#trying not to scream into the void so i can be more considerate of the voids feelings

[em1e]

⠀ ⠀ ༝ i’m trying to be cool about it. feelin’ like an absolute fool about it. 

夏 // COOL ABOUT IT ⠀ ༝ ༝ geto suguru ⠀ ༝ ༝ 2.2k words ⠀ ⚠︎ angst :3 this is a sort of interactive story - at the end u get to pick ur own ending ! choose wisely ! ⠀ — it infuriates you beyond belief because that place hasn’t felt like home in months, and somehow he never noticed.

the temperature around you was dropping considerably fast - your ability uncontrollable at the best of times, but with the ground below you digging uncomfortably into your shoulder, into your chin, it’s easy to agree that this is not the best of times.  

and that’s not the reason you were shaking. 

“don’t hurt them.” you don’t recognize your own voice from the way it trembles, the way it breaks as the sorcerer steps in front of the cage holding the two girls you’ve spent the last few years taking care of. 

since their parents passed and they had no one, you were there for them; since the village went on a witch hunt and punished the three of you, you were there for them. 

and now, as this long-haired jujutsu sorcerer kneels in front of you, head tilting as he takes in your beaten form, you are here for them. 

“i-i’ll take all the blame, please, they didn’t do anything-” 

you whimper when something is shoved into the small of your back, fighting against the restraints keeping your hands together as one of the men from this godforsaken village places a heavy footed boot against it. 

“shut up, bitch. we know you taught them to be evil like you - like their parents.” someone behind you hisses out. 

“ple-ase.” you beg again, ignoring the protests your body screams against speaking more, against your better judgment to just shut up for once. desperation leaking out of the words for the girls. your girls. 

the man stands, towering over you and the men from your village at his full height. and he says those damning words. 

“what exactly is this?” 

⠀ ༝ ༝

he shelters the three of you after. 

provides a home and safety and warmth you hadn’t felt in ages, and the girls settle far easier with him than you do. 

still timid and shy, antsy when he approaches, but it melts away gradually when you see how good he is with them - how kind he is to you, too. patient. waiting until you’re comfortable with him, and that comfortability comes with ease as time goes on. 

until you’re not quite sure how to label what you share with him, but you know deep down you love him as much as you love your girls, and he seems to share that same sentiment and that is enough to move you forward, for you to follow in his shadow at his beck and call, ready to serve with an adoring glint in your eye when he asks anything of you. 

he helps you care for the twins, filling a void you could never compete with as the pair to your paternal figure for them. aides them in places you can’t with schooling and learning how to use their techniques better. it’s bittersweet watching from a distance as they grow older and begin to favor him to you. 

you, the rule maker, the party pooper, the square, the wash your hands before eating and set the table, the clean your rooms or no screen time, the no going out until your chores are done not faring well against geto’s rule breaking, party starting, fun to be around, go ahead and dig in, you don’t have to clean your rooms now, the chores will be here when you get back. 

and it’s infuriating as they become teenagers. because the older they get, the more argumentative they are, the quicker they are with retorts, words flying off their tongues before you can really get your say in anyways. 

“i asked geto and he said we could go, i don’t know why you’re being so sour about it.” nanako pops her gum loudly as you rub at your temples, the start a headache already seeping its way under your skull. 

“because i said so.” is the only argument you can come up with. because you did say so. because it’s been a week since geto’s been home and you want to have a nice family dinner and a game night like you used to when they were little, but those words don’t hold the same weight as they did back then. the twins share a look before nanako rolls her eyes and mimiko sighs heavily. 

“but geto said-” 

“said what?” the aforementioned male steps into the kitchen as if being summoned, arms wrapping around your shoulders and leaning down to press a quick kiss to your temple. 

you lean into the contact, far more tired than you originally thought. maybe a nap would be good before you started dinner- 

“that we could go to the mall then that new udon place downtown.” mimiko hums out, hopping on the counter and swinging her legs despite the many times you’ve told her there were chairs all around, surely she can find one to sit in. 

“oh,” geto’s eyes flit from you, then to the girls “yeah, i did say that.” 

“but (y/n) says we can’t.” nanako groans out, leaning into her palm with her elbow on the counter. she says your name with such venom, it almost leaves you recoiling, opening your mouth to comment on it but deciding one argument is too many for the day. choose your battles wisely, or whatever the saying is. 

“i did say that.” you agree instead, stare heavy on the two and sure that you will be labeled the victor since geto is here and they listen to him when he speaks and he sometimes listens to you when he sees how important things are to you-

but then he’s squeezing at your hip, nodding his head towards them with a small shrug. 

“we should let them go, yeah?” 

and that’s enough to leave it all crashing down. because geto has said his piece and what he says goes. mimiko hops off the counter, excited, while nanako rushes over to pull geto in a hug, saying a quick ‘you’re the best!’ before they’re both leaving the two of you in the kitchen. 

the kitchen that feels so much colder than when geto first arrived. 

he moves to pull you back to him, frowning slightly when you scoff and push him away to go to your shared room. 

“we have to let them be their own people.” he’s saying, but the words fall on deaf ears, with the only reply coming in the form of you slamming the bedroom door. 

that night, your room is far too cold to be comfortable. geto crawled into bed shortly after the girls came home. he lays on his back for a bit, drumming his fingers on his stomach as he decides what to do, before ultimately deciding against anything he could come up with. he turns on his side, and for the first time since you’ve began sleeping together, doesn’t hold you. doesn’t wrap his arms around you and envelop you in warmth, doesn’t push away the cold creeping its way into your veins.

you think the temperature in the room drops a few more degrees before you fall asleep. 

⠀ ༝ ༝

geto isn’t in the bed when you wake up, a note on your bathroom counter saying he’d be out for the day and potentially the day after that, and you hate how you’re still bitter from the night before - hate how that bitterness shapes the way your day goes. 

“why can’t you clean off the table?” nanako groans, “why do we even eat at the table anymore?” 

“i’m cooking, nanako. it’ll take like two seconds, and it’s mostly you and mimiko’s stuff on it anyways,” you search through the cabinets for the proper pan to cook the meat in, frowning when you can’t seem to find it, “i’m not even asking you to set it.” 

“yeah, you're asking me to.” mimiko grumbles, making a face when you give her a look. 

you slam the cabinet shut a little harder than necessary, temperature around you dropping with a small laugh passing your lips. it comes out in a puff of condensation, and usually you’re so careful to not let it drop so low, careful because the girls don’t like the cold, you don’t like the cold, but fuck - you didn’t ask for this.

you didn’t ask to become a caregiver at seventeen, you didn’t ask to get beaten for something you or the girls had no control over, didn’t ask to become a maid, cook, babysitter, something sweet to come home to after a long week of wrecking havoc, and you surely didn’t ask to be treated with less than respect from people you love and care about, from people you’ve only asked for the same in return. 

you untie the apron from around your waist and toss it onto the counter, throwing your hands up as you step away from the kitchen. 

“y’know what? order something for dinner, i don’t care. eat wherever you want. do whatever you want.” 

and you’re leaving them in the kitchen, unable to catch the way they shake from the cold or the look they share with a frown, the whispers of confusion when you’re just out of earshot up the stairs. 

“where did that come from?” “why’d they just snap at us like that?” 

you shove things into a bag haphazardly, throwing on a jacket despite it being mid june to fight against the cold biting into your skin, and don’t say another word to either of them as you leave out the front door. 

they stay in the kitchen almost an hour later, waiting for your return. until geto comes back home with flowers and a small gift bag with your name on the label. 

“they just yelled at us and left!” mimiko’s saying as he sets the bag and flowers on the counter, pulling the two of them in a hug to push away their clear distress. 

“did something happen?” geto tilts his head. surely something must have, but he’s uncertain who could be at fault. his girls could do no wrong, but you’re usually so level-headed. 

the girls share a glance before both look down, “might’ve . . . argued about cleaning off the table . . .” nanako mumbles out. 

“and about setting it after . . .” mimiko adds, hands finding themselves behind her back while nanako picks at a fraying string on her sweater. 

“i told you guys to help them when they ask.” geto sighs out, pinching the bridge of his nose. 

“but-” nanako begins to argue, only to be shut down by geto holding a single finger up. 

both girls' shoulders drop at being in trouble, and geto does well to console them still, patting the tops of their heads before he’s heading up the stairs to your room to see the damage. 

it’s in disarray, as he imagined it would be, your clothes scattered all around with some of your drawers pulled half open to be taken from. the promise ring he gave you a year ago glints mockingly on the bedside table. 

⠀ ༝ ༝

you heave a sigh, toweling dry your hair after your shower, opening the bathroom door and pausing when you see none other than geto hovering at the neatly made bed, flicking through the tv guide you’d left on the comforter after you arrived at this hotel. 

he looks up when you make an appearance, offering a tightlipped smile as he flips the book closed. he’s upset, you can tell, but you’re angry. 

even angrier as you look around the room and find the clothes you’d taken out of your bag to look for your pajamas were now folded nicely and placed back into your bag beside his foot. 

the temperature drops around you.  

but geto still only smiles, head tilting and brows furrowing. 

“why aren’t you home?” 

the question boils under your skin, fingers digging into your palm for some sort of grounding to keep yourself calm. it infuriates you beyond belief because that place hasn’t felt like home in months, and somehow he never noticed. 

“i obviously am not needed there. the girls are old enough to take care of themselves and you are busy doing whatever it is you do, so it’s not necessary for me to stay there.” you cross your arms over your chest for some comfort.

“and what about this?” he holds up the ring you’d left, sees how your jaw clenches at the sight of it, how your arms fold around yourself a little tighter, and how your fingers dig into the skin of your biceps. 

“what about it?” you manage out, lip finding its way under your teeth. 

he laughs a little, and the sound that used to make you swoon now prickles at your skin. it hurts. 

“is this your way of leaving me? of leaving the girls?” 

you want to argue. to remind him you just need a break because it’s all too much at once and you don’t have a leg to stand on anymore but no words come out. but geto, always good at reading you, picks up on your internal battle fairly easily. 

“c’mere,” he waves a hand towards himself, opening his arms for you, and your lip wobbles before you crash into his embrace. 

“i’m not gonna make you come back,” he starts, rubbing smooth circles into the small of your back while you hold the front of his yukata like it’s the only thing to keep you afloat, bunching the material in your fists, “but you’ll always have a home with us. with me and the girls.”

[ LEAVE ] ༝ ༝ [ STAY ]

[hanbindans]

ways they're comforting (hyung line)

a/n: listening more closely to the in bloom lyrics ruined me so I'm posting this from my drafts. I'll get to the maknae line soon enough but since I already wrote the hyungs I'll post them first. enjoy me screaming into the void 🤍

jiwoong

you're like the older brother I never had. there's something comforting in the way you are exactly how I want to be when I grow up; considerate and caring and willing to love someone regardless of their flaws- kind to others but more importantly to yourself. you remind me that it's possible to go through all the stages of adolescence and young adulthood, and both see and feel so much hopelessness and negativity and doubt, and still be able to see happiness in all the small things. like finding peace in petting a small, fluffy animal. you've become the type of adult we all look up to. I'm so proud of you.

hao

I don't know, I just see so much of myself in you. in the way you were the smart kid who did well in school, the kid who worked hard at everything he did, the kid who got compliments from teachers and other people's parents. you could have had anything you wanted- you would have done what it takes to achieve it- and you chose with your heart. people probably had a lot of (high) expectations on you and you made a decision that was for you- something that you really wanted- and you worked as hard as you always did because you knew that you could do it if you really wanted to. I envy your courage to chose with your heart and follow your dreams. maybe one day I can learn it from you.

hanbin

sometimes I think that I can see when your perfect mask starts to slip and your facade cracks a little, and you race to patch up the holes before anyone takes notice. it's okay. I do it too. in some ironic way it makes you even more relatable. there's so much good in you and there's even more desire to be good, do good, make it overflow and spread to everyone around you and paint the whole world in yellows, smiley-faces and sunflowers. "don't regret what you do". I'm not sure if it's meant for me or for yourself. I hope it's for yourself. I hope you let yourself be bright, loving, and most importantly happy, even if it makes you imperfect, more raw, and easier to hurt. people will be ready to love you just as you are. they will love you because they want to return the good you have given. you make me want to do more good.

matthew

there's something very genuine in the way you carry yourself. it's unfair to just call it "unfiltered"- I think I would call it unapologetic, authentic, honest. you're not the type of person to lie about what type of music you listen to or order a plain salad when you're with people you don't know too well. I still have a feeling that you want to be impressive, but you don't try hard to impress. you want to do and be and try so many different things but you won't do it anything at your own expense. you will always say what's on your mind, always do things your way, even if not everyone agrees with you, because it's your life and you won't live it for others. it's admirable. please don't ever start apologising for the way you are.

taerae

I love how you're the colour yellow personified. from the duck emojis to the way you laugh at every joke like they're the funniest thing you've ever heard. you're so warm and fun and I just want to be around you all the time so I can re-learn how to be silly and not wince at the way my face scrunches up when I laugh. it's like you've already figured it out. how to be kind and caring and happy without being scared of being soft and vulnerable. there's so much comfort but also stability and security radiating from you and it's so infectious. I hope you never waver from that. I hope your laugh will always fill up the room and you will keep drawing your ducks and you will keep making your silly little poses. you seem like you're having so much fun.

[a-xyz-s]

One hell of a meetup

Characters: human!tubbo and giant!ranboo

Word count: 1350 words

Cw: vore, safe/soft vore, angst, unintentional fearplay, mentions of death (doesn't happen), very light profanity, instincts

Just a short oneshot from almost a year ago I finally got to finishing. Idea, motivation to finish and proofreading provided by the lovely @brick-a-doodle-do am a vore hoe indeed Brick :D

******

"Ranboo?" Tubbo breathed out in a shaken whisper, a wave of cold sweat washing over his neck when his own voice echoed back through the pitch black cavern.

No response.

For a bit he could swear he was dead and in hell, the heat certainly fit the description. What wasn't quite fitting was the sheer humidity, the gentle winds of cool forest air passing by just out of reach, the deep thunderous rumbling of what could've been recognized as a hum and the ever slightly motioning and twitching wet ground right under his stiff sprawl out body. It wasn't long before the realization hit with full force and Prime had Tubbo wished he was dead right then and there.

The bloodchilling memory of what happened only moments ago fought its way to the front of his mind encasing his already blind eyes with panic filled darkness. Then, as if on cue, was the teen scrambling back to his feet, squirming around as his sporadic movements lead to his limbs slipping and sending him tumbling back down, each soft fall followed by a frightened whine.

Desperate determination left his body momentarily, lying limp on the muscle he now recognized as his 'friend's' tongue, heaving heavily, not getting enough oxygen through his system to think rationally. When it began to shift under his weight, he felt his body slipping off of it, slipping closer to… something, gravitation sending him downwards.

Now that? That forced a horrified scream out of his tightened throat, all the determination and adrenaline from moments ago returned in double the force and successfully pushed him up on his hands and knees.

His eyes have adjusted to the dark by now, but without a sliver of light he simply couldn't see, not even his own trembling hands moving him forward were more than pitch black splotches blending with the surroundings.

It's not like he needed to see, he knew his- 'friends' end goal far too well, he knew he just tried to slowly finish him off, most likely savoring the moment.

It wrecked a choked sob out of him, he never thought meeting up with an online friend, someone he trusted with his life, would cost him his life.

Guiltily he thought back to his parents, all those well-meant warnings and stranger danger talks he's had through the years, Prime, he hated them so much, but what would he give now if he had just listened.

Tubbo growled, he felt rage boiling his insides substituting the previously consuming panic, this wasn't fair. None of this was fair!

All he wanted was his friend, not just the comically deep voice coming through his phone's speaker, nor the half pixelated face smiling back at him. He wanted to hold him in a long tight hug, which he'd make sure was only the first of hundreds more. But he supposes that was too much to ask of life.

Ranboo may have tricked him, but there was no way he was going to give up, going to make it easy for the motherfucker. Oh fuck no!

He's going to reach the front, reach the teeth and then kick with all the force he can muster, if it takes a lost tooth for the bastard to open his jaws, if that's the price for Tubbo's life, then it's one he will be paying.

'Surely just a bit closer', Tubbo reached his arm out trying to feel for the teeth, he felt nothing but void in front and before he could piece together the puzzle his other hand slipped.

This time there was no slimy plush to catch his fall, he felt the upper half of his body slip for considerably longer before stopping at an elongated wall of flesh which wasted no time in doing it's duty. It squeezed around his torso tightly and began pulling down, paying no mind to the protests of Tubbo's hands which tried and failed repeatedly to push him back up.

"RANBOO!!!" the boy screamed in terror. He knew it was stupid, calling out the name of his soon-to-be-murderer, but in the chaos all his mind wanted was his friend.

All at once the tugging stopped and the boy found himself back on unstable ground, he stifled a sob. 'Back on Ranboos tongue', he reminded himself bitterly, but it was a ground no less.

A loud booming vibration came from all around him, startling his tiny-in-comparison form, similar enough to the previous hum, but different in tone to be recognized as something softer. Maybe less of a hum and more of a hush? In any other circumstance it may have even been comforting, weren't it for the burning feeling of betrayal and impending doom.

"Let me go, please," Tubbo broke. "I just- I just wanted to be friends, just to meet you, to have you here with me, to hold you, and- no nO NO NONONO!!!" The boy shrieked, kicking with his boots into darkness which mercilessly drew him in like a magnet. His nails found nothing to dig into, hands nothing to hold onto and feet nothing to push against and so helplessly his body slid back to the very same demise he was spared of moments ago.

This time, as a final nail in the coffin, as the fading light that sealed his fate, the same muscle he found his footing on pushed against his torso. Briefly his back got harshly pressed against the bony roof of the mouth, squeezing all air out of his lungs. Afterwards came a strange sensation, as though he was falling but oh so slowly, like every inch of his fall was slowed by some strange kind of safety measure sliding up his sides, leaving them drenched in increasing layers of slime. His limbs rested there, pinned against his body and rendered useless.

It only lasted ten seconds or so, the longest ten seconds in Tubbos life.

He landed, the soft walls underneath giving in downwards and further softening his ungraceful arrival.

This really was happening, wasn't it?

Ever since he's made eye contact with the giant who had yet to utter more than a hum of uncertain tone and emotion this is where he was bound to end up.

He should've run when he had the chance, should've fought harder and somehow, anyhow, fought off the monster's gluttonous gullet. And he should've begged when he had the slightest sliver of hope his words may be heard. To be frank, he felt an overpowering certainty that nothing he did mattered anymore.

Tubbo let his body fall back, slowly pressing against and sliding down the wall of flesh behind him. His hand, shaking, unable to stay still, traced a soft half circle by his head. More followed suit. Minutes later he finds himself gently rubbing at the stomach walls.

Tears fell silently down his cheeks, everything around, every inch of the plush surrounding him, was Ranboo. His entire world was nothing but his wished-for best friend. And yet, Tubbo felt so alone.

None of this was fair.

******

Ranboo let out another hum, content with the light weight finally resting securely in his storage. The tangled mess of thoughts his mind had become, blinded by primal instincts which screamed nothing but 'protect him', began clearing up now. If he had to guess, Tubbos first reaction to his sheer size may have been the trigger, he didn't hold it against his friend, meeting a giant, in a literal sense, wasn't quite the everyday occurrence.

It was quite fear inducing, but sadly someone forgot to notify his instincts and deliver the message that his friend wasn't in any real danger.

And in the process Ranboo forgot to notify Tubbo, who now sat there, sobbing and trembling terribly, awaiting what he believed to be approaching death.

When he fully awakes from his instinct flooded trance, Ranboo will have a lot of explaining to do, but for now, he was overflowed with joy to finally hold his best friend close.

******

Thank you for reading! Lemme know if you liked this shortie :D

[oshiawaseni]

The atypical shounen MC and his tsundere deuteragonist boyfriend

Izuku’s mental is cooked and one of my favourite gags in doujinshi is when someone, usually Kacchan, references his emotional instability. I’ll laugh and think “true sis” because I feel a kinship in that doujinka seeing it in him too. And then Izuku can also be a trigger happy cry baby and that’s not “normal” for shounen MCs. I adore Horikoshi for designing and fitting him outside the box of certified normal™ standards. Because that box is a trap. It’s a stereotypical, overused and tiring pitfall of shounen protags past. It does make you wonder, though… if Horikoshi isn’t afraid of making his MC completely susceptible to his emotions, what else isn’t he afraid of..?

Izuku presents as a high in “typically feminine” energies, incredibly giving, considerate, loving, sensitive, yet somehow still ambiguous teenager (none of us know for sure what he truly thinks or feels most of the time, as he is prone to keeping his innermost feelings tightly locked inside his chest, where they can’t be judged or rejected) and to round his personality off, his role was cast to a seiyuu who has a higher vocal register and the same beautiful soul, but Izuku can sometimes be emotionally volatile. I can’t think of any major shounens that have written their MC in this way. I think that is why we sometimes see people call bnha mid. Because just like the mha fandom dudebros who stan Izuku when he was at his worst because he was more of a Chad for them, I think these people simply don’t understand Izuku and his sensitivity to emotions he feels with his whole self, so they can’t relate to him well.

But that’s what makes him so unique and loveable to the rest of us - just as he represents quirklessness in the series, he is also a king of neurodiversity. His head’s got a screw or two loose, right? His thinking has always been out of whack and we know this to be true because the person who knows him best says it too and he doesn’t even know the other half of it.

Kacchan sees the boy who’s pushing himself too hard to prove his worth but from our perspective, Izuku also has breakdowns, ptsd, memory lapses and is losing his shit at the slightest slight to Kacchan. All of this is in contrast to Kacchan who used to be just as screwed up with his own lifelong misunderstandings and foul temperament, but has been slowly getting his act together, and while doing so, metaphorically grabbing Izuku by the hands, gently taking him along with him, to that same path of self-care that Kacchan also longs for him. So that they can live healthier lives together. Apologetically so, because Kacchan feels a lot of Izuku’s messed up thinking/behaviour is somewhat his fault. That simply by being in each other’s lives, their problems and feelings had become so tangled and twisted for years. So Kacchan has been desperately trying to unravel and blow away the garbage of it all and go back to how it should have been, had he taken that small, unassuming and kind hand 12, 13 years ago.

Their struggle and battle with feelings for each other is what makes the main bnha relationship so interesting and endearing. They say there’s a fine line between love and hate and they have both loved each other a lot and hated each other in between, but through it all, through every moment, in every interaction they have together, it is so clear to me and to all of us here rooting for them that they need and complete each other.

They are both for each other: the Ying to the other’s Yang, the quiet and understanding kindness to the fragile vulnerability, the heart on the other’s sleeve, the anchor of reason to the unreasonable and the personal hero who always saves them, again and again, without hesitation. Two complete opposites that eventually lost to their unshakeable magnetism, overcoming their messed up history together and subsequently revealing feelings that yield the angsty fine print of them both screaming out into the void:

 “PLEASE DON’T LEAVE MY SIDE!”

This kizuna-bound pair have gone through so much pain and misunderstanding, only to realise the life-or-death need and crazy, obsessive, passionate love for their “most closest” other half, and damn it, if they were never meant to become canon after all this slowburn buildup, I’m going to throw down with Kohei🥊😤… 😂

[deliriiuumm]

dreamling post-canon time loop au headcanons

I honestly can’t believe we don't have a wealth of Dreamling post-canon time loop AUs. There's so much untapped potential in them & let me tell you why they slap (MAJOR COMIC SPOILERS AHEAD):

Imagine Dream being reincarnated as a human after TKO but has no memories of being an Endless. Imagine him being trapped in a time loop that is a metaphor for unresolved issues & self-punishment. Imagine him accidentally pulling Hob into the time loop & experiencing the inherent romanticism of watching his lover from his past life die in his arms while trying to fix his mistakes over & over again. 

How do they break the loop? By confronting their past issues & forgiving themselves. That's right, enforced character development & therapy via time loop, baby!

For your consideration:

Reincarnated Human!Dream & Johanna are childhood besties who like getting drinks at The New Inn owned by none other than Hob Gadling (who may or may not have been Dream's lover in his past life)

Dream doesn't remember Hob but he feels like an old friend & he feels safe with him

Random & headache-inducing flashbacks: “You take care of yourself"/ “Thank you… I shall”

Number of deaths:  ∞; Cause of death: tumbling down the stairs 💀

Enter Delirium who disguised herself as Reincarnated!Dream's human little sister because she missed him terribly & she's sick of losing her siblings 😢

“I want my brother to be okay, I don’t want him to get hurt” 💔

Hob's POV after The Wake: living on deliriously after losing his oldest friend, the one he thought he'd spend his immortality with. What would be left of the world without his old stranger, his beloved, and only confidante? How did he cope with grief? Did he cope at all?

[Narrator voice] He did not, in fact, cope well at all.

Post-Wake flashback: Hob dropping to his knees, screaming in anguish, and begging Dream to haunt him

The past begins to unravel in bits & pieces: a field of red flowers, bloodstained hands, a whiplash across his cheek, and the comforting touch of Death's hand. Nothingness. 

The deaths become more violent as Dream starts remembering the past. Being in so much pain, he's going mad. "Morpheus, we're dying again."

Objects and people start to disappear into the void. If they die one more time, will they come back? Or will they simply disappear into oblivion? 

Time loops are within Father Time's domain. Does he have anything to do with this or is it a cosmic anomaly?

Where do the Endless fit into all of this? Can they interfere or not? Will they be willing to? Or will they let Dream sort it all out as he did in the fishbowl?

And lastly: Dream vs. the Final Boss aka Death. Dream holding Hob as he dies in his arms for what may be the last time, filled with unfiltered rage as he summons and confronts Death of the Endless. 

That's all for now. I have many other headcanons for this AU that I hope to string together into one coherent fic. 

If you have some Dreamling/ Sandman time loop headcanons, I'd love to hear them!

[tiredfoxtf]

Collison Theory (for the fic name)

TW: description of injuries, blood, train crush;

Character(s): Stagedduo/Drunz: Dream and Punz;

Modern setting;

Collision theory states that when reactant particles collide with each other in the right direction, only a certain number of collisions will create noticeable changes.

We can say that all the people in our lives have given it considerable attention. This is nothing more than wishful thinking.

In truth, life in this respect is little different from a chemical reaction. Only a few "collisions" in our lives actually show a tangible result. Who are these people? Passers-by, passengers of the same train, acquaintances, friends, family? People you have never met directly, can they have this impact on your life?

It could be anyone. And the most exciting thing is that you never know about it before it happens. Who will be the person who will change your life.

The light from the dim lamps of the subway car flickered, now taking away into the void, then returning back to chaos. No, it's not light. This is Dream's consciousness itself. He closed and opened his eyes, and everything changed, as if in time-lapse photography. Even though he knew that the train was no longer moving, the world was shaking like an earthquake. Damn, it's a concussion, if Clay survives, Nick will kill him. 

The last thing the man remembers before losing consciousness is the abrupt stop of the train and a sudden blow from the side. He had already woken up among the rubble, screaming, panic, crying and blood. A lot of blood. Is it his blood? No, not everything. Shit. He has to get up and help, which is what he still attends medical school for, after all. But when he tries to get up, he hisses in pain as the world spins, skinned palms grounded him. He must help himself first.

He tore the shirt he was wearing and did his best to wrap his palms. It turned out sloppy, but it is what it is, thanks for that. Clay examined his body for other injuries, starting with his head. Apparently today was his lucky day, as there were no other open wounds and not a single bone was broken. However, he still hit his head hard. He was afraid that he would lose his balance in a second if he stood up. 

But that can wait. Dream heard a man who looked a little older than him groan in the shards of glass and concrete to his right. With a metal bar in his right shoulder. He was only a couple of meters from Dream himself, so it was not difficult for him to crawl to the victim.

“Hey, are you conscious? I need an answer,” Clay spoke, examining the stranger's body for other external wounds. The answer was one open blue eye and another groan. “Can you speak?”

“Yes,” the answer came out quiet, mixed with heavy breathing. Clay went into a sort of trance, as even such a quiet response caused his ears to ring for a second. The man's blond hair was stained with blood and stuck together. Dream found the strength to ignore his head ringing with pain.

“I'm a doctor,” Dream omitted the fact that he was just a student, it didn't matter, he could provide first aid, “You have an open wound in your shoulder, you lose a lot of blood. I'll lift you up, try not to move.”

The other man nodded and Clay made an attempt to lift his torso. Damn, he's pretty heavy. The wounded bit his lower lip and narrowed his eyes, but did not make the slightest movement, as requested. The second time Dream managed to get him off the metal bar, great, one less problem.

“I need you to stay conscious,”  Dream took off the no longer white sweatshirt from the man and tore off another piece (longer than the previous ones) from his shirt, ”What is your name, what day is it today”

“Luke. Today is Tuesday, September 8th, 2020, ouch” male- Luke writhed in pain again as Clay proceeded to bandage his shoulder.

“Sorry,” Clay slightly loosened his grip on his shoulder, “I'm Clay. Does it hurt anywhere else?”

“I would say “nice to meet you”, but this meeting can hardly be called pleasant,” the wounded man chuckled, “The right leg is definitely broken, and I hit my head hard”.

“Yes, it’s definitely not pleasant enough,” Dream grinned in response and finished the bandage, tightening the knot as tight as possible. 

Luke was right, his right shin was swollen and reddened, when asked to move it, it emits a characteristic “crunch” and, according to Luke himself, “Hurts like fucking hell”. Clay put a makeshift splint on his leg, tearing up the remains of his shirt. Luke showed no signs of a concussion, which was already good. But they couldn't go anywhere on their own. Not with Clay's concussion and Luke's broken leg.

Instead, Dream picked up his bag and Luke's backpack and returned to position next to the wounded man. 911 have already been called and are currently clearing the rubble that blocked access to the train, they found out thanks to Luke's working phone. While waiting, they talked.

It turned out that they have a lot in common, in addition to the blond shade of hair. They talked about video games, about Minecraft, to be more precise, about how their Internet names are forever attached to them, about school and university, about sports and personal life. 

Dream told Punz about his roommate, Sapnap, about their mutual Internet friend George, who lives in London, about his cat, Patches. In return, Luke talked about Foolish and his little obsession with sharks, about the teenager Purpled, who is like a little brother to Punz, and about his dog, Teddy, whom he left in Massachusetts with his parents. 

Dream was amazed at how easy their conversation was. He had many friends, at school, university, on the Internet, but something like this, when you barely know each other, but as if you had known each other for many years, happened only a few times in his life.

And every time it changed his life.

Such successful changes are called successful collisions.

[stardew-obsessed-ora]

Random Dobson Headcanons because he's REAL TO ME AND THEREFORE IS REAL

I listed so so many headcanons for Dobson under the cut. They're all relatively silly, but I figured he deserved a bit of care and consideration given he's forcibly preoccupied one of my braincells. (especially since, you know, dobson exists in the void)

He looks to be in his early 20s to me, so I'm going to go on a whim and say he's very into popular internet culture. He's probably sent tacky, confusing memes to the work GC in an attempt to seem relatable before then going "um but none of you have actually met this weeks quota snort snort." On that note, Dobson has absolutely used common Gen-Z phrases to his older higher ups.

"Seriously, who exactly are they trying to rizz up on work time?"

"Sorry- what's a rizz?"

"Nevermind. I meant to say they were having inappropriate conversations during precious work hours."

I feel like Dobson is one of those people who uses a flip-phone unironically. He doesn't even have one of those pretty docomo flip phones, no. He has a bulky flip phone that he uses nearly constantly. In fact, he uses it so often, that he's certain he can type faster on a flip-phone keyboard than he can on a smartphone keyboard. (Spoiler: He can. It's terrifying to witness.)

I imagine he's a college student. He applied for Joja Corporations in order to help pay for his courses. It's a wonder he's able to joggle both middle-management work and course-work.

Dobson can practically live off of microwaveable pizzas, ramen, spaghetti, and a selection of other readily available foods. He doesn't really get tired of his diet. In fact, he gets offended at the sheer implication that his repetition is wrong.

He's so short. He's only about 5'2 or so. No, he doesn't give a shit about his height but if anyone brings it up he's going to make sure their work day is hell regardless of how little he cares. He definitely games on his free-time. It helps ease his nerves after a long day on that Joja grind. He's one of the worst motherfuckers to voice chat with because he's bound to scream in his mic at any given inconvenience. His rage is immense. He's a class-act Joja suck up. People thought Morris was bad? This dude would do absolutely anything for even an ounce of praise from the higher ups he works under. He wants a promotion, he wants to be able to brag to people more than he was already able to. He wants the satisfaction, the thrill, the feeling that he's doing something right. On that note, I genuinely feel like he's desperate for praise and approval from others. Something about him screams gifted kid burnout to me, and I feel as a result he's constantly looking for some form of praise from authority figures. He's still a total asshat though. Don't let this motherfucker fool you. He's chaos incarnate, and would burn your crops if it meant he'd be giving Joja the upperhand.

He is so prideful. He has so much pride for such a small man. It's hard to knock him from his pedestal, and he'll probably laugh at you or retort with an insult if you tried. But if you manage to, he has a bad habit of hiding his face with his hands and turning away. He doesn't want to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing him all frazzled.

He acts like he's high and mighty and untouchable, but could quite literally be folded like a piece of paper with a strong gust of wind. He's far more bark than he is bite, and thats for his own good.

His introduction scene mentioned how he found the citizens of Stardew Valley unfashionable, but if anyone told him he was unfashionable he'd be seething. As much as he hates admitting it, the most understanding he has of fashion comes from videos he sees. He has no clue how to coordinate an outfit, and doesn't actually care to. He finds he looks perfect in just about anything he puts on.

He'd never admit it, but he's actually quite sentimental over the little things he's given from people. He cherishes gifts, and would probably opt to bite someone before giving anything away that was given to him.

For some reason, this little man screams AroAce to me. I imagine the idea of receiving a bouquet somewhat scares him, and that he'd rather just be approached about being platonic partners than actually have to face any romantic confrontation. The thought of being asked on a non-platonic date admittedly scares him. He's never really experienced romantic attraction, and doesn't feel like he should bother himself with trying to venture into something like that or trying to understand it. (im aroace. i aroacified him with my super radical aroace beam.)

[cotillion-the-rope]

Shade Lord Ghost Drabbles: God of Gods

Ghost is now the God of Gods. Along with their troupe consisting of their close friends and followers, they wander the world in search of Gods, so that Ghost may live to their title as God of Gods and deal with any higher being that decides to abuse their power,like they did with the Radiance.

~

Gods always let out a scream when they died, shaking the both physical world as well as the Dream Realm. This was one was no different as Ghost’s void tendrils ripped him apart. He burst into essence, some of which Ghost absorbed, mostly automatically by virtue of just being there, the rest dispersed, fading in the early morning air.

Ghost next destroyed the temple that the god had resided within, raising up a mini void sea to consume it. Up here in the mountains and so big and grand it no doubt had been a quite a feat to build. It was also quite beautiful, inside and out, many great artists had taken part in its construction. But Ghost couldn’t leave up a reminder of a strict, petty god who burned alive any who dared not to follow him. They left nothing behind but puddles of void to act as reminders of their wrath.

Once done, they started back down the mountain, shrinking their form to a more reasonable height as they went. At the base, the Void Dancers had already started celebrating. They would soon descend into the kingdom’s tunnels, parading through and letting everyone know that there was no need to fear; the god who’d killed their tyrannical god ruler was benign. It was starting to become a whole big thing for some reason but if they felt the need to do so, Ghost wasn’t going to stop them.

Grimm was waiting for them at the edge of camp, his own troupe having set up their circus tents nearby. “That is the third god you’ve killed since becoming one yourself.”

Ghost nodded. Prior to their return to Hallownest they’d encountered kingdoms ruled by tyrant gods but had never been able to do anything about it, hadn’t even been in a place to consider trying. Now though, they could. One of their titles was ‘God of Gods’ after all, might as well exercise the power that had granted them said title and use it for good. So far, not everyone was always happy when they did, some bugs benefited from and enjoyed serving cruel gods, but such bugs were always cruel themselves too and thus not worthy of consideration.

“So this is what your godhood is going to be, huh?”

“Part of it.” They still haven’t figured everything out yet but they were enjoying this, the traveling as well as using their power to kill those who ruled with an iron fist. Alas, none of them had provided much of a fight though, certainly not a challenge.

Grimm nodded thoughtfully. Silent but he had something more to say so Ghost waited until he found the words. “Do you consider me to be an unjust god?” The unspoken question there being did he deserve the same fate Ghost had visited upon the other gods they’d deemed unjust and cruel?

“No. Why would I?” Ghost had never felt anything other than love for Grimm, they’d even liked his predecessor even if it hadn’t been in the same way.

“I don’t remember all of their crimes or even the details of most of them but I do know that not all of my predecessors were kind. Many forced others to become Grimmkin to increase their own power. Others still wanted free of the Nightmare Heart’s influence. Of the ones who tried, some desperately, none ever succeeded. The Nightmare Heart could never let them go. They were forced against their will to continue the cycle of death and rebirth. You were one of the few who had a chance to end that cycle but at my request did not take it. The Nightmare Heart is not kind nor is intentionally cruel of course, but in its indifference it can be. So if you are extending judgment over other gods and their actions, shouldn’t that also include me?”

“Hmm… do you want free of the Nightmare Heart?” Ghost wasn’t sure if they could do so without killing him but they had so much power, surely they could find a way if that’s what he wanted.

“I… no, not particularly. But if you deem it evil and wish to destroy it I suppose I can’t object to your reasoning. I know you wouldn’t want to harm me but I am not sure if there is a way to destroy it without destroying me too. And I do not wish to die if possible. Which is why I took long to bring this up after you killed the first god.”

“I’m not going to destroy it if you don’t want me to. It’s not kind but you are. That’s more important.” Ghost didn’t care about Grimm’s predecessors’ crimes, they were all dead and gone. And the Nightmare Heart was indifferent, only wishing to continue, needing a host in the process of course but as long as this Grimm did not mind being its host then Ghost didn’t mind either.

Grimm was silent for a few seconds before replying. “You’ve put my mind at ease, I think. Thank you.”

Ghost hummed an acknowledgment before moving on. They wished to explore this kingdom more, having been interrupted while doing so via learning of how cruel this kingdom’s ruling god had been.

[zachthehopelessromantic]

I love your work!

Could you give me some insights about this composite chart ?

Hello yes, sorry for the long wait. This week has been very busy for me haha. ❤️

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✨Libra Rising: The relationship is very cute, that's the first thing that comes to mind. Since it conjuncts Pholus, you two may get a lot of onlookers when you are together. You two seem perfect together, but as we all know nothing is perfect. You two are able to interact with your environment with a sort of, graceful daintiness. And it looks like you two sort of, balance each other out so to say. Aries on the 7th house suggests you two might interact with others in an aggressive or competitive manner when together, it may also seem like you two are unbothered by others as well since Saturn sits in the 7th house. But you also may find you two naturally attract these kinds of situations that allow each other to show the world the most spontaneous parts of each other. The relationship started out like it sort of the perfect romance story, what it will grow into is up to the both of you.

🎈Aquarius Moon: the relationship is full of acceptance, you two feel like you can be your most authentic selves with each other. Although, there may be some difficulties opening up to each other emotionally sometimes like there could be spells of detachment sometimes. Sometimes you two tell each other everything one day, and nothing the next day. When feelings are shared though, they are handled with careful consideration and comfort.

✨Libra Venus and Mars: this placement screams romance, you two are social, like very social. You two might have met at a party. The relationship is very give and take, about really everything, you two want to give each other anything you have. Be it money, gifts, love, your soul perhaps? (12 house stellium hint hint). It is a very generous partnership. Although, difficult situations and conflict may be voided because you two are so standoffish and you two want to keep the peace of the relationship. You two may also be deathly;y afraid of conflict in the relationship, terrified you might lose each other. And WHEN you two actually try to confront that conflict, one of you may get extremely pissed and the other, very standoffish.

💀12th House Stellium: yes, I may have put a skull emoji in front of it and put it in red text but really there is nothing to be afraid of with this stellium. I mean, unless you're scared of digging up past trauma about not feeling worthy in any relationship ever (Since it is in Libra and Virgo). There is an innate or subconscious feeling in both of you, the feeling of never wanting to be apart, feeling like you two must be together at all times. A lot of past karma comes up too. The relationship may also be a very private one, maybe only a few select friends know about it since the 12th house lord is in the 11th house. The relationship itself may also be a point of contention, for other people that is, people rooting for its downfall because it "looks so perfect" due to the Libra rising. \

🔒Virgo Juno in the 12th house: You're both very dedicated to the relationship itself, keeping it intact (Conjunct Sun). There might be a bit of over idealization because Virgo can be just as delusional as Pisces, be careful of putting unrealistic expectations on the relationship.

🪞Venus Conjunct Pholus: Again, the theme of over idealization is coming up, be careful of that.

👊Mars Conjunct Adonis: there might be an overabundance of masculine energy. And there could be a lot of jealousy, from either the both of you or just other people.

🔥Vesta in Gemini: To keep the relationship spark alive, go on nighttime car rides together, or just talk to each other, and share knowledge.

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If you have any more questions, just DM me and I can answer them. Thank you ❤️

[korineedsanap]

I would love to see compelling evidence for why someone doesn’t like a famous person that doesn’t sum up to man and woman had a messy divorce  because I know this may come as a shock, but misogyny of a industry large does not equate to misogyny the of an individual  because yeah, messy divorces are messy  especially when a catalyst of said, messy divorce seems to be  person a being rightfully upset at being seen as less of an individual and more of a attachment to the other, especially when the other at the time of the divorce had been flung into  a not in considerable amount of fame  but people not being able to maintain a relationship and then on top of that cope with a dynamic shift, especially when fame is involved  which makes your lives way more public and way more susceptible to public misogyny. All of that does not make someone a bad person. 

I don’t know I could be completely off based  but like I think, if someone is bad in any reasonable sense, I think they would have to be actively hurting someone in anyway shape or form  I don’t think having a messy break up makes someone bad I mean it can momentarily, but I don’t think it’s grounds for long-term badness. I don’t think there is such thing as long-term badness. I think if that situation has been resolved a reasonable amount of apologies or action has been taken in regards to the situation. That’s all I really care people as a concept are too ever-changing don’t give me wrong. There are some truly vile people in the world. But being mad at a famous person for having a messy break up that all things considered has been kept pretty private doesn’t feel like strong enough evidence to call someone bad.  I don’t know I saw some thing and it kind of pissed me off and I just need to get it out of my system because they were actual people who are actually terrible who deserve to be shunned because despite the regular. Hey maybe don’t do that you are hurting people by doing the thing you’re doing and then continuing to do the thing that is a bad person, but heating people because you want to hate people doesn’t feel good? Or at least if you dislike people for no solid reason.  maybe don’t post that on the Internet I once had a friend who told me that she didn’t like Ryan Reynolds, and that she thought he was a bad person because she just got a bad vibe from him which is not a reason not to like someone and manufacturing reasons to justify your distaste of a person kind of sucks like if you don’t like them that’s valid don’t like them but if you don’t have solid evidence for disliking them, that’s OK but that doesn’t mean you get to make other people dislike them to intuition is not always correct it’s possible they just remind you of someone for purely superficial reasons that you don’t like that you actually have reasons to dislike, don’t take that out on the person you don’t actually know. Famous people are a weird breed that we are required to have para social relationships with so like fundamentally they’re going to suck because they have the misfortune of some of their basic privacy is being taken away from them and that can make anyone a little shitty that does not excuse bad behavior, but that does mean if someone’s trying to have a private messy break up  this does not give you the right to use it as cannon fodder for you say they’re bad and you should all agree with me because it’s a dick move to put somebody on a pedestal only to throw tomatoes at them know if they were put on that pedestal and then start throwing tomatoes at onlookers then they’re rude. They’re using their platform to do a harm you see how that’s different these two people are not the same

OK venting done. I feel better now thank you void for letting me scream into you. 

[codexbrainhasbrokenfree]

BRAIN CURRENTLY SET TO : YAKUZA

The Codex, he/it, 🇲🇫🇬🇧

This is @marcocodex 's sideblog, where I scream into the void and can occasionally post half-assed pencil drawings or reblogs funny things about my favorite characters or anything

@marcocodex is kind of inactive because of how much time art school is taking out of me, but it's supposed to be my main art blog.

Here though I will be funny. Heyyy. That's a bargain right there

Rambling tag : #the codex brain

More info below the cut

FANDOMS

Fictions I'm overly interested in, ranked based on the passion I have for them. You can come up to me and ask me about them and I will immediately consider you my friend /hyp

Undertale / Deltarune

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure

Guilty Gear

Batman

Team Fortress 2

Five Nights at Freddy's

Bendy and the Ink Machine / Dark Revival

Dofus / Wakfu

Yakuza

FAVORITE CHARACTERS

I feel a very strong attachement towards my favorite characters. I love them very much and I will be annoying about them. Here are a list of them with the tag associated to me rambling about them.

Dr. W. D. Gaster (Undertale / Deltarune) : #schrodinger egg. I've been theorizing on his character since 2017 and I have no plan of stopping now. I also reblog cool arts of him. I usually shorten his name into just G for convenience. My favorite character ever and he doesn't even exist.

Enrico Pucci (Jojo's Bizarre Adventures) : #kabutomushi. I've written plenty of small essays about him ever since I read Stone Ocean in late 2020. I will reblog cool arts of him and thoughts I have about him.

Romeo "Bedman" Neumann (Guilty Gear) : #benomad. Literally me. I've been playing him on Xrd and Strive since mid 2023. Will post thoughts about him and most probably reblog cool arts. I reiterate : Literally me.

The Assassins' Guild. Or Millia Rage, Zato=ONE, Venom, Slayer, Eddie (Guilty Gear). Common tag : #average existence enjoyer. I am very normal about them all.

Robo-Ky (Guilty Gear) : #powered by tangerines. I play him in Accent Core +R. I've written plenty of short essays about him and will probably continue to do so. Current Objective: getting him in Strive.

Edward "The Riddler" Nigma (Batman) : #dies of green. So obsessed about this character I've written a whole Batman AU fueled by the frustration of having read too many bad version of him (among other things). Maybe I'll talk about it someday.

Dr. Ludwig "Medic" (Team Fortress 2) : #platonic pocketing. I've been playing him since 2019 and my skills are pretty good. I've read the comics religiously, loved them a lot, and adopted Medic in my brain full-time.

William Afton (Five Nights at Freddy's) : #bunnies die frice. I've been trying to stop caring about him and his franchise for years. It's no use. He always comes back. That's very upsetting.

Joey Drew (Bendy and the Ink Machine / Dark Revival) : #the illusion of understanding what i'm talking about. I've been a fan of Bendy since 2017, but Joey truly became an important character to me after I've played Dark Revival and read the books, especially The Illusion of Living. I might post some thoughts I have about all of this.

Jacquemart Harebourg (Dofus / Wakfu) : #jackie strasbourg. Mainly enjoyed him in the manga Ogrest, fascinated by how strangely (/derogatory) he was depicted in Wakfu. I've known him for a decade or so, he's the oldest of my favorite characters.

Qilby (Dofus / Wakfu) : #who is bill anyway. I swear there was an anomaly in the space-time continuum when Tot wrote this character. Nox too. But god S2 was something great.

Goro Majima (Yakuza) : #lapped your ass. The lastest addition, I'm still playing through all the games but I can say with considerable confidence I'm not gonna be normal about him.

ABOUT ME

I have the autism software installed.

I have difficulties understanding sarcasm or jokes, and I appreciate tone indicators (/j, /s, /srs, /rh etc). Please keep that in mind when interacting with me as I can easily come off as rude even though this isn't my attention.

I will infodump and hyperfixate on certain characters/topics. This is where the "annoying as fuck" in my bio comes from.

With that being said, welcome to my brain! Make yourself at home.

[spiky-bees-knees]

Hello? Is this thing on? I'm sitting on my throne at my workplace now and want to just talk to the void.

What makes a successful life? I've always thought that I didn't want a lot and that it would be easy to attain the few things I wanted in life. Perhaps if I was born a few years earlier.

I wont make this a complaint, I don't think even the void wants to listen to that sob story.

I think my simple dreams are just that. A small home where I can scream at my computer screen in peace without disturbing anybody else.

A place I can modify at will, and be alone as much as I want. Don't mistake my desire to be alone for someone who doesn't want to have a social life, I most certainly love talking (despite my poor conversational ability) to people, as well as making new friends.

I think it's probably mostly about control, I *feel* as though I've never been in control of my life. Though, I know I can really do whatever I want as a 29 year old able bodied man.

Woah, slow down, I'm already laying down the tracks for multiple directions I want to go and we're just at the start.

Before I start with the idea of control I think I need to talk about my relationship with my parents.

First and foremost I'll just state that I love my parents. Now that I've got that out of the way, I will say that I've definitely become disillusioned with my parents.

Growing up and until young adulthood I always saw my parents as perfection. My parents always knew everything. If I asked a question, whatever my parents answered is what I thought was the universal truth, why would I think otherwise?

However, now that I've reached my late 20s I've started realising that this really isn't the case. My father was someone I aspired to be. He was a genius who was also really funny, he worked very hard and made good money. Now in that place previously on a pedestal, I see a man who always has an answer, but states opinion as fact, and often says things that I know are incorrect. he so confidently just says things which is sometimes baffling. correcting him with factual information is disregarded, and It's gotten to the point where I don't even try to correct him anymore because there really isn't a point in doing so (as a side note, this is probably something people on the internet should do more often).

I often cannot stand being around my father anymore unless he's just making jokes (he is a funny guy), but if he starts making conversation it becomes less and less pleasant.

As for my mother, she is a fantastic, considerate person. She cares deeply for everyone and is also a very smart and hard worker...when she's sober.

My mother has a bit of a drinking problem which became exacerbated after she finished her struggle with quitting smoking.

When she's drunk she becomes a very petty and mean person who will often just flat out ignore you and give you the cold shoulder if you talk to her.

As someone who has never smoked or really even drunk alcohol, I can't imagine the struggles she has, but at the same time it is not an excuse for her behaviour and attitude.

This has caused a big rift between my sister and my mother (maybe I'll tell the void about this sometime).

With a lot of that out of the way I can give some context to the feeling of no control.

Earlier in my life I was quite the hyper kid, and my parents were always scolding me. I don't think that's an inherently bad thing, after all you have to direct your child in a direction in life (side note: I won't be having children so try not to jump down my throat about how to raise a kid because I won't be doing it anyways).

I would say the problem was that my parents ended up raising a kid who follows instructions and rules. Once again, this doesn't sound like a bad thing on the surface, but when all I know how to do is follow rules and instructions, then I'm awful at making independent decisions.

This even affects my relationships in life. If a friend asks me what I want to get for dinner, all I can really do is shrug and say whatever is fine. Or what activity I want to do "idk, whatever you want is fine". I know this is frustrating, but honestly I can't bring myself to make independent decisions. I have no idea what I am and am not allowed to do as ridiculous as this sounds.

Recently I've been trying to give myself permission to do things and this has been quite useful, but these things are usually small in scope.

This inability to make decisions has left me just kinda shuffling along in life every so often.

In my early 20s my mom told me some place was hiring nearby and so I applied and stayed at this awful job for 5 years. 12-14 hour shifts with no lunch breaks. I just stayed because I didn't know what I was allowed to do other than that job. They paid me only slightly above minimum wage and my year end "bonus" was a company wide lunch (as long as we rated well on our health inspection (which we did by being perfect little employees and following all the rules when the inspectors were around)).

Now I'm at a different, much better job (once again advised by my mother that this place was hiring). I've worked here for 5 years as well now and I'm starting to feel trapped, it is a nice job but I don't want to live in this city anymore, however, as someone with no education, I can't really move somewhere else and expect to get another job with equal pay. Not to mention Canada's housing prices (a topic for another time).

So let's circle back to where we started. What is a successful life? I just want a small home and a quiet life, while owning just a fancy computer and a decent internet connection. Unfortunately this seems to be out of my grasp ultimately. I also wish to make lots of friends online and expose myself to lots of new communities that I never even dreamed of, but where do I even begin with that? I've never been part of a community before.

This has gone on a lot longer than I was expecting this to but I'm glad I could just say this to the void. Can the void even read this? Hello? Ah well, until next time void.

[cleverclovers]

Walmart online ordering fucked us over, so I'm here asking for help. We placed an order for roughly 100$ worth of groceries that was supposed to go on my EBT card, and the delivery fees were to go to the bank, just the delivery fees, so we could still afford to pay bills and buy the other things necessary for life (like cat litter and pads later in the month)

The site glitched and instead of charging my EBT, the charge went entirely to the bank. We did contact customer service, who informed us that we could take the receipt to the CS counter at Walmart and they'd scan it, process the return and charge those items back to the EBT card. When we went to follow through on this process we were informed at the counter that that was not, in fact, possible. Now we're 100$ short in money that can be spent on bills and supplies.

We come up tight every month, but this is more than we can handle, and we have no idea when or if we're going to get stimulus, so we can't really hold out. I don't have the ability to ask my family for help, either, since that results in chaos every time, which leads to stress, which leads to seizures.

I have a lot of back log on commissions, to the point where i feel guilty trying to work on personal projects and I'm in a constant state of anxiety. the stress from this is leading to more and more break through seizures and spiraling mental health issues.

I regularly need help getting through the month, affording food, affording supplies for my household, because being disabled is expensive, and the government really doesn't care--they only factor in rent, electricity, and phone, not internet, or travel, or excess medical costs from teeth falling apart, or the expense of allergy and interaction safe foods, and that adds up quickly.

I would love nothing more than to finish my back log of commissions and be able to draw the things that could actually bring me personal fulfilment, and I'm here begging for help making this happen.

At this moment I need to fill that 100$ hole walmart left in our finances. I would prefer not to take commissions for that, because I *am* incredibly backed up on those.

For that i have

- https://ko-fi.com/rosesinclover

- https://PayPal.me/theogandall

- venmo/cashapp $Rosesinclover

For the long term, I do have a patreon, and support there allows me to draw the things I want to, like serotonin providing fan art, or pieces for my personal comic that's currently being overhauled

https://www.patreon.com/Rosesinclover

Help is greatly appreciated if it's available. I just want to get out of this anxiety pit. I'm so tired of feeling like I'm drowning or screaming all the time.

[getouswh0re]

Howdy!! Could I request Yandere Gojo and Geto from jjk, with a special-grade sorcerer reader? Ty in advance, I really like your writing!✨

an; thank you for the love ˊᗜˋ💕 here are some drabbles for them separately, hope you liked it :3

warnings; yandere, gore, blood, unhealthy relationships, obsessive behaviour. do not condone such actions in real life, and please kindly read at your own discretion.

THE night was quiet, almost serene, totally at odds with the glowering menace in Geto’s eyes. Gone was the subtle gentleness in those inky slits you had grown to adore; in its place, inscrutable darkness bore holes into the back of your skull as you shuddered beneath the curse user’s glare.

It was still Geto in the flesh: the same face, unique hairstyle and robes he’d wear just like any other day. Yet it was no longer the special-grade sorcerer whom you once knew and loved. You never knew what caused such a drastic change in him; all you wished for, was for the old Geto to return, hoping that all of this was none other than another nightmare.

“Suguru? W-What are you doing at my door? It’s already late, you should be taking some rest ...” A hint of dismay — maybe sadness, ghosted his expression when the raven picked up the quivers in your tone. Nonetheless, a gentle smile adorns his face, emerging from the shadows to reveal himself as the raven explained himself.

“Why? Can’t I come and visit you?” He cocked his head, a playful smirk evident. Geto never ceased to make your heart flutter; perhaps it was his flirtatious nature and mellow personality that drew you towards him, but even after being one of his closest friends for a long time, at times you felt like you couldn’t understand him at all, with this being one of the occurrences.

You chortled, about to invite the raven into your apartment when warning bells started to ring incessantly in your head, warning you that there was something awry about him once you caught a glimpse at his clothes imbrued with crimson splatters.

“Sugu ... what is that on your clothes?”

“Oh this? Satoru splashed me with red paint, it’s not much of a big deal.” You knew he was lying, instantly picking up the revolting metallic stench from the stains. Dread filled your mind while you staggered back, keeping a distance from the male who gave you a perplexed look in return.

“You and I know a smell like this isn’t red paint ...” Trying to be as calm as you could, you retracted a step backwards with every stride Geto took. “Be honest with me. What on earth have you done?”

“Sharp as ever, y/n.” A condescending look took over as Geto finally revealed his true colours. “The world needs to change. All these monkeys are the reasons why curses exist. They can’t even control their cursed energy properly, and we sorcerers have to battle with death every time a curse poses as a threat to them. Their ignorance is revolting in its core, and I believe to make the world a better place, it would be better off to remove all of them out of sight. Don’t you agree —“

“What the fuck are you thinking?” Unable to withhold your seething rage, you snapped at the curse user. “This isn’t what sorcerers should do! What you are doing is of no difference from a brutal murderer Geto! I can’t fucking believe you!”

“How can you think of me like they y/n? That hurts my heart you know.”

Before you could even scream, he was already inches away, blood-stained hands caressing your cheeks tenderly as if you were made of fragile glass. “I just want to make life easier, there’s no need for us to put our lives at stake every time we exorcise curses. Right? We could be enjoying peaceful days together, free from the dangers of this world ...”

“Stop! Your delusions are sick, this isn’t you at all Geto! I don’t know what is wrong with your brain, but it’s never too late to turn back —“

Suddenly, your vision darkened — your consciousness sinking into a bottomless void as the raven carried you in a bridal style, the two of you vanishing into the tenebrosity of the night.

“And I thought you were the only one who’d understand me ... love.” He shook his head in disapproval, but the disappointment in his eyes were eventually replaced with glee as Geto stared at your limp figurine in his arms.

“But don’t worry, what needs to be done will be done. For our sake, for our future together.”

EVERYTHING would always be uglier up close.

At first glance, one might find Gojo Satoru a perfect man: with talent, looks and wealth all in one package. Men envy the greatest sorcerer of all time, and women grovel at his feet, desperate for a sprinkle of the man’s attention. Despite living the life everyone dreams to be in, the heir of the Gojo clan couldn’t care less about how the world spins around his axis. For the sorcerer has his eyes set on something much more worthy of his time and effort. 

He is a man of determination, willing to achieve his goals with whatever means possible — even resorting to dirtying his own hands. It is such an irony that underneath the charming façade, such a disgusting soul exists.

“For the last time Satoru, I am not interested in dating anybody.” Heaving an exasperated sigh, you politely shoved the lavish presents piling up at your front door back into the man’s arms. 

“I feel really flattered that you have feelings for me, I truly do. But I’m sure you know as sorcerers, we fight with death every day. If there is any regret that I’d dread to have ... it would be to leave everything I love behind. And I would rather die alone than leave my partner suffering on their own.” 

“That’s what I love about you y/n.” 

A loving sigh slipping from his tongue, Gojo took a step forward, cupping your face with utter delicacy. Yet you felt more than revolted by his sudden intimacy, struggling to writhe away from his tightening grip.

“You are always so kind, so considerate ... something I cannot find in anyone else other than you. But think about it sweetheart! You and I are both special-grade sorcerers, but I can protect you from the curses — at the same time giving you the moon and stars. We could move in together, you wouldn’t even need to work anymore. Why make your life harder when I could simply provide for you? Seriously —” 

“S-Satoru, I hate to tell you this but you’re pushing the boundaries right now.” Trying to reason with the sorcerer, you spoke with a harsher tone, praying that Gojo would get the hint and respect your choices. “You’re out of your mind! And why would you force 

Nonetheless, your words fell on deaf ears. 

“Now this is not how you should react when someone offers you their heart and soul.” The light in his cerulean eyes darkened, cyan hues glimmering beneath the penumbra of nightfall. “And I know you are a smart young woman, so you’d come to realise what is in your best interest. I really don’t want to do this to you y/n; but if you are trying to push me away from your life again, I would have to keep you to my side — the hard way.” 

With that, he pulled down his blindfold.

You were aware of how dangerous Infinite Void was; still, experiencing it first-hand was one hell of a terrifying experience. Fleeting images flashed across your vision as if all of this was in fastforward motion, depicting your fate in the past along with future. As certain blurred vestiges showed up, your heart sank in indescribable despair; moments of you and none other than Gojo were portrayed — blood splattered across the labyrinth of streets in Tokyo, your trembling hands intertwined with his, platinum bands wrapped around both of your ring fingers, adorable kids that were exact replicas of both of you. At this point, you could feel the will to fight back dwindling to fickle embers. 

No matter what you did, Gojo would always find his way back to you.

Even if he had to tear the world apart with his hands. 

[bubblegumbeech]

The Losing Move

Day two Ectoberhaunt:  Scream vs Laugh

AO3

It started with a scream. That’s how Clockwork knew it was finally time. 

He hesitated, of course. There was so much to lose, so much still uncertain, paths branching in different directions, moments shrouded imperfectly from his view, strings of fate tangled and misused. But he was the Master of Time. He could hesitate and no one would ever know. 

Not even them. 

Clockwork made a portal, leaving his Clocktower and walking towards a tall grey rock almost as old as time itself, weathered by age and nothing like the statue it had once been standing proud in a garden of overgrown thorns and long dead leaves. Nocturn appeared next to him, a swirl of inky black void scattered with stars and nebulae. 

“Did you hesitate?” he asked. 

It was a valid question. An important one too, if they were to succeed. Clockwork’s hesitation could lead to an uncertain future, to a failure in their plot. And then they would be lost, set back hundreds of thousands of years again. 

“No.”

Nocturn accepted his answer. Perhaps he knew that Clockwork was lying, perhaps he did not. Either way, they both turned to the stone. 

It wasn’t long before the others appeared. 

Misery Vex was the first, then Sojourn, on and on until they all stood, surrounding the stone. 

Misery turned to Clockwork. “Did it take?” she asked, and he flew forward, taking off one of his gloves to run his hand along the smoothed side of the rock. It hummed, an energy unlike any else, unique to here yet everywhere and nowhere at all. Very chaotic indeed. 

“It has.”

She hummed an affirmative, linking her hand in his before reaching out to take Sojourn’s. Clockwork reached for Nocturn and as they all linked together they formed a shield, thick and impenetrable between their varied talents, around the stone. 

“How long will this take,” Vortex said, ever the impatient one. He was jittery, yellow cords of lightning constantly jumping all over him in a nervous jumble, branching in and out of each other like writhing snakes. 

Clockwork sighed. “Not long.”

“You musn’t get too close,” Misery warned.

“I know.”

“You musn’t go too far,” Nocturn reminded him. 

He knew that too. 

“You’ve failed before,” Misery said, her voice steady and calm. She was not wrong, nor accusatory. He had faltered, it had led to a less than ideal outcome. He would not admit this. 

Clockwork didn’t allow any emotion on his face. “The threat is contained. My faults did not lead to the failure of our mission.”

She scoffed. “No, only to ‘inconvenience’. Right?”

As far as she knew. As far as any of them did. They relied on him, to determine if their future would be a success. He was the only one who could see which path to take, what choices would lead to their victory. He was the only one who knew just how thin the chance was, how precarious the choice. It would not benefit them to know. He did not need their doubt.

“Who was it?” Sojourn asked, referring to the scream that had summoned them here. The scream that had echoed hauntingly throughout the entirety of the Infinite Realms. 

Clockwork hadn’t looked. He looked now. 

“A boy, fourteen years old, between child and adult, between living and dead, between here and there.” 

Nocturn smiled, “How fitting.”

The stone shattered. Power and chaos, magic and will swirled around in a tornado, beating against the solid weight of their shield and making what was once so obviously strong seem weak and pitiful in comparison. 

Vortex’s eyes glowed in excitement. It was a sign, they all knew, that things were getting close. 

Eventually the storm faded and all that was left was a weathered pile of ash and rubble where there had once been a stone, where there had once been a statue, where there had once been nothing at all. 

It would come to nothing once more. 

Soon.

  The Infinite Realms had been lifeless for so long. Nothing more than ambient ectoplasm and void. A place. Nothing more and nothing less than it had to be. Many of the denizens had never seen them alive, existing as they once had. The panic was only natural. The frenzy, exciting and new. The heart of it all beating again. 

There was one ghost in particular, of course, who had only known the realms as they existed now. Sure there might also be others, newly made and newly dead, but this one was the important one. He’d been the one to give his life for the life around them now. 

Or at least, he’d given half of it. 

The Observants, of course, were furious. 

They had attempted to hunt down the Ancients, knowing it was they who had done this, who had planned this and then hidden it from the view of those who watch. Vortex had been taken first, as expected, and Undergrowth had fled to the mortal realm. The others also split, the time for them to come together was over; the time to prepare for the end was nearing. 

Clockwork, of course, their ever loyal subservient pet that could not leave his tower without their knowledge, that could not use his power without their permission, he’d never been looked at twice.

“You told us the threat was neutralized.” Nocturn said, sliding up next to one of Clockwork’s monitors. He watched a scene, where Daniel and Pariah fought. It was not a real fight, of course. Pariah had long shed the haze of bloodlust that had driven him mad, and was now attempting to be endearing, to rebuild a trust Clockwork had never actually had in him. 

Clockwork took a sip of his tea. It was made from some of Pariah’s newly grown coraleander leaves and made a thick, murky green tea that Clockwork quite enjoyed the taste and texture of. Unfortunately that was exactly why Pariah had grown them, and while Clockwork had snuck them away like a petty thief, he doubted that the missing leaves had gone even a moment unnoticed. 

It was infuriating and Clockwork sipped at it slowly, savoring it’s warmth.

“He is no longer the King. In fact, there is no King at all, just as I said it would be.”

Nocturn turned to meet his eyes, tilting his head just slightly in suspicion. “Yes, you did. Though I suppose the others thought you meant he would not escape his sleep. Or at least, that he would not escape his sleep until after .”

Clockwork looked away, towards the monitor. Pariah had soundly defeated Daniel and was laughing. Likely at the way the poor boy looked, his hair a mess and covered in the very coraleander leaves Clockwork was drinking. He’d need to wash them off before he transformed back into a human. While they wouldn’t be immediately deadly to a Half-Ghost, they would form a large, hard to explain, rash. 

“That wasn’t what I said though, was it?” Clockwork met Nocturn’s eyes once more. 

The other ghost just snorted and shook his head. “No, no I guess it wasn’t. Clockwork, the tightrope you’re walking, that future you see that you haven’t told us about? I really hope you get it. I do. Because the brightest lights cast the darkest shadows and I can’t imagine what would happen if you missed.”

Clockwork’s tea had gone cold. He continued to sip it. He ignored Nocturn’s words and he watched the screen as Pariah helped Daniel stand, only for Daniel to tackle him when he wasn’t expecting it. 

“I’ll take that under consideration.” 

It was becoming habit, he found, to lie to Nocturn. 

  Daniel was at the Clocktower, eating a plate of cookies and complaining about some of the varied ghosts he had to deal with and fight on a regular basis in his mortal realm. It was a side effect, of course, of Phantom’s new role as the Heart of The Infinite Realms. The smaller, weaker ghosts, especially younger and newly dead ones, had attempted to flee the Realms when they noticed the sudden changes. 

When the Observants had become so busy trying to find the cause of the change, so busy trying to hunt down what was left of Chaos’ children, that they could no longer micro-manage the state of the Realms. Could no longer constantly overstep their authority and keep their tasteless ‘Order’. 

The Realms had become more and more lively and Clockwork had found himself in a perpetual good mood. He took a cookie for himself. Nocturn caught him baking the other day; his expression had been dry as he congratulated Clockwork on his adoption. It was  a pointed accusation. 

He had shoved it to the back of his mind and decided to make some forgoent tea to go with the cookies. He hadn’t offered any to Nocturn. 

Daniel paused in his musings for a moment before speaking again, his voice careful. “I’ve been visiting Pariah.”

Clockwork hummed, not looking away from his screens. “I am aware.”

“Of course you are.” Daniel rolled his eyes. Then he sighed like he didn't know how to bring up what he was going to say next. “Did you… Did you know he was going to get free if you sent me after that key?” 

Ah, so he’d figured it out then. “It was a possibility. Each and every choice you make creates an entirely new future with entirely new consequences.” 

“He doesn’t seem all that bad…” Daniel argued, as if Clockwork was going to disagree with him. Clockwork raised an eyebrow, the one with the scar Pariah had given him, and looked over to him. “I mean, he just. When he first woke up he was really mad right? But like, I’d also be really mad if I finally woke up from a forced coma only to have Vlad there.”

Anyone would really. 

“And even though he sucked Amity Park into the Ghost Zone, no one actually ended up getting hurt. At least, no more than usual in a ghost attack. And I’ve been talking with the other ghosts that have been ‘Challenging’ him and they all say he's a pretty cool teacher… Like, he knows how to fight and he’s good at showing them how they can use their unique powers-”

Clockwork didn’t interrupt Daniel as he rambled. It was rare, at least since he’d been deposed, to hear lists of Pariah’s more positive aspects. It wasn’t uncomfortable so much as mildly frustrating. Was this part of Pariah’s ploy? Get Daniel to fall all over himself to recite poetics about Pariah to Clockwork. He should have learned by now that whatever affection he might hold for him, it would not be enough. Not to stop his plans, and certainly not to stop the others.

“So uh, you know, he seems… chiller. Without the crown and ring and stuff.”

“Yes, it was the Ring of Rage Daniel, what did you think it was used for?” 

There was a small imperceptible shift in Daniel’s expression, as if he’d realized something and made the choice to file the knowledge away for later. He must have learned that from Pariah as well. “So, if there’s things that can change even powerful ghosts like Pariah, are there things that could change, say… one of the Ancients?”

Was Daniel befriending another Ancient? Clockwork smiled, that was good then. He could hold that against them, the weight of his failure to keep an emotional distance wouldn’t be as stark, if another Ancient or two fell just as easily to Daniel’s pleasant company. He could use that, he simply had to find out which of them it was. Perhaps Sojourn? He was always soft for children, but Clockwork hadn’t been aware of him returning to the Barrens lately, and Daniel rarely went any further than the Time Locked Lands or the Far Frozen. 

“It is good to befriend others Daniel,” he says halfheartedly, searching through his mirrors to locate Sojourn, “but remember not to trust too easily. You never know the goals of those around you, if they might be using you towards their own ends.”

“Of course,” Daniel replied, his voice hard. 

Clockwork looked over to him, he was staring at the dregs of his tea, expression dark. 

“Would you like more tea?” Clockwork offered, wondering what had plummeted the boy’s attitude so suddenly. 

Daniel looked up, a small smile on his lips, “Yes Please.”

Clockwork left to make more, his mind still trying to find which Ancient Daniel had befriended. 

  “The Observants are completely ignorant of your machinations,” Pariah said as Clockwork entered his study. “Of course, they don’t know you as well as they think.”

Clockwork should stop visiting him. Should never have started, a fact that Nocturn was only too happy to remind him of. Sometimes Clockwork wondered if Nocturn got his taste of Chaos from Clockwork's mistakes, he seemed so dedicated to reveling in them. 

“I didn’t come here to talk about the Observants. I have my fill without the need to remark upon them when absent from their presence.” Clockwork was scowling. He could hide his irritation, but despite his lies and trickery he was hardly an accomplished actor. 

Pariah chuckled, flipping another page in the thick book he’d been reading. The title was faded, but Clockwork recognized it easily enough. It was a detailed history of the Infinite Realms after King Dark had been sealed away. It was a long history, though not as long as the history that came before his reign entirely. 

It was also the exact kind of thing Pariah would read cover to cover, like the obsessive monster he was. 

“I suppose you came to warn me away from your ward then?” Pariah asked, his voice casual. Clockwork scoffed, allowing a roll of his eyes before floating over to Pariah’s shelves and grabbing one of the books that looked recently used. It was about old soul binding rituals, much like what had happened to Fright Knight. It was amusing, the thought that Pariah’s oldest friend might still be whining about his little curse. 

“Hardly,” Clockwork said, idly flipping through the pages, “if I could control Daniel I never would have let him near you to begin with.”

Pariah smiled, placing his own book down. “Yes, I imagine you wouldn’t have. It would be a mistake to let me get close to him and realize he is the reason the Infinite Realms have started to sing.”

He’d figured it out then. Of course that wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility. Unlike the Observants, Pariah was wickedly intelligent and fully capable of coming to the appropriate conclusions. “Sing? An interesting way to describe it.”

Arms encircled his waist and Clockwork was pulled back into a warm chest. Pariah’s chin rested on Clockwork’s shoulder as he spoke softly into his ear. “Is it enough? The realms feel alive, weaker ghosts are fleeing or banding together once more. It resembles the time we once had, between Chaos and Order. Will you stop here?”

“There’s nothing more I can do,” he lied. 

Pariah hummed an agreement and reached out to flip a few pages through the book Clockwork had been holding. There was a beautifully illustrated drawing of a necklace, bewitched and layered in curses. Pariah must have memorized the pages, of course. “Would you wear jewelry if I made it for you? I would see you decked in gold and finery if I could.”

Clockwork slammed the book closed, just missing Pariah’s fingers. He didn’t think about the earrings Pariah had once gifted him, or how he wore them even now, dangling hidden beneath his hood. “You should know better than to ask that.” 

He felt a smile against his neck. “Then I won’t ask.”

  He held the Thermos in his hand. 

The other Daniel was a menace, truly. But he would not be so desperate to ruin Daniel’s life anymore. It had been long enough for him to realize that his existence was no longer predicated on Daniel’s decisions, or on the loss of his family. 

It would change him, of course. The knowledge that he exists in the same time as his once family will either soften his grief, or sharpen its edges. There were so many paths he could take, and Clockwork could not see them all, did not bother to look much further than the distance he needed him for. 

There was something more important than his grief that he and Clockwork had in common. Something Daniel and Pariah likely had in common with them as well: the detestation of the Observants. 

Clockwork opened the thermos, releasing Daniel’s worst nightmare and not thinking about how the young half-ghost had given it to him so easily, had trusted him so quickly when all Clockwork had done was protect his human family one time. 

The other, once possible, Daniel appeared in an explosion of light and matter and immediately attacked, using his claws to scratch at Clockwork’s face. He was prepared for that though, years trapped in a thermos had eroded much of Dan’s more refined aspects. It would work in Clockworks favor of course, he had made sure of that.

For now, Clockwork froze time and moved behind him. That way his wild attack would meet nothing but ambient ectoplasm and Clockwork could speak his piece. Provided his piece took less than a second to speak.

He allowed time to flow and watched as the other Daniel floundered, confused, only to instantly realize just what Clockwork had done and turn around, ready to attack once more. Clockwork smiled as their eyes met and asked, “Would you like to End the Observants and their Order?”

the other Daniel attacked him, but Clockwork could see the consideration in his eyes. The thought had been implanted, now all he had to do was sit back and watch. the other Daniel had always been rather good at ruining things after all. 

“CLOCKWORK!” Daniel yelled, flying frantically into the Clocktower. “Clockwork Dan escaped somehow! He attacked Amity Park!” 

His desperate flight slowed when he saw Clockwork floating casually at his screens as he always had. He was watching a specific screen now, and pulled the image onto the largest one to share with Daniel. “Yes, I know.”

Daniel looked between him and the screen, his expression growing more and more confused. “But, he was here though. Locked up. How did he escape?”

Clockwork didn’t turn to look at him. “I’m sorry Daniel,” he lied. “Your trust in me was misplaced. He escaped while I was distracted with another matter and I was unable to stop him. It’s my fault.”

Daniel’s eyes widened, searching for something in Clockwork’s expression, and then in Clockwork’s screens. The only thing he saw though, was the other Daniel causing havoc and destruction. After visiting Amity Park and re-traumatising Daniel’s sister, the other Daniel had been driven away by Daniel, whose power had become far superior in the time since they had last met. It was only natural of course, Daniel’s existence was unique and far beyond that of Dan’s mangled pieced together form of conflicting obsessions and damaged cores. 

It was possible, Clockwork knew, for the other Daniel to stabilize properly. Perhaps he could become a proper ghost, perhaps he could stop attempting to restrict what humanity he had left. Either way, it did not matter in the end. If anything, his existence was a fun riddle that would play itself out long after Clockwork’s plans came to fruition. 

Clockwork looked over at Daniel, his expression hidden behind the shadows of his hood. The boy was staring emptily at the corner of the Clocktower that led to the inner dungeons where the other Daniel had been hidden away.  After a moment he turned away, hiding his own expression, and began to walk. As if his legs had become too heavy to fly. 

“It’s fine. I’ll get him back. It won’t happen again.” There was a promise in his voice and it softened to be almost inaudible entirely. “I won’t let it.”

After he left, Clockwork turned back to the screen with the other Daniel on it. He was finished terrorizing the ghost from before, and was now floating listlessly in the void of the Infinite Realms. Likely, he was warring with his obsessions- or his emotions- it was hard to tell which. Eventually though, he shook his head, looked up as if to catch Clockwork’s eye, and flew off.

In the direction of the Observants. 

  It’s eyeball was glaring at him, the normally dull yellow of it’s sclera bright with fury. “You were given responsibility over him! You were entrusted to keep him from destroying the Realms!”

Clockwork’s own eye twitched as he fought back an eyeroll. Those who Watch were as predictable as ever, not showing up at the moment of Dan’s release but instead at the moment he began to take his rage out on the Observants. Their responsibilities had always been superfluous though, a vague excuse to do as they pleased in the name of Order. 

“I failed. He escaped. Woe is me.” He floated over to one of his more intricate gadgets and began to tinker with it, pretending to be busy. “Surely an Order such as yours, full of powerful ghosts that command the Realms, did not come to me in fear though? He attacked you directly, does that not make your vow of inaction void?”

“ You-! ”

“Of course, it would be different if you simply couldn’t defeat him. But… he’s only a decade dead. That would be an embarrassment.”

The other Observant that had come to scold (and demand his servitude) floated in front of its companion so as to cut off a likely incensed reaction. “He’s an abomination, and an amalgamation. Surely you can understand why we wanted him dealt with before it came to this.”

Clockwork inclined his head, playing at civility. “Perhaps then, you should seek to work alongside Phantom. I have it on relatively good authority he’s also trying to deal with your resident menace.”

Both of the Observants took his suggestion as an insult, one even growing red with it. “That Abomination? He should be destroyed along with it!”

“Pity,” Clockwork said, turning back to the screens and watching as the other Daniel tore the core out of another Observant’s chest and crushed it in his palm. He wasn’t even absorbing them for their power. It was a waste, but Clockwork was certain it was a waste born of trauma. Dan’s creation had, after all, been due to a botched absorption with a powerful ghost core. “You can leave now.”

“You must deal with this.”

“I will deal with it when the time is right,” he said in lieu of an answer. 

The Observants, disgruntled and unwilling to leave, as if hiding in Clockwork’s lair would somehow protect them, made comment after comment demanding his action and threatening punishment should he fail. He replied with sarcasm and an aloof attitude that soon had them leaving out the door if only to try and do what they could to tighten his bonds. 

He sighed, there was time still. He should make cookies, that always seemed to calm him, help him to exist in the present and not become impatient for what is yet to be. He headed to the kitchen, only to see an unexpected visitor at his table. 

“Nocturn, you’re early.”

The other Ancient nodded. “Yes, your plan seems to have worked flawlessly. The Authority of the Observants has been shaken. Much of the power they had gained through fear and reputation has dwindled, but…”

Clockwork raised an eyebrow as he opened his cabinets. There was egyptian sand flour left over, it would be dryer than using something more modern, but the age would add a good aftertaste. He just needed to add extra Honey-Wasp bits from the outskirts of The Undergrowth and that should balance it. Maybe some purified ectoplasm. Pariah gifted him a jar after he had somehow managed to create a device to filter it from the Infinite Realms. 

He had also made an absolutely unsubtle offer to join him in his new ‘sauna’ that Clockwork had pointedly refused. 

“But?” he prompted, there was little information he could glean from silence. 

Nocturn watched him prepare the batter. He sighed and stood, grabbing a knife and helping to mince the Honey-Wasps before speaking again. “But they still have their numbers, and much of their actual power. And Clockwork, Pariah has made his move.”

“I know,” Clockwork admitted, “but is that not in our favor as well?”

“Not if he takes more power from them, Pariah on his own is not a fight we can accept lightly. Anything more being beholden to him is hardly something I wish to see.” 

Clockwork cracked a Kraken’s egg into the mixture and moved the bowl closer to Nocturn so he could scoop the Honey-Wasp bits into it as well, without losing any of the juice. Mixing it would be troublesome, some of the more experimental batters attempted to gain sentience and would try to escape the bowl. “It will work in our favor either way. the other Daniel caused havoc, their power was broken across the realms. Pariah is merely salting the ground we have burned.” 

He used a dull knife to cut into the batter and stirred, stopping any attempts at formation. Nocturn grabbed the bowl from him, forcing eye contact. “What if he seeks something else?”

“Haven’t I already escaped the chains he bound me in before?” Clockwork laughed. “Do I not have allies that would find short work of cutting chains that I did not allow to bind me?”

The bowl was set back down and Clockwork and Nocturn both made short work of dividing the dough and setting it into the oven. “We could not break the bindings of the Observants,” Nocturn said as Clockwork closed the oven door. 

“That is different, that was part of our plans. They needed to never suspect me, if we were to get this far.” Clockwork waved him off. “Would you like a cookie?”

“We have to wait for them to cook, Clockwork.” Nocturn said, exasperated.

Clockwork simply rolled his eyes and increased the time surrounding the oven. “I don’t wait.”

Daniel hadn’t visited again since Clockwork allowed the other Daniel  to escape. It was possible, he admitted in the back of his mind, that Daniel blamed him for what happened. As well he should. Yet, the thought left a sour taste in his mouth. 

He was watching the screens again. Aiming them in every direction he could to see everything as it played out. Most were occupied by the remnants of the Order he had set about decimating. A few were dedicated to their interconnected Lair, the place where they held their play courts and kept their prisoners. It was where they kept Vortex before he was freed. One screen though, was aimed at Pariah’s Keep. 

It had been a simple thing that Clockwork had neither encouraged nor discouraged, Daniel’s visits with Pariah. But now that Clockwork’s own visits had come to an end, it had become something distinctly bitter, a feeling that was building in his chest, where his core hummed, that Clockwork was ignoring with all the practice of a man dead set on his goals. 

Daniel would visit again, of course. Clockwork could even tell the exact date and time, or at least the most likely ones. He didn’t look at the futures where Daniel never came back, there was no point in uselessly fretting about it. He’d be fine, there were more important things to deal with now. 

He could feel the pressure of his binds loosening as more and more of the Observants were hunted down. Not all of them were ended by Dan, of course. They had made many enemies. Both Vortex and Undergrowth had gone out of their way to visit quite a number themselves, along with a few of the other Ancients. Clockwork was certainly tempted to do so, alas, the restrictions upon him prevented it still. And the only way for those restrictions to end was for those wielding the reins to End. And well, then there wouldn’t be anyone left to take his ire out upon would there? 

Instead he allowed his own part in their demise to be enough for his bruised ego and the millennia of torment he’d undergone beneath them. Then he ate a cookie and kept watch of his screens. 

Pariah was teaching Daniel how to use a sword. Pandora had attempted to teach him swordsmanship but Daniel had been disinclined to it. He wasn’t particularly elegant to be fair, and the finesse and practiced movement of Pandora’s sword was more akin to an art than anything else. Her limbs risked entanglement if she wasn’t careful and had developed a style suited to such. 

Daniel was much more inclined to blunt, ferocious movements. He often thought with his fist before anything else, even as a ghost with a multitude of powers to command. He used speed and strength to win and outmaneuver his opponents and despite his lack of polish, he often won due to those two traits alone. Pariah was a talented teacher, in that he was clearly taking what Daniel had already in ample supply, and taught him how to wield it appropriately to its maximum use. 

He was still only beginning of course, but Daniel was a fast learner and had grown significantly in a short period of time. 

Clockwork had toyed with the idea of taking Daniel on as an official apprentice once or twice before. Teaching him how to exist beyond the means which he had become accustomed to as a human. While he would not have Clockwork’s inclination for time specifically, Daniel’s connection to the Realms would allow him a level of control over his surroundings and the beings that exist in them that simply does not exist in anyone outside of the Ancients. And even then, Clockwork’s Time was different enough from the others’ domains to be unique in and of itself in a similar vein to Daniel’s powers. Even if they’d only just barely begun to show. 

But it was a risk to do so before everything else came to fruition. If Daniel realized his plans, it would be troublesome. He likely would not agree to the lengths Clockwork is willing to reach, and more than that, there is no guarantee that his existence as half human would not have him attempting to side with Order over Chaos. No, it was better to wait and see how it all played out first. There wasn’t much left to do before the end. 

Yes it would lead to anger. Perhaps even to hatred. It would be fitting for Clockwork. He had never known a love that had yet to turn. That had truly been any kind of unconditional. 

But he would be free. 

Finally, finally free. 

Free from this horrid linear existence, free from his servitude, free from his bonds. The root of him, the core, had been born from Chaos, from the mess of all things and no things, and like any child wishing to cradle in the arms of its mother, Clockwork longed once more for it. 

He had been patient, as had the others. There was little left to do. 

  When Daniel finally visited again Clockwork had made cookies. 

They resembled human chocolate chips, if one squinted, and Clockwork had made sure to take them out of the oven just as Daniel arrived so they would be warm.

“There you are Daniel,” he greeted. The cookies were still moving and he had to give the tray he was holding a bit of a shake to get them to stop. He doubted Daniel would eat them if he thought they were alive. 

The boy didn’t look well. He had deep bags under his eyes, and a skittish, weary look about him. 

Clockwork clicked his tongue. “You need to sleep,” he said, not waiting for Daniel to speak. 

“What?” The boy lifted his head, confused. 

“I said, you should sleep.” Clockwork grabbed one of the amulets from the wall and placed it around Daniel’s neck. “I’ll stop time for a few hours, you can sleep here if you want.”

Daniel just blinked. “Oh.”

Nodding, Clockwork turned back to his screens so he could keep watch. Nocturn had warned that Pariah was making his move and Clockwork was determined to keep an eye on him now, when the timing was most crucial. 

He felt a tug on his sleeve. 

“Clockwork…”

He looked down to catch Daniel’s eyes. “Yes?”

“Nothing,” he sighed, “thanks.” He grabbed the amulet in one hand, a torn expression on his face. Then he floated off to the room Clockwork had given him to sleep.

Watching as his ward wandered off, Clockwork waited until he was out of sight to grab hold of time and let it rest for a moment. It was the least he could do. 

It wasn’t long after their fall that the final thread snapped and Clockwork opened his eyes in triumph. Everything was available to him now. There were no hidden futures, no shrouded pasts. His screens multiplied around him as even his Lair was freed from its limits. Like a beast stretching from a long hibernation, Clockwork lost himself to his Obsession, revelled in the freedom he had long gambled away. 

The Infinite Realms felt it as he left the Clocktower for no reason other than because he wanted to and he didn’t have to ask. He didn’t have to come up with some convoluted reason as to why this was perfectly acceptable before his own body allowed him to leave the doors of his own Lair. It felt wonderful, he almost took down his hood to see everything around him with the eyes of a free spirit. 

He didn’t though, it would be too much of a hassle to wrangle his hair back and he didn’t really want someone to see him so freely bared. It was enough in every way, that he was finally free. 

“I almost forgot how powerful you were, Clockwork.” He turned to see Misery Vex, lounging comfortably just outside his lair. “The Eyes Around Us are gone then?”

Clockwork nodded, looking to the future, looking to the past. She had been waiting here for him, but not for long. And she wouldn’t have waited much longer. “Are you ready for what happens next?” he asked. 

“Are you?”

He nodded again. There weren’t any more preparations to make, how could he be anything but ready?

They didn’t meet at the Clocktower this time. 

It was no longer necessary after all. This time they met in the night. The soft evening of eternal sleep and dreams, Nocturn’s lair. It was spacious if nothing else, and creative with its decoration. Should one of them wish to sit, they merely needed to chance sitting and see if the space around them would accommodate. It suited him immensely. 

“Have you found her yet?” Misery asked.

Sojourn nodded, a small enthusiastic smile hidden under his beard. “Yes, Clockwork and I were able to locate her shattered core amongst Pandora’s boxes.”

“ It will not be easy to receive her, and it will only be more difficult to revive her,” Nocturn warned, “especially if we wish to keep this to ourselves. Rather than risk the entirety of the realms turning on us as they did the Observants.”

Clockwork nodded, “we shouldn’t do much in more than pairs. Sojourn and Misery should seek Pandora. Nocturn and I can set the ritual once the pieces are complete.”

“And the rest of us?” Undergrowth scowled, he hated Nocturn’s lair. It was cold and empty, barren of any more physical matters and there was nowhere for him to take root. Clockwork suspected half of the reason it was that way was intended to irritate Undergrowth specifically. 

Sojourn clapped his hands together and smiled, his eagerness truly knew no bounds and his obvious delight was nearly infectious. “You’re our escape plan of course! We’ll need help once we locate the right box, Pandora’s obsession is hardly a good one to be on the wrong side of.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” Vortex grinned.

Clockwork couldn’t help but agree, what are they waiting for indeed? 

  “What is Chaos, Clockwork?” Daniel asked. But Clockwork was distracted.

He hadn’t expected Daniel to show up today, he hadn’t paid attention to it. There was so much to do, so much to get ready for. The time was now after all. 

He took care to answer anyways, the changes that were to come would affect the boy. At least a little. He was strong enough that he would thrive in Chaos, and it would help to nurture his Obsession, if the weaker denizens of the Realms needed help. And they would

“Chaos was the first, how it all began. Everything started with Chaos or nothing could have been at all.” 

Daniel frowned, a small furrow in his brow. “That… didn’t really-“

Clockwork paused for a moment. “Is something wrong Daniel?”

He sighed. “So if you were made from Chaos, is she like, your mother?”

“No. Chaos is not sentient so much as conceptual.” Clockwork frowned, “though I suppose she predated concepts as well if she was the first. Chaos was neither one thing nor many things. It’s safe to say Chaos was everything and everything came from her. But that did not make her nurturing” 

Clockwork looked back at Daniel, letting time flow smoothly once more. It wouldn’t do to delay. 

There was a hint of something in Daniel’s eyes, a wariness that Clockwork had never seen before. It must have been due to their conversation, but Clockwork couldn’t place what about it would have Daniel on edge. Chaos would not be any more a threat to him than it would be the other Ancients. 

“Clockwork, if Chaos came back…” he paused, as if the words had been stuck in his throat, “what would happen to the humans? The mortals?” 

What a strange question. “Life would not exist as it does now, utter chaos would not permit it.”

It had been something of a sport, to watch Sojourn and Misery in their attempts to find and excavate the remnants of the Core of Chaos. Clockwork and Nocturn had watched it from the safety and comfort of Clockwork’s lair, on the largest of his screens. 

“They’re having fun aren’t they?” Nocturn mused, taking a sip of his tea. He’d made it himself in Clockwork’s kitchen, had been insistent about it when he’d seen Clockwork start to make his own.

“Pandora is a valiant warrior and a good fighter. Misery has been on the sidelines for some time since the end of Pariah’s court.” Clockwork’s tea was cold. He frowned and set it aside.

“Yes, it’s good to see her stretching her limbs. I hadn’t seen all of them since her last fight.”

Clockwork thought back, the fight Nocturn was referring to played on one of the smaller screens. It was a gladiator based competition, where Pariah had sent her as a member of his court to show his power. She had challenged the Lord of Little Crawlers to a duel and shredded him to pieces before even five minutes had passed. Then she had collected herself, reset her veil, and gone right back to Pariah’s Keep. 

Now she was using every extra limb she could against Pandora, swords clashing with long knitting needles and strings of silk. Watching the fight was mesmerizing to be sure, almost akin to a dance, if not for the frustrated vulgarities being thrown around and Sojourn’s overly eager cheering from the back.

“Do you think they’ll make it?”

“Sojourn will remember what they’re supposed to be doing when he almost drops one of the boxes held in his arms. Upon that realization he will sneak away while Pandora is distracted and meet with the others. From there they will come here with their spoils and it will be our turn to prove our worth.” Clockwork answered, easily detailing the future ahead of them. 

Nocturn nodded and took a sip of his tea.

  It didn’t happen exactly like Clockwork had predicted. But it was close enough. Sojourn had bypassed Vortex and Undergrowth completely and simply flown straight to Clockwork‘s lair on his own. Nocturn spared Clockwork a glance, but he remained unaffected. It was still on track to be an ideal future. 

Once Sojourn entered his lair Clockwork grabbed hold of time with his hand and twisted , forcing it to bend and still under his palm. The trip to the Cave was only a step after that and once there, he let loose and released time to settle amicably around them.

“Amazing,” Sonourn said, “I do think I’d like to travel this way more often. It’s quite convenient.”

Nocturn patted him on the shoulder and grabbed one of the delicately detailed boxes he’d been balancing precariously in his arms. “You’d need to be very careful if you did, there’s no telling what might get caught up in all that twisting and turning.”

“It won’t matter much longer after this,” Clockwork said, taking his own box. 

The entirety of Chaos was not here, her core long since mostly destroyed, but there was enough to recreate something should they use the ritual they had devised. 

It needed to be hidden, so they had found a cave. It was ancient, and once thought to be a reliable doorway into the spiritual and mortal realms, every wall was covered in ancient arts and writings. No rhyme or reason between them, a bit of a mess conceptually, but perfect for their purposes. Once Vortex had destroyed it in the mortal realm, it had been simple enough to recreate, especially using Undergrowth and Misery Vex’s powers. 

Most ghosts dared not travel here, where they placed it. It was a deeper part of the Infinite Realms, where the pressures of the ambient ectoplasm was strong enough to kill even some of the more stable spirits, certainly more than any Watcher could have ever handled. 

Clockwork gathered the ashes in the center of their chosen chamber. Three rights from the first left. Nocturn moved around the edges, the walls solid and firm under his hands as he tested them. And Sojourn, setting his own box aside, lit the flames. 

It began. 

They had known the work would be hard, tedious even. Most mortals, when they picture rituals like this, imagine chanting and holding hands, perhaps some use of indomitable will. But this was far more personal, more hands on.

Clockwork took the broken edge of a shattered piece of core, and began to mold it, shaping and soothing it into a puzzle-like shape. He had spent time looking into human carpentry practices, and had come across the traditional Chinese techniques of Lu Ban. 

It had taken more than a human lifetime to learn it properly and then suit it to his own needs, but he put it into practice now, shaping the shattered pieces anew and slotting them together so that they might fit and stay snug.

Sojourn had weaved together layer after layer of treated ectoplasm into a fine cloth and was now sewing it into a fitted dress, each stitch small and tidy, seamless against the weave. 

The one who stoked the flame, who kept its energy strong and the newly forming core well fed, was Nocturn. He kept a measured gaze upon it, not once turning away or getting distracted. 

This continued for an eternity, the creation, or recreation, of something both ancient and now new was exhaustive work. But eventually, Clockwork felt a hum. A small, weak thing that would have left him breathless had he needed to breathe. 

Chaos was born again, though faint, though weak. Not anything close to what she once was, but still, she was there, feeding on the flames of her own ashes, pieces of her own core held together and finally finding life. 

They needed to keep going. This was delicate work, if they got distracted, if there was even one misstep, it would be over. Chaos would be what she is now, what they made of her, and not what she needed to be. 

The fire went out.

“ Damn ,” Nocturn hissed, quickly turning to look around. He did not bother to relight the flame, it was too late. Clockwork felt hollow, had they truly failed? But how? 

He acted quickly, bundling the newly formed and still fragile core into Sojourn’s half sewn garment and thrusting it fully into the other Ancient’s hands. 

“You are the fastest of us, run, hide her away before we lose her entirely.” Sojourn nodded solemnly, flying quickly through the winding tunnels that led out of the cave. 

Nocturn scowled, “whoever is there should be glad I am merciful. Come out now and I shall forgo eternal torment for a quick End.”

There was only silence. 

Clockwork was growing irritated himself and looked to the future, only to see Nocturn tackled into a wall by a familiar black and white blur. 

“Daniel?!” He said, his thoughts screeching to a halt. But, there was no way. He couldn’t have followed them. He would have had to know about the cave and been lying in wait for the exact moment to-

There was a soft sound, like the clinking of a delicate chain, as Clockwork felt a weight upon his neck. All at once he felt the universe stand still, as if he had been trapped in the moment, the singular moment no longer able to spread himself beyond. It was cloying, claustrophobic. Something he never thought he’d experience again. 

And he knew who was behind it. 

“You’ve always been impatient my dear.” Pariah spoke softly, his lips far too close. 

Clockwork fled, slipping between moments to force space between them almost on instinct alone. Pariah simply let him go, a smug smile on his face. No, he wasn’t supposed to be here. How did he know about this place?

What had he placed on Clockwork’s neck?

He lifted a hand, not taking his eyes off of Pariah in case he decided to get any closer, and felt around his neck. It was a chain, delicate and just long enough to have slid over his head and dangle its pendant at a point on his chest, just above the glass. The shape of it was vaguely familiar, but Clockwork couldn’t place it.

“What have you done to me?” he asked, using anger to hide the tremble in his voice.

Pariah’s expression softened and he took a step forward. “Did I not say I would see you decked in gold?”

No…

The necklace…

It had been a cursed necklace, layered in charms meant for protection that slowly twisted into possession and control. It shouldn’t have been strong enough to cause any trouble at all to Clockwork, if something this simple had worked, Pariah would have used it long ago in the peak of his madness. 

Clockwork grabbed the chain, intending to rip it off, but Pariah spoke, startling him. “I wouldn’t, you’ll only hurt yourself.”

“Then why did you put it on me?” he tugged at the chain in emphasis, without his strength. Pariah never warned for no reason. 

The bastard smiled, like Clockwork had asked a stupid question, one he should know the answer to. Clockwork scowled, and moved further away from him. His back hit a wall. The cave, while earlier it had been comforting, a sign that eternal chaos was close at hand, that all Clockwork had done was paying off in the end, it was now more reminiscent of a stone cage. 

A trap.

He’d walked straight into a trap, one Pariah had been laying since he awoke. And Clockwork had never paid it any heed, had not bothered with his machinations because he assumed Pariah would be too slow, had thought whatever he did would be too weak. He had underestimated him, and now Pariah Dark was walking towards him, a lion stalking its prey.

Clockwork froze time.

He was still moving. Clockwork had frozen time and Pariah was still moving . 

It shouldn’t have been possible, there was nothing restricting Clockwork’s power in that way. He felt the threads of all existence tangled around him, grabbed the ones moving forward and tugged, sharp, desperate, to keep them still. He felt them still. 

Pariah kept moving though. 

“How-?” Everything else had frozen, all around them was silence and the only things that moved were the two of them. It was a strange kind of dance, one stepping closer and the other floating away. 

“I made it myself, the charm. It ties you to me, obviously.” Pariah caught him, gently because he didn’t need to use force, didn’t need to use any of the almost limitless strength behind him. “It’s based off the contract you signed with the Observants, I hadn’t honestly expected it to be so blatantly one sided when I read it. Though I suppose it was on purpose, a miscalculation on your part, in the end.”

Clockwork pulled his hand away, but Pariah simply moved with the action and stepped closer, crowding against him. “It doesn’t work like that,” Clockwork said through clenched teeth. A one-sided contract that gave away so much of himself was necessary. It was also only possible because Clockwork had signed it. Pariah couldn’t mimic that without Clockwork’s consent, that wasn’t how it worked. That wasn’t how any of this was supposed to work. 

Pariah hummed in agreement. “It wouldn’t be, if that was all I did.” He brushed a lock of hair from Clockwork’s eyes. “The Order of the Observants was in chaos. They were desperate. They wanted someone powerful to protect them. They were willing to give anything for the possibility they might find safety.”

Then he pulled out a medallion of his own, a horribly familiar one.

Oh.

So that was all it took…

Pariah was right, it had been a miscalculation indeed. 

“Even if they gave me to you, the contract dissolved with the Order. I felt it break.” 

“It did,” Pariah took hold of one of Clockwork’s hands and held it to his lips in a kiss, “But I had you for long enough. Long enough to bind you to myself instead. All it took was some craftswork.”

He let go of Clockwork’s hand to touch the pendant hanging from his neck instead. It was a gentle, reverent touch, as if thanking the damned thing for its work in keeping Clockwork trapped for him. “Luckily I was up to date on all the most prominent binding curses. I have a friend who suffers from such an affliction after all.”

“Fuck you.” 

Pariah laughed, a genuine surprised chuckle that truly lit him up from the inside. His eyes were so warm, his hands burned like brands, and Clockwork wanted nothing more than to tear out his other eye with his teeth. “Come Clockwork, you’ve failed. Let’s go home.” 

  Pariah led him back to the Clocktower, his lair. His home and prison. Clockwork stormed past him once they were inside. “And what is your plan now? I can’t imagine I’d be much use in subjecuting the Realms, as you can see I’m quite traitorous by nature. All of my previous masters can attest.”

“Then it’s good I’m keeping you for your sense of humor,” Pariah said as he closed the door behind him. 

It was the first time Pariah Dark had ever been inside Clockwork’s lair. Pariah had always been a cautious ghost, it made sense that he wouldn’t allow himself the vulnerability of being inside another powerful ghost’s lair, a place where they quite literally held all of the power and had all of the control. 

The irony of course, was that the moment Pariah had stepped inside, it was Clockwork that felt vulnerable. Exposed like a raw nerve, every part of him standing on end, tightly coiled and ready to flee. 

“How is this exactly how I have always envisioned it?” Pariah says dryly, his eyes roaming freely, invasively over every nook and cranny. Every randomly placed cog and haphazard ticking machine. It was a chaotic mess, naturally, it was Clockwork. 

Clockwork picked up a twentieth century alarm clock and weighed it in his hands before chucking it as hard as he could towards Pariah. The bastard caught it, of course. And Clockwork scowled.

“Did you often picture yourself waltzing into my Lair?”

Pariah set the clock down carefully, as if it would break. As if it were truly a piece of Clockwork himself. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t have. You were certainly at home in mine.”

“Oh please, half the Realms has access to your Lair. We are not the same.” Clockwork scoffed, crossing his arms and floating awkwardly in the middle of the room. He didn’t want to be any closer to Pariah, but neither did he want to risk being backed into a wall again . It seemed a recurring treat for Pariah, to cage him in that way. 

There was a touch of mischief in Pariah’s smile when he replied. “Perhaps we can change that, would you like more visitors?”

“No.”

“Pity.”

Clockwork grabbed another trinket to throw, this one he had pried from the walls. Pariah handled that just as easily, an uncomfortable expression aimed at the destroyed part of Clockwork’s wall. He was truly the most obnoxious perfectionist. If Clockwork’s mangled mess of a lair was going to bother him he shouldn’t have bothered to come inside.

In fact, if he was going to be disappointed so easily he shouldn’t have chained him in the first place. It wasn’t as if the bindings guaranteed something like loyalty. They couldn’t even force him to act should he not wish to. Clockwork wasn’t going to change from how he had been for eons under the damn Eyes. 

“Why did you do this?” Clockwork asked, “And don’t dare say it’s only because you said you would. You may be meticulous but you are not beholden to simple words.”

Pariah had fixed his wall. And was now attempting to reinstate the very same decoration Clockwork had used as ammunition. It was strangely domestic to see and Clockwork felt rage simmer and build. Would he simply make himself at home then? Perhaps he would seek to combine their lairs in a twisted amalgamation so that he might seek order where it damn well did not belong.

“You were going to leave.” 

What a useless excuse. “Did you lose your ability to reason permanently to that crown?”

This time it was Pariah that rolled his eyes. “Obviously not, if I was able to out-fox Clockwork of all ghosts.”

“You had help.” Clockwork said through grit teeth. He wouldn’t ask who, he didn’t think he could handle having it confirmed.

Pariah’s eyes sparkled. “So you knew?”

“I figured it out.”

“Feeling very betrayed, Clockwork?” This time Pariah’s smile was sharp, a vicious little thing that certainly made him more recognizable as the fallen tyrant he actually was. 

Clockwork refused to rise to the bait. He did not regret, it was impossible to feel regret when every single decision he’d ever made had been so thoroughly calculated. “I wasn’t going to leave. Where would I even go, Pariah?”

“You were leaving me.” Pariah walked towards him, quicker than his usual slow prowl. Clockwork had chanced a step back himself but it only served to darken Pariah’s expression further so he stilled instead and allowed himself to be caught and held. Pariah’s hands were heavy, one landing on his hip and the other reaching for his wrist. “You were disappearing to the flows of Time, one minute here and the next somewhere no one could follow you. You speak of chaos and the freedom it would give you, but you lie to yourself when you say that is all that you desire. The freedom you had so desperately sought, how lonely would it have been.”

Pariah had not been able to talk after that, too busy weathering Clockwork’s sudden violent outrage. 

Nocturn was the first to visit him, to see Clockwork’s anger, his desperate lashing out. He had the same expression he’d always had when the topic of Pariah or Daniel had come up. The look of undisguised pity, as if he had known from the start that Clockwork would fail, that he would be chained in this way, the moment his freedom was closer than at any other time. 

“We do not hate you for your failure, Clockwork,” Nocturn said, and Clockwork bared his teeth. It had been sometime since he’d carved out an eye in petty vengeance but he was not above making it a hobby.

Nocturn simply kept his distance, just one step away with one of those damned medallions around his neck, stopping Clockwork from freezing him in place in his own lair. “You’ve always been easily twisted by affection, too willing to be tied down with familiarity.”

His words hurt, like an arrow piercing through Clockwork’s chest. He hadn’t thought it would be so literal, hadn’t taken Pariah’s threats seriously. Had believed, genuinely, that he would be able to escape whatever bonds Pariah had fashioned for him. Had not thought to protect himself thoroughly enough and now all was for naught. Nocturn said he harbored no ill will, but he should . 

And Clockwork was distraught that he did not. 

He deflated and Nocturn floated closer, just within range. But Clockwork’s arms hung heavy, and he was exhausted now, the weight of it all too much. “You should. Chaos is lost to us.” he spoke, his voice barely audible.

“Yes,” Nocturn acquiesced, “but Chaos was lost to us long ago. It was a child’s hope, that we could get it back.”

“You are content then? To rot in containment in an infinite realm of order and stability?”

A laugh escaped Nocturn, perplexing Clockwork and only flaring his temper worse. The other Ancient didn’t even try to hide as he fell into a laughing fit. “I would not be, no. But my oldest friend, I am not the one in containment. I have always known you look too much towards the forest and its tallest trees, very rarely have you ever noticed the grass or the leaves.”

“Speak sense,” Clockwork snapped. It was his job to speak in riddles, he had little patience to hear them now. 

Nocturn did not call him on his hypocrisy though, instead he shook his head and floated closer, relaxing next to Clockwork as if they were two friends taking tea. “It was not, as you believed, an all or nothing gamble.”

“Was it not?”

“No, the realms are back to Anarchy as they should be. The Observants were the last hold in their attempts to tame them, and they have been destroyed. There is no King, not even a sleeping one, and Chaos exists.”

Clockwork listened, the cold weight of failure that had settled in his chest chipped and cracked as Nocturn spoke on. “She does not exist as she had.”

“But perhaps this is a better way,” Nocturn pondered, “last time, Chaos reigned so supreme it seemed all were insistent to seek order. Then order reigned supreme and we sought Chaos. Perhaps now, with the Realms alive once more, and order and Chaos in balance, it will last instead.”

Nocturn placed a hand on the top of Clockwork’s head, petting his hair. “The other Ancients and I shall seek our fun, and find ways to exist in this new existence. It is only you, I am afraid, that will remain trapped.”

Clockwork slapped his hand away, “How comforting, Nocturn. Do you also go to the newly dead and tell them not to weep, at least they were the ones that died and not others?”

Nocturn’s hand returned to pull his hood down over his face and Clockwork had to slap it away again. “It is not in my perogative to comfort the newly dead. I thought only to inform my dearest friend that he had not earned my animosity. A fear he might have had, failing the plan we had painstakingly worked towards for eons.”

“I don’t want to be chained any longer.” Clockwork admitted. It had been so long since he’d had any semblance of freedom. Did he even know what it would feel like anymore?

“We know. Though some, like Misery Vex, believe it karmic, that your attachments, which had led so thoroughly to our defeat, came back in the forms of chains for you alone. But know that if one day it comes to pass that I can free you, unlikely as it may be, I shall make the attempt.” Nocturn stood, leaving Clockwork alone in his tower. 

“Clockwork?” It was Daniel’s voice. It was the first time his young ward had come to visit since the binding. It was not a comfort to hear his voice, to see that he was okay. It was not .

He didn’t acknowledge Daniel when he entered, wouldn’t have let him in the door if he still had complete control of his Lair… But he’d bargained that away long ago in a gamble that had failed him entirely. 

Instead he floated to his screens. Ever since the fall of the Observants, he could see properly at least. Pariah had no interest in obscuring his vision, had even less in controlling what it was he could see. Pariah’s only interest had been binding Clockwork to him so that he might not escape, so that he might not regress, so that he might not lose himself to the chaos of infinity and escape his limited existence.

Clockwork scowled, still ignoring Daniel’s presence, his attempts at conversation. Pariah’s interests should not have mattered. Because Pariah should not have won . Because Pariah had lost before and Clockwork had been so certain that he would again. Because- 

Because Clockwork had made a mistake when he sealed him away. Because Clockwork knew he could not bring himself to end him. Because Clockwork had seen an opportunity to see Pariah again and had known it would be a mistake but had wanted so desperately just to see him again. Wanted to see him free of the haze of anger the ring and crown had obscured him in, but a ghost’s natural state was obsessive. And Pariah had never hid his desire to keep Clockwork as he was, Clockwork had simply brushed it off as words of affection. He should have known better really, Pariah was hardly the type to speak lightly, and had never claimed what he did not mean with his entire core. 

The screen he was watching was boring, most things were now that he had no reason to keep track of the threads, no overarching plan to work towards. It was so simple. A young ghost was trick-or-treating with a watermelon instead of a pumpkin and was turning into a large candy-based monster whenever someone turned them away. 

It was the middle of summer where the ghost was, and Clockwork allowed himself to appreciate the tiny bit of chaos that the ghost was bringing to the small mortal town. Nocturn had told him that not all had been lost, Clockwork may be trapped, but Chaos had been released. 

Just enough. 

He sighed. 

“Why are you here Daniel?” he finally asked.

Daniel straightened up, he’d been rambling, no doubt in an attempt to cajole Clockwork into joining conversation or listening subconsciously. He hadn't been.

He was also carrying a plate of cookies that Clockwork had not seen, because Clockwork had not looked. When would he learn his lesson about that? Why was he always looking too late?

“I wanted to check on you,” Daniel said, setting the plate of cookies down now that he was sure Clockwork had seen them. “Pariah said you were… having a hard time.”

Clockwork scowled, too many things tearing at his chest at once. Damn Pariah, damn him . 

“Having a hard time?” he said with a false calm. “The plans that I made eons ago, plans that had been in work before your mortal realm even knew what time was, were ruined by someone I trusted. Someone I did not think would step so easily between me and my goals. Exactly what kind of time should I be having, chained to my own lair without even the authority to deny entrance to whom I wish?”

There had been a small flinch, Clockwork noticed, when he had mentioned betrayal. But if Daniel felt any guilt he didn’t look it. He raised his head, eyes full of determination. The very same expression Clockwork had seen through his screens so many times, in the fights against the other Ancients. The plans they’d made to make him stronger, to keep him stable, so that when the Chaos had been released he and the Realms with him would survive. 

He had certainly survived. 

“Pariah said this was the only way to save you.” Because of course that was what Pariah had told him. Because Daniel was intelligent, but Daniel was also a child and all too willing to trust any competent adult. A flaw that Clockwork himself had been so quick to take advantage of. A flaw that cursed him now. 

“Do you really believe that Pariah Dark has my best interest at heart?” he would have sneered, if it had been anyone else. If it hadn’t been Daniel, who was practically his own child. Instead, he asked softly, his frustration drowned entirely by exhaustion.

Daniel still answered him though. “You were changing Clockwork,” What? “The same way you told me Pariah had once changed.”

He hadn’t, there was no way it had been so obvious. He hadn’t, it wasn’t as if he had lost himself to his obsession, nor had he gained power that grew out of his control, what was he talking about?

“You were distant, as if you were struggling to stay in any given moment. Sometimes you’d forget everything going on around you, and others you seemed to be somewhere or some-when else entirely. I mean,” Daniel took a breath, “you’ve always been a bit cryptic, but you were losing yourself entirely . Halfway through a conversation you would start talking completely randomly, in languages long dead or unrecognizable. Or you’d start talking about things that had never happened or had happened forever ago.”

He was almost shouting now, his eyes shining with more than just energy and Clockwork felt a sting in his core. He had known that Daniel would disapprove, that he would get angry. But it had not occurred to him that his anger would be pointed towards this rather than his blatant manipulation of Daniel and his friends.

“And your actions! They were reckless, Clockwork!! Releasing Dan? What the hell?! ”

It was Clockwork’s turn to flinch. “Your future self’s release had always been part of the plan. It was why I had you leave him with me to start with. I was not losing myself Daniel, I was revealing who I actually am.”

Daniel made a desperately frustrated noise. “Do you think saying something like that is going to convince me we were wrong, Clockwork? I- I trusted you! I care about you! You’re-”

“So you’d cage me and try to force compliance so that the more unsightly aspects of myself can be filed away? So you can teach me to be better, like some kind of petty human criminal, Daniel?” He let his anger take over instead. It was easier, so much easier. It was what he had always done with Pariah. 

Daniel rolled his eyes. “How dramatic,” he said dryly, “Didn’t you do the same thing to Pariah, wasn’t what you did like way worse? You’re throwing a fit just like he said you would.”

“If you trust Pariah Dark so much, why are you even here? Have him make cookies for you. I'm sure he’s fully capable.” Clockwork wasn’t throwing a fit, he was angry. 

Daniel sighed, grabbing one of the cookies he’d brought. They had long gone cold, but it hardly mattered to Clockwork, he wouldn’t be eating them. “Pariah has a lot of faults, and there’s a bunch of things I don’t really like about him. He’s manipulative, methodical. He never lets me half ass anything and he’s really picky. He doesn’t actually care if a person dies or a ghost gets Ended, and we fight about that kind of stuff a lot. But…” he met Clockwork’s eyes, his expression looked hurt, heartbroken. Clockwork didn’t want to see it. Had never wanted to see Daniel like this.

“He’s never outright lied to me. I’ve been checking, ever since… Well. I don’t just trust anyone at their word anymore. So yeah okay, I know he’s manipulating me just like he was manipulating you, but he never lied to either of us about his intentions. He didn’t do what you did.”

Clockwork couldn’t look at him any more. He’d made so many mistakes. If he was truly destined to fail… He should never have revealed his true nature or intentions to the boy. His disappointment burned almost as much as the chain Pariah had placed around Clockwork’s neck.

It didn’t matter though, that Clockwork could not stand to see him, because Daniel flew towards him and grabbed his face gently, hands on either side of his cheeks. 

“I don’t trust you anymore, Clockwork, but I still love you. So does Pariah. We can fix this, okay?” Daniel said and Clockwork’s eyes widened at the threat. 

He had truly lost, hadn’t he?

[bestworstcase]

I read your giant rwby narnia post and I found it very very interesting! It was a pleasure to read. I had a question which I think you discussed but didn't directly answer, unless I missed it--so I figured I'd ask here: Do you think Penny is coming back? I'm sorry if you actually did answer that and I just read your post wrong. (If that's the case, do you mind pointing me towards where you answer my question?) Thank you, and I hope you have a good day!

anon i promise if i’d really gotten into the weeds with penny’s deaths and the penny resurrection theory in the narnia post you would probably still be reading it on account of it being… a lot. A LOT!! longer than it already is fskjdkl

in brief,

no.

if she does, it won't be through the doors the penny 3.0 crowd are watching, because

the only narratively coherent way to bring penny back involves aligning the heroes with salem against the gods.

and relatedly,

i'm not a fan of how...not all but a considerable number of penny 3.0 theorizing reduces penny to just, ruby's love interest, and i'm really over the dismissiveness of the same cohort towards penny's friendship with winter.

if the rwby narnia post was a marathon, this one’s a goddamn triathlon. i hope you like to read.

table of contents (😐)

1. rwby's approach to death and grief 2. the three deaths of penny polendina 3. penny, winter, & the battle for personhood 4. pyrrha, penny, & passing the torch 5. ozlem as a cautionary tale 6. regarding various yes-resurrection theories … a. suicide and the glorification thereof … b. why even bother then? … c. narrative loose ends … d. crwby broke the fandom’s trust … e. the screaming void … f. the breaking of jaune’s aura … g. why gold instead of green? … h. taking “i’ll be a part of you” literally … i. but rwby is hopepunk! … j. but nuts and dolts! 7. the thematic case against resurrection 8. the logistical case against resurrection 9. (but here's how penny 3.0 can still win)

GOOGLE DOC VERSION FOR YOUR HEALTH & SANITY

1. rwby’s approach to death and grief

i’m going to open by quoting from the letter ruby writes to yang in 4.12, because it might as well be rwby’s thesis on its own central themes:

It’s been hard on all of us, and I’m not just talking about the monsters we’ve fought out here. Every step we made took us further and further away from the things we knew, and every morning we woke up wondering if just over the next hill would be something good, or something terrible. It’s scary not knowing what’s going to happen next, and the things we do know now, just how bad it can get, almost makes it all worse. You told me once that bad things just happen. You were angry when you said it, and I didn’t want to listen, but you were right. Bad things do happen all the time, every day. Which is why I’m out here, to do whatever I can, wherever I can, and hopefully do some good. We’ve all lost something, and I’ve seen what loss can do to people, but if we gave up every time we lost, then we’d never be able to move forward. We’d never have a chance to see what beautiful things the future might have waiting for us. We’d never have the strength to change, whether it’s ourselves, or the world around us. And we’d never be there for other people who might one day be lost without us. This is what we were training for, Yang. To become huntresses. To become the ones who stand up and do something about all the bad in the world, because there are plenty of people out there who are still lost, and even more who will try to gain everything they can from their sorrow. Believe me when I say I know it can feel impossible, like every single day is a struggle against some unstoppable monster we can never hope to beat, but we have to try. If not for us than the people we’ve already— than for the people we haven’t lost yet.

rwby is, and has always been, a show about love, loss, and the ways fear and hope shape how people act in grief and in love.

consider salem.

the root of salem’s suffering is the utter absence of hope. that is the essence of the curse the gods inflict on her in 6.3: that she will never find relief, never get a reprieve from the pain of grief. in making her immortal they tore away her hope and promised her an eternity of suffering, and each time she tried to change that fate she got dragged in deeper and deeper—until she gave up, surrendered to despair, and became the monster she is now. salem is pain and misery and destruction incarnate—trapped in grief, mired in agony, unable to heal or move on. so she stews, and stagnates, and externalizes all of her pain as cruelty.

in contrast, ruby’s deepest strength is her ability to hold on to hope and inspire that hope in others. she knows loss and fear and pain and she refuses to flinch away—and because her nature is to love fiercely and stubbornly and without reservation, ruby finds herself surrounded by people who reflect this strength back at her, who stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her in a war with hopeless odds, and who, like her, choose to hope anyway. she’s not alone—none of the heroes are alone. and when they lose someone, whether to death or to darkness, they reach out for each other to mourn and support each other in their grief; they don’t stop, they don’t look back, they don’t get stuck in their pain. they move forward. they heal. they honor the fallen by carrying on their legacies. they keep trying.

that is what sets them apart from salem and her ilk. think of hazel, who in betraying salem also rejects her model of grief and adopts the heroes’ instead.

the essence of rwby’s approach to death is this: it hurts, but you have to keep going. there’s still hope—there is always hope. there is light and love and beauty and goodness in the world, and those things are worth searching for, worth cherishing, and most of all worth defending. grief hurts, but even worse than the pain of loss is the agony of letting it fester.

life belongs to the living, and you have to live.

2. the three deaths of penny polendina

i. penny as a character exists in this tension between her purpose—she was quite literally created to be the ultimate weapon against the grimm—and the reality that she is, by any metric, just a person with a metal body. when pietro describes how penny came into existence in 7.7, he explains that ironwood challenged him and several colleagues to “find the next breakthrough in defense technology,” and that out of all the proposals submitted to answer that challenge, ironwood chose penny.

which is to say: penny’s father received military funding to develop advanced technology for the sake of fighting the grimm, and instead he made a little girl with a piece of his own soul.

penny is a child soldier who was built and programmed to be a weapon, but she has a soul—and she was a person, and she wanted to be free, and then cinder fall murdered her on live television to make a statement.

This is not a tragedy. This was not an accident. This is what happens when you hand over your trust, your safety, your children, to men who claim to be our guardians, but are—in reality—nothing more than men. Our academies’ headmasters wield more power than most armies, and one was audacious enough to control both. They cling to this power in the name of peace, and yet… what do we have here?

there is a reason cinder fall chose penny as her victim, and it goes well beyond the convenience of exposing her robotic nature in order to stoke fear of atlas. because—while everything cinder says in this speech is calculated to sow division and distrust—one of the reasons it is so effective is that it does contain a genuine kernel of truth about atlas and about the institution of hunters and huntresses generally.

it’s a truth that cinder—raised a slave in atlas, brutally tortured at the whims of her owner, trained by a mentor who never lifted a finger to rescue her but turned on her the instant she defended herself—knows intimately.

and it’s a truth that penny embodies. she’s just a kid who wants to have a life and friends and for everyone to be okay—but she is also a living weapon, a perfect soldier, a symbol of atlesian strength and a cog in the machine of the atlesian military.

one idea i’ve seen expressed a couple of times is that penny’s death at the end of vol3 was meant to represent a loss of innocence—but i submit that with penny’s first death rwby was actually doing something quite a bit more complex than that; revealing something about cinder, something about penny, and something about the authoritarian rot that is hollowing atlas out from the inside, by symbolically connecting the innocent child who became cinder fall to the innocent child penny wants so very much to become. (does that first part of cinder’s statement not describe the very essence of the atlas arc?)

the first time penny polendina dies, it is because cinder fall makes of her a tragic symbol of all that has gone wrong in atlas since its very inception.

ii. pietro loves his daughter.

her death is senseless and unfair and cruel, and her dad, who loves her so much that he can’t bear to lose her, tears out another piece of his soul and uses it to bring her back.

but the thing about bringing penny back is this: he can’t only revive penny the kind-hearted child who just wanted the freedom to be herself. he has to also bring back penny the child soldier trapped in the jaws of the atlesian military, and no matter how much pietro loves her, he can’t save his daughter from that.

when we meet penny again in vol7, it seems at first like she’s come into her own. she’s confident and happy, surrounded by her friends, and content to fulfill her purpose as the protector of mantle… but it doesn’t take long for the fascism rotting atlas from within to begin to seep through the widening cracks in the façade, and a conflict between following orders and doing what is right emerges, tilting with penny as its fulcrum.

(she’s a weapon and a tool and the face of atlesian authority. she’s the helpless pawn watts uses to light the kindling of tensions between impoverished mantle and high, untouchable atlas. she’s a child who just wants, with all her heart and all her soul, for everyone to be happy.)

penny tries throughout vol7 to navigate this ever-more fraught conflict by balancing her duties with the demands of her conscience and her heart; until, in 7.13, she’s forced to choose.

fria, addled and exhausted on the brink of death, offers the power of the winter maiden to penny—contrary to ironwood’s design—and penny accepts. she does it to save winter’s life, but nevertheless by that one simple act she tears herself violently out of the atlesian machine. she subverts ironwood’s orders, defies his will, and in the eyes of atlas steals something that does not rightfully belong to her. she flees from atlas with her friends, all fugitives now, as the rift between atlas and mantle is wrenched open into an uncrossable divide.

becoming the winter maiden separates penny from atlas, but it cannot make her free, nor can it save her from the tyrant who sees her and that power as his weapon to wield however he chooses. precious few of ironwood’s choices afterwards are truly about fighting or fleeing from salem. besides the attempt to bomb the grimm whale, every significant action he takes from this point forward is a ploy to force penny back in line. the blame. the manipulation. the guilt he piles onto her shoulders. the devil’s bargain he makes with watts, the virus. the bomb and the ultimatum.

the second time penny polendina dies, it is because the ruthless indifference and all the cruelties and injustices of the atlesian regime killed her; all the ugly little truths hidden in the statement cinder made of penny’s first death, rendered now in real time, in clear, horrific detail.

iii. think about that death. all technicalities and loopholes aside, it ends with penny watching her own body tear itself apart. she sees the life fade from her own eyes. she witnesses the disintegration of her corpse. her friends love her—her friends try so fucking hard to save her, and this is the best any of them can do.

this is a horror story.

and think about the child who became cinder fall, tortured and tormented by the madame and her daughters. the closest thing she ever had to someone who cared for her was a hunter more concerned with protecting the status quo than protecting an innocent child, and when she tried to save herself in the only way she could he treated her like a monster.

this is a horror story.

the thing about cinder fall and penny polendina is that they are not the same but they could have been so, so easily. if cinder had been truly loved and led by that love into the soul-crushing military pipeline of atlas academy, if pietro had been cruel instead of kind. cinder had nothing and no one to shield her from the brutalities and degradations of atlesian society, and it crushed her into the ground; she has never known anything but war.

and penny had love—penny was so loved, by almost everyone who knew her—but she was made to serve atlas, and atlas chewed her up and ground her down and took and took and took from her until she had nothing left to give. atlas stripped everything away from penny except for the only things it couldn’t: her humanity, and the love of her friends.

and so: unarmed, unarmored, with nothing left but her human soul, penny walks into battle barefoot and vulnerable, and there she dies.

the third time penny polendina dies, it is because cinder fall—broken and desperate and acting out echoes of the violence atlas inflicted on her long ago, unable to escape atlas even as it falls in part by her hand—is the one who murders her. one victim of atlesian exploitation slaughtered by another victim of its violence.

it’s a tragedy. it’s a horror story. and it has always, always been about how atlas tears people apart.

3. winter, penny, & the battle for personhood

one idea i’ve seen expressed time and again is that the struggle to define herself as a human being in spite of her robotic nature is a major pillar of penny’s character arc—and i think that is 1. not true and 2. missing the forest for the trees.

when her robotic nature is revealed in 2.3-2.4, penny is scared that ruby will perceive her as “not a real girl” and reject her for it, but she also states outright that she is capable of generating an aura—meaning, she has a completely ordinary human soul. and, once she’s cleared that hurdle of fearing rejection, the question of whether penny is or isn’t “real” ceases to matter altogether. she knows she’s a person, and so do her friends, and so does her dad, so does everyone whose opinion matters.

“does the sentient robot count as a person?” is a question rwby asks and answers, with an emphatic YES OF COURSE, in the space of about thirty seconds straight out of the gate and then never revisits because it doesn’t need revisiting. it’s a non-issue.

however.

penny exists in a fascist dictatorship, and that is what gives rise to the struggle for individuality and humanity—not just for penny, but for everyone caught up in the atlesian machine. winter, all the ace-ops, may marigold, willow and whitley schnee—even ironwood himself. one of the core themes of vol7-8 is how people keep or find or lose their humanity amidst a storm of rising tyranny and inescapable fear.

that one of them also happens to be a robot is beside the point.

segueing into the real meat of this section, i’m going to quote what i said in the narnia post: penny and ironwood spend vol7-8 in a pitched battle for winter’s soul, and penny wins.

to expand a little on this thought: one of the key threads developed throughout vol7 is the parallel relationships between penny and winter, on the one hand, and oscar and ironwood on the other; wherein penny and oscar serve as voices of conscience for winter and ironwood respectively. she succeeds. he does not.

and… i’ll just quote all the relevant conversations upfront.

in 7.7:

OSCAR: Well, I can tell you what I think. The path you’re heading down—where you’re the only one with the answers, where you do the thing you think is right no matter the cost—it’s not going to take you anywhere good. IRONWOOD: …We have to stop Salem. Nothing matters more. OSCAR: Some things matter more, I think; keeping our humanity. It’s what makes us different from her. IRONWOOD: Sometimes I worry that’s her greatest advantage.

in 7.8:

PENNY: Are you okay? WINTER: I’ll be fine. I just let my emotions get the better of me. PENNY: What do you mean? WINTER: You wouldn’t understand. PENNY: …Oh. Right. WINTER: Oh– no, no, what I mean is—this place holds a lot of memories for me specifically. I thought I was in control, but… well, you heard me. I sounded like a petulant child. PENNY: I thought you sounded fine. You were just speaking from your heart! WINTER: And that is precisely the problem. I should have just stayed in line. PENNY: I guess you’re right. I don’t understand.

in 7.9:

IRONWOOD: I… I tried to keep the kingdom safe, and now we’re losing everything. OSCAR: General? Earlier, you asked for my advice. IRONWOOD: I wanted Ozpin’s advice. OSCAR: And his advice probably would’ve been to keep your secrets. When we first got here, you already knew that wasn’t the right course. You had a new plan. IRONWOOD: It’s time to give up on that plan. It’s all falling apart. OSCAR: The panic you were worried about? It’s already happening. The secrets you’re keeping, they’re about to be in the open anyway. It’s time. Tell the truth.

in 7.12:

PENNY: The General is leaving Mantle to perish? WINTER: He’s saving Remnant. We can’t let the relics fall to Salem. PENNY: But all those people we just protected—they won’t survive. WINTER: We don’t have time to— PENNY: That doesn’t bother you? …What about your sister? Our friends? WINTER: My personal feelings don’t matter. We have orders. I’m to retrieve the power of the winter maiden so we can access the relic; you’re here to ensure my safety. Now come on. We’ve already lost enough time. PENNY: It should matter. WINTER: Penny… the General is making hard choices so we don’t have to. For the good of all, not just a few. PENNY: I do not see what is good about any of this. WINTER: …On that we can agree.

and:

PENNY: You said your personal feelings do not matter. WINTER: They won’t change my actions. What I’m committed to. The power of the winter maiden and the relic must be kept from our enemies; even if it means she dies. But… yes, Penny, we must still acknowledge our personal feelings. Wrestle with them. It ensures us that we’re on the right path. It’s… what makes us human. PENNY: I think… I think I understand.

in 7:13:

IRONWOOD: You still think I’m afraid. OSCAR: We all are. It’s what we do in our fear that reveals our— IRONWOOD: That’s easy for you to say! You can label me whatever you’d like, but the fact of the matter is I was right! The minute I softened, let my guard down, that’s when Salem had her opening. OSCAR: If you abandon Mantle, you abandon our best chance of reuniting the world—you abandon Remnant, leaving millions to fend for themselves so a few can survive! What kind of— IRONWOOD: All excellent philosophical points that won’t matter if Salem wins! OSCAR: Listen to me— IRONWOOD: No, you listen! I am done letting others’ inability to see the big picture get in the way of doing what’s right! Robyn, the council, this kingdom—even you. OSCAR: Then you’re as dangerous as she is, James. IRONWOOD: …James is what my friends call me. To you, it’s General. [He shoots Oscar, point blank, off the edge of the vault.]

and:

PENNY: She’s… gone. WINTER: N–no. She’s a part of you now. [beat.] I suggest you all surrender and comply with the General’s orders. WEISS: We can’t do that. WINTER: Then—I suggest you run. WEISS: No, you’re hurt! I’m not going to leave you like this— WINTER: You’re not leaving me! I’m giving you a head start!

i want to highlight all of these because i think, taken as a whole, they illustrate why penny could reach winter but oscar couldn’t do the same for ironwood. both penny and oscar are very blunt in expressing their disagreement and disappointment when winter or ironwood refuse to change course—but penny also seeks to understand winter’s perspective, while oscar leads with the (not incorrect) assumption that ironwood is acting out of fear.

penny ends the conversation in 7.8 by acknowledging that she doesn’t understand winter’s reasoning. she questions winter in 7.12, pushing her to articulate what she truly means—pushing winter to engage in a mutual conversation about the ethics of what they’ve been ordered to do and whether or not their personal feelings should be allowed to influence their decisions.

and, thus, winter confesses to penny that she, too, feels that ironwood’s decision to abandon mantle is not good, that her heart is at odds with her sense of duty, and that emotions do matter—that even if winter holds to her commitments, she needs to wrestle with her feelings instead of blindly following orders, or else risk losing her humanity.

ironwood is so lost to fear that he’s begun to think of humanity as a weakness, of salem’s indifference as her greatest advantage; and winter—his protégé and his most trusted deputy, the woman he hand-picked and molded into the perfect obedient vessel for the power of the maiden—winter tries so hard to emulate his cold, unflinching ideal, but penny’s earnest efforts to not just listen to her but hear her pierce straight through every layer of conditioning and abuse winter has endured to drag out the truth that winter knows she is in danger of losing herself, and even more importantly, that that matters to her.

and, mere minutes after this final conversation, winter schnee defies her general for the first time.

the situation is thus: fria is dying in penny’s arms. cinder breaks through the ice and, realizing what’s about to happen, lunges at penny in a desperate rage; and winter bursts through the ice to stop her by cutting off the grimm arm.

then, while cinder is writhing and incapacitated by pain, winter takes a moment to assess the situation. she sees penny holding fria, sees that fria is about to die, and—just as cinder did—she realizes that penny is about to become the winter maiden.

winter has two choices at this point.

cinder is incapacitated; winter is out of aura, but penny is in perfect fighting condition. winter could have rushed to switch places with penny, accepting the maiden power from fria while penny kept cinder at bay—just as ironwood ordered.

but she didn’t.

winter cares about fria, and she loves penny. seeing fria on the brink of death and penny cradling her, afraid and confused, crushes her—and winter allows herself an instant to feel that sorrow…

…and then her resolve hardens, and she focuses on cinder, bracing herself and—metaphorically if not physically—putting herself between cinder and penny. even with her aura broken, even knowing she doesn't stand a chance, even with ironwood’s orders directly to the contrary—when push comes to shove, winter chooses to protect her friend instead of following orders.

this scene and oscar’s last confrontation with ironwood are played against each other, and that juxtaposition underscores how important it is that winter makes the choices she does; because ironwood, her mentor, is similarly presented with a choice between his humanity and his authority, and he makes the opposite choice.

this is the moment where his path and winter’s diverge.

she isn’t ready to walk away from atlas altogether, not yet. but just as penny’s acceptance of the maiden powers irrevocably separates her from atlas, so too does winter’s decision to see and accept penny as the new maiden set her on a course away from ironwood’s control. when her sister and ruby arrive on the scene, she tells them to run; she calls for medical assistance and reinforcements, but omits enough details to allow ruby, weiss, and penny a clean escape.

it’s one small step. it’s a start.

and penny is the one who helped her get there.

and it really couldn’t have been anyone else but penny, because the thing is: both of them are trapped. both of them have been conditioned and dehumanized and treated like pawns, and—

okay.

i have read… a lot of discussion to the tune of winter being, in penny’s mind, just a backup plan because she believed ruby was dead, but i submit that it’s actually the opposite: when penny suggested that ruby kill her to circumvent the virus, she intended to pass the maiden power on to ruby only because—as far as any of them knew at that point—winter was still loyal to ironwood.

(if penny had been thinking pragmatically when she chose whom to bequeath the magic too, she would’ve chosen weiss. penny had no way of knowing whether or not winter could get to the portals in time to save jaune and weiss from cinder; giving the maiden power to winter meant risking her friends’ lives.)

because winter would always have been penny’s first choice. as much as penny vibes with ruby, and as close as they are, winter is the one who’s been through it all with penny. for penny’s sake, winter threw herself on cinder’s sword without a second of hesitation; and only moments before that, penny risked sacrificing both the maiden power and the relic to save winter.

penny, a literal machine created with so much love that she had a real soul, real feelings, real humanity that could never be overcome by her programming even as atlas sought to make her into a weapon; and winter, who grew up with an abusive father and tried to escape but found herself entangled in the violence of the atlesian military instead, broken and molded into someone who believed down to her core that her life and feelings didn’t matter, that she existed to follow orders and nothing else.

winter has been down in the trenches with penny in the atlesian war against their humanity since the beginning. and penny! the machine! is the first person to truly see and understand what has been done to winter and say no, that isn’t right. to say i do not see what is good about any of this.

ruby and the others are penny’s friends, but winter is her family.

and that is why penny chose winter: because they’re family, and because together the two of them are the face of resistance against the dehumanization of the atlesian fascist machine, which seeks in the name of safety to crush individuality and instill loyalty above all else. no questions, no thinking, just shut up and do as you’re told—they’re not banning art like pre-war mantle did, but that blueprint is still there, written inescapably into the fabric of atlesian culture, and it victimizes both winter and penny—both of them pressed and bent and sculpted into cogs of the war machine—and it’s the power of the winter maiden, the maiden of creation, that gives each of them a chance to escape.

and i think this is what they’re both getting at, when they say their goodbyes:

WINTER: You were always the real maiden at heart. I was just the machine—just… following orders. PENNY: You were my friend.

that’s what winter is going to carry forward. that’s the part of penny’s legacy she will become the standard bearer for, the dismantling of everything atlas stood for and creation of a new way of living where no one gets crushed down or asked to sacrifice their personhood on the altar of peace and security—a new world where everyone is free.

because that’s what the power of the winter maiden always represented for both of them.

4. pyrrha, penny, & passing the torch

penny’s third death is a direct echo of pyrrha’s.

both of them are murdered by cinder fall, who steals the power of the fall maiden from pyrrha and attempts to steal that of the winter maiden from penny. both of them are, in their final arcs, trapped in a tragedy from which they cannot escape.

moreover, penny is—in a way—the pyrrha to winter’s jaune, in the sense that both she and pyrrha embodied the qualities winter and jaune needed most: penny’s relentless love and stubborn insistence on following her heart and conscience above all, and pyrrha’s unflinching compassion, courage, and dedication to helping wherever she was needed, in whatever way she could.

and they were both so, so loved, so deeply and by so many people. they are and will be mourned. they are and will be missed, keenly and fiercely by everyone who cared for them.

we’ve already seen how the characters grieved for pyrrha.

jaune sloughed away what little still remained of his ego and bravado in favor of committing himself to quietly doing whatever needed to be done—even if it wasn’t glamorous, or heroic, or something that win him admiration or esteem. he picked up the torch of pyrrha’s kindness and kept it burning just as brightly as it had done while she lived.

and the others, too, drew strength and inspiration and comfort from her example, even though it hurt to be without her.

we’ll see them grieve for penny in the same way. winter has already begun; reawakened to her feelings by penny’s friendship and having cast off the shackles atlas bound her with. she made an implicit promise to penny to use the maiden power as penny would have—in accordance with what she believes in, what she feels, what she thinks, rather than blindly following orders.

it’s sad—of course it’s sad—it’s unfair and senseless and tragic. but part of the responsibility of grief is to keep the fires burning. to pick up the torch and carry on, because that is how the memories and legacies of the fallen are honored and preserved and kept alive.

5. ozlem as a cautionary tale

one of the most interesting things, to my mind, about the phenomenon of the penny resurrection discussion is how closely and… from what i can tell unwittingly the prevailing theories for how penny can be revived again mirror but don’t acknowledge the arc of a canon storyline about a young woman fighting to bring her loved one back from the dead. 

like—it is absolutely astounding to me how much penny 3.0 theory-posting just straight up does not mention salem at all.

you know, salem. the woman who lost the love of her life and begged the gods to bring him back; the one they cursed with immortality for spite so she could never be with him again; the one whose anguish rocked the whole world to its foundations, because she refused even then to give up trying and incited a rebellion against them? 

the one whose grief and rage they punished by slaughtering everyone on the planet and leaving her to rot on a world abandoned by its own creators as nothing but a pitiful failed experiment—the one who loved so fiercely and deeply that she lived long enough to see humanity evolve anew and submerged herself and was changed by the pool of grimm and yet still clung to her capacity for love afterwards, the one who endured unfathomable suffering without hope of reprieve for millions of years and did not break until the one she loved rejected her?

LIKE—COME ON.

when she lost ozma, salem did exactly what the yes-resurrection crowd want the cast of heroes and ruby in particular to do, and the gods punished her for it with quite literally apocalyptic brutality. all of humankind was obliterated in the blink of an eye in retaliation for her defiant grief—and her immortality twisted her into an unrecognizable monster, and ozma has spent god only knows how many thousands of years being shunted from host to host, unable to rest, bearing the sole responsibility for redeeming humanity in the eyes of the omnicidal gods upon his shoulders, buried alive under the threat that they will destroy everything if he fails.

(salem was right to call them monsters.)

team rwby knows all of this. 

in and of itself that does not preclude their trying to bring penny back anyway, but any quest to do so will and must be carried out in the full knowledge that they are walking down the same path salem followed all those years ago, and that these are the consequences that hang over their necks should they fail. 

6. regarding various yes-resurrection arguments

i have read… a lot of penny resurrection theory-posting and while i find it all, across the board, not really persuasive, for the sake of thoroughness i do want to at least touch on a few specific lines of reasoning.

a. suicide and the glorification thereof

alright.

describing penny’s final death as a suicide at all is absurd. y’all. cinder impaled her. through the chest. five times. that’s– that’s murder! cinder killed her!

“but jaune tried to heal her and she stopped him!” look

in 5.11 cinder runs weiss through with a spear, through the right side of the torso, close to the bottom of the ribcage—approximately, a clean pierce straight through the liver. as thoracic impalements go that’s one of the better case scenarios: no major arteries were severed, the spear did not pierce the heart, lungs, or any portion of the digestive tract, the spine was not damaged, and the liver happens to be the only visceral organ capable of tissue regeneration.

even if jaune hadn’t been there—even if his semblance hadn’t manifested!—it is likely that weiss would have survived that injury regardless. assuming that every scene in 5.12 and 5.13 happens in sequence—i.e. that the scenes with raven and cinder in the vault do not happen concurrently with what’s going on topside—then roughly fifteen minutes elapse between the time of the injury and the arrival of the mistral police force. within twenty minutes of being impaled, weiss could have been rushed to the nearest hospital for medical treatment.

(it’s also possible that the spear pierced her right lung. that weiss faints immediately following the injury suggests to me that her gasping afterwards is symptomatic of shock, but it might also be a sign of lung collapse. this is a more serious injury but the point stands; an open pneumothorax is dangerous but not rapidly fatal, and the odds for weiss to survive on her own long enough to receive proper medical care remain pretty high.)

jaune’s semblance manifests in 5.12 at 06:55 and he maintains it through the end of the episode (13:58). 5.13 opens (at 01:30) exactly where 5.12 left off, and from that point jaune continues to use his semblance until some point between 06:30 and 08:00.

again assuming that the scenes in the vault are not concurrent with topside scenes, jaune spends roughly 12-15 minutes using his semblance in order to heal weiss—or the more conservative estimate of roughly 8-12 minutes if we assume the vault scenes are concurrent.

so… what this tells us is that on average, it takes about ten minutes for jaune’s semblance to facilitate the healing of one serious, but not immediately life threatening, stab wound to the torso.

why am i harping on this?

in 8.14, cinder punches several holes into penny’s torso: one on the left side of penny’s abdomen, just beneath her ribcage, and four spaced high across her chest, just under the clavicle. the upper set of injuries missed the heart but certainly punctured both lungs and may have ruptured the aorta; the lower wound would have hit either the stomach or the top of the large intestine. these are much more serious injuries than the one weiss suffered.

for illustrative purposes let’s assume there is a hospital just outside the portal. if jaune scoops penny up immediately after cinder lets go and rushes her to that hospital, there is still a tremendous chance that penny will die. both of her lungs have collapsed. she’s likely bleeding from the largest artery in the human body. depending on whether cinder hit her stomach or her intestine, she’s leaking either digestive acid or fecal matter into her abdominal cavity.

penny needs immediate, intensive medical intervention in order to have even the slightest chance of survival.

with that in mind, let’s recall that jaune’s semblance is not healing—rather, he supercharges the recipient’s aura.

aura has a natural healing factor; we’ve seen it close minor superficial wounds in a matter of seconds, and when weiss impales hazel in 5.13, he’s able to shrug it off courtesy of his semblance, which enables him to just ignore the pain, plus the abnormally fast regeneration of his own aura.

thus, for people with active auras, there are two kinds of life-threatening wound:

1. severe traumatic injury that will kill you in a matter of minutes, before your aura has time to repair the damage.

2. serious injury that will deplete your aura faster than your aura is able to repair the damage.

in 5.11-5.13, weiss suffers the second kind of injury—her natural reserve of aura is not deep enough and doesn’t replenish itself fast enough to outpace the physical damage inflicted by cinder’s attack. the actual mechanism by which jaune “heals” her is just giving her more aura to work with, either by directly linking his own, much deeper aura to hers or by burning his aura to fuel the rapid regeneration of hers.

in 8.14, on the other hand, penny suffers the first kind of injury. both of her lungs are collapsing and her aorta is probably ruptured; she has a few minutes, if that.

what i’m getting at is, bluntly: i don’t think jaune could have healed penny. because the danger, for her, isn’t running out of aura.

it’s running out of time.

as discussed, it takes about ten minutes for aura-healing to fully repair a single best case scenario thoracic impalement, and penny, in all likelihood, does not have ten minutes.

but for the sake of argument, let’s say she did.

penny has ten minutes before she bleeds out. if jaune activates his semblance immediately after she hits the ground and maintains it for ten minutes, her aura will be able to rapidly heal enough of the damage to at least stabilize her, saving her life.

the only people remaining in the between-space of the portal are penny, jaune, weiss, and cinder fall. everyone else has already exited to vacuo and are unable to re-enter, meaning there are no reinforcements coming.

cinder’s foremost goal is to kill penny, but weiss attacks her, forcing her to release penny and engage weiss instead.

jaune and penny are non-combatants—penny because she’s grievously injured, and jaune by necessity because he must stay by penny’s side and concentrate in order to maintain his semblance. if his semblance lapses before penny has stabilized, she will most likely die.

(remember that in 5.11-5.13, nora stands guard over jaune and weiss until jaune deems that weiss is fully stable, meaning he could stop what he was doing in order to defend himself if someone were to attack them without endangering weiss by interrupting the healing process at a critical stage.)

it takes cinder just under one minute to disarm weiss and knock her to the ground (09:07-10:03). at most a few seconds later (10:09), she advances to strike a killing blow.

in canon, it’s at this point—10:09, slightly more than one minute after penny is injured—that jaune ends penny’s life. his anguished cry when he does it interrupts what would have been the blow that killed weiss instead.

what happens if jaune tries to save penny?

option 1: jaune ignores penny’s refusal and tries to heal her. cinder kills weiss, then turns right around and knocks jaune off the platform with a blast of fire—because he can’t fight and maintain his semblance—leaving herself alone with a dying, defenseless penny. she siphons the remainder of the maiden powers and walks away clean with both the staff and the lamp.

option 2: jaune grabs penny and sprints for the exit portal while weiss duels cinder. if he’s even fast enough to make it out, which is unlikely, cinder kills weiss and turns around just in time to see him rush through the portal. jaune and penny emerge into a crowd of terrified refugees, in the middle of a sandstorm, under attack by a horde of grimm—and, seconds later, cinder’s there, too.

every combat-capable person in that crowd has to make a choice between protecting thousands of innocent people from the grimm, or protecting jaune and penny from cinder. and while cinder is badly outnumbered, the onslaught of grimm, her ability to explode bystanders by the dozens, and the fact that she can turn the sandstorm into a cyclone of serrated glass will all work to her advantage here.

and if that wasn’t enough, cinder also has the staff of creation.

maybe she’ll manage to steal the power and maybe she won’t, but the heroes are going to suffer steep casualties no matter what. between the panicking refugees and the dearth of fighters, it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that this battle becomes a massacre.

option 3: jaune leaps into the fight alongside weiss, hoping to overpower cinder. best case scenario? penny dies of her injuries and bequeaths the maiden powers to weiss, evening the odds and allowing them to survive. worst case? cinder swiftly dispatches both weiss and jaune, then rips the maiden powers out of penny.

option 4: jaune tries, and succeeds, at wrestling the staff away from cinder before penny bleeds out, hoping to pause time long enough to save her. however:

1. because healing is a temporal process by its very nature, aura healing might not even work outside of time.

2. jinn suggests that she can choose whether or not to answer if she senses that someone has summoned her without intent to use the relic for its true purpose. it’s quite likely the spirits of the other relics have similar flexibility, and even if ambrosius—not being omniscient—can’t sense jaune’s intentions ahead of time, nothing stops him from simply returning to the staff right away in a huff if he doesn’t appreciate this trick.

3. when ruby tried this with jinn, she bought herself about thirty extra seconds. jaune needs ten uninterrupted minutes.

4. jaune could probably stall for that long if he used the staff for its intended purpose but got very, very pedantic about what he wanted… but that will cause the bridges and portals to collapse, dooming everyone inside except for cinder. (in canon, it takes a mere forty seconds from the time cinder uses the staff to the total collapse of the portals, and jaune doesn’t even have enough time to run from halfway up the last bridge to the exit; when penny dies, everyone’s fighting on a landing somewhere near the center of the between-space, much further away from any of the portals.)

5. and all of this depends on jaune having the presence of mind to even think of this plan, while panicking, in the sixty or so seconds he has to make a decision before cinder kills weiss and turns on him.

even assuming he can get the staff from cinder—which is a long shot in and of itself—this scenario has way too many points of failure to be truly viable.

penny is smart and hyper-analytical. she can calculate and prepare for half a dozen plausible outcomes of a given combat situation in a matter of seconds (a la 7.5 “i will plan for six different outcomes!”). when she says, “there’s not enough time to heal me,” it’s because there’s not enough time to heal her. there is no plausible scenario where penny walks out of this situation alive.

she recognizes that, and she tells jaune not to try.

that’s not… suicide.

that’s just an acknowledgement of reality.

and given that reality—penny is going to die no matter what—the choice she makes is the optimal one.

cinder has both the relics. neither weiss nor jaune can overpower her and will likely die if they stay much longer. no reinforcements are coming. penny is dying and cannot be saved. the battle is lost.

the one piece still in play—the one uncertain variable here—is the maiden powers, which will either go to a person of penny’s choosing (if penny dies) or to cinder (if penny lingers long enough for cinder to kill her protectors).

if jaune tries to heal penny, he’ll keep penny alive long enough for cinder to kill weiss, then him, and then rip the powers out of penny via shadow hand.

if jaune does nothing, or tries to fight cinder, he might be able to stall her long enough for penny to bleed out, but that’s a gamble.

if jaune gives penny a quick death now, he and penny can guarantee that the power will go to someone who isn’t salem’s most important lieutenant.

that jaune chooses option number three doesn’t make him penny’s killer, and penny’s consent doesn’t mean she committed suicide! neither of those things would have happened if she weren’t already dying! cinder killed her! that was murder!

you can’t glorify suicide by having one character murder another character! just– just an ounce of critical thinking—

and yes, there’s a content warning at the top of the episode and a link to the national suicide hotline in the description, because the whole scene is emotionally intense and for someone who is already struggling with depression and suicide ideation it could be very triggering, yes! absolutely! i’m not arguing that—a depressed suicidal brain could easily fixate on penny asking jaune to end it now and spiral into crisis because mental illness is not rational and doesn’t care about context. there’s nothing wrong with putting a content warning on something tangential out of an excess of caution!

but the fact remains—look.

hazel knew with absolute certainty that salem would kill him if he fought her and he put himself between her and the kids anyway, and then he grabbed her and set himself on fire and told oscar to blow them both up.

was that suicide?

was that glorifying suicide?

no.

and neither was penny’s death.

b. why even bother then?

i’ve seen this sentiment expressed in… various ways, all of them flatly infuriating. why even bother bringing penny back if they were just going to kill her off. why even bother giving her a human body. why even bother developing her character. why bother putting her in any scenes at all!—as if dying rendered her character totally pointless, as if any role she played, any importance she had, any meaning she could have brought to the narrative was retroactively expunged by the fact of her death.

as if—not to name names about the specific fans who do this, or anything—the only value penny has as a character is to be alive and available for ruby to date.

full offense, but fuck you.

c. narrative loose ends

along similar lines, another recurring sentiment is that penny must be coming back because her character arc feels “unfinished” or she died without fulfilling her fundamental goals or only a few characters witnessed her death while the rest are in the dark—or it being odd for her to die after pietro expressed his fears about her dying—or various other arguments which, in my opinion, boil down to:

1. a failure or refusal to understand that sometimes characters do die in the middle of their personal arcs, and

2. grasping at straws for anything that could be construed as “evidence” that penny’s story isn’t properly over.

but… well, two things. the first is that some characters do just die without first reaching a clear end point in their personal arcs, and indeed characters often die before their fundamental goals come to fruition. this is, in fact, one of the essential tools a writer has when it comes to constructing a tragic death.

but the second and i think more salient point is that penny’s death is not merely tragic but the natural culmination of a character arc that is constructed as a classical tragedy.

briefly, a classical tragedy involves:

1. a noble, heroic character

2. who suffers a change of fortune from good to bad

3. as an inevitable but unforeseen result of their hamartia—a single tragic mistake.

(there are other characters in rwby besides penny whose arcs follow the trajectory of classical tragedy; pyrrha and salem both spring to mind, and while it remains to be seen what precisely happened to summer rose, what we do know of her story seems to be pointing in this direction as well.)

the suitability of penny’s character to play the role of a tragic hero is… obvious, given her endless compassion and kindness and desire to help people; she is good, unreservedly and unquestionably good, and that is the basic qualification for the tragic hero.

her hamartia occurs in 7.13 when she accepts the powers of the winter maiden—not because that was the wrong choice, that isn’t what hamartia means, but rather because it is this decision that puts penny on the inescapable path to death.

penny accepts the powers of the winter maiden because that’s what she must do to save winter’s life, and she cares more about winter than she does ironwood’s orders. in so doing, she locks ironwood out of the relic’s vault, thereby preventing him from using the staff to raise atlas beyond salem’s reach…

…which leads first to his effort to manipulate her into obedience, and second to him accepting watts’ suggestion of installing a virus to force her to do as he demands…

…which leads to penny’s fall from amity and to schnee manor, where her friends first defend her from salem’s hound and then aid her struggle against the virus…

…until they’re able to concoct a plan to save her from it altogether, by removing her soul from her original body and giving her a flesh-and-blood replacement…

…which, being squishier than her original body, leaves her comparatively defenseless in a fight where having the maiden power painted a target on her back.

moreover—though this part is speculation—i don’t think penny ever learned how to shield herself with aura, simply because she never needed to. it’s stated in 5.4 that learning how to raise a defensive aura is difficult in and of itself, and that mastering the skill to the point where it isn’t physically and mentally exhausting requires intense concentration and considerable practice; for most fighters, of course, the steep upfront cost of learning is more than paid for by the protection and safety a strong defensive aura can offer. but… for penny, a defensive aura only offers a tiny bit of extra protection relative to the natural durability of her metal body. simply put, she doesn’t need one, and it doesn’t feel like a stretch to think that learning more than the basics might’ve been considered a waste of time for her.

when penny stops a truck with her hands in 2.3, most of the skin covering her palms is sheared away to reveal the metal interior, without any sign of her aura breaking. likewise in 3.9, there’s no visible reaction from her aura before she’s torn apart by her own wires. and in 7.10, a goliath whacks penny hard enough to stun her and fling her several blocks—she lands in a crater of shattered pavement—without even a shimmer of aura, though her standby button does flicker. nor do we see penny’s aura break during the fight in 8.14, not even when cinder impales her five times through the chest; we do, however, see the characteristic shimmer when penny’s aura is agitated by jaune’s semblance.

and… if that’s true, penny was more than “comparatively defenseless.” she was uniquely vulnerable: stuck in a new and weaker body with unfamiliar limits, no armor, no defensive aura, and thrust into a battle where she had to improvise replacements weapons out of magic on the fly while cinder targeted her specifically. this is her downfall.

and all of that, as i mentioned, points unerringly back in time to that single act of accepting the winter maiden’s power.

rwby is not penny’s story—thus the ending of penny’s story is not the ending of rwby, and her death will reverberate loudly throughout the remaining narrative. of course there are loose ends to tie up; jaune and winter and weiss still need to deliver the news of penny’s death, and her father still needs to find out that he lost her again, and everyone who loved penny still needs to grieve. in that sense, the story of penny is far from over.

but her character arc? penny’s own story? it’s finished. it was a meticulously crafted classical tragedy and it ended the way all classical tragedies do, and must.

and it’s okay, it’s natural to feel sad, it’s okay for it to hurt! penny’s death provoked grief and anguish because those are the feelings a classical tragedy seeks to inspire; the heart of a tragedy is its sorrows!

and tragedy—i really need people to understand this—tragedy does not equal bad writing. it’s just a genre and a particular form of narrative structure, and that’s it.

which segues us into

d. crwby broke the fandom’s trust

leaving aside the issue of the kind of PARASOCIAL NIGHTMARE RELATIONSHIP you’ve got to have with the creators of a story in order to feel personally betrayed by a creative decision you don’t like—

no.

they didn’t.

rwby has been dealing with themes of death and grief since day one. the first shot of the first trailer is ruby visiting her mother’s grave; summer’s disappearance and presumed death is first discussed in 2.6 and the gravitational pull of that loss on her children’s lives has only grown since. the show’s first use of classical tragedy occurred in vol3 and culminated in pyrrha’s death in 3.12. the backstory portions of 6.3 likewise follow the arc of a classical tragedy—with the twist of the tragic hero being cursed with immortality, and surviving her downfall only to be warped into a monster by her suffering.

the point being that nothing about crwby’s handling of penny’s arc in vol7-8 was new. it didn’t break without warning from the story’s established tone. neither the use of classical tragedy in a character arc nor the violent, sudden death of a major character were unprecedented. (pyrrha and penny were even murdered by the same person.)

a story should establish expectations appropriate to the story—and rwby did that. rwby devoted three volumes to slowly and steadily building up to the tragedy of pyrrha nikos. it spent the next several volumes raising the stakes and building tension one piece of information at a time until it had all its dominoes lined up—and then we hit atlas, and it flicked the first one down, and we’ve had two volumes of an intensifying downward spiral. rwby has been as upfront as a story can be about the possibility that major characters may die and the heroes may suffer catastrophic losses.

writers do not owe it to you to not write tragedies. they don’t owe it to you not to utilize tragic tropes. you are not owed a happy ending for your favorite character. you are not owed avoidance of genre conventions that you don’t like.

crwby has zero obligation to appease their audience. penny’s death was a narrative choice, not a cruel personal attack that they need to “make right.”

get a grip.

e. the screaming void

these next few items are things i’ve seen presented as evidence of there being something unusual about penny’s death, which i want to touch on for the sake of completeness and because i think they’re silly. first:

there’s—apparently—some disagreement on the subject of the big scream in 8.14, which has led to speculation among the yes-resurrection crowd that it might be related to penny’s death or her connection to the staff of creation itself; that she’s a product or byproduct of the same magic that formed the bridges and portals, that perhaps the void itself is angered by the spilling of her blood.

and… nnno.

the order of events is this:

at approximately 13:10, winter knocks the staff of creation out of cinder’s grip and it falls onto the circular platform immediately above and behind the big platform leading to the exit. in this screenshot, taken at 13:12, we can see cinder hovering high above both platforms:

the staff is circled in light blue at the low center-left of the frame. jaune and weiss, circled in red, are visible at the high center-right, where they are just stepping onto the exit bridge—weiss injured, jaune supporting her. in this shot, we see cinder glance at the staff, then up at jaune and weiss.

at 13:16, cinder launches a volley of flame at jaune and weiss, which compels winter to rush to their defense.

13:17-13:18, jaune hears the approaching fireball, turns, and throws his… forcefield grenade thingy into its path. the hard-light shield catches the fireball but explodes on impact. the aftershock of that smaller blast knocks jaune and weiss to the ground…

…which cinder superheats in large radius beneath them at 13:20 and then detonates in a massive blast at 13:24.

jaune’s aura seems to absorb a lot of the force of this explosion; he’s thrown by the blast and skids a foot or two before coming to a stop, and his aura breaks. weiss—without a massive aura to protect her—is launched what appears to be hundreds of feet into the air and falls into the void. winter dives after her in a futile effort to save her.

at approximately 13:35, winter realizes that she’s too late and too far away to catch her sister and halts her descent, hovering in midair for a moment in horror before flying slowly back up to the exit platform, where she collapses to her knees, overwhelmed by grief.

then, between 13:46 and 13:47, winter’s sorrow transmutes into rage, and she lifts her head. this happens:

the focus of this shot is on winter, but we can clearly see cinder—circled in red—descending to land on the circular platform behind her and reaching down to retrieve the staff. then—

in the next shot, at 13:50, cinder straightens up, holding the staff, and turns around. her hair is blown back—as if by a breeze—and she grins as winter gets to her feet, prepared to fight.

between 13:52 and 13:57, the void screams, the bridges and platforms shake, and the portals flicker. what happened?

cinder uses the staff immediately upon picking it up. we see the exact moment she activates it—at 13:50, when she grins and that breeze ruffles her hair. (watch closely when weiss uses the staff in 8.12; that same little breeze moves her hair at the moment when ambrosius emerges from it.)

the staff pauses time for whoever uses it, but not for anyone else, and in that shot at 13:50 we’re seeing cinder from winter’s point of view. thus: we don’t see ambrosius, and we aren’t shown what cinder asks him to create.

what we do see, and hear, is this wrenching shriek and collapse of the portals. specifically, my thought is that the scream is a result of cinder having used the staff while inside ambrosius’ last creation—the staff must be removed before the deconstruction of the last and creation of the next can properly begin; hence why the collapse doesn’t start until after cinder has flown back through to atlas.

but regardless of the specifics, the order of events and the line of causation is very clear, and there’s no correlation between the scream and penny’s death almost four minutes prior.

f. the breaking of jaune’s aura

way back in vol1 we learned that jaune has an extraordinarily deep reserve of aura, and that is borne out in the sheer endurance he demonstrates when using his semblance—for example he’s able to amp weiss’ aura long enough to heal her from a full thoracic impalement and top her off so she can use her semblance immediately afterwards, all without so much as a twinge of visible strain—and in the fact that prior to 8.14 his aura had never broken.

like the screaming void, this has given rise to wild speculation in yes-resurrection circles that jaune may have done something to penny using his semblance, in the forty or so seconds he had to work with, which burned through most of his aura reserve and somehow prevented penny from truly dying.

but, friends. y’all.

cinder exploded him!

she blew up a chunk of the ground as wide across as jaune is tall, directly underneath him and weiss. just– for god’s sake just LOOK AT IT!

those teeny tiny smoke trails—THAT’S WEISS AND JAUNE. THOSE ITTY BITTY LITTLE SPECKS. LOOK HOW TINY THEY ARE COMPARED TO THE BLAST.

THIS EXPLOSION COULD’VE WIPED OUT A CITY BLOCK.

AND THEY WERE SITTING RIGHT. ON. TOP. OF. IT.

look at the different trajectories there. jaune caught less than half the height and way less distance than weiss did—because his extraordinarily deep aura reserve absorbed significantly more of the explosion’s force than hers.

this thing is orders of magnitude worse than any hit we’ve seen jaune take before sO OF COURSE HIS AURA BREAKS WHEN HE HITS THE GROUND CINDER EXPLODED HIM

his aura is extraordinarily deep—not infinite!!

everyone has a limit. it just took us eight volumes and one very pissed off fall maiden for us to find out what jaune’s is.

FURTHERMORE. it’s symbolically relevant that jaune’s aura breaks when it does. jaune’s semblance manifested for the first time in response to his pure desperation not to lose anyone else; jaune was TERRIFIED for weiss, TERRIFIED that cinder was going to kill another person he loved, and the strength of that terror and the love it sprang from awoke his semblance and granted him the ability to heal her.

and symbolically, the reason jaune’s aura breaks after penny dies? it’s because jaune couldn’t save her, because his aura, his semblance wasn’t enough to save her—and the exact thing he was so scared of happened. cinder fall killed his friend, and once again, jaune couldn’t do anything to stop her.

and that broke him.

g. why gold instead of green?

when penny bequeaths the maiden powers to winter in the white void, the flow of energy is pale gold, rather than green. this is incongruous with the transfer of powers from fria to penny, wherein the flowing energy was pale blue to match fria’s aura. which—again—has prompted a lot of speculation from the yes-resurrection crowd.

i will acknowledge that this one is something of a mystery.

it could simply be an oversight. rwby is meticulous about its use of color and symbolism, but it’s not immune to error, so i wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the animators just… made a mistake? stranger things have happened.

that said.

i do have my own theory.

to begin, we have a sample size of three: amber → cinder, fria → penny, and penny → winter. each one is anomalous in its own way, which makes them a bit tricky to compare—the first was violent (and animated with different software), the second was voluntarily initiated by the maiden herself, and the third occurs in the white void.

with that in mind, take a look at this. in all of the on-screen transfers, we’ve seen both the color of the giving-maiden’s aura and a bright glow occurring when the magic passes to the receiving-maiden. what we’re looking at here is:

1. amber’s aura - a medium mustard-yellow.

2. the colors of the glow - white and pale gold.

3. fria’s aura - a medium-light icy blue.

4. the color of the glow - pure white.

5. penny’s aura - a dark foresty green.

6. the colors of the glow - white and pale gold.

7. a side-by-side comparison of the glows from the amber-to-cinder and penny-to-winter transfers. the hue and saturation of both are roughly the same, although the amber-to-cinder glow is a little bit darker.

next, consider the different circumstances of each transfer:

amber → cinder: using the aura pods, ozpin initiates a transference of amber’s aura into a new vessel, pyrrha. we see amber’s aura flow through the machinery and surround pyrrha—and then cinder shoots amber in the chest with an arrow. amber’s aura pours rapidly back into amber, and the instant it’s all back in her body, a bright white-and-gold ball of light explodes out of her—shattering the glass screen on the front of the pod—and flows into cinder, who begins to glow as she absorbs it.

fria → penny: fria states that she’s ready to pass on the maiden powers and sinks into penny’s arms. as fria dies of purely natural causes, she asks if penny is the one ironwood chose to receive the magic. penny hesitates, but after a moment—because fria is on the brink of death and cinder is seconds away from killing winter—takes fria’s hand to accept the transfer. we see fria’s blue aura shimmer, engulfing both her hand and penny’s, as small jots of blue light begin to rise out of it. then there’s a brilliant flash of pure white light that blots out the screen and it’s over.

penny → winter: penny dies thinking of winter. her soul and winter’s soul are drawn together in the white void, which seems to exist outside of time. they say goodbye. penny takes winter’s hands, and as a shimmering white-gold light engulfs both of their hands, swirls of small green sparks—the color of penny’s aura—appear and float away. penny’s soul fades slowly to white, and the transfer is completed with a brilliant burst of pale gold light.

lastly, think about what we know about the maiden powers and how they’re transferred.

when a maiden dies, the magic leaves her body and flows into a new host—always a young woman, preferentially whichever young woman the maiden thinks of as she dies. the salient point, for the purpose of my theory, is the actual mechanism by which the maiden powers attach to each new host: namely, by anchoring themselves to the young woman’s aura.

thus the logic behind the aura-transference pods: if you take the aura of a living maiden and put it into a new vessel, the magic tethered to that aura should be brought along for the ride. (since this is how it works for oz—his aura and his magic are linked, and the magic follows him from one host to the next—it’s probably safe to assume this line of reasoning is correct.)

that is also, explicitly, NOT what happens in the natural passage of the maiden powers from one host to the next. in the natural process, the magic leaves its dying host—i.e., detaches from her aura—and then seeks a new one.

now—putting all these pieces together, my theory is this: the white-gold light we see in the amber-to-cinder and penny-to-winter transfers is the maiden power itself, separated from its last host but not yet attached to the next. further:

1. every transference of magic draws the souls of the old and new hosts together into the white void, but—because these encounters are spiritual in nature and occur outside of time—the transfer appears instantaneous to an outside viewer.

2. the green sparks that appear during the penny-to-winter are fragments of penny’s aura, scattered by the separation of the magic from her aura—very much like the scattering of aura sparks when a defensive aura is shattered.

3. every transference of magic appears, to the outside viewer, as a brilliant flash of white-gold light bursting out of the dying host and into the new one. if the old and new hosts are not in the same location, i presume that this light will appear to burst from the old host and dissipate, and appear around the new host as a spontaneous flash of light.

4. if, however, the old and new hosts are touching at the moment of death, there is no visible burst of light—the magic simply flows through the point of physical contact.

5. when cinder uses her shadow hand to draw the maiden powers out of other maidens, she’s doing more or less what the aura-transference pods are meant to do—ripping out bits of aura that the magic is tethered to—which is why the color of energy flow in these cases matches the victim’s aura. (while grimm cannot use aura, the CFVY books do establish a precedent for them being able to absorb or siphon it, so cinder draining aura through the shadow hand is not out of the realm of possibility.)

thus, for each of the onscreen transfers, i submit that all the visual discrepancies are a result of the point of view through which we see them occur:

amber → cinder: the outside perspective from beginning to end, from ozpin’s, pyrrha’s, and jaune’s point of view.

fria → penny: the perspective of the receiving-maiden, penny, up until her soul is drawn into the white void (that’s the white flash)—at which point the perspective shifts to the outside, from cinder’s point of view.

penny → winter: the inside perspective from beginning to end, from winter’s point of view.

of course—this is just a theory. it’s hard to draw certain conclusions with only three examples, and i might be wrong! how…ever, i find my theory much more convincing than the penny-resurrection-something-weird-happened speculation simply because… well, mine doesn’t rely on “something”s.

mine is based on specific observable evidence interpreted through the lens of what knowledgeable characters have to say about the mechanics of the maiden powers and their transference. there’s also a well-established precedent for magical events occurring outside of time—the relics—including one example of us seeing the instant a character experiences an outside-time event without our being shown the event itself—when cinder uses the staff.

my theory explains every visual dissimilarity between all three onscreen transfers without requiring any assumptions about the existence of information being withheld or secret circumstances or narrative sleight-of-hand during the moment of penny’s death. its weakest link is the slight difference in value between the pale golds of the first and third transfers, but that difference can be explained by 1. the different animation software and 2. the former being color-picked against a very dark background while the latter was color-picked against a very light one.

by contrast, the penny resurrection speculation tends to focus only on the fria-to-penny and penny-to-winter transfers and largely amounts to: this is weird, did jaune do something? did penny figure out something about jaune’s aura? did jaune’s aura evolve somehow? did jaune drain his aura to do something odd to penny? does it have something to do with ambrosius?

and… maybe? who knows! it’s not impossible! but this whole line of reasoning seems to be a significant pillar of the broader theory that penny will come back again—i think out of every argument i’ve read, this one pops up the most—and… i mean, “did something weird happen here that will bring her back?” isn’t… a compelling piece of evidence. it’s not even truly a theory. it’s just a question mark in the margins of the narrative being treated almost like absolute proof that penny has to come back.

h. taking “i’ll be a part of you” literally

this is in reference to this dialogue:

WINTER: Thank you, for trusting me with this. When you’re—gone… PENNY: I won’t be gone. I’ll be a part of you.

which the yes-resurrection crowd likes to take literally as some sort of hint that penny’s going to stick around somewhere in winter’s brain a la ozpin and oscar or—honestly i don’t have a lot to say about this one.

we know that isn’t how the maidens work. cinder doesn’t have amber in her head, and penny didn’t have fria in hers.

practically every single character who has ever died in any story ever written has some variation of this exact sentiment expressed about them unless they were Literally Evil. like—come on.

it’s they’ll be a part of you or they’ll live on in you or they aren’t gone so long as we keep their memories alive or they’re here in our hearts—or however else you want to articulate the concept that people who we’ve loved and lost still linger in our hearts and minds long after they’re gone. in penny’s case she is also directly and doubtless deliberately echoing what winter said to comfort her when she was distressed about fria’s death.

it’s said of pyrrha, too. not in the same words, but:

JAUNE: She should be standing here. PYRRHA’S MOM: She is.

the same feeling.

it’s not literal.

i. but rwby is hopepunk!

this is a sentiment i’ve noticed being tossed around in penny resurrection discussions from time to time with the reasoning that rwby is hopepunk, therefore the characters can, will, and must fight to bring penny back from the dead, and they can, will, and must ultimately succeed in that endeavor, because hopepunk meansrefusing to accept bad things. i’ve also seen the argument that penny… symbolically embodies or represents the idea of hope, and therefore she must come back because … hope.

both of these ideas are flatly ridiculous.

the essence of hopepunk is that terrible things can happen, do happen, and it is worth it to keep trying anyway. that you will be knocked down again and again and you’ll stand up every single time. that the war may be long and difficult and painful but you don’t have to fight it alone, because all around you there are other people who will stand up and fight with you, because fighting for a better world is worth it. the essence of hopepunk is that happy endings are not guaranteed and change is hard and kindness is important and caring about people is not only right but necessary. it’s about resistance and resilience—and it’s about the clean-burning fuel of rage against injustice.

it’s about holding on to your humanity as hard as you can, even in the darkest night, the bitterest winter, the bleakest and most dire circumstance—because without your humanity you have nothing.

it’s about hope, which is antithetical to denial.

you want hopepunk? ruby rose is fucking hopepunk:

OSCAR: I’m… scared. I’m more scared than I’ve ever been in my life. Than I ever thought was possible. I always knew that I wanted to be more than a farmhand, but… this? Who would ask for this?

RUBY: We all went to Beacon because we wanted to help people, but… you’re right. None of us asked for this, either. We just have to press on and—

OSCAR: How can you be so confident? People have tried to kill you. The world’s about to go to war all over again! How are you okay with any of this?!

RUBY: …When Beacon fell, I lost two of my friends. Penny Polendina and Pyrrha Nikos. I didn’t know them for very long, but that doesn’t change the fact that they were two of the most kind-hearted people I’d ever met. But that didn’t save them. Pyrrha thought that, if there was even the smallest chance of helping someone, then it was a chance worth taking, and because of that, she died fighting a battle she knew she couldn’t win. And Penny was killed, just to make a statement.

OSCAR: I’m… sorry.

RUBY: I am scared. But not just for me. What happened at Beacon shows that Salem doesn’t care if you’re standing against her or not. She’ll kill anybody, and that scares me most of all. Pyrrha… Penny… I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t hurt, that I didn’t think about them every day since I lost them, that I didn’t wish I had spent more time with them! If it had been me instead, I know they would have kept fighting too, no matter how dangerous it was. So that’s what I choose to do. To keep moving forward.

hope and grief can coexist—

and, thus, so too can hope and tragedy.

(hope does burn ever in the blackest night.)

j. but nuts and dolts!

i’m sorry half your ship died. try fanfiction?

7. the thematic case against resurrection

so.

having said all of this.

it is self-evidently not impossible for rwby to bring a dead character back to life in some way. ozpin died at the end of vol3 and reincarnated as a voice in oscar’s head in vol4, and of course pietro rebuilt and reanimated penny after she was killed in amity arena. summer rose has been presumed dead by the characters, but the narrative itself is building toward some kind of reveal involving her and it’s not out of the question that she might turn out to be alive after all. all of these things occur within the context of a show whose central themes include grief and healing after death, which means that theme alone is not enough to say with certainty that penny polendina is not coming back to life.

however.

both times a character has died and come back, they did so separately from the core cast, and their reintroduction to the core cast came as a welcome surprise. with a singular exception, we have never seen a heroic character try or even consider trying to resurrect a fallen loved one—and that exception was salem, and her trying destroyed her and dragged the whole world into ruin.

when pyrrha died, her friends mourned her and emulated her and supported each other and kept moving forward. the first time penny died, her friends grieved for her and remembered her and tried to move on. thematically and narratively, rwby has affirmed and continues to affirm that this is the right way to answer loss, that part of taking care of yourself means refusing to sink into your pain and stagnate there, that the way forward lies through acceptance and healing and focusing one’s efforts on the ones who are still here.

it would be a drastic, egregious deviation away from that theme to make penny an exception to that rule—not the least because she wasn’t an exception last time—and likewise it would be pretty dramatically out of character for everyone involved except pietro.

rwby is better than that.

8. the logistical case against resurrection

but let’s assume for the sake of argument that penny is an exception, this time, to the established patterns of grief. maybe her death is ruby’s final straw; maybe the fact that she came back once represents a temptation too irresistible for her friends to resist; half of them are trapped on a bizarre magical island, after all, and lotus dreams are hardly out of the question.

how do they do it?

i think—at this late stage in the game, and for something as huge as bringing a dead character back to life—that whatever mechanism by which resurrection occurred would need to be something that we, the audience, have enough clues to piece together into a concrete guess. it needs to be genuinely PLAUSIBLE for penny to be brought back again.

ozpin’s surprise return worked with minimal foreshadowing because it happened relatively early in the story, at a time when we were still learning the rules of the setting. penny’s surprise return at the beginning of vol7 worked because—well, was it really a surprise? as shocking and sad as her sudden death was in 3.9, i know i’m not the only one who had that little voice in the back of my head saying: “oh, but she’s a robot; they can rebuild her. it might take a while, but she’ll be okay.”

but then, in 7.7, rwby made a specific point of explaining that penny’s run out of get-out-of-death-free cards, so to speak. her dad built her by tearing out a piece of his own soul, and to bring her back he had to tear out another, and he simply doesn’t have enough left to do it a third time.

someone else could rip out part of their soul and put that in a robot to create a being like penny, sure, but that new person wouldn’t actually be penny. penny’s soul came from pietro. you can’t just– you can’t grab a bit of whatever soul’s available and stick it in a vessel and expect to get penny! souls aren’t interchangeable! even ozpin and oscar are distinct characters—so much so that salem instantly sees through the ruse when oscar pretends to be ozpin in 8.4—and their souls are explicitly so alike in nature that they’re gradually fusing together!

in a similar vein, it has been shown quite clearly that the souls of former maidens do not inhabit the new hosts along with the magic itself; cinder doesn’t have amber in her head, and penny didn’t have fria in hers. it has been six volumes and six separate maidens since the concept of the four maidens was introduced to us, and never once has the narrative so much as hinted otherwise. winter does not and will not have penny in her head.

and “jaune maybe did something” isn’t a theory or speculation so much as it is a question mark with a lot of hope behind it. it’s perhaps a data point to bear in mind as we see whatever vol9 has in store for us, but on its own it’s not something we can extrapolate any meaningful clues from. (also, as discussed, i think all the pieces of evidence in favor of the idea are adequately and better explained in other ways.)

we know that ambrosius cannot retrieve people from the afterlife, either because he is forbidden from doing so or because it’s beyond his capability; also, the staff is presently in salem’s possession, which at least in the near term takes it off the table for any possible resurrection schemes.

one possible avenue that i’ve seen proposed a lot is the aura-transference pods, which have thus far made two major appearances with a near-miss on using them each time. this is beyond chekhov’s gun; this is chekhov’s nuclear bomb. absolutely, sooner or later someone is going to use these pods and we are going to see it. that said—

the aura-transference pods have never been portrayed as good or even neutral technology. pyrrha was horror-stricken when she learned what they’re for. glynda agreed with her that their intended purpose is intrinsically wrong, and so did ironwood, although he felt leaving things to chance would be even worse. ozpin—who has thousands of years of direct personal experience living with two souls in a single body—shows extreme hesitance to actually use the machines, and palpable guilt when circumstances force his hand. even winter seemed to feel apprehensive about using them, stating that she hoped fria wouldn’t feel any pain.

and—if the way pyrrha screamed in agony when she and ozpin tried to give her amber’s soul is any indication—the process itself is indeed very painful.

it’d be odd, to say the least, to devote all this time building up the aura-transference pods as a horrific last defense against the maidens falling under salem’s control—a last defense that might not even be worth the cost!—only to turn around and use them to bring a beloved character back to life.

i am very confident that when chekhov’s nuclear bomb finally detonates it is going to be bad.

moreover, while it’s very likely that whatever technology pietro used to tear out a bit of his soul in order to make penny works via the same mechanism as the aura-transference pods—both penny and the pods were developed in atlas, under the auspices of the atlesian military, and the end result of taking a soul in whole or in part out of its original vessel and storing it in a new one is near-identical—the aura-transference pods are limited by the souls they have available, i.e. there still remains the problem of retrieving penny’s soul from the afterlife, a feat that has hitherto only been accomplished by the gods, who are stridently against resurrecting the dead for any reason besides Tormenting Salem.

the one big uncertainty is the mysterious island-in-the-void. we are undoubtedly going to learn more information on that island that will deepen our understanding of magic, the relics, the gods, or possibly the grimm or salem herself, or some combination thereof. it’s… possible but i think unlikely that we’ll get any reveals about wholly new concepts, because it’s getting to be pretty late in the story for that, but there’s plenty of room in the extant categories for new information to change the calculus vis a vis the viability of resurrecting penny.

as it stands now, though, with the information we have to hand as of the ending of vol8, i don’t think there’s a mechanically viable path to penny coming back to life that doesn’t require violating any established rules of the setting.

9. (but here’s how penny 3.0 can still win)

but.

if you’ll recall, at the top of this absurdly lengthy post, i said this: the only narratively coherent way to bring penny back involves aligning the heroes with salem against the gods.

in 6.3, when salem’s history is revealed, the narrative invites us to sympathize with her. she is very much framed as the tragic hero of this story; the lonely girl locked in the tower, rescued by a kind and noble knight who falls every bit in love with her as she does with him. they should have gotten a happy ending together—but they didn’t.

the gods took a grieving, heart-broken young woman whose only wrongdoing was asking for their help and squabbled over her and her dead lover like toddlers fighting over a toy—literally played tug-of-war with ozma’s soul while he died and came back in her arms over and over again—and when she lashed out and called them monsters, they cursed her to an eternity of pain. and when she raged and rallied an army against her tormentors, they answered with an extinction.

team rwby saw all of this.

eons later, salem has long since shattered. she’s every bit as monstrous now as the gods who made her that way—but she is still, beneath all the evil she’s embraced and atrocities she’s committed, deeply human in her pain. still entangled in this conflict with ozma; still thinking of the family she loved and lost and found again and then destroyed and lost forever; still a victim of the gods’ unspeakable cruelty.

and if the heroes set out to bring penny back from the dead, they’ll step onto the very same road that led to salem becoming what she is now.

i think, thematically, narratively, if rwby were to build a pathway to penny coming back again, this is the only route that makes sense: for it to happen hand-in-hand with the heroes reevaluating what jinn showed them in 6.3 and coming to the realization that what the gods did to salem was wrong.

they don’t need to forgive her. they don’t need to work with her. they don’t need to stop fighting her, because the depth of her tragedy doesn’t make her present agenda any less heinous; and salem herself doesn’t need to undergo an arc of moral change in any form in order for the heroes to change the way they think of her. (although for the record, regardless of whether or not penny comes back, i think it’s at least not implausible for her to do so.) what would need to happen is for the heroes to approach bringing penny back from the dead as an act of ideological war against the gods—because fundamentally that’s what it is—and prepare accordingly, because it’s looking pretty certain at this point that the gods are going to come back to remnant before the story ends, and when they do—one way or another—the heroes are going to have to argue hard on humanity’s behalf.

so: if penny comes back—and to my mind that’s a very, very big if, because again i’ve yet to see a persuasive explanation for why penny should be the exception to the way the heroes grieve—i don’t think it’s going to be until very close to the end of the story, and i don’t think it’ll happen through the heroes finagling the laws of reality like they did to save her from the virus. i think it’ll be because the heroes convince the gods that they were wrong to treat salem as they did, and penny’s resurrection will come as a symbol of that ideological triumph.

10. secret bonus section for winners or, “for the love of god farran how long is this post?!”

it’s fifteen fucking thousand words long i am not sorry