#under the same sky ( queue. )

[fightinggamegirlfriend]

me rambling about some character interactions (honestly its really just Hayate/Ridley/Ryu, and some additional Ayane characterisation??) that occur right after the events of DOA5. uh. DOA5 and slight Ninja Gaiden 3 spoilers, but also a VERY LONG post!

thinking about a moment that’s set immediately after the events of DOA5, where Hayate makes a quick detour to Ridley’s apartment only to find Ridley in an emotional wreck because she’s been listening/watching the news reporting of a DOATEC facility (that Hayate, Ayane, Ryu, Kasumi and others were on) that had blown up not too long ago - and that Ridley has been dreading the absolute worse case scenario that none of the Shinobi made it out alive. She was informed before hand by Helena of what was planned, and that she'd promise to ensure the Shinobi would be fine, although after that platform collapsed, she has to do DOATEC's PR/Damage control and hide/lie to the public what actually occurred on that platform facility.

(What occurred on that DOATEC facility out in the ocean is that it doubled as a facility that harbored MULTIPLE Kasumi clones, and the Mugen Tenshin Siblings + Ryu got a little more than they bargained for, as the Kasumi Clones have reached their 'final' phase as being walking shapeshifting weapons of mass destruction that can also mimic abilities off the fly. and one of the clones copied Ryu's form and tried to do a dangerous technique of his, and the real Ryu had to respond quickly by doing the same thing and uh. it leads to facility going kaboom and everything collapsing. If you don’t believe me you can just watch this video. Obligatory DOA5 spoilers.)

There would be a moment where Hayate and Ridley are just standing in the middle of her apartment, embracing each other and Hayate profusely apologising to Ridley for causing any distress. "I’m sorry for making you worried, it was never my intention to do so. It was going all according to our plan but it went south so quickly, and I was powerless to stop it."

Ayane would eventually enter the apartment herself, because she would get really antsy about getting back home after the events of the day. However the moment she lands on the apartment’s balcony and enters, she immediately regrets her actions as she almost interrupts her sibling and Ridley’s intimate moment (even though it’s literally just two people hugging). Just as she’s about to turn tail and head back outside, she’s halted in her tracks when Ridley just barely croaks out a "thank you," to her for “having Hayate’s back,” and even adding on a “I’m glad you’re okay too...”

And Ayane is in complete shock and disbelief to hear this from Ridley, a person she has resented for so long for ‘taking her sibling away from her'. Only recently she has started to soften that stance over time after witnessing first hand Hayate’s and Ridley’s affection for one another. So hearing those words do disarm arm her slightly, like just enough to leave a tiny crack in the cold exterior she has but not enough to break it entirely. That said, in this moment Ayane would be caught off guard to just see Ridley in such an emotional state, and for a brief moment she feels her heart sink a little, and she doesn't know why (it's a ‘I don’t want to see my sibling’s precious person be in such distress’, but Ayane doesn't know it yet.) To get her bearings she sits on one of the couches, and does her very best to not tear up at Ridley’s sincere words.

Lastly Ryu enters the apartment, and I think a little before hand, Ryu would recognise that what has occurred in the last few hours have been exhausting, so he's open to Hayate's suggestion of a detour to Ridley's apartment for a brief rest stop. He would also acknowledge that there's no way that Helena Douglas and DOATEC in general can just hand wave away what's happened, and that there's absolutely a high chance the news would cover this incident, albeit they news would never know the true story. Ryu would reason that just telling Ridley in person that he's okay is a genuinely overall, good idea.

Winding down would also allow the Shinobi to fully process and comprehend the events of what happened at the facility, and relay more accurate (and critical) personal accounts of what occurred at the facility to their respective clans.

When Ridley finally pulls herself together, she does her best to make the Shinobi trio at home.

Uh during this down time, Ridley actually sees Ryu’s face for the first time and the interaction itself is highlighted in this post! There would be a lot more exchanges between these characters, although I'm not super sure how they would unfold right now, but there is a follow up exchange between Ryu and Ridley again, where he takes her aside and privately thanks her for being there for Hayate, when Ryu himself couldn’t (be it preoccupied with clan duties, the occasional demon fiend troubles or artificial gods etc.). Additionally I think in this moment Ryu, in a semi-tired state does confess to Ridley his feelings for her (albeit in vague terms) + mentions that since she's Hayate's special person, that by proxy, she's also special to him. He’s had these feelings lingering around for a while (since DOA4/Ninja Gaiden II) but he never really fully accepted them until the events of Ninja Gaiden 3, where Ridley makes a surprise appearance and punches the daylight out of a mutated Cliff.

Again, as previously mentioned, these feelings for the pro-wrestler is partly due to how genuinely supportive she's been to Hayate and Ryu holds those in high regard who are willing to lend a shoulder for others to lean on. I am aware its not exactly a sound justification for what will eventually turn into a polyship, but within the lore of DOA and Ninja Gaiden there's only so much I can work with, so cut me a little bit of slack. (also the connected timeline is kind of a mess... i have no clue when NG3 takes place tbh.)

I guess I should stress that Ryu does not envy Hayate and Ridley's relationship or closeness, I feel like Ryu is more rational in his emotions and doesn't let petty things bother him. like you'd have to try VERY hard to get him to be jealous.

ANYWAYS, back to the confession, I’m not sure if Hayate should walk in on the conversation or happen to overhear or, or have Ayane snitch on Ryu (would be an insanely funny idea, but it would be OOC as she deeply respects and holds Ryu in high regard). Whatever choice I go with, Hayate would be hurt to know that her relationship with Ryu wasn’t 'strong enough' for her life partner to feel comfortable in telling her that he had romantic feelings for her girlfriend. Ryu would justify the decision to not divulge these feelings to them as: “I wanted to prioritise your well-being first,” and that “I wanted to ensure that I could provide cover for you if any Mugen Tenshin Clan Elder asked me where you’ve gone. I don’t want you to be exiled or hunted down all your life like your sister, all because you’re seeing a person who isn’t from a Ninja Clan.” Hayate would feel very tired and defeated by that last justification, and even as Clan Leader, she knows she’ll have to answer a lot of questions if she dared tried to change that policy/rule (traditional can suck sometimes).

A few hours before the Shinobi trio leave Ridley’s apartment, Hayate would present the question to Ridley if it was alright to open up the relationship to include Ryu. Ridley doesn’t mind this, although she’s very confused on how Ryu has gained feelings for her. She literally says: “I’m not that special.” It would take a bit for her come around to develop her own feelings for Ryu, she IS attracted to him after seeing what’s under that mask, it’s just the development of romance between the two will take some time, but she’s open to trying :3

uuhhhhhh god this post is so long so I'll end it off here. there's nothing more to add atm other than Ayane being the obligatory fourth wheel to all of this unfolding before her eyes (much to her annoyance).

[moonetherial]

[hermitadaymay]

WELCOME TO HERMIT-A-DAY MAY 2025!

Another year, another Hermit-a-Day May! I'm so thrilled to be able to bring this event to you all for the third year in a row.

THE RULES: 1. Any type of fanwork is welcome so long as it features, or is otherwise inspired by, the Hermit of the day. 2. Tag #hermitaday to have your fanwork reblogged, or submit it directly to the blog (Please note that while we recognize the value of fanworks involving more mature themes, and they can certainly count toward challenge completion if you're keeping track for yourself, content on this blog will be kept "PG-13" so that all may enjoy.). 3. Fanworks for one Hermit posted after the day rolls over to another Hermit's day (per the US Central time zone) will be reblogged in one big queue in June. 4. Traced or stolen work is NOT welcome. If we discover you have posted traced or stolen work, you will be given one chance to delete it and apologize, or you will be blacklisted from the blog. AI-generated/assisted pieces are similarly unwelcome and will not be featured on the blog. 5. We are not interested in seeing captions or tags in which you disparage your art/skills, and will not be reblogging posts where this happens. We're all improving all the time. Be kind to yourselves. 6. Technically not a rule, but we strongly recommend adding alt text or description to all images. Click here to learn more about writing alt text - it's pretty easy!

WHY SHOULD I PARTICIPATE? To show love to every Hermit, from the most to least subscribed, from those who have been on the server from day one to those who only joined this season! And because challenges are fun! And because we are once again out here for a good cause: we're running another fundraiser for Gamers Outreach, featuring art incentives by nine amazing artists. Learn more about our incentives in these posts:

MILESTONE REWARD POST

INDIVIDUAL REWARD POST

RAFFLE POST

WHO’S RUNNING THIS? Hi! My name is Luna! You can use ze/hir, she/her, he/him, or ro/ros/roseself pronouns for me. My main blog is @as-if-unreal. Helping me out this year is the incredible Mod Sky ( @skyspersonalhell ), who uses any pronouns!

BONUS DAY PROMPTS EXPLAINED UNDER THE CUT

FAVORITE "ALT" HERMIT - May 4th HoTGuY and Poultry-Man. Helsknight and Evil Xisuma. Renbob and - look, you get the idea. This server is full of theater kids ready to toss on an alternate skin and play into a brand new character at the drop of a hat. Who's your favorite?

OUTFIT SWAP - May 9th What would Doc look like in Cleo's Life Series leotard? How would Cub fare in Wels's armor? What laundry day mishap could lead Mumbo's suit to lose its sleeves like Skizz's? Only hilarity can come from this...

GROUPS AND COLLABS - May 14th This month is all about one Hermit a day... but what we really love is when they interact with each other. What does your favorite duo or group of Hermits get up to together?

FAVORITE BUILD - May 18th The Hermits have put thousands of hours into their builds, from cozy starter bases to the sprawling halls of Deepfrost Citadel, from idyllic natural landscapes to machines the size of mountains. Which builds have inspired you?

TFC - May 23rd While he may no longer be with us physically, TFC left behind him a legacy of quiet care and good humor, and Hermitcraft would not have been the same without him.

FRIENDS OF HERMITCRAFT - May 28th There are plenty of shows, podcasts, competitions, other servers, and more woven into the internet ecosystem around Hermitcraft, and plenty more people involved in them. Today is for celebrating all of those who, while they may not be Hermits themselves, exist and entertain in proximity to them.

[kabr0ztrousers]

Hiya ! I love your posts, they are all amazing 🫠

I'm not sure if you're really into poly relationships, but i've got this on my mind for a while now.

Reader is dating two monsters, the monsters know each other since kids and get along very well, they are predators, they like to play with their mate as if she is a prey.

Someone tells her they'll eventually hurt her for real and now they're upset, to make her feel safe again, they decide to show off to the whole village how they take care of their mate (if you know what i mean 🫦).

Kabr0z Writes Episode 60: Beauty and the Beasts

Find the rest of the Kabr0z Writes anthology here!

CWs: Lashings of oral sex; public sex; exhibitionism; interspecies; knotting; enthusiastic consent; restraints;

A/N: This one sounds like fun, and it's not gonna kill me to write this one and the other I have planned to make up for missing Wednesday.

Plus I get to put out a little more exposition on why there are werewolves in a low-magic world. If there's one thing you've probably worked out about me, I love me some ✨Exposition✨

As always, requests go to the ask box or DMs so they're in the queue when I check it. I won't not do stuff asked for in comments or reblogs, but they won't be in the queue so they're very likely to fall through the cracks

##########################################

The year is 1670. Almost twenty years since everything changed. You were only a small girl then, when the sun darkened and the menfolk of your village changed. You remember them falling to the ground as bones cracked and rearranged, blood streaming from broken faces as snouts and muzzles replaced human mouths and noses, tails bursting from the smalls of their backs, and the fur spreading in patches to cover their skin. Then, the sky lightened again. Those who had changed picked themselves up, strong limbed and sharp toothed, but still themselves despite the monstrous form they had taken.

Other villages suffered the same, boys and men who saw the shadow over the sun turning into monsters. A royal decree came a week later. The changed men were to leave the towns, banished to the forests and woodlands where they would bother the women and the unchanged no longer. So it came to pass that the lupines were driven out. Most were never heard of again, but you still heard stories of children being born in villages with tails and fur, the get of the banished wolfmen.

You were approaching your twenty-fifth year. Despite them being banished you never lost touch with your close friends from youth, a pair of boys named Leo and Michael, if anything, you'd grown even closer to them over the years. You could well understand the tales of wolf-children being born.

Your rendezvous with them had not gone unnoticed either. The men of the village gave you a wide berth, not wanting to get too close to you for fear of your wolfen lovers. The women who would still speak with you warned you to no end that the lupines you cavorted with under the stars and the treetops would be the end of you. Of course, over the years, fewer and fewer women spoke to you. They were all getting married, their husbands forbidding them to consort with the strange woman of the village, warning their children away from you. Little by little, life in civilisation became quieter and quieter, lonelier and lonelier.

You head leant on Leo's belly, complaining about the villagers, gently stroking Michael's back as he topped off the cuddle pile. Michael's tail began to wag as you saw a mischievous grin spread over his features

"What are you thinking" you were starting to match his grin. Michael had the best plans

"Well, if you're miserable there, why not join us lupines? They see you as one of us, why not leave?"

You hummed, it's not like you hadn't thought about it "I don't want them using it as an excuse to come after you..."

Leo snorted "They wouldn't have waited if they weren't so scared of us, though I like the idea of giving them a show of things... They want to banish you? Let's give them a reason"

Michael's grin widened "I have an idea... Mind if Leo and I talk a few minutes alone? I wanna make this a surprise"

That's how you knew this was gonna be good. "Sure, I'll be by the river, need a piss anyway"

You took your time. You couldn't hear them over the flowing water, but you could see them discussing intently from your spot. Every time one of them spoke, the other would get more excited until they were both looking at you. You stood up, letting your skirts cover your ankles again as you walked back to them "Made a decision?"

"Yeah, just about... Oh, one quick thing"

Leo tapped Michael's hand and held up two fists "left or right?"

Michael chose left, the fist was empty, the other revealing a crumpled leaf

Leo smiled "I win"

Michael laughed "Right, now we're ready. Do you trust us?"

"Always" you nodded. You'd known these two since you were children, you helped them get used to walking again on their back-turned legs, you brushed their fur and spent every spare moment with them. You'd trust these two men with your life.

Good thing too. The moment the word left your mouth, Leo tackled you and both of them took off in a sprint. Towards the village.

A lupine can outpace a stallion if they have a mind to, and over a longer distance. Many of the changed men had left the country and were living as condottiere in Italy and France if the tales were true. You could feel why, the wind rushed through your hair as the two wolves charged down the path to the village centre, alarmed cries coming from behind you as the furry blurs sped past terrified peasants.

They stopped at the pillory, placing your head and hands in the wooden frame and shutting it, keeping the latch closed with a stick jammed where the shank of a padlock would fit. You knelt there a moment, head waist-high off the ground, knees on the paved stone below you, a crowd gathering and murmuring as the wolves howled around you, stomping and snarling at the villagers. You tried not to laugh. They're trying to make a scene.

The crowd must have grown to their liking.

"You there! Priest!" Leo pointed at the local clergyman "Come here!"

The crowd pushed the hapless man forward, clutching his bible ahead of him like a shield "W-what are you going to do with me?"

Michael laughed at him, trying to make it sound scary, but only making it harder to keep the grin from your face "You're going to marry us"

The priest stammered a protest, but a showing of sharp teeth from both wolves silenced him. He cleared his throat "We are gathered here today to witness the union of this woman with this" a snarl "These, sorry, these... men? Er, that is to say if any know of any reason why these... people should not be wed, please speak or forever hold your peace" The priest held his eyes shut. Silence fell for a moment, a voice yelled from the back of the crowd "Get on with it!"

"Ahem. Yes. Er" the monk stammered again "Do you take these wolves to be your lawfully wedded, er, husbands?"

You nodded your head "I do" you croaked out, mouth still dry from the run

"And do you-"

"We do" both of your wolf lovers said in unison

The priest drew a cross in the air in front of the three of you "in which case I pronounce you man and wife" The last words were said so quickly it took a moment to process. Then the wolves were upon you.

Michael stood in front of you as Leo stepped behind, tearing the skirt off your rear end, showing you off to the villagers behind you. His tongue went at you, licking your cunt vigorously, making your jaw drop at the ferocity of his touch as he held you open and ate you out. Michael craned his head to watch as he gripped his sheath, the cock inside starting to poke out. The pillory kept your mouth at crotch-height as he slapped his cock on your cheeks, teasing you with the feeling of it as he painted you with his scent. You tried to catch it again and again as the crowd jeered, every time it rubbed against your face, giving you another sniff of his shaft. Until, of course, it didn't.

The crowd cheered as his cock slipped into your mouth, and you started to suck it. Michael grabbed the pillory and started to fuck your face while Leo brought a hand to your clit, sending an orgasm rocking through you as the pad of his finger circled your sensitive nub.

Leo stood up behind you and leant over, his hard cock between your thighs "I'm gonna take your maidenhood, alright?"

You nodded, the cock in your mouth stopping you speaking, the roar of the crowd would drown out any muffled grunts of approval. Thankfully, Leo saw the slight move of your head as you looked into his eye.

The cock pulled out from between your thighs, then plunged into your pussy. Your eyes widened as he pushed in, gently at first but gaining speed with confidence. Your legs bent as your toes curled, the canine cocks ramming into both sides of you building up to another orgasm as the braying, yelling crowd surged your adrenaline.

You felt your pussy squeezing on Leo as Michael hilted himself in your mouth, spraying hot cum down your throat. There was just so much, you felt it dripping from your nose and leaking out of the seal of your lips.

Michael's grunts set Leo off. His knot started to swell in you as he howled, the first load of cum your womb had ever taken, filling you to the brim and over the top. You tried to lock your legs around him, but needn't have bothered, the knot stuck the two of you together.

The crowd started to disperse now, the show was over, all that was left was the gentle licking of your new husbands as their excitement wound down. You each knew the villagers wouldn't do anything about this, there wasn't a watch to speak of and by the time a magistrate blew through you'd be long gone.

It took almost an hour before Leo's knot deflated enough to pull out of you. You opened the pillory with a single push from your back, the flimsy stick giving way immediately. It was only there for show, after all. Together you walked back to the forest where you met with the rest of the lupines. After all, you're family now.

When you finally came with child, you weren't sure which of your men had actually fathered the pups, but you didn't care, they were sure to be great fathers. Plus, you'd even started seeing familiar faces from the village again, moving in with new, furrier husbands.

All's well that ends well, you suppose

####################################

Don't be alarmed that this episode is being published in the evening, rather than 1am, I'm not getting all responsible on you, rather just making sure I'll have steam in the tank for tonight when the next regularly-scheduled episode is going to be written!

One of these days, I'll write a couple ahead of time to build a backlog. Until then, this shit's happening live!

[ginnsbaker]

All Of Your Pieces (9 - The Sokovian Witch)

Chapter Summary: It's Halloween, and Wanda provides just enough distraction to make you forget the incident of crossing the Hex's barrier, but it inadvertently leads you back to the same spot as a Night Patroler, determined to keep your family safe. Meanwhile, Monica and Jimmy must face the consequences of their defiance. Pairing: Wanda Maximoff x Female Reader Chapter word count: 3.2k+ | Chapter Tags/Warnings: None

A/N: Happy New Year! One more chapter to go, and we'll see what really led Y/N to Westview :) and yeahhhh totally forgot to queue this for last night lol // More author's notes here.

Series Masterlist | Main Masterlist

“Isn't this beautiful?”

You're walking hand in hand with Wanda through a sunlit meadow. Wildflowers stretch out in every direction, and the sky's the bluest you've ever seen. Everything feels perfect. Wanda turns to you, her eyes reflecting the clear sky, and smiles.

You squeeze her hand a little tighter. “It is. But not as beautiful as you.”

She laughs lightly, the most melodic sound in your ear. Being with her like this, you can't imagine wanting anything more. She's not just the light of your life; she's the reason you exist. 

As you walk, you notice how the sunlight seems to glow a little brighter around her, as if she's the source of it. The thought crosses your mind that maybe she is—that without her, none of this would exist. It's a strange idea, but it feels true somehow.

But then the sky begins to darken. The colors start bleeding out, and a chill creeps into the air. Wanda’s hand in yours starts to crumble, grains of sand slipping through your fingers.

“W-Wanda?” You try to hold on, but she's disintegrating, pieces of her caught in a wind you can't feel.

“I'm sorry,” she whispers, eyes full of something like fear. You reach out to touch her cheek, but your hand passes through her like smoke. 

“Don't go,” you say, but she's already gone.

You're alone in a field that stretches forever, under a sky that's the color of nothing.

“Mom!”

The sound pulls you back. Your eyes snap open to see Billy and Tommy bouncing at the foot of your bed, both dressed in their Halloween costumes. One's a pint-sized wizard, the other's a little speedster.

“Finally! We thought you'd sleep all day,” Tommy says.

You rub your face, trying to shake off the dream. Heart pounding like you've run a marathon. 

“What time is it?”

“Time to get candy!” Billy grins, eyes bright.

“Right,” you say. “Halloween.”

As you make your way downstairs, the warm smell of pancakes and cinnamon greets you. Wanda is in the kitchen, humming softly as she waits for the toasts to be ready. She looks over her shoulder and gives you that radiant smile. 

The same exact one in your dream.

“Morning, sleepyhead.”

“Morning,” you mumble in reply, pouring yourself a cup of coffee. You watch her for a moment, taking in the way the morning light catches her hair. She's so effortlessly beautiful, and for a second, you forget about your dream.

“Kids are excited,” Wanda says, setting a plate of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on the table.

“Yeah,” you mumble distantly.

“Everything okay?”

“Just a weird dream,” you say, taking a sip of your coffee. It’s too bitter, but you don’t mind. You need something strong to wake you up more fully.

“Want to talk about it?”

You shake your head.

Wanda watches you for a moment longer, but you’re too dazed to notice. She’ll accept your silence in the meantime. “Breakfast is ready,” she says, moving on. 

As you all sit down, the conversation revolves around candy and costumes. You cut the sides off your sandwich, while the boys do most of the talking. Wanda laughs along with them, and you’re there but not there.

After breakfast, the twins don't waste any time heading out to compare notes with other kids in the neighborhood. You start clearing plates. Wanda comes up beside you.

“You're quiet today,” she says.

“Just tired,” you tell her, before wincing at your sorry excuse. Tired at eight in the morning? You could do better than that.

She touches your arm. “You sure that's all?”

The contact coerces you to consider it—consider telling her everything. How she disappeared in your dream. How it felt like losing the only thing that matters. How sometimes it feels like she's the center of everything, like without her, you'd just stop existing.

But you don't.

“Yeah,” you lie. “I'm good.”

She doesn't look entirely convinced but nods anyway. “Okay. Let me know if you want to talk.”

You watch the boys through the kitchen window. They're tearing around the yard, laughing like nothing else in the world matters. You want to keep it that way. Make this Halloween one they'll never forget.

“Do I really have to change into a costume?” you ask, glancing over at Wanda.

She giggles, pinching your cheek. “We talked about this, honey.”

“Now?”

“It’s a whole day's event, you know that.”

You groan, make a big show of it, drying your hands on the towel. “Fine, but only because it's for the kids.”

“I'll be right there with you! Make sure you wear everything—cape and all!” Wanda calls after you as you head upstairs.

Your footsteps fade up the stairs. The moment you're out of earshot, Wanda's smile falls. She grips the edge of the sink, her knuckles turning white.

Last night was too close. You almost broke through. Beyond the boundary, your body started to come apart, unraveling like a loose thread pulled too hard.

She can't let that happen again.

She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. Red energy crackles at her fingertips, as she tries to keep herself calm and in control. The nightmare she slipped into your mind should be enough. Enough to keep you from remembering. Enough to keep you here.

“Mom!” Billy's voice shakes her out of her thoughts. “Are you coming?”

“Be right there!” she calls, forcing brightness into her tone.

She takes a deep breath, wipes any trace of worry from her face. By the time you come back down, awkwardly adjusting the cape around your shoulders, she's composed again.

“You look amazing,” she says, her eyes warm but hiding so much.

“Yeah, yeah,” you mutter, fiddling with the costume. “Let's get this over with.”

For now, the day ahead seems promising. Everything has to stay perfect. 

She won't let it be any other way.

—

Agnes stares out her window, eyes following the charade playing out on the street. Kids in costumes wander by, the whole neighborhood stuck in a loop of synthetic joy. She drums her fingers on the windowsill, impatience eating at her.

Messing with things from the shadows was entertaining at first. A glitch here, a nudge there—watching Wanda, supposedly the most powerful witch she'd ever met, none the wiser. For someone twisting reality itself, Wanda's awfully oblivious and somewhat naive. 

Agnes snorts to herself. All those years buried in the Darkhold, chasing after scraps of forbidden knowledge, and she never touched this level of power—actual reality manipulation. Near-perfect autonomy. It's like Wanda's playing god without reading the instruction manual.

But the novelty is wearing thin.

She needs to find out how exactly Wanda is doing all of this and tap into the source of her power. Maybe even claim it for herself. The thought sends a thrill through her veins. But first, she has to get Wanda alone, away from the distractions of her playground.

And so, a plan starts to form.

It shouldn't be too hard. She knows how to play the nosy neighbor, the concerned friend. It's worked before.

Agnes steps back from the window, a sly grin creeping across her face. She grabs a plate of warm cookies—props help sell the part—and heads for the door.

“Time to drop in on dear Wanda,” she mutters.

Tonight, she’ll make her move.

—

Back at the base, the wind knives across Monica’s face as she walks toward the Command Center. Ever since the incident, things have been... quiet (especially without Darcy’s chatter every minute). Not calm—it’s never calm given the situation—but it’s like everyone’s holding their breath, waiting for the next explosion. Monica knows that if Hayward chose to back down, they'd all be scrambling for cover in no time.

Jimmy walks beside her, hands shoved deep into his coat pockets. “It’s like a ghost town in here,” he mutters under his breath.

Monica gives a curt nod. “Hayward's up to something. I can feel it.”

At the checkpoint, two guards block their way. Stern faces, their hands near holsters.

“Agent Rambeau, Agent Woo, Director Hayward wants a word,” one says.

Monica arches an eyebrow. “Funny, I was just looking for him.”

The agents don’t smile, don’t offer even the hint of small talk. Instead, they turn sharply, motioning for Monica and Jimmy to follow. Inside, Hayward stands at the center of the room, assessing the damaged drone Wanda threw at his feet. He turns as they enter, offering a tight-lipped smile.

“Monica, Agent Woo. Glad you could join us,” Hayward says.

Monica crosses her arms. “We need to talk.”

“Yes, we do,” he replies smoothly, nodding to the guards. They take a precise step back, but they remain close——close enough to remind Monica and Jimmy they aren’t free to move as they please. 

Hayward clasps his hands behind his back, his expression pulled tight with feigned regret. “Effective immediately, you’re being removed from this operation.”

Monica’s brows knit together. “Excuse me?”

��You're off this case,” he states flatly. “And you can take the FBI with you,” he adds, his eyes darting to Jimmy, dismissing him with a glance. “The FBI has no jurisdiction here. This is a S.W.O.R.D. matter.”

“With all due respect, Director Hayward, the safety of American citizens is our jurisdiction. And last I checked, this entire situation is happening on American soil.” Jimmy says. 

“Not when it involves phenomena like this one. This is above your clearance level.”

“Whatever you're planning,” Monica starts, “you can't outgun Wanda. Antagonizing her is only going to make things worse.”

Hayward shrugs, casual in the face of her warning. “We’ve assessed the risks.”

“Have you?” Monica challenges, stepping closer. The agents around her follow, startling Monica, though manages to keep her composure. “None of know what will happen if Wanda dies or loses control.”

But her words bounce off him like rain against steel. “You're becoming an impediment to this mission,” Hayward continues,“constantly advocating on behalf of super-powered individuals.”

“I’m advocating for a solution that doesn’t leave a body count in its wake!” She fires back. “If Wanda is our problem, she has to be our solution.”

Hayward lets out a short, humorless laugh, his eyes glinting with something almost cruel. “This isn’t about peaceful resolutions, Monica. This is about neutralizing a threat.”

“Your fear is clouding your judgment—”

Hayward’s eyes narrow dangerously. “Careful, Captain Rambeau. Your history with Carol Danvers is well-known. Your affinities—”

“Leave her out of this.”

Hayward tilts his head, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth, clearly savoring her reaction. “You’ve always had a soft spot for the enhanced. But the world doesn’t run on goodwill and second chances, Monica. Sometimes, things need to be burned down to be rebuilt.”

“Director, ignoring Monica’s insight is a mistake. She’s the only one who’s managed to make any connection with Wanda inside the Hex,” Jimmy explains in a placating manner. 

Monica shoots Jimmy a sharp glare, irritation flashing in her eyes. She hates the way he’s playing the good cop, even if she knows it’s probably the right move. What she wants is to tear Hayward apart, drag him in front of a tribunal, and make him answer for every reckless decision he’s made.

Hayward looks at Jimmy with a bored expression. “And look where that got us. An agent compromised. A situation spiraling out of control.”

“You’re not listening!” Monica yells, fists clenched tight at her sides. “We have a chance to fix this—without more people getting hurt.”

“Enough.” 

Hayward's voice drops, cold and final. He signals to the guards flanking the room. 

“Arrest them.”

Monica instinctively takes a step back. “What?”

“You heard me.” His stare doesn't waver. “You're both under arrest for insubordination and obstructing a tactical operation.”

Jimmy’s hand twitches at his side, inching toward his belt. The guards move forward, guns raised—not aimed, but ready. He scoffs in disbelief. “You can't be serious.”

“Oh, I'm dead serious.” Hayward's smile is a thin blade. “Hand over your devices.”

Monica’s eyes dart to Jimmy. They’re cornered, outnumbered, and every exit is covered. Resistance will only make things worse. Slowly, they remove their communication gear—phones, earpieces, anything that connects them to the outside world—and place them on the table.

“You're making a dangerous mistake,” she warns Hayward, but looking at all of them in the room.

“The only danger is letting you interfere any longer,” he replies, and then turns to his men. “Lock them up. They'll stay secured until the anomaly is resolved.”

The guards close in, securing their wrists with zip ties.

“This isn't over,” Monica asserts as they're led toward the door.

Hayward smirks as he finally reveals his true colors—so far removed from the man she’d known five years ago. For the first time, Monica realizes how completely she'd misjudged him. 

“For you, it is.”

—

Halloween—the one time of year that feels like pure magic, even if the other celebrations are a little hazy in your memory. The town square's a carnival of fake cobwebs and carved pumpkins, strings of orange lights draped between lampposts, jack-o'-lanterns grinning from every doorstep. 

You’re standing beside your wife, who’s dressed as a Sokovian witch—though you’re pretty sure real Sokovian witches didn’t dress like that. Not that you’re complaining. Honestly, you’re just glad the other guys in town seem distracted because you haven’t been able to stop staring since she slipped into that costume.

Billy and Tommy are off to the races, dashing back to doors they’ve already knocked on, hoping for extra candy. They compare their haul with other kids in costumes, trading them like astute business men.

Watching your family, the nightmare from last night becomes a little less real. 

“Hey there, neighbor!” Agnes materializes out of the crowd, wearing that smile of hers—one that, admittedly, is starting to creep you out. She's decked out in a witch costume, pointy hat and all. How original.

“Agnes,” you say, forcing a polite smile.

“Wanda, darling! Love the costume,” she gushes, then turns her attention to you. “We're a bit short-handed for the Halloween patrol tonight. Too many tricksters, not enough treaters, you know?” She throws you one of her signature, overly exaggerated winks. “Think you could lend a hand?”

Wanda's smile falters. “Oh, I don't think—”

“Sure,” you cut in. “Happy to help.”

Wanda looks at you, partly annoyed that you’re about to ditch her out of nowhere. “Are you sure? We were going to take the boys to the haunted hayride.”

You shrug, ignoring the nagging sense that this might lead to an argument later. “It won’t take long. Besides, better safe than sorry, right?”

Agnes beams, evidently pleased. “Fantastic! Meet us by the gazebo in ten minutes.” With that, she vanishes into the crowd as quickly as she appeared.

Once Agnes is gone, Wanda turns to you, her hands on her hips. “What's that about?”

“I just feel like... it'd be good to keep an eye on things. Make sure everyone stays safe.”

It’s a weak excuse, and you know it. Wanda knows it too. But you’re too desperate for a moment alone to clear your head.

Wanda watches you closely—suspiciously. “Is everything okay?”

“Just thought I could help out. It's a big night. Lots of kids running around.”

She reaches for your hand. “You know you can tell me if something's bothering you.”

“I'm fine,” you say, mustering a smile that wobbles at the edges but manages to settle just in time. “Really.”

“Alright,” Wanda sighs. “Just be careful.”

“Always,” you say, turning away before the doubt in her eyes anchors you.

At the gazebo, a motley crew assembles—neighbors you recognize but don't really know. Agnes flits around, assigning everyone in pairs despite some groans and protests.

Agatha eventually reaches for your arm and starts dragging you to someone. “You're with... her!” she declares, practically pushing you towards a woman adjusting a pair of oversized glasses. Agnes leans in and whispers, “I don’t think I’ve seen her around before, but I think you can handle a complete stranger, am I right?”

You're puzzled why Agnes thinks you're the best choice to pair with a newcomer, but you can't complain. It's the perfect cover to snoop around without Wanda wondering where you are.

“Hey, I’m Jane,” your newly-assigned partner says, offering a gloved hand. “Looks like we're stuck with each other for tonight.”

“I’m Y/N,” You shake her hand, a sense of déjà vu washing over you. “Have we met before?”

“I don't think so. I'm new in town.”

“Oh? Well, welcome to Westview.”

“Thanks! Happy to be here,” she says brightly. “So, where should we start our patrol?”

You glance around, considering. “Maybe we should stick to Main Street? That's where most of the activity is.”

She leans in conspiratorially. “How about we head to the southern boundary instead?”

You raise an eyebrow. “The southern boundary? That's pretty far from all the festivities.”

She shrugs with a grin. “Exactly! The perfect spot for mischief-makers to hide. We wouldn't want any trouble brewing unnoticed, right?”

Her suggestion is oddly specific, but you can't fault the logic. “Alright, southern boundary it is.”

—

“Been in town long?”

Jane sits beside you in the passenger seat, fiddling with the radio that's only picking up static and oldies. She hums along to a tune you've never heard. Despite your repeated reminders, she hasn't buckled up. Instead, she's sitting casually with one foot on the seat, as if you two have been driving together like this forever.

She turns to you with a half-smile. “Just moved in yesterday.”

“From where?”

She freezes, hand hovering over the radio dial. The silence stretches uncomfortably. It's like watching a video buffer, stuck in that endless loading circle.

“From... another town,” she finally says, the words feeling rehearsed.

You glance at her. “Which town?”

She blinks rapidly, as if rebooting. “Just a small place nearby,” she says, a little too quickly.

The conversation stalls. As you drive, the houses grow sparser, streetlights fewer and farther between. You feel like you've been here before—in a distant dream. You're starting to question whether joining this patrol was the right choice instead of enjoying the night with Wanda and the kids. Actually, it's not doubt but a strange dread you're feeling now, like this is the last place you should be or there will be dire consequences.

“You sure we haven't met before?”

She gives you a non-committal look. “Pretty sure. Why do you ask?”

“It just feels like I’ve seen you before,” you say, “and like I’ve driven down this road, but I can’t remember when…”

She chuckles softly. “Maybe I just have one of those faces.”

“Maybe.”

Suddenly, a figure darts across the road.

“Watch out!” Jane yells.

You slam on the brakes. The tires screech. Jane lurches forward, her head smacking against the dashboard.

“Shit! Are you okay?” You reach over, but she pulls back, touching her forehead where a thin line of blood appears.

She sits back, eyes unfocused. “Oh my God,” she whispers. “Oh my God.”

“Let me see,” you say, but she seems more rattled by the second.

She turns to you abruptly, eyes wide with recognition. “It's you!”

“M-Me?” You're baffled.

“You’re Y/N!” She screams.

You back off a little. She's starting to act crazy, and you're preparing to bail if she turns out to be dangerous or violent. “Uh, yes. I told you my name earlier,” you say.

She shakes her head slowly. “No, I mean... you're Y/N!”

“That's what I said.” You frown. “Are you sure you're okay?”

She takes a shaky breath. “Sorry, yes. I'm not Jane. My name is Darcy Lewis, and boy, do I have something to tell you.”

[taesanrot]

[songs for women] anton x reader | 0.6k words drabble, musician!anton, best friends to ???, childhood friends au, implied college au, mutual pining note. a short lil thing i found from a few months ago in my drafts <3 wrote it for the beginning of fall. may turn this into a full length fic but i wanted to put this out for now bc i really like it.

now playing: songs for women by frank ocean

"don't even listen to the songs i record, but she be bangin' that drake in my car ... all damn day long, it's like she never heard of me, heard of me."

turning his key in the ignition, anton hears his car engine thrum as it comes alive. the fall air is warm and balmy and you’re sitting in the passenger seat, head propped on your hand as you gaze out the window.

“wanna roll it down?” anton’s soft voice coaxes you back to reality and you turn to look at him with a grin on your face, nodding excitedly. he smiles softly as he watches you turn the handle and let the fresh air into anton’s old four door sedan.

plugging the aux cord into the his phone, anton bumps your shoulder, handing you the glowing screen.

you gingerly take the phone out of his hands, fingers typing away in the search bar of his spotify app to queue a song.

turning towards the road, anton finally eases his foot onto the pedal, and the car’s wheels squeal slightly as he turns out of his driveway into the neighborhood’s winding roads.

the citrus colored leaves bring a fond smile to his face, and the breeze from your open window tickles his face and ruffles his hair.

old memories play through anton’s mind, flashes of long bike rides and pool days with you. you’re weaved into all of the moments he holds close to his heart, and he thinks it’ll always feel this way.

anton doesn’t think the jumps and twists in his stomach when he’s around you will ever fade. not when you smile so brightly at him, or laugh so prettily at his dumb jokes.

the two of you aren’t kids anymore, you’ve outgrown your bicycle helmets and kiddie pools. anton is an upcoming singer and you’re about to graduate college. but somehow whenever you end up in your hometown again, it’s like you’re teenagers again. you spend hours in the old coffee shop that was your favorite studying spot for finals, and you go to the same drive in ice cream parlor.

the song that you handpicked floods anton’s ears as his hand glides across the steering wheel. with a sigh and roll of his eyes, he looks over at you.

“park wonbin again? seriously?” you laugh at his dismay, fingers turning the dial to increase the volume. anton groans in response, his adam’s apple moving under the skin of his neck. your eyes catch it for a second, brain forming an unusually erotic thought at the sight. you’re brought back to earth by the sound of anton’s voice again.

“i’m starting to think you don’t listen to anything else.” tucking some hair behind your eyes, you grin at your best friend.

“what else do i need besides wonbin?”

“you know, other people would kill to be driven around by me, and you refuse to even listen to my songs.” it’s your turn to roll your eyes, but you do so with another cheerful laugh.

“someone’s gotta keep you humble.” you chide, shoving anton’s shoulder playfully.

as anton trains his focus back to the road, he looks over at you one more time, just for him. you’re laying your cheek against the car door and watching the trees pass. the wind sweeps your hair into something of a halo, and the setting sun makes you look like an angel glowing in the sky.

a familiar thought plagues the boy’s mind again. anton wonders if you’ll ever sit down and listen to some of his songs, like really listen to them. maybe one day you’ll see past the playful melodies and soft guitar and hear his songs for what they really are:

love letters to you.

[raven-unkind]

HII RAVEN!! hope you're having a great day <3 could you perhaps do “the moon is beautiful, isn’t it?” prompt with jungwon? thank you!!

˚₊‧⁺⋆❤︎ stars ft. yang jungwon

yang jungwon x fem!reader

wc. 844 words

content. A lil bittersweet, Jungwon is a sweetheart & kinda selfless; he just wants reader to be happy. 

200 followers event: “The moon is beautiful isn't it?” 

a/n. THIS TOOK SO LONG IM SO SORRY GUYS. I wrote this listening to pryvt so i'd recommend listening to them while you read Im somewhat back :] idk what happened to me but i was brushing my teeth this morning and inspiration struck me so i wrote this ☺️ (i guess having smt in my mouth gets my thoughts going?) I’ll get my queue going and get started on the nsfw part 😼

Jungwon has been friends with you for a long time. Maybe even too long. Long enough that he knows exactly what you’ll order – no matter if the place you guys were at the restaurant you’d been going to since middle school or if it was a brand new cafe that opened a week ago. – He also knows that you have a habit of being on time but somehow also running late to everything or that you can somehow smell the rain – something he has yet to experience. 

Somewhere along the way of years of friendship, he realized he wouldn't mind being the one to wake up next to you in the morning. He’d alway had these feelings, it was so natural to him that it took him almost 4 years to realize he was in love with you. It started in freshman year, when his friend Heeseung asked you for prom. Jungwon swore he’d never felt so betrayed in his life. He’d buried his disappointment under the guise of friendship, and every incident that stirred similar feelings within him would get the same badge. It took your first – and current – boyfriend to make him realize his feelings.

…

“We broke up.” The text had illuminated his phone half an hour ago. He didn't know exactly what he was expecting to feel when he saw that text but happiness, and sheer relief was not part of the list. Upon realizing his feelings for you, Jungwon had done the only logical thing to him: distance himself from you. No matter how sincere his feelings were, he would've never forgiven himself if he'd put your relationship and happiness in jeopardy because of his own, probably unrequited, feelings. So in some way, the breakup meant he was able to be close with you again. 

"I'll come over." He sent the message a few seconds after reading yours, grabbed his key and left his apartment in a hurry. On his way to your place, he stopped by the small Japanese restaurant owned by Riki's parents. He grabbed your usual order after finals; curry, mitarashi dango and a cup of scorching hot black tea. 

It’s already 9h26 by the time he reaches your apartment building. He engulfs you in his arms the second you open the door. It’s the first time in months he’s able to hold you like this without feeling like an egotistical jerk. And it feels nice, he can't even deny it anymore. 

“How are you holding up?” he asks softly. “I’m alright… I- I think it hasn't really hit me yet… you know.. That it’s over.” he nods, humming in response and sets a familiar plastic bag on the counter of your kitchen. You smile. “You got food at Riki’s?” Your tone is soft like you’re almost surprised he’d do that for you. Jungwon offers you a lopsided grin, setting a large cup next to the bag. “Black tea, extra hot, extra strong with 1 cube of sugar.” You huffed a laugh, “Thank you Jungwon.” “You’re welcome. I wanna go eat on the roof?” You nod, and he grabs the bag on food and a blanket before the both of you head to your building’s roof. 

…

“I thought he cared, you know? I told him multiple times but he never listened.” You say, playing around with the last dango, covering it in syrup. “I feel stupid.. Like I wasted my time.” “You’re not stupid.” Jungwon replies quietly. You shrug, opting to look at the night sky. Talking to Jungwon felt good. It always had. “Thanks for being here by the way.” You hear him huff next to you “Always.” He feels like his heart is going to explode. It’s been so long since you two sat down and talked like this. Too long. He’s been fidgeting for the past 30 minutes with the loose string of the old blanket you’re both sitting on. 

“... I missed this. I missed you y/n.” You finally turn to him, a soft smile on your lips. “I missed you too Wonnie.” He swears his heart stops for a second at the sight of you under the moonlight, saying his name so sweetly. He snaps his head towards the sky, unable to look at you for too long. “The moon is beautiful isn't it?” He can see you turn to look at him from the corner of his eye. “Yeah…”  

The silence stretches; comfortable, familiar. You lean your head on his shoulder, and his heart stutters. Jungwon stays quiet for a bit, for a moment he almost gives in. He wants to tell you. He wants you to know that he’s been in love with you for a while. That your ex is an idiot. That he’d never make you cry.  But he doesn’t. Because you trust him and he could never do this to you. If that’s all he ever gets, he’ll take it. Even if it meant he would never be the center of your world, he wouldn't mind it too much. As long as he’s with you.

©RAVEN-UNKIND

reblog, comments and likes are appreciated!

taglist: @annybah @dazzlingjaeyun

[gloomwitchwrites]

Video Game

John "Soap" MacTavish x Female Reader

Content & Warnings: oral sex (male receiving), swearing, brief spanking, hand job, cum swallowing

Word Count: 1.4k

You test Johnny’s concentration while on a game with the boys.

ao3 // taglist // main masterlist // summer 2024 masterlist

The ceiling fan turns slowly.

You lay on your back, staring up at it, wishing that it had a faster speed. There is a slight stickiness to your skin from the humidity. It’s too early for a shower. You’ll only become gross again, and there’s no point in wasting water.

Sighing, you roll out of bed and head toward the kitchen, seeking a cold drink.

“They’re over there. Yeah. Up top.”

Johnny’s on a game. It’s amusing to you how he comes home from work only to play video games of the same vein. It’s his whole life even when at rest.

Pouring a lemonade for yourself, you causally stroll into the living room. Placing your drink on the side table, you settle into the couch next to him, tucking your feet under you. Johnny briefly glances at you, giving you his best smile before returning his attention to the game.

You watch for a bit. Listen. He usually plays with Kyle and Simon, two men you’ve only met briefly but know Johnny works with on a regular basis.

You place your hand on Johnny’s large, muscled thigh. The corner of his mouth quirks when you touch him but he doesn’t glance at you. His eyes are on the screen and his fingers are a whirlwind across the controller.

Squeezing his thigh, you settle closer to him.

“I’m not taking an L, Lt,” he says into the mic, his focus intense.

Your gaze falls to the timer on the screen. There are seconds left, and it’s clear they’re losing.

The timer goes off. Flashes. And then red lettering appears across the screen, showing Johnny’s loss. A bunch of stats appear that mean nothing to you, and then a little montage follows it.

“Bloody fucking hell,” he mutters at no one in particular.

You pat his thigh and he reaches out to squeeze your hand.

“We can’t go out on a loss,” he says. “Another round.”

Johnny glances in your direction and you smile at him, nodding. Another game isn’t a big deal. He could play several more and you really wouldn’t care. On summer evenings like this, sitting next to Johnny on the sofa is nice.

Johnny queues up another game and you decide right then that you’d like to see if he can really go out on a win.

“This is it. Last one,” says Johnny as the screen changes, his avatar operator dropping from the sky and onto a building.

You rub your hand over his thigh again, moving closer to his groin with every pass. Johnny doesn’t seem to notice, or if he does, he’s not showing it. Gently, you slide down to his inner thigh, squeezing him just beside the prize you’ll eventually seek.

This snags his attention.

Johnny shoots you a quick, cheeky grin before returning his focus to the screen. It’s not enough for him to lose concentration, and from what you can tell, his team is winning. It’s too bad you might shake the potential win out from under him.

Slowly, you lean forward, shifting slightly to slide to your knees next to him. Johnny’s gaze darts from you to the screen and then back again like he’s trying to figure you out without completely tearing his attention away.

He’s shirtless right now, still a little glossy with sweat from his workout. Johnny has that delicious, masculine scent that clings to him. The one that always makes you feral when he walks through the door after hard labor. His gray sweatpants hang low on his hips, and the outline of his cock is apparent.

You adjust on your knees, settling yourself between his spread legs, hands on his thighs. With back bent slightly, you go under the controller. Johnny’s gaze drops to you and then back to the screen. Keeping the controller in one hand, Johnny gently cups the side of your face before returning it to the controller.

“What are you doing?” he whispers. His gaze narrows. Glancing up, he swears. “Fuck. Bastard’s on my tail.”

Your fingers curl around the band of his sweatpants. They’re already so low. All it needs is a small tug and then you can take Johnny in hand.

Johnny reaches out again, this time grasping the side of your neck. A warning, and one you completely ignore.

His hand disappears and you slide the band down just enough to wrap your hand around him. Johnny stifles a groan and continues on like you’re doing nothing at all. With his headset on, you cannot hear what’s happening on the television. You cannot see anything either, which means you don’t know how long you have.

Can you get him off before the game is done? Or are you wasting time?

Better to be aggressive. Make this a competition. Test Johnny’s resolve.

You squeeze gently and slide up, the pad of your thumb stroking over the underside of the head. Johnny squirms but says nothing to you. He doesn’t even glance down. You won’t go all in just yet. It’s good to tease first. Make him writhe a bit.

With another stroke of your hand, you lightly run your tongue across the head, the tip parting the small slit. Johnny’s hips twitch and his jaw clenches, but he remains focused. It’s not enough, which means you need to do more.

Running your tongue over the head again, you use your hold on Johnny’s cock to slide his cock across your tongue, in and out of your mouth without closing around him. His nostrils flare as he aggressively smashes the buttons on the controller.

This time you close your lips around him, sucking hard on the head.

Johnny groans loudly and then coughs. “I’m good,” he breathes, talking to someone in his headset. “Close call.”

You smile inwardly, and hold this position, allowing your saliva to collect while also stroking him with your hand. Johnny’s gaze darts downward and pauses. His fingers freeze on the controller.

You stare into his eyes and then throat him entirely, stopping when your lips meet your hand. Johnny’s eyelids flutter, and his lips part. Repeating the motion has him falling back against the sofa. His bare chest heaves as his fingers begin moving across the controller again. There is a slowness though. A sluggishness.

In his eyes you see the haze forming. Johnny’s concentration is slipping even as he desperately clings to control. This is your chance to seize this win from him.

Shifting your hand away from the base of his cock, you slide beneath the band of his sweatpants to cup his balls. Squeezing gently, you take him entirely into your mouth, lips almost meeting his pelvis.

You set a pace, making sure to breath through your nose. Johnny is all grunts. He’s hardly speaking into the mic anymore.

This tastes of victory.

Other than Johnny’s grunts, you can hear the click of the buttons on the controller. He’s still trying to focus, even as you feel him swelling in your palm. He’s fucking close, and you’re going to take all of it.

Hollowing your cheeks, you slide up, swirling your tongue around the head.

“Fuck,” groans Johnny, elongating the vowel.

There is a pause—an absence of clicking buttons—and you go for another pass.

Johnny chokes, grabs the back of your head, and draws you flush against him. His cheeks are flushed, mouth open slightly, gaze focused on your face. In his other hand is the controller. He’s hardly holding on to it, one side aimed directly toward the ground.

His flavor explodes on your tongue, and you drink him down. Johnny’s hold on the back of your head eases, and you slowly slide off him, revealing your empty mouth to him. The corner of his mouth twitches, and the smirk on his face startles you.

It’s self-satisfied, as if he meant for all this to happen.

Johnny laughs, gaze returning to the television screen. “Great win. Same time tomorrow?” Johnny chuckles. “Fuck off. Both of you.”

He tears off his headset and tosses it to the side. You turn around and notice the bright green lettering above the stats.

They won.

Johnny grabs your chin and guides your gaze back to him. “That was naughty.” His thumb brushes over your bottom lip and your tongue darts out for a taste.

“Fucking hell, love,” mutters Johnny. “Come here.” He draws you into his lap, claiming your mouth in a fierce kiss.

Johnny’s hands fall to your ass, he squeezes, and then comes down with a sharp slap to your ass. You yelp, but it’s smothered by Johnny’s mouth on yours.

“Bedroom,” he growls. “Now.”

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[klunkcat]

blackholes and other parables

read on ao3

Fandom: in stars and time

Relationships: loop & siffrin, everyone & siffrin, isabeau & siffrin (can be read as romantic also)

TW's: self-harm, canon typical violence, depersonalization and dissociation, blood and injury, this ones rated M for a lot of heavier suicidal topics as per yanno, canon., It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better,

Spoilers for two hats ending!

Summary: It starts with the stage, as it always does. A boulder, and a slapstick comedian missing his queue.

It gets much worse from there.

Word Count: 18k

___

Another day, that’s all this is. Another day, you remind yourself with hands gripping at countertops and dagger hilts: just one more. If it’s the same one, wrapped up in a myriad of lines and lists, it’s still here and yours. Just yours, no one else needs to know. And there will be another one after, even if it looks just like this, so you can try again.

You’re fine. You are, it’s just that your leg is just a leg attached to the mess of strings that make up your heart and its use in what it can do, never in what it already is. You know this, it’s why you grab the glass every time, why the prick on your finger vanishes like it was never there to begin with. You’re just the blank canvas, just the actor under the spotlight. You’re playing your part and you’re fine with it, you’re fine. 

You’re also careless. 

One would think, after fifty or so odd trips, of walking through the same exact room to follow the same exact steps, that you’d learn. But you’re useless, bad at your job, and there’s another day for you to try and not fuck up, so of course you don’t. 

That’s why you’re still. Here. 

You walk a little too far into the room because you’re thinking about finding books and reading more and what the King said last time, and— 

Loud noises, crashing. All the air compressed out of your lungs at once, then blissfully, nothing at all.

It’s dark. You think you must be dreaming again; eating a tear straight down to the center of yourself and floating off into the vague inbetweens the way you’re used to by now. 

The vague thoughts like slow syrup swim past you— a door in front of you; a lock; a key. Masks that are laughing and crying and you don’t know which one fits best, but you know you’re meant to have them. There is a hallway behind the door that stretches back and back and back and you know where it goes, where all the doors lead, but you can’t take a single step. You’re alone here, it’s dark, danger is coming but danger’s already here, inside you, twisting and warping away at everything you ever had. 

You had something, you lost it, you found something new, and it’s being taken away. It’s you, and it’s you, and that never means anything good at all. 

Then: you wake up.

You look up again to Isa’s face looming over yours. Did you have a nap? Did the loop change? It’s usually Mira, it’s always Mira, or you alone in the field, but there’s no sky over the bulk of his shoulders, it’s all just gray dark and dark and— 

You’re not sure what happened, actually. The trap was sprung, you didn’t find the switch, and the rock fell. You’re not in the field. The loops kick in when you die most often, and you always die when the rock falls. But you’re here still, and it hurts, still. 

Something twisted in you lights up with glee. It’s different, something different, you say to yourself, and you have to concentrate to not let the giggles bubble straight out into the open exposed air. Only, there’s no sun above you, just old dark stone, echoing breathing in circles following you everywhere you go. Oh, you’re in the House. You didn’t think about where to loop, maybe you need to— 

Sitting up makes the strings in your chest catch lightning, a wall of pain and a hot sticky fire so distant and all encompassing that it makes you nauseous. You can’t even really feel it, just this wet feeling of hurt poking through a wall at you. A knowing of what should be, maybe. 

You wished to take hits harder, this loop, didn’t you. Not faster, like usual. Huh. Noise, there’s so much noise around you your thoughts scramble straight up into nothing and land back down uselessly. You think it might be words.

“--frin! Just, lay down, okay? Hold still, ‘Dile and Belle went to find more stuff, but you’re not s’pposed to move!”

“Shh, hey– hey buddy, can you hear me? Can you do the breathing thing with me? I know— I know it hurts, I know, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, j–just breathe, okay? With me?”

You know this, it’s your thing. You breathe in, and out. The pain drifts somewhere farther away, enough that your words can rush back into your head behind the static. You force your eye open— that’s, oh Bonnie’s here too. They’re safe, they look worried but whole. 

You close your eye again, breathing as slow as you can manage. Your leg, you think. Not so fast now, are we.

“No going to sleep, Frin! Belle said so!” 

You’re not, you try to say. It comes out like wet paper, unfurling on the cold ground. Can’t sleep anymore, anyways. 

“... Yeah, you do look tired, I know, but we need you to stay awake just. Just until they get back, alright?”

You make a concerted effort to blink. Anything for Isa, really. 

“That’s good,” Isa smiles, it’s wobbly. “Good, yeah, eyes on me, okay? Stay with us here.” You frown, and lick your lips.

Your whole self feels funny, floating right off the page in front of you without you having any say in it at all; you don’t even really hurt, just a thought that you shouldn’t look at whatever’s become of your leg. No burnt sugar, though. You’re somewhere, you’re still here. You don’t know what loop this is. You’d been– The picnic  happened, it always happens now and you’d gone through the door— you don’t know this part. 

It’s rare to have new scripts. So rare, you’re almost greedy for it. You hope Bonnie isn’t looking at your leg either.

Isa looks devastated, that’s not allowed. You can do this. “...eye’ve… got nowhere. Left to. Be.” You huff. Isa blinks. 

You wait for the loud laughter. Isa is your most reliable scene partner, he laughs every time. 

“Sif, did you just—” Isa starts, eyes wide. And promptly bursts into tears. Oh, oh stars. You can’t. Move, to help. 

Bonnie leans closer, eyes watery and face red. “Not funny! You can’t— you’re so stupid! You scared us!” 

“S’rry.”

“No, no it’s— don’t apologize,” Isa wobbles. Something warm falling on your forehead distracts you for a moment. “ — just want you to stay here, right? You can make jokes, I love it when you make jokes.” 

Where are… “Mira?” You manage. Isa presses a thumb across your brow, smoothing gently as he sniffles. It feels nice, you don’t feel yourself enough to know if you flinch. 

“They— they just went to find a tonic. They’ll be back. They’re both fine, Sif, I promise.” Isa says, a nervous little nod to go with it. Isa doesn’t lie, so you have to believe him.

“Craft?” You ask. Words are always hard. This is more like a bag of marbles you’re struggling to sort through.

Bonnie’s fists clench on their lap, right there by your limp hand. There’s a lot of dark all over, you notice— on your clothes, on the floor. Smudges of it on Bonnie’s hands and right there on their cheek that they don’t seem to notice. “The death hallway! The big rock fell and— you were under it, only a little. I knew you were fast but it was like I blinked! You just moved, it was—”

Ah, you think. Stupid. Scared them  with how fast you side stepped. Not enough to get out of the way completely, but, you’d have to reset anyways if you had. Wouldn’t be like clumsy Siffrin to dodge an impossibly sudden trap like that, they’d be scared worse.

Your leg groans at you through the static of everything. What did it matter if you were faster than them anyways, you’d always been the fastest. Not fast enough to not get stuck under it, and look where that got you? Wasting time, Mira and Odile wandering off alone. Stars, but that’s a terrifying thought. You should loop back. You should loop back right now so you don’t have to be such a burden every single time, such a massive fuck up who can’t even remember the first way that you fucked up and you need to loop back, loop back– 

The tug doesn’t come. You, and the parts that stick to you stay planted on the cold dark floor. An amalgamation of shapes and noises pass through you. Figures.

“You got hurt pretty bad, buddy,” Isa says, thumb still petting at your face. You maybe lean into it, the vague press of warmth, you’re not sure of anything. “Mira healed you but—” He winces.

It makes sense, you’re still at the beginning; Mira’s healing isn’t strong enough, she doesn’t have those more useful skills. It makes her more tired like this, to heal, and she’d probably tried too much at once knowing how worried she gets. It’s sweet, you love her for it. You’re not sure if she knows that. It would probably be too much if she did anyways, you always love too much. 

“It’s okay though,” Bonnie chimes in. “Right? It’s okay, because. Dile is going to find a big tonic, and Belle will use her healing again when she rests up, and— and you’ll be okay.”

Isa keeps petting your head. He’s never touched you before, not in any of the loops. You can’t help the way you freeze when you realize. 

“Hey,” Isa coos, soft as anything. Big dark eyes peering down at you with so much worry it  makes you sick. “I— I know it hurts, I’m sorry. Just stay here with us, okay? You can hold my hand, squeeze as hard as you want. I’m strong enough to take it, okay? Breathe through it with me, Sif, I’m not going anywhere on you.”

You remember thinking Isa was the strongest person you’d ever met, once. How he made you want to be more of a person, just so he’d laugh. Now, it’s like you’re an oil spill on this open lake and you’re stretching out everywhere and everywhere but he can’t touch you. They never touch you, except for when you do everything right on purpose to make them all love you. When you’re dying, too. 

Well, that’s a thought. 

He puts his hand in yours, though, and you squeeze it. Pretend that the pain in your leg even registers beyond the ache in your stomach and the split of your head. 

“Maybe, um. Frin, would you wanna hear a joke?” 

“That’s— yeah, sure thing, Bonbon. They’d love one, right Sif?” 

Bonbon, the sweetest kid you’ve ever met in all the ways they’ve also been endlessly prickly, all the ways that you fucked up and made them hate you also. You’d said once that they’d been distant from you— had that still happened this loop? You manage a nod anyway. Anything for your kid. 

Bonnie looks nervous, there’s tears in their eyes as they lean closer, hands balled on their knees. You should smile, you try to smile. It feels far away. 

They bite their lip, glancing over at Isa and back. “Okay. Um. I could make a skeleton joke, but. I don’t think you’d find it very humber-oos.” 

You blink.

“That’s humorous, Bon,” Isa says. “I don’t uh–”

“Humorous,” Bonnie repeats, stone faced. “What. Wait. Was that a bad joke? Because his leg is—”

A laugh rips through you— it hurts it hurts it feels like nothing at all, but you’re smiling, you think you’re smiling. “S’okay, Isa. I can take it,” you manage through wheezing. “In stride.”

A pause. “You–” Isa stares at you. You wait. “That’s—” A wobbly smile cracks across his face, and a surprised burst of snickers. Success.

“No,” Bonnie pouts. “Hey. I made a joke, and you didn’t laugh, Za!” 

“Sorry, Bonbon, I’ll laugh next time, I promise.” 

This is so all outside of script, the words keep sticking to your skin and your lips. Or maybe you’re just transparent and fading, somewhere in between the lines out there, watching. You can see yourself almost; head cradled in Isa’s lap, his warm hand on your brow. Bonnie nervously leaning forward, careful not to look. 

They love you, now, like this, don’t they. They’re holding you, now and they never did before.

It didn’t work before, but maybe you hadn’t loved them back enough. Maybe Mira will make it back and heal you up, and somehow your blood on the stone will be a sacrifice big enough to let you out.

As soon as you let the thought coagulate in your mouth, there’s burnt sugar on your tongue. Hah. It always happens when you think love will matter, doesn’t it? Stupid of you.

Your eye flutters closed. 

“Hey, no Siffrin, you can’t— buddy, please, no, no. Sif keep your eyes open, hey? For me? Sif? Siffrin!”

Too late. End scene. 

There’s something wrong with you. Well, obviously there is. You run through a script on purpose every day of your friends bearing their deepest secrets and fears to you just so that they’ll care about you the way you care about them. You don’t think nice people do that. Probably only the rotting ones, the ones who’s rot is so big it can stretch all the way up into the world and fester like an open wound. 

Beyond that, though; there might be something else. 

Waking up in the field this go around, you feel… you think it might be called giddy, the name for the popping stars in your fingertips. You’d gotten half crushed by a boulder and bled out on the floor in your friend's arms while they begged you to stay, and you’re what. Happy about it? 

That’s probably not normal, realistically.

Loop looks uneasily at you under the dappled light of the tree. “So.” 

“So,” You echo. 

Their eyes shift away and back. 

You’re still giddy, you have to fight to look as tired as you normally do. You know Loop can see it vibrating in your core as easy as anything, as easy as they always see everything about you. The twitching yearning need, coiled and barbed right there under your fingernails. 

“Pretty silly of you to forget the switch again,” Loop lands on. It’s maybe supposed to be snarky, but falls just outside of it. 

You shrug. “I’ll do better next time.” 

“Sure you will.” 

The barest wind shuffles at the leaves and they rustle around you for a moment.

Loop sighs. “It would be good, I think, if you didn’t make me watch that again.” 

Then don’t watch, you think, viciously, and tuck it away again. 

“I did try to move out of the way, you know,” you sulk back. 

“Not fast enough!” They sing-song back at you.

They’re prodding at you, the way they always are for reasons you never understand, but you’re immune for this go around. The fizzing in your hands makes you want to end this as soon as possible. Whatever way will get them to ask less questions. “I’ll just remember the blinding switch next time. Or not move, whatever.” 

Loop frowns slightly. “Contrary to what you may think, I don’t actually enjoy seeing you in pain.” 

You’re not sure you even were in pain though, or that it existed beyond your thoughts. You’re not sure at all why Loop cares.

“Oh, Stardust! I can’t stay mad at you. Look at you, naive and stupid, bumbling around. Missing switches you already know about. It’s so endearing, really!” Their laugh twinkles through them, sharp and high pitched. You sink into your coat. 

“I just forgot.” 

“My little darling clown. We should get you a collar, face paint. Slapstick really seems to be your specialty.” 

Annoyed, you’re annoyed. Your brain unhelpfully spins off to play books you’ve read, laughing masks and all. Bumbling foot archetype, yeah, fine, you fit the bill. It seems like someone must enjoy a good comedy, anyways. 

“It’s not on purpose,” you grouse, for the sake of having said it. 

Loop giggles. “And doesn’t that just make it all the sweeter. Stardust, I do think it would be in your best interest to loop forward next time! Just forget the whole business with the hallway, no?”

“Yeah,” you agree, because it’s easier than arguing. Why do you even want to argue, anyways? Because it was new, you think. You’re desperate for something new. Maybe you want to run it all from the first act curtain opening to the closing, just to know if something else would be new, too. 

This part wouldn’t be new again, though, would it. You’d know the lines already, so: no boulder, that’s fine. More room for improvising. 

Is it good that you’re thinking of ways to break your bones again? Just to see what else might be new? You think it must not be at all, because you want it, and most things you want are already gone and you forgot them anyways. You pause, sitting on your usual branch with the bark biting into the backs of your legs. Maybe… Loop would know. Maybe they’d be able to explain this, whatever went wrong inside you. 

You open your mouth.

Loop claps their hands together loudly. “Well! I think you have quite a bit of reading still to do, no? Best get back to it!” 

Well. Maybe next time. You nod, and hop off the tree. Maybe the wrong in you won’t stick at all, or you can bleed it out horrifically somewhere until it’s right again. Normal things. 

“Stardust?” They call, tone hesitant. Strange. Loop stares at you, a flicker of something in their eyes you don’t recognize. Or maybe you know it too well. 

“If there’s an end to this, you’ll find it. You know that, don’t you?” 

You don’t know that, but you have to believe it anyway. “There’s gotta be something to that wish craft thing he mentioned,” You agree. “I’ll find it.” 

You try to remember to force yourself to stumble at least once as you stalk through the halls, playing the part the way you’re supposed to. Poor laughing clown, less a pierrot more a harlequin. You remember not to comment on the Universe, to avoid the stack of checked out books in the hidden library. You’ll get this one right, and something will change. 

You will mold yourself into a loveable shape, and they’ll reach out and love you like they did when you were bleeding. Won’t they? 

Nothing happens. It’s the same. It’s always, blindingly, infuriatingly, the same. 

You enter the room with the broken vials, and— the fizz takes over, maybe. Or you move without thinking. Some part of your mind is lost in the dark, dark, covering your clothes and the floor and that far away floating feeling of warmth. You stab your hand a little too hard, rather than just brushing the edge, and there’s blood. Too much blood. Shit. 

“Siffrin!” Odile admonishes, immediately scooping your hand in hers. “For goodness sake, let's not go around playing with glass, shall we?” 

She’s touching you. Your brain skips. 

Odile fusses with your hand, ripping a piece of her shirt apart to clot tightly at your palm where your pale skin shines through your glove. Bonnie doesn’t have to sneak the glass from your pocket this time, because Odile stomps on it where it falls from your hand. New, you think. New, new again. This is all new. 

“Sif,” Isa pouts, crouching closer, too. “That looks pretty deep.” 

“I can heal it!” Mira offers, “Or, we have tonics, too right?” 

Bonnie nods, pulling out a vial from their pockets and dumping it all over your palm eagerly.

They hold your pinky as they do, angling your hand more towards their eye level. Isa pats your back as a strange wheeze leaves your lips. He’s touching you. Odile’s touching you. 

You’re warm, you hadn’t realized you’d felt cold at all. 

They all seem to realize at the same moment, though, and back away with embarrassed looks. 

“Are you okay, Siffrin?” Mirabelle’s wide eyes meet yours, brows pinched together and serious. 

No, you think, strangely untethered. No, I’m not. 

“Of course, sorry. Clumsy,” You offer, thinking of masks and plays, and you wait for them to all relax when they remember your role. 

Slapstick comedy. You’re always laughing. 

The usual lines take too long. Yes, Mirabelle I know what the papers are. Yes, Bonnie, I do pay attention to you. Of course I know where to find the family tale, Odile. Maybe you’ve stopped caring about the words they’re saying at all, maybe it’s all rote and it’s a shame because to them it’s their very first time sharing but you’ve. Heard it all. Before. 

You want to talk to Isa again.

Something changed, that last loop. Again, it changed again. He’d touched you, even though he always stops. Maybe this will change too. 

“Isa,” you say, brighter than you can remember speaking in a while.

“Sif, hey!” He smiles at you, crosses his arms. The most northern point in your universe, keeping himself carefully away from you.

You say the joke perfectly, you always say the joke. You need him to laugh the way he does with you, or something in you really will snap apart entirely. You think of words, big floating ones you knew once because someone taught you but the how and why goes somewhere else.  Aphelion, the part of orbit farthest from the sun. 

He laughs, the world carries onward, and you watch.

As. His hand. 

Reaches out. 

Please, you think, shooting stars and fizzing bubbles and endless, deep, painful aching, wanting. Wanting. 

Wanting. 

“Oh, hey, Sif, you okay?” 

You blink. His face has shifted, worry more than mirth, and he’s looking at your hands, which are balled up so tight you’re biting right into the meat of your palms in perfect dark crescent jagged tears. Isa’s hand is hovering just there, in the air between you. 

Shit. Stars. You forgot.

Isa’s staring. “You looked really—” He cuts himself off, you watch his hand as he visibly thinks about grabbing yours and stops himself. That’s. That’s more than you’ve gotten, he shifted closer this time. 

He won’t touch you, he never does, you wait and wait and it doesn’t happen, it might never happen, but he’d thought about it. Does that count? 

“Sif, you’re… uh. Kinda worrying me here? Having a quiet day, or?” 

Right; the lines. Your mask. “Sorry,” you smile at him, ashamed and sheepish at yourself. Fit the bill and the play carries on. “Did you need help with anything?” 

Isa’s frown smoothes out, you relax your hands. The sting of it sends something to your brain that you don’t think about. 

Nobody touches you for the rest of that loop. 

You beat the king, you don’t ask any questions about wishes even though you’re supposed to, even though you should. Another thought has slid neatly in between, like a glass in a telescope. A lens to sharpen impossibly far away thoughts, pull them right into the space before your eye. 

You’re… curious, is the kinder way to phrase it. The itch in your palms, in your skin, is loud. You feel real when they’re touching you, when he is. You feel like you can stay. 

Is it okay to want? It can’t be, because you want it in the wrong ways. 

You’re distracted, stupid. Useless, fucking stupid idiot, blindingly bad at their job constantly and yet constantly in the front, the role of the clown etched into your blinding hands: 

A sadness gets too close. Mira’s healing is on cooldown and you're out of tonics. Slapstick, right?

The slide of its attack right against your rib cage knocks your breath from you, rolling silently out into the open. The floor jumps up to cradle you, and the battle slides somewhere sideways around you. It sounds like someone is calling your name. 

Isa’s face blurs in front of yours, pale and terrified, and instantly pulling you into his arms. You’re smiling, you shouldn’t be smiling. You can’t make yourself stop. 

“---Sif, are you— M’dame! It’s—” 

“We got it, it’s done. Quick, pull them into this room over here.” 

Something shifts, your midsection howls with some distant memory.

You’re still. Smiling. 

You must have made a noise, Isa’s face crumples. “Sorry, sorry, Sif, I — hang on, okay? Here.” He lifts you up. Holding you in his arms, your head tilting to press just there against the rabbit quick thrum of his heart. Isa’s holding you, cradling you carefully and bundling all the aching parts of you close. You feel so warm, so. 

Warm.

Mira appears in your field of vision. “Hang in there, Siffrin! I’m so sorry, I should be able to heal again in a minute, oh… I should have paced it out better!” She slides her hand into yours, giving you a reassuring, wobbly squeeze. You make yourself squeeze back and see the flicker of surprise and joy pass through under her worry.

You’re stealing these moments from them all, even now, aren’t you?

Does it have to be like this? With you, broken on the outside as much as you are on the inside, before Isa’ll be brave enough to reach out first, before Mira will believe you over her own brain? You’d do it, you think sickly. Dark as night. You’d break all your bones a thousand times again and suck all the joy right out of this moment too, if it means you can have it now. Because you’re greed and you’re envy and you’d dig your greasy claws into all of them and take every good thing they can give you– you’re already cataloging it, aren’t you? How to get this ending again? How to say your parts right? 

Sick. Disgusting. 

Freak. 

“Hush, hey? Eyes on me, Sif. We’re just gunna— can you clear the— yeah, thanks Mira. Okay, shh. Okay, just putting you down here.” No, you think with all your twisted sick parts, let me stay right here. If I loop, it’ll be warm, at least. I’ll die right here like this, and it’ll be the warmest I’ve felt in years. Wouldn’t that be nice?

There’s no burnt sugar on your lips yet, no tug in your stomach, though. You can have this, for more greedy vile seconds, and you’ll take them all. 

Odile swims into focus. “Siffrin, I need you to listen, alright? This is going to hurt, but we need to apply pressure. Can you nod?” 

You think you do. Odile seems content enough. 

“On the count of three then. One, two—” 

A fire blooms in swirling constellations at your side, fiery comets and collapsing stars all in one. It doesn’t feel like anything, but why would it? Silly, really. You’re not a star, you’re a blackhole. You’re what’s left behind when the star gets too tired to burn. 

“ — I know, oh, sweetheart, I know. Okay, yeah, you can squeeze my hand here, okay? As much as you need to. Crab, I’m so sorry, Sif.” Isa’s hand is in yours, he called you— you’re still warm. The pain feels like it’s siphoning itself away into a dark tunnel, a thousand miles away. 

“I should have blocked it, oh… why didn’t I think to block it?” 

“Let’s not play the blaming game, shall we?”

“Yeah! Frin’s hurt, and—and he’s crying a lot, so. We have to be nice, right? That’s what Nille did when I was sick, said you have to be quiet and nice.” 

“Oh, Bonnie, don’t look, okay? Can we—”

“Boniface, let's give them room here, just give me one second.” 

You’re… crying? You can’t feel your cheeks at all, just the hand in yours. Just the sparking lightning, stars in your ribs. Oh, you think you’re still smiling. 

Bonnie puts their hand on your ankle, you can see them peeking up at you over the lip of the table they’ve placed you on. Frowning and worried, thumb brushing back and forth across your leg in some practiced, unthinking movement. Odile is staring intently at your side, but has a gentle palm on your stomach like a balm. Mira’s brushing your hair from your face, and Isa—

They’re all touching you. You fit this once inside the confines of your own outlines, and it doesn’t hurt at all. 

The hands leave, Bonnie and Odile floating out of sight. Isa’s squeezes at your shoulder, knuckle brushing at your cheek. 

“Mira…” he says, he sounds grave. Heavier and lower than you know him as. 

Her hands shake as they move to your stomach, there’s a horrible noise around you like the time before you’d met them, you’d found an animal caught in a trap. Left out in the winter. You’d forgotten that, somehow. 

“I— I know, I know… I’m.” Mira sniffs, watery and shattering apart in a hundred ways. “I don’t… I don’t know if we have enough, why don’t we have enough?” 

Because you didn’t stop by the room on the first floor, probably. Because you lead and they follow and you hadn’t cared about tonics at all. 

“M’bad,” you say. Think about saying, it’s the same. She doesn’t seem to notice. 

The hand on your shoulder tightens more, and Isa bends closer. “Hey, hey… it’s okay, it’s— I’m here, okay? We’re here, Mira’s here. I— why’d you take that hit, Sif? I could have handled it.”

I’m the comedian, you think. I take the falls. You promised you’d never do it again, sit in the tree tops and be left behind; it’s okay if you go, though. Someone has to go first, right?

“Don’t go at all,” Isa says, a hard whisper that sounds like it hurts. He presses his forehead into yours, eyes squeezed shut and upside down. “Don’t go, Sif. Please, don’t go.” 

You think about telling him that it doesn’t hurt, that you’re warm. That you feel here, and held, and staying for once. You can’t feel your lips to tell if you speak. 

You want to cry, stars stuck right in your throat like boulders. You already know it won’t feel as warm the second time around.

There’s something wrong with you; slapstick, laughing, you’re smiling and hollow behind it all. You touch a tear to get back to Dormont faster and your dreams slide sideways and rancid on your tongue. Rotting fissures of disgust that are shapeless, nameless. And you, floating out into the Universe. Cold, empty. Eating the stars up for the warmth they hold inside. 

You dream that you’re on a stage, and you’re watching the play, and you know your parts in all the ways you don’t know what line is next at all. You dream that there’s another version of you, standing across in the hot lights. 

Isa walks out in costume, shadows heavy on him in capes and harsh angles; he has a mask with a long nose that just barely hides the dimples when he smiles. He puts his hand on the other Siffrin’s shoulder. 

You don’t feel it, it’s not yours. You’re overwhelmed with envy and greed and rage and wake before your hand can meet your own doppelgangers face.

And, the sickness at the center of you grows. 

You’re already thinking of it before your eye even opens in the field: how to get them to worry, to get them to hold you, how to make it slower, last longer. You could misthrow the bomb, but, no. There’s too much risk. Everyone stands too close for you to allow it, it might do too much at once, you’d loop before anyone could pull your rubble out from your skin. Getting frozen just means dreams, it just means Mira unsticking you. The blindingly infuriating option in town happens before anyone can see you. 

You catch yourself fantasizing about rivers of dark sticky nothing, pouring out of your side like the night sky itself. 

Normal people don’t do this, do they? Think of ways to manipulate their friends to pretend to care for them. Calculate how slow they can die, how much worry they can swallow up and hold inside themselves. Your insides are nothing, poison-noxious-empty-nothing, maybe they always have been.

You start thinking of caskets, of open funerals. The grass under your hands feels like maggots. 

“I couldn’t find it,” you say to Loop, because it at least looked like an accident this time. They’re still giving you a sideways glance but, it’s nothing neither of you can comment on out loud. “Do you know where I should be looking?” 

“Hm,” Loop says, flexing out their hands like they’re inspecting their nails. You have a sudden pang of intense envy for the way their skin pulses under their outlines, like magma under stone. At least they’re warm, you think vaguely, but— no. They’re stuck here too. Any warmth is just what’s left, right? That’s why you’re stardust, you’re what’s left. 

They tilt their head at you. “If I was a book on a subject no one had thought of in who knows how long, I probably wouldn’t be sitting out in the open.” 

True, and there are all those ones you can’t read. Where can you learn more about the patterns and the stars? 

If you tore yourself open. You shake your head. 

“I should ask the King, right?” You sigh. You make sure to make it look like you care about this, still. Like you’re trying and you’re tired, and that’s why you messed up. You’re not sure how Loop knows you so well, but you’re fairly certain they can’t read your mind at least.

“...Yes,” Loop says, squinting. 

You stare back, thinking nothing. 

“Hm. Well, it must get tiring having to walk back to all those tears to restart, no?” 

Are they… trying to get on your nerves? Slapstick, right? They want you to find something creative, surely. 

“No,” they wave a hand, “not antagonizing you on purpose of course!” 

Hm. Mind reading is back on the table. 

They snort. “No tricks required, silly. I just know you so well!”

“It. Is annoying to walk back,” You agree, squinting back. You’re not sure what Loop would be implying, unless– they called you the director once, maybe they know this play, too. Less the harlequin more the leading role.  “Well, I do have a dagger.” 

Loop giggles. “That’s true, you—” Suddenly, the mirth drops from their shoulders, a blank wide eyed stare takes over instead. “What do you mean you have a dagger.”

You shrug,  you know what the play demands. Separated lovers, hamartia, the you across the stage that gets everything he wants. Surely, they’ve seen you leaning in and taking more, right? Surely that’s damned you already, hasn’t it? Your fatal flaw, greed and indecision, like the brightest touch of sunlight streaming across a windowsill.

“Stardust, you can’t be serious! Stabbing yourself isn’t like a tear, you know! It’ll hurt! A lot!” 

Yes, you think. You know. And it’ll pour out of you somewhere else behind the warmth, and you’ll feel real. You’ll feel like you exist. 

“I’ve died multiple times already, Loop,” you roll your eye, playing at nonchalance just like every other mask you wear. “I know. It wouldn’t be any different.” 

Loop just. Stares. 

“It wouldn’t be any—” their voice cuts off, splinters. They don’t blink. “I don’t want you to!” 

Their light flares, fractals spinning off into the swaying trees. You don’t think you’ve ever seen them react like this. “Since when are you in charge of me?” 

“Since I chose to be here to help you, obviously!” 

You scoff, tucking your face further into your cloak. “You said you didn’t choose me. You said that. So why does it matter? It’s faster, I’m dying all the time.” You think, you pick open the scab wound of the dark oil slick inside yourself and say: “I’ll just use the glass, then. It’ll be messier, won’t it?”

Dark ultimatums and threats behind painted lips, is that what you are now?

Loop’s glaring now, fists balled up at their sides. “You’re an idiot. You’re— I don’t want you to, because it should hurt, because you should care. Because you are the only thing you get to keep across all these blinding restarts, don’t you understand tha—”

Something happens. 

The air goes still, clicks. Resets, fizzes out. Burnt sugar, but you don’t feel a tug. 

Loop stares back at you, eyes white and unseeing. “You can use your dagger whenever you want. It’ll end the loop if you choose. Whenever you want.” 

“Um,” you say.

“You can use the dagger. It will end the loop.” they say, voice stretched out and blank.

You don’t move. The sugar taste goes acrid around the edges. 

Loop blinks back with another fizz before you can manage to think further. They won’t look at you.

“You should probably leave,” Loop says, tone flat in a way that reminds you of harp strings tightening. “I don’t want to see your face again, this loop.” 

You run. 

You’re scissors type, you know what that means: Cold, calculating. Unfeeling. Callous, sometimes. You’ve tried to live the opposite, ever since you— since you woke up. Since you met Isa, really, and decided to make yourself the one who jokes and leads and checks for traps. 

You’re starting to think of other words, now. Void, maybe. Trapped, is another one. Harlequin, pierrot. 

“Hey, Sif? You feeling okay?” Isa asks, in the safe room, you forget which floor you’re on. You haven’t touched your madelines at all, and you need to, or Bonnie will get upset. You know this, you just— you spaced out for a moment is all. Your thumb is on your dagger unthinkingly, inside your pocket where nobody can see at all.

It feels like you’re on a cliffside, waiting for someone to care enough to call you back from the ledge. Waiting for the wind to blow either direction and make a decision for you.

You give him a thumbs up, and cram the whole fistful of food into your mouth at once. 

He blinks, snorts. “Hungry as ever, huh? Don’t choke on it!” 

Yeah. Hungry. That’s another word you’d use. Gnawing. Constantly ravenously hungry and greedy for everything and nothing at all. 

You wear gloves most of the time, just because it’s easier. Because it means less splinters and road rash when you trip and less likely to nick yourself when you were training before. They have a pointed tip, just a little from when your nails grew out longer. 

You see your hands and you see claws. Something to dig in, to hold in place. Something to bleed. 

For the first time in a long time, the thought scares you.

You think about running back Dormont and to Loop and begging. About throwing your dagger across the room, about fighting with your fists and claws. Loop, you think, please. I don’t want to be the leading role, or the director anymore. Don’t let me have this, say no. Take it back. 

Take it back. 

You can’t keep the doll or the bell or the four leafed plant, but you can keep your hands, and those can stay yours, can’t they? If you’re good, if you play the clown right? They’re your hands and your mask isn’t your face yet, it isn’t, and you could find the way out Loop is so sure exists, and you could keep all of you right here and yours, couldn’t you?

Except.

The skin of your hands is smooth. No scar to remember the last time they touched you at all. 

The pain didn’t even matter to you then, either. It should, Loop said. It should hurt. Like the hurt is a benediction, an earned punishment. Or maybe a reward. Maybe Loop was too late already. Maybe if you cut yourself apart, there’d be absolutely nothing at all inside to fall out. 

You can’t trust yourself with anything anymore. 

Isa watches you funny, as you eat all the food Bonnie will give you. You find yourself smiling without meaning to.

You play with your dagger at the picnic with the stars lighting up the curve of your blade. 

The King won again, you were distracted. Fighting him isn’t even hard now, usually, but you didn’t tell Mirabelle to prepare the shield at the right time again, and you didn’t ask him anything about wishes at all. Stupid mistakes, forgetful ones, and everyone died. Loop would laugh at you, probably, if you’d been brave enough to see them. 

The dagger sits at home in your hands, light and quick as always. Flipping it up, around. A flourish between your fingers. You’re not sure if someone taught you this, long before like guided lessons or well worn family tradition. Maybe your mother taught you, or your father, and all that’s left of either of them is just muscle memory. Maybe you should feel guilt for your hunger, for what you want as some kind of sullying or a defacing of this last memento.

“You’re good with your dagger,” Odile speaks up, soft in the night ambience. “Practicing this late, are we?”

Performance is practice, you think someone once said. “Want to be ready for tomorrow.”

Odile leans back on her hands, Mirabelle and Isa are swinging Bonnie around between their linked arms in the field— giggles pouring up into the open air as easy as anything. Fireflies chase along with them, like stars pulled straight from the sky. 

“I think you’ll do just fine, Siffrin,” Odile says without looking at you. She sighs. “Though I appreciate your focus on preparedness. I can’t say I’m not nervous myself.” 

Odile? Nervous? You’d never have guessed. Her mask is better than yours, even. She must read it in your face as she glances over, she chuckles to herself as she pushes up her glasses. “Oh come now, it can’t be so surprising that I have nerves. We are facing the end all be all subject of our quest, are we not?”

You think about all the times you’ve won, the times you haven’t even come close. You think of a massive fist, tightening, someone calling for help— of being in the trees and thinking: they made it there without you. You swallow. “We are.” 

You flip your blade around your fingers again; this is new in itself, having a quiet side conversation with Odile isn’t in the usual script. Normally, you sit in silence, smiling at the antics of everyone else until the stars are fully out and bright and no one knows the name for them except for you, but it’s time for bed. 

You would be excited, usually. Differences are so hard to come by anymore, you should be excited. You’re somewhere beside yourself, watching from across the stage though, mask in place and empty as always.

You remember to smile at her though, and give a tiny shrug. “He’s also facing us, too.” 

Odile snickers. “You know, somehow I hadn’t quite thought of it like that.” 

You don’t know what her point is, or why she’s even speaking to you; it feels like you’re lying in a thousand directions all at once. You flip the blade, and balance the tip on your finger until your tremors shake it to the ground. Odile raises an eyebrow. 

“Is… something the matter, Siffrin?” 

Stars. You don’t even have it in you to be afraid either. Your smile is bland and stretched thin, a veneer of paint, a shitty thin nothing of cheap fabric. “Nervous, too. I guess.” 

She breathes out. Bonnie shrieks with giggles a few feet away, sending another spark of fire flies bursting into the sky. “Well, never let it be said that I’m one for emotions, but. I have faith in you completely. If there’s a way through, we’ll follow.” 

“Yeah,” you say, because you lie more than you breathe these days.

Blackholes and sinking ships, you realize you’ll just drown them all with you.

To give yourself credit, you try to make it all the way to the King. You commit yourself to trying to read the books and look for an answer, the way through that Loop promised, you even pretend you believe it. There’s something wild in your chest that sounds like a clock ticking even as you skim pages, a counting down of hands— the clock tower, six o’clock, dinner and food and your friends laughing around a meal that fills absolutely nothing at all in you, it’s all irrelevant. It shouldn’t be, though. 

It should be the only thing that matters, shouldn’t it?

If you can break out, this loop, this time, then— you won’t think about it anymore, you tell yourself. If this is it, you’ll stop. You’ll leave your dagger and glass shards and sharp edges alone. You’ll find warmth somewhere else. 

If you let me out, I’ll stop, you think, pacing alongside the stage. 

Please, you think, aimlessly. 

The Universe stays silent. 

You linger, at the end after winning once more, saving the world like it’s the first time and it’s real. You spend too much time talking to everyone as many times as you can even though Bonnie calls you stupid and Mira gives you a nervous smile and Odile pretends to read while watching you. There’s a biting tearing thing in your heart that wants out, that’s caged behind the teeth in your throat: notice, it says. Pay attention. Stop me. Keep me here. 

“It’ll hurt,” Loop had said, and you know this. You know. Your heart already hurts. 

“Siffrin?” Odile’s voice rings through the static in your head. You’re standing in front of the Head Housemaiden, and she’s looking at you with a strange half-smile, full of concern and confusion. She hasn’t started speaking yet. 

Move, you tell yourself. You’re not sure what your face is doing at all, frozen in time right before the plunge. 

Isa perks up. “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”

The Head Housemaiden tilts her head at you, hands clasped together. Her mouth opens and— no, you think, please. I’ll be good. I’ll stop thinking about black holes. Promise me my insides are good. Tell me there’s something at all inside, it’s not just empty, I’ll believe you this time. I swear.

“Frin?” Bonnie steps forward, frowning. You can’t. Turn your head. Watching the slow parting of her lips, the death sentence waiting beyond it. 

I didn’t even kill myself this time.

Isa reaches for you, face alarmed and serious like it rarely is. He looks sheet white, concerned beyond measure. Terrified for you, even as the world turns sickly sweet and burnt around you.

“-- You’ll be going back,” she says, of course she says. Fat droplets of tears pouring from her face like she’s sorry. She won’t even try to listen, she’s wearing a mask, too. 

“Siffrin!” 

He’s reaching for you. You can’t reach back, you don’t try to. 

It’s not like he’d touch you anyways, you’re not even bleeding. 

There’s a dream waiting for you. It might be a memory, the way it shifts and grows like paint on a page, but you don’t remember. You never remember any of the things that you want to. 

“Hey Sif?” Isa says, because you’re sitting together on a bench in another city, far before you had all the orbs to unlock the first door, before you’d lost your eye. The stars are twice as bright but you don’t think about them, that hasn’t happened yet.

Adventure was fresh on your lips, then, wasn’t it? It still felt like a page being written. This thing that existed in the in betweens of Isa’s words wasn’t so thick and cloistering, you hadn’t seen it at all yet. 

You tilt your head towards him, kicking your feet. You don’t remember where Mira and Odile had taken Bonnie— maybe some supplies shop, or for ingredients. Maybe they’d forgotten you entirely, you wouldn’t know. 

He rubs the back of his neck, looking down at the grooves in the cobblestone road below you. “I was just thinking. Not to be morbid, but… what if. What if we don’t win?” 

You’d smiled at him before. You’re not sure if you’re smiling here, if the mask is already part of you before you walked into the play. “We will,” you say, because that’s what the wish wants, or thinks it wants, and you wouldn’t leave where you were without it. 

He gives you a tiny lopsided smile back. “Right, love the confidence, really. I shouldn’t be talking about this, I just. Do you think he’d—” He swallows, glances around. “We’re really the last hope, is all, huh.” 

The last hope, the only one. The combined fueled up image of hope at all, and it’s all stuck in the fading crumpled up photograph that is you, faking a grin. Sorry, everyone. Show’s lost its sparkle. You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here. 

You pretend to contemplate this. “I think that means something,” you say, not knowing that it’s because of the Universe yet, because you’re following and it’s leading, yet. Because you don’t remember who told you the bedtime stories or your own language, or all the words that don’t stick because you learned them differently. 

Isa looks at you, absorbing every word like it’s scripture. You shrug. “Doesn’t it? If it’s just us here, then. That means it’s supposed to be us.”

“Huh,” Isa says. You forget the next part. The dream fades between two planes of glass, Isa’s voice melting and pulling itself across dimensions in front of you. 

“I guess it has to be you then, too.” 

Spotlight. On. 

You… wake up, in the field. You think you wake up. It’s hard to believe there’s differences between when you sleep and when you’re on stage. It’s all motions, even your dreams are repeating. 

There’s the static in your hands again, tiny electric jumping stars trying to burst straight out through your skin, making them shake and tremble. It itches. You can barely think about anything else— enter Mira, say the method, find the book for Odile, check the blinding change god statue, talk to Isa and waitwaitwait. You let Bonnie hug you and try to hug them back as tightly as you can.

They’ll hug you when you’re seemingly fine, they’re the only one that will. Is that enough?

Of course it isn’t. You’re made of greed and gnawing hungry things, nothing is ever enough.

It should hurt, you think. And: It will.

The giddy feeling is back, distant and layered but it’s enough to make your grins come easier and spread wider. Some of your usual monotone affect is missing, you’re not sure if that’s the version they’d remember anymore. Did you talk more often? Were you happy? You think you’re happy now, knowing that you can bend everything again to your needs. That you can play the part right, that you can only follow and make them join you the ways that make you warm.

Sick, disgusting. Manipulative. You’re too full of thick lightning bolts and storm clouds to mean it the usual way. 

You get past the trap easily, forgetting to seem surprised at all with this constant thrum of go, move, next, pushing at your outlines, but no one questions you at least. Not that you’d have the ability to play it off, really. Maybe you’d just stab yourself the moment they asked, rewrite the whole scene mid word, wouldn’t that be funny. 

Odile gives you a strange long look as you navigate around a corner easily. Your hand hovers over the hilt of your dagger, is it now? 

Should it be now?

The moment passes, no one speaks. You don’t look at yourself in the mirror. You close your eyes and smile as big as you can and look everywhere except for yourself when Odile hands it to you. You ignore the way she stares at the photo slightly too long, also. 

Whatever she’s seeing, you already know.

And then: there’s wishes, made by everyone at the Favor Tree. Involving you somehow, you’re sure of it. And you need to— logic says you need to ask them, to figure out what the wishes were specifically, how it’s keeping you here. Logic says: this is the next step. 

You have to go back to the start, walking to a tear would take too long. Isn’t that annoying?

“Oh, I should have asked everyone in Dormont,” you say out loud, not for your family because they’re just characters on a page, they’re the Il Dottore and the Franceschina and Il Capitano and you’re erasing them even as you speak, but for Loop. To keep up appearances on a thing they shouldn’t be watching anyways. Here, Loop, an offering. A reason for what I’m doing, isn’t that nice? You can look away, now. We don’t have to talk about it, you don’t have to watch. There’s a purpose to it, it’s efficiency, isn’t it? Scissors type means efficient. 

“Ask them what?” Mirabelle says, with a head tilt. You’re in the secret side library and it’s cramped in here with old paper smells and mildew and the not-real sense of should-be warmth. Her voice echoes off the stone walls, wrapped in the candlelight Odile had kindly set. 

“What they wished for,” you say. “Maybe if enough people wished it, even though the steps were wrong, it could do something.” Even though there was nothing to hold it, maybe you would have. You’re a blank canvas, and you could fold right around anyone's wishes just to steal the warmth, you’d eat straight through the stars themselves.

Bonnie perks up. “Like beating the King?” 

Isa glances between the kid and you, a small divot forming on his face. “I guess so, but we can just find out when we beat him, no?”

You smile. You smile and you smile. “Sure, yeah. Let’s go then.” And you make your way towards the door. 

Isa doesn’t move, hands on his hips and staring at you funny. 

“Sif? You look weird.” 

Do you? Your face is somewhere far below the swimming static, you wouldn’t know what you’re doing with it. You’re just. Moving. Fingers dancing across the hilt in your pockets, feeling cramped even though there’s a perfect bubble of distance around you and everyone. Oil and water, they’d kill themselves to get away from you. The thought makes a bubble of laughter crack at your teeth. 

“Tired,” you say. Think you say. Isa nods, slowly, crossing his arms warily. 

“Well. You didn’t get a nap today.” 

Bonnie gasps. “Cranky Frin!” 

“Perhaps we can make it to the next floor quickly, then. Stop for a breather?” Odile suggests. 

Bonnie throws a hand up. “I’ll get him snacks!” 

You hate when they talk around you like this, more distance, more separation. Talking behind your back, making eyes, side conversations they can’t have with you. Their roles are to deceive, are they not? To doublespeak to be the Pantalone and Dottore and all the other masks. It’s all just space and space and cold empty nothing. Your hand is on the hilt now. 

“Right,” you say. “Let’s leave then.” 

Isa stares at you for another long second. Do it, you think viciously. Cold, calculating. Manipulative. You’re a coward. You won’t push it, you won’t touch me. You won’t say it. Do it. 

He breathes out, he lets you pass. 

You step out into the hallway first, they can’t see the way your palms bite into the grooves of your dagger’s hilt, or the way your eyes close. They can’t see the hitch to your breath as you think. This will hurt. Then: it should hurt. 

You hold the blade out, dark and smooth like a stone in the river before you. This is thy sheath.

It’s surprisingly not hard at all to push, like butter really. You try to give them time to notice, because you’re a sick wanting thing. You treat your blood like an offering. See? See, it’s dark inside, it’s nothing. Does that scare you? Do you want it?

“Siffrin, what are you— shit! Stop that, Isa, grab him!” 

“What— oh, fuck, Sif, why—” 

It does hurt, worse than almost anything, but you’ve died slower. Isa knocks your dagger out of your hand, you hear Mira’s ragged gunshot of a gasp as she pulls Bonnie close and tucks their face into her side as they fight to know what’s happening. Isa’s grip on your wrist is hard, it hurts, too; the good hurt, the kind that sinks all the way into your bone, swims farther and worms into your heart like a confirmation.

“Sif, why would you—” Isa chokes, face crumbling blearily above you and— oh, you’re on your back again. He’s holding you upright with an arm behind you, you can feel the heat of him through your shirt because— your cloak is in a pile across from you. Dark, dark stains like ink blots across the front.

Fire burning like dry kindling runs through you. Your eye crosses, fades out and back in. Odile is pressing her shirt against your side and speaking quickly to Mirabelle in a tone you haven’t heard from her before. She could heal you, you realize with some amount of dread. Then you’d have to— you’d have to explain. 

That can’t happen, they wouldn’t want you at all. You bite your tongue, waiting for the taste of sugar. 

It’s funny, really. You want to drag out the seconds long enough to know, not enough to be known. Greedy, selfish. You can’t have it all. 

You trip over into the sweet empty warmth anyways before you can be dragged farther back into the night, and feel relieved. 

Avoiding Loop is normal, it’s fine. You’re fine. You crave warmth and dream of rivers of nothing at all, cascading ink spills of night sky, of eating a star whole and burning through the paper of your skin. But you’re fine. You feel nothing, so that’s fine. 

They said it should hurt, and it did. You did it right. You can do it again, if you need to. 

Want and need are funny words aren’t they. Words that crawl up into each other and rust and break apart into nothing when you pull at the seams. Your needs are like that: a hangnail that bleeds and bleeds, a word that’s lost all its meaning and can’t be spoken. 

(You try to speak it anyways, once. Twice, alone in the field. The tinge of copper in your mouth that rips you open isn’t even anything special anyways, like you’ve grabbed hold of the singularity and pulled the gravity back outwards. Just means the blackhole is you.) 

Acting doesn’t require feeling, at least. It requires knowing lines. No one asks, no one says anything. No one touches you. 

You wake up in the middle of the night holding your dagger, the tip pressed against your chin, and you think: this, too, is a play. These are my lines: the next scene beyond the intermission. Maybe that’s what this is all for. 

But then you’d be sitting here, all the blood in you lined up against your spine and the backs of your legs, pooling and still. And you’d still be cold. 

You put the dagger down, it stabs your finger and for a moment it barely feels like anything. 

There’s something to what Loop said. The broken doll will never see the end, you’re not sure if you’re the mask or the actor. You pour and you pour everything out that lives in you and it goes nowhere. Just you and the space and no sound reaching through. 

Stabbing yourself isn’t even hard the second time. You mess it up and do it too fast though, so all you can see is the rounding of Isa’s scared eyes before you’re yanked to the stage. The third time, there’s not even anyone around to see. 

A long time ago, someone told you a story.

Look up at the night sky, all the way up to the moon, they said. Do you see how brightly it shines? That is made of love, you know. The sun is long past its time for rest, and the world went dark, and she rose to give us light to walk by. 

You’re walking on a rock hewn path, you’re jumping from stone to stone carefully. Someone waits patiently, holding your hand as you contemplate how to jump and how to land. You don’t know where this is, but it doesn’t matter because a hand is in yours and the moon shines bright because it is love. 

The sun's light made her vanish, so they could never meet. The moon asked for love as a messenger, just for her, so the sun could hear her in the day. The messenger went up to the clouds and pressed them together, and made time slow. You see the sun, just there?

The sky is something, another shade. Not light or dark. A vibrant thing that pours out of the inbetweens of night, the way your eyes have forgotten how to see. 

That’s for them. The dawn, so they could meet. So they can say ‘I love you’, and know they are loved too. Them, reaching across time to hold each other for a moment every new day. When you meet, you can see the love, because it looks like yours in the shape of their eyes and their lips and their smile pouring the sun right back into you. Do you know this, Siffrin? 

When you think of this, you imagine a smile and creased eyes and dimples and the sun, pouring love into you, too. You don’t think of it. The world has never let you think of it. 

You carry touch and love in you like an illness. Yours is not a love that looks like anyones. It pins down everything in its path like butterfly wings under glass, and keeps the dawn stretching out and out forever. And you are made wrong for it. 

“Hi Frin,” Bonnie waves their hand at you, making a show of slowly inching towards you until they poke you lightly in the stomach. “You saw that, right? You didn’t even flinch that time! Good kid, good kid!” 

You didn’t flinch because you didn’t feel it. All of this for a touch you don’t feel anyways. Your arm is just an arm attached to the messy strings that make up your center; it’s not yours anyways. You don’t exist there. 

Bonnie squints at you and tilts their head, hands on their hips with a pout. “You didn’t eat your food, you know. Did you not like it? I have other food.” 

The samosa is in your hands, or— no. It’s not a samosa. It’s plantain chips. You think of rocks and bleeding to death and cracking your head open so hard all of you runs out onto the grass like egg yolks. You think of Bonnie, skipping along and finding the empty shell of you and saying silly stupid Frin, napping out here all day long, and propping you up and taking you along inside the castle anyways. It would be the same, wouldn’t it? They’d made it to the King without you. 

Dead weight, and sinking ships. 

Bonnie pokes you again. “Frin? Are you even listening? Are you doing something stupid like sleeping with your eye open? Your back will get all crunched up like that, you know, Dile said so.” 

Are you sleeping? The maschere would know. Your palm is splitting itself open and sewing itself up over and over again and never leaving a mark. Do you know this, Siffrin? It should hurt. 

The maschere blinks at you. “Um. Frin? I know we— I mean. I was angry at you, and I didn’t talk to you and stuff, but you know I… I was just worried, right? Za said I should say it to you when I asked so, in case you didn’t know somehow. I didn’t mean it, Frin, and— and this is pretty serious in here and we’re gonna get Nille back, but. I don’t want you to go away, not really.” 

The actor playing you isn’t moving. Puppet strings cut, limp and still on the stage floor. There’s an exit line they should say, it’s the same one for every show because it’s repeatable and inoffensive. He should say it now, you think, if he’s done. He can’t leave the stage without saying it. 

“Frin? …. Is it a quiet day? You— normally you nod or something, I— are you ignoring me?” 

Maybe he can pull the strings from inside himself right out, through their fingertips or their mouth. String themselves back up the right way, the kind that has a smile. 

“Frin, you’re scaring me. It’s not. It’s not funny, stupid! Your face is scary!” 

Say goodnight, leave the stage. If you’re tired of shining, let the moon burn instead, come on. Say the line. Leave the stage. 

“Dile! I think… I think something’s wrong with Frin! Belle? Za!! Can anyone—” 

“It’s fine,” the actor says. “It should hurt.” 

“It should– what?” 

There’s no dawn here. No weights to hold you inside yourself. The actor flourishes his blade with gusto, and the crowd ooh’s and ahh’s with the quick flash of steel. He can find the strings, if he looks. Look, maschere, love will win out in the end, we just have to keep the play moving! You could help string them up, too, you know. Il Dottore would know how to make it neat.

I can show you my strings, you think, and this maschere’s mask is changing right before your eyes. You wait for it to match yours, but you’re already pouring your love out all over the stage floor and it’s not light at all, is it? Lightless, as black as the night; taking all the stars and spitting them up, used and dark, too. 

You think you see other masks, rounded eyes and stiff mouths, and theirs aren’t like yours either. Maybe if you. Dig in. Deeper. 

Visceral— something bright but not darkless. A great big splash of it. There we go, the actor laughs. There is something inside after all.

“Siffrin!” 

Well, that one had been an accident, you think. Your brain had tripped and fallen outside the lines, and you hadn’t caught it in time, easy mistake really. You don’t even know if anyone had held you, if you bled out too quickly onto the stone. Why Bonnie had been left alone with you at all, it’s just blurs and noise.

You’re glad Bonnie won’t remember your last burden at least.

(Some maggot filled corpse in your mind wonders if they’d get the joke of it, the slapstick at the center. If they’d look in and see you laughing. Didn’t get hurt for you, Bonbon! That was for me! Selfish selfish Siffrin, good kid good kid.)

It’s almost funny, really, how little of your sanity you have left. Do you even know what loop it is, anymore? Do you remember all the times you killed yourself? Maybe you forgot. You don’t remember anything anymore beyond this field and the dagger and this hunger in you gnawing at every thought. 

You look at your palm being smooth and whole and want to tear it wide open. You do, with the sharp points and your nails to dig in wider, and you reset because no one would find you here in the grass because you sent Mira away and your skin is smooth again. Over and over again, smooth glassy palms like nothing ever happened. 

Giant gaping messy holes digging down into the center of everything. Perfect, smooth black leather and pale skin. Someone once said you had a long love line. You slice right down along it just to be sure your love can’t hurt anyone else. 

Maybe it hasn’t, right? If you find a way out and through, you’ll be the only one left to hold all these shredded versions of yourself. You’ll have bit and chewed your way through a hellish cocoon and emerged as some fucked up mirrored version of everything you hate, and they’ll all say you’re the same. 

Loop won’t though. Loop will know, Loop always knows. 

You don’t know how long you sit there. 

“Siffrin! Are you napp–” 

Oh. 

You tilt your head back. You’re sitting in the middle of the field, trees swaying with blank audience faces around. Cheering and clapping in the breeze. 

Act Five

Scene Nine

Harlequin is sat in the open field, tossing about their favorite dagger. The field is empty as it always is. Harlequin has been having some fun to himself. The grass is dewy and dark beneath him.

Franceschina enters. Stage left. 

Franceschina: [Siffrin] what— (immediately, stunned into silence)

She is coming to fetch the Harlequin from a nap in the fields. They are gathering all the maschere for a feast! Their big day begins tomorrow, and she freezes mid stride, taking in the scene before her.

Franceschina: Is that. (faltering) Oh my— 

Her hands come to cover her mouth. Her mask remains beautiful and pristine, her skirts sway. 

Harlequin: (loud laughter) My nap went too long again.

Franceschina: (struggling to speak, hand over mouth) I’ll… I’ll get someone, or. No, I— you’re bleeding, [Siffrin], what— What happened! 

She shuffles forward, pausing. Hands outstretched as if to assist, but too afraid to dare to come close to the Harlequin. They must never touch of course.  

Harlequin: (through laughter) I’m just napping. Just a nap, silly. I might nap some more. 

The Harlequin flourishes his blade, smiling wide.

Franceschina: (lurching forward) W–wait! I– what if we just talk? Can we talk, please?

Harlequin pauses. 

Harlequin: (perplexed) What is there to say?

Franceschina: You— (visibly gathering herself) you’re hurt.

Harlequin: It doesn’t hurt.

Franceschina pales.

Franceschina: It— 

Harlequin: (tilting their head, thoughtful) It should though, shouldn’t it? Maybe there’s nothing left to hurt.

Harlequin flips the blade, grips it hard by the handle. Pointed in at themselves, smiling.

Franceschina: (lunging forward) Wait! 

And pushes it. Directly into. 

His heart. 

Scene end.

The pages are blank, they’re blank they’re blank and you grab at your handle but it won’t stick. You wake up and your hand slips right through the back of it, right through into the dirt itself and nothing at all can keep you here. 

I need it, you think, maybe you say. Mirabelle might stare, the Franceschina can never touch the Zinna here, she might leave instead with the knowing of it. Doesn’t matter, the script restarts. But it can’t restart because you can’t find your props. 

You practically run to the tree, blurting out some rote shit to Il Capitano Isa that won’t blindingly matter just to make him leave. If he says anything, if he looks at you with that concerned mask, you have teeth and you can tear, what does it matter. Isn’t that funny, Loop? You said they wouldn’t be mine anymore, and you were right! Stage props, a puppet you were given to play your part better. Any part is reattachable! 

Loop can find your props, the benefactor knows. They’ll set your strings right. 

“I thought I might just stay out of it, far be it from me to judge how you handle being trapped after all, but this is getting too pathetic even for me,” Loop is saying. Loop isn’t a mask, they have no expression at all and the mask is the maschere. It’s what the play demands, Loop isn’t playing the right part. 

“No, Stardust,” Loop frowns. It’s funny that they don’t have a nose or lips— maybe they are a mask, just a blank one. A nothing emotion, not laughing or crying. The thought makes some forgotten panic shift around in your throat. 

“Siffrin. Stay here, listen to me. Just— feel the bark under your hands? The wind? That’s all real, you know it is. You’re real. Don’t go down that road.” 

Your mouth moves, you don’t hear any of your own words. Puppets can’t speak. You think about wanting to stay, that it’s what you’ve always wanted, but now you’ve lost everything else but the staying and it’s leaving you too. Time is fluttering right past you without you being part of it at all, that doesn’t seem fair. 

“It’s not. It’s not fair, you’re right, and you can be mad all you want, Stardust. Be mad at me, if you must. Or— or the stars, or the Universe for leading you here. But feel something, at least, it’s better that way. It is.” 

It should hurt, you remember. But it didn’t, it didn’t even hurt that first time. You can’t remember the last time it hurt at all. 

“Your friends! You did this for them, didn’t you? That matters. Are they even people to you anymore? Stars, you spent all that blindingly useless time running through their problems because of what. Because the only thing you think you’re worth is keeping them safe. It’ll hurt if you stop seeing them! It’ll hurt more than anything.” 

That’s. Specific. You think that might be true, you miss them. The masks taking up their face and their names aren't the same, and they don’t touch you and you don’t feel it anyways. Pierrot, the sad clown; somewhere an audience is laughing as your misfortune catches you sideways over and over because you’re meant for this. 

“For stars sake, it is adorable really, how completely inept to anything in The Universe—” 

Leads. You can only— 

“ — Follow? My voice, at least? I know, Stardust. You can’t— this isn’t what I came back here to witness either, you know!” 

You bite your tongue, it pulls the focus back in. Planets, stars. You’re here in these hands and this skin, for now. For now. 

“How blindingly stupid can you– oh! You’re back. Well, that was painful. Let’s never make me watch that again, hm? Have your existential meltdowns somewhere else, yes?” 

You… blink, feel around the backs of your teeth. Stretch your claws hands and relax. Okay. Okay. 

“... sorry,” you manage, it scratches at your throat. 

Loop stares at you, brows pressed tight and firm together, like a current on a blank sea. 

You breathe in. And out. “I’m back. I think.”

“You think?” 

“It’s not like I meant to–” 

“No,” Loop stands up abruptly. You realize that they’re as tall as you, it seems funny. You’d thought they’d stretch up taller, like their shooting star parts would brush against the bottom of the leaves, but they stay at your eye height instead. “You didn’t mean to, but you did. You took the dagger, and you used it more times than you should have, and you’ve gone all… desperately pathetic and charmingly stupid with the remainder. Like I said you would.” 

“It would have happened anyways.” 

“I guess we won’t know that now, will we! So desperate to throw yourself into a gorey tragedy, hm?”

Not a tragedy. There’s too much laughing. 

“Oh no, I know you know your play structures, Stardust. We call this pile of dead bodies a tragic waste, don’t we? Can’t have the catharsis without the death of the villain, and you seem awfully primed to just let him win up there.” 

Him? Oh, the King. You’d forgotten he existed, isn’t that funny? He’d be furious to know. You’ve forgotten your land and where you were born and you’ve forgotten the only other person who has the shape of it somewhere in them. Maybe that’s what you need. They’d held you when you’d tried to say it, hadn’t they? Like biting clean through your own tongue. 

Loop glares. “Now, Stardust, I know you’re not thinking about that directly in front of me. I know you wouldn’t do that to me.” 

You would, you are. You shouldn’t, but you are. 

There’s a flicker of something in their face, an unreadable other. You think about when they went blank, the strained monotone like the palest shade of grey to their voice. There’s no sugar though. 

“I’m here to help, remember that. Regardless of what you believe, I asked for that much. You make it rather hard, you know.” 

It’s fine, you think. It’s me. It’s how I was made. 

“I should go,” you say. You want to remember the name, bleed out through your eyes and nose but having known that you held it for a second at all. Maybe it would be warm then, too. To remember anyone at all like that, maybe it would matter. 

“And do what?” Loop sounds angry.

You shrug. “There’s… I have to ask everyone about what they wished.” 

“You did that already, did you forget?”

You. Did?

Loop stares at you, hands balled on their knees. “Yes. You asked everyone, and then you went through the House and you found the list in the Head Housemaiden’s quarters, and honestly Stardust, do you think this act is fooling anyone?”

What act, what at all. The mask is the character, they are the same. If there’s no curtain call the play never ends. 

“The act where you pretend you care about any of this.” 

You blink. “I…” 

Loop crosses their arms impatiently. “You’re not trying to get out, to follow the clues. That desperate thread of hope you adorably keep clinging to is just hanging there all sad in the middle of nothing while you prance around in the background trying to control how everyone cares for you.” 

“I’m not controlling them,” you frown. You are, and you aren’t. You’re following the lines, you didn’t make the masks. 

“Pfft.” Loop giggles that sharp pointed way. “Sure, you’re only controlling how you hurt yourself in front of them to make them react how you need.” 

Selfish. Disgusting, you know this, you’ve heard all of this before from yourself. 

You’re not angry, you’re nothing at all. But your palms itch and Loop won’t let you tear them open here. “I don’t have to sit here,” you remind them. You avoided them for however many loops, if they want that again. 

“You don’t,” Loop agrees. “But you’re the most yourself right now than you have been. And I’m tired of watching this stupid exercise.” 

“Then don’t watch!” You think, but your mouth moves and with it, the whole cage you bar the worst parts of yourself with. It bursts out of you, the worms, the maggots, all of it. Dead on the floor. 

Your chest heaves. “Just. Look away, then. I’m fucked up, manipulative; you think I can’t see the blinding shitty reality of me? I know, alright? It doesn’t— I don’t feel it! Nothing. Not this, right now. Not you. It’s just. A big black hole, right there.” Your hand is on your chest, the pit that yawns. “Pulling every fucking thing with it. Doesn’t matter.” When it’s on the outside, it’s warm. It exists. Loop can’t take that from you, they can’t. 

You won’t let them. 

They stare. It’s not shock on their face. “I said I wouldn’t tell you how to deal with your prison, but I am here to help you. You wouldn’t believe how annoying it is to know those aren’t the same.” 

You feel… something shift. A small rewind, like sugar cubes melting in a cup of tea. No. You reach inside your cloak, hand on your dagger. Everything in your mind says ‘it’s not the time for that’, like it’s locked up tight in its sheath somehow, no matter how hard you pull. Your hand slips right through. Your prop is— 

Your hands scrabble at the hilt, clawing at it, the belt, the leather. Nothing shifts. You stare up at Loop, sitting impassively. That small furrow in their brows. 

“You can’t— what did you do?” 

Loop has the audacity to shrug, inspecting their nails instead of you. Legs crossed and poised as ever, like the missing control over anything going on with you means so little. Maybe you are angry, maybe the gravity well will let you keep this. 

“I’ll just bite myself apart then,” you snarl, leaping to your feet. The world sways around you, spinning in orbit around the star in front of you. “I’ll leave and I’ll find the. The glass shard and, my teeth.” Fangs, they’re fangs and claws on the outside, you’ll make it all outside. Loop wants to see a tragic waste? Okay. Fine. Gauntlet set. “I did it before. I’ll just do it again. I’ll loop right now.” 

“Do it,” Loop meets them, evenly. “I’ll keep pulling it from you any time you try. If you so desperately need the child safety lock, I’ll give you it.” 

You stalk away, and back. Caged in a bigger prison. A stage within a stage. “What’s the point? You said it was faster. Anything to make a loop faster, you said.” 

“I said I might make the same choice, not that I wanted you to,” Loop matches. That strange expression is still annoyingly floating in front of you. You hate it, you hate seeing it. 

“So let me make my choice!” 

Loop stands, slow and slinking as always. “I did, Stardust. You were stupid with it. Contrary to your charming and adorably stupid self destructive desires, this is for your best interest.”

You— their face is the only thing in focus, that unaffected heavy stare. You’re pinned under it, a bug under a magnifying glass. Slowly being heated by the sun, burning apart from the inside. You’re neither the moon nor the sun at all, are you, just some insignificant creature trying to pretend to be big enough to be part of it. But— 

It matches, you realize. Their eyes, their frowning steady brows. Standing there across from you, they’re matching everything that you’re pouring out, just like you were told. 

You can’t look at them. 

“Leave me the fuck alone,” you bite out, and force yourself to move as fast as possible out of the clearing before anything else reflects back at you, too. 

You find the open field. You dig right into the heavy meat of your hand and wait for the pain to hit.

Breathe in, breathe out. Copper on your tongue and on your teeth. Metallic and sharp. Dark greys shifting on the lighter grass below, seeping right into the ground like it’s drinking you down all the same. 

It’s not. Helping. 

The field is empty, the birds in the trees across the stage don’t care to join you. There’s no audience. There’s just you. 

“I don’t want this,” you confess. Your palms still itch underneath, all the way down to the bone. 

Nothing speaks. The Universe shifts on without you. 

After a while, you shove your gloves back on the wounded gaping holes of you. Black and fingerless, leather and thick enough to hide all of it away. Your nail beds are cracked through with dark, dark nothing.  

Somehow, you make it to the third floor again, just by walking. No loops, no bleeding out. Just the shakey, weary, empty husk of you. You know Odile is whispering to Isa when you charge out ahead, you know Mira is keeping Bonnie close and away from the amalgamating horror behind your eyes. You know none of them know, but they feel it anyways, and you can’t bring yourself to try any harder. 

Your friends, Loop had said, you did this for them. Did you? Did you do this somehow? Did you look at yourself and see the infestation of rot and the dead star burning out and decide you had to be quarantined from everything else?

There’s a thought buried inside you haven’t let yourself have before. You hate the taste of it, you stop digging. 

The King is on the next floor. And then more of the same. Maybe you’ll let him kill you again, it feels deserved. Loop’s only ever tried to help you and you yelled at them, and you scared Bonnie, and you did something unforgivable over and over again because you could. And now you’re mad that you can’t. 

And your palms itch. 

“Well, time for one more snack break?” Odile says, surveying the last safe room. Mirabelle is quiet— did you talk to her before you set out? You don’t remember. It’s fine anyways, you always say the CARROT method by autopilot, you don’t have to think. 

The itch on your hands grows, now on your wrist. You pull at your gloves distractedly, under your cape. 

“I have some snacks! Not a lot left, though,” Bonnie bites their cheek, rustling over to their bag and fussing with it. Burnt samosas, you think. “The leftover samosas! These are the burnt ones, though.” 

“Hold on just a second, Bonbon,” Isa interrupts. You— you blink. That’s. Not the script. 

He’s looking at you with a twist to his mouth. “Siffrin and I are gunna take a walk, okay? We won’t go far. We’ll eat when we get back.” 

Odile raises a brow, but nods and holds back Bonnie as they pout. Mira looks surprised, then curious but nods cheerfully enough. So, not something they’d talked about then. You’re not sure if that’s a good thing. 

“Sif?” Isa asks, gesturing with their chin towards the empty corridor you’d come from. You follow wordlessly. 

He never says what his secret is, he never will you’re sure. You know what it is anyways, but it isn’t real if it’s not spoken, and you don’t have to worry about why it shouldn’t be real so long as he doesn’t say it. He’s never done this before, though. You don’t know what this means, you’re not sure you have anything in you to care what it means at all. 

The hallway is dark, flickering candles still pin pricking the walls in a long winding stretch. When you dream about being here you’re always alone and it’s always longer than it should be. 

“So, you wanna tell me what’s going on?” Isa’s voice startles you. You look up at him, mouth opening. Closing. 

What?

Isa snorts, more a sharp exhale than anything. And gestures at your side. “I covered for you by taking you out of there, but. Buddy, I— you gotta know that doesn’t look good.” 

You glance down. There’s the rug, it’s dark grey plump like the fruits outside, and— oh. A small spattering like ink right there, and another.

“You’re bleeding, Sif.” 

You pull your hand free from your cape. There’s dark, trailing out the top of your glove, it feels sticky and peels on your skin, the leather has gone stiff in patches with blood. 

Isa kneels down, gesturing for you to hold your hand out. Cradling it carefully in his big palms. See, you think, tired and as weighted as the thing in your chest. He’ll touch you now. You’re bleeding again.

He peels the glove off, it pulls and makes more rivulets of dark spill out and you see him wincing. You see him glancing up at you, too, but you don’t bother making your face move. What’s the point to this at all, really. Let me bleed out in this room and be done with it. 

You forget that the marks won’t look like an ill dodged attack or accident until Isa’s choking off his own breath. You haven’t looked at it, just felt the itch and wanted to widen it more than you’d be allowed to without resetting. Some part of you had wanted it to stay, the wound and the warm all on the outside for as long as you were allowed to, just once. Look where that got you.

“Sif, this is—” He glances up at you again, eyes shining in the candlelight. Back at your hand, and sets his jaw firmly before squeezing your fingers. “They were right, weren’t they.” 

“Who was,” you manage, almost a whisper. 

“Your… friend. They came running out of the woods so fast I wasn’t sure if they were just… I don’t know, telling me a tall tale to scare me but—” Isa closes his eyes, brings your hand to his forehead. Your knuckles press against his skin. He runs warm, he told you so but you feel. 

Nothing. 

Hah, you think. Lost its sparkle already, too. 

“Sif, did you. Did you do this to yourself?” 

His voice shakes, warbles completely. A fat tear rolls down his cheek and you think: rotting, something’s wrong, it’s rotting, you’ll be going back. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, one day I hope you’ll forgive—

You pull your hand back. Hold it close to your chest. Your breaths are heaving, are they heaving? “Why would I do that,” you think you say. There’s an edge to it, a hysterical note that cracks through the air embarrassingly. “That would be—”

Isa stands, you don’t know the look in his eyes. You don’t know it, because it looks like pity and you can’t possibly— 

“You did, didn’t you.”

“No. No! I—”

“Siffrin, those are teeth marks.” 

You know, you know because you find yourself licking your gums like you can bite again harder and keep the taste of it longer. Keep the warmth longer. Because there’s something rotten in you, but it was supposed to be yours and not his. Never any of theirs. 

“They’re not,” you try. “It’s— I cut my hand on a rock, I didn’t notice.”

Your voice is too loud, Odile’s going to hear and then. And then you don’t know, you don’t know any of this. You don’t feel warm at all, even though his hand was on yours. Isa’s face twists in front of you, smoothing out with the blank nothing of a mask in its place. 

Loop was right, this was never a comedy. You were never the leading role. You’re the ghost haunting a story that should have moved on without you, and you’re making this a tragedy. 

Sugar. A pull in your stomach. 

You’re running for the Favor Tree before you can think. 

“You told him!” You’re yelling, that’s your voice. Your thoughts won’t connect, there’s metal in your teeth and copper on your tongue, and dying rotting citrus fruits you’ve never tasted. Loop dangles in your grasp, hands held up palm side, because your hands are fisted in the strange give of their center. 

“Stardust—” 

“No!” You shake harder. “You told. You said— you took it from me! Why are you taking them, too?” 

You didn’t even feel anything, you were bleeding and it didn’t do anything. Loop did something, didn’t they? They pulled that right out, too. They were never here to help, only to trap you more, judge you for the thing under your skin. Give and take away. 

“I’m not.” They spit back. “You’re doing that just fine on your own.” 

“I need this,” your voice sounds like broken glass. It’s not yours, it’s across the field and mirrored backwards. Some other Siffrin with sharp, frightening edges and bags so deep under their eye they can’t even see. 

“No, you don’t. You and I both know that’s an excuse.” 

You shake your head wildly, a laugh punching through your chest like a cannonball. Exploding behind your lips and into your brain with just, sound. Noise. 

“Fine! It’s not real, none of this is real. It’s an excuse, or it’s a need. A want, whatever you’re trying to get at. Fine. You wanted this, didn’t you? Maybe— maybe you’re the audience, not the benefactor at all. Right? Watching me— How’s your little show? Having fun yet?” 

Loop watches you. “...no,” they say, quietly. “No, I don’t think this is fun at all.” They place one hand carefully on your fisted ones without blinking. “I guess I was simply. Waiting for the dawn, too.” 

You. Blink. “No,” you hiss. “No, that’s not...” Rage spinning out and away and cresting with some other feral wild thing. You’re floating right out into the thick nothing of space and the Universe isn’t leading anywhere you can see, at all here, you don’t know— you need— 

Another hand lands on your shoulder. “Siffrin? Who— who’s this?” 

Isa. Right, you’d. You ran past him, you hadn’t asked him to leave. He saw the whole thing. Stars, how stupid can you possibly be.

“It’s okay, buddy. Easy,” Isa says, squeezing lightly. Your hands go limp immediately, call and response. You always end up shaping yourself in the ways that make Isa the happiest, don’t you?

Isa’s voice continues on, over your shoulder. It’s not at you, you don’t have to listen, you can think about the fact your nothing is pushing all the way out to your skin and your nails and he can probably see it already. You can try with every failing thing in you to lock it back up under your strings and your mask and be what he likes, the way you always want to. 

You’re. Fine. You need your dagger, the hilt, the bite in your palm, anything at all.

Your hand is— your holding his hand. Isa nods at you, his smile a watery and timid thing and squeezes back. “Good, hey, that’s good. Breathe in and out, like you always do, right?” 

You… try. Your lungs feel far away, your breaths escaping faster than you can find them. He demonstrates nice and slow, and his hand is on your shoulder. You’re not— you’re whole, now, and his hand is on your shoulder, your hand is in his. It’s enough to push you back to the ground and into your skin. 

Isa’s smile widens, eyes on yours and earnest, even as they flicker over your shoulder and back. His other hand pushes against yours, uncurling your nails and sliding your fingers together. You bend. 

“I don’t. Know what’s happening, but. Can you look at me? You were saying something, just now. Can you say it again? I couldn’t hear it.”

Your lips are forming soundless words. You can’t give them air, you can’t speak them.

“Okay, that’s okay, um,” He blows out a long shaky breath, hand still in yours. “Can you, um. Can we drop the dagger?” The– oh. You’re not supposed to have that. Loop made it so you couldn’t have that, but. You let go and there it is. Blade shining up at you in the sway of the longer grass.

Isa smiles, that’s what you want, isn’t it. You’d do anything to keep that. “Good, that’s good,” he says. He kicks it further with his foot and keeps your eyes on his. “Sif? What… was…” He stops, licks his lips. 

He looks pale and shaky, behind the smile. He glances over behind you again. “Um, who’s this?” 

You can’t possibly speak, there’s no air in you anywhere at all. Soundless, shapeless, nothing. There’s a rustle behind you.

“I’m a friend,” Loop says. “We were. Having a disagreement.” 

Isa frowns, glancing back at you. You don’t react. “Okay. It looked like Sif was pretty mad at you though, mind explaining that super quick for me?” 

Loop hums. It’s not as twinkly as you’re used to. “I could try, but I think he’d be more mad if I did.” 

Isa’s face twists further. “Normally, I’d be all for keeping my friends' secrets their own and not prying, but.” He pauses, looks at you apologetically. There’s nothing here, yet. Your palms still itch, but there’s nothing— “I just had to pry a dagger out of his skin. I think we’re passed that.” 

Silence. You think very quietly about shooting stars, burning up on entry. The air displacement at the front that makes them glow. You think once you had another name for that, the glow. You think it used to be more than just white. 

There’s a laugh, a tragic sort of thing. “We may just be. It’s true, Stardust here was less than thrilled that I caught them, I suppose.” 

Your words return, shaky and weak. “That’s not—” 

Isa’s face is hard, blank. The light in his eyes is luminous, though. He grits his teeth, the bolt of his jaw harsh and steady for a long pause of nothing, not looking at you but at Loop. Harsher and more serious than you’ve ever seen him. The moment passes, and you know he’s understood. 

You freeze. That wasn’t— you don’t— 

Isa’s eyes are on yours, he’s leaning down again. His hand slips out of yours, but he’s right there, radiating sun out at you from all directions. The harshness falls entirely away leaving only soft, worried, tender edges the way you know him. 

“Is that. Is that true, Sif?” 

You can’t. There’s nothing. Nothing nothing nothing.

His expression falls. A horrific crest of heartbreak washing over him that makes you panic, makes your hands reach up to— to what. To nothing! You can’t stop this, he knows. He knows. And Loop is, what? Just going to keep ruining this? Keep telling him? 

But this is you, it was all you here. You forgot again, like the trap and the tears and the shields. You’re the one ruining this last thing, this time.

Isa looks down at his hands, they’re trembling. “If… if your friend here is concerned, I… maybe that means I missed something, and I’m sorry, is all. I’m really, really sorry.” 

No, no, it’s never been Isa’s fault. You didn’t want him to know. He wasn’t supposed to ever know, you don’t know what to do with him knowing.

“You wouldn’t—” he tries, helplessly and lost. 

“I think it’s less a matter of if they would,” Loop adds in, sourly. “And rather more if they should continue.” 

Isa looks punched clean through, off kilter. Your heart is snapping in half and plunging into the cold dark center of yourself and freezing over all at once. Loop back, you think. Loop back. 

Loop gives you a sideways look, like they know. Stars, but they’ll just tell him again, won’t they. There’s nowhere to run.

Isa sighs again, shaky and wet. “If you um. If you felt you couldn’t talk to me about it, that’s on me. I will do whatever I need to do, to make sure you trust me next time.” His eyes shoot up to yours, pinning you all the way through and then some with the weight. “But I’m here, okay? And I don’t want you to be upset or hurting and not tell me. I want you here with us, the way M’dame and Bonbon and Mira all do, too. There’s no one I’d trust more at the end of the world, you got that? There’s no world to save without you in it.”

There’s no possible way this is happening, you think you must be dreaming but all of your dreams have gone sour, too. 

“Isa,” you try. 

You’re not spinning off, you’re heavy and layered and stuck tight right under all the hurt but it’s surrounding you all at once with noise. You feel weak under it all. Impossibly pressed by gravity beyond yourself, like the black hole has left you and moved right into the open air between you both. 

Touch me, you think. Because his hand has left yours and he’s keeping his distance, and you’ve never actually thought to ask before, but your words keep getting pulled right along with the stars into the pit beside you. 

You shake your head helplessly. You’ll be lost again, pulled right back under with the waves, if he doesn’t— 

A hand circles your wrist gingerly. Your lungs expand, contract.

Oh, you breathe. 

Loop stands beside you, looking away angrily. Hand perfectly looped around your wrist. This is real, then, because. Someone is here with you. Someone’s always been here with you. 

“Yeah, it’s real, Sif. Okay? It’s real. You’re with me, and your friend here. And we’ve got you, right? You don’t have to hurt on your own, I promise. We can take it from you, bud.” 

It should hurt, you think. But then— Isa isn’t touching you. And you still feel so warm. And the warm is loud, and it’s heavy and overwhelming and it does hurt, but it’s. Yours. Your palms don’t itch, the masks fade. 

Loop isn’t looking at you, their hand doesn’t move. A perfect circle, right there, around the rapid thrum of your heart beat. Nowhere to run at all, only to go forward through it. 

It hurts, but you think you might be tired of it hurting for once. 

“I think.” You swallow. Roughly. “I think I need some help.” 

EPILOGUE

You stare at your hand. Curling your fingers in until you make a fist, until the light of your bones shows through your pale skin, and: release. Faint imprints like dark moons, a neat row of dark where your nails pressed in. 

Long lifeline, someone once told you. You no longer remember their face. 

There’s a scar, just there. A faint sliver of something across the thick of your thumb. You’d gotten that somewhere lost in the House apparently, although you’re not sure when. Things had gotten a little… fuzzy, for a while. You think you must have grabbed for the glass again, more instinct than anything, when you stopped being able to tell where your hands and teeth were. 

It’s been a while since everything happened. You’re managed to furl your edges back inside yourself at least, after laying everything out in the most painful and agonizing series of conversations you’ve ever been forced to sit through. There’d been a lot of crying, hugging, reassuring careful touches, but— you made it through. Defeated the King, broke the loops, came out of it with more instead of less. 

Mira had been especially helpful at the end. Her hands gently in yours and her lips pressed flat and nervous across from you, just as stressed about the concept of being honest as you were. “Feelings are. Hard to say, or. Know? I don’t know mine very well. We can practice together, okay?” 

In the face of everyone else’s gungho forward words heavy approach, maybe it was good to know you weren’t the only one with a clawing wild need to be seen and not known. Maybe it’s helpful to find out that someone as kind and lovely as Mira doesn’t see the stars in her own words either. 

Isa had also been a rock in ways you always knew he was. Picking up on all the meaning between your words, carefully assessing and listening. Sometimes when he looks at you, you feel the names and places of forgotten homes springing up out of the dark in your heart like they’re waiting to be shared. You’re not sure what it means yet, but he tells you that you have time. 

“Sif!” 

You look up. Sunlight bounces off the water in front of you, a dark roll of ripples and fluttering light that makes you squint. You lift a hand to cover your eyes, the other one still buried in the dirt beneath you.

Isa bounds over, grinning wildly and hair in disarray, holding a squirming Bonnie under one arm. “Sif, Bonnie has something to say to you.”

Bonnie stops squirming, falls limp and flat in Isa’s hold. “Sorry I filled your hat with beans because I was mad at your pun.” 

“And?”

Bonnie scrunches up their face. “And. I’ll make you fritters as much as you want for a week.” 

Isa looks at you hopefully. You hum for a second playfully, hovering your hand in the air before tilting it into a thumbs up. Isa plops Bonnie upright on the ground between you both and pats their head. “See! Nice words, good job BonBon.” 

They cross their arms, kicking at a tuft of grass. You lean over conspiratorially, stage whispering. “It was pretty un-bean-lievable.” 

“No!” Bonnie yells, outraged, lurching forward and stopping. Even in the pits of rage, they’re the sweetest, always checking. You give them a slow nod. 

Bonnie tackles you, all rocket no finesse. “No, no no! No more words from you! You use them for evil!” 

Your vision is entirely flailing limbs for a moment until you can scoop your hands under Bonnie’s armpits and tickle them back. Which involves more flailing and screaming. 

“Jeeze, you guys,” Isa laughs. 

“Is siblicide being considered?” You hear Odile ask dryly. 

“On my watch, M’dame? You wound me!” 

“You are quite literally just standing here, watching, Isabeau.” 

“Got me there.”

Neither of them move in to save Bonnie at all, and Bonbon shrieks with rage at the betrayal. Or would, if you were not poking them repeatedly in the sides and turning their outrage into a round of giggling. 

“No!” Bonnie squeaks, slapping at you ineffectively. You decide to let them up, purely out of the kindness of your heart rather than because they’ve earned their freedom. You pat them on the head. Bonnie scrambles up to their feet instantly, leaning down with their hands on their feet and a pout on their face. Something in their eyes still looks vaguely worried, though, which isn’t allowed. 

You wink at them. “Fritters sound great, Bonbon.” 

They huff, and poke you once in the chest. “Good! I’ll make so much you’ll barf!” 

“Okay!” Mira calls, “The picnic is ready everyone!” 

Isa reaches his hand out towards you, smiling widely. The sun streams across the side of his face, making his eyes twinkle at you— stars, it’s all stars. For once, thinking of them doesn’t make you yearn for anything more than being right here. 

You take his hand, and let him pull you to your feet.

“Do you think they got those cheeses again?” Isa asks.

You shrug. Odile pauses the book she’s reading to hum thoughtfully. “Well, our dear Mirabelle did say she was ‘pulling out all the stops’ for the venue, whatever that entails. Something about giving Petronile and our new friends a full welcome to the party celebration?” 

“Not without me!” Bonnie gasps. “I’m the snack leader, no snacks without me!” 

Isa pats them on the shoulder, looping his other arm lightly around your shoulders. “I’m sure they only bought the ingredients expecting you to make something super cool, Bonbon.” 

Bonnie huffs, and breaks off into a run ahead. “I’ll just make sure!” 

You laugh, and lean ever so slightly into Isa’s warmth at your side. It’s. Nice, really. To be full of enough warmth on your own, that this can just be that: nice. 

“Should I warn them?” You ponder, looking up at Isa. He’s blushing slightly, surprisingly, and takes a second to register your question. 

“Oh, that Loop’s got that thing about cheese?” He hums dramatically, looking up at the clear sky. “Nah. It’s not like they’ll actually tell them.” 

It’s true. If there’s one thing you know about this strange new dynamic you’re stumbling into, is that Bonbon has Loop wrapped entirely around their finger. You’re not sure how that happened— it was a long, difficult few months of convincing and arguing, and one memorable ‘fight to the death turned crying session’ to even convince Loop to talk to any of them. The moment Bonnie had grabbed Loop’s hand though and very loudly shouted ‘thank you for making sure Frin was okay’, you saw it shift. The flicker of their light, the re-orbit. 

They’d always understood you, after all. You wish you could have told them that they were always warm on their own, too. 

Silly, really. That Loop had ever thought they wouldn’t fit in right here with everyone as easy as anything else. 

Your palm itches— you pull at Isa’s arm until he drops it to his side, and slide your hand into his. Locking your fingers together, you breathe. In and out. 

You’re out, the stage is gone. It’s just you and the people that loved you loud enough to pull you through with them. A home to make somewhere new, and somewhere you bring with you.

“Here’s to tomorrow, hm?” You say. You think you mean it. Isn’t that a funny thought?

[zeldareference]

☆ molly (zelda/zelref also works!), 16, any pronouns, mexican !!

I post mostly abt undertale/au's rn, but i will also post fanart of different fandoms sometimes, most likely loz :)

i tag all my drawings "#zelref art" if u wanna skip my reblogs ^_^ !!

i tag all my rants "#zelref rant" if u js wanna see what i have to say *_* !!

my art requests r open!! i’ve been busy with school lately and i also have a bit of a queue right now which means that i probably wont get to ur request immediately, but i will eventually!!

i do not (and will not) draw any nsfw, but i might draw suggestive sometimes if i think its funny enough LMAO

also, apparently i need to say this?!?? but frans shippers r NOT welcome here!! like at all 😭!!!

-> my fav ut au's r underfell, horrortale, and farmtale!

-> my fav zelda games r ocarina of time and wind waker

-> my fav links r sky, wind, and warriors

-> my fav song is (currently) Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)

⭒ some other things im into r: loz (obviously), tmnt (2012 mostly), batman (comics), alnst, house md, fma:b, hollow knight, earthbound, and pmmm

⭒ some music i like is: moe shop, maretu, kikuo, molotov, pink floyd, korn, machine girl, maximum the hormone, t+pazolite, and uhh pretty much anything nightcore!!

⋆ on twitter and discord under the same @!! (i dont post anything on twitter anymore tho)

i use ibis paint x to draw!! my brushes r:

sketch: ruling pen

lineart: love pen (thickness of start 53%)

color: felt tip pen (hard)

"to quiet my fears i'll drown in you." - w 🫶

[chilling-seavey]

With or Without You (ob87)

↳ Timeless: F1 Grid Masterlist

↳ Summary: The mall food court is the place to be after classes and university freshman, Ollie, finds his groove right in with the crowd.

↳ Title Song: With or Without You by U2 (1987)

↳ Word Count: 883

↳ A/N: The final Timeless blurb <3

↳ Warnings: None

August 1987

The sounds of the arcade echoed through the room, machines clanging and games ringing, the radio playing the top rock hits through speakers while guests spoke loudly to be heard over top of all the noise. In the centre of it all, Oliver stood shoulder to shoulder with his friends, positioned at the one of the arcade game consoles in the centre of the neon lit room. The four of them watched him carefully as he maneuvered the joystick of the arcade game, fingers darting out to smash down on the buttons here and there. His tongue poked out the side of his mouth just a little, eyebrows furrowed, ignorant to the noise of the mall as he focused on beating his high score. 

“Come on, Ollie…” one of his friends muttered under his breath, eyes glued to the pixels. 

“Almost there…” another mumbled. 

With a flick of the joystick and two more quick presses of the buttons, the machine played a triumphant sound and the screen filled with a box reading ‘YOU WIN!’. The group of friends burst into cheers and Oliver was given high fives and claps on the back in celebration. It had been a whole year or more of him trying to beat the high score at the mall arcade and it only took until their last day of freedom to actually succeed in doing just that.

“Oh, yes!” Oliver laughed, clutching his chest in relief as he tilted his head back towards the ceiling of the arcade. “Finally!”

Clapping him on the back, another friend asked, “Celebratory lunch at the food court, then?”

The group made their way out of the arcade and into the hallways of the mall. Strangers bustled to and fro with hands full of shopping bags, many mothers being trailed by school-age children shopping for back-to-school or teenagers, just like Ollie’s group, making the most of the last days of summer. The five of them meandered along the tiled floors, their excited voices being carried up to the sky-light lined roof of the mall and earning a few glares from older patrons. 

One of Oliver’s friends, despite being inside, hadn’t parted with her roller skates and was skating circles around the group while she shared in their conversation on their way to the food court. When she got herself dizzy, she looped her arm in Oliver’s and he half-dragged her alongside him the rest of the way. He didn’t mind. He would do anything for his friends…even drag them a mile. 

The group always went to the same fast food restaurant in the mall every time they visited, filling up the queue with their rambunctious teenage selves. Oliver ordered first, selecting his favourite hamburger and milkshake from the menu above the counter, making sure to be extra polite to the university-age employee who looked like they, frankly, wanted to be anywhere else but there at that moment. He passed the employee his cash and waited for change and even dropped some money in the tip jar just because he felt generous. 

Across the crowded food court, they found a table for four and Oliver sat on the edge as the extra man out. They dug into their meals and spoke about the arcade and Oliver’s impressive feat in beating the high score. 

“Sucks we won’t be able to add to the new record now that we’re going off to college.” one of the boys said through a mouthful of fries.

“Well, we’ll be back,” Oliver shrugged, “this is our hometown, after all. Our parents are here and stuff.”

One of the girls’ straw slurped dramatically at the end of her Orange Julius and she wiggled her straw around as she answered with a naive shrug, “We’ll be friends forever, anyway.”

“You’re not worried?” someone asked her.

“Don’t you remember that blood pact we did in freshman year?” she rolled her eyes, “We’re bound together now. Obviously.”

Oliver smiled into his milkshake.

There seemed to be a moment's pause at their table before another friend spoke up, “We’re all going off to university now, studying our own stuff, but where do you think we’ll be in 40 years?”

Oliver answered without thought, “Happy, hopefully.”

The truth of his claim settled over them for a moment, the reality that growing up into adulthood made everything feel possible; whatever aspirations or ideas they had were theirs and theirs alone to bring to life. There were generations before them of young adults just like them and there would be generations after them with the same dreams. Whatever background, decade, or way of life, humans were connected by internal drive to live. 

Oliver could only hope that maybe someday he would live enough to keep his name in the whispers of time for decades to come. 

Then, suddenly, breaking them out of their reflective state, their rollerskate friend jumped up, stumbling only slightly, “Ah, I have to go to Radio Shack before we leave! Told my dad I’d pick up something for him.”

The friends started to pack up their mess from the food court table with excited chatter at the mention of another journey across the mall.

Oliver hopped off the table with his milkshake in hand and offered a grinning, "What would we do without Radio Shack?"

♡ Enjoying my content? Support my writing here :)

♡ None of the original writing on this blog may be reproduced, reposted, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

[bigtreefest]

Happy Hoelloween! 🎃❤️ Please accept this lil hoe treat just for you:

It looks like he’s had a hard day and needs one of your sweet treats to turn his frown upside down. Hope you’re up for it, because he sure is 🍆😘

A Well-deserved Treat

Pairing: Curtis Everett x Reader (modern AU)

Summary: After a long day, you know exactly what Curtis needs

Word count: 729

Content/warnings: 18+ ONLY, MINORS DNI, grunty Curtis, grumpy Curtis, nonverbal Curtis, soapy handjob, shower, Curtis’s beautiful naked body

A/N: Hehehe, happy Hoelloween, Siri!! A sweet treat, indeed!! Thank you so much for sending this in. Sorry it’s a little bit after Halloween, but I think this kind of slowed-down comfort is what we need right now. My poor Curty having a hard day? The least I can do is take care of him when he always does the same for me!!!

Thank you all for reading! Comments, reblogs, and asks are sooooo appreciated.

Dividers by @strangergraphics

Main Masterlist

Curled up on the couch queueing up all the scary movies you had planned to watch for the night, you heard his truck pull into the driveway. Curtis was finally home, and it was much later than you both had anticipated.

On most days, he was gone before the sunrise, that part wasn’t new. But early hours usually meant an early return unless something went wrong at the shop. And judging by the way the sun was well below set in the sky and you were already on your second bowl of candy for the trick-or-treaters, something went really wrong.

The door closed a little harder than usual, although Curtis was careful not to slam it. Based off of that, he didn’t seem angry about the day, but most definitely annoyed at the very least.

You turned to greet him, but he was already gone, the faint sound of him toeing off his boots filling the hallway along with his jingling belt buckle. He was probably going to take a shower to wash the day away, which was a good idea. That always calmed him a little, but he probably needed even more than that.

Curtis was probably going to take a bit of a longer shower, too, but you didn’t want to waste time. You moved quickly to throw the blanket off of you, grabbing the bowl of candy and setting it on the doormat for kids to help themselves. Your man needed you.

You ran quickly with your socked feet faintly sliding on the wooden floors, grateful you had already closed the windows earlier as you shucked off pieces of clothing one by one, leaving a trail.

Once you got to the bathroom door, Curtis was already under the water, simply standing there and letting it rush over him, a faint frown on his face. His hulking shoulders rose and fell steadily with his even breathing which was interrupted as you stepped into his space.

Curtis’s eyes blinked open, his long eyelashes catching droplets of water. Your heart sunk a little, seeing the clear exhaustion in his features as you reached up, your hands gently cupping his jaw, beard lightly scratching your palms.

“Hi, honey,” you whispered just above the sound of rushing water. He simply sighed and gave a grunt in response. Curtis had used his voice too much today, barking orders and corrections around the shop, dealing with more than his fair share of customers. Words were not something he wanted to produce right now, and he was so happy you could see that with the sympathetic smile that you flashed him.

Without a second thought, you knew exactly what you needed to do, reaching to the side and grabbing a dollop of body wash. You lathered it between your hands before pressing them against his firm pecs, rubbing in small circles. You moved outward across the broad expanse of his chest, watching his eyes flutter shut and his head tilt backwards in ecstasy.

You worked your way downward, over the hair of his chest and the ridges of his abs until you came upon the thatch of hair just above where he was starting to grow hard. The relaxation and care you were showing him was enough to do that, and after the kind of day he had, be needed a release.

You reached your soapy hand for his shaft, slowly pumping his length. You were startled as Curtis’s hand shot out and slapped the shower wall, his chin falling to his sternum as his breaths began to pick up. You could hear them huffing out of his nose. He watched the way you expertly twisted your wrist, slightly tentative since he still hadn’t spoken yet.

Curtis’s head slowly rose, his pupils blown with pleasure looking at you through his eyelashes. From the sight of his lust and need to feel good taking over, you got distracted, lost in his gaze. You didn’t even realize your hold weakening, your rhythm faltering until his large hand clasped over yours, helping you squeeze him and move faster.

Finally, Curtis’s lips broke their seal with a small gasp. His chest rumbled in a way that sent a shiver through you despite the warm water. His voice came out in a low growl, one you couldn’t ever bring yourself to deny.

“That’s it. Give me what I need.”

Bonus A/N: Gimme that beast of a man. Lemme shower him in affection and wash off that grime in an actual shower🫣

Taglist: @hawkeyes-queen @ronearoundblindly @mercurial-chuckles @steviebbboi

[usergif]

RESOURCE DIRECTORY 2.0 + HOW TO NAVIGATE USERGIF

Hello! We hit 10k followers! I want to take this moment to thank all our wonderful followers and the talented members of usergif! We created this blog less than 2 years ago and are constantly blown away by your support and beautiful creations. As a thank-you, we're proud to announce our new and improved resource directory!!! Shout out to arithemes' custom page which allowed us to create a more streamlined and organized directory for everyone to use. Under the cut, you'll find a guide to help you find exactly the resource you're looking for on our blog. Happy gifmaking! :)

THE UPDATED DIRECTORY

All resources are in alphabetical order first by the creator's URL (at the time of entry), then by the resource's title. Each title is a clickable link that'll redirect you to the original post. Beneath that, you'll find the creator's URL and the resource's relevant filter tags:

As always, whenever I add new entries to the directory, you'll see the last date listed on the right side of the blog here:

If you don't see one of your recent tutorials listed there, please be patient. I update the directory on a monthly basis, but only add resources that have already exited our queue.

THE FILTERS

Please note: the Source section has exclusive filters, meaning you can only select one at a time. In the Type and Effects sections, you can select as many filters as you want. However, if you select 2 filters in one section, like "animated" and "blending," it'll show results for any resource with either of those tags, not necessarily resources that include both of those tags.

Here's a breakdown of how we categorize our resources:

Source: ↳ all: posted by any creator ↳ usergif: posted by usergif

Type: ↳ all: click this to reset filter selections ↳ action: pre-recorded photoshop functions that can be replayed ↳ basics: non-effects-related resources to help new gifmakers get their feet off the ground (please remember usergif is not a resource for beginner-level gifs and focuses on intermediate to advanced gif effects. however, we thought it would be helpful to keep some basic resources available) ↳ brush: various brush shapes like ripped paper edges or intricate textures ↳ fonts: names and links to fonts or font packs ↳ template: pre-made, downloadable layouts and designs ↳ texture: overlays that add a different finish to a gif such as Ben Day dots (retro comic dots) or glitter ↳ tutorial: any post that provides an explanation for a gif effects process ↳ other

Effect: ↳ all: click this to reset filter selections ↳ animated: an effect that applies movement to an element such as rotating text or wiggling shapes ↳ blending: aka double exposure, this effect combines two or more gifs layered on top of each other ↳ color: specifically for color manipulation, an effect in which the original colors are completely different (e.g. a blue sky colored to look pink) ↳ glitch: an effect where color channels are toggled and layered over the original gif to give a flickering effect ↳ layout: multiple gifs on one canvas like a collage (e.g. hexagon layout) or poster-style templates ↳ overlay: an added element layered above a gif (excluding text) such as a shape, another gif confined to a shape, a texture, etc. ↳ transition: an effect that stylizes the passage from one scene/clip into another, such as a fade, glitch, linear wipe, or motion blur transition ↳ typography: any kind of stylized text added over a gif (does not include basic captions)

You can find examples of all these gif effects via their respective tags on our Nav!

THE SEARCH BAR

This search bar functions the same way as the search bar in the upper right corner of our main blog and the search function on Tumblr's mobile app.

Tumblr search allows you to generate results using keywords found in the body of the post or the tags. So, if you're looking for a post but can only remember it having the word "rotoscoping," you can type that in either in the directory's search or blog's search and find any post on our blog that mentions the exact keyword "rotoscoping."

THE NAV & TAGS

Tags function differently from search keywords as these relate to exact words and phrases found only in the tags, not the body of the post. Our members use tags to categorize original posts and reblogs. Some of our most frequently used tags are listed on our Navigation Page and saved in the mobile search function pictured below:

But if you ever want to quickly navigate a tag, simply add /tagged/word to the end of our url to find that tag! For example, if you want to see all the posts we've tagged as a #tutorial, just go to usergif.tumblr.com/tagged/tutorial.

BROKEN LINKS

Whether it's due to a creator frequently changing their url, the absence of an automatic blog redirect, or my own mistakes when coding the directory — you may stumble upon a broken link. Here's what to do:

If a creator has changed their username but their blog doesn't automatically redirect you to the new blog, check if they listed their new user name in the title of their old blog like I did:

In this case, simply replace the url you landed on with this new url. For example, https://sith-maul.tumblr.com/post/692130400398704640/how-to-make-an-animated-google-search-overlay-a → would become → https://cal-kestis.tumblr.com/post/692130400398704640/how-to-make-an-animated-google-search-overlay-a

However, if you can't figure out the creator's new url or in the case that I messed up the link due to human error, feel free to send us a message so I can help find the source or correct the mistake!

WHERE TO FIND THIS INFO AGAIN

If you ever need to access this guide while using the directory, simply click the "i" button here:

And that's it! We hope this revamped directory is a lot more efficient and helpful. Thank you again for all your support and for helping us reach this follower milestone!

[bbnibini]

You, Over the World (Solomon)

So, I wasn't satisfied with the “snow” entry in the 9days of Solomon challenge and always intended to write another fic in the challenge outside of the continuing narrative I was working on, but life had plans and I ran out of time so I dedicate this oneshot to its wonderful organiser @impish-ivy. I switched out “humanity” for “the world” in the repeating dialogues cause it sounded more dramatic lol but this should have been an entry for ‘humanity’.  If the vibes are familiar, I was thinking a lot about Frieren while writing this. :))

“Would you choose the world over me?”

He mutters a yes over the verdant foliage, amongst the spring flowers that bloomed over melted snow. He says it again as he traced the petals with his fingers, his memories simmering in the past—your understanding eyes, smiling and unwavering, as if he were waiting for you to say something else. 

He held his breath,

“Would you choose the world over me?”

…and he says yes again under the shade of an umbrella overlooking the horizon. He squints his eyes against the hot air blowing on his face. The unchanging view he once saw with you became unrecognisable. The sky was blue as always; the summer sun, hot and cruel as he buried his feet under the warm sand—he strained his ears to listen to your stories, but even a whisper of them had been lost in time—the weight of his choice carried away by the thrashing waves. The world over you. “The greater good”. The “logical” choice that even you understood that he had to make. He thinks this over and over until the cicadas had stopped crying, and the punishing heat of the sun hid itself away to welcome a cool, moonless sky. 

With nothing but his thoughts to occupy him, he walks towards the ocean again. Aimlessly, almost dragging his feet, until he heard the currents, the salty air welcoming him as his feet touched the seawater. He hated everything about it, but he couldn't get you it off his mind–he should not even care anymore. He never cared. Everything that carried a piece of you is seafoam dissolving in the tides, and your memories were nothing but a ghost haunting him in the night.

“Would you choose the world over me?”

He was at a loss for words as he remembered the question again when a leaf fell on his face, waking him up from an unplanned nap. He was never the earliest riser. Mornings to him were nothing but extra hours of sleep, but he found himself there again despite the absence of…everything. The busy crowds haggling for bargains—cinnamon and nutmeg and the falling leaves. Your hands were on his face, slapping him gently on his cheeks to rouse him from his slumber. Your voice was admonishing yet sweet.

It's gone too, I suppose. 

He thought to himself as he waited for a flea market in the forgotten park, with nothing but the dents on the pavement and fading paint telling him that it was actually there. Years ago, maybe. Relocated somewhere else. Why didn't he bother to know? He did remember a stall there that he frequented with you. A kind stranger told him they have a whole chain of restaurants now; sold to a big company after the original owner’s passing. The orange leaves crunched beneath him as he left to take another train, waiting for hours on the queue to be seated.

He ordered your favourite.

But it didn't taste anything like it. 

The texture was off. Something was wrong with the taste. It was too hot and too cold at the same time. That couldn't be right, so he tried again and ordered his usual but it tasted even weirder: an amalgamation of textures and flavours that barely paid homage to its humble roots. And he wasn't even much of a gourmet. 

He left, letting his eyes linger on the seated crowd: their blissful faces obviously enjoying their meal. He sighs.

“Would you choose the world over me?”

Everything was grey; the orange and yellows and reds were being buried in the cold drafts. He asks you to close the door, only to be reminded that Cocytus Hall was nothing but ruins now; earth and dust. Rotting foundations and leaking ceilings. Seen better days. 

“Why have you chosen the world over me?”

He didn't know. What should he have answered you? The more time passed, the more it felt as if the hours had gotten slower and slower. His youthful face was a painful reminder of an eternity waiting for him. There was an aching that lingered in his chest that never went away. The view from outside was pure white. A light fog formed on the window as he breathed out and drew faces. He had many thoughts, but most were barely comprehensible, mangling into static noise. He stared into the distance. 

It must be a beautiful day. It was warmer than a usual December, and the view from outside was breathtaking. Didn't he just  make a breakthrough in his research? The Demon Prince and his butler are set to arrive in a day to honour his contributions…or something like that. He wasn't sure. It was a feat that his academic peers envied greatly, for he had yet again proven why he was called “The Wise”. 

.

.

.

.

.

Never “The Heartful.” Not even discerning. He closed his eyes and drifted to sleep. There, he saw you. 

“Cheer up, Solomon!”

A gloved hand that took his own. There was a question lingering in his mind as you walked through the thick snow. 

“Would you let me choose the world over you?”

He couldn't remember your face. He had imagined the scenes in his head so many times, and it only worsened every cold winter he had to spend on his own.

But he had no choice.

Company was all but warm bodies that didn't seep into his soul. They laced fingers with him and whispered sweet words, but he was a phantom whose presence they couldn't even touch. 

He was barely there or anywhere. See-through and paper-thin; deaf to kindness even in the face of sincerity. He remembered caring more, maybe a century ago, when he could still count the numbers of your fading presence with his fingers. But now…

…he saw you walking away again, so he pulled you back into his arms where you fit perfectly.

Where dreams were his only comfort. Where centuries and aeons felt like minutes ago, and the entire world that remained at your loss had any semblance of meaning. He held your face and pressed your lips on his, hoping all of what he couldn't say would reach you, 

“I wish I didn't.”

…even if it's too late.

[blitzwhore]

For the kiss prompts, could you do one of these? Like, whichever you like best or whatever: 31, 48, 56, 59

56. Angry kisses

Stolitz | 1.2k | T | fluff and humor, bickering, flustered Blitz, Stolas is a tease, idiots in love

On AO3

“Seriously?!” Blitz exclaimed. “Caramel?”

“What?” Stolas blinked down at him. “What’s wrong with caramel?”

“What’s wrong with—” Blitz pressed his fingers to his temples, aghast. “I can’t fucking believe this. I’m dating someone who asks for caramel on their ice cream.”

The imp behind the stall gave them both a weary look, which only Stolas caught, because Blitz was, it seemed, too busy questioning his every life choice. 

“I like caramel,” Stolas said, confused—but mostly endeared—by Blitz’s antics. “It tastes nice.” 

“Of course you like caramel.” Blitz raised his gaze to the sky, as though begging Lucifer himself for mercy. “Honestly, I don’t know what I expected. You had to have something wrong with you, no one can be perfect.”

Stolas was handed his ice cream, and, after Blitz paid for both their orders, they moved out of the way of the queue and stood under the shadow of a big palm tree.

“So you think I’m perfect, hmm?” Stolas teased, dipping the plastic spoon in his ice cream and tasting it with a smirk.

Blitz, who was shoving his tongue right into his ball of stracciatella covered with tiny marshmallows, glared up at him. “Of course not,” he said through a mouthful, then swallowed. “You like fucking caramel on your ice cream.” 

“I see.” Stolas’ smirk widened. “And tell me, darling, have you tried this combination before? Since you’re judging it oh so harshly.”

“I-I—” Blitz’s tail twitched and his eyes widened somewhat. “Of course I have!” he said a bit too quickly for it to sound convincing.

Stolas chuckled. He took Blitz’s free hand in his and guided them to a low rock wall a few steps ahead, right by the pier, where they could watch the boats as they swayed gently with the dark, glistening waves. 

“Is that so?” Stolas asked as he sat down, Blitz doing the same next to him. Stolas leaned down and whispered, close to Blitz’s cheek, “And would you try it again just for me?”

Blitz grimaced, giving Stolas the most disgusted expression in the world. He opened his mouth, clearly about to express how much he was not willing to do that, but Stolas cut him off with an innocent, “And here I thought you’d do anything for me…” He made sure to give Blitz his best puppy eyes, too, just for good measure. 

Blitz's resolve cracked delightfully quickly.

“You sly bitch,” Blitz grumbled, a faint blush tinting his cheeks. Stolas thumbed at Blitz's cheekbone appreciatively. He couldn’t help it—he loved making Blitz just the tiniest bit flustered.

“I’ll even try yours too to make it up to you,” Stolas said, and, cradling Blitz’s cheek to keep him in place, he ran his tongue over the corner of Blitz’s mouth, where a bit of ice cream had gotten stuck.

“Fuck,” Blitz cursed under his breath, so easily worked up from the barest of touches. “Okay, fine. What the hell. I’ll do it. But if I puke on you, you had it coming,” he said, pointing an accusatory finger at Stolas. 

“Fair,” Stolas conceded.

Carefully, he fed a very reluctant Blitz a spoonful of ice cream with plenty of caramel, giggling at the appalled expression that twisted Blitz’s pretty face as he tasted it, his eyes squeezing shut and his mouth scrunching up in a grimace. 

Blitz swallowed, and then, still frowning at the aftertaste, slowly blinked his eyes back open.

“Was it so terrible, dearest?” Stolas asked with a mischievous smile.

Blitz didn’t answer for a couple of seconds, his frown—as well as the tip of his tail—twitching adorably with discomposure.

“Um,” Blitz mumbled. “Fuck.”

Stolas grinned. “Well?” he asked, eating another spoonful of his ice cream.

“It was…” Blitz looked pointedly away, avoiding Stolas’ smug expression. “Less gross than I was expecting,” he admitted with a grumble.

Stolas hummed. Bumped Blitz’s knee playfully with his. “So you liked it.”

Blitz shot him a murderous glare. “First of all, fuck you,” he snapped back, shoving Stolas’ shoulder, which only made Stolas’ smile widen. “It was alright, ‘kay? No need to get your bird puss wet over it. Fucking dick.” He muttered that last part, taking another bite of his own ice cream. 

Delighted, Stolas nuzzled Blitz’s cheek with his beak. 

“It’s okay to admit you liked it, darling. I won’t judge,” he teased with a murmur.

“Fucking hell,” Blitz said under his breath. “Fine! I liked it. It was good. You have good taste in ice cream. There, happy?”

“Mm. Very much so,” Stolas said, pleased beyond words by this turn of events.

Blitz went to take another bite of his ice cream, but faltered. He eyed Stolas, who watched, amused, as Blitz debated with himself before angrily placing the small paper container on the wall by his side. A second later, Stolas, whose mouth was full of ice cream, was suddenly bracketed between Blitz’s arms as Blitz crawled atop him on all fours.

“Oh,” was all Stolas had time to utter before Blitz buried a hand in his hair feathers and brought their mouths together, kissing him deeply and tasting the caramel right off his tongue. Stolas’ surprised moan seemed to spur Blitz on, who straddled his lap and kissed him deeper still, unbothered by the people walking past them on the promenade. 

“Stupid fucking bird,” Blitz said against his lips, and kissed him again. “You’re exasperating, you know that? Of course your ice cream tastes better than mine.” Another kiss. “It wasn’t enough for you to be this fucking tall and sexy and soft,” he rambled with annoyance, burying his free hand in Stolas’ chest feathers, which were in full display between the open buttons of his crop top shirt. “You also had to have the best fucking taste in ice cream in all of Hell. Satan’s ass crack. You are perfect. Shit.”

When Blitz kissed him again, Stolas grabbed one of Blitz’s horns and kissed him fervently back. He reached back blindly and placed his own ice cream on the wall behind him so he could sneak his other hand under Blitz’s shirt and caress the sensitive area between his back spines. 

It was Blitz’s turn to groan into the kiss, his tail curling around Stolas’ arm, no doubt to keep those fingers on him. Not that Stolas was planning on moving them away. Blitz pushed roughly at his chest as he deepened the kiss again, and Stolas leaned back, lost in the wonderful caramel taste of Blitz’s mouth. 

And then he lost balance.

“Oh dear—” He moved his hand back to stop himself from falling and knocked over his ice cream. Blitz plunged forward, but, in trying to catch it before it fell, kicked his leg up and toppled his own ice cream, which flew into the sea just as Stolas’ clattered loudly on the promenade pavement.

For a bewildered moment, they both watched as Stolas’ ice cream, with all its delicious caramel, spilled and melted all over the hot stone while Blitz's ice cream drifted away.

Their eyes met.

“...” 

“...”

“Two plain ice creams with caramel topping, please!” Blitz said cheerfully to the exasperated imp behind the stall as Stolas hooted gleefully by his side.

—

(On AO3)

[raccoonfallsharder]

boring meeting scribble time

a couple lil pieces inspired by @hadesinsane

most raccoons have the instinct to swim and even enjoy it, but i suspect all of rocket's augmentations weigh him down in the water. to make a raccoon body stand and move like a human body requires so many pins and plates, new bones, osteotomies. but when we see lylla in vol 3, it really looks like only her arms have been altered (as far as her skeletal/muscular system goes), and otters don't appear to use their arms much for swimming. i like to believe she retains her aquatic abilities.

in another universe, a kinder timeline, i like to think lylla survives. maybe she and rocket escape at the same time, or they find each other later. she has a little den on a nicer part of morag, or aladna, or tarka. i like to think she convinces him to wade in the shallow water while she plays, and teases him for looking like a drowned f'saki when his fur gets all wet (because lets face it, otter-fur withstands the water a little better than raccoon-fur). but afterward, even though he’s so much bigger than her now, she curls him up in her arms like he's just a little baby otter pup, and floats him on her belly while they watch the clouds or doze under the stars, and the sky is beautiful and forever above them.

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raccoon dividers by @/thecutestgrotto fairylight dividers by @/saradika-graphics