#THE MOON SEES NOTHING OF THIS ( sc: ilia. ) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

etruatcaelum · 3 days

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[ @shroudednoir // ilia ]

“You can’t do this!”

Ilia turns her head away, glaring hard down the street through the slats of her mask. From here, she can see the ocean unfettered by the spiderweb docks of the harbor; a deep black expanse gilded by moonlight, rising and falling like the flanks of some great beast. She watches it for a long moment, breathing in time with the surf rolling up and down the shore, until the tight feeling in her chest abates.

“You don’t understand,” she whispers.

(Even at night, even lit by the colorless moon, Blake’s eyes are purest gold. It’s hard to meet them without flinching.)

Her fingers clench even harder around Stormtongue. The grip feels slippery in her hand, slick with sweat. “You don’t–” A sharp breath. “It’s getting worse, Blake. Maybe you missed it while you were off—pretending to be one of them, at Beacon. But…”

Blake’s right—Ilia knows she’s right—that bringing threats of violence to Kuo Kuana won’t solve anything; but the—the timidity of these people makes her blood boil, that they’re content to just sit and cower here in the hope that if they act tame enough then the human kingdoms will leave them alone forever, all while their kindred go missing in Mantle or keep ever-growing lists of towns and neighborhoods to avoid in Mistral.

She grits her teeth. “None of the faunus in Kuo Kuana will care. Not unless we remind them that there’s still a war going on out there. So yes, I can do this.”

#LEGENDS AND FAIRYTALES ( ic. )#THE MOON SEES NOTHING OF THIS ( sc: ilia. )#THE MOON HAS NOTHING TO BE SAD ABOUT ( v: fall. )#shroudednoir

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etruatcaelum · 5 months

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[ @the-gray-maiden asked: ]

20. how does your muse feel about public displays of affection? would they engage in them?

SALEM.

No. Just being in public—being looked at—makes her feel viscerally uncomfortable and unsafe. She's spent millions of years with no one but herself for company, and her experience with other people has been overwhelmingly defined by violence. Even something as small as holding hands where someone else might see would be deeply upsetting for her.

OZMA.

Their comfort with public affection fluctuates from one life to the next, although they tend to be more reserved than not. Right after they're separated from Oscar, they have a brief period of wanting to just hide in complete silence somewhere nobody can find them—and as that feeling settles, it turns into Ozma being intense about their privacy.

SUMMER.

She doesn't go out of her way to engage in PDA, but she's also not shy about it.

OSCAR.

He would be so embarrassed to be caught kissing somebody, but he's fine with things like holding hands or hugging in public.

CINDER.

In the event she had a partner, Cinder would absolutely not feel comfortable with open displays of affection—but she would also unflinchingly go for it anyway if she felt like she had something to prove.

WATTS.

He doesn't pay any attention to it. Half the time, unless the participants are being truly over-the-top about it, he won't even notice.

ELAH.

His guiding philosophy is "you only live once." That this is, in his case, demonstrably not true will in no way stop him. If he likes you he is going to do his best impression of a lapdog and you will scritch the teeth behind his ears. That is a threat.

HENRIETTA.

She is the type to commentate when she sees it. Loudly.

BLAKE.

It depends a lot on her comfort with her partner and the time and place. Around friends, with Yang, she's pretty okay with PDA in moderation.

ADAM.

He is… weird about it. Emotionally, he never actually feels okay with making romantic gestures of any kind in front of people—but with Blake, he also felt like a certain amount of grand gestures and very public displays of (chivalrous) affection were just part of being in love, so he crushed down any discomfort he felt and ignored hers.

SIENNA.

She isn't stridently opposed to it, but she does feel that open affection is better kept private. In her own relationship, she would be okay with very small gestures only.

ILIA.

On the one hand, she finds it obnoxious and unnecessary and even a little gross when a couple really gets into it. But on the other, when she imagines being so in love with someone herself that kissing made the rest of the world fall away, it sounds unbearably romantic. She's aware of, and vaguely embarrassed about, this hypocrisy. She would absolutely make out with her girlfriend at a bus stop, zero hesitation.

#MAIDENS AND KINGDOMS ( hc. )#THIS DARK THING THAT SLEEPS IN ME ( hc: salem. )#FOND HEARTS CHARRED AS ANY MATCH ( hc: ozma. )#THE FIRE AND THE ROSE ARE ONE ( hc: summer. )#SUNS RUN TO SEED ( hc: oscar. )#THE CROWNED KNOT OF FIRE ( sc: cinder. )#THOSE WHO FAVOR FIRE ( sc: watts. )#EVEN DEATH MAY DIE ( sc: elah. )#THE RABBIT IN THE MOON ( sc: henrietta. )#AS THE TOOTHED MOON RISES ( sc: blake. )#A STAR WHERE DRAGONS BREED ( sc: adam. )#THE OLD MOON IS TARNISHED WITH SMOKE ( sc: sienna. )#THE MOON SEES NOTHING OF THIS ( sc: ilia. )

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etruatcaelum · 5 months

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[ @the-gray-maiden asked: ]

12. does your muse get flustered easily? how would they typically react to compliments from someone they are interested in/dating?

SALEM.

She does. Forget compliments, forget someone she has a romantic interest in, being treated with basic decency by anyone is enough to flummox her. It runs contrary to all her social expectations and she has no idea how to react; so she just… doesn't. At most you might get a faintly incredulous look.

OZMA.

It… depends. Being complimented is likelier to make them feel guilty than flustered, but coming from a romantic partner, verbal affection matters to them a lot. They're far more comfortable giving compliments than receiving them—and this is compounded by Salem's difficulties with speech and her lack of confidence in her own ability to communicate verbally. Even when they were married, she very rarely told them how she felt in words, which meant the rare occasions she did scrambled Ozma's head like an egg.

SUMMER.

As a huntress—and sometimes even now—she tended to hear compliments as implicit expectations. They didn't get her flustered, but they did fuel her unspoken anxieties and the pressure she felt to be a heroic paragon. In the present, she's much more relaxed.

OSCAR.

He is fifteen. Small talk with someone he's crushing on flusters him.

CINDER.

She leapfrogs over "flustered" to land on "anyone who says something nice about me is fishing for something, and this is a game that I am playing to win."

WATTS.

The closest this man has ever gotten to feeling flustered was the time he delivered himself to Salem's front door, fully expecting to have to spend hours making the case for his employment like his life depended upon it, only for Salem to hear the words "wrote Atlas' security code" and ask him which of her spare rooms he wanted to set up shop in.

ELAH.

He is unflappable. He is also more or less indifferent to being complimented, although he is fairly liberal with praise when he feels it's deserved.

HENRIETTA.

She takes compliments as basic facts of the universe and may preen about it if she's feeling especially pleased with herself.

BLAKE.

While she doesn't quite get flustered, Blake does have a difficult time accepting compliments. It's something she's working on.

ADAM.

Superficially, compliments feed his ego and are an unspoken expectation of his—but that arises from his insecurities and extreme lack of self-worth, fueling a vicious cycle of Adam seeking, and sometimes demanding, external validation to keep frail sense of self afloat.

SIENNA.

She is very comfortable in herself, and too outspoken to let anything anyone else thinks of her break her stride. In the event she did have a romantic interest in someone, though, she would be very flattered to receive compliments from that person.

ILIA.

She would not know how to handle being sweet-talked at all, and just dissolve into an incoherent and vividly pink mess.

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etruatcaelum · 5 months

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[ @the-gray-maiden asked: ]

3. has your muse been mainly attracted to men, women, non-binary people, another identity not specified, or an even split?

SALEM.

She is at least two hundred million years old and immortal and the original sin and her creators annihilated the last world and shattered the moon to spite her. Her gender no longer exists in any meaningful sense because the Ruakhian conception of "grimm" as a gender category has been erased from the historical record. Ozma is the only lover she's ever had because she is inescapably aware of being older than dirt and one step shy of unknowably eldritch.

OZMA.

Ozma is a hopeless romantic who exists in a perpetual state of being spiritually drawn and quartered by a divine curse and they're coping with not being with Salem by being with Salem but in a "fated enemies" way. They inherited every other romantic partnership they've ever had from their hosts, and also see their ex-wife every time they look at a grimm. They don't know what a gender is and at this point they're too afraid to ask.

SUMMER.

She does not know how to be friends with someone without also being a little in love with them. Summer would tell you that she's never been in love with anyone, and then say the most blindingly romantic shit you've ever heard about her friends. She's confused aromantic bisexual noises all the way down.

OSCAR.

He is fifteen and never felt much in the way of romantic attraction to anybody prior to leaving home, which makes Ruby his first crush—not that he's actually identified that feeling as such yet.

CINDER.

She associates upper-class femininity with power and very much has her wires crossed in regard to envy and attraction, in that she cannot differentiate between the feeling of sexual attraction or romantic interest and the feeling of coveting power, whether real or perceived. Under her myriad layers of toxic femininity and gender anxiety and gender dysphoria, she's attracted to gender-nonconforming women.

WATTS.

His one true love is being left alone to write code in peace.

ELAH.

He prefers women but he isn't especially particular; like Salem, his relationship to gender harkens back to a very different culture—as a human-passing faunus born in Mantle decades before the Great War, Elah was influenced quite strongly by the faunus-separatist movements of the time and regards "human woman" and "faunus woman" as discrete genders. His romantic and sexual interest does not extend to humans.

HENRIETTA.

She is utterly indifferent.

BLAKE.

Gender does not figure into her attraction to people whatsoever; she's attracted to people whose character she admires—to virtue, honesty, and a strong sense of justice.

ADAM.

Blake was his first love and—in part because what drew them together in the first place was a shared love of romantic stories, and in part because his sense of self depended on being perceived as a heroic archetype—he came to believe that she was his only true love. That belief decayed into obsessive hatred after she left him and it became clear that she wouldn't come back.

SIENNA.

She likes men, although romance has always been a distant consideration of hers—not that Sienna is uninterested in the possibility of romantic partnership, but she's comfortable being alone and it isn't something she feels inclined to go out and look for.

ILIA.

Blake was her first serious crush, although she had plenty of fleeting crushes on other girls in her school before the collapse killed her parents. She's never had any interest in boys.

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