for life. that’s his soulmate. he’s absolutely miserable without her. he’s thought about cracking and going to find her again but he always talks himself out of it, convinced she’d just tell him she hates him or something

so as stated in his patented Edward Cullen Self Loathing Guide, first thing to do is isolate yourself from all the lovebirds you usually live with. Sure, he keeps in contact, but...not well. he’s currently living alone and posing as a university student. He’s not even really sure what he’s supposed to be majoring in. He’s mostly been in a haze since he left Forks.

and one day....he gets a call from an unknown number. he ignores it, thinking it’s a spam call. but then it calls like 8 more times in a row and he figures answering might be a bit smarter than simply throwing it at the wall

And Edward...swears he came back to life and immediately had a heart attack the second he hears Bella’s voice

He feels breathless and disoriented the whole conversation, trying to figure out if his memory did her voice any justice, trying to rush out 15 years worth of apologies, trying to comprehend she’s actually speaking to him.

But Bella’s very blunt on the phone. She doesn’t want to let herself get emotional. She’s on a time limit, and she has to focus on getting her daughter to safety

And Edward swears he somehow misheard her the first ten or so times she told him. He had a daughter? that wasn’t possible

“she has the audacity to be your Evil Twin so I’m pretty sure it’s possible”

so she gives him a rundown. she needs to go into hiding, no I don’t need your help with that, gives him details about Nessie, what she’s like, what she likes to do, her diet, her favorite color, how annoyed she is by this whole situation, “Edward I know you don’t love me anymore, but I remember how protective you were, and that’s what I need Nessie to have right now. She needs you right now” and Edward wants so badly to refute Bella’s claim of lost love, to tell her he has absolutely no idea how to be a parent, but...her tone is aching so much he can barely speak. He can’t let Bella down again, and he can’t let this little girl he foolishly created and left down anymore than he already has, either.

So he agrees, she tells him to be at the airport in a few days, and hangs up. 

Edward loses about half a day staring at a wall in shock, before he jumps into preparations.

Bella told him while their daughter possessed some speed and strength, hunting was fairly dangerous for her. She was more delicate than his kind, and had a heartbeat. Reheated blood bags had been their best option, and she also needed human food as well. He also had to get a room ready for her- he wandered around stores for hours, reading young girls minds to see if there was any furniture or decorations that were universally liked- which was of course, fruitless, but he did manage to find a handful of things he was sure Bella would have liked at that age, and prayed for the best. He somehow got himself covered in purple paint that was a nightmare to get off. Bella had sent him some forged documents claiming Nessie was his younger sister he’d won custody of, and he got her enrolled in a nearby school. He lived every day leading up to her arrival staving off a panic attack.

it wasn’t until he was on the way to the airport that he realized he forgot to inform his family about this life update. they must’ve been on a hunting trip, because he got nothing but voicemails 

imagine being Carlisle and you come home to a voicemail from your son who’s banished himself from the family that’s just like ‘hi. you’re a grandfather now. I’m having a nervous breakdown and might crash my car. call me back at your earliest convenience I suppose” like what would you DO

 after he gets to the airport he starts panicking again, realizing Bella had never actually sent him a picture, worrying about how he’d find her, but then- he sees a tiny girl with untamed, dark red curls, features strikingly similar to his own that are pulled into the expression Bella always made when she was reading, absently chewing on her lip, and before she looks at him with her mother’s big brown eyes, he already knows who he’s looking at, and he’s certain if he was human his tear ducts would be having a fit right now

Renesmee, however, seems less willing to have an emotional meeting. She mumbles out a simple greeting before gathering up her bags and heading for the door, Edward rushing behind her to try and help

listen. the awkwardness of Charlie trying to connect with Bella. but 10000x worse because of Edward’s overthinking, self-deprecating ass and Nessie being like ‘ah yes the guy who broke my pregnant teenage mothers heart, fantastic’ lmao

the car ride is p a i n f u l. Edward’s trying so hard for light conversation and Nessie’s barely giving one word answers. Bella had warned her about the mind reading so she was carefully keeping her mind blocked, which Edward is trying very hard to be understanding about instead of annoyed, but By God does he want to know everything about her

when they get back to his place, she quietly thanks him for the room and then promptly locks him out of it lol. He spends the rest of the day just pacing back and forth until he realizes he should eventually feed her lmao

and that’s...kinda how the first couple weeks go. she only emerges from her room if he bribes her with food, she awkwardly tries to dodge his questions, he drives her to school and then begs her to tell him how it went when he picks her up, he spends his college classes distracted because he’s freaking out constantly about how to successfully bond with her. His favorite time of day now is night, because she can’t block her mind while she’s asleep, and even if her dreams are all nonsense they’re still...part of her that he gets to know.

His family keeps begging him to let them meet her, but he’s pushing back because if she’s this bad at adjusting to one new family member, how is she going to handle six more?

(meanwhile Alice and Rose started a group chat with her and are having a ball clowning Edward lmao)

wait ksjflksd I think this vine perfectly sums up the dynamic im envisioning  https://youtu.be/wQZIUHNORHg

anyway they....very slowly make some progress. much too slowly for Edward’s taste, but hey.

Like he finds out snacks she likes. or jewelry she likes. stuff like that and just...wordlessly leaves it around for her lmao. he thinks it’s like trying not to startle a deer, Nessie thinks it’s more like a cat trying to gift you a dead mouse, but either way it’s weirdly endearing.

He notices she always has a huffy little frown when he picks her up on Wednesdays. So instead of begging her for an ounce of information of her school life, he asks her one Wednesday morning if she’s excited for the day and she admits she has an elective class every Wednesday with a girl she doesn’t get along with.

He gets her school photos (and Weeps) and realizes apart from her room the home is fairly barren of decorations, so he buys a bunch of picture frames and hangs up the school shots, and some pictures of the Cullen’s over the years, and the few he has of Bella that he could never bear to part with. Other than catching her smiling at the prom picture of her parents, Nessie doesn’t say anything- but the next time he comes home from hunting, there’s a pile of pictures of her growing up on the table, and he starts weeping all over again as he hangs them up

(there’s one of her and Bella hugging and looking at the camera with identical grins and joy in their eyes, he can’t help but put that in his room. He hopes one day he’ll get to see a scene like that in person)

He starts trying to get her out of her room a little more- he still hasn’t managed to a get a ‘favorites’ list out of her, so he starts playing movies Bella loved, to see if any of them lure her out. some do, some don’t- he got halfway through a Lord of the Rings marathon, which was Torture in his opinion, but then Ness came out and quietly asked if he could restart it and suddenly they became his favorite movies ever.

Bella’s not able to contact her on a set schedule or anything because of her situation (and you can bet your ass Edward’s contacted every vampire he knows and ordered them to help her out if they come across her or the Volturi), and Edward realizes that’s probably taking a toll on the girl, so he starts telling her stories of her mother when he knew her in Forks. She’s particularly amused by the blood typing incident- the first time Edward hears Nessie properly laugh, he literally starts crying on the spot

could you imagine the sheer panic if she ever gets so much as a cold

And yes, she’s still pissed on Bella’s behalf, and yes, she specifically blasts 70s music because Bella told her he hates it one time, and yes, if he looks at her like he’s a kicked puppy one more time she might claw his eyes out, and yes, she refuses to introduce him to her friends from school because she Knows everyone will then start asking her about her ‘hot brother’ and she can’t live with that and also can’t live with him knowing that so she told him if he ever introduces himself to any of her friends she’ll set him on fire, and yes, she’s homesick 95% of the time but...he’s growing on her. like a mold, or something.

(okay, maybe when Seth tried to analyze why Mamma Mia is her favorite musical, he might have had a point. half a point. quarter of a point. shut up.)

And Edward’s still trying to not have a panic attack every time she’s out of his sight- he’s got Carlisle keeping tabs on the Volturi for him, and it’s not exactly hard for him to keep track of her through other people’s minds- but she’s so tiny and her heartbeat is Too Fast and what if she inherited her mother’s unlucky streak??

but they’re toeing the line of co-existing peacefully and Edward’s scared to push it past that

then he has to, because it turns out he sent her to one of Those Schools where the parents have to be involved in the school in some way or another and Nessie’s Annoyed

sdkjfsdkjf she keeps trying to get him to just sign up for like pta meetings or something and he’s like ‘I need you to understand you are the only person in this town I actually know or like I Cannot survive around fundraiser moms I can’t’ 

so she’s like ugh fine I’m in the drama club

listen.....Stage Parent Edward Cullen.......the power this holds...

that’s right this whole post was an elaborate ruse for me to make a musical theater headcanon again lmao

no okay but seriously he starts off just helping build sets and stuff like that but then midway through the year their music teacher gets fired and the schools like begging him to take over because they can’t find someone in enough time that’ll know the music for the show they’re doing and he’s like “I need you to understand Nessie will never talk to me again if I start actually working at her school” and they’re like “She also will never talk to you again if we have to cancel the big musical, though” and he’s like. fuck.

silent treatment for a week and a half

lmao so now he’s trying to juggle being an overly-enthusiastic stage parent who’s making costumes and sets and kinda crying backstage when he sees his daughter in her costume with also being the music director for the damn show and trying to teach a bunch of kids how to read sheet music 

one day he ended up in a coffee shop with the hair and makeup moms, gossiping about the cast’s love lives, and he literally doesn’t know how he got there

is it wrong to pass Nessie in class even though she’s putting all the wrong answers on the test but he Knows she knows the right answers and is only answering wrong to try and get a rise out of him

Bella sneaks into town to see the show- they thought it would push their luck if the pack came, but they sent an ungodly amount of flowers and candy. When she snuck into the house while Ness was sleeping she Was Not expecting to find Edward up to his elbows in sequins, trying to fix a bedazzler he accidentally broke in frustration, muttering under his breath about how if Nessie’s romantic opposite in the show doesn’t keep his thoughts clean he’s gonna kill him- and it just cracks her up. She WAS nervous about seeing Edward again but now she’s assured he’s still a dork lol

So Edward freaks when he sees her but they don’t wanna wake Ness up so they’re trying to be quiet but like. they’re going through it 

Like Bella Wants to be pissed at him but she can’t, she still loves him- and while she can’t just get over what he did to her, it’s also not lost on her that ‘leaving to protect someone I love’ is literally what she had to do to her daughter

And Edward....Edward, who only left to give Bella a chance at a safe, human life, seeing Bella in front of him as a vampire, knowing it’s his fault she ended up that way and she had to go through it alone, had to raise a baby herself because he’d made it so hard to find him...knowing if he’d just pulled his head out of his ass he would have been able to be there for her...would be able to form a coherent sentence around his love right now, would have long and fond memories of Nessie’s childhood, likely wouldn’t have to watch Bella hide from the Volturi...he’s back in a self-loathing spiral already

But they haven’t seen each other in so long and they just don’t want to...deal with the unpleasantness right now, so they just push it aside. Bella helps Edward with the costumes. Edward fills her in on what she’s been missing with Nessie. Bella tells him some stuff about when Ness was younger. They just spend the night talking, and it feels like no time has past between them at all- which just makes the heartaches a little stronger

When Nessie wakes up to her mother there she’s ecstatic- bubbly and loud and glued to Bella’s hip all day, giving her in depth play-by-plays of her school and rehearsals and friends she’s made, bouncing on her toes all morning, hyper, giggly, and- it kind of breaks Edward’s heart a little, even though he knows he hasn’t really...earned this side of his daughter, yet. 

(at least he got his wish of seeing their twin smiles in person)

(he wishes he could see them every second of every day)

so the girls spend the day catching up while Edward mostly feels like a thirdwheel, and then they have to get Ness over to the school so she can get ready

Bella decides to hang out around the school theater before the show actually starts- she leans against the wall next to the piano, the two talking in hushed tones while Edward runs through songs. Bella really missed watching him play- the only thing that managed to drag her away from it was when Nessie called her to the dressing room to help with a hair emergency 

she didn’t talk to him much at intermission, her attention being stolen by the rest of the Cullen family (who had been Very Loudly supporting the show so far, she knew Ness was probably dying of embarrassment backstage)

after the show, the three went back to Edward’s and just...talked. Nessie was gushing about the show and eating while her parents assured her she was the greatest actress ever born, simple stuff like that. she fell asleep sandwiched in between them on the couch 

Bella realizes she’s never going to be able to bring herself to leave again if Nessie wakes up, and tells Edward as much. He clearly doesn’t want her to go just yet either, but...she’s on the run, it’s not like she has much choice 

He has so much he wants to say to her but he just- can’t. it’s not the right time. but he’s hoping she can see that in his eyes

Bella shifts Nessie off her shoulder so Edward can hold her, and she gives him a light kiss and says ‘thank you, Edward’ before disappearing in a flash. she needed to go before she lost her nerve.

Edward can’t bring himself to let Nessie out of his arms, so instead of carrying her to bed he just stays there, holding her, trying his best not to think that that could be the last time for a long time he’d ever see his Bella again, trying not to let thoughts of a life he gave up unwittingly consume him

okay I didn’t mean for this to be So Long so I’m cutting it here uhh...let me know if anyone wants a part 2? sorry lmao

[tristintea]

Endersleep

AU that’s basically a bunch of headcanons about endermen ft. Edward the Enderman and Lethe (Ranboo) :D

~

Endermen do not give birth, like piglins, humans, and other mammals do. Endermen do not lay eggs, like sirens, avians, reptiles, birds, dragons, and fish do. In fact, their method of reproduction is more akin to that of spores. Everywhere an enderman goes, particles are left behind, little bits of ender that fade but never quite dissolve. Those little particles are replaceable, insignificant, until they find enough of themselves that they can remember what it feels like to be ender.

It is nigh impossible to find infant or adolescent enderman anywhere, even in the End, where they are the only creatures other than the nearly extinct enderdragons (see: The Enderdragon, A Summary) and face no natural predators. At first, it was assumed that endermen were at risk of extinction, but studies showed no significant changes in population. One dedicated researcher by the name of Rhianna James, however, spent her life with these cryptic creatures, eventually learning the answer to this perplexing question.

As James discovered, most endermen spawn fully grown. It is only very rarely that there are enough particles to spawn an enderman but not enough to make an adult mind. That is why, when an enderman finds an enderling, it will adopt it into its haunting, and all members of the haunting take on the role of a caretaker. You will never find a more protected child than that of an enderman.

Edward’s haunting is gone. Edward has been wandering for many years now, and as the grief that accompanied the loss turned to nostalgia, they’ve regained their old vigor for life. Now they see sights worth seeing, places worth being, people worth meeting; now they search for others to spend their nights with. 

It has been far too long since they’ve sung the Old Songs properly.

Travel is dangerous, Edward has come to know very well. Others, non-endermen, often meet Edward with a sword in hand, either in defense or in greed. Edward themself has learned that connecting gazes is not a threat to non-endermen, but they have yet to be able to control their instinct to retaliate in anger.

The weather is also dangerous. Being caught in the rain is painful, and the only escape is to teleport to one of the other dimensions. Snow is beautiful, but when it melts it hurts just as bad. 

It has just stopped raining when Edward hears a call that is painfully familiar but distinctly off. It’s the cry of a wounded enderman, but the sounds are higher-pitched and slurred. They don’t register that, though; they are far too preoccupied with searching for its origin, ears flared outward as they listen intently for the next call.

They find a small, precious thing, under the dripping leaves of the forest. They have to ignore the sharp sound of the sizzling of their own skin with every drop that hits them, and it is worth it, because of all the endermen to be blessed with an enderling, Edward never thought that they would be one of them.

Their enderling is a little strange. They are split down the middle, one half of them the proper coloring, with the bright green eyes that they have been told all enderlings have for many years, while the other half is white and its eye red. But Edward does not care. They are theirs, and they will protect them with their life. 

As we know, endermen, when stressed, become aggravated; however, what James discovered is that they go into a catatonic state once the perceived threat is gone. This state is called endersleep, a term coined by James herself, and it can last from anywhere between a few minutes to decades. In fact, an enderman might never wake up from endersleep, and yet it can still live out its entire expected lifespan. Its haunting will feed it, nourish it, and carry it with them either until its death or its awakening. 

James wrote that she had only twice seen an enderman in endersleep. “It was sudden[....] One moment [the enderman] was screaming, and the next, [it] had collapsed. I thought [it] had passed out,” she wrote in one of her earlier entries. In a later entry, she said, “The haunting showed me their fourth member, that they had been carrying with them for some time now. I had wondered about this, with no hypothesis in my thoughts and only bafflement[....] [To] my surprise, I found that [it] was not actually dead, but breathing very slowly as though in a deep slumber.” Then, much later, “[The enderman] woke from endersleep today. I had assumed that [it] would never wake up again[...] now I realize that this is a common occurrence.”

While their enderling rests, Edward carries them away from the forest and the remnants of rain. They are badly injured, splotches of burning skin still sizzling even now, and the humming of their pearl is weak and broken. Edward hurries, a line of particles left to fade in their wake. They cannot let their enderling die yet. 

They trill comforts to their enderling, who has grown too weak to do anything but chirp when the pain grows too much. Even with a dying star pressed to their chest, Edward cannot feel upset. The fact that they held one at all will be enough for them, if Lady Death takes them into her own arms.

They move past trees and stones and hills, ignoring the hiss of a creeper and the whistle of an arrow, because such things do not touch them. They keep moving even as the sky begins to lighten and the hills grow taller and the air grows clearer. Their pearl aches, but Edward does not falter. Their enderling has stopped chirping, has stopped moving entirely; so they must move for them, must sing part of a song they don’t know if they’ll ever truly hear again.

They are cold.

Endersleep could be compared to hibernation, if it weren’t for the fact that for endermen, cold is nothing to be worried about. When an enderman is too warm, it grows drowsy and confused, but when an enderman is cold, its pearl is free, and the colder it gets the more energy it has, until of course it is too cold to move. This is one reason why endermen are nocturnal: to avoid the heat of the sun.

Edward does not slow when they see high stone walls towering over them. They teleport to the other side of them, into the quiet of a city, and they do not quiet their song to match. 

They are looking for one of the non-endermen, someone who has a potion of healing. 

Of course, another reason why endermen are nocturnal is the End, their original habitat. The End is a dimension filled with clusters of endstone islands, floating in the ever-black void. There is not much natural light there.

The city is filled with lights, flames flickering in iron cages hung over every door and at every street corner. It starts to meld together in Edward’s eyes, blurs of orange and yellow smudged with shades of grey and blue. 

There. They come to a halt, shaking the fuzziness out of their vision, and only take one look at the potion bottles in the overworld building before they enter in a silent explosion of purple. 

They can still hear the humming of their enderling’s pearl, soft and weak next to their own loud humming, and it makes them slowly walk around the shop. They regret that they do not know how to read Overscript very well. It takes precious time to make out the characters, and longer to stitch them together to form something understandable. 

Harm. Stre. Fir. They don’t look past the first few letters, knowing enough to remember that Healing starts with none of them. Rej. Po. 

Heal.

Edward knocks the bottle from the shelf with one sweep of their tail, and it shatters on the floor with a sound that seems to cut into their skull. They do not flinch. They find a scrap of cloth, and they drape it over the puddle of potion and glass, so that the liquid seeps in and the glass stays behind. 

They leave, rubbing the dripping cloth on their enderling’s shoulders, and behind them a livid alchemist bursts into the room with curses on his tongue and a gleaming sword in his hand.

It’s hard to say whether James’ research is reliable, though. She dealt with delusions for many years before the end of her life, and there are journals filled cover to cover in nothing but nonsensical scribbling and occasional letters, evidence of one of her more questionable projects. She thought that endermen had their own language, going so far as to claim that they had books and even enchantments, and for the rest of her life she tried to convince everyone she met that endermen were players, not mobs. 

[bouncyirwin]

Under The Skin

Pairing: ShiSaku

Rating: PG

Word Count: 943 Words

Beta’d by @sleepyfoxfanworks

This was inspired by @sariasprincy-writes comment on my fic Is It My Turn Yet? ~

——————————————————

It’s not easy to get under someone’s skin, to meld together. To coax tendrils of your energy into the fibre of their being, to slowly mend them using your life force.

Sakura thinks if this was easy then everyone would do it. Yet medics all around the shinobi world are always understaffed.

No one can heal like Sakura. No one can sink their chakra so deeply into skin and muscle and bone and still come out intact in the end.

It’s important not to get attached, not to accidentally draw on your patient’s natural life force.

Which is why this is a lot more difficult when Shisui is the one lying under her healing palms. Sakura knows this body like she knows her own; understands its chakra, its scars, the way it mends and the way it breaks.

She knows the mind that inhabits it, the tender soul that’s contained within. It goes against her instincts not to sink into him.

Shizune’s wary eyes study her carefully as Sakura works on broken ribs, repairs a cracked femur and soothes a ruptured lung. She can’t help the way she aches with his pain, the way her own ribs twinge and her lungs constrict tightly. The way her knees feel weak under the weight of her worry.

“He’s going to be okay,” Shizune murmurs to her as she cleans the wounds littering his face. “He’s survived worse.”

Sakura doesn’t reply.

She’s intimately aware of what he’s survived from abuse as a child and injuries as a ninja. Those hands have bled more than they had any right to, and this precious body contains a history of bruises and scars that would cripple anyone.

Sakura spares a moment to brush a soothing hand over his strained eyes and feels a sting in her own. The chakra residue in the smaller capillaries leaves them at risk of rupturing and he’s bled enough as it is.

Her hand moves back to lungs that struggle to keep on breathing. The way his chest stutters over every exhale has her own winding tighter and tighter until she feels choked.

“He’s going to be okay,” Shizune reminds her softly, pulling her attention back to the surface from where it had sunk to the depths of him. “Stay focused, Sakura.”

Sakura redoubles her efforts, green eyes scanning frayed skin critically. There’s a badly scorched patch of skin on his hip that she meticulously heals, and another on the inside of his elbow.

Her eyes steadily avoid his face, though he looks nearly serene in slumber, like all he can feel is her touch and not the battlefield of wounds decorating every inch of him.

Sakura cleans the blood on his abdomen, sutures deeper cuts that mar the skin she loves so much. Every dip and ridge of his abs is a memory of a happier time; a time she tickled him to tears, and another when she lost herself in the feeling of his skin.

She takes the time to erase the little cuts on each one of his fingers, touches him softly as she goes and wonders if he feels her in his dream.

“I think that’s enough for now,” Shizune says gently.

They’ve healed all of his serious wounds and Sakura has moved on to his minor ones.

“I’d like to keep going,” Sakura says quietly.

Shizune opens her mouth to argue but Sakura cuts her off. “Please.”

Shizune sighs. “Don’t run yourself dry,” she beseeches and leaves the room.

The door shuts with a soft click, leaving Sakura in the eeriness of a still room filled with beeping monitors.

Sakura runs healing fingers across his scarred jaw, down his bruised throat. Soothingly strokes the scab on his collarbone and the aggravated collection of scrapes on his shoulder.

Finally, her fingertips settle on cracked lips, closing a small cut crusted with blood.

He looks heartbreaking when she steps back to survey him, lying exposed on the operation table and hooked to so many wires.

She can’t bear the sight of him like this.

Sakura makes a trip to the closet for a sponge and a bucket. There are nurses for this kind of job, but Sakura fears, irrationally, that they won’t do it right. That their clinical touches will hurt him, will make him feel cold.

Instead Sakura settles by his bedside and wipes him clean of blood and grime. Scrubs gently at his skin, as carefully as she can manage. She cleans every inch of him, spends long minutes getting the blood from under his nails until they’re spotless.

When she’s done, she opens a fresh roll of bandages and wraps up all his wounds; his thigh, his ribs, his bicep, and finally around his head, where he sustained a nasty hit above his brow.

Sakura stares at the still shadow of his lashes on his cheek, brushes her finger delicately over the arch of his brow. “I wish you wouldn’t do this to me,” she whispers, carding her fingers through his curls. “It’s cruel, Shisui.”

The monitor carries on its steady rhythm.

Sakura is thankful for that small mercy. She bends to kiss his head. “Get well soon,” she tells him and strokes his cheek in farewell.

It’s not easy to get under someone’s skin; to feel every beat of their heart struggling to live. It’s even harder to take the broken vessel of the man you love and put him back together when every part of him keeps trying to fail.

Sakura shuts the door after her and goes to hide in her office, feeling wrecked.

“Just be okay,” she prays in the silence. “Just be okay.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Unraveling

The Unraveling is Ben Rosenbaum’s debut novel. If you’ve followed Rosenbaum’s work to date — glittering, cerebral, hilarious short fiction — then it will not surprise you to learn that this is a book that is as weird and wild as shoes on a snake.

https://www.the-unraveling.com/

I wrote a novella with Ben, “True Names,” a tribute to the Vernor Vinge classic. It took something like five years to write and got nominated for a Hugo. Writing with Rosenbaum was a genuinely surreal experience.

https://archive.org/details/TrueNames

Like, I’d add 500 words to the story and email it back to him, and he’d mail back 500 more, along with a 2,000 word essay on the nature of consciousness and identity and reality and what he was trying to get at with his 500 words.

The fiction was amazing, but the notes were like mainlining Rosenbaum’s neural matter, some kind of overwhelming frazzledrip mind-meld that I couldn’t quite impedence-match. I could see that there was something amazing going on, but I just couldn’t quite…understand it.

It was like attending a recital of the world’s greatest poet, but he was declaiming in another language…which turned out to be the language of the dolphins.

But, you know, in a good way.

That’s pharmaceutical-grade Rosenbaum, the stuff that comes up while he’s figuring out how to downshift it so it makes sense to the rest of us — his Grundrisse or Silmarillion. It’s not really meant to be enjoyed in its pure form — just kind of admired from a safe distance.

Rosenbaum’s been working on The Unraveling for a long time — nearly two decades — and I think the time was basically spent figuring out how to skate precisely on the rim of infinitely dense Rosenbaumium-218 and something that’s safe for human neural consumption.

And he just nails it, honestly. But the consequence of his careful just-this-side-of-too-strange-for-mortal-ken means that summing up this book is hard.

Fundamentally, this is a book about a sociological rupture: the end of a long, stable period of seeming utopia.

It’s set on a distant world in a distant future, something like a million years from now. The world was colonized long, long ago by a long-haul spacefaring human civilization with incredibly advanced technology and the kind of wild hair that sends you to other galaxies.

Hundreds of thousands of years later, after a lot of turmoil, the spacefarers’ descendants have deliberately constructed elaborate, metastable social and technical structures that allows for a trillion people to live in a hollowed-out planet surrounded by artificial moons.

Everything everyone does is visible to everyone else. Everyone has “followers” and when you do something interesting (or bad), you go viral and your follower count shoots up. Everyone is in constant contact with a bunch of AIs that serve as advisors on social comportment.

People live in households constructed of collections of “Mothers” and “Fathers” (more on this later) and as many kids as they can get away with, based on ratings with the people who follow them — if your ratings tank, you lose your kids and are forcibly evicted and divorced.

People have lots of bodies. Three is a conservative number, but some people have dozens of bodies. Mostly these bodies are human-ish, but some people go for weird canids and other fancies.

Also, they live to be about 1,000, and among them are “aliens” — later-come spacefarers who have access to lost technology that allows them to live for hundreds of thousands of years. People seriously stan these aliens. They’ve got huge followings.

There are, finally, two genders.

The Staids are kind of Talmudic scholars who spend much of their time cloistered with sacred spoons (yes) in religious ceremonies where they memorize, recite and debate the “Long Conversation” — their civilization’s lore.

Meanwhile, the Vails are hotheaded, romantic, violent lovers who are into rough sex and honor-battles in closed-off dojos.

Vails and Staids marry each other and raise kids together, but they don’t have intergender sex, which is considered seriously gross.

Gender, meanwhile, has nothing to do with whether you have a penis or a vagina. Some people have both, or several of one or the other. Some people have genitals that consist of prehensile, twining moss, or long feathers that droop to the ground and drag behind them.

That’s the world, more or less. The hero is a young Staid named Fift whose childhood best friend is Shria (a Vail). It’s OK for them to be friends, but there’s more going on, heavy Romeo and Juliet stuff with high stakes due to AI and social media panopticon and whatnot.

Fift and Shria are manage to keep it under wraps until the Clowns — one of the many political factions — declare a new show, and Fift and Shria both end up holding Tickets. As they travel to the outer reaches of the world to find the Clowns, they happen upon a riot.

This riot is a seriously unusual thing for this society. It turns out that despite 20,000 years of political stability, there’s this simmering Vail underclass that resents its political fortunes and wants to overthrow the order.

Being caught in the riot puts Fift and Shria’s forbidden friendship in the social media crosshairs and threatens to cost them both their families and more.

As Fift’s Fathers and Mothers strive to perform social propriety for their feeds, they miss that society itself is unraveling — that the riot was the torch that set off a slow-moving, unquenchable blaze that creeps and then races through the trillion people of the world.

Fift and Shria, meanwhile, become the focus of the revolutionary uprising, a symbol for all the discontented, gigastars whose actions are monitored by billions (think of Locke and Demosthenes from Ender’s Game, but far more anxious).

Rosenbaum skilfully weaves all of this stuff together with madcap multi-PoV action-scenes inside all three of Fift’s heads at once, and a juxtaposed claustrophobic story of forbidden teen love and the vast, slow collapse of an unimaginably huge and ancient civilization.

It’s bananas. It’s hilarious, it’s mind-bending, it defies description and beggars belief. It’s really quite a thing.

Anyway.

Ben and I are launching this strange artifact Monday Aug 23, with LA’s Book Soup. I’m going to make him explain it.

https://www.booksoup.com/event/benjamin-rosenbaum-conversation-cory-doctorow-discusses-unraveling

[tropical-gothic]

Kaze no Kuni Indigenous Medicine

Disclaimer: These are all headcanons. Fun things I like thinking about. If you like it or have additions, pls feel free to reblog. These headcanons have been hashed with @thatshipcat who has brilliant ideas on Kaze no Kuni’s pantheon and Sunagakure in general (and is also my forever editor ;A; Bless you Kitty).

x.X.x

Before the Shodaime Kazekage “unified” the tribes of Kaze no Kuni (the Land of Wind), there existed several different systems of medicine. 

Said tribes, both settled and nomadic, bumped into each other, traded with each other, and inevitably influenced each other. So, there were some constants among the different tribes—- like the Desert Mother and the Great Sky above. There were also some names and ideas that sound like they’ve been through a bad round of pass the message, and this was fine. Each had different ideas on disease causation in Kaze no Kuni.

In terms of medicine, there were three main systems— but there are no solid lines written in the sand between culture and culture. The first, and the one we’re most familiar with, was the chakra-based medicine. The second was Karam— or a system of medicine that leans heavily on seals and amulets. The third believed that disease was caused by an imbalance of Heat, Breath, and later Blood (though some would argue, didn’t even fall into Kaze no Kuni’s main systems of medicine until after the unification— it, therefore, has no name).

The nomads of Kaze no Kuni brought the chakra-based medicine from their constant interactions with other societies who ventured into Kaze no Kuni from the East. These would include those from Konoha, those from Ame, Kumo, sometimes as far as Uzushio— but mainly, this medical system was solidified when the Jashinists came over and started building temples in Kaze no Kuni that became places of healing. [Will be expounded on in a later headcanon]

Meanwhile, there was a settled society in the Western Waste that lived on the edges of a large meandering river, where a bed of black sand kept fertile lands. There was nothing beyond this large river in the Western Waste— or at least, nothing human. There were other beings who can bless humans, who can curse humans, and with this cause disease. From here came the medicinal system of Karam that relied on amulets, seals, and living in harmony with the other unseen beings. [Will be expounded on in a later headcanon]

Down south, where the desert dissolved into the ocean and humidity was high, there was a system of medicine that leaned on keeping the balance between Heat, Breath, and eventually Blood. Disease happened when heat or cold gets stuck in the wrong places, or if blood stagnates. To realign the body, they often used a series of massages, filter tinctures to drink, or lather herbal ointments on skin. Their medicine came from their surroundings— both the desert and the ocean, and where the two meet in harmony.

And then, everything changed when the Shodaime Kazekage attacked.

Well, sort of.

Shodaime Kazekage wanted to unite (conquer) Kaze no Kuni— and now, after his own tribe trained in chakra-based fighting, was the perfect time. He knew that absorbing cultures and learning for them was the key to evolution and surviving in the desert. However, those same desert people did not have a solid identity as Kaze no Kuni.

So, in a strategically brilliant (if cold) move, he decided to use an us vs them mentality to forcibly unite the tribes. He invented the myth of the invader, the outsider, which the many tribes needed to fight against. Jashinists proved to be an easy target of this policy.

In the end, the Shodaime Kazekage kicked Jashinism out of Kaze no Kuni and then hauled representatives of the different tribes into Sunagakure— with his chakra-based clan being the dominant one. Much of the melding together of the three systems of medicine was facilitated by Chiyo et. al. who hailed from a nomadic tribe that practiced a little bit of each.

Currently, Sunagakure still leans heavily on the chakra-based medicine that is widespread in the Narutoverse. But these practitioners also prescribe written charms, amulets, and write fuuinjutsu using henna on skin as needed. There is a specific branch of medicine in Sunagakure that deals with seals for closed-surgical techniques, for example. There are also times where it’s most appropriate to align the heat, breath, and blood of a person— though this finds more favor in civilian populations than a state-sponsored medical institute. However, much of Suna’s knowledge on poisons and herbal medicine comes from this third system of medicine.

For now, the thrust is towards learning from other places. Suna would often bring in foreign experts or send out their students to learn different systems that could be integrated into their own—— but always /moulded/ and indigenized to fit Suna (much to the chagrin of other villages who think that Suna doesn’t practice it correctly).

[bodytoflame-ao3]

guess i’m just jealous

originally posted 04/19/21

willow and buffy; about faith.

post-homecoming, pre-bad girls.

Read on Ao3

“What’s… what’s going on with you and Faith?” Willow asks, cautious of how to broach the subject. She doesn’t look up from the book — demon research waits for no one and nothing, not even the complicated personal life of a slayer.

Faith’s danger and sex appeal, granted, two things Willow’s never really considered much, but she’s also so much more. And for some reason, she makes Willow’s blood boil. The way they fight together is like they’ve known each other forever — and Buffy didn’t even know she existed a month ago. But she’s known Buffy for two years (it feels like so much longer), and she’s her best friend.

“It’s…” Buffy smiles, “nothing. She’s just…” She’s complicated.

“‘Cause if you’re jealous of her, you shouldn’t be. You’re a way better slayer, and she’s all,” she pouts, thinking, “…broody.” It’s a bold accusation, considering Willow’s the jealous one — stupid Faith and her stupid leather pants and her whole stupid stealing her best friend. But maybe that’s why Buffy wants to hang around her so much?

“I’m not jealous! She’s a slayer, I’m a slayer, we… slay things.” It’s their job, and it’s kind of in the name. “I don’t want to be like her,” she says, calm, “She’s impulsive, and doesn’t listen to me, but—”

“She’s also like… smashy-punchy… kissy-kissy… bad news!” Willow explains, gesturing wildly, still not big enough to encompass her interpretation of the other slayer. In short, she’s not someone you’d want to bring home to your parents… and, Willow realizes… Buffy’s done exactly that. She sighs, grounding her emotions back inside the library. “Plus… I kinda miss being a card carrying member of the Scooby Gang. It’s not the same,” she pouts, “not going on patrols with you and stuff. Why does Sunnydale even need a second slayer?”

“She’s good at what she does,” she says, finishing what she’d been thinking for the entirety of Willow’s tangent.

(Handsy and reckless is what she does, Willow thinks.)

“And she’s got my back.” She sees Willow’s face fall, immediately backpedaling. “I mean— not that you don’t, but she’s got the slayer strength to… rough ‘em up!”

Slayer strength this and that, Willow’s staked vamps too! But nothing like the two of them, she reminds herself. It’s almost like they’re psychically linked — half of Willow wants to chalk it up to some kind of super slayer mind meld powers and call it a day. Still, she protests. “But I’m good moral support!”

“Will,” Buffy takes her hand from across the table, stopped mid-page turn, “You’re the best moral support. And your research has saved our lives… I don’t even know how many times. You’re kind of a secret badass.”

She blushes, shrugging, not used to this kind of flattery. “‘S not a big deal.” It means that much more coming from her — decidedly badass herself.

Buffy purses her lips. “I know you’re still upset.”

“It’s just… you spend a lot of time with her, but you act all weird around each other. And I don’t know if I should be upset you’re spending more time with her, or happy that you don’t actually seem to like her all that much.” Willow sighs loudly, “And it sounds so mean when I say it out loud.”

She laughs. “She’s a slayer too, Will. We have a connection, whether I like her or not.”

“Do you?”

“It’s not that I like her… but we’re the only two in the world. We shouldn’t both be here.” she sighs. “It’s gotta be a slayer thing. Like I can sense when she’s near, or in trouble. She came out of nowhere the other night, staked a vamp that was sneaking up on me. Pretty handy.”

So… that’s a yes on the mind meld? “That’s… cool.” I guess.

“Why do you hate her?”

“I don’t—” Willow cuts herself off when she realizes her voice has risen to a near-yell in her defense, taking a deep breath to compose herself. “I don’t hate her. It's...” She does. She’s a best-friend-stealer, she flirts with anything with a pulse, and given Buffy’s track record, Willow wouldn’t be surprise if it extended to the pulse-less as well. And she’d probably be a boyfriend-stealer too if they let her stay around long enough. “Like you said, she’s impulsive. And I don’t want her to put you in danger. We need our slayer.” I know I do.

“Don’t worry about me, Will. Nothing’s changed. I still kick demon behind like no one’s business. Just… doesn’t hurt to have another one of me around sometimes. Less danger for you guys.”

“It’s just been all weird since homecoming,” Willow admits, because really, that’s when it started — the weirdness. Shouldn’t she be grateful to not have to charge demons head-on? That Buffy doesn’t have to do it alone? “Why did you invite her?” And it isn’t like she ditched Willow. She had a date — she had Oz. She’d just always thought that prom would be one normal, fun night for the three of them; her, Buffy, and Xander.

“I thought… if she felt like she belonged…” she trails off. “If we have to work together, we should all be friends.”

Willow frowns. “I don’t think it works that way.” She doesn’t want her to be friends with Faith — there’s just something about her, that every time she sees her talk to Buffy, it’s all prickly across her skin.

Buffy’s silent for a minute, staring back down at the book in her lap. Willow recognizes the look on her face as she turns the page. “Will? Come look at this.”

[barb-aricyawp]

Number 2 for Bucky but may I request something like metal teeth implants, fangs perhaps, idk you're just rlly good at this stuff and I'm amazed 😃🤌🏻

This is so sweet! And what an excellent idea. I ended up breaking my five minute rule because this swept me away.

trigger warnings: body modification, teeth, detailed orthodontic experimentation, blood, drugs, this ended up being pretty gnarly

Show Me Your Teeth

pt I, pt II

When Bucky comes to them, he is mute. And he is afraid.

Steve doesn’t blame him. He alternates between states of cognition, sometimes calmly aware, sometimes sharp and wary. But often disoriented and spooked. 

They can’t even get near him long enough to remove the metal visibly ensnaring his teeth, melding his jaw shut.

The first time they tried, Bucky bashed his own head into the wall. Abject panic.

It was a Soviet experiment, towards the end of their custody of the asset. Or at least, that’s Tony’s best guess. Given the quality of the metal and the way the metal teeth were implanted.

Steve sits by nervously wringing his hands while Tony tinkers around in Bucky’s mouth and Bruce takes x-rays. 

Bucky, to his credit, is leagues calmer than Steve. He would seem the picture of composure...if it weren’t for the clench of his fist over his thigh. He’s frightened. Each time Tony’s scraper clinks against his teeth or skims his gums, that fist tightens.

When Bruce returns, he has the x-rays in hand.

“What’s the damage?” Tony says, stripping off his latex gloves. Steve’s eyes flicker over to Bucky to see his reaction. There is none.

“As far as I can tell, all his teeth are implants. And the screws in his jaw aren’t dental grade, which means they’ve started to corrode. Which explains the smell.” Bruce rubs his face, looking tired. “But, uh, it gets worse.”

Worse than metal rusting in Bucky’s jaw? Worse than metal teeth sealed together so Bucky can’t eat or drink or speak?

“They didn’t just seal his teeth together, they also wired his jaw closed.”

“Seems like overkill,” Tony mutters.

Steve stiffens. But a soft sound comes out of the back of Bucky’s throat. A laugh. He’s laughing. Even rigid with terror, disoriented and vulnerable, Bucky manages to laugh.

Fondness blooms in Steve’s chest. He takes Bucky’s hand and squeezes.

---

The idea had been to equip the Soldier with metal fangs. Originally, the Soviet techs had designed them to be retractable. They even carved tunnels into the gum tissue above his incisors...or attempted to. The gums kept getting infected. They puffed up and oozed corrosive pus.

Eventually, they settled for ripping out all his teeth and replacing them with titanium implants. 

The Soldier managed to remain stoic and silent during the removal, but when the techs drilled the implant screws into his mandible, he fought like a dog.

Three of their techs lost a finger that day. Two would sport circular bitemarks for the rest of their lives.

When they finally sedated the Soldier enough to finish the procedure, his face was slaked with blood. Even under the influence of drugs, he sobbed.

---

The Soldier was different after the procedure.

In the field, the titanium fangs worked like a dream. Many agents would speak fondly of the many times they witnessed the Winter Soldier rip a man’s throat out with his teeth.

“Like watching a wolf take down a deer,” one agent would say to anyone who would listen. “Beautiful.”

But the teeth caused more problems than they solved.

Previously, the Soldier’s weapons were removable: his assault rifles, his knives, even his arms. But the teeth? Those couldn’t be removed.

Constantly equipped, perhaps suffering orthodontic discomfort, the Soldier behaved erratically after missions. He bit more than one handler, and bared his teeth at anyone who came too close.

It was eventually agreed that the teeth needed to go.

---

Part II

[chaseatinydream]

pirate king (88): epilogue || atz

Perhaps, somewhere deep in you, you’ve always known that it would have to come to an end.

Death isn’t a concept known only to humans. From the second the breath of life passes through any living being, it fights, flees and struggles to stay alive. The reason a a shoal of fish scatter before a shark, why birds take to the sky to escape stray cats fighting for their own sustenance, death is the one language every creature understands.

Survival instinct. The basest, most primal drive shared by every living being on this earth. Stay alive.

That’s what you’re fighting as you walk towards the black dagger pointed directly at you, the wind screaming in your ears, power surging through your fingertips even as you feel your body crumbling apart under the onslaught you’re putting it through. Slowly chipping at you, sand falling through your fingertips, the end draws closer and closer no matter how much you’ve tried to fight it - inevitable.

Two responses, fight or flight.

You can no longer run from this anymore.

“Finally, we meet again, sea goddess.”

An odd feeling stirs in you, strangely serene even as the storm swirls around you, lightning flashing and thunder raging. Right, you remember now, your memories slowly surfacing the more your body deteriorates. The sea, the storm, the sky. You could never ben human to begin with. This is who you are.

Hot tears burn your eyes, sting against the cracking skin of your cheeks, but you bite your lip and stand strong, back straight and eyes fixed firmly on the man in front of you. The blade in his hand trembles at the sight of you, and somewhere in the depths of your memory, you realise why Hongjoong’s gaze had drawn you from the very beginning upon your first meeting.

The same fierce gaze. The burning glare. Both father and son had the same eyes.

“You.” The sea goddess speaks with you, every word falling from your lips echoed by thunder, its resounding cry. His eyes burn the same way they did years ago, and the image of a venomous green stare blazing with tears superimposes itself over the vision in front of you, a scream of vengeance from a single man left alone on a deserted beach louder than the howling wind - I will never forgive you! “We’re here once again.”

“Right where you killed my crew.” Commander Kim speaks, voice even as he keeps the blade pointed straight at you. You can feel the very power thrumming in your body flowing through his and all about you. This place rises from the depths of aeons of memories - a single ship, splintering upon the sheer indomitable force of the storm, the screams of its dying crew, the anguish of its only surviving captain. “I’m here to take back everything you took from me.”

“You want to kill me.” You say slowly, nails digging into your palm, and skin splits beneath the force before it too, is blown away like chaff in the wind. “Your soul, it’s mixed with the essence of the sea. You’ve committed taboo of the highest order against yourself, foolish mortal. What you’ve done cannot be reversed.”

Sluggish, like a waking beast, an ancient force churns slowly in the commander’s body, wrapping its claws around the human soul. Like a predator, it latches on to the only support it has, burying its tendrils so deep that you can’t tell it apart from the original soul. There’s no going back for him.

All water eventually flows back to the sea, and now, it’s reaching out for you.

Blood trickles slowly from the corner of his mouth, his eyes mirroring yours - you see the primal force in them as in yours. “Then I’ll have to see it through till the end.”

In the blink of an eye, the waves surge.

Higher and higher, until they tower high above you, a seething mass of water and wind, the storm sounds its death knell - and it all comes crashing down upon you. Move, the survival instinct in you screams, and you throw your hand up. Beneath your feet, the sea twists and writhes like a massive beast before it responds to your call, crashing into the incoming wave and breaking it apart in a shower of salt water that rains down on you from above.

Commander Kim stumbles, more blood dripping from his lips and staining his teeth red, while burning pain engulfs your legs, so agonizing that you collapse to your knees. You can’t think straight, fingers of your one remaining hand burying itself in your hair even as you try to force yourself to your feet once more.

“-hin Hae! Chin Hae!” A voice fights its way through the death knell of the storm, and you turn your eyes to see three people on the beach. Yeosang, mouth agape, Wooyoung, his eyes wide with horror, and your captain, shaking on his feet and staring at the scene before him in shock. The entire island they’ve been standing on has been reduced to nothing but a bare strip of sand by the commander’s massive wave, yet only where Kim Hongjoong stands stays untouched.

“Captain, you need to escape-” You begin to shout, but before you can do a thing Hongjoong unsheathes his sword, and with a cry runs towards his own father, blade swinging down in a merciless arc.

Horror leaps into your throat, and you take a step forward. “No!”

Commander Kim moves aside just in time as Hongjoong brings the cutlass down in a flash of wicked silver, dodging and avoiding every swing aimed his way. Yet he doesn’t retaliate even once, wordlessly defending, never attacking as his own son raises a blade to him with the intent to kill.

“That blade can kill gods, can’t it?” Hongjoong snarls over the roar of the storm, and lightning races across the sky, so dark it almost resembles night. The clash of steel rings in your ears, punctuated by claps of thunder. “Then it should be able to kill you too, am I right?”

His words echo over the storm. The tears in his one remaining eye cry even louder than his words.

“Hongjoong, I’m warning you, get out of the way!” His father utters, a guttural growl that sounds more bestial than human. “I can’t control this much longer, and if you try to fight, I-”

The energy in the commander tightens its grip on his soul, squeezing. The more your body falls apart, the better you see things that humans cannot - the cracks emerging on that soul, the strain of the commander who is struggling to resist its power in its entirety, and for a moment, panic floods through you.

“Captain, run!”

You hear the sound of a soul breaking, like glass shattering. Like a now empty, broken vessel submerged at the bottom of the ocean, it can only helplessly watch as water gushes into it, wiping out every last remaining trace of what it once used to be - and then it’s as if the entire sky turns black.

The scream you hear tears the sky in two.

Another wave rises and sweeps towards you, picking up in ferocity and height until it almost blends in seamlessly with the sky overhead. You throw up both hands and the sea obeys your call, sweeping up into a massive hurricane that envelopes you in a spinning mass of water and wind like a protective cocoon. And not a second too late, because in the next moment a wall of seawater crashes into the barrier you’ve thrown up, the sound thunderous enough to make your ears ring.

“I will kill you, sea goddess! My crew, give them back to me!”

More tears fall from your eyes, hot and burning. Memories overlap with memories, and you can feel them, the bones lying at the bottom of the seas, so deep that the sun will never reach them ever again. Hear the screams of the dying, the feeling of suffocating, their cries and pleas to spare them - you feel their deaths in your body, the sea that you encompass, and tears only come faster, harder - this is why the gods do not have emotions.

Right. That was you. This is who you are. What you are.

“You should have taken my life with theirs!” Commander Kim screams, face so twisted with fury and grief that you can barely recognise it, and you can barely raise a hand to block it, feeling your body crumbling apart more and more under the repeated attacks. “I would have gladly given my life for any of theirs, so why-”

Another wave.

“Why!”

The sky shatters, lightning cutting a clean line through the clouds, and a torrential downpour falls.

“Why did you have to take them from me?”

The sea rises from every direction, storm and sky melding together, and brings their joined fists down upon you.

Your shield breaks apart under the onslaught, and you cry out as you’re flung onto the beach like a limp rag. Head swimming, you taste copper in your mouth, vision going double as you try to sit upright, shaking uncontrollably.

Just how many had he killed to become this strong? Just how powerful is his desire for vengeance that he was able to endure this long?

Run.

The voice in your head chants, louder and louder.

Run. Run. Run.

You can’t win. Flee. Escape. Run!

A pair of arms wrap around you, warm. You glance up shakily to see a pair of concerned green eyes staring down at you, and one hand rises up to brush your tears away. “Wooyoung...”

“What happened?” Wooyoung’s voice breaks as he looks over you, his own eyes turning wet with tears even as the rain pelts down upon him, soaking his shirt and dripping from his hair. “Chin Hae. What’s going on? What’s all this about you being a sea goddess? What’s happening to you?”

Fresh tears roll down your cheeks the second you hear the anguish in his voice. “I’m sorry-”

“Father, stop!” You hear Hongjoong screaming over the storm. “Stop it! If your crew could see you right now, you’d be a shame to every single one of them! This isn’t what they’d want you to do!”

“Don’t bring them up when they’re already dead!” Thunder shakes the entire sky, the sound ringing painfully in your ears. “They’re gone, and this is the only path I have left! As a captain, you understand, don’t you?”

Through your own tears, you see Hongjoong’s lip trembling as he stares down his own father, blade shaking uncontrollably in his hand. A single tear rolls down his cheek.

“I understand.”

Commander Kim nods, eyes hard. “If you do, then-”

Hongjoong takes a deep breath, and closes his eyes. When he opens them, his eye burns with the same fire you had seen all those years ago on his father’s face, and you can’t seem to breathe.

“I understand.” Hongjoong repeats, voice shaking, but his words come out clear. “It’s exactly because I understand,” he raises his cutlass at his father, pointing it directly at his chest in a clear challenge. “That I will die before I let you hurt Chin Hae. Because that’s what you taught me. Because that’s my role as a captain, just like yours.”

Commander Kim stops moving for a second, blue eyes wavering, and for a split second you see a flash of green once more.

“I will never forget everything that you’ve done. But even when I denied it this entire time, I realised my whole life was spent chasing after your back. I wanted to become a captain like you.” Hongjoong grits his teeth, tears spilling from his eye, mixing with the rain as they slip down his cheek. “But the man you are right now, is not that captain anymore.”

A single tear falls from his father’s eyes.

“Hongjoong, I...” He begins to say, but at that moment, he collapses to his knees, coughing and retching. Dark red blood begins to trickle from his mouth, his nose, his ears, and your mouth falls open in horror. His body is failing. Water always returns to the sea, and if it’s been kept in this mortal body for this long...

“Hongjoong, get out of the way!” You scream, throwing yourself forward. And just in the nick of time, because the second you do, the sea crashes down right where Hongjoong had been standing, and would have swept him into its depths if it wasn’t for your arms wrapped tightly around him protectively.

“Father!” Hongjoong cries out as Commander Kim groans in pain, red soaking into the sand. The waves leap to and fro like untamed, unbridled horses, increasingly wild and erratic. “Father, stop this! Please! I’m begging you!”

Commander Kim shakily rises to his feet once more, and to your shock, one of his eyes are a familiar shade of green once more. That shouldn’t be possible, how could his soul fight back against the sheer power of the entire ocean? Another tear spills from that one eye, and he smiles - a sad, resigned smile.

“What...” He says, so softly you almost miss it, as he looks at his son and then down at his own hands. “What exactly... am I doing?”

The wind screams overhead, piercing and shrill. Lightning flashes, outlining the world in white light and darkness. Commander Kim stands on the beach, alone as he was all those years ago, as the sea whips itself into a frenzy behind him, wild and uncontrollable.

The power in him responds, tearing his body apart from the inside out. He’s a vessel filled close to bursting, and the second he does...

Commander Kim knows as well. He turns to look at you, eyes beseeching. Black wind and rain whips around him, ferocious, near terrifying and yet he looks so, so sad, a lost, broken man in the middle of it all.

“Please.” A plea, begging. “Stop me before I end up killing everyone in this place.”

Tears stream down your own cheeks.

Don’t! The survival instinct in you screams. Don’t do it! You’ll die! You-

“Father, what are you talking about?” Hongjoong screams, voice painfully raw. The sheer desperation in his voice stabs you straight through the heart. “What are you doing? Don’t leave me again! Father!”

He’s talking to you.

You rise to your feet, liquid fire burning your entire body, and take one step forward. Another, and another, until you’re standing in front of the commander.

“You’re already a great captain.” Commander Kim says gently, and there’s so much warmth in his eyes as he looks down at his grief stricken son. “A greater captain than I ever was. You’re my pride and joy, Hongjoong.”

Hongjoong wails.

He turns to you, a self deprecating smile playing on his lips. “Sea goddess. I underestimated you, and I am sorry.”

You nod your head, but hold out your remaining hand as an offering. You know what you have to do.

“I understand why. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry too.”

He smiles at you, and takes your hand.

“Wait!” Hongjoong stumbles forward, collapsing onto the sand once, before he forces himself to his feet once more, reaching out for you. With a pained smile, you hold up your crumbling hand, and a gust of wind physically holds him back, preventing him from taking a step closer to you.

“Chin Hae!” You hear Wooyoung cry out, Yeosang’s sobbing. “What are you doing? Where are you going?”

Taking a deep breath, you turn and give them a final smile, voice trembling. “Commander Kim’s body is falling apart, and if all the power accumulated in his body is released here, a storm large enough destroy every ship in the ocean will rage. I’m going to bring him to the bottom of the ocean, so we can minimise the impact.”

“But you’ll get caught in it, won’t you?” Wooyoung screams, body shaking from sheer agony of watching you walk to your own death. “Chin Hae! You’ll die!”

You try to smile for him, to reassure him. For some reason, at this moment, all you can think about is them. Will they be alright? Will they be okay? “I know. I’m dying anyway, Wooyoung. This is something that only I can do.”

Hongjoong screams, wordless, fingers digging into the sand as he sobs, his entire body trembling from the force of his cries.

“Captain,” you say softly, even as Hongjoong cries harder. “You’ll forget all about me once I die. It’ll be okay. You won’t feel any pain, nor any guilt. It’s alright-”

“I never want to forget you!” Hongjoong screams, and at his words, the tears you’d been holding back finally fall from your eyes, your heart throbbing painfully. “Never! How could I... how could I ever forget someone like you?”

“Then please,” you manage through your tears, “don’t forget me, okay?” Sobs fills the cavity of your chest, and a muffled cry escapes you. “I thought... that if all of you were to forget me in the end, that this life I lived would have been completely meaningless. But now...”

You take a deep breath, and give him the brightest smile you can muster. “But now, nothing about this life was meaningless, because I spent it with all of you.” Another sob slips past your lips. “You called my name. With you, I was human. Chin Hae...” you bow your head, trying to stifle your sobs. “Chin Hae lived a very blessed life.”

Hongjoong doesn’t say a word, only staring wordlessly at you as if he’s trying to commit every feature of your face to memory before its too late. His eye is brimming with tears.

“So thank you, captain, for everything that you’ve done.”

With that, you turn around and take a step forward, Commander Kim walking with you. The two of you walk towards the ocean, where the storms rage and clash, and step into the water without looking back.

The water rises, as if to swallow the both of you whole. You can feel the sea surging, thrashing in response to your presences. You continue walking. The water rises to your chest.

“Chin Hae! Chin Hae!”

The water rises to your ears, and their cries are blocked out by the waves.

You continue walking.

All this while, the hand in yours doesn’t let go.

The two of you walk till there’s nothing beneath you. Until darkness surrounds you, and the weight of the sea is crushing from above. You grip the hand in yours tight as you sink, slowly descending to the bottom of the ocean, and you can no longer hear the storms overhead.

You open your mouth, and water rushes to fill you. Your mind goes peacefully blank, nothing but warmth surrounding you in this freezing ocean, consciousness fading. You wrap your arms around the man whose hand is in yours, and hear a soft thank you resound in your head as his power swells, tipping the breaking point.

An orange and black flag against a smoke darkened sky.

A single green eye, a confident smile. Warm arms wrapped around yours, furious pounding on a wooden door.

The taste of cream, an awkward scowl. Strong hands gripping a cutlass.

Rising sun breaking the dawn from a crow’s nest. Two rings braided in brown hair.

The scent of herbs and medicine. A cheeky laugh, soft hands and a softer heart.

The sound of meat sizzling over a stove. The taste of vegetables playfully stuffed into your mouth

The feeling of hot blood and gunmetal under your fingers. The sound of flipping pages, a serene voice.

A commanding bellow, pink beaches of sand.

Purple hair, and the warmth of conjoined hands in a pocket. Scarred wrists, a tender gaze.

The sea surges one last time, and vaguely, you see a gentle smile in the back of your mind.

Your lips part to form his name with the last bit of air in your lungs.

“___”

Somehow, you think, you can hear him calling your name.

[trashcankitty12]

Tecna Headcanons

Tecna Mode, the Guardian Fairy of Zenith would like to make your acquaintance. 

She’s a tad sassy, a bit of a show-off when it comes to her projects, and a video game expert. 

(All headcanons are for my main au verses, “Balance/New Company of Light” and “Left”.)

-Tecna tends to be reserved in her emotions, but just as her family knows, her friends (and Timmy) quickly learned that Tecna can be rather affectionate when she feels safe and loved.

-As a Zenithian, Tecna has an easier time learning new technological systems and how to rewire electronics.

-She also tends to be able to see at night. Not better than nocturnal animals, but better than most Magical Dimension people.

-Tecna is also somewhat immune to being electrocuted. Somewhat. (Lightning attacks by storm harpies and Stormy aside, electricity doesn’t bother her. In fact it sort of wakes her up.)

-Tecna is really close to her parents, partially due to her being an only child, partially due to her curious nature putting her in the middle of her parents’ work because she was determined to help.

-(She didn’t necessarily want to be an only child, and her parents had wanted another… But Magnethia had had a hard enough time getting and staying pregnant, that they felt Tecna was more than enough.)

-Tecna may have been a bit of a spoiled child… Her parents made sure to get her the latest technology when it came out, and they gave her her own workspace when she got older.

-As close as she was to both of her parents, she’s closest to her mother. Magnethia loves having Tecna help out at her and Electronio’s workshop. They have created many new gadgets and gizmos together, including specialized robots to do household chores. (Which is why Tecna has no idea how ‘obsolete’ cleaning tech like brooms and vacuums and mops work.)

-Because of Zenith’s climate, most animals and plants do not live/thrive there. So Tecna has had minimal contact with non-robotic plants and animals. Which led to quite a shock when she came to Alfea and saw all the greenery and the birds. (And Kiko and Flora’s plants.)

-Tecna, as a Zenithian, isn’t as bothered by the cold climates as other people would be. In fact, it’s the heat that bothers her.

-Which is why she’s not a fan of the beach. She doesn’t mind going and hanging out with her friends, but the heat and the sand and weird feeling of the ocean just sort of… Bugs her. (Which is why she stays more on the actual beach and wears specialized shoes to keep sand away from her feet.)

-Tecna has a major sweet tooth and has ‘borrowed’ from Stella’s secret stash of chocolates before. (Please don’t tell Stella…)

-She doesn’t like veggie meals much. It’s the textures and slight tangy tastes that turn her away from them. (And as a Zenithian, she doesn’t need them as much.)

-Physically speaking, she’s not in the best shape. She’s like… Bare minimum shape to pass Griselda’s and Real Avalon’s classes. (She’s decent enough at running away and decent at feats of climbing, but trying to be acrobatic or trying to physically fight with her fists or feet is difficult without her winx/fairy forms).

-She’s not a strong swimmer either. But Layla has helped her get to be decent enough that she can make it to her destination without getting herself hurt or drowned.

-Layla has also helped Tecna get better at dancing, which has in turn helped Tecna with her rhythm and dance video games. (Take that Rubis!)

-Tecna is extremely competitive when it comes to games. Video or board or card games with Tecna can lead to arguments and a smug Zenithian fairy. (Bloom even brought some from Earth to try and trip Tecna up… Monopoly and Uno are no longer allowed on Alfea’s school grounds. Thanks, guys.)

-She may not have the best grades at Alfea, but it’s not her fault… Well, not entirely. Okay so she could stand to study more… But her projects just need a little more tweaking. (Please Ms. Faragonda, understand.)

-Tecna doesn’t have the best handwriting… But her typing skills are out of this world.

-Tecna doesn’t have a big appetite, but when she’s hungry, just hand over the plate. (She doesn’t just get hungry, she gets hangry.)

-Everything has to have a place. Tecna’s workshops/workrooms may be messy and unorganized due to everything always being used, but her actual room and desk? Spotless. Everything put away neatly. (And she tries not to look over to Musa’s side of the room when they were still sharing a dorm. That’s not her mess or her side, it’s not her problem.)

-Tecna is sort of a mom friend. But she’s the sort of mom friend who will be telling you why what you did was stupid while she’s bandaging you up. (“Dammit Layla, I told you this would happen. Why did you think you could jump from that height without your wings?” “Musa bet I couldn’t do it.” “Why do I even bother?”)

-(Yes, Tecna has swearing problem. But only around friends or on her own. She tries to tone it down around parents or those who are in charge.)

-Digit, despite being just as big a gamer and tech guru as Tecna is, is also more in touch with her emotions (thanks to having roomed with Amore for so long). Which is great, because Digit helps Tecna naturally learn more about her own emotions without pushing or pressing. (And damn does it feel good to see Tecna and Timmy being more open with each other.)

-Tecna is unabashedly an anime fan. (Or at least, the Magical Dimension’s version of anime.) And she loves comics. (Which shocked her when Stella showed her her own collection. They may have a few get-togethers just to talk about their favorite comics now.)

-Tecna first transformed at 12, after trying to protect a younger cousin from an incoming snowstorm they had gotten lost in. Thankfully it helped her boost her power to signal for her mother and aunt.

-At Alfea, Tecna is part of the STEM club, anime club, robotics, and gaming club. Thanks to her and a few other Zenithian fairies, Alfea’s robotics club finally beat out Red Fountain’s.

-Speaking of Red Fountain… Tecna may have borrowed Timmy’s badge to enter into Red Fountain’s weaponry.

-(She was always curious about how Red Fountain’s weapons and ships worked, and the best way to figure that out is to take it apart and put it back together… She may have even upgraded a few things… Please don’t tell Saladin.)

-Tecna didn’t thrive as well as she claimed while in Omega. She just didn’t want her friends to feel guilty about not coming for her sooner.

-She understood why it took so long. And it was lucky that she was used to Zenith’s frigid temperatures. But it just… She did her best.

-She had to fight like hell most days, trying to keep herself alive and safe.

-And once she was back at Alfea… She had nightmares. (Which she logged into her tablet to try and help herself with later.)

-Eventually, during spring break, she went home and talked it all out with her parents. They had a hard time letting her go back to Alfea after that, but they knew they couldn’t keep Tecna from her education or from her friends.

-(The nightmares eventually faded a bit. But they still haunt her from time to time.)

-Before the whole Earth mission, Tecna and Timmy were one of the first couples to move in-together without any of the other members of their teams.

-They got an apartment on Zenith near their university. (They still go to their classes, though they take them mostly online these days. And they still keep the apartment, though it’s mostly a glorified work space now.)

-Tecna surprisingly gets along really well with Riven. They help each other with their respective partners and they like to build and work on projects together. (And play video games. They’re both super competitive and watching them go at it is like watching a train wreck. It’s awful but you can’t look away.)

-Tecna finds Flora to be the hardest to converge with. Their personalities and feelings on different issues tend to clash and it makes it difficult to meld together.

-Surprisingly, Tecna finds Stella to be the easiest to converge with. It’s like they just complement each other on a new wavelength.

-Tecna didn’t have any interest in music until rooming with Musa. After a few months into their rooming situation, she asked if Musa would teach her how to play an instrument because she felt it’d be cool to come up with her own soundtrack (for a video game project she’s been working on since she was like 12). Musa got Tecna a keyboard and the rest is history.

-She doesn’t get emotional about a lot of things, keeping a cool and level head to focus on facts is a Zenithian trait after all, but when someone messes with her projects or belittles her work or comes after the people she loves? You’re gonna get fucked, and not in the good way. (She has a real temper when she blows up, and people tend to get electrocuted.)

-Once they started their Earth mission, Tecna had to mentally fight herself every day to not upgrade or complain about Earth tech. (“Bloom… How the fuck do these people live like this?!” “Tecna…” “Please. Just one computer. Let me upgrade one computer.” “People will notice and we have to keep a low profile.” “Dammit Bloom!”)

-Tecna has several projects going on any given day, and since dating Timmy and having been bonded to Digit, they’ve been included in helping her with them.

-Most are gadget-based projects, things that girls need immediately or things that can help them. Some are robotics or engineering/vehicle based. But the one she’s the most proud of is the video game she’s still working on. (It’s almost done and she hopes to be able to publish it soon! Maybe sooner than expected since she’s got backing from Sky, Stella, and Layla.)

-Tecna’s main goal, after all this craziness with being a Winx Girl is over, is to take over her parents’ business and to further the Mode Brand of tech. (And maybe even expand into the video game departments. Depending on how her video game goes when she finally releases it.)

[dwordza]

Fuck it, lets be gods

Dream: God of Mystery. Controls the enigmas of the mortal realm. Ironically, has close to no power in the pantheon, and is Extremely pissed about it. Minor God of Control, Power, and Thieving. If you and/or a loved one has recently found one of your most prized possessions stolen, there’s a chance the Mystery God has found himself a new plate of meat to play with. Tread with caution, and keep your enemies close. No one likes the God of Mystery.

Schlatt: God of Secrecy. Every whisper you share, he hears. Frequently visits those having affairs, just to fuck with them. Also visits those suffering from addiction. Minor God of alcohol, drug usage, and rams. If you feel as though you’ve become something no one forgives, it’s likely the Secret God has touched your soul with bile. Be not afraid when you die, he welcomes all with a smile and a swig of whiskey.

Techno: God of Trust. Be mindful to never use those around you, he will tear you in twine. Aside from being a God, he also acts as a servant for the Angel. Minor God of loyalty, war, and revenge. The servant of blood is not to be fooled with. A savage beast born from mans greatest ailment: his own dishonesty. Do not lie to a pig, for they will never find your corpse.

Philza: God of Creation. All mountains and streams are made of the same gods tears. Those who follow the Creator are forever under his control, and even in death do they serve him. The Angel of Death, the Blood God, the destructor. Atoms cannot be destroyed or created, and you must get your building blocks from somewhere. Minor God of birds, death, and dreams. Those who hope are often imbued with the spirit of the Blood God. But do not try to escape his afterlife, he’s a firm believer in “You Only Live Once”.

Ranboo: God of Duality. The cost of silken fists is a broken memory. An eye for an eye is what the Dual God lives by, forever in a constant battle with himself. He’s haunted by apparitions of the Mystery God, cursed to have sacred hymns whispered into his psyche. Those touched by his careful hand frequently forget their names. Wrote the 3 Great Tomes, but lost 2. Minor God of memory, cats, and the Sky.

Wilbur: God of Possession. He has his things and you have yours, keep it that way. Those touched by his demanding grasp often hoard and steal. He is defiant towards the pantheon, cast out by his own Father and cursed to roam the earth as a wandering Bard. Minor God of music, explosives, and performance. Any performer or star wears a pendant of the Possessive God on their neck, for good luck. His unfinished symphony lives on in the demigods he raised, and in a siren mistress.

Tommy: Demi-god of Attachment. Before Tommy, the world was very bleak. Only the gods felt connections, and from the Creation God bore a human child capable of caring. He sent him down to be raised by his eldest son, the Possessive God, and to be brought into his godhood by age 16. This did not go as planned. The Possessive God disappeared without a trace, and the Mystery God took Tommy under his wing. Tommy has been cloaked by Mystery, and left to fend for himself with no friends in sight.

Tubbo: Demi-god of Devotion. Tubbo met a lone boy in the forest, and climbed a rickety tower to where a demigod reached for his home. Together they’ve become great soldiers and best friends, working with others to fight back against the tyrants who wish to hurt them. Visited by the Servant of Blood and brought to their knees by the Mystery God, they only wish to find peace alone with themselves. Tubbo has visions of a Secret God, a goat man who leads him to make decisions to favor the very gods he wishes to know. The God of Creation shows distance towards his children, but to Tubbo the most.

Fundy: Demi-god of Trickery. Cursed into a fox body with the brain of a genius, Fundy wanders the mortal world searching for someone who will simply listen to him. Luckily, with the help of the Dual God, Fundy found himself to be a bipedal beast with glowing eyes and great, sharp teeth. He now serves the Dual God and keeps his many tomes in pristine order. Though sometimes, when the Gods sleep and the town dreams, he stares into the sky and longs to find his lost family. Fundy has lately been seen drinking with a man people can only describe as “severely intoxicated, like really man go home.”

Quackity: Bard of Corruption. A humble butcher hellbent on murdering the Servant of Blood, Quackity uses his supernatural qualities to morph his face into another. He frequently takes the mask of the Mystery God, and finds himself the owner of much land simply because he resembles a God. He mocks the Gods, too, creating personas that dirty the Gods names and create propaganda about their intentions. Quackity is very intuitive, extremely smart, and with enough cockiness about him that he can serenade even the coldest hearts with his lovely music. He sold his butcher shop and took himself and his good friend Sapnap on a great journey to find a God willing to fund their operation. And they did.

Karl: God of Prevention. Karl has traveled through time and space trying to stop the terrible things he’s seen, and he’s failed every time he’s tried. Minor God of dance, wealth, and the arts. Karl was so close to resetting again, when a wild bard and an AWOL knight begged him for funding. He... he couldn’t turn them away. He found himself enamored with their jokes and the way they danced around his temple, chasing each other with sticks and small daggers. Karl, for the first time in his eons of living, danced. This timeline wasn’t like the others. In the others, his Bard died. In others, his Knight never left the castle. In the others, he never swung in their embrace and asked them to stay forevermore.

Sapnap: a once loyal knight turned to murder and thieving, Sapnap is a force to be reckoned with. He once dueled the Servant of Blood himself, and would’ve won had it not been for the Servants second wind. For his good fight, the Servant rewarded him with the Axe of Peace, a enchanted weapon created from the Servants very soul. Sapnap sold it to a wandering soldier boy dubbed ‘Theseus’. He followed his fellow Quackity to the temple of Suspension, where they found a lonesome God on the brink of madness. He’s now engaged to said God, along with Quackity, and ferrying him around the world, showing him everything he’s missed cooped up in that temple.

Jack Manifold: The man who escaped the labyrinth, Jack Manifold is as shifty as they come. He was slaughtered by Tommy, and hellbent on revenge he tore his way out of the Creation Gods labyrinth, and started his hunt. Cursed with a capped chain and a broken spirit, even the Servant shakes when he sees Jack Manifold. He’s recently joined the Blood Gods temple, and his triumph in his labyrinth gave him a great deal of leverage. The Blood God himself has given him protection, bidding him to find and kill his youngest son. Jack Manifold plans to do just that, and he’s not going to stop there.

Niki: Niki Nihachu is a woman of great power, protected by the Possessive God and close ally to the Servant. She left her home in ruins and burned the great tree which she had grown to hate, calling upon the Possessive Gods sacred soul to grant her the power of explosion. And grant he did. She now finds herself working with one Jack Manifold and, with the help of the Servant, she’s found the location of the Demi-god Tommy. She plans to assassinate him, becoming the true heiress to the Possessive Gods thrown in the pantheon. She’s had great success, as of late.

Note: in this AU Tommy is one of philzas children, but in a “I created you from nothing” type beat. Tommy isn’t his Blood son, but instead a ball of magic melded into human shape by the Angel. Philza then sent Tommy away to be raised by Wilbur. I came up with this AU when Tommy was still assumed to be Philzas son in canon, and it fits the story well so I’m not gonna change it. Just know: philza is not a “bad dad”, he’s a really cool god who got bored and created a funny little demigod to go and cause problems. He also respectfully bid Jack Manifold, among others, to hunt down his creation bc he’s a Girlboss in this AU lmao.

[saladejin]

Broken | Seokjin (M)

Seokjin x Reader | idolverse au, established boyfriend!Seokjin | Pining, rough smut, fluffy undertones 

Summary:  Free time is hard to come by for the two of you, but soon another problem arises in the form of his beloved bandmates.

Warnings: Rough sex, swearing, mature and explicit themes, wet dreams 

Word Count: 4.9k

<< masterlist

* Request from my Ao3 series ‘Movie Night’.

~

Skin tingling with excitement and breaths coming out in short gasps, your hands found purchase buried deep within his thick strands of hair.

His lips melded themselves to your own while his fingers roamed your figure expertly. He knew exactly where to touch to turn you into a whimpering mess, and he would never stop learning. It was like your body was a panel of buttons, and he the curious child wanting nothing more than to find out what each and every one did. 

“Baby…”

The man slowly grinding his hips into your clothed core didn’t respond to your plead. You wondered if his brain was too occupied, because you knew yours was surely gone. Your fingers traced the firm outlines of his abdominal muscles and travelled upwards to use his wide shoulders for leverage. You could hear his hurried and shallow breathing the more you swivelled your hips to create the desired friction.

Another moan tore from you when you felt his hands moving everywhere at once. Their familiar warmth cupping your aching sex attentively. You arched at the memory of his fingers trailing the sensitive outlines and openings. 

“Seokjin, I need you,” You gasped, looking upwards but feeling frustrated that the shadows masked the face of your lover.

You reached forwards for him, eager to have him in any way you possibly could…

~  

Oh to hell with it all!

Reality was fucking harsh. You awoke with groan of disapproval and shifted your sweaty body around in the sheets hesitantly. Just as expected, you felt a certain slickness coating the insides of your thighs again.

This was literally the third sex dream you had conjured up in the past week or so. Each time you snapped open your eyes to find yourself cold and alone in your bed, you felt the wave of disappointment washing over you growing stronger. God, you missed him.

I just want him back in my arms. I just want him.

You sighed as you imagined the smiling face of your long-term boyfriend, the one and only Kim Seokjin of BTS. Life was pretty hectic considering you both worked taxing jobs, with him being a world famous idol and you being a full-time teacher at a private academy a fair drive away. Time had become very difficult for you both to find, but lately Seokjin’s had completely cancelled out when the band began promoting their new album overseas. After that, the bucket-loads of fame brought on caused even more difficulty and restriction on you both.

If it wasn’t for the strong bond and resilience you both upheld, the relationship would have broken to pieces a long time ago.

You grabbed your phone from the nightstand and got up to start the day, trying to ignore the sexual frustration tearing at your insides. A tiny light winked at you from the screen’s surface.

“Good morning my love, I hope you slept well x”

You felt the fluffy warmth spread through you as you reread his text again, but rolled your eyes when you thought about how you actually slept.

Should I let him know? It would probably cause problems.

You shrugged because caution had never been a part of your relationship in the first place. Direct teasing was what created so much of the chemistry between the both of you, and it was almost always much to the disapproval of the other members.

“Good morning! It would have been better if I was getting fucked by the real you and not a dream.”

You watched with an evil cackle as the three little dots appeared and disappeared several times.

“I’ll have to tell my dream-self to do a little better. It’ll only be a few more days until I’m the one breaking the bed again, sweetheart.”

You felt so pathetic for getting turned on by his simple cheesy text, but you were so starved at this point you couldn’t really blame your brain for weakening. He was due to come back to Korea in the next few days, so you really wouldn’t have to long to wait.

“Sounds promising, I’ll order a new one tonight.”

You left the room chuckling quietly to yourself. The weight of his words usually proved fruitful, and the fact that you had both freed up a single weekend was exciting enough. This rarely ever happened so you knew you were both super keen to spend time together for two whole days in a row.

It’s sad to think how even that has become special.

You settled down with your breakfast, already falling into the usual routine of your daily texting with Seokjin. He usually sent you all kinds of funny pictures with the other members, as well as beautiful photos of any places they went. You found yourself having your own private tour each and every day, and you always thought about how caring he was to take all that time out for you.

Not for long. Soon, (Y/n), soon you won’t need to see anything but the bedroom.

You really needed to clear your sex-driven mind.

~

The door swung open and you threw yourself into Seokjin’s arms without hesitation. He had arrived back late in the night and had already slept off most of the jet-lag before texting you to let you know he was on his way to your house. You had almost certainly jumped out of your skin in surprise, because even though you knew you were both longing for each other, you still hadn’t been prepared at all.

“Sorry babe, I tried to stop them but they wouldn’t listen,” Seokjin grunted lowly into your ear, and you tried your best to stifle a shiver at the sound to think about the words.

“Noona! It’s great to see you!” A voice boomed, and you leaned back from the broad chest of your boyfriend to see Taehyung, Jimin and Hoseok filtering in behind him.

“Guys, oh! How have you been?”

You moved to give them all friendly hugs, hoping to mask your utter shock. You glanced behind to see Seokjin gritting his teeth in cleverly hidden annoyance, but you knew him too well for it to be completely invisible. There were slight bags underneath his beautiful brown eyes.

He probably didn’t even tell the boys no, knowing how much they’ve wanted to visit lately.

You invited everyone inside and offered drinks immediately. The fun chatter built up and you left the bustling boys to themselves to go and get some water for them. If you had known they were coming and staying for a while, maybe you wouldn’t have been so quick to throw on the horribly risky lingerie set you’d bought a few weeks ago.

Soft footsteps sounded behind you and suddenly your body was being turned around to press backwards into the kitchen bench. You ran your arms up to loop around Seokjin’s neck, grateful that the kitchen was walled off from the other guys and their watchful eyes.

“I wanted to come here alone,” Seokjin exhaled, seemingly in a daze as he moved one of his hands down to grasp loosely at your waist. You ignored the fire spreading from his subtle touch and craned forward to press a loving kiss to his plump lips.

“I missed you so much, I wouldn’t care if you brought your whole fanbase with you.” You blinked pointedly.

He cracked a smile and pressed another tender kiss to your lips, the wet sound echoing through your mind jarringly. You knew if you focused your attention on his uneven breathing you would lose what little control you had left. It was bad enough that he had started to push his body further into yours as the seconds drew onwards.

“I haven’t had you in so long,” he sighed and sunk his teeth into his bottom lip, eyebrows furrowing as he tried to lean in and close any distance you might have had. You felt the heat pooling in your lower regions like some kind of dam had broken. His needy and darkened gaze called for your touch and attention loudly.

“(Y/n)-noona? We brought you a gift from America, do you want to open it now?” Jimin’s voice called from the living room. You realised with a jolt how filthy the current scene would seem, as Seokjin almost had you sprawled out on the surface of the bench. You probably would’ve let him take you right then and there too.

You looked at your beloved boyfriend knowingly before squeezing his biceps in reassurance and pushing off the edge of the counter. His loud disappointed sigh basically summed up your entire mood, but you knew you still had the whole upcoming weekend to yourselves.

“Coming!” You smiled tightly, preparing to walk out with the glasses of water in hand.

“Well fuck, you could be,” came Seokjin’s irritated mumble.

You tried your best to fight down the sparks of arousal at hearing his angry rasp behind you, but it was all pointless in the end. Your level-headed boyfriend bickered with others quite often, but when he was actually angry, boy that was another story.

Last time you had seen him that worked up, it had been over how he couldn’t get a certain dance move right even after hours upon hours of practice. He had come over with all his muscles tensed up from the building fury, and when you had offered to relieve his tension, he hadn’t hesitated on fucking you hard into the early hours of the next morning.

That’s a memory I should not be thinking of right now. Next thing I’ll be dropping to my knees right in front of the boys!

You shook your head, trying to concentrate on the words Jimin and Taehyung were speaking as they described each perfume they had discovered and brought back. You were so grateful for their thoughtfulness and thanked them so many times for the presents, but your eyes kept wandering to where Seokjin was sitting with his legs crossed conveniently; his eyes averted and fingers tapping to a random rhythm against the arm of the couch.

It had been way too long. It was almost too much for you to stand being in the same proximity as him, and even if he felt the same there was nothing either of you could really do except wait it out.

~

Your panties were soaking as you smashed in the code for Bangtan’s dorm. Seokjin had been constantly riling you up for the past hour over text, and now that you had finally managed to make your way over things were very heated for you. Your fingers trembled with adrenaline and you cursed when you accidentally punched in the wrong number more than once.

He had managed to score the whole dorm to himself for a small amount of time. This was an absolute triumph, because even though you had both freed up the weekend, escaping the members was truly another task in itself.

“Jin I-”

“Baby I’m so glad you’re here!” Seokjin’s noticeably forced shout caused you to stop in your tracks. The shock tightened its grip as you realised you definitely weren’t alone.

Your boyfriend sat on the couch surrounded by his smiling bandmates who were joking amongst themselves, but you knew by his painfully apologetic eyes and conspicuously placed couch cushion that this hadn’t been planned at all.

“Hey noona, we finished practice early so we could have a movie night!” Jungkook greeted as he jumped up to hug you warmly. You just couldn’t let the disappointment hang around for long when this bunny made an appearance.

“Hey Kook-ah.” You smiled sharply, trying to edge away from him so he wouldn’t accidentally feel what you were wearing underneath.

Fuck, Seokjin knows what it looks like too…

You locked eyes with your boyfriend and you both silently conveyed a sorrowful message.

Yes, you would need to do some more waiting apparently. Children were high maintenance, but you knew if this would’ve gone completely your way you would have dragged him into the nearest bedroom and ridden him like your life depended on it.

Sometimes he was just so caring it hurt; quite literally in your case if your weeping pussy had anything to say about it.

“Um, so what are we watching?” you asked through clenched teeth, smoothing down your skirt in hopes of hiding any ‘evidence’. You looked up again to see Yoongi slouched deep in his armchair and felt your heart thump when his piercing eyes flickered from you to Seokjin knowingly.

Shit, I forgot how perceptive this guy was.

You could see the hints of a half-amused smirk tugging at the rapper’s lips, and the fact that Seokjin’s cheeks were reddening gave away that he had noticed too. You had no time to feel the mortification creep up on you since the younger ones were already dragging you towards the couch.

“We picked a great action one, you’ll love it,” Taehyung rushed excitedly and barely even gave you time to comprehend what he was saying.

“Sorry we haven’t got enough room on the couch,” Jimin clicked his tongue, eyes scanning the room intently for a spare spot. You smiled and opened your mouth to say you were fine on the floor, but someone slipped in before you could speak.

“It’s fine, she can just sit on Seokjin’s lap like she always does. They’re together after all,” Yoongi suggested while craftily masking his intentions under a smile. You saw the way the smirk still poked through his guise all the same.

This sneaky bastard.

But you would admit, this had created the perfect opportunity to tease your boyfriend a little. Usually you wouldn’t hesitate at the chance, but this time you knew you would probably suffer just as badly. Seokjin met your eyes and gave the tiniest shake of his head in warning, there was no way he would be able to handle himself if your ass was pressing itself against his rock hard cock.

“Guess there’s nothing wrong with that.” You shrugged and watched as Jin’s expression crumbled into one of darkness and defeat. You knew exactly what was in store for you, and you loved it.

Yoongi covered the bottom of his face with one hand to muffle the chuckle threatening to break past. You smiled towards Hoseok and Namjoon on the other couch before strolling over and glancing down at your boyfriend with lidded eyes. He opened his arms for you, just as usual, but you felt the vital difference as soon as you sat down onto his muscled thighs.

A deep exhale brushed past your ear as he shifted underneath you, and every inch of your skin tingled with heat as you felt the prominent outline twitch suddenly. He was so aroused it was almost too much for even you to bear.

“Please try to stop moving, please (Y/n),” he blew into your ear almost silently. You couldn’t suppress the shiver that racked your form at the sensation of his breath, but this only caused a tiny grunt to fall from his lips. Damn, you were both way too sensitive to each other tonight, and Yoongi knew it too. The sly fox only sat there watching you two with the biggest shit-eating grin you had ever seen.

“Okay it’s getting good, everyone be quiet from now on.” Jungkook brought a finger to his lips, bunny eyes gleaming with enthusiasm as he grabbed Taehyung’s arm and ran to sit back down on the floor. Seokjin had his head bent forward to rest against your back as his whole body tensed up. You knew he was struggling to keep himself together.

“(Y/n) I’m about to lose it, stop fucking moving.” He shuddered as you unintentionally moved to get more comfortable. You just knew he was about to reach the breaking point, but he would regret everything if he exposed you both so quickly, so you reached to squeeze his hand in reassurance.

“Not here. Come over after the movie and we’ll make it real good,” you leaned down to whisper almost silently into his ear so nobody else could overhear. His lip was bitten as he registered the words, the tension from the implied promise hanging thickly in the air. If he had really wanted to calm himself down he would’ve sat on the floor himself not even minutes in.

You almost squeaked when he rolled his hips slowly upwards just once. Just small enough so you could feel what was waiting for you, but not noticeable to anyone else in the room. Even Yoongi had shifted his attention to the movie and had forgotten about the two horny beings sitting on the couch barely two metres away.  

Minutes flew by as you struggled to keep your attention anywhere else, but you kept failing time and time again.

“Hey Jin-hyung?”

Your heart skipped a beat as Seokjin’s minuscule grinding came to a halt, a large breath trying to casually leave his lungs.

“Yeah?” His low voice crackled slightly.

“Now that it’s over can you help me with that hour-long vocal training thing you were talking about?” Jimin asked as he got to his feet and dusted off his shirt from the popcorn pieces.

Wait it’s over?

You were aghast as you looked over to see the credits of the movie scrolling down the screen. You had literally been focusing on the hard outlines pressing into your clothed heat the entire time. Now the cold dread and disappointment lodged itself deeply into your chest as you looked back to gauge Seokjin’s response. Your underwear was nothing but a scrap of wet cloth at this point.

“Argh! Fuck this!”

To your utter surprise, you felt two large hands swooping down to pick you up somewhat roughly. Everyone else gaped as Seokjin yanked you into his chest and marched furiously towards the hallway where his bedroom was. You were left to helplessly cling onto his neck as he abducted you away from everyone else.

“What was that about?” Hoseok was quick to pipe up, wondering why his eldest bandmate had gotten so agitated. Jimin quickly held up his hands to show his innocence, but Yoongi and Namjoon exchanged amused glances.

“If I were you, I'd go plug in your headphones.”

~

You were breathing heavily as Seokjin kicked open his already ajar door, not even caring if he made enough noise to alert the whole building.

“Are you okay babe?” you huffed, watching in amazement as he proceeded to close the door by knocking it with his hip sharply. He didn’t utter a word and only growled before throwing you onto the bed.

Excitement crawled up your body as you were suddenly being pressed into the mattress, his lips were on you in an instant, hungry and desperate. Nothing could be heard but your occasional gasps for air as the primal urges took over.

He needed to have you, and you needed to have him inside you as soon as possible. You positively ached for it.

“Sorry, I just can’t waste time right now,” Seokjin grunted, eyebrows still furrowed from the irritation lingering in his mind. You knew this look. This was the look, the one that had gotten you mercilessly drilled for hours on end. Your heart almost stopped at the strong surge of arousal licking at your abdomen.

“No foreplay needed, I’m flooding myself right now.”

He locked eyes with you for one electrifying moment before licking his lips and pulling you close to his heated body. Without warning, he plunged one hand underneath the edge of your skirt to search for proof of your words, and your lusty whimper mingled with his pleased moan as he ran his fingers along the dripping entrance he found there.

“Fuck, I could slip in so easily.”

You eyed the prominent bulge growing even larger in his pants, but couldn’t act because you were now both too busy undressing yourselves. He was as ravenous as a starved dog, and there was barely a moment where he wasn’t marking your skin or leaving wet kisses in his wake. You couldn’t keep your hands to yourself either, and the sinful noises falling from him only drove you onward.

You let out a breathy moan as he flipped you onto your stomach roughly. You caught sight of his tensed muscles briefly, and you knew he was so worked up it was insane, yet exhilarating at the same time.

“How will you take me?” You moved one arm to sweep your hair over your shoulder, letting him see the entire expanse of your arched back and rounded ass on full view.

“Wow, just like this. I can’t make it slow tonight, I want to fuck your brains out (Y/n),” he almost whispered, voice low and raspy with desire. You didn’t need to see his eyes to know they were filled with a familiar fire, but the thought caused a fresh wave of need to hit you full-force, and suddenly a trail of your own hot wetness slid down your thigh.

“My God, are you trying to kill me?” He groaned and you heard the breath leaving his lungs harshly. The ripping of the condom packet made you jump in anticipation. You arched your back further and sighed, completely ready for this bundling ball of pent up frustration to unleash his wrath onto you and your pussy.

His hand smoothed down your back and you felt the tiny hairs rising at the sensation. This upped sensitivity was going to be the death of you both, and you knew he could also tell by the way your thighs trembled with longing.

“Head down, my love.”

With that he thrust forward and made sure to follow through with a smooth grind of his hips. You cried out in pure pleasure as his length eased past your soaking folds with little resistance. You shifted backwards to meet him, but still winced at the somewhat tight fit. It had been a while, but at least you had plenty of time to get accustomed.

“O-oh, oh that’s good,” He moaned painfully above you, but you knew the serenity wouldn’t last. He was too frenzied to stop at any moment. His hands were already gripping firmly at the tops of your thighs to spread your bent legs further apart.

A plethora of bruises later, but I’m not complaining now…

You sunk your teeth into the nearest pillow as he began setting a punishing pace. Your walls were being battered by his cock, and he was hitting that sweet spot so rapidly you were already coming undone beneath him. You angled your body higher and couldn’t help but moan wantonly at how he hit you in even deeper places.

“This is for all the time we could’ve been fucking,” Seokjin growled through gritted teeth. “A whole weekend, this is a whole weekend in one.”

You widened your eyes at his words, feeling tears prick at the corners from the pure amount of pleasure building up in your core. He twisted you so you rotated on his cock to lay on your back again, and only groaned in approval when your head and shoulders were met by his headboard with a dull ‘thud’.

“Don’t hide anything, I don’t care if they hear everything,” he breathed into your ear as he spread your thighs open once more, the surface of your skin visibly glistening with your fluids. He took in the sight eagerly before looking up with darkened eyes. You knew how completely messed up you were, but he looked pretty fucked too with his flushed complexion and shuddering breaths.

You opened your mouth to reply, but he shoved his thick cock back into your heat unexpectedly, and your words came out in a garbled scream. This new missionary angle felt even more deliciously sensitive and deeper.

“That’s it,” he grunted, brows creasing in concentration as he watched every little contortion of your expression.

He fucked hard and fast, not leaving any room for thinking as you climaxed shockingly. Your thighs shook and your whole abdomen clenched as the orgasm racked your form. Your cry of relief could probably be heard by the whole dorm, but you couldn’t let your mind wander to that when Seokjin picked up the pace again.

The feeling of your walls spasming around his length caused his common sense to fly out the window. He lowered his body onto yours so he could enter you quickly and easily, your beautiful and breathy noises edging him further to the edge he so desperately sought.

Your shoulders and back continuously edged further up the headboard as he pounded into you. You could vaguely hear the banging of the wood against the snowy white wall behind, but your attention was ripped away as another orgasm abruptly bloomed and jerked your entire body into uncontrollability.

Seokjin reached up to still your shoulders, throwing his head back in complete ecstasy as he allowed the slow rhythmic rolling of your muscles to send him over. He groaned loudly as he came, abdominal muscles tensing as he breathed deeply and gently moved his hips to ride out the finish. You were a sight to behold below him, eyes closed and swollen lips hanging open in blissful shock. He watched in admiration as your clammy body continued to jolt occasionally from the aftershocks.

No words were spoken, but you felt his lips against your skin through the haze clouding your mind. He tenderly trailed the outlines of your neck and jawline as if saying ‘thank you, I’m sorry’. You only gasped as another wave of sensitivity coursed through you from head to curled toes. You could still feel the heavy weight of him nestled inside you, but you didn’t want him to leave.

“You’re always so good to me baby. I needed that.” He sighed and almost reluctantly pulled out of your soaking folds slowly. You whined as the sharp feeling almost brought you closer to the edge again, but the stimulation was just too much. He inhaled sharply in stunned disbelief and moved to calm you down with soft words of encouragement.

“I-I think that’s the best sex we’ve had. You were amazing and fuck, if that wasn’t the hottest thing I’ve ever experienced,” You breathed out, eyes still closed and one hand resting over your eyes as you tried to see anything other than stars. His deep chuckle sounded from somewhere beside you as he got up to dispose of the condom. You sighed before also getting up to use the toilet and clean up a little.

“If only we could go at it for two days…We waited for so long,” he murmured as you returned from the bathroom to see him pulling on some loose pants. You looked around and found one of his large shirts to throw on before climbing back into bed with him.

“Well considering how rough you were when you were angry, I wouldn’t mind getting you like that more often.” You smirked as you cuddled into his chest, trying your best to ignore the dull ache flaming from your lower regions.

“What? (Y/n) if you wanted me to be rougher all you had to do was ask.” He snorted, reaching down to smooth away some of your hair and pull you further into his arms. You hummed as he pecked tiny kisses down your bare arm.

“Well, I guess I just found out.”

~

The next morning you woke a little earlier than usual. Seokjin still slept soundly as you smiled at the sight of his slightly parted lips and fluttering eyelashes. He was so adorable when he was like this, but then your mind flashed back to the smouldering heat within his gaze and the rough pumps of his hips last night.

Well everyone has their duality I guess.

You took a deep breath as you swung your legs out of the bed, wanting to prepare your boyfriend an amazing breakfast for making you feel so good the night before. You made it to the door with a little difficulty, but as soon as you tried to walk normally the ache flared from your vagina and you stumbled forwards into the hallway.

Your knees bent at awkward angles as you tried to shuffle down the passageway, wincing while keeping one hand clenched at your pelvis almost as a reassurance. Damn, he had seriously taken away your ability to walk this time.

You grunted in exasperation, yet somehow didn’t completely hate the sore feeling. You looked up in determination to get to the kitchen but felt your breath hitch when you saw Yoongi and Namjoon sitting at the bench eyeing you in shock.  

Shit, they just watched me amble down the hall like a newborn deer.

“Uh, maybe you should get some rest (Y/n),” Namjoon suggested with a kind smile tugging at his lips. He had a half-eaten slice of toast in front of him, and you felt hunger bubble up in your stomach at the combination of smells.

“God knows you didn’t get any last night…” Yoongi mumbled and you stifled a surprised chuckle as Namjoon wacked his fellow rapper’s shoulder, utterly horrified. You leaned against the wall as they looked to you for a response.

“Well,” you began with a smug raise of your eyebrows. “I’d be lying if I said you were wrong.”

                    Copyright © 2020 by salade. All rights reserved.  

[texastheband]

Texas V Wu-Tang Clan

Interview by Steven Daly Photography by Peter Robathan Taken from The Face - December 1997

It’s the pop story of ’97, the most unlikely end to a weird year: TEXAS collaborating with the WU-TANG CLAN. First, a Scottish rock band on the verge of slip-sliding away into a tasteful obscurity was reborn via a slew of hit singles and a glut of stylish imagery. Now, in New York, their Brit-cool meets hip hop in a mutually beneficial deal. For everyone concerned, it’s all they need to get on…

Sharleen Spiteri took the call in her front hall. "Yo, Peach," growled a strange voice over transatlantic wires. The gentleman caller was none other than Ol’ Dirty Bastard, court jester of New York hip hop dynasty the Wu-Tang Clan. Apparently Mr Bastard fancied working with Spiteri and her band, Texas. It all started in August, with one of Texas’ managers discussing Land Rovers with someone called Power in New York, who turned out to be the manager of the Clan. A video of Texas’ "Say What You Want" was dispatched, and prodigiously gifted Wu-Tang chieftain RZA signed on to do a re-recording of the single for a prospective single project. Original rapper OI’ Dirty Bastard was replaced by Method Man, the next Clan member with a solo album scheduled.

The hook-up with the Wu-Tang Clan is the perfect climax to a year that’s seen Texas rise from a tumbleweed-strewn grave to grab the pole position in British Pop. A year in which Glasgow’s Sharleen Spiteri has stared out, defiantly remade and remodelled, from every magazine cover and TV show. From a media point-of-view, Texas’ – Spiteri’s – reconfiguring of music and fashion has been the year’s dream ticket. Ever since Bryan Ferry took the innovative step of getting Anthony Proce in to design Roxy Music’s wardrobe in the early seventies, successive phases of pop’s history have thrown up performers who use the fashion photographers, stylists and designers du jour to present The Package. It is these performers who most often capture the youthful mood of their time: that’s why you can see the vulgar glamour of the Seventies in the cut of Ferry’s sleazy lounge-lizard jib; the naive aspiration of the early Eighties in the box-suited and pixie-booted "style" of Spandau Ballet; and the onset of the late-Eighties mixing and matching of different cultures in Neneh Cherry’s Buffalo Stance. When we look back at 1997 we will see in Texas’ sound and vision a new mix, all to do with living the high life but keeping it real. Catwalk and street, the designer and the understated, Prada and Nike; the slick and the cred. Ten years’ gone Scottish guitar outfit and this season’s bright young labels (in both senses). The setting too, has helped. Fashion, again, is big cultural business. Clever pop stars (Goldie! Liam!) want to be seen by the runway and hanging out at fashion parties; young designers yearn to be visible on the stage or the podium (viz. Antonio Berardi’s autumn London show at Brixton Academy). Factor in a paucity of self-motivating, button-pressing, songwriting, photogenic women in British music, and you have a ready-made media phenomenon.

Sharleen Spiteri is holding court at a New York restaurant with a gang of Calvin Klein employees who’ve just accompanied her to the VH-1 Fashion Awards. The annual ceremony is a mutually convenient arrangement, a TV cluster-fuck where the music and fashion industries exchange credibility and cachet. Texas are contemplating just such an exchange themselves, having recently been given the OK by CK. (Tommy Hilfiger has also made overtures.) Spiteri is to have an audience with Klein himself; she’s already been bribed with a trunkful of CK merch, including the streaked black dress – "inspired by [the artist] Brice Marden" – she’s wearing tonight.

Someone suggests that Texas would be perfect for Fashionably Loud, an MTV special where models strut on stage as the hot bands of the moment rock out. "Forget it," quips Spiteri. "there’s only room for one star up where we play." If Spiteri were to join Kate Moss and Christy Turlington on the Calvin Klein payroll it would not, as she sees it, detract from Texas’ music. "Fashion and music have always been connected, and now more than ever," says the singer. "You couldn’t have one without the other. If there’s shit music at a runway show it just doesn’t work."

Meanwhile, there’s the songs. With "White On Blonde", Texas’ fourth album, the music takes care of itself. Radio-friendly unit-shifters abound, helped on their way by producers Mike hedges (manic Street Preachers) and Manchester’s Grand Central. The singles have been, in sequence, nu-soul fresh ("Say What You Want"), springy pop ("Halo"), Motown-sunny ("Black Eyed Boy") and winter warming ("Put Your Arms Around Me"). The B-side remixers have covered all bases in these dance-savvy late Nineties, ranging from of-the-moment talents like the Ballistic Brothers and Trailerman to old stand-bys like Andy Weatherall and 808 State. Texas, patently, lost their dancefloor cherry by cherry-picking the brightest and the best.

Of course, while the singles have all enjoyed heavy airplay and gone top ten, and while "White on Blonde" has sold two million copies (more than its two predecessors put together), the remixes haven’t necessarily helped those sales. As the go-faster stripes of credibility on the solid saloon car, though, they’ve still been essential to The Package; all part of the thoroughly modern mix.

So now, the Wu-Tang Clan. To many, though, this latest development could smack of opportunism. One group are renegade roughnecks who mythologise themselves in epic hip hop anthems; the others are fastidiously tasteful Scots with an eye for perfectly modern consensus-pop. The Wu-Tang Clan are certainly among the aesthetically correct names that Texas always drop in interviews, but can there possibly be a legitimate connection between the two? "A lot of the Wu-Tang backing tracks have the feel of soundtracks, and we’ve always gone for a cinematic sound," says Johnny McElhone, Spiteri’s genial songwriting partner and bass player. "And I’ve always liked Al Green, and they use a lot of Willie Mitchell, Al Green, that whole Hi Records sound, and make it modern. And Marvin Gaye: Method Man, in that duet with Mary J. Blige, used ‘You’re All I Need To Get By."

Having dominated the charts in Europe this year, Texas are now, logically, turning their attention to America: the country that has always inspired them, whether it’s the dusty, pseudo-roots sound of their first three albums, or the iconic-soul and post-soul sounds of Memphis and Staten Island that they give props to now; the place where success has always eluded them. Yet given the commercial momentum of "White on Blonde", their approach to the Wu-Tang Clan is surely not driven by desperation. They are, then, viewing the collaboration with a combination of fan-like wonder and disbelief.

"Method Man is just a wicked, wicked rapper," enthuses Spiteri. "I can’t wait to hear the combination of my vocals and his – I‘m really excited about it. I have a kind of sweet, virginal thing going on, and he’s got this dirty sex vibe. It could be the perfect marriage."

It’s a Saturday night in Manhattan, and ten storeys above Times Square, Sharleen Spiteri sits on the floor of a recording studio, tinkering with her latest high-tech gadget, a Philips computer about the size of a TV remote. Across the street, three ten-foot high electronic ticker-tapes provide testimony to Monday’s stockmarket crash. No matter how much Spiteri plays with her new toy, there’s still that nagging worry: what if the Wu-Tang Clan won’t show? They’re supposed to be on a tour bus returning from a gig in Washington, DC today, but these, after all, are the original masters of disaster. The crew whose normal modus operandi seems to be chaos. The band that recently quit a national tour because only five of the nine members could be relied upon to turn up.

The studio has been booked since six, so Spiteri and McElhone breathe signs of relief when RZA and his posse finally roll in around ten. Among the dozen-strong throng, they’re surprised to see Wu-Tang member Reakwon, a stout fellow with a Mercedes cap and a Fort Knox of gold dental work. Several cigars are hollowed out, their contents replaced with weed; bottles of Cristal champagne and Hennessy are passed around as the air grows thick with smoke.

Half an hour later, method Man makes his entrance. Stooped over, he looks deceptively short – maybe only six-four in his Hilfiger fleece hoodie. "I’m John-John," he tells Sharleen, referring to his alias, Johnny Blaze. Pulling out the big blunt from behind his ear, Method Man considers the job at hand. "She got a nice voice," drawls the laconic giant. "This band not exactly my type of listening material, but they going in the right direction, if you ask me, by fucking with us. I’m waiting for RZA to put down a beat, hear how the vocals sound melded with the track before I come with ideas. I’m one of those guys."

As his friends get on with the serious business of partying, RZA goes to work, feeding a succession of sample-laden discs into a sampler. He has a diffident, genius-at-work charisma about him as he sits with his back to the room, keyboard at side. With a flick of his prodigiously ringed hand he reaches out and conjures up a brutal bassline. The speakers pulse violently. RZA takes a sip of Hennessy. "Record this, right here!" he tells the bewildered-looking engineer.

RZA has decided to dispense with the original master tapes, shipped over from Britain. He wants a completely new version, recorded rough-and-ready without the standard safety net of a time-code. This convention-trashing, wildstyle approach to recording elicits some consternation from the studio’s engineer, a central-casting white guy who warns RZA: "You won’t be able to synch to this, you know." RZA waves him away and turns to Johnny McElhone. "This riff is in E," McElhone tells RZA. "Maybe we should try it in the original key, D." "What are you saying? I understand no keys," says RZA. "You want me to sing the whole song straight through?" asks Spiteri, trying to divine RZA’s intentions. He orders the lights turned down, and offers Sharleen some herbal inspiration. She politely declines and walks to the vocal booth. "What’s her name? Sheree?" asks RZA as Spiteri warms up. The engineer wants to know if he should maybe start recording. "Always record everything!" exclaims RZA. "Ready, get set, go! Play and record, play and record!" Spiteri rattles of a perfect new version of ‘Say What You Want’, grooving along by herself and passionately acting out every word, even the ones borrowed from Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing". Now it’s time for Method Man, who at this point is so herbally inspired that he can hardly open his eyes. He jumps up and lopes around the main room, running off his newly written rhymes and clutching a bottle of Crystal. Method walks up to the mic and opens his mouth, and that treacly baritone sets a typically morbid scene: "Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest…" The Texas duo just look at each other, shaking their heads in awe.

The hours and the rhymes pass. Around 6am, things are starting to get a little weird. As Method Man snoozes on the sofa, RZA bounces off the walls, dancing like a dervish. "These are the new rhythms," he yells. "These are the new dances from Africa. I learned them when I was there last week!" McElhone and Spiteri crack up. The engineer probably wishes he were in Africa right now; he further draws RZA’s ire by making a mistake as he runs off some rough cassettes. As everyone says goodbye, RZA decides that he’s taking the studio’s sampler – he already has two of the $3,500 items, but at this point it’s all about the wind-up. The engineer, though, having last seen the end of his tether a good few hours ago, has had enough. By the commencement of office hours that morning, the rest of the session will have been cancelled and the band and Clan banned from this studio.

After a few frantic phone calls later that morning, a studio is found that is prepared to let the Wu-Tang Clan through the door. With one precondition: only two of them are allowed in the studio. Now it’s midnight, and four-fifths of Texas watch a trio of RZA-hired session men go through their paces. They shift effortlessly through a handful of soul and funk styles, and the Scots mutter approval. These are the kind of players that are so good they can get away with wearing questionable knitwear.

Soon, another couple of Wus pop in. Then another couple. In the control room RZA orders up a bottle of Hennessy and talks about hearing "Say What You Want" for the first time. "I didn’t fully understand the sound of it," admits the soft-spoken maestro. "It was obviously a popular song, a radio song, and my sound is the total opposite. But I thought that the artist had something, so I thought: "Let’s take her and rock her to my beat."

"Sweet soul, that’s what her stuff sounded like to me. Smooth. It reminded me of the Seventies: in those days, they did songs that would fit anywhere. If you went to a club getting high it would fit; if you was cleaning up your house it would fit. That’s when you’ve got a real great song right there." Whether or not "Say What You Want" is a great song, it’s not quite coming together tonight. Despite the best offers of the studio management, a full complement of Wu posse members ended up in the house. As the night drags on the trio of musicians don’t get with the track, and by eight the following morning there is little in the way of usable material. But everyone stays upbeat. Texas will work on the track in Glasgow, and send it back to RZA to finish, along with a new song based around one of his samples. After vowing to stay in touch, everyone stumbles out into the Manhattan morning light together, the Scots with an American name, and the Clan without a tartan.

From a distance the collaboration will continue. But it’s only a different kind of distance. Culturally, creatively, the gap between the Wu-Tang Clan and the old twang clan is considerable. Yet so it goes, this cross-cultural exchange programme. Whether it’s The Stones copping blues movies, Bowie digging the Philadelphia Sound, Lisa Stansfield getting soulful with Barry White, Sting getting doleful with Puff Daddy… Whether it’s Todd Terry reviving Everything But The Girl or Armand Van Helden making Sneaker Pimps the unwitting jumpstarters of speed garage, naked opportunism and risk-taking innovation have always been confused. Now, with genres blurred and tricknology proceeding apace, anything is possible and everything is permitted. Perhaps it is this, the sheer unlikeliness, that makes the Texas-Wu experiment the most illuminating collaboration of the year. Whether it works or not.

"If you play her stuff in a club, everybody be dancing, but it’s a clear room and you can see everybody’s face," RZA reflects on the departing Sharleen Spiteri. "But if you play mine, the room is smoky." And perhaps it is here, among the clouds and the clarity, between the smoke and the mirrors, where a new sound and vision lies.

Text originally posted on texasindemand.com

[brooklynislandgirl]

♥ Do they have at least one bonding activity they devote to doing with their partner exclusively?

Love and Courtship || Accepting

{{ @mynameisanakin }}

Impending Doom is elaborate with a compendium of rules, rewards, punishments, and structure that could rival the great Archives in complexity and for being abstruse to any outside observer. Which is also rule number 46...allow no one to ever observe acts of Doom.

While she and Anakin can claim all they like that it is simply an innocent game to alleviate outside sources of distraction, to remind themselves to be more mindful of their thoughts and connection to the Force, and a ragged litany of a great many other things they ought to be doing or not doing as faithful, obedient young Jedi, the fact of the matter is...that it isn’t. Really a game that it. What it happens to be is an elegantly multifarious ritual designed to carefully explore all the infinite emotions and desires they have that are far too conveniently forbidden to them for the mere fact that they exist. And were she put on the spot, Keni would have absolutely no idea when exactly it had begun or for just how long they’ve been playing. How different rules or clauses get added to it and which are carefully pruned for either not exactly bearing the hoped-for fruit or because by nature of being a living thing connecting them they have become obsolete.

One example of the previous had been the exchange of robes, practice sabres, and the like. Even for that brief period where she and Anakin had been roughly the same height ~much to her surprise~ no one had ever been fooled by their attempts at trading places. An example of the later had been the joint decision to be either the first or last padawans to seek their sleeping pallets in the clan creches so that they would not be discovered sharing blankets and curling up together. Privacy had been gained when they’d been appointed their small, cell-like quarters, but that instituted a need to become stealthier. To better learn how to weave compelling tales of why they were so often together. To being able to reach out across increasingly more vast distances all for the sake of never being parted for long.

Some parts of the game were strictly intended for comfort or pleasure in small ways that had intrinsic Logic built in: by sharing an actual water bath or shower or time in the refresher was not an excuse to rest against one another skin-to-bare-skin, but an effort at conservation of precious resources too often squandered in the austere decadence that was life on Coruscant. Her sense of taste and smell are by far sharper than other humans in part owing to the night-blindness that effects all Zelosians, preventing them from seeing anything at all in light less than that of a full moon. Biting Anakin the way she does is absolutely a conclusive tool for medical diagnosis of blood-born pathogens. When ~after hours of being bent over sick and wounded patients~ he would take his clever fingers both metal and flesh and work out the series of knots and kinks in her shoulders or neck, Anakin was displaying his retention of having learned that if left unattended these would cause great pain and eventually compromise her work.

All very reasonable, functional, things. 

But the part of the game that isn’t...the part that has its roots in her deepest love and devotion to Anakin has no real Impending Doom behind it. If anything it is directly opposing, born of a need to affirm life and health, things that others have always seemed to fail in ensuring that Anakin thrived. But it, too, is a ritual. From the moment she lays eyes on him, she cannot help but devour every line and lilt of his too long, too thin frame. Every strand of hair windswept across his brows. The weariness in his eyes that like a sea can drown her and despite being a strong swimmer, she would let happen because she can think of no better end than one found in him. The instant it is appropriate, she steals moments in which to press as close as physics and voluminous robes will allow. Beginning at his crown and trickling downward in mimic of rain, she brushes the pads of her fingers down his neck to his shoulders then follows along down the length of his arms and back up partially so she can make fists at the small of his back, grasping cloth if it is there, or to settle against his bones if he is only in his skin. She rises on the tips of her toes and tilts her head upward, eyes closed. She becomes a flower basking in the vivifying warmth and light of its sun. And then she breathes Anakin. Oh, her nostrils will flare and can pick up those traces of recycled and filtered air, the perfume she has come to dislike on principal, the faintly dusty reek of papers she downright despises. She breathes in the scent of sweat and soap. Of wherever he has wandered and come back from. She breathes in his exhale and fills her lungs with him. Lets him seep into her pores and through the supple bark of her skin. Absorbs him in a way that cannot take more than what is offered in their long embrace. All of it edged in a kind of quiet desperation because the truth is...the longer they are parted, the more she is starved of all that she has come to love. But the physical realm cannot compare to the way they meld around and within each other within the Force itself. Ebb and flow. Without beginning or end, without any desire or need to retain individual essence. They dissolve into a singular consciousness. Formless and eternal and without separation, and perhaps it has always been meant to be this way. Nothing but shades of colours that are indefinable to sentient gaze. Nothing but emotions expressed in their purest lights and darks. There is no need for words. There is no need for anything that is not one to the other. Nothing else can come close, nothing else can come between.  Nothing else exists. Nothing else can.

[sleepless-in-starbucks]

if anon hasn't swung by yet, i'm here to ask what happens when remy realizes when he's in love with patton

Yes hello!! Welcome to: so you’re a gay bastard who’s just met a literal ray of sunshine who’s as fluffy and soft and sugary sweet as a marshmallow. falling in love’s inevitable, but how does the gay bastard recognize when it’s happened to him??? come find out!

set in the Mindscape because I Said So

Remy exists as a function of Thomas

Most functions just live in the Imagination but he’s active enough he gets his own room with the sides

(Technically it’s just a guest bedroom that’s in Thomas’s house- Remy took the memory of it and put it in the mindscape to use, which is why Thomas can never accurately remember the room or its layout when he’s not in it sjdbfhjsd)

That’s not super important but I wanted to say it

Anyways

Remy interacts with the other sides, of course

He doesn’t always get on amazingly with all of them, though

As a technical ward of the Imagination, Remy feels… slightly awkward dealing with Roman or Remus extensively. It’s not like he can’t, it just feels off

He and Virgil can be snarky and sassy together but they also clash a good amount when it comes to bedtime for Thomas

He’s not really ever up against Logan or Deceit, and they get on well enough, but it’s not like they click like natural friends or anything (shocking, I know, given my losleep agenda, but shhhh I haven’t gotten to the good part of this bullet fic)

Patton, however, is the exception

Sure, Remy may not be a happy-pappy optimist like Patton is, but surprisingly enough… he appreciates Patton’s brightness, his sunny outlook, his big smiles and sweet offers

And Patton is surprisingly accepting of Remy’s snark and sass and snap. He finds them amusing, enjoys entertaining his quips and returning them with puns and wordplay and giggles

Their friendship’s a quick-formed one, one that’s usually found chatting in the kitchen while Remy abuses the coffee machine and Patton bakes, but also in the Commons watching various shows you’d never expect them to watch, and in each other’s rooms when it’s late and they should be sleeping but they can’t for one reason or another so they waste the time sipping hot cocoa and talking together instead, and more

It’s good. They’re good.

Remy really should have seen this coming

He has a lot of chances to fall in love with Patton

And he takes all these chances very happily

But there’s only one where he realizes that he’s fallen, and fallen HARD

There were many moments that could have been ‘the one’

Like one of the few times he chose to bake instead of just watch with his coffee, him complaining about the mess while Patton laughed and showed him how to do it

They always ended up with something edible smeared on his face- chocolate or frosting or cookie dough, just a touch normally dashed against his chin or cheeks

And that always ended with Patton carefully wiping away the substance (and once or twice, on more memorable substances, kissing it off- normally when it was a smear of Patton’s favorite cookie dough)

One of those times, when Patton and Remy’s faces were stupidly close, Patton tenderly wiping away whatever mess was left on Remy’s face, Remy’s sunglasses useless to hide his gaze when this close, eyes both on each other, would have been a perfect time for Remy to remember that he was very gay and Patton was very cute

But he normally only remembered the ‘very cute’ part without any context, and another day passed with him left in self-ignorance

He could have realized it one of the times a movie marathon of cheesy romcoms (Remy and Patton both loved the cheese for different reasons) ran long and Patton fell asleep against him, head against Remy’s shoulder and body tucked against Remy’s side

He only got closer to Remy the longer he was asleep, but that was okay. Remy knew a sleepy Patton was a cuddly one. He just wrapped his arm over Patton and held him closer

Patton was always mumbling something when he was sleeping, which was cute, Remy had considered, cute how he scrunched up his nose as he thought before spilling out nonsense words and phrases

Cute how he would smile at whatever his sleepy thoughts were

Cute how sometimes he’d just… happy wiggle. Remy wasn’t sure why, but one minute Patton would be pressed against his side and the next he’d be doing a lil wiggly-shake and then he’d be back to trying to meld his body with Remy’s. It was cute.

Eventually, Patton would open his eyes, just a little, looking tired and sleepy, blinking blearily at Remy but not trying to move away from his side

He’d ask what had happened, when he’d fallen asleep, and Remy would just chuckle quietly and run a hand through Patton’s hair and say it’s alright, go back to bed, he’d take care of it

And Patton would just nod and lie his head against Remy again and be asleep almost immediately

And soon enough Remy would slowly, carefully, gently pick Patton up and move him to his bed, staying just long enough for Patton’s blankets and sheets to warm up and mimic his own warmth- hence making Patton willing to release him- before leaving

And if he lingered a moment in the doorway before leaving, wishing he could stay, could curl up with Patton and kiss his forehead and fall asleep with him?

Well… Patton was warm and cute and cuddly. Who wouldn’t want to sleep and cuddle with him? That was a Normal Friendship Thought to have. It didn’t mean anything!

And once more, His Sunglasses Make Him Oblivious Remy strikes again

Incidents similar to the baking ones and the sleepy ones continue to happen

Remy spends a good two hours doing nothing but trading horrible puns with Patton because they make Patton giggle and chuckle and LAUGH and for some reason Remy just realized he could listen to that laugh for weeks and if puns causes it… then puns he shall tell

He learns to do basic sewing because Patton accidentally rips his catigan a lot and yes Patton can sew and he does fix his own tears but Remy likes to sneak in and fix them when Patton’s busy (Patton always gets excited, later, having decided that he’s got some sort of guardian angel looking out for him but unsure who. Patton’s happiness over the whole thing’s enough for Remy- he never admits it’s him)

When Patton’s doing something/is distracted, Remy will sneak up behind him and pick him up and spin him in a half-circle and Patton will giggle and Remy will never feel more alive than he does every time he does it

There’s a lot of moments like these, where Remy turns into an absolute sap over Patton doing something as impressive as Smiling, and yet Remy throughout it all, Remy refuses to just realize ‘oh hey shit I’m in love’

Finally, however, not even Remy’s thick dark sunglasses and mindset of ‘what is love (baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more)’ can stop him from realizing how lost he is on this boi

It all happens one late night

Remy’s sleepless and up and wandering

He notices, eventually, that the light’s on in Patton’s room, and he figures, hey! late-night buddy, let’s say hi

The hi was well-timed, but not for the reasons Remy had hoped

Remy peeks in the crack and finds that, yeah, Patton’s up, but he’s also hugging a body pillow and his eyes are a little red and there’s a tiny bit of sniffling and okay someone’s not having a good night and for once it’s not Thomas as Virgil slowly goes through decades-old memories

Remy had been looking for someone to goofy off with at two am but now it is Comfort The Fluffball time and he is READY for this mission

He doesn’t go in immediately- pulling away and quietly making his way downstairs first, quickly making two mugs of hot cocoa, putting in plenty of mini marshmallows in Patton’s (and bringing the bag of them as well, for when Patton inevitably wants to snack on them)

Then he goes back upstairs, lightly bumping Patton’s door with his foot until he hears a loud sniffle and Patton hastily whisper-shouting to give him a moment

Remy waits, listening to the shuffling noises, well-aware that Patton’s cleaning his face off, trying to hide his self-perceived sin of feeling bad

Eventually, the door opens, Patton’s eyes still red as he refuses to meet Remy’s, aware the function has likely already guessed he’s not doing amazingly

His eyes light up, a bit, however, when he sees the cocoas and the marshmallow bag beneath Remy’s elbow and Remy’s gentle ‘I’m here’ smile, and Remy feels his heart light up at that

Patton lets him in, taking his mug and the bag of marshmallows from Remy as he does so, moving back on to the bed and leaning against the body pillow he had been crying into a moment ago (Remy can tell because the top of it’s damp) and he gestures for Remy to join him

And Remy does, sitting down right next to him, pressing against his side and resting his head against Patton’s

They don’t speak, just sipping their cocoas and being close

They’ve talked about it before, Patton’s tendency to repress his bad emotions and isolate himself from help

And Remy knows Patton’s trying

Patton letting him in is trying

So Remy’s not going to talk about it, because that’s not what Patton needs now. He needs to be able to be safe with someone. To be comfortable, to be un-judged despite the tear tracks on his cheeks

Remy’s halfway done with his cocoa when he lightly bumps Patton’s foot. He’s wearing bright mis-matched socks whereas Remy’s got black ones with coffee cups on them, the steam coming out of them in the shape of z’s (Patton gave them to him, and ever since, Remy’s always worn socks at night)

A smile twitches onto Patton’s face as he bumps Remy’s back

It’s small

It’s important

Eventually, they finish their cocoas

Patton places his mug on his bedside table, automatically accepting Remy’s and moving it there too

He takes the marshmallow bag, then, pulling a few out and squishing them between his fingers as he pops a few in his mouth

Remy smiles, watching Patton amuse himself with the marshmallows for a moment before asking, softly, ‘do you want to watch some tv? or do you think you’re ready to go to bed?’

‘bed’ Patton answers immediately. he knew the question was coming. Remy always asked it on nights like this.

‘of course’ Remy answers easily, beginning to stand up, moving to take the mugs away and part with a few words of reassurance and a reminder that Remy’ll find someone to cover making breakfast in the morning, please, Patton, sleep in

He’s stopped when Patton grabs his arm, just lightly tugging on his arm and pulling Remy back to sitting beside him

‘please stay’ Patton asks, quietly, but still fiercely, as if if his voice wasn’t strong enough, his want for this not there enough, Remy would say no (Remy knew he never would’ve so much as dreamed of saying no)

‘of course’ Remy repeated as the moral side tossed the marshmallow bag onto his bedside table. ‘how long do you want me to stay?’

‘until- I mean- until I fall asleep?’ Patton settled on, hesitantly

Remy frowned as he gently reached out, cupping Patton’s cheek with one hand. he didn’t press, since he knew Patton wouldn’t tell him what he really wanted if pressed. he’d clam up and stick to his lie. he had to be given time.

Patton leaned the slightest into the touch, letting the silence hold for a moment before he said, quietly, ‘I don’t want to be alone’

‘you won’t be’ Remy murmured back, easily coazing Patton into his arms, happy to let the moral side fold into his chest, pressing himself ever closer to Remy as Remy held him ever tighter

He slowly tugged Patton over, pulling Patton’s duvet over the two of them as he settled them down amongst the pillows of Patton’s bed, the lights in his room turning off at Remy’s mental urging

Patton moved with him easily, happy to be held, snuggling close against Remy and tucking his head beneath Remy’s neck and tangling their legs together and more or less enuring that Remy wouldn’t be getting up until he did (not that Remy minded)

Soon enough, they were still, Patton breathing deeply, very quickly falling asleep as Remy rubbed circles into his back

‘hey, Remy?’ Patton asked, words slurring as he fought the call of sleep to say whatever he had to say

‘yeah, babes?’

‘thank you, for... for everything’

Remy smiled, a stupidly sappy smile, safely hidden in the dark. ‘of course, Pat. always happy to help.’

Patton hummed in agreement to that, nodding a bit against Remy’s chest. when he didn’t say anything more, Remy thought he had fallen asleep, until Patton said one last thing,

‘I love you’

It wasn’t that surprising- Patton had said it before, and so had Remy, normally after Remy had complimented Patton’s cookies or after Patton showed a complete lack of shame for a rather terrible pun- but he had never said it like this before, so quietly, so simply, so meaningfully

It took him a moment to collect himself enough to respond, and by then Patton had fallen asleep, but it didn’t matter, because Remy still said it,

‘I love you too’

And that, dear reader, is when Remy realized just how heavy the weight behind those words was

That’s when Remy realizes he’s in love

Anddddd because I’m a bastard (and also tired and said I’d post this today) that’s where this ends, even though I now remember the question was ‘what happens when Remy realizes he’s in love with Patton’ and not ‘how’ he realizes, but shhhhhhh enjoy what I gave you

And like,,,, I’m not saying I’ll give this a part two if y’all want to see what happens after Remy finally comes to terms with the fact that he’s in love with the sun, but like... I def will just hmu sometime sdfjsvfsdf

[vanessakirbyfans]

Ignore the cringeworthy title, which brings to mind several lives’ worth of Lifetime movies — Pieces of a Woman, a portrait of personal disintegration and the from-the-ashes process of piecing things back together, gives you three distinct reasons to pay attention to this late-breaking entry in the seasonal Pretty People in Pain sweepstakes. (It hit theaters on December 30th for a qualifying run; it starts streaming on Netflix on January 7th.) The first is The Shot, a set piece that kickstarts the drama in motion. We’ve already briefly met Martha (Vanessa Kirby), an expectant mother days away from her due date. And we’ve been introduced to her partner Sean (Shia LaBeouf), a construction worker who’s building a bridge in Boston. She is warm, witty, nurturing; he is rough-hewn, earthy and, per his own description, boorish (“now there’s a Scrabble word,” he adds). Martha’s middle-class family, especially her brittle and controlling mother (Ellen Burstyn), doesn’t much care for this blue-collar dude, but the couple love each other. They’re ready to eagerly embrace parenthood.

So when Martha’s water breaks, Sean distracts her with dumb jokes — already with the dad humor! — and places a call to their midwife. The woman they’ve prepped with, who the two have trusted to guide them through a home birth, is unavailable. A substitute named Eva (Molly Parker) will be assisting them in her stead. She shows up, helps with what turns out to be a somewhat fraught delivery … and then things suddenly, inexplicably take a turn for the worse.

The fact that the Hungarian filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó presents this entire sequence of events in what’s designed to resemble a continuous 24-minute shot sounds, on paper, like just another virtuoso move designed to induce a “how’d they do that?” shock and awe more characteristic of magic shows. Yet the director, making his English-language debut, isn’t indulging in hollow, look-ma-no-cuts showing off for its own sake; by letting viewers experience these wrong turns in real time, he’s both establishing your bond with these characters and letting his actors dictate the scene’s free fall from joy to tragedy. Cowritten by his longtime collaborator Kata Wéber, Pieces draws from her play of the same name (along with a very personal experience), and you can see the theatrical origins in this extended set-up. But that aspect works in the movie’s favor here. It’s not the fluid, snaking and craning camera that draws you in but Kirby’s animalistic grunts and cries, LaBeouf’s manic running around and tender encouragement, Parker’s authoritative earth-mother commandeering that slowly turn hesitant as the situation spirals out of everyone’s control. The “single” take is not the showcase itself so much as the stage for it.

Mundruczó’s breakthrough film, the 2014 Cannes prizewinner/canine-payback parable White God, proved he could meld feeling onto feats of incredible technical prowess — just try to direct an actual pack of 30 dogs to behave like an organized, vengeful army. Displaying your chops while also giving your performers room to do their best work, especially in a story that threatens to tiptoe into maudlin territory at any moment, is far more impressive then how much you can whip a Panaflex around. Not to mention that he’s marshaling a truly odd and unique cast: Name another drama that features LaBeouf, Burstyn, one of the Safdie brothers, Succession‘s Sarah Snook and stand-up comic Iliza Schlesinger in the same scene, much less the same movie. It’s a delicate balance, and this is where the second and third stand-out aspects enter the picture.

Everyone deals with the tragedy in their own way, from chilly disassociation to bad-habit relapses to furtive stabs at fucking the grief away. (To say that a sequence involving LaBeouf aggressively pursuing sex with Kirby before angrily storming away plays … incredibly uncomfortably in light of recent news is to put it mildly. There’s a fury in his work here that makes you feels like a voyeur, and not in a good way.) Martha’s mother chooses to pursue her catharsis by holding Eva accountable via legal means. Cue: The Monologue.

The matriarch has gathered the family together for dinner, in the hopes of, among other things, convincing Martha to go forward with a lawsuit. There is resistance. So Mom recounts the story of how sheer luck saved her as a baby, at which point Burstyn hand-delivers an elderly woman reopening a decades-old wound. There is so much kindness and sorrow, survivalist grit and a pleading sense of grace in the reading; Burstyn herself has said that she improvised part of the speech as the cameras were rolling. No one needs convincing that she’s a national treasure, yet to observe the veteran Oscar-winner elevating what could’ve been a clichéd exercise in pushing emotional pressure points is to observe the power of acting. It’s a showstopping turn in miniature, from someone with a career already bursting with them.

Pieces of a Woman largely belongs to the woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown at its center, however, and it’s Vanessa Kirby who gifts the film with The Performance. London theatergoers were lucky enough to catch the 32-year-old on stage, doing Shakespeare and Chekhov; the rest of us have been content to watch her flex as a clutch supporting player (The Crown) and action-movie femme fatale/hero (Mission: Impossible — Fallout, Hobbs & Shaw). But her profoundly traumatized Martha is something unique, a fully formed and in-focus picture of someone falling apart. She is a walking, talking, dead-eyed raw nerve, and after being partially responsible for the most realistic screen labors in recent memory, Kirby plays the bulk of her scenes in the key of shellshocked. It’s less a performance of repression than recession, as Martha keeps drawing back into herself or numbly shuffling through her interactions and routines. When she does occasionally lash out, it’s like the flailing gestures of a drowning person.

This is an extraordinary example of how to craft an empathetic take on psychic agony bit by bit, piece by piece, and without pandering for easy points. And it’s the sort of achievement that doubles as a coronation of Kirby as a first-rate actor, that next-gen star willing to crack herself open for a role. She’s a much-needed anchor here as well, notably when Weber’s script and Mundruczó’s conceptual choices veer off into shaky territory. There’s surely a way to express the ginger process of healing other than the heavy-handed visual metaphor of a bridge that, as we see the dates go by, slowly comes together as a solid structure; should you think you’re imagining some of those Biblical signifiers that pop up, an ambiguous Garden-of-Eden coda lets you know you’re not losing your mind. Not even Kirby can keep a late-act courtroom address from collapsing under its own weight.

But riding shotgun with her maternal phoenix makes up for a lot, and out of the trio of reasons to seek this work out, it’s the experience of shuffling miles in Martha’s blood-flecked boots that compels you to stay with it. So many movies deal with grief, anguish and personal reformation as little more than a chance for performative grandstanding. Pieces of a Woman has some of those moments, too. What’s fueling it, however, is a very real sense of what’s happens underneath all of the things we associate with melodrama — the tiny implosions beneath the surfaces. You merely see the impact instead of the demolition itself, but you see the damage done nonetheless. And when it’s all over, you see the hard work of someone succeeding in, hopefully, becoming whole again.