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kieron-oduibhir · 4 days

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For the meme: Naruto, nursing home au, accidentally kidnapping a mafia boss please?

i want you to know this made me make such a delighted expression at the sheer nonsense i was forced to explain it to my parents.

decided that in keeping with the spirit of a high school AU the main character generation had to be the geriatric ones just to cut down the sheer variety of options this challenge left me choosing between a;slfafsjl;kfsd. i think this is actually my first ever naruto fic?

Orochimaru stood stock-still, stiff with outrage as soda fizzed out through the bullet hole running clean through the can in his hand. "They're shooting at us! Why are we being shot at?"

"Go go go go go," said Tsunade, kicking him in the heels so he'd get moving back to the van. Honestly!

"Jiraiya!" Orochimaru shouted as the two of them slammed the doors behind them and Jiraiya peeled out of the rest stop with a scream of tires. "Why are we being shot at?!"

"I don't know! Why would I know!"

"This whole operation was your idea."

"It was not! Ask the geezers!"

"Hrrnnnn...shweeeoooo," said one of the two old men, apparently sleeping straight through both the sound of gunfire and Jiraiya's driving--in the rearview mirror they could be seen slumped into one another; Tsunade was glad of the assurance that at least one of them wasn't dead, at this point. Past them, the featureless black humvees could be seen resuming pursuit, though thankfully not yet shooting ahead through traffic like something from a movie. They were definitely all going too fast.

Tsunade punched Orochimaru in the shoulder because punching Jiraiya at interstate speeds could kill them all. "Put on your seatbelt!"

Her phone lit up, buzzing menacingly with Haruno-sensei's ID for the tenth time today. Tsunade seriously considered answering it. She would be getting yelled at, and probably fired, but Haruno-sensei might explain the men with guns.

She punched 'answer' instead of 'decline.' "Sensei!"

"Put those fools back where they came from or so help me...!"

"Sensei they're shooting at us!"

"Sasuke!" Haruno-sensei's voice rose to a shriek. "Put down the gun!"

Tsunade checked over her shoulder as though she thought her boss could see into the van somehow, but Uchiha-san was still sleeping like the dead. Hopefully just 'like.' If he had had a gun to Tsunade's head she would no longer have been surprised.

"No," she tried to explain. "Sensei, there's--we're in a car chase, somehow...?"

Before Haruno-sensei could give her advice about this, Jiraiya had slammed on the brakes so hard Tsunade's phone went flying from her hand. Fortunately, everyone was wearing seatbelts. "Jiraiya!" Tsunade coughed, trying to simultaneously see why they'd stopped and if the two old men had broken any ribs, and consequently learning nothing at all. "What the fuck?"

They were, somehow, surrounded. Tsunade wasn't sure whether the vehicles closing them in in front had just gotten ahead of Jiraiya or abused the police-only U-turn cut-ins to come from the opposide direction and cut them off, but all three lanes were blocked in both directions. Warning lights were blinking. Honking from a growing traffic jam behind floated over the scene.

Out of the Humvee that had most directly cut them off climbed a figure with shock-white hair, an eye patch, and a surgical mask over his face--he was either very well preserved or younger than the clients Tsunade was used to seeing with hair like that. There was an assault rifle slung across his back and a weird little gun in his hand.

"A taser?" Orochimaru muttered, as though he was offended by the downgrade to nonlethal weaponry.

"Even if we'd survive it, the geezers' hearts wouldn't," Jiraiya hissed back, and pointedly raised both hands over his head. Which would hardly stop him from stomping on the gas and slamming into the man, but Tsunade put her hands up too.

"You have til the count of ten to get out of the vehicle and down on the ground. One."

"There is no way that's a cop," Jiraiya muttered. He put the van in park, so Tsunade guessed he meant to comply.

"Four."

She opened the passenger-side rolling door beside her. "Give us some extra time, we've got elderly invalids on board!"

"Leave them. Six."

Orochimaru folded his arms and scowled. It was even odds with him whether he was offended by the concept of surrendering or of abandoning their patients. Tsunade bit the inside of her cheek. She climbed carefully out, hoping that at least a small show of compliance would lead the gunmen to hold their fire.

The man with the taser started to advance. Despite the less-lethal weapon Tsunade had no trouble believing he was willing to see her dead. "Nine."

Shitshitshit. "Don't shoot," said Tsunade, measuring the distance and trying to decide if she could dive at him and like, take him hostage without getting tased or provoking fire, or if that would just make things worse. The only practical use she'd ever put her martial arts training to was coralling unruly patients.

"Ehehehe!" The stooped little figure of one of Tsunade's patients hopped stiffly out of the same door she'd just used, stood up as straight as he could, and spread his hands. "My boy!"

What.

The masked man let the taser drop to his side. "Old man." He sounded entirely disgusted.

Uzumaki-jiji cackled. "Foiling my escape attempt in person, are we?"

"You orchestrated this?"

"Of course! What else was I to do when my cute juniors so cruelly locked me away to rot in that prison?"

We do not hit the patients, Tsunade counseled herself. Even when they almost get you killed! This was an important part of training! No hitting patients! At all! Especially not for failing to appreciate the level of care they receive at our top-rated facility!

"You picked it out," said the man in the mask, rubbing the spot between his eyes. The gunmen bristling from the humvees were looking increasingly awkward. The honking from behind was getting louder. "You wanted the social life! You said you wanted to step aside so we could work outside of your shadow!"

"Did I say that?" the old demon was grinning like a loon.

"There were more adjectives in your version. Your super cool shadow. Yondaime."

"Jiraiya what the fucking fuck did you drag us into?" Orochimaru growled from the front passenger's seat.

"Ah! Still calling me Yondaime when I had to arrange my own exfil from Sakura-chan's establishment! Just to celebrate our anniversary at our special spot one last time!" Tsunade did not trust the sentimental hand over the old man's heart one bit.

"Stop telling people we're married," groused Uchiha-san, leaning out the side of the van to take a swipe at the back of Uzumaki's head with his good hand. "They actually believe you these days!"

"That's funnier," said Uzumaki.

Orochimaru made an enraged hissing sound through his teeth and flung the shotgun door open--he had definitely only let Jiraiya drag him into this because he was a sucker for elderly gay love stories and he was not happy he'd been scammed.

He got only one foot on the ground before there was a humming sound and he crumpled. Tsunade sprinted forward but didn't quite break his fall; groped hurriedly to try to find both the wound and a pulse. "Rochi!" Jiraiya yelped, trying to lunge across the vehicle without having unfastened his seatbelt.

"Hold!" rapped out the masked gunman. "Who fired?"

One of the many indistinct shapes attached to the various humvees straightened up, a rifle in one hand. "A nonlethal sedative round," announced someone just as old as either of her patients. "The kidnapper was offering violence to the Yondaime."

"Reliable old Sai!" cackled Uzumaki.

Tsunade had found a thready pulse and was distinctly unimpressed. There was no medically safe way to induce unconsciousness that rapidly.

The eyepatched individual with the taser pinched the bridge of his nose. Tsunade found herself feeling almost charitable toward him, in comparison with the unrepentant old troll who'd apparently played them both. "Just...get back in the van. Everybody. We'll escort you to the next rest stop and sort it out there." He turned to go back to his Humvee. "Tenzou, tell the cops to leave it."

Oh, wonderful, he could tell the cops to leave it. Tsunade huffed with annoyance and heaved her poor boneless childhood friend into her arms.

"Have an ambulance meet us, maybe?" she called after the one-eyed man. "In case my friend here has a heart attack?"

He gave a careless wave of acknowledgement without looking around. Tsunade grumbled in her throat. "Inside, if you please?" she said coolly to the patient. "Mister Uzumaki?"

The troll snickered to himself and got a hand up from his fake husband. "There, there, Tsunade-chan!" he said, patting her head. "I'll see to it you're all well compensated for our nonsense!"

"Moron," muttered Uchiha, helping his fake husband sit down right next to him in the back seat again, while Tsunade got Orochimaru settled and safely belted in the seat beside hers.

In the driver's seat, Jiraiya was being very loud, and everybody was ignoring him.

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kieron-oduibhir · 4 days

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For the fake fic game: The Stone The Chicken Laid.

Ah woop had to retype this reply after power outage.

So idk what fandoms you're in nonny, so I'm taking this for ffvii because it reminds me of that fancy little white chocobo in mideel that horks up a rare materia for you. (And because the way I use metaphors means that I would feel the need to make this one amusingly literal on top of its thematic weight, if I were to use it lmao.)

Hojo had deliberately waited whole weeks to spring the trap on his beloathed old mentor, to make sure his exciting bonus test subject was fully complete and he would have the opportunity to observe its development. He was not interested in hearing that she seemed to be a perfectly normal human child.

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kieron-oduibhir · 4 days

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PROMPTS. Too many bEDS AND kidnapping mafia boss! Maybe Obi-Wan? I like to think he’d be so exasperated

this is the second of four mafia boss kidnap prompts, please a moratorium on accidentally kidnapping a mafia boss guys 😂

"She's around here somewhere! In a bed!"

"It's a medical transport, Anakin!" Obi-wan had a headache. Sometimes it seemed his life was merely the story of one long drawn-out headache. "It's nothing but beds!"

The Force was not offering guidance, or possibly Obi-wan was failing to be receptive to its urgings through his headache. Mace was going to be insufferable about Anakin commandeering an entire hospital on his watch.

"Split up!" proposed Anakin. "I'll do the upper decks, you do the lower ones, we get our fugitive and I'll have Artoo turn this hulk right back around."

"Just don't try to land it," Obi-wan retorted, and peeled off to the nearest gravlift to head for the next deck down.

Ward Forn-2, Ward Forn-3...there were entirely too many beds on this ship. Most of them empty, at least, so he only had to glance over the filled ones to see whether or not the patient might secretly be a Twi'lek with a cybernetic arm.

He and Anakin rendezvoused in the transport's staff refectory, neither of them with their quarry in tow and both inclined to blame the other for this. "Could she have taken an escape pod?"

"No, Artoo would have overridden any attempt to launch."

Obi-wan huffed. "You are hardly the only being in the galaxy capable of jury-rigging an engine, Anakin, so I propose you go check the pods. With your physical eyes."

Anakin rolled these, but before he could come up with a parting jibe the kitchen door buckled and an enormous form burst in, shouting. "Is that a Hutt?" Obi-wan asked, idiotically since it clearly was.

"Uh," said Anakin, "she says she's contacted her syndicate and we won't get away with this abduction...?"

Obi-wan immediately decided to pretend he knew not a single word of Huttese. "Right. You go talk the Hutt down, I'll continue the search for our fugitive."

"Master," Anakin complained.

At this point the heretofore wraithlike Twi'lek cyborg dropped down from the ceiling and made a spirited attempt to take Gorma the Hutt hostage. Obi-wan was not entirely clear whom she thought this would be useful against.

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kieron-oduibhir · 4 days

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A LA MEME. MDZS, Really nice guy who hates only you, hate at first sight?

It was totally inappropriate for a corpse to be popular.

But there it was: the Ghost General was more well-liked every day. He seemed to spend all his time wandering around rescuing maidens from monsters and lifting wagons off of old men. In a few years he'd be a hero of the people.

Even the cultivation world didn't expect harm from him anymore. Most of Jin Ling's peers addressed the corpse as qianbei; Jin Ling didn't, but he seemed to get on with him well enough.

Jiang Cheng hadn't actually said out loud, when he saw Wen Qionglin parting ways with Sect Leader Jin with an exchange of polite salutes, he killed your father, but he'd looked it. Jin Ling, fluent in Jiang Cheng's expressions, sighed.

"It was an accident," he said. "And he's apologized. And, you know, uncle, he was held prisoner by Jin Sect almost my entire life, you can't say he hasn't paid for it. And..."

And they had killed his whole family. And his older sister.

Jiang Cheng looked away. "Huh."

When Jiang Cheng had made his first, clumsy attempt at mending a little of the gruesome breach between himself and Wei Wuxian, the Ghost General had been there, glaring daggers at him from behind the Yiling Laozu.

It had been more disconcerting than it should have been, and Jiang Cheng had stumbled, interrupted himself, and fallen silent enough times that eventually Wei Wuxian had taken pity on him, reached out, patted him on the arm one time, said, "Good talk, Jiang Cheng," and extricated them both from the situation.

Freed from the burden of conversation, he'd returned Wen Qionglin's glare, and lost. Corpses didn't need to blink.

He didn't want the bastard to like him. Which was just as well since it was out of the question. Jiang Cheng had never for a second in his life liked Wen Qionglin; from the first time he'd laid eyes on him when they were youths he'd interpreted him as a pathetic, burdensome coward, and despised him for it.

Owing the man his life had made it worse--he hadn't even wanted to be saved, and it was Wei Wuxian's stupid horrible charm and habit of interfering where he wasn't wanted that had done it, and like hell had he owed anything, when that person's family had murdered his. (I owe him nothing, he'd told himself once, because Wen Qionglin had been the reason he lost Wei Wuxian.)

Another time, he found himself in both their company and drew apart, letting the Yiling Patriarch and the Ghost General play at being mentors to the youth. Neither of you lived to see twenty-five, he wanted to shout. What do you think you have to teach them?

Even Jin Ling...it made him furious. Furious to glance over and see a corpse's stiff face conveying softness.

Furious to look past the crowd and see Lan Wangji's eyes falling on Wen Qionglin with an unmistakable resentment. And to know that it wasn't the stiff propriety of the Lan Wangji of their youths, objecting to the heresy of that fierce corpse's existence; that it was the look of a petty, jealous man resenting the way Wei Wuxian knocked his shoulder together with the Ghost General's and laughed.

"Where do you get off hating Wen Ning?" he asked the next time he found himself alone with Lan Wangji. It was a stupid thing to ask, but if he let himself think about how they were threshing through the underbrush looking for Wei Wuxian, about the last time they had looked for Wei Wuxian together...

Lan Wangji ignored him.

Jiang Cheng snorted. "Okay. So maybe you don't hate him. But he likes you! He's so deferential it makes me want to puke."

Lan Wangji favored him with the merest hint of a sneer, just enough to show he was listening to Jiang Cheng talk.

"You're disgusting," said Jiang Cheng. "Do you really think he shouldn't have anyone but you in his life? That he's your property?"

Lan Wangji's stride broke. It was a triumph, in a way--Jiang Cheng had never thrown him so badly in all the years they'd known each other.

"Each man judges others by his own heart," said Lan Wangji, thick with contempt, and then he was walking ahead with pointed rapidity, determined to separate from Jiang Cheng, until staying together would have meant chasing after him, and Jiang Cheng turned and went the other way, muttering blackly.

In the end, fittingly, neither of them caught up in time to be of use. Wen Ning, with his homing sense for Wei Wuxian, had shown up out of who the fuck knew where and bailed him out.

Jiang Cheng stumbled upon the haunted spring just in time to see a sodden, bedraggled Wei Wuxian launch himself away from his pet Wen's supportive arm and fling himself against the upright form of Hanguang-jun, which bent around him with a reverent murmur.

Jiang Cheng was already turning away in disgust to head back home, hating that he'd let himself be dragged into this, when he heard Lan Wangji say with careful, solemn deliberation: "Thank you, Wen Qionglin. For taking care of him."

Jiang Cheng glanced back against his will to see the Ghost General saluting deeply, wide-eyed, infinitely humble, his murmur that it was nothing special, Hanguang-jun, nearly drowned out by Wei Wuxian's delighted shouting about how good his Lan Zhan was and how much Wen Ning deserved to be appreciated.

Jiang Cheng walked away.

Wen Qionglin wasn't rude to him. Not in any way you could point at. And he knew full well he'd be making an ass of himself if he tried to pick a verbal fight.

After all, they had killed Wen Qionglin's older sister.

The whole cultivation world had done it, but only Jiang Cheng had done it after Wen Qionglin saved his life. He'd told himself he owed no debt for that, and perhaps he hadn't, but the fact remained: of the two of them, one had been brave and virtuous and earned the loyalty of Wei Wuxian.

And one of them had been pathetic, a coward, a burden.

Jiang Cheng could never look at the man without seeing the look in his dead eyes across the length of Suibian.

Jiang Cheng had never been good at lying to himself, especially if the lie was meant to be comforting. He always tried it anyway. Comforting lies used to sound so true, in Wei Wuxian's mouth; he should never have gotten into the habit of relying on that. To letting that person think Jiang Cheng was someone who needed to be swaddled in falsehoods to give him the strength to bear up under his own duties.

Wen Qionglin was a kind, gentle, courageous dead body, shy and courteous and increasingly appreciated for his virtues, in this strange new world created in the wake of Jin Guanyao's disgrace. And whenever his eyes fell on Jiang Cheng they were cold, hard, flat, contemptuous.

Every time he looked at him Jiang Cheng could nearly hear him thinking, like a cold wind against the back of his neck: I should have left you in that heap of corpses with the rest of your family.

What are you worth, Jiang Wanyin, that so many should be spent in saving you? That Wei Wuxian would drag us all into the shadow of death to make you whole, only for you to turn your face aside when it was me lying there, and let him die for us without lifting a finger?

Selfish, whining coward. If only I had left you there to die.

If only, Jiang Cheng imagined spitting back, anger hot and bracing in his throat. If only! I never asked for any of it! How dare you expect me to repay you!

But Wen Qionglin never spoke any of the words out loud. He only looked, cold dead flat black eyes. A frozen river. Sometimes Jiang Cheng thought that if he lashed out hard enough he would break a hole in the ice, and be devoured whole.

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kieron-oduibhir · 4 days

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The Untamed: Instead of fake dating, everyone is convinced that you aren’t actually dating OR Fake amnesia

skipping 2 mafia boss kidnapping prompts for now because i already kidnapped 2 this is not a novel scenario anymore; i got blocked trying to come up with two more ways to accidentally kidnap a mob boss that were funny to me personally and took less than 500 words of exposition.

this is set in like, a canon AU where the politics just didn't go fully to shit, i think my chosen justification this time is a mdzs reader transmigrated into Wen Ruohan and immediately canceled the war lmao. they're about 19.

"Wei-xiong! You're late."

"Sorry! I was with Lan Zhan," Wei Wuxian explained. He sounded pleased with himself. He was. Lan Wangji had been the person most obdurately opposed to liking him that he had met since Yu Ziyuan, and now it turned out he'd just been mad that he liked Wei Wuxian too much, haha!

He was entitled to this smugness. He was entitled to the way Nie Huaisang laughed at him and Jiang Cheng rolled his eyes, too, and he laughed as well and sat down.

He wouldn't torment his shidi with any further details of what he'd been doing with Lan Zhan, as a gentleman shouldn't kiss and tell.

Apparently all he had missed was a speech by some Jin, which meant he'd profited doubly, and Wei Wuxian picked happily at the nuts and wine through a speech by another Jin, following which the banquet was allowed to officially progress.

The food was good, and there were dancers. Wei Wuxian rather thought being a hired dancer a cultivator party must be a stressful job, considering your audience was largely composed of people whose physical cultivation meant they could replicate all your best moves with fairly little effort, and were consequently difficult to impress.

But maybe he was just judging the performance a little harshly, since none of them could approach the grace of his Lan Zhan. They were very nice, anyway. He wondered if he could convince Lan Zhan to wear such sheer silk for him, in private.

Once the banquet at last broke up and they were free to circulate, Wei Wuxian saw Lan Wangji standing upright across the hall, in pale blue silk holding his pale sword, and a tall guan in deference to the formal event, and felt himself brightening. He immediately started to get up, waving a hand over his head, eager to hurry back to the side of his Lan Zhan, but a hand closed hard around his wrist, dragging him back down.

"Don't," bit out Jiang Cheng.

Wei Wuxian was accustomed to that hand on his wrist--it was rare, and therefore he usually attended, even on those occasions when in the end he did not obey; if a situation was pushing Jiang Cheng past words and into physically interfering with Wei Wuxian's choices it was probably serious, and Jiang Cheng might know something he didn't.

"What?" he demanded. "Jiang Cheng, I'm not going to shame Jiang Sect or anything!"

Jiang Cheng snorted. "This isn't the time or the place for your sense of humor, Wei Wuxian. Not all sect leaders are as easygoing as Dad."

"I know that? I'm just going over to Lan Zhan, there's no need to be a sour puss just because no one wants to kiss your grouchy face."

Jiang Cheng's face darkened. "Wei Wuxian," he said. It would be shouting but he kept his voice low, trying to avoid drawing the attention of the older generation, or anyone from another sect besides Nie Huaisang.

This was sort of offensive. "What do you think I'm going to do?"

Sure, he was shameless, but he wasn't going to be doing worse than holding hands right here in public!

"Isn't this enough? You've always been harassing Lan Wangji, but now you're slandering him like this?"

"Slander?" Wei Wuxian repeated. He looked slowly toward Nie Huaisang, who didn't back up Jiang Cheng but didn't seem to think he was wrong, either.

It wasn't that they'd been super public about it. They just hadn't been hiding it, either.

Wei Wuxian hadn't even been the one who wanted to be open about the relationship, really; it had been Lan Zhan who was determined not to hide. He'd said he wasn't ashamed of Wei Wuxian and it had made Wei Wuxian go all soft and gooey and agreeable.

Now he felt cold. He pulled his wrist free and now that he wasn't trying to get up, Jiang Cheng let him.

"We're adults now," Jiang Cheng said waspishly. "You can't just go around destroying people's reputations for a laugh."

"Why are you so sure I'm lying?" Jiang Cheng, ah, normally nothing you say can hurt my feelings, why is this so different?

He wanted to ask, does shijie think the same thing? He hadn't told uncle yet. It had only been a few weeks since they fully worked things out between them, this was their first real public occasion; he'd kind of been counting on the gossip handling that for him. The gossip had definitely been going around! He'd overheard some of it! Mostly just their names linked by a giggle, admittedly, but.

Jiang Cheng fixed him with his most disgusted stare. "Second Young Master Lan hates you. And he's a respectable person, with an image to uphold and a family to answer to! A person like that doesn't have affairs, and if he did he wouldn't have them with a man, and if he did he would be discreet about it. And he wouldn't choose you! Aren't you usually good at telling lies people will actually believe?"

Nie Huaisang gave an apologetic fan of his own face when Wei Wuxian checked with him; he didn't disagree.

Had...had everyone who saw them together really assumed Wei Wuxian was just harassing Lan Zhan again? But Lan Zhan let him hang off him now! His expressions had gotten so soft around Wei Wuxian. It was...it was so different, now! Surely that was obvious to anyone with eyes?

The thing was, of course Lan Zhan wouldn't have an affair, in the sense that he valued fidelity enormously. That was a lot of the reason he didn't want to conduct what was between them now furtively, in hiding: if his family believed him unattached, they would think themselves free to arrange him a match, which would pave a road to far more embarrassment and disgrace to more people than could possibly result from their arrangement being public.

After all, both of them were considered highly eligible bachelors.

Of course, Lan Zhan had been very vulnerable to embarrassment, before. But living through the sack of Cloud Recesses, his own kidnapping, his father's death, his brother's disappearance, being forced to set the torch to his beloved library himself, being buried alive with a monster and Wei Wuxian--all these had adjusted his standards, when it came to suffering. Embarrassment was not important anymore.

They understood each other better, now.

And Jiang Cheng...Jiang Cheng had never understood him perfectly, of course, but it was strange to feel this gap open between them.

Wei Wuxian got up. He evaded Jiang Cheng's belated grab, ignored the snap of Yu Ziyuan's head as she noticed there was some sort of trouble between them, and crossed the hall to Lan Zhan.

He wasn't especially dramatic about it. He walked normally, navigating the crowd with the usual polite dance though less of a smile than usual and a little more haste. No heads turned to follow him. But Lan Zhan was looking concerned, if you knew what to look for; the space between his eyebrows and the tilt of his chin.

Wei Wuxian came to a stop a little further from him than he usually stood--not an awkward formal distance, the same closeness he defaulted to with most people he liked. He could have reached out and touched Lan Zhan easily enough. He just didn't. The trouble on Lan Zhan's face thickened.

Wei Wuxian looked down at his own hands. Almost reached out to take Lan Zhan's, but then didn't. Wasn't sure why. It wasn't like he was afraid somebody would see. He wasn't even afraid they'd see and misunderstand. "Jiang Cheng thinks I'm lying about us," he said.

Lan Zhan stiffened. "Wei Ying."

"An important young master like you would never," Wei Wuxian said, looking up with a crooked smile, making a joke of it.

Lan Zhan's hand reached out. Brushed his. Wei Wuxian steeled himself and gripped it, moved half a step closer. Someone might be looking or they might not, but this didn't count as making a scene. There was something angry in Lan Zhan's bearing now.

"He was worried I was going to hurt you," Wei Wuxian said, because Jiang Cheng was; when you came down to it he was usually trying to protect someone from something. Even though Wei Wuxian was a little mad at him right now and they didn't always agree about priorities, it was important that Jiang Cheng had a good heart.

"Never," said Lan Zhan, even though Wei Wuxian had obliviously hurt his feelings lots while annoying him on purpose. "Wei Ying," he said quietly, folding their hands together tighter. "You really don't mind? If everyone knows."

"Before," said Wei Wuxian, "I didn't really care one way or the other. But now." He paused. Yeah. "I want them to know. That I love you, and you love me back. This way."

Lan Zhan nodded. He closed the distance between them another step. Settled his free hand on Wei Wuxian's hip, which he had heretofore dared only when they were quite alone. Wei Wuxian felt a delightful shiver run up his back.

And then Lan Zhan was kissing him. And then Lan Zhan was kissing him, deep and shameless as never before, gathering Wei Wuxian in against him and tipping him back, as though he wanted to climb down his throat, slipping him kind of a lot of tongue, and Wei Wuxian sort of forgot they were in public at some point in the process of kissing back, of holding on to Lan Zhan as he was dipped into an arch he couldn't have maintained on his own, as he felt Lan Zhan's pulse racing against his fingertips.

Lan Zhan pulled him upright again even as he broke the kiss, so Wei Wuxian got to stand there, slightly dizzy and extremely delighted, both his hands clasped in his partner's, while everybody stared. Lan Zhan had created a scene. Wei Wuxian was so proud of him.

When they got to the naked stage of things it was going to be so good.

Except for a slight redness in his lips and the tips of his ears, Lan Zhan already looked exactly the same as always again. Wei Wuxian let go one of his hands and he tucked it into the small of his back, turning so they were facing the same way instead of face to face.

"Excuse us," Lan Zhan said in his usual restrained way, to nobody in particular, and he and Wei Wuxian made their way out of the banquet hall hand in hand to go admire Jin Tower's famous peony garden, Wei Wuxian grinning and waving to people he knew but not stopping to chat on the way.

He checked on Jiang Cheng exactly once on the way out. His mouth was hanging open like a dead fish's. Nie Huaisang and shijie were both laughing and Jiang-shushu's eyebrows were raised but he was definitely amused as well. Madam Yu looked like she was about to explode but that was okay.

Lan Qiren and Lan Xichen had both clearly actually believed Lan Zhan entirely, and were both looking distinctly long-suffering but not as surprised as Wei Wuxian might have expected.

He squeezed Lan Zhan's hand, and Lan Zhan squeezed back.

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kieron-oduibhir · 7 days

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spicy mdzs idea, someone asks nie huaisang why he didn't try to reach out to jiang cheng to form some kind of alliance of Sect Leaders Fucked Over By The Jin as an alternative to a decade of clinging and fawning on his enemy while he got his pieces lined up. after all, the jiang weren't involved in the murder. did he think jin ling was too close a tie?

and he says nah. it's because of what happened to wei wuxian.

not like, wwx was his friend so he was mad on his behalf. nothing sentimental like that.

but because if that was what became of basically jiang cheng's favorite person in the world once he became a liability, nie huaisang wouldn't even rate. first second he was vulnerable and inconvenient, wham, that's the end of the nie.

he thinks it's ridiculous anyone would imagine he'd have considered trusting jiang wanyin with anything important for a split second.

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kieron-oduibhir · 8 days

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In a great historical example of how continuity of language can obscure dramatic change in practice: tar.

You know how the smell of tar comes up so frequently in Age of Sail media? Cuz it was omnipresent. And we figure we know that smell. It's still around. Smells like fresh asphalt. Yurk.

Psych! Totally different stuff. The tar that was used to waterproof every-fucking-thing shipboard all that long while--the Vikings used masses of it, huge Swedish export for centuries--was wood tar. It's made from pine trees.

And while it's not exactly a friendly, healthful substance, its regular use in medicine notwithstanding, it's not nearly as hazardous to the health as the petrochemical tar we use in more limited applications today. Oil tar, coal tar, very nasty. (Though even more effective at waterproofing wood.)

And it almost certainly didn't smell as bad.

I don't know exactly what it did smell like, but creosote--the main ingredient in 'liquid smoke' for flavoring meat like it was smoked without the trouble and expense of actually smoking it--is produced via a fork in wood tar production, so there's probably a little overlap.

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kieron-oduibhir · 8 days

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Hello! For the reverse tropes writing prompts (if this catches your fancy) — murderbot diaries with fake amnesia and Really nice guy who hates only you

this is really not in the spirit of that second inverse trope, but for mb this was the only thing i could think of, and it was very funny.

"Gurathin," said Gurathin. "SecUnit, you know it's me."

"I don't think I know that," it said, pleasantly, in an okay but not excellent imitation of its creepy canned dialogue options. "Please present some identification, and we'll see."

Gurathin didn't bother sending his data over the feed again. Murderbot walked away, but left a drone eyeballing him. He resisted the urge to flip the drone off. "Come on," he told it, knowing SecUnit was paying attention. "Let me in."

He watched the SecUnit bend forward slightly to show two of Mensah's kids that it was paying attention to whatever they were saying, and then bend over further to help the toddler up onto a chair. It was just fucking with him now. On the other hand, if the prickly bastard started letting children hug it just to piss off Gurathin, who was the real loser?

It finished spoiling the children and moved over to smoothly de-escalate a brewing disagreement over the punch bowl. Gurathin tried to catch Pin-Lee's eye; she did not cooperate. Gurathin tried to walk through the open door; the hovering security drone took a potshot at him.

SecUnit got roped into conversation with Bharadwaj and her media colleagues. It said something that made everyone laugh. It wasn't scowling. It was faking looking people in the face pretty well; that was just creepy.

It went on like that; Gurathin had never seen it go this long interacting without pissing someone off. Presumably it was venting all of that impulse on him. Ratthi introduced it to his favorite cousin; zi was visibly charmed.

Gurathin goaded the drone into firing two more warning shots before the SecUnit circulated back over to him.

"SecUnit. Come on. You have known me for actual years. I helped you rob a place once."

"I don't recall."

"We met on that planetary survey mission, don't tell me you don't remember that one, it's the reason you're even here." That came out maybe a little harsh, but everyone was letting the SecUnit abuse the power of being entrusted with party security to bully him, he was allowed to be annoyed.

"Oh, were you there? That data must have been lost in a corrupted filetree," it said, with incredibly cutting blandness.

Gurathin groaned. "Okay! Okay. I'm sorry."

It technically counted as a reward when SecUnit stopped giving him the customer service face and switched to the hairy eyeball, which just showed how stupid this whole situation was. It was clearly not satisfied with just that.

"I'm sorry for using your personal name without permission. I wasn't trying to weaponize it or anything, it just slipped out, but I know that's not an excuse and it was a really inappropriate disrespect for your boundaries."

SecUnit kept looking at him. Gurathin knew two other SecUnits now, neither of whom was as supremely weird as this one; that was why he'd started mentally tagging it with its personal name, just to keep things tidy. Of course, if anyone else had done that and made the resulting mistake, SecUnit probably wouldn't have been half so mad.

Gurathin sagged.

"I'm sorry for going through your personal files and using your name against you back during the survey," he mumbled, wishing he kept drones around to control with his brain so he could watch SecUnit's extremely expressive face without having to look at it. "That was really shitty. Rim paranoia isn't a good enough excuse for refusing to see you as anything but a tool of the Company. Okay?"

SecUnit was looking as pained as though Gurathin had stripped naked in its presence. "Yes, fine, you can come to the party just stop having feelings," it said, in its normal voice.

"Great!" said Gurathin. "The spinach puffs had better not be all gone."

"I don't pay any attention to the things humans consume," it said, moving out of his way and taking its drone with it.

"I know," Gurathin acknowledged, rolling his eyes and trooping after it. Ratthi waved enthusiastically at him and Pin-Lee raised her cup in a welcoming toast. Apparently SecUnit's relenting returned him to the ranks of people who existed again. "Believe me, I remember this about you."

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kieron-oduibhir · 10 days

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Hello! For the reverse tropes writing prompts (if this catches your fancy) — murderbot diaries with fake amnesia and Really nice guy who hates only you

this is really not in the spirit of that second inverse trope, but for mb this was the only thing i could think of, and it was very funny.

"Gurathin," said Gurathin. "SecUnit, you know it's me."

"I don't think I know that," it said, pleasantly, in an okay but not excellent imitation of its creepy canned dialogue options. "Please present some identification, and we'll see."

Gurathin goaded the drone into firing two more warning shots before the SecUnit circulated back over to him.

"SecUnit. Come on. You have known me for actual years. I helped you rob a place once."

"I don't recall."

"Oh, were you there? That data must have been lost in a corrupted filetree," it said, with incredibly cutting blandness.

Gurathin groaned. "Okay! Okay. I'm sorry."

Gurathin sagged.

SecUnit was looking as pained as though Gurathin had stripped naked in its presence. "Yes, fine, you can come to the party just stop having feelings," it said, in its normal voice.

"Great!" said Gurathin. "The spinach puffs had better not be all gone."

"I don't pay any attention to the things humans consume," it said, moving out of his way and taking its drone with it.

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kieron-oduibhir · 1 year

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i am so interested in your nano characters and so annoyed that my brain has been on holiday lately so i am going to take this opportunity to request three questions you would most like to answer for as many characters as you would like to answer them for :3

(engagement: hacked!!!)

hahaha hacked! i mean i can't complain given i reblogged the thing and then went away to let my head recover enough i could read the questions so i could ask you. 😂 and then i got this which was yay! this is exactly the wrong ratio of expectation to structure for me though, i get choice paralysis.

fortunately i already answered two of these so the negative space they created will guide me.

i'll do three questions for Owl and Duluth both, they being the less-developed members of the 'main cast.'

1. What’s your chosen OC’s favorite color? Least favorite?

Owl's favorite color is the specific silvered green of a sort of lamb's-ear-like nettle native to her home range--it's a color produced by having little silver hairs covering a certain green and scattering the light, so it can't exist as a pigment.

Duluth's favorite color is a deep golden bronze. He likes really saturated oranges and yellows in general, but there's a technique for gilding bronze that makes his absolute favorite color in the world.

Also not doable as a pigment?? Huh. A commonality.

Her least favorite color is. Hm. Probably some variety of rust-red. Duluth's least favorite color is black, mostly because it's what the cops used to wear.

14. Does your OC have any superstitions? Good luck rituals? Do they believe in and/or practice the arcane arts?

Neither of them does anything really magic, and to the extent that they believe in that kind of art it's mostly in a pretty pragmatic way, because on the one hand sun-stealing wizards are a real problem in the world and on the other their setting's magic system mostly runs on using written language to reinforce physical objects in specific ways, and isn't a whole lot more mysticized in that function than high-level craft techniques are in general.

Like, more, but it's a sliding scale. I think most people would consider geometry way more arcane than the more basic kinds of enchanted objects.

Owl is a werewolf and Duluth knows a little bit about runework, but those are categorized as 'having an ethnicity' and 'having a little bit of a practical education.'

Owl is very religious. I'm not sure at what point that shades into superstition? A lot of her religious obligations aren't really doable away from her family because it's a very communal practice. But there are for example words she says when she has to kill a person and different words she says when she kills for food. (Important note because there's a certain line of hysteria that insists werewolves are given to cannibalism.)

She keeps track of the moon and makes a point of laying eyes on it every night that it's visible. Technically her policy of sharing food and shelter with anyone in need is a religious principle, although no one would really even notice that. She absolutely believes the moon is aware of things to come and will communicate about it, mostly in dreams and portents. One of her parents is a respected religious figure in their community.

There's not a lot of expectation in her religion that failing to do the right things will carry consequences, and only a moderate one that doing the right things will improve the chances of good fortune--I think over time they've reacted away from that transactional kind of cosmology specifically because it's popular with their neighbors, and people do like to define themselves relative to who they're not--so not much in the way of doing specific things for luck.

Duluth is not religious at all, really, having grown up in a society where the mainstream religion was suppressed from achieving organized expression and not fallen in with any covert groups or anything growing up, but he's very polite toward anything even mildly divine just in case, basically. Which includes politely adding a pebble to a cairn in honor of a mountain any time he passes one and dropping flowers in streams and rivers to ask not to be drowned, so I guess what that works out to is he's intensely superstitious.

He worries a lot about luck and ruining it by doing the wrong things, which is largely a childhood trauma thing tbh. I hadn't thought about giving him any ritual behaviors around that anxiety but it's a good idea. I'm sure there are a lot available.

18. How does your OC feel about education? How much education do they have? Are they studious or a slacker?

Owl comes from a prominent family so there were very high expectations and a lot of access to instruction. Her astronomical knowledge is very good and her history is extensive, as is her herbalism. She can't read. She has become numerate since leaving home, but only for very basic arithmetic; she can only do the common-sense sort of division and she does that in her head.

Owl's a very determined person with a good memory and control of her focus, and learns fairly quickly, but is only moderately adaptable and (especially as an adult) isn't highly motivated to learn new things just because they're new.

Duluth was the youngest of six children, but all his older siblings and mother were dead by the time he was four, and his father had married late to begin with and started having chest pains, so he saw the writing on the wall that he'd probably die before Duluth was up to working the farm alone enough to make rent or old enough to marry, and started selling off the tenancy rights to various plots of land to the neighbors, until he had the cash in hand to buy his nine-year-old an apprenticeship to a whitesmith in the nearest medium-sized town. (I have in mind the sort of whitesmith who works mainly in pewter, rather than in modifying forged iron with things like files and engravings, but for plot reasons may switch to the latter.)

That went pretty well until his master's former apprentice and only son went missing on the road, presumed dead, and the couple started taking their grief out on Duluth. So he broke his contract and ran off at eleven, leaving him with two years' worth of training. Didn't get past the basics, really, but he did pick up some advanced things from being around and observing, which is one of the purposes of apprenticeship as an education style. This is where he gets most of his grasp of runework, the kinds of virtues his master often had occasion to set into metal.

Later he tried to steal from some people he found camping, who turned out to be wanted criminals, just like you'd expect from people camping in some woods in a society where no one had decided this was a leisure activity somehow.

This got him adopted, and Elaine made sure he learned how to read because as a fugitive it had turned out to be a valuable survival skill. (She'd resisted being taught herself lmao.)

His writing is much weaker than his reading--they're not actually the same skill for all we tend to learn them together. He also learned sword-fighting and various survival skills from his new crime family. He isn't really numerate.

Duluth is very weird about education because he associates it with both acceptance and rejection in elaborate ways. So his level of effort is often less tied to the material than his relationship with his instructor.

He got really good with a sword because Marl was his main instructor with it at a time when Marl was pretty emotionally unavailable to him, because he takes a while to warm up to people and Elaine had kind of really shaken up their whole lives by suddenly adding a twelve year old just when she was finally an adult. So Duluth got it into his head that if he was good enough at swording Marl wouldn't turn against him.

The only source of formal education, in our terms, on the continent are currently the Colleges at Glissare, on the Sun Coast. Duluth would actually do really well in a couple of those, if he filled in some gaps in his learning first, and is technically qualified since Prince Barisson knighted him for his war service, but the normal age to start there is fifteen or sixteen after private tutoring and he's twenty-one with a shoddy educational base, so it can't really happen.

He'd be too uncomfortable, and there's no obvious aim since he's not planning to go into a clerical career in either the government admin sense or the church sense, and the war is over so entering the College of War now as a decorated captain to get i.e. strategy classes from people who mostly haven't actually commanded in the field would be weird. If he wanted to take a military job with Barisson it might be worthwhile but it would be excruciating, socially. And working for Barisson is very much a fallback option in case he doesn't come up with anything more personally fulfilling to do with himself.

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kieron-oduibhir · 1 year

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For the oc ask game 2, 3, 6, 20, 21, and 25.

Okay this time I'm gonna do Darya. She's from the same story as Marl, and technically in story structure terms she's one step less Main Character than he is, but she's also one of the main POV sources and we're not allowed in his stupid head, so no she isn't.

2. What do they think is their best feature? This can be both physical or personality wise.

Her greatest asset has always been her looks, but she knows she was only able to use them to her advantage instead of getting victimized for them because she's a schemer, goal-oriented and patient. Also she's 37 and aware the usefulness of her beauty is very much in decline.

So definitely her ability to think long-term, even in circumstances that pressure you toward thinking only about surviving to see tomorrow.

3. What is something they are really self-conscious about?

She tries really hard to be aware of how she's coming across every second of every day but also not to care what people think, except as it's relevant strategically. So this is tricky! :D

The places she's worst at the latter are...she's overly defensive about being seen as an opportunist in the places she's acting out of loyalty or something approaching altruism, but since she identifies as an opportunist generally assumes people are always assuming it.

But at the same time she's very touchy about the idea that she's letting herself be taken advantage of and the possibility people might assume that instead.

6. What is something they are absolutely hopeless at doing? Why?

Darya has a lot of holes in her education generally because she basically brought herself up and not in great circumstances. But she's done a pretty good job of filling most of them in. So there are a lot of things she's pretty bad at but can scrape by in, and mostly avoids having to attempt. She's a bad cook, but that just means the food is bland and overdone.

I guess what she's hopeless at is vulnerability? I was going to say emotional honesty but while she's pretty avoidant about it, and will often default to either appeasement or anger, she could be a lot worse.

The funny thing about her is she considers herself a schemer but is pretty straightforward, for the most part. Which is only partly because she observed from a very young age that every additional point of complexity introduces a new potential point of failure, so the strategic thing to do is usually not to over-strategize.

20. What makes your OC special? Why are they important or different ? What makes them a particularly wonderful and/or evil character?

I should make a case for her?? Like in the story or in the literary canon?

The point of Darya, for me, is she's someone who's always had to rely on herself but in a way that's made her acutely aware of how false and untenable the concept of self-reliance is. That people need people. So her personality is defined by the need to obtain security from others without trusting them. Which is a shitty way to live.

But she's not like some glamorous mastermind or social predator, she just ingratiated her way from abject poverty, to mild respectability, to the leisure class. Then found that position insecure in a fun new way and was eventually forced to choose between 'kill a decent person to ingratiate yourself with Asshole Social Leader and become his direct client' and 'chuck it all and throw yourself on the mercy of Cool Bandit Teenager' and chose the latter in a fit of basically violent reaction against the sunk-cost fallacy.

That was nine years ago and they've since overthrown the government, so she's just constantly torn between viewing her relationship with her found family as a healthy mutual-reliance thing built on trust, and seeing it as a complicated web of mutual exploitation that may collapse at any moment as their individual needs evolve.

And she wants it so desperately to be the former, but she can't bring herself to rely on it. Or even admit this conflict is a thing.

Which means everything she does has at least two motives and both of them consequently feel a little like lies she's telling herself.

Like, she's quietly setting aside a small fortune in relatively liquid assets--is she embezzling from her friend's nonprofit militia to set herself up in comfort when she's left hanging since they have no more use for her and have moved on, or is she socking money away to take care of her family when Elaine's stupid refusal to let the wealthy buy her off leaves them all in the lurch? It's both.

21. What sets your OC off? What will make them go from a docile little lamb to a rampaging, fire-breathing dragon?

This is a weird question, why would everyone's OCs default to lamb? I don't think any of this group are docile lambs. Marl can be uncomfortably slavish but only to (1) person, Owl only does what people want if it seems like a good idea, Elaine's entire Deal is about personal autonomy. Duluth likes to get along with people but he's got a lot of pride and grew up with Elaine as his top role model. Dan is probably the most biddable overall, but he's also royalty so the number of people he actually defers to is low and mostly he's kind of high-handed.

Anyway though. Intent of query. Darya gets mad pretty easily, but she usually channels it through her survival instincts so there's no rampaging, because she doesn't have the kind of power that makes that useful to do.

She gets mad about injustice but she's also really inured to it and thinks of herself as a strict pragmatist, so what truly pisses her off is being sold dishonest narratives about why an injustice is actually Good and Moral. Still wouldn't fly off the handle about it, though.

I guess the main exception turns out to be when someone she trusts lets her down severely, and she's the one in a position of power subsequently? Or at least enough power? Like that's the one scenario where she'd consider it worthwhile to just have a yell, and/or her survival instincts wouldn't be enough to counterbalance the amount of emotion.

If she doesn't care about someone personally and she's yelling at or attacking them it's not because she's simply lost her temper, it's because she thinks it'll help in some way to do that. If someone has offended her deeply and she's destroying them because of that she will probably do it like. In a way that isn't obvious.

Not, again, that she's someone inclined to or capable of deep elaborate manipulations, but it's just safer to cut a throat or publicize someone's dirty laundry than to confront them directly. And if she's planning to murder you (note: she has never actually assassinated anyone but she thinks of herself as the sort of person who would if it was ever a good idea) she's not going to blow up at you first. That would be stupid.

So yeah, her first instinct is to sit on that kind of feeling.

If she's betrayed and she's at a disadvantage she'll keep her head down and try to find a way to salvage the situation for herself, regardless of level of seething--the anger will definitely inform her choices and is likely to make her more reckless, but she's not going to actually blow up unless she feels secure. You know? She's a survivor first.

That's kind of what makes Elaine stand out, in the setting. She's the person who can get apocalyptically angry and go on a flaming rampage and find she's accomplished something thereby, and isn't dead. But you can't count on that happening every time, even when you're a hero.

25. Describe your OC in one sentence.

When your second midlife crisis is that your first involved leaving your husband (who let his boss throw you to the wolves) and joining a nomadic commune, and now the commune finished killing evil wizards (like your husband's boss) and is breaking up.

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kieron-oduibhir · 1 year

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5. What does your oc do on their free time if they have it?

9. What is your favourite OC moment?

For the ask game please.

i always appreciate that copy-paste so i don't have to refer to the post! ^^💕 ty. okay now i gotta pick who this is for. i'm actually super bad at favorites, so i'm just going to go with who's at the top of my head.

5. One of the ways you could tell there was something wrong with Marl long before there was anything very obviously wrong with Marl is how uncomfortable he always was with the idea of free time.

Like, he's from a societal context where there's always more work to be done, so keeping busy even in your downtime is normal, and a sign of good character to an extent, but that's like. Working on useful handcrafts while unwinding by the fire before bed, kind of thing.

Basically trying to parent his younger sister, first with a useless stepfather around the farm and then homeless, did a huge number on him, and he gets anxious if he's not being productive, so he doesn't really have leisure activities.

But his self-indulgent activity of choice is going the extra mile to make food that's really good, especially in contexts where no one would rationally expect more than edible. This includes focusing the hypervigilance on wild herbs and spending a lot of time simmering the meat off a squirrel. (They illegally camped in the woods a lot. There aren't even woods where they come from it's too dry; they had to learn it all on the run.)

For periods of forced inactivity where cooking wasn't an option, he developed a habit sometime between 'when his baby sister became a famous bandit' and 'when his baby sister started leading an uprising' of compulsive weapon maintenance, but while this honestly looks from the outside like a hobby, he does not enjoy it.

9. I'll stick with Marl again, and that's a good question. I'm gonna meditate on this one. I have the strong suspicion I haven't written it yet. I should lean into having favorite moments tbh I think I got cringe about it at some point which is stupid, you can't create 'that moment' for readers if you're not pursuing them on your own account.

Inciting moment for his character, yea like seven years ago, long before I started reworking those brainstorm fragments into the current mess of a manuscript: He comes tearing back into camp, after blowing his own cover in the elaborate double-agent operation he made up on his own without consulting anybody, all torn up from covering his actual allies' escape from his fake allies, and collapses dramatically, making yelling at him incredibly unsatisfying.

That original scene in all its particulars has become totally incompatible with the story and worldbuilding as they've developed, but it's very much a defining moment for the guy, that I often keep in mind as I write him.

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kieron-oduibhir · 2 years

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in the shadows

hey guess who has two thumbs and just spent 5 hours straight writing another batman AU?

Batman wasn’t a person.

He faked it very well. When the League gathered, the line of his mask against pale skin looked natural and human, a little more perfectly fitted than the Flash’s but not quite as perfect as Green Lantern’s, which was an energy projection and not a real object and thus lay against his face flawlessly, without shift or gap.

His mouth didn’t bend into many expressions and his body language wasn’t voluble, but the emotive gestures that he did make were pretty normal. The rare smile seemed honest. He had a heartbeat, perfectly steady. His shadow (almost) always matched the shape that was blocking the light.

The stories that came out of Gotham, about the Bat—those could be exaggerations, born of terror and manipulated perception. Clark, of all people, knew how much you could convince people to believe things that weren’t real, because they made a better story. Even the scraps of photography and film showing a towering thing of black fog and long fangs could have been some clever trick with projectors.

The fact that Superman couldn’t see through his suit just meant it was well made.

He’d had to pool his observations with Diana and J’onn before he’d been sure he wasn’t imagining things. But Martian Manhunter knew shapeshifting, and said the block against his mind when he tried to touch Batman’s thoughts did not feel quite human. And Superman knew what posing as human looked like. And Wonder Woman knew truth, and its absence.

Batman wasn’t human. Which wasn’t the problem, of course.

The problem was that he was pretending he was. Pretending it rigorously in a situation where there shouldn’t be any need, unless he had something worse to hide. Pretending it in a way that overlaid on a certain inhuman predatory grace began to look very dangerous indeed.

Superman could see both things in him now, watching narrow-eyed through a roof into the room where Batman bent over a child’s bed, cape swirling up larger and darker than he let it get around them. The man and the hungry creature, flipping in and out of focus, neither ever gone but superimposed, like a trick picture that was two things at once.

Knuckles ghosted over the boy’s cheek, claws turned inward, and the child sighed softly, and sunk deeper into sleep. Batman’s heart wasn’t beating, but Clark could monitor the child’s vitals easily from here.

Batman drew his hand back, and tipped his head up—looking back at Superman as though the roof was no more a barrier to his perceptions than to Clark’s. Waited a beat, as if making sure his attention had been noticed, and then passed soundlessly between the other beds to the window, slid it open, and launched himself out through it and up onto the roof.

He didn’t bother to restrain himself to even a plausible approximation of human limits, now. The arm he reached up to the edge of the roof to pivot himself up by was too long, and his shoulder rotated further than it should have been able to, and he landed with impossible soundlessness in a billow of cape that was far, far larger than any cape that only reached to his heels should have managed, and which faded out at the edges into shadow. He knew he was found out.

Superman took the obvious invitation, and sunk down to join him. It was better, sitting like this, facing the same way on the ridgepole of a two-story building. Batman hadn’t hurt that child, that he could tell. There was no need to make this a confrontation.

“I don’t understand why,” he said at last. Out of deference for sleeping children, he kept his voice soft—he would have worried about a human being able to hear it, but now he knew he didn’t have to worry about that with Batman. “Why go to so much trouble to deceive us? We haven’t kept secret what we are. Not from you.”

Alien, alien, user of alien weapon, magical princess…

Batman sighed. He spoke almost as softly as Clark had, and his voice sounded the same as ever, except for the fact that a human voice couldn’t get this quiet without falling into a whisper. “I’m not like you.” He turned.

He’d let some of the details of his human mask fall away—what must have been the exhaustively rendered texture of skin, the flakes of dry skin on chapping lips, a crease at the corner of his mouth that had suggested he scowled or smiled more, outside of his costume. There was no pretense of a jawbone, under the skin, though the jawline externally hadn’t changed. The cowl still looked like something he was wearing, but Clark knew it was not. It flexed like skin when Batman narrowed his blank white eyes and said, “I can see you know that.”

“You’ve visited that kid every day for weeks,” Clark said. “Why?”

Batman stared at him. “How long have you known?”

“Batman…”

“You’re confronting me now because you’re worried about my intentions toward Dick. He changed your mind about something. Ergo, you’ve been sitting on this for a while. How long have you known I wasn’t real?”

Keep reading

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kieron-oduibhir · 2 years

Text

in the shadows

hey guess who has two thumbs and just spent 5 hours straight writing another batman AU?

Batman wasn’t a person.

The fact that Superman couldn’t see through his suit just meant it was well made.

Batman wasn’t human. Which wasn’t the problem, of course.

Alien, alien, user of alien weapon, magical princess…

“You’ve visited that kid every day for weeks,” Clark said. “Why?”

Batman stared at him. “How long have you known?”

“Batman…”

Keep reading

#right this is my writing blog!!!#hi #i'm very organized #my fic

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kieron-oduibhir · 2 years

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I would die for baby Stephanie 🥺 especially with her making friends with Bruce. I love it!!! (Til-then story)

ahhhhh thank you for reminding me 13yo bruce and stephie's friendship is one of my favorite things in that fic! i love them.

i didn't see them coming at all but once they bonded over being the relatively normal kids in a room full of Robins (while still being violent little maniacs in their own right) i was like oh you're perfect 💖🤣💕

#ask #Anonymous #hoc est meum #batman #my fic #people say nice things

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kieron-oduibhir · 2 years

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I also love reading your rambles. More Juamg Yanli analysis please?

See I meant to give you the meta you asked for but my attempt to focus on Yanli -> drop the WIPs I'd been making progress on finally, drop the cake, must urgently type up 5k of the Terrible Don't Do That Jiang Cheng Idea from the previous spate of Yanli meta from that ask last night.

I blame your cursed Naruto ask for sticking me in the 'make AU make sense' zone.

So here you go, hope this will do for now!

Cake has been accomplished btw but it came out of the oven at midnight a;lfdj;klfsd.

Jiang Yanli finished peeling the lotus roots, took up the knife, and began to cut.

Strong, broad hands made even slices. Unfamiliar to her, at least like this, they were yet familiar with the task. A-Cheng had known this recipe, had made a habit sometimes of cooking for himself and for his tiny family, even in her absence. He’d always worked so hard, and had had so much patience for the things he felt really mattered.

Yanli had adored both her little brothers to death and beyond, and shamefully part of the reason had been their unflagging conviction, condescending as it had grown with age, that she was one of the things that truly mattered, always. They had loved each other so much, all of them. They had loved her.

How could something so good become so bad?

How could it have come to this.

The kitchen staff clearly knew better than to bother their Sect Leader who was cutting lotus root with a thunderous expression. Yanli was grateful for this. Like everything she was grateful to A-Cheng for in this moment, it was full of bitter poison, but less than most, and so she let herself taste it, a little.

You were always stronger than me, A-Jie, his letter had said. As though her dedication to looking after her brothers had been some great feat of heroism, and not just the thing she needed to do, the thing that made her feel worthwhile. As though a truly heroic older sister wouldn’t have been one who stood up to her mother instead of steering around her like a boat through shoals, and patching up the wounds she left in hopes they wouldn’t scar, even though they obviously had.

In spite of everything else, she’d still flashed cold enough to half expect herself to faint, when she found out how quickly Wei Wuxian had followed her into death, how little time she'd bought him. Jiang Yanli had never been any use to anybody, and A-Cheng thought she was the one to steer them through this?

She wished he was here. She wished she had her husband or her son. She would even take her parents.

Yunmeng Jiang and Lanling Jin were on the brink of war. A-Ling’s visits to Yunmeng had been suspended even before—all this, that had in an indirect way been the cause of everything that followed, but now…

Cao Yufeng made me promise not to throw away the lives of our disciples, Jiang Cheng had written, speaking of the Head Disciple who had died getting him out of Jinlintai that final time. And—she lost her daughter, the last time I took us to war. Because I chose to send us against the man who’d torn himself apart into a weapon for me, gone insane.

I can’t say things would be alright, but more of us would still be here if I hadn’t done it. If I’d listened to you. If I hadn’t put my opinions about vengeance and politics over yours about mercy and family.

We can’t beat the Jin on the field. We’re outnumbered and outsupplied. If I tried to get A-Ling out by force we’d. This sentence ended in a great, deliberate blot of brushstrokes, characters obliterated. The rest of the letter had been very neatly written, even where A-Cheng’s hand had clearly begun to shake, with nerves or weeping; Yanli was fairly sure this had been a third or fourth draft. He must have given up on getting it perfect.

In slightly oversized characters, the next line began, I don’t know what else to do.

Jiang Yanli stirred the soup with her brother’s hands, paying close attention to how the fat in the pork was melting. If you cooked the meat too long, it was no good, all the flavor went out into the broth, and you might as well give the ribs to cats.

I can’t think what to do. I can’t make any more decisions. I can’t trust myself with them. I don’t deserve to lead the Sect, after all of this. Even if I could get A-Ling back, I know I’ve never deserved to have him. You deserved so much better, A-Jie. Let me give you what I can.

Let me get it right, this time.

As if he’d given her any choice in the matter.

Carefully, grateful for the rigid habits of Jiang Cheng’s face, Yanli moved the pot off the heat and carefully dished up three bowls, which she set on a small lacquered tray. The kitchen had had to be partially rebuilt after the fire the Wen had set, all those years ago now, but Yanli had been heavily involved in that process and everything was still kept where she had put it then, mostly the same organizational system they’d had since she was a girl but with a few modifications for convenience or efficiency.

She’d taken a small comfort in being able to get some use out of having to rebuild. Life from ashes, she had told herself a thousand times, in those two years after the war but before she married.

Ignoring the staff as she wouldn’t have, once, when she’d been herself and they’d all been people whose names she knew, Jiang Yanli took her three bowls of soup and carried them out of the kitchen and back to the Sect Leader’s private rooms. A-Cheng had barely changed those since they rebuilt them almost ten years ago, either.

She put the soup down on the table and distributed a bowl each to the boys waiting there for her, then took one for herself.

The taste of the first bite made Yanli’s heart clench so hard she wondered if it was A-Cheng’s grief she was feeling, not her own. A-Cheng who had made this recipe who knew how many times, always knowing he would never taste her soup again.

Wen Ning’s spoon stirred anxiously through his soup bowl, which he had leaned over to smell, but he didn’t take a bite. “Ah, thank you very much, Madam Jiang,” he said, using the bittersweet title they had agreed on for private conversation, because she could not bear to hear Jiang-zongzhu constantly when she had to answer to it so often outside these rooms, knowing they meant someone who was not here. “But I can’t eat.”

Jiang Yanli blinked at him. Somehow this felt like something she should not have taken nearly two days to learn. “What did you do with that soup I gave you that time, then?” she asked. Her words, honest and reasonable, seemed to be coming from a slight distance, as they so frequently were now. Yanli wondered a little if this was a consequence of death, or something about how A-Cheng’s body worked, but it had gone away just enough times and was familiar enough that she knew it was shock.

Wen Ning dropped his eyes further like he was hoping they would fall into his soup and free him from the burden of deciding where to look, although A-Xian had preserved his body far too perfectly for that, even if apparently not as well as she’d thought. “I gave it to my baby cousin.” A shy glance up. Wen Ning had died at nineteen; Jiang Yanli wondered if he was capable of growing up in any sense, like this. “He loved it.”

“Of course he did,” said the actual teenager in the room, already more than halfway through his bowl. “In Wei Wuxian’s notes he kept making little asides about how exciting it was to eat anything that wasn’t radishes, that kid would have been over the moon about anything with a bit of meat in it even if it wasn’t the best soup in the world.

“It kind of is though,” he added to Jiang Yanli, in a manner that made it very hard to tell whether he was paying her a calculated compliment or unleashing a burst of wild sincerity.

She could trace his resemblance to her A-Xuan in the outside corners of his eyes, the bow of his upper lip, the way his nose joined his face, but he resembled his other brother in the jaw and inside eyes, as they joined the bridge of the nose, and he’d inherited something from Jin Guangshan neither of them had, around the eyebrows. He even reminded her a little of A-Xian, which must come from his mother.

Yanli wondered who A-Ling resembled. He was seven now, he’d have grown into enough of his face to be able to begin to say.

“Wei-gongzi always said so,” Wen Ning told Mo Xuanyu, and to Jiang Yanli, “It smells wonderful.”

How amazing, she thought, taking another bite, that he could smell things. But after all, she too was long dead, and here she was tasting golden broth and simmered lotus.

Out of habit, she’d put extra meat in the other two bowls.

Wen Ning seemed to have noticed this, too, and lifted one tender rib with his spoon. “Would you like—”

“No, thank you.” Yanli was working her way methodically through her portion, but she hadn’t made this soup because she especially wanted to eat it.

“I’ll take it,” volunteered Mo Xuanyu, tipping back his own bowl to hastily finish off the broth now that he had a prospect of seconds. Wen Ning silently pushed his own serving over.

It was almost heart-warming, to see the way the boy tucked in. You could see he hadn’t always eaten enough, even though he’d been in Koi Tower and the last thing any member of the Jin should have to worry about was running short of food. Had his brother, or his father before that, kept him on short commons to keep him in line? It was the kind of thing Jin Guangshan had done.

Never to A-Xuan, but Yanli had had a year to get the lay of the place. Mostly her father-in-law hadn’t interfered in Madam Jin’s more sane domestic arrangements, but when he had it had been unpleasant, and in the back of her mind Yanli had made some preliminary plans for if Jin Guangshan outlived his wife.

She had intended in that case to begin on what she’d intended to be a strong alliance with her brother-in-law, who was excessively eager to please his father but also had a much better understanding of the realities of household management than any of the other men in the family. Jiang Yanli couldn’t say she’d liked him, but she hadn’t disliked him either.

She’d thought she had better than even odds of enlisting his help, considering that he’d seemed clever enough to understand that having Jin Guangshan’s favor at the expense of a functioning Jin Sect and his brother’s good opinion wouldn’t be a good trade, not if he could have both. She’d thought a lot of things.

A-Xian had always eaten like that, even when he wasn’t half-starved. Yanli had fed him this soup while his bones showed too-sharp like that three times, even though the first time she’d sworn he would never have to go hungry again. The third time, she’d gone away and left him afterward, knowing he was going hungry.

There hadn’t been a real alternative. Wei Wuxian had made his choices and Jiang Yanli had respected them. But she should have tried harder, should have worked to establish herself more in Jinlintai and known about the ambush or—a hundred things she could have done differently, if she had known how the first and only year of her marriage would end. Choosing to live happily and lay careful foundations had seemed like the right choice at the time.

So many things seemed like the right choice, when you did them.

“How could you let him?” she asked abruptly. It came out—menacing. Her own voice hadn’t been capable of conveying anger like that. If she’d tried very hard to rage, it would still have sounded shrill and unimpressive, and if she’d spoken the way she’d tried to just now, it might have chilled the right room but it would still have sounded gentle.

A-Cheng’s voice had no softness in it, and both boys went very still.

Mo Xuanyu put his spoon down into his second bowl of soup. “Well, I could hardly stop him,” he said. “It was Sect Leader Jiang, Sandu Shenshou, and I was technically his prisoner.” He said this even though he’d affirmed the impression given in the letter that when Jiang Cheng had removed him from Jinlintai they’d both regarded it as a rescue, even if the Jin did not agree. “And he had the notes. All I could have done was refuse to help him, and then he’d have done it alone, and what if he messed up and died and didn’t even get you back?” He shook his head.

Jiang Yanli looked at Wen Ning, who flinched for a second, and then raised his head and she thought she saw a flash of this Ghost General people talked about, the person or the weapon that had killed her husband. “He pointed out I helped do something similar once before,” he said. “He asked if I thought you were worth less than him. He asked what I thought Wei-gongzi would have wanted.”

“Not this,” slipped out of Yanli’s mouth, A-Cheng’s mouth.

“No,” Wen Ning admitted. “But I was there in Yiling, after—” After his family murdered hers. When A-Cheng had just…lain there. “Wei-gongzi and Jiang Wanyin did agree between them that your life was worth more than theirs.”

Of course they had. And of course it wasn’t.

“I’m the eldest,” Yanli said. And only a woman. “It was my place. Never theirs.” And she’d always known they’d never agree to that.

Wen Ning looked down at the table. “I would give anything if I could make A-Jie take her choice back,” he said.

Because, of course, the two of them had given themselves over to the Jin—her second family, the one she’d married into—and Wen Qing had died and it had saved nobody. That murder was what A-Xian had come to the Nightless City to avenge, ruining everything even though Yanli couldn’t pretend it had not been already ruined, or that he had been any more in the wrong than anyone else making decisions at the time. Especially with what Jiang Cheng had uncovered about the circumstances of Jin Zixuan’s death.

“That was a tragic and unjust waste,” Jiang Yanli told Wen Ning, as though that did not describe almost everything that had happened between their families all these years, or perhaps because it did.

“Also,” he said to the table, “Jiang Wanyin attacked me with Zidian and covered me with paralyzing talismans when he thought I might interfere, and I couldn’t do anything until Mo-gongzi let me out.”

Something unlocked in her chest even though it shouldn’t. “But you meant to?”

Wen Ning’s stiff face did a strange thing. “Your brother took the choice out of my hands.”

So he wasn’t sure. Well. At least Jiang Yanli could consider forgiving him for A-Cheng, just as she’d partly forgiven him for A-Xuan. Both of her loved ones had, after all, made their own choices, even if her husband’s had been a sort of reckless trust and her brother’s deliberate self-destruction.

Both her brothers. And how angry did she get to be with them for choosing that, when she’d done it too? Not first, because apparently A-Cheng had gone first, throwing himself out as bait, and A-Xian next, carving himself open. She’d taught them that, somehow. She’d never wanted to. They were such good boys. They had always been so good.

If she’d been allowed to raise her A-Ling, would she have brought him up to do the same?

She sighed. “For now,” she said, “I have to take responsibility. Mo-gongzi, I will welcome your guidance in the coming days as I try to undo my brothers’ work, but in the meantime I have a Sect and a son to consider. Can I ask you both for your support?”

“Anything,” said Wen Ning, and she saw that he blamed himself more than she ever could.

Mo Xuanyu nodded, more judiciously. “I’m not a demonic cultivation expert, or anything,” he said. “But—I’m seeing that betraying people is a habit Yao-ge has, so it wasn’t my fault, and I’m. Really mad.”

“Thank you,” Yanli said, regretting that she had to rely on a child. But then he was only a little younger than her brothers had been in the war. Which had been far too young, and wasn’t that perhaps a root of how she found herself in this position? “Do finish your soup. There’s more in the kitchen.”

Mo Xuanyu applied himself to his bowl, and Wen Ning asked, “What can I do? What are you planning, Madam Jiang?”

Jiang Yanli chewed the meat off a pork rib with careful deliberation, making herself pay attention to the flavor, to the sensation of the fat on her brother’s lips and tongue. She set the bone down again.

“I am going,” she said, “to start with something I know A-Cheng could not have done.” If he wanted her to be the one making decisions now, if he felt that his solutions could not serve and wanted hers instead, well.

For the first time, the world demanded that Jiang Yanli act.

It had spent so long demanding she refrain from acting. As her mother’s daughter, she knew what it took for a woman to carve out the right to make her own decisions in the way men were expected to, and she knew what the costs were, and she had never been willing to pay them. But now her little brother had paid everything to ensure that the girl who had bandaged his scrapes and talked him through his childhood despairs would be in charge of a Sect on the brink of war.

“I am going to speak to Lan Wangji.”

Under only slightly different circumstances, the best thing would have been to send a letter inviting Hanguang-jun to Yunmeng. It would be polite, save effort, and put the conversation on her own ground and her own terms.

Hanguang-jun, however, apparently hated Jiang Wanyin and would not have come in reply to one letter, and Yanli did not have the time for the kind of letter-writing campaign that would persuade him. And she badly needed to go off alone, anyway, and could hardly assign herself a solo night-hunt. Anything fit for a Sect Leader in such a tense time would almost certainly be beyond her capabilities, but having taken it on she would have to complete it somehow.

Yanli went to the Ancestral Hall and knelt. Honored her parents, in all their flaws that somehow she found more utterly forgivable than ever, and more terrible, because their children should not have come to this and it could not be all Yanli’s fault, surely. Even if it was all her doing that her brothers had made these choices, shouldn’t Yu Ziyuan have been there, setting a better maternal example, then?

“I’m sorry I let this happen,” she said, bowing, and letting the resentment go. It was no use now.

She looked at the tablet bearing her own name and imagined it was for each of her brothers in turn. A-Xian, how could you make something like this, she thought, knowing he must have meant it for his own use, if he’d meant it to be used at all and not as an intellectual exercise. In the end he had not used it. Was that because he knew better, or because by the end there had been too many dead for him to choose only one, or because he hadn’t wanted to burden her or Wen Qing with having to live in the body of the Yiling Patriarch?

Or maybe it really was meant for demons and he had never considered using it to trap the dead.

A-Cheng, how could you do this. Yanli pushed the question toward him, into the world. She refused to believe he was really gone. That he’d torn himself apart, obliterated, lingering nowhere and never to live again.

It was supposed to be a bargain, wasn’t it? And he’d left her with nothing to fulfill, made a gift of it. Surely that was a weak point, something she could use to unravel the whole thing somehow. Surely he was still out there. Surely.

“I will make it right,” she promised, and rose, and went to dress for the road.

A-Cheng had taken Suibian from Jinlintai, along with so many of A-Xian’s other things, and Wen Ning and Mo Xuanyu. Deliberately, Jiang Yanli hung it from her belt beside Sandu. Then she opened the chest from under her brother’s bed that she’d gone through the night before and took out her own sword, Yinglian, which she had never been any use with at all and would never have received if she had been some outer disciple with the same abilities.

This, she strapped across her back, where she had worn it the few times she had bothered, before it was tacitly agreed by everyone that her cultivation had stagnated enough she would never fly the sword or be much use in a night hunt, and she was allowed to put it away. It lay much smaller across Jiang Cheng’s shoulders than it had across her own. They had never managed closeness, she and Yinglian. It had always felt like an even worse arranged match than the one between her and Zixuan—even if he had not liked her, she had always known she could be basically competent in the office of wife. As a cultivator, she had always been useless, body and spirit equally unfit.

There was no way to know which if any of the three would best suit her, now.

She walked out carrying all three swords, and there was nobody in the whole compound who dared to comment.

“We can’t stand alone against an outright assault from the Jin,” she said, to the crowd of mostly young disciples who followed her to the quay. Jiang Cheng had, helpfully, explained as much as he felt they needed to know of the situation to the Sect before leaving her here; they knew about a large number of crimes including Jin Guangyao having sent Jin Zixuan to his death in a strategic multi-layered assassination, experiments in demonic cultivation, the murder of his father, and what she and her brother were both treating as the kidnapping of Jin Ling. “And it was Cao Yufeng’s dying wish that we not act recklessly in the name of honor.”

Faces around her showed signs of recognizing the reference to the Jiang disciples that had died fighting Wei Wuxian, who would never have been a threat to anyone who didn’t go after him and his first. Though probably almost no one here recalled that, remembered what he’d been like.

Cao Yufeng had been twelve years older than Yanli, not one of the shijie she’d relied on or gotten on well with particularly, but one of the only people left after the war who’d known the three of them growing up.

“I am going to Gusu to ask for their intervention.”

Yang Sugong, who had been fourteen when Yanli had last seen him and not yet using a courtesy name since he hadn’t been born into the gentry, made a grimace and said, delicately but with a conviction that showed Jiang Cheng had come to rely on him: “Ah, Sect Leader, you realize the Jin will have been there first.”

Of course. Jin Guangyao would have been in correspondence with his sworn brother instantly after Jiang Cheng had fought his way out of Jinlintai with the Ghost General at his back, and he’d probably visited in person by now. Jiang Cheng had given him four days to work, and Yanli another two. It was past time to defend.

“Yes,” she said, in what would be a cool voice for her but came out contemptuous from her brother’s mouth. She was still learning. “But I trust the Lan will not attack or imprison a Sect Leader on a diplomatic visit just because Zewu-jun is intimate with Meng Yao.”

Even if this really had been a diplomatic visit, she’d have been best served by going to the Lan first and getting the Jiang side of the story on record, before any further proceedings between Lanling and Yunmeng. If Chifeng-zun were still alive the Nie could be looked to as an ally, because sworn brother or not he hated double dealing of this kind, but Jiang Yanli didn’t understand enough about how young Huaisang was operating as Sect Leader yet to approach him.

Some of her disciples made faces that suggested they’d read something scandalous into her flat wording and weren’t sure if it was an intentional joke. Interesting, in that she’d heard such rumors spitefully shared in Jinlintai seven years ago but not in Yunmeng.

“Lan Xichen is always careful to be fair, but if he only hears one side of the story of course he’ll be biased. At the very least I don’t want them dragged in to punish us for harboring Wen Qionglin or kidnapping Mo Xuanyu.

"Remember that Mo-gongzi is a guest that sought sanctuary here, and is free to leave. Don’t let him remove any of Wei Wuxian’s effects.” She couldn’t make Mo Xuanyu help her undo this, but she wasn’t having him take her information about how. She and Wen Ning were the only people left with any right to A-Xian’s things, anyway.

“If the Jin attack, send a message to me and focus on securing Lotus Pier. Let the Ghost General fight as much as he likes but keep a perimeter around him. We don’t want a repeat of what happened to Jin Zixuan.”

One of the girl disciples whose name she hadn't caught fretted a handkerchief. “Are you sure none of us can come with you?”

Yanli felt bad for leaving them. They’d just lost their Head Disciple, war loured on the horizon when they weren’t truly done rebuilding from the last one, and now their Sect Leader was going to be gone.

But the truth was, their Sect Leader had already left them. And Jiang Yanli was doing what needed to be done.

She didn’t smile, because A-Cheng wouldn’t. “I can move faster and less noticeably alone. You’re all more use here. Do you not believe in the strength of Yunmeng Jiang?”

“Of course!” said the disciple who’d asked and several others.

She inclined her head. “So do I. Make me proud.”

And she stepped off the dock and set off in her one-person boat, which would carry her a good part of the way almost as fast as a sword and far more easily.

Yanli had rarely gone out alone, in life, both because it was not her way to seek solitude and because her body had been weak enough that no one would have been comfortable with it if she had, nor would it have been a sensible decision. But though they were all easier now the tasks of sailing were old and familiar, and they comforted her until she reached the pier where her path diverged from the water.

She left the boat in the care of an associate of the clan, a man who had been in this role since she was eleven years old and was beginning to look weathered, and walked on out of sight, carrying the three swords which no one had dared to remark on.

The Sect Leader of Yunmeng Jiang stood in a forest clearing, well out of sight, and ran through the forms of the Jiang style.

She did them better than she ever had in life—Jiang Cheng’s muscles knew these movements, had spent nearly as many years practicing them as Yanli had lived. Yinglian was no good to her, though. It responded, but sluggishly, unhappy with the amount of energy she was trying to feed it when it had been designed for light, precision work, a sewing needle of a jian.

It recognized her, too, and remembered her rejection, which had been if not quite personal, certainly not an act of affection.

Also, it was physically too light in her brother’s broad hand.

Sandu was little better. It joined her in missing A-Cheng, and in that spirit they could work together—she would, she thought, be able to fly on Sandu if anyone was watching—but their bond had been close. Jiang Cheng had taken his title from this weapon. There was only so far it could bring itself to help her, and Jiang Yanli needed all the help she could get.

It was Suibian that was willing to give that. Suibian that leapt in her hand, reinforced every stroke to be stronger, faster, more precise and less tiring. It recognized her, at least as someone A-Xian had wanted to see succeed, and she could feel in her hand that it did not resent him as Yinglian did her. Suibian understood that it had been left behind not out of a lack of love.

And Suibian recognized the core burning in her belly.

It was Suibian she would fight with, if it came to real battle. If she needed to seriously defend herself and her Sect, if she needed to learn to kill. No other partner would carry her through that well enough. She would wrap the hilt and paper over the name and find another sheath, if necessary, or she would live with the whispers. Sandu Shengshou has reclaimed the Yiling Patriarch’s sword that he cast aside. The Jiang Sect Leader has forgiven the traitor to his sect whom he killed himself. Jiang Cheng is possessed by the ghost of Wei Wuxian.

Jiang Yanli put a hand to her chest, between heart and core, and smiled faintly, sadly, a smile that she knew would sit oddly on this face if anyone could see but which felt familiar. “Not quite.”

Zidian responded to her beautifully. She was, after all, her mother’s daughter. Now more than ever before.

A-Cheng had already done the hard work of teaching his arms and qi to twist and snap the whip into its many forms, but Yanli stayed there practicing her precision and control until the sun was sinking.

And then she walked on, ring on her hand and three swords with her. Jiang Yanli, with Jiang Wanyin’s hands and Wei Wuxian’s golden core.

We three, she had said once upon a time, are the closest on earth.

We'll never be apart.

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