#actually used their fucking platform to do like. anything. our struggles are connected you need to careeeee YOU HAVE TO CARE........ ok bye
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my final from last semester that i made into a zine. cooked this one up in a couple hours before the critique (the ink was still wet!), so it's very raw and kind of sloppy but the sentiment is there. i love you trans people of color. we are the backbone of this community 🌟
#pan draws#pan designs#zine#risograph#i'm not gonna lie i don't love how this one turned out OTL and i think the wording is not done but well... a deadline is a deadline#i'll probably touch it up and rewrite it in the future but who's to say.. i need to stew on how to articulate my feelings coherently#anyway my transness is so closely tied to my experience as a person of color. the current political climate is so fucking ass to exist in#but more than anything i am pissed off at white punks & leftists & trans people that refuse to have meaningful solidarity with us.#so yeah anyway. i was stuck on this one forever and only really got anywhere with it after attending 2 punk noise shows in a row where they#actually used their fucking platform to do like. anything. our struggles are connected you need to careeeee YOU HAVE TO CARE........ ok bye#tdov#trans day of visibility#<- i was sitting on uploading this for a while so the stars kind of aligned for it to be today huh.... happy tdov i love you
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an introduction and some books
hi hotties!
the idea for this blog came from the twisted fantasy of my three closest friends and i as a way of producing something collaborative and creative without submitting ourselves to the mortifying ordeal of being known. we all get a fun little code name (i'm ruminating on magnolia, which i like but also think is a bit wanky in a way that i can't reconcile myself with spiritually just yet) and a week of the month to post whatever we want. the idea was essentially to create a platform where we get to talk uninterrupted shit about anything we want to because it’s our fucking blog, goddamit, and you’re not going to come onto our blog and tell us how to post.
and so, to kick things off, i am going to be talking about my favourite books of 2023 because i am cultured and sophisticated and definitely didn’t spend the first half of the year drowning in fae romantasy smut in an attempt to feel something. if you don’t like any of these books don’t tell me because i simply don’t care!! xoxo
non-fiction favourite - the anthropocene reviewed, john green
i spent 2023 working very hard to reprogramme my misanthropic brain, and this book was a huge part of what allowed me to do that. i’m still by no means cured of my hater tendencies, but this book was a beautifully tender examination of that little spark of humanity that connects us all, and the numerous ways in which it has manifested throughout human history and across the borders of nationality, age, and gender. green somehow manages to weave in his own life experiences in a way that avoids being preachy or self-aggrandising in a way that i think a lot of non-fiction writers really struggle with - i’d also highly recommend consuming this in audiobook form as his narration really made the experience for me.
fantasy favourite - a court of silver flames, sarah j maas
if you read this and immediately want to start lecturing me on how booktok is ruining the fantasy genre please know that im manifesting your downfall as we speak. i have my own issues with the flattening of the fantasy genre that takes place on tiktok, but the acotar series is a sugary, pulpy delight and this spinoff novel is where, in my humble opinion, it really hits its peak. as you can probably tell just by reading this, i am what is affectionately known as ‘a prickly unfriendly bitch’ in my day-to-day life, and i love seeing characters who represent me in a way that doesn’t glamourise being an unkind person - and nesta in this book is someone whose tendency to push people away isn’t justified or apologised for, and whose growth i found legitimately inspiring. also i’m still waiting for sarah j maas to stop teasing a dp scene and actually write it, the coward.
sci-fi favourite - the arc of a scythe trilogy, neal schusterman
this trilogy rocked me to my fucking core, bitch. this was another audiobook read from early 2023 and it’s one of the better pieces of speculative fiction i’ve ever encountered. schusterman pulls off some really complicated and in-depth worldbuilding in a way that doesn’t feel like i’m reading an instruction manual - something that’s genuinely hard to do in this genre - and the series only gets better as it goes. as someone who is profoundly afraid of artificial intelligence this offered a perspective on ai that i’ve not really seen in media before now - and i will also be thinking about my pookie scythe lucifer for ever and ever amen.
lit fic favourite - all the names they used for god, anjali sachdeva
i’m actually not going to talk about this one too much because it’s quite a difficult book to explain without giving away too much - not in a spoiler sense, but in a 'this is an experience that you need to go into with an open mind' sense. this is a collection of short stories that play with genre, setting, and character to tell a series of profound stories about the human struggle with fate and the pursuit of meaning. sachdeva manages to build such engrossing and vibrant worlds in the limited space she allows herself for each story - and she avoided the pitfall i find that a lot of short story anthologies fall into where you can very clearly tell that the writer had one story they desperately wanted to publish and wrote the rest as a way of filling up space for a full book.
well, those are some of my 2023 faves. i have a million honourable mentions but i’m not going to put them here because i’ve already written way too much. i’m not sure who’s taking over the reins for week 2 of this little blog experiment but be sure to give them a kiss on the forehead from me!
yours,
magnolia
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Paris
18+, minors DNI
Tags: Dream x GN!Reader x Sapnap, Top!Dream, Top!Sapnap, Btm!Reader, 3k Words, Double Penetration, Fingering, Degradation, Praise, Daddy Kink (sorta), Competition, inspired by Sapnap’s latest alt stream where they went back and forth between who could last the longest.
Masterlist and Info
Dream and Sapnap had to make everything into a competition. Who could clean faster, who could cook better, who loved Patches more, everything. Now their latest bout of competition has fallen upon your shoulders, and you have to help them figure out who wins this time.
Living with Sapnap and Dream had it’s ups and downs. Grade A wagyu beef, unlimited cuddles, and living with you best friends were the ups. Your roommates’ constant arguments and competitions were the downs. Sometimes they ended well, with you getting to choose who cooked better, or once they cleaned the entire house because they wanted to see who could do a better job, leaving you with no chores to do. However most of the time they just ended in pointless back and forth yelling for a good few hours.
MCC was coming back, and all of you had been separated into separate teams. This only made Sapnap and Dream’s competitiveness worse. Not only were they competing against each other, but all the other streamers as well, and after months of no practice, they were a little rusty on the mini games.
“What kind of psychopath plays Hole in The Wall for an hour and five minutes!?” Dream yelled into his mic as you and Sapnap hopped back onto the platform for another go.
Sapnap had ended his stream awhile ago, but you all decided to keep practicing, allowing you to talk about the things you can’t while on stream.
“I have no idea, but I doubt he’ll last that long in the actual competition,” you said, trying to calm everyone’s nerves.
Dream was about to agree with you, until he got knocked off the platform again. “What the hell!”
Sapnap started laughing at his friend’s struggle, only making him angrier.
“Oh shut the fuck up, Sapnap, I’ve lasted longer than you have every time.”
“You can’t last longer than I can,” Sapnap said, trying to poke the bear.
“Yes I can! Both of you come down so we can reset and we’ll see who can go longer.” Dream said as he stared at you flew off the platform, and Sapnap jumped off.
“Fine, but I we all know I can last longer,” Sapnap said in a way that suggested he was referring to something other than Minecraft. You just rolled your eyes despite having your camera off. However, you would be lying to yourself if you said his suggestive tone didn’t wake up the butterflies in your stomach.
Dream laughed at Sapnap’s words, “Oh yeah? Why don’t we put you to the test then?” he replied in an equally flirtatious manner. A deep blush was starting to form on your face. Being completely honest, you had a major crush on both of your roommates. Dream was tall, strong, and handsome. Sapnap was loyal, cute, and soft. You may have had one too many dreams of the both of them... having their way with you. The contrast between both their personalities sending dream you into a spiral of pleasure.
There were times when you thought for a second that they may have similar feelings for you. Once when you and Sapnap were having a ‘friendly’ cuddle and watching anime. You had both fallen asleep, and you woke up with his hand you your thigh and his very obvious hardon against your ass. You hadn’t know what to do, so you quietly slipped out of his arms despite your heart telling you other wise. As you opened his door, you quietly heard him murmur your name in his sleep.
Dream was more subtle with his emotions. Small touches, glances, and blushes were what cued you into his possible feelings, it was just that you always felt you might have to choose between them both. However choosing one may ruin your friendship with the other, and you valued that more than any relationship. So you vowed to just keep quiet and let your hand fill in for them.
“HELLOOO?!” Sapnap’s yelling had brought you out of your thoughts. “You still there?”
“Y-yeah, sorry. I was just lost in thought,” you replied, jumping onto the platform to continue your practice.
“Well, Dream and I want you to help us settle our debate.”
“About who can last longer in Hole in The Wall? Why not just play and see?”
Dream laughed, “No idiot, who can last longer.” There was that flirtatious tone again. Sapnap was laughing slightly.
You were at a loss, do you play it safe and act innocent, or do you play up their banter. There was almost a 0% chance this ended in a threesome. Almost zero, but not quite.
“Oh gosh,” you said in a breathless tone, “I’m not sure? I think I might need to know what you guys can do.” There, not asking to get fucked, just asking what they would do to you should you get fucked. Now the worse that could happen is you have more inspiration for your late night alone time.
Dream let out a small laugh, “Do you really want to know?”
“Well of course, I have no idea good you both are, so in order to give an informed decision I need to know all the dirty details.” This felt like the start up to a bad porn film, but at this point you’ll say anything to be sandwiched in-between the two.
“Hmm, that does make sense... However, I have noticed you’re more of a visual learner. Why don’t we just come over there and show you what we can do,” Dream said, logging off the MCC server.
Sapnap laughed, “Ooo~, then we can know for sure who can last the longest.”
“Get over here then,” you encouraged, “At this pace it seems like I’m gonna last the longest.” You definitely were not.
Neither Sapnap nor Dream took the time to disconnect from the Discord call. You heard their steps bounding up the stairs and down the hall to your room. Sapnap was the first to barge into your room.
“There.” He demanded, pointing to your bed. You were quick to follow his orders, pinching your arm slightly on the way there to make sure you weren’t dreaming.
Dream came into the room as you lied down, coming over and setting a box of condoms and a bottle of lube on your nightstand. He stood over you and just stared down. You tried to avert your eyes, which fell onto Sapnap, his dick showing through his sweats.
“So Sap, how do you want to go about this.” Dream asked, taking his eyes off you to look at Sapnap, who didn’t take his eyes off you.
“We could each take a side? I want their mouth...” He said with a small smile on his lips.
“Fine with me,” Dream replied with a shrug. He flipped you over onto your stomach and gave a solid smack to your ass. “You sure you’re okay with this?”
“Never been more sure of anything,” you replied. It was the truth, you wanted this more than you have every wanted anything else. Doesn’t mean you weren’t nervous as hell. You’d never had a threesome before, and doing so with your roommates that you had a major crush on was nerve racking.
Sapnap stood in front of you and lifted your head up with his hand. He gave you a small kiss on the lips, before pulling away and throwing a condom at Dream. “We need to start at the same time so it’s fair.” Sapnap took his shirt off as Dream helped pull yours over your shoulders.
“Of course, we need to make sure they’re prepped first though. However that might make it a little unfair to them...” Dream said as he continued to undress you.
“We can just add a couple minutes onto their time.” Both you and Sapnap were down to just your underwear, while Dream was still fully clothed. Sapnap crawled onto the bed and sat on his heels in front of your face. He reached down and kissed you again, however this time it was much more than a small peck.
Dream just sat back and watched as you and Sapnap made out, your ass in full display for him as you held yourself up on all fours. Your small moans went straight to his dick, and it didn’t take long before he started to palm himself through his shorts.
He let out a small moan that caused Sapnap to open his eyes and look over at his best friend. He managed to smirk at him with your tongue still in his mouth, and his cocky attitude broke Dream out of his trance. He was supposed to make this last, not get himself off. He quickly pulled his shirt and shorts off before pulling your underwear down and giving another smack to your ass.
“Sapnap, hand me the lube,” Sapnap huffed at Dream’s request, having to break away from you, a small line of saliva connecting your lips for a moment before breaking apart. He threw the lube at Dream and went right back to your lips.
Dream opened the lube and applied a generous amount to his fingers. He slowly circled one around your entrance, the cold lube sending a shiver down your back. He suddenly thrust his finger into you, causing you to let out a loud moan against Sapnap’s lips. Dream’s finger worked you open while trying to hit all the right spots, and when he found it he added a second finger before ramming into it over and over again.
Sapnap pulled away from you, causing your face to fall into the mattress. He quickly took his boxers off before slowly stroking his dick, watching you get finger fucked by his best friend. At this point he had three fingers inside of you, and it made you wonder how big his dick was that he needed this much prep.
“You think you can take it now?” He asked while slowly scissoring his fingers inside of you. All you could do was nod weakly.
He slowly pulled his fingers out of you and took off his own underwear, dick twitching at the cool air. You looked up at Sapnap when he let out a small “Damn” at the sight of his best friends dick, Sapnap was about average in length but thick. You turned your head over your shoulder and saw Dream’s as he rolled the condom on. He was about the same thickness as Sapnap, but a good six to seven inches in length, and you now knew why he took so much time to prep you.
“Okay we go in at the same time,” Dream lightly patted your ass, “You ready?” He asked.
You nodded, and looked up at Sapnap before opening your mouth for him. He grabbed your face and Dream grabbed your hips, both steadying their dicks at your entrances. They looked up at one another, nodding, and slowly pushed in. Sapnap stopped at just the tip, letting out a high pitched whine. Dream on the other hand pushed all the way in, stopping to let out small pants once he bottomed out. He gave you a second to adjust, before slamming into you, pushing Sapnap’s dick deeper down you throat.
Dream set a slow but steady pace as you sucked on Sapnap’s dick, the force of Dream’s thrust causing you to bob your head slightly. Sapnap had one hand on his dick, the other gripping your hair has he looked up at the ceiling.
Dream laughed at his friend’s face, “Oh come on now, you could at least look at the slut, taking both of our dicks so well.” He smacked your ass again before thrust into you harder. It caused Sapnap’s dick to go all the way down your throat. He moaned louder than ever as you gagged around him.
“Oh god... So good for me... You’re doing so good baby...” Sapnap said as he pet your hair. The contrast of Dream’s degradation and Sapnap’s praise causing your head to spin.
“Yeah they are good at this, I wonder how many people they let do this to them. What do you think? They probably fuck anyone who looks at them. Oh well, it’s our turn now. I’ll use them up until they can’t walk anymore.” Dream continued to talk, but you barely understood what he was saying.
Your moans were muffled by Sapnap, the vibrations causing his dick to twitch in your mouth. “Oh fuck yes baby, just like that. You take daddy’s dick so well...”
Everyone was snapped out of their trance when Dream’s pace faltered and he began to wheeze, “DADDY?!” He yelled, folding over you, tears falling from his eyes from laughed. You pulled Sapnap out of your mouth as you began to giggle as well.
“W-what? I didn’t say that!” He stammered.
“Yes you did,” you replied, smiling up at them. “Do you really like me that much, daddy?”
“I-I, uhh, I... I mean... Y-yes?” Sapnap’s brain faltered at hearing you call him daddy. He just shook his head and grabbed your face. “Both of you shut up. We’re trying to prove a point with all of this. Hey, is it okay if I just fuck your face.”
You nodded, mouth falling open with a moan as Dream roughly thrust into you once he had caught his breath. He was somehow hitting all the right places with every hard thrust. Sapnap took this opportunity to roughly thrust his own dick down your throat. You gagged a little, causing you to tighten around Dream’s dick. He let out a loud moan, large hands gripping you harder.
This was bad, you were getting close. While you were nowhere near as competitive as Dream and Sapnap, you still wanted to see how long you could last. It wasn’t quite equal, you thought. You were getting pleasure from two places while they where only receiving it from one. Dream fingering you also didn’t help.
Dream snapped you out of your thoughts as he laughed lightly again, “Awww, are you close already? Dumb slut can’t even last long enough for us. How long have you been waiting for us to take you? Do you think I don’t notice you staring at us at dinner, or the way your hands grip your thighs whenever we cuddle you. I’ve even heard you screaming our names when you touch yourself. Such a fucking slut, I bet you wanted me to hear you and come in and do something about it just like I am now.” You were almost crying at how good you were feeling, Dreams strong hands smacking your ass as he continued to call you names.
All of the sudden Dream hit your sweet spot one to many times, and you were coming all over his dick, and moaning around Sapnap’s. “Oh fuck yes, come for me,” Sapnap said, the pain of him gripping your hair fading into the pleasure of your orgasm.
“Heh, that’s one down,” Dream said as his pace slowed down to let you ride out your orgasm. He reached his hand out to Sapnap for a high five, who just rolled his eyes and let him have it.
Sapnap would be lying if he said he wasn’t close. The feeling of you moaning around his cock, and the sight of you taking the both of them was too much for him to handle. He just watched as his dick went in and out of your soft lips, saliva dripping down your chin. It was getting harder and harder for him to care about this dumb competition. Who cared who could last the longest? He had the most amazing person sucking him off, and that’s all he cared about.
Despite his cocky attitude, Dream was just as close as Sapnap. He was the real slut who thought of fucking you every chance he could, but he would never let that one. He watched as your ass jiggled with every strong thrust against his hips. However, he did want to win this competition, yet it was hard to focus on doing math in his head when you were almost screaming around Sapnap’s dick from overstimulation.
Sapnap’s whine just got louder as tears started to run down your face, and just a few more thrust into your throat and he was pulling out to cum all over your face. You opened your mouth to catch some of his cum on your tongue. Sapnap just watched in awe as your tried your best to catchy his cum in your mouth, the rest dripping down your cheeks and off your face. The force of his own orgasm caused him to fall back onto his ass, with your face falling onto his pillowy thighs.
Dream had won, but to him all that meant was he could finally focus on chasing his own release. He reached over to push your head down more into Sapnap’s thighs, cum, drool, and tears mixing on your face and his thigh.
Dream pounded into you, feeling you clench around him as he sped up. “Look at you, covered in cum and you’re still taking my dick. Want more you fucking slut? Want me to come all over your back so you can have more, huh?” Dream said, when you didn’t answer he gripped your hair and pulled you up to have his face against yours. “I asked you a question, whore. Do you want my cum or not?”
A weak “Yes,” was all you could muster before Dream dropped you back down onto Sapnap’s thighs, who just looked on in awe in his own post orgasmic haze. Dream’s pace faltered a bit before he gave a few more rough thrust right into your sweet spot, leading to your second orgasm of the night. It didn’t take long for Dream to pull out, pulling the condom off before stroking himself to cum all over your ass. He threw his head up moaning loudly before collapsing against your back.
You all lied there for a few minutes, catch your breathes as you all finally came down from the events of the night. Dream gently stroked your arms and Sapnap did the same with your back.
The quiet moment was broken when Dream started to laugh, “I win.”
“Oh shut the hell up,” Sapnap said, “I’ll beat you next time, that is if you want a next time.”
Both boys looked down at you expectantly. “Nah, I’ll win for sure.” All three of you laughed slightly before falling back into comfortable silence. The idea of this becoming a regular occurrence sounded quite nice to you all.
#sapnap smut#dream smut#mcyt smut#dream x reader#sapnap x reader#dream x reader smut#sapnap x reader smut#mcyt x reader#mcyt x reader smut#dream x gn!reader#sapnap x gn!reader#This one was a doosy#i had fun with this one lol#i hope you all like it! feedback is always appreciated :)#my writing
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Risotto Nero - A Price to Pay
{Being the only girl in the Bucci Gang has its perks. Your familia loved you, & were fiercely protective- but what’re they supposed to do when another Capo decides to have you to himself? He’s gotta have you.}
{one way or another.}
_____________________________________
“Bucciarati were almost to Napoli, should I head straight for the city or the safe house?”
Fugo’s sharp voice woke you from your nap. You & the team have been traveling for days tracking three stand users who’ve been smuggling contraband out of Passioné’s grasp. So far, the trail has led to Napoli- and to make it worse, no one knows what they look like. But luckily, you had the name of the man in charge of the operation.
“Go to the safe house. They’re not going to move anything in broad daylight, & we haven’t been able to stop for an actual break.” Bruno circled the location on Fugo’s map. “We can spare a few hours.”
You looked to your right to see Mista asleep against the window, drool slowly coming out of his mouth. You would’ve laughed if you had any right to, with the glimpse of yourself you caught in the rear view you were surprised no one woke you up with a camera flash.
You stretched your neck side to side, your movements slowly bringing your body back to life. You could hear Giorno, Abbachio, and Narancia gently start stirring to life as Bruno continued to talk about the location, not being able to keep in their loud ass yawns. Well, honestly, that was only Narancia’s problem.
Bruno swiveled the seat to face the back, his perfect black bob not moving an inch while he does it. “Now that we’re in Napoli, it’s time to be debriefed about our current situation. Would one of you please wake Mista?”
Abbachio wasted no time to slap Mista in the back of the head, causing Mista to lurch forward with a yelp. His hand immediately went to the back of his head as he whipped around towards Abbachio. “What the hell, you dumbass!! What was that for??”
“For debriefing you idiot, pay attention.”
You giggled, resulting in a hearty “Shut up!” from Mista. After Bruno’s scolding, he started to explain the facts.
“The intelligence we received stated that the man controlling the contraband operation is a Capo. His name is Risotto Nero, the leader of La Squandra. He’s been known to defy the Familia before, so it’d make sense that he would be the one running this show.”
Bruno’s face slowly grimmed as he continued, pausing after he spoke. “While he is a traitor to the Familia, he is also one of the most powerful Capo’s in the organization. Not just because of his title, but because of his stand.”
The tension grew substantially.
“What’s his stand, Boss? Does anyone have an idea?” Narancias question rung in the air like a bell.
“No. Because no ones lived to tell about it.”
The chill that ran down your spine was unnerving. No one knows what his stand is?? No one has even the slightest idea?? How can that be?
“Boss, how’re we supposed to find this cazzo when all we have to go on is a name?” you ask, “How’re we supposed to defend ourselves against a stand that no one has ever beat?”
“By keeping your stand close. Giorno’s Golden Wind can sense life, and Narancia can track anything that breathes. Abbachio’s Moody Jazz could very well be our ace in the hole, if we can simply find where he’s been- but that’s hard to do when you’re following a ghost.”
God, that wasn’t reassuring.
Soon, Fugo’s road rage landed you at the safe house, a 3 story cabin in the middle of the woods. Mista’s excitement blossomed as soon as he saw the giant flatscreen through the window, everyone else’s did when they finally got to leave the stuffy ass van.
Abbachio helped you out of the car, letting you hang on to his arm until you’ve cracked all the bones you needed to feel relief. “Thank you Abba, I’ve been needing to do that for a while now!”
Abbachio threw you a smirk. “Yeah yeah don’t get gross on me.” He could throw up any facade he wants- you see right through his badass tough guy wall. You gave him a grin back, & grabbed your duffel bag out from under your seat. You looked back to see that the other boys had already made it inside, Bruno & Giorno already setting up the radio & laptops to start working.
Bruno def wasn’t playing around when he was looking for a place to buy. This was the nicest cabin you had ever seen, pure dark wood walls with marble flooring, a grand staircase with a BEAUTIFUL bay window?? Capo DEFINITELY had perks.
***************
[3:33 AM]
You bolted awake as thunder and lightning surrounded your bedroom. Your mind frantic as the open curtains revealed howling winds and light flashing through the skies.
You took some deep breaths and calmed yourself down. It’s only a storm, nothing to- why was your door open?
Adrenaline started to churn in your stomach as you swung your legs over your bed. You stepped carefully towards the hallway, peeking down to see that everyone else’s doors were open too. You tip toed down, peering into Bruno & Abbachio’s rooms, seeing them both empty; and upon further inspection, so were Giorno’s and Mista’s. Narancia and Fugo’s following suit.
Where the fuck is everyone, and why are you not with them?
You back tracked down the hall, your legs shaking as you slowly walked down the stairs.
Were you being attacked?
The lightning lit your path down the stairs as you kept your eyes peeled for anything out of place. As you came down to the first platform, the stench of blood overwhelmed your senses, making your eyes grown wide and your hand go over your mouth and nose. This cannot be real, why is blood in the air??
“You know when I first saw you, I thought you were an angel among the saints & sinners of Napoli.”
Your hand gripped the banister as you stood in defense, looking everywhere for the source of the deep voice. Who was that?? Where the fuck is your team??
“& Then I saw Ghiaccio getting in a fight with another Mafioso. I thought it was just one of Bucciaratis boys, but oh was i so close yet so wrong.”
You slowly made your way down stairs, “I guess your a big fan of mine then, quite a shame I can’t see where you are for such occasion.”
A deep chuckle resonated through the estate. “Our life together will be wonderful, I am very sure.”
“The fuck are you-“
Your stomach dropped.
The blood. The gashes. The gore.
All of the boys were hanging by their hands, bloody chains protruding from their wrists and connecting them to the ceiling. Blood oozed from Fugos mouth, while Narancias unconscious form clearly had a broken nose and extreme loss of blood. They all were simply.. hanging by a thread.
“Jesus fucking Christ.. you’re fuc-fucking kidding..”
Invisible hands hold onto your sides as your body freezes in shock, the pressure and heat of them telling you they were quite large. Your heart beater out of your chest as you felt a muscular set of abs press against your back, those hands weaving over your chest to hold down your arms.
“Do you see, Amore? Do you see how powerful I am compared to them?” Your eyes tore away from the bloodied boys, closing them as tightly as you could. “When I saw how powerful you were and how you carried yourself, I knew we were soul mates. I had to have you. I had to have your body, your mind,” His hand rubbed gently against your clothes crotch, shooting heated adrenaline to your core, “& your pretty little cunt just full of my kids.”
Your cheeks turned violently red as you staggered to breathe. “Who..are you..”
Lips pressed against your temple as a deep chuckle vibrated your body. “Darling, I’m the whole reason you’re out here.”
Your heart froze.
“Risotto?? It’s you?!”
Suddenly two black clothed muscular arms appeared around you, one of them tilting your chin back to reveal two black and red eyes staring straight at you. “Surprised, Cara?”
You started to panic, the danger of your situation settling in. Bruno, Giorno, all of the boys, were out of action. There was no help for you, and you couldn’t summon your stand like this. Was this simply the end? Was he just saving you for last for his sick fantasy??
“Please.. what do you even want from me??”
Risotto put your hands behind your back and tied them together. “What I’ve wanted since I saw you; a life. With just you & me.” He placed you on a chair, kneeling before you with his hands tracing you and your skin. Your breath hitched as he ran over certain spots, his eyes growing darker and darker the more you react. You had to do something, you couldn’t let your family be killed over someone’s obsession over you.
“I’m going with you whether I like it or not, right?”
Risotto chuckled a humorless laugh. “A smart one! Oh i like that, I like that. Maybe our kids will get that trait.”
Dread sunk in your stomach. There’s no escape, is there?
“If I go with you, willingly with no struggle- will you allow me to use my stand on them so they atleast don’t die of their injuries?”
Risotto stared at you, looking for any sign of betrayal, but he wasn’t gonna find anything. You knew there wasn’t a way out, and you knew you didn’t stand a chance in hell against him. Atleast if you can save the boys, there wouldn’t be any death.
“Fine. But one slip up, Amore, and I’ll make your condition worse than theirs.”
Risotto unbinded your arms, helping you stand up and get your balance again. You walked towards the boys until you were a few meters away from them. You could sense their shallow breathing from your powers, you knew if you were gonna do this you had to act fast.
“Iron Maiden.”
A steam punk victorian girl emerged behind you, wielding a glowing white scythe, its jet black hair flowing behind her.
“Scythes Blessing.”
Iron Maiden hovered to the front of you, your scythe glowing bright white as it swung a mass of energy towards them all. Their wounds mended together, the blood returning to their bodies. After the act was done, the boys passed out on the floor, surely to wake up in a few hours.
“Now, we start our life, my sweet angel.”
Tears silently went down your cheeks as you turned to the beautiful, evil man. His eyes showed a softness towards you as he extended his giant hand. Your dainty one took his, holding it as he led you to the door.
“Where are you taking me?”
Risotto swung open the huge doors to reveal the storm still actively raging, his matte black sports car in the circle drive. “Home, cara. Our home.”
You hurried to get in his front seat, Risotto closing your door and going to the drivers door. He got in, revving the car to life and pulled the car out of the drive way. Risotto placed his hand on your thigh as he took you away from the estate. Your heart hurt for your boys, but this was for the best, right? Atleast this way they’re safe. They’re safe.
“Say your goodbyes Cara. Your life starts over with me.”
“Only me.”
#jojos bizzare adventure yandere#n/s/f/w jjba#vento aureo#yandere jjba#yandere risotto#la squadra#risotto headcanons#risotto nero
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This idea is based of this post! A huge thank you to @tack-tick who inspired me to write this and @dreamsmp-au-ideas for giving them a platform to put it on.
tw: hurt/no comfort, major death warning, I put smajor in place of Sclatt because i saw some cool ideas of him being Phil’s brother somewhere, a role reversal au.
ao3 link
*
Wilbur’s lost count of how many portals that he’s moved through at this point. The endless voids of stars and the sickening purple swirls that he’d raced through all blurring together as he moves through world after world.
It’s been two weeks since he’d received the letter from Technoblade that had prompted the mad dash. He’s read it so often that he can recite it by memory, can see where Techno’s always steady hand had smeared ink.
‘Dad’s not doing too well. Things aren’t going the way that we had planned. It might help us out if you could by. The sooner would be better.
- Technoblade.’
Most people wouldn’t find that alarming, some would even scoff at the way that Wilbur - a relatively soft musician in a family of warriors - is rushing to help the mighty and untouchable Technoblade.
There are only three people in the world who could read the warning signs, the red flags, the imminent danger in his brother’s words. It’s the reason that Wilbur had received the letter instead of the several more powerful people that Technoblade knows.
As soon as he’d gotten it he’d called on every single connection that he has, pulled on old favors, tracked down any kind of help that he could find. At every turn there was helpless shrugs and advice to not go anywhere near that server. Blocked from the common every man in a way that it hadn’t been at the beginning.
He places the ender eyes and does his best to focus on the sketches that Niki had sent him. The bare outlines of a podium, the white house in it’s half - glory (Tubbo and Phil) and it’s half - disatrous (Quackity) state. The flag that he’d designed.
His breath catches as his feet find air. He thinks of his father’s glorious iridescent black wings, Tommy’s barking laughter, Techno’s deadpan jokes. The smell of freshly baked bread.
The end swirls around him, stars twisting around him at a breakneck speed.
Phil’s voice starts to echo all around him a moment later.
“I think that there really was something special about it, ya know?” Phil says, sad and melancholic, “The way that we all built it from the ground up. The way that we managed to keep Dream from stepping all over us, but I think that - I think that eras passed us by.”
“Phil?” Wilbur calls out, struggling to keep his eyes open. “What are you doing?”
A beat of silence.
A whispered, “Wilbur?”
“No, it’s one of your other sons. Yes, it’s me.” Wilbur says, the stars finally slow down until they’re merely turning around him. “I’ve been looking for you guys for so long. It’s a bitch of a thing to get on a server without being whitelisted.”
“Wilbur, mate, you really should go home.” Phil says. It takes far too long before Wilbur realizes that he’s crying. “There’s not really much to be done here.”
Oh gods, Wilbur doesn’t think that he’s ever once heard Phil cry.
“Where are you?” Wilbur calls. He doesn’t know if the stars are actually closing in on him or if it’s a trick of the void. He doesn’t much care when he has a crying father to try to talk too, “Dad, where are you? Where are the others?”
“We’re in L’manberg,” Phil says, catching on the word. “You wouldn’t know exactly where I am. I - Wilbur. I think that it’d be best that you stay out of the Dream SMP for right now. You can try again in a day or two -”
Wilbur’s feet finally meet stone, but much more importantly his eyes are fixated on the black feathers of his father’s wings. The feathers are all in disarray in a way that Phil would never let happen. Wilbur isn’t naive enough to think the dark red smeared against the back is anything other than blood.
The room that they’re in doesn’t look like anything that’s been described to him. There are words carved into the wall shadowed so Wilbur can’t make out more than a few words. His hands start shaking when he realizes that they’re the semi - joking lyrics that Wilbur had sent to him, months ago now, after they’d won the war. Wilbur had insisted that they’d need a national anthem.
“How’d you get in?” Phil asks.
“I - I hacked my way in,” Wilbur says, taking a careful step forward. He has to duck so he doesn’t hit the top of the ceiling. “Phil, what the fuck is going on?”
“Stay back!” Phil snaps, whirling around as the sound echoes in the small space. The instinct to obey that voice has Wilbur taking two steps back. Phil swallows, a few tears trailing down his cheeks, he attempts a horrible facsimile of a smile. “Wilbur, we won.”
“You don’t seem very happy about that?”
“Scott - Scott’s dead, Wilbur.”
Wilbur’s heart drops into his stomach. He has to grab at the edge of a wall to keep himself steady as the words slam into him like a blow. “What?” he whispers, “But I thought you were going to take him in peacefully?”
“He didn’t want that,” Phil says, tragedy written into the deep-set wrinkles of his forehead and in the bags under his eyes. “He made sure that we wouldn’t be able to take him in.”
Wilbur forces himself to focus on Phil. He has too because otherwise the grief would overwhelm him. He still doesn’t know how his vibrant, extroverted, and fun - loving uncle had turned into the cold tyrant that he’d been told about.
Instead he focuses on the way that Phil looks like he might turn into dust at any moment. His bucket hat is wrinkled and sags against his forehead, his shoulders curved and his wings hunched defensively around him. He looks old in a way that Wilbur’s never seen him look.
He hasn’t moved away from the wall. He’s so obviously hiding something from view.
“Phil,” Wilbur’s voice is shaking despite his best effort. “Phil, what’s this room suppose to be about?”
Phil takes a deep fortifying breath. His back straightens, his wings go lax against the floor even as they twitch with energy.
“Phil?”
“Do you remember Eret?” Phil asks.
Oh, Wilbur remembers Eret. The deep wounds that they’d left on his already untrusting father and brother had Wilbur and Tommy sending scathing letters for weeks afterwards. He remembers the half - upset, half - amused way Phil had written about the rainbow - themed castle. He remembers laughing so hard that he’d cried when Tommy told him about the crusade that he and Technoblade were undertaking of stealing every single flamingo that Eret had dared put up.
“I remember Eret,” Wilbur says, “I don’t know what he has to do with this. Phil, please, let’s just go and find our boys -”
His communicator beeps. Several rockets go off.
TommyInnit was slain by Dream using [Nightmare]
Dream went off with a bang due to a firework fired from [Rocket Launcher] by Technoblade
Wilbur stares down at the communicator in horror. He glances up desperate to see the same horror echoed in Phil’s face.
Phil doesn’t even look down, instead just staring at him with tears trickling down his cheeks. He’s moved so he’s no longer hiding the back wall. His hand is hovering over a stone button.
“Did I never tell what Eret told us? Before he betrayed us all?” Wilbur shakes his head. Phil smiles a very sad smile, “It was never meant to be.”
A click of a button, the hiss of TNT igniting, the hard impact of Phil slamming into him, the sound of wings fanning out and feathers puffing out into a protective layer.
It all happens so quickly that Wilbur doesn’t have anytime to process it before the sound of utter devastation hits him. The sound of buildings crumbling into dust, the sound of screams, and rockets.
The beeps emitting from their communicators are coming every second.
“Oh my gods,” Wilbur cries out, coughing and spitting when dirt ends up in his mouth. He can’t open his eyes against the dirt and dust that must be lining his face. “Phil!”
Gentle hands wipe at his eyes until he can finally open them again. Phil is staring down at him, the previous grief and tenseness replaced with worry.
“Are you hurt?” Phil demands.
“Oh my gods,” Wilbur whispers as he stares at bloody stumps where wings once were. “Dad. Dad, your wings.”
“Are you hurt?” Phil demands again. The worry replaced with a steely resolve.
Wilbur shakes his head. His hearing hasn’t even been damaged despite how close they both were.
Phil stumbles to his feet, leans his shoulder against a half - broken wall. Wilbur stays laid out against the wall and stares out at the utter devastation of what he assumes had once been a nation. Now there is only rocks and collapsed buildings, people standing the edge of a crater.
He can’t recognize any of them from this distance.
“Wilbur,” Phil says, drawing his attention to him. His tone has gone utterly casual as if he hadn’t just blown up his own nation. “Have you been practicing with a sword like we’ve told you?”
“Y - yes?”
Phil pulls a netherite sword from it’s sheath. He doesn’t look quite right without his wings but even more than that, there’s something gone from behind his eyes. He holds the sword out to Wilbur, “I need you to kill me, Wil.”
“No!” Wilbur says, pulls himself up onto shaking legs. “Phil. Phil, we need to go find our boys. We need to make sure that Tubbo and Niki are alright. I’m not -”
The handle gets pressed into his shaking palm. Phil continues to look completely blank, “Do it, Wilbur.”
“No! Phil. Dad, listen to me. This is nothing. This can be rebuilt in a few weeks. We can salvage what we need to -”
The words catch in his throat as Phil meets his eyes. He takes the handle back out of Wilbur’s limp hand.
“Alright,” he finally says, a hand reaching up to cup Wilbur’s cheek for a moment before falling away. “Alright, Wilbur.”
Wilbur nearly collapses again from the relief, “Thank you. You were scaring me -”
Phil drives the sword through his own stomach. Stumbles backwards with the force.
Wilbur screams. He doesn’t think that he makes any words but if he did then he wouldn’t be able to hear them over the blood pounding in his ears.
“I’m sorry, Wilbur.” Phil mouths, “I’m sorry.”
He stumbles back another step.
It takes him right off the ledge and into the new crater. It’s a free fall that that a mere minute ago he could’ve flown away from. Now, he’s utterly helpless against the gravity pulling him down. Wilbur lunges towards the edge, his hands hanging uselessly where his father had once stood.
He isn’t quick enough.
His father eyes never leave his face.
Philza hit the ground too hard while trying to escape Philza
#text#fanfiction#wilbur soot#philza#role reversal au#hurt/no comfort#this isn't beta'd at all so sorry for any mistakes!#let there be a garden and a man in it
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im tired so I can’t think of a threat but if you read this and you’re not @angelwiththeblue-box ue-box then I’ll cut off your uvula and make you drown in your own blood
Anthony was just stepping out of the Sanctum when he got the call on his glasses. They buzzed gently against his face as his sister's name flashed right in front of his eyes, reminding him that his sister was the only person connected to his spectacles. And she only called him for one thing. "I will thank every god in the multiverse if you tell me right now that you're not in prison again," Anthony whispered with a seething rage as he answered the call, his fingers flexing on a stress ball.
Her overly long silence wasn't comforting. I'm in prison again.
Not knowing whether to scream or break things, Anthony just inhaled sharply as his stress ball popped. "Frigga, I'm about to go on a date! With Atreo! Remember, the Greek god of a man that I'm somehow dating?"
I remember.
"Is there at least not anyone there who's going to immediately kill you? Can you wait a night? Please?"
There was a huff from the other end. You're going to leave your sister in prison for a night to have sex with a mortal?
"Well he doesn't make me break him out of space prison!!" Frigga was right of course. He had to help her. And normally he didn't mind it, it was cracking codes and breaking laws, two of his favorite things, but Atreo was... hot. And Anthony was gay. It was unfair. But like the message of every single Fast and the Furious movie, family came first. "Fine. I'll help. But you owe me big time."
Okay okay, I owe you I owe you, just help me get out of here.
So with the gay side of his mind screaming at him to go hook up with a man carved out of stone, he teleported into his lab and plopped down into his swivel chair with a huff, then letting it roll him over to his main computer. "What prison are you at?" He started up the monitor and tossed his destroyed stress ball over his shoulder.
The Xandarian one.
Anthony groaned. "Again? Stop going to Xandar! They know you're a war criminal!"
It was just a little treason, don't be such a bitch.
"It's not the crimes, it's the fact that you keep going to the places where you know you'll be arrested. I'm a felon on at least 12 planets, but at least I'm smart enough to avoid them," Anthony pointed out, tapping the correct coordinates into the computer before dragging out the 3D model of the building and spinning it around in his hands. "But I guess it's better than one we've never broken out of before. Even though you'll probably be locked up twice as much and have three times as many guards making sure you don't get out. Fun. Really really fun." Anthony double tapped the side of his glasses to increase the volume on her end. "Where are you right now?"
I'm in line for my mugshot. My wrists are locked together with power dampers and there's a guard ready to taser me if I take a wrong step, but besides that I'm pretty free. So I was able to tap the piece with my shoulder and they just think I'm crazy talking to myself. Same place as last time.
The young scientist increased the size of the hologram prison until he spotted the room she was talking about and he then pulled it out before pushing it back into the computer. The camera footage from that room immediately popped up. Due to Frigga being arrested so frequently, he had already programmed the entire hologram with the codes needed to access both their camera and security system. It just made the whole process a lot simpler. "Alright I'm in." Anthony rolled forward in the chair and squinted at the monitor, increasing the picture with two outstretched fingers until he could zoom in on where his sister stood waiting for her mugshot to be taken next. "Oh my god, you put up another fight didn't you?"
...Maybe.
With a groan Anthony leaned back in his chair and pinched the bridge of his nose. "You may be powerful Frigga, but you, with your wrists and neck locked, and your powers suppressed, and four Xandarian guards surrounding you, you absolutely will not win in any situation." And it was obvious she didn't win that time either. A black ring was around her eye with blood dripping down her philtrum and her chin, as well as what appeared to be another bruise on her left cheekbone.
Says the guy with more scars to mark his battles than me.
She was right. She was. But that didn't mean he liked it. "This isn't about my problems right now, this is about yours," Anthony pointed out. "Focus on listening to directions. I don't want you to get hit again." Even though she was messing up his date, that's not how he wanted to get revenge on her. He already had a better plan that was calming his anger just from knowing they'd be even in the end.
You're not breaking me out now?
"Surrounded by guards and other unstable patients and chained up to your ass? I'm not stupid. Just trust me, I know what I'm doing."
A sigh came from her end. Fine. But I need to get a new prison breakout guy. My current one's too slow.
Anthony laughed back. If he was suffering emotionally, then she could too. It was only fair. "I'm the best in the business honey, don't underestimate me. And I don't make you pay me. Calculating the exact price of a hacker-if we ignore the fact that they would have to be available for you at any time since you get arrested way more than the average person-with the amount of times I've helped you out, including now, that adds up to about... $14,191. And we're poor."
Fuck you.
"Fuck you too, I'm out of fourteen hundred dollars and a date. Now just pretend to be obedient for the next 20 minutes and I'll get you out."
I still hate you.
"I hate you too."
The siblings fell into silence as Frigga's arm was grabbed and she was then pushed onto the platform, right in front of the electronic height measurer that all mugshots had for some reason. In her flat shoes she rose up to the marking of 6' 1". Which did annoy Anthony a bit, as he sort of received the short end of the stick when it came to tall genetics, but he swallowed his jealousy and listened to what the officers had to say while she was scanned and her pictures were taken. ACAB might be true, but they did have some pretty interesting banter.
She's back again? one guard, who Anthony nicknamed 'Terry' on the spot, commented with a hint of sarcasm.
Yep, the other guard, nicknamed 'Jake', responded with a small *pop* on the 'p'. The bounty's big on her, I'm surprised she wasn't handed over sooner.
Well she's escaped out of here thrice, so she's obviously got some tricks up her sleeves.
Jake let out a low whistle. Three times? That's gotta be a record.
It is. She just... slips through our fingers every single time. I don't know how she does it. Maybe with an accomplice or something, something that our camera's can't detect, maybe a brother or a parent or a friend, but there's no way they'll get through this a fourth time.
The two space cops laughed and assumedly bumped their fists together based on the small popping noise that came from the other end. Anthony only smirked and then tuned out their annoying voices when it moved to annoying prison stuff to then jot down the information typed out on the wall where she stood, describing her ethnicity, criminal background (there was a lot of that), special powers, descriptive marks, etc etc. He didn't look up when she was told to turn to her side.
You're paying attention, right? I can hear you writing something, Frigga suddenly interrupted.
"I have to record all the information they have on you to figure out if it can possibly be exploited. I'm organized Frigga, and anything can be important."
Frigga just groaned. Just get me out.
"Patience... is a virtue."
Patience can kiss my ass.
"You can kiss your ass goodbye if you don't shut up and follow the guards; I can see them looking at you." Although it was mostly to shut her up, he technically was telling the truth, as one of the guards broke out from the group to grab Frigga's bicep and pull her away from the mugshot space. Normal prisoners moved on their own with guards nearby, but three time escapists were snatched and moved on their own. Which Frigga wasn't used to, nor did she like. If Anthony wasn't there to bargain with her for her peace she definitely would have put up another fight and made practically everything ten times harder for herself. "I'll lead your escape plan in the direction of killing that guard," he offered as a reward if she stayed calm. A pretty useful tactic that both of them used on each other whenever something that they weren't good at was involved and needed to be done.
And it worked as usual. Frigga just huffed and pushed her shoulders back in order to hold her head high as she was walked toward where she would be temporarily staying, knowing she'd get to slaughter the person manhandling her in the end. Anthony followed them through the different rooms along the different security cameras.
More and more shackles were added as they went. A muzzle slapped on that thankfully still let her speak, new and bigger handcuffs, legs chained together to be dragged along the floor, and a full on torso restraint, all with Frigga looking more and more annoyed. It was actually pretty funny. Not that Anthony would say that aloud since he knew she'd just get (rightfully) mad. Although he had clicked record a minute prior and planned to laugh his ass off in front of her later. Once no one's life (but his) was in danger.
Eventually there were enough chains on her and she had reached her single containment facility, so while one guard lifted her up from the ground, the other opened the door for her to be thrown inside like a sack of potatoes before they then slammed it shut. At that Anthony had to laugh audibly at.
Oh fuck off.
"You didn't- they just- they just fucking threw you-" Anthony struggled out, wheezing through the words due to how hard he was laughing. It was so fucking funny. "You should have seen yourselffff."
Get me out of prison quicker so I can kill you quicker.
Anthony had to take another minute or two to stop laughing before he could actually get to work. "Alright, could you describe your surroundings? I have no quick way of getting in there."
Fine. I'm in a small, most likely vibranium room, about four feet by ten feet by... 12 feet. There are some sort of magnets in the back that connect to the chains' padlocks, so as soon as I was tossed in they snapped together, so now I'm hung up kinda like Jesus Christ on the cross. The room besides the door is bare.
"Any cracks above or below the door?"
Not a thing. They really don't want me to get out of here.
"But you will. Could you describe your chains to me? I didn't get a good look when I was watching you before."
The links are about three inches across, the metal an inch thick, and the cuffs are as heavy as Jeff, being almost four inches up and one and a half inches thick. They cover most of my forearms. The color is... a dark gray with a little hint of navy blue. Uh, I should paint this scene. I think I could really piss some Christians off with it because no joke, I'm exactly positioned like Jesus was in the El Greco pai-
Silence followed for a few seconds. Anthony was planning on telling her to focus once her sentence was done and comment on her mention of Jeff, their childhood 15 pound cat, but the end of it never came. So he just zoomed in on the door and increased the volume on her side once more. "Frigga? Come in Frigga."
There wasn't even silence on the other end. Static started to come through. "What the-" Anthony's work didn't produce static. His inventions and creations didn't create static. Ever. "Frigga tell me this is a joke, what's going on?" There had been no movement at the door, and as he was forced to take Frigga's word about the room's layout, there was no other entrance to it. "Frigga. Come on."
The only reason he was snapped out of the repeated cycle of him adjusting his glasses and repeating his sister's name was because his other senses perked up and he caught the feeling of a presence behind him. A certainly unfamiliar one. But before he could even turn or react, he was snatched from behind and his whole world went black.
~~
Frigga was being manhandled again when she woke up. "Ugh, did you dickheads knock me out again?" she hissed as she twisted in her shackles, surprised to be out of her personal prison with no warning, but still angered. "I was thinking about painting, asshole." She was struck in the face (as expected) for her rudeness. At least Anthony didn't scold her for it. Could you do your best to not piss everyone off while you're vulnerable? That would be great, is what he always said. As your doctor I have to tell you that it's a stupid ass thing to do. But he said nothing.
In fact there was no sound at all from Anthony. Not even breathing. Just static...
Wait. "What's your name?" the guard holding her up by her biceps demanded before she could properly think about where her brother was. "Who are you?"
"Who am I? You guys have arrested me four times! In fact I should be asking you that, are you a new hire or something? I didn't see you the last time I was here."
The guard brought his arm back to hit her again, but that time the other one stopped him. "Her sleeve is torn. She's telling the truth; she has been arrested multiple times."
"Then explain why she isn't in the system!"
"I can't. But she's not lying, so you shouldn't hit her. Let's just bring her to the mugshot area, get a photo, and then put her in the hardcore containment facility so we can figure this stuff out on our own," he bargained with the more unstable guard.
The guard did agree after a bit more negotiating, and soon enough Frigga was brought back to the mugshot area and positioned on it. It didn't look like the same one she was in just minutes earlier. Well, it looked... similar? Yet... outdated. Like the old system they used to use. She didn't say anything aloud, as she knew that would just get her hit again, but she tried to imprint the oddities in her mind as best she could. Dammit why did Anthony get Dad's photographic memory?! she mentally hissed as details vanished from her brain almost seconds after. Why do I have to be forgetful?
"Turn."
"Yeah yeah, I know I know," Frigga grumbled, reluctantly doing as told and then eyeing the information they were presenting about her on the screen. Some of it was from the identifying marks and tears on her clothing, like her escapist status and such, but most of it had come from the special type of scanner that The Kyln owned that could identify everything from hidden objects on the body down to a being's DNA. Hers was correctly listed as 50% Terran, 50% Jotunn. Her ear piece wasn't recognized just like Anthony had designed. But, in an odd turn of events, none of her powers were listed as they usually were. Not one.
After the scan was done, leaving both the guards and the young demi-god with more questions than answers, Frigga was grabbed by the bicep and led over to a containment facility. Not her usual single one, but a seemingly group one with approximately 13 more people inside. Only a few had handcuffs. And no chains were added to her, leaving her completely open spare her wrists, which was a ridiculous oversight on their part. (There had been a lot of weird oversights on their part by then.) At least it would be an easy break out. "Anthony, are you there?"
No answer.
Frigga bent her arms and reached over to press into the ear piece in case it accidentally got turned off when she was passed out. She said her brother's name again, ignoring the looks she got from other hardened criminals inside. "If you're fucking with me you are so dead when I get home."
"Hey crazy, stop talking to yourself, some of us are trying to nap here."
The familiar voice made Frigga stop in her action and turn toward it. "Rocket?" The other guardians also laying down looked up at the call of his name. "What- what are you all doing here? You're supposed to be in New Asgard."
They all looked extremely confused. "What? Look, lady, I don't know who the hell you are or what New Asgard is," Rocket continued, reluctantly pushing up to his paws and rubbing out the flat spot in his fur, "so I guess I'd prefer for you to talk to 'Anthony' because what you're doing now is creeping me out even more."
"Okay- no. I'm not the crazy one here. Everyone and everything has been weird, and now you guys too? Come on, this isn't fair."
"Hey, isn't New Asgard that place where Thor was living before he joined us?" Quill questioned as he too sat up.
Rocket only groaned. "Great, let's get more people in on this conversation. Peter, please don't enable her, she's obviously lost her head."
"What do you mean she lost her head, her head's right there on her shoulders!" Drax chimed in, getting up and gently shaking her back and forth with a grip on her shoulder to show that her head was really on there.
Frigga was used to Drax's typical maneuvering and his deafness to sarcasm, so him moving her back and forth was the least of her worries at that point. It was the others. "Mantis, come on, you remember me, right?" Frigga said in exasperation, being the only one in the room who was completely lost making her a bit worked up. Especially since she didn't have Anthony in her ear. He was always with her when she was arrested; in one way or another.
Mantis seemed to sense this and walked over to press her open palm to her revealed bicep. "You feel... desperate."
"Well I am desperate because I'm the only sane one here but you're all looking at me as if I'm the crazy one. Rocket, Quill, Drax, Mantis... Groot! Come on, you all know me," she went on, just waiting and practically praying that one of them would grin and tell her it was just a stupid joke. But that didn't happen. In fact the only change in their expressions was Groot looking up and murmuring something about it being too loud for him to play his game. "Oh come on!" With a huff she plopped down on the floor and rested her head against the wall's cool steel, bending her elbows again to cover her eyes with her hands and hoping that it would all just disappear. But, as one might guess, that didn't happen, and in fact she felt someone move over and sit next to her. Most likely out of pity.
It was Quill, of course. "What's your name?"
Maybe they were hit with some memory loss thing. Maybe there was a reasonable explanation. So Frigga opened her eyes and turned her head toward him. "Frigga."
His eyes widened a bit and Frigga got a little too excited. "Do you finally recognize me?"
"No- sorry, but that's just this- guy that I know's mother's name. Frigga," he gently explained with a slight blush and a nervous scratch at the back of his head.
The movements were a little confusing at first, but then Frigga realized that they were coming from the mention of Thor, and didn't have to do with her at all. But why would he act like that? Thor and he had been dating for decades. Since before she and her brother were born. She and baby Anthony were at their wedding. He was in a little blue tux and she in a little green dre- wait a fucking second. "Quill... What year is it?"
"What do you mean? It's 2024. What else would it be?"
Frigga gasped and jumped to her feet. It all clicked at once. Why the guards didn't know her. Why all the technology and architecture seemed older and outdated. Why her own uncle and the guardians didn't recognize her. She hadn't even been born yet. But the only question still there was... how? And also, why? But in order to have a prayer at answering those questions, she had to get back to Earth where she knew the Avengers as well as her parents would be. Although they technically weren't her parents yet. God are they even dating yet? It didn't matter. She just needed to get there and hope that Anthony was there too. The only problem (besides every other problem that she had) was that she had never escaped a prison without him before. They could only do it with each other. It seemed like a major roadblock... until she glanced over at the raccoon.
"Hey, Rocket, could you remind me again of how many prison's you've broken out of?"
Rocket, who had clearly been trying to ignore them but was just accepting his fate as his name was called once more, turned toward them with crossed arms. "About 24. What's it to ya?"
A small smile spread over Frigga's face. "And how many times out of here?"
"Just the one."
"Great. If you bring me to Earth, I'll help you get out."
He scoffed as if that was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard. "And why would I need your help out of here?"
"Because I've escaped here three times myself. And, you don't have Gamora, nor is Groot an adult as he was last time. Earth isn't even that far from here, just a few jumps, so why not pad your escape with me- a demi-god by the way -and just take me there in return?" she bargained, getting more and more calm and excited as her thoughts clicked together. Sure, everything was still weird, but at least she was able to get a grip on her situation.
Based on his extremely annoyed expression, Rocket knew that she was right and that they could use the help, yet was extremely reluctant to admit it. "Demi-god? We already got a half celestial, I don't think we need any more half- things," he tried to point out.
But Quill was on her side. "No, no, I think we should hear her out. Especially since I don't even have the powers of a half celestial anymore. If she's escaped from here three times then she could really be a big help for us. They've changed a lot of things since we were last here, and we're in a new area. And, although I'm not sure how she knows about Gamora and Groot, she's right about that too."
Rocket snarled as Frigga smirked and raised her arms up at him in a shrug. "The man's got a point."
"That man is also an idiot. But fine. You can join us, and we'll bring you to Earth."
Frigga grinned wider as Rocket moved closer and removed what seemed to be some sort of bobby pin from the back of his head, making her cuffs fall off in under a minute. She rubbed her sore wrists and thanked him. "We should probably pick up Thor from Earth anywhere, I'm pretty sure he's still there with the Avengers," Quill pointed out as he joined them and glanced at the red rings on her skin. "Why were those so tight?"
"Well, due to my powers they need to restrict me so I don't just slaughter them all and escape like that, and they usually do that with overly tight power dampers," she explained to him as she continued to try to get the blood flowing normally back into her hands. "You get used to it. Especially since they get steadily tighter and tighter due to the guards' fear in me increasing every time. I killed a bunch last time so the chains applied doubled. Until I woke up in 2024 of course, but I'm ignoring that for now."
Quill very obviously had no idea what she was talking about, but as he wasn't one to judge with making sense he just smiled at her. "Good, you can do it again."
"After this stunt? Fuck yeah I'm going it again."
<finish prison scene and go to anthony>
Stephen had no idea why he was being called to Avengers Tower. Except for the occasional meeting that he was forced to attend that he usually managed to escape early from, he had never been asked to go to their living and working quarters. So he couldn't imagine what the problem was. "What's the situation and how can I get out of it quicker?" was the first thing that fell out of his mouth once he stepped out of the portal. He was met with the stares of all six Avengers and Loki. Great. "What the hell happened?"
"We found a kid."
Definitely not what Stephen expected Tony to say. "What?!"
"Okay that was a shitty explanation. Just look." The group parted to reveal a body rested on their couch with handcuffs around his unconscious wrists. The only indicator that he was alive was the small rise and fall of his chest. He looked young, easily 18, with dark brown hair that slightly fell over his forehead, and glasses over eyes of a hidden color. Stephen noticed most of all was that he had two thick scars on the dorsal side of his hands; one for each. "We found him in our meeting room. There's no identifying items on him, and his fingerprints aren't in the database, so we have basically no idea who he is."
"So what can I do?" Stephen questioned.
"Ask Loki. He's the one who requested you."
Only then did Stephen look up to lock eyes with his fellow sorcerer. One that he had never really gotten along with. "You?"
"To be fair I didn't request you, I just said it would be useful to have another magic user here. John Doe here has magic practically radiating off of him," Loki tried to explain without making it seem like he wanted Stephen there, hints of forced annoyance and real nervousness leaking through. The 'John Doe' reference was imprinted in the sorcerer supreme's mind without a clear reason. Since when does he know Midgardian terms? "Can't you sense it?"
Stephen could. There was a large amount of power coming from him. "It's a multitude of different types. I can't even distinguish them; they're all so mixed up."
Loki agreed. "I was planning on picking through his memories, but due to the mixture of magic and power, I thought it'd be more safe if I waited for you to hold him down if anything goes wrong." An uncomfortable amount of silence passed between the two, unknown whether to continue genuinely or be sarcastic and snarky. "Not that I think you're capable of it, but you're sort of better than nothing."
There it was. The Avengers looked around at each other as they were described as 'nothing', the sorcerers forgetting about anything that wasn't the other, as usual. "You're very kind, Loki," Stephen drawled out with a sarcastic smile.
"I am, aren't I?" With that he jumped over the couch and kneeled down next to the body, gingerly going to place his fingers on his forehead.
But just as they brushed his skin the entire tower shook lightly and made everyone look up. FRIDAY spoke up to fill them in. The Guardians have arrived, sir. And they have a guest on board.
"Well that was quick," Thor murmured under his breath. "They're getting better at escaping."
"Were they in prison again?" Bruce questioned.
Thor nodded back. "I'll go greet them, you guys stay here and figure out his identity." With a small wave the god of thunder then left the room, and all other attendants watched until he left the room and then they all turned back toward the boy on the couch. Except- oh. Fuck.
"Where did he go?" Loki whispered.
"I'm right here."
The entire group swiveled to see the boy formerly laying on the couch sitting in a chair behind them all, his legs and arms crossed tightly, handcuffs done, and a stern expression on his face. "And I'd like to know what the hell is going on."
"You're the one who somehow got into our tower, why don't you explain it to us?" Clint shot back.
The boy only looked at him with a face void of all amusement. And with eyes that were a colored a blood red.
#sorry i keep bothering you with stories i feel like this thing is one sided where i keep asking you for favors and im really sorry about tha#that#hope you like it thou
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The hunting of men… The dissolution of our past through the recognition of our mistakes
The hunting of men… The dissolution of our past through the recognition of our mistakes
I am a man. I am a man who strives to be better every single day but am haunted by my own personal reflection that I have done wrong in the past. Like every man going through their various stages of growth there are moments when we are completely oblivious to why we act in the manner we do and we can analyse these experiences to the point where there is a psychological explanation for every single facet of our behaviour. I do not believe that this is the problem because like every man or woman there are stages of development and growth that we go through and this is essentially a process to become more conscious and aware and steering towards becoming more self-actualised individuals.
In other words, we do not come out the womb with this experiential knowledge of how we should be. This is down to life and the experiences that we encounter along the way. There is no one blueprint to how men should be and this phase we are in currently is highlighting an interesting shift that more and more men are becoming aware of themselves and the mistakes they have made.
Let me rephrase that: Men are becoming more aware of the bad choices they have made!
The problem with experience is that there is no master reset like a video game. We only have one shot at the experience itself and once we make a particular choice, we have to follow through with the chain reaction that follows. No matter how quickly or delayed we may be in recognising these bad choices, once made they will be imprinted in our minds forever.
Men have a different relationship with shame and what I mean by this is that we all have encountered shame throughout our lives but the manner in which we bottle it up and hide it away is very unique to us. We almost dissociate from the actual feeling itself and we will continue to find other avenues of achievement to mask the real knowledge that we carry this shame within us. It is only through very deep self-reflection that we realise how we have attached this shame to something enjoyable like sex or masturbation or work and other achievements. We have an uncanny ability to mask this shame.
Regardless of how many years of therapy I have done for myself and the continual personal development that I embark on daily, there will always be a conscious connection with the shame I feel towards the bad decisions I’ve made in the past. This is not to say that I am a monster or a villain like most men, but the manner in which I have carried myself in the past in relation to anyone or anything still holds an imprint deep in my soul when I compare who I was to who I am today. I believe this is a common feeling for many men, where you will find a common statement heard “can we move past this please”.
This is because there is shame there, and we feel it. But unfortunately we do not have a machine that can quantify how much shame we are feeling to visually illustrate to the person in front of us that we are feeling remorse and are deeply pained by the way we have been.
Most if not all of us going through this process of development can recognise that with hindsight we have probably behaved badly according to the current blueprint of how men should be and we are quickly labelled with the toxic masculinity title, or the narcissistic brand. I too am culpable of using these titles for men but I do so with knowledge of their history and most importantly the desire within them to change. Not using them in a manner to squash the individuals who are doing the work.
I truly sit here struggling to write this piece because it feels that there is a 50/50 split at the moment between men. This split is being maintained by very regressed men who do not want to change because their ecosystem they find themselves in wont challenge them enough to make the necessary changes, so why should they.
There is no immediate gratification in making these changes as a man, especially if it means that we have to change to suite others around us. There is not allure to being more evolved and being more conscious because it is too healthy and not charged enough. There is no draw to making love over fucking like animals where we can appease our ego drive in its fullest. Immersion into our conscious self takes time and patience and perseverance but is not easy.
So the question is why should we change as men?
The simple answer is one of respect. The man who does not try to become more within himself so outwardly he can serve more is a man who has no respect for himself and the world he lives in. There is no denying that men want sex all the time but this doesn’t mean that the manner in which we go about getting it isn’t sullied. We need to become more reflective of the kind of man we want to be and make the changes necessary to achieve that self-image. Because we have a choice in most things, the moment we become more conscious in our ability to make changes, this is where our responsibility towards our self and others becomes paramount and we have to honour ourselves in the quest to achieve this.
We are given a loose blueprint of how to be as men. This blueprint is constantly changing but can be seen to slowly shift towards a better model, but unfortunately still maintains very bad traits. The blueprint that has been bestowed on us may not be a conscious one in its acceptance and its seldom a case where someone has sat us down and explained this is what is expected from us being men. Instead most of our learning is achieved through the collective of men we engage with. It is only within recent years that we can say that men’s groups are becoming more popular and we now have a platform to face up to the varied styles of masculinity and most importantly the shame we harbour.
The importance to change, is not about change but growth. This may be a clever term for the same thing, but I truly view this process as one of growth. Growing inwards towards a more connected and authentic self, grounded in the knowledge that everything we do as men can be founded on a principle of love and kindness. The knowledge that we can still be “manly” and love motorcycles and extreme sports and bars and pubs and all the things that stereotypically have been labelled as things men like to do. BUT, it too means that we have a choice in how we relate and show love in our fullness because in essence we as men want to show this love but struggle with “getting it right”.
The realm of relating and being exposed in our vulnerability is not an easy task for anyone especially men. Unless you’ve been fortunate enough to have these feelings normalised we run risk of not knowing how to navigate the space and in general the masculine mindset is about “getting things right”. This is usually why one of the most common problems in relationships is the man trying to fix the woman’s problem rather than knowing that holding the emotional space will be more effective over the long run in comparison to finding a solution.
We run an additional risk here and that is not knowing against who we should model ourselves on because there is such a variety of masculinity available. We have the tendency to model ourselves against men who are high achievers and unfortunately these are the men that will more often than not have a voice and be bold and stereotypically “alpha”.
We confuse achievement and success with acquisition and forcefulness. We confuse dismissal of the other with knowing how to navigate a debate linguistically and be present in doing so. We confuse our partners emotional turmoil as a task to fix and avoid learning to sit with discomfort. We confuse what society says about emotional expression as a means to express our anger towards someone rather than processing it in a manner that is constructive for you and the relationship you are in. We confuse superficial infatuation with deep love because we are mostly not able to navigate the full range of emotions. Ultimately this list of critique can go on and on, and we can point out all the flaws that men have.
The one thing we must not do is shut down a man who is really trying to change and be better. Because the harsh reality for many men out there is that we are afraid or have been afraid that our shame is provoked through an altercation or interacting with someone and instead of the actual work we’ve done being the primary focus we are hunted for being men on the backs of other unevolved men and on the backs of our forefathers and the mistakes they have made.
Like most atrocities in history, there is a collective reparation that needs to be spoken about and implemented. This doesn’t mean that there should be more segregation between men and women but really a coming together where we can celebrate ones self-actualisation and recognition that we are changing. This is not an easy process for people going through it and especially for the people who have experienced an unevolved man.
My hope is that the more and more men coming together to explore and understand the range of masculinities that are out there are also understanding that there are other more effective ways of being. More effective and fulfilling processes to challenge our ego and shadow and ultimately get to grips with who we are as men.
It is essentially brave for men to embark on this, but it is also incredibly courageous for women to accept and trust this process so that we can evolve forward.
Via Con Dios
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scary damian scary damian scary damian scary d-
prompt: the title speaks for itself lmaooo
thank you bear for dealing with me sending you every other paragraph to make sure i got the energy of the fic right
orignal g/t mg
I shoved my phone into my pocket, approaching the tiny pick up zone. I felt bad pulling Damian out of class but I'd feel worse if I passed the fuck out from exhaustion and got him worried.
Nothing telling my teacher I'm going to the nurse won't fix.
I walked through the tiny halls, the unfinished ceilings and led beams hanging down. The occasional light flicker really setting in the horror genre feel. I tried not to concentrate on the hallway decor too much, it hurt more than anything. The half-assed drywall with bulletin boards hung occasionally. There were tiny lockers that went largely unused and some vending machines that haven't been refilled since I was a freshman.
I yawn, approaching the tiny pick up zone.
As expected, the hallways are quiet. The occasional student walks past but nobody pays me mind. I liked it better that way anyway.
I slumped against the wall, letting my head fall forward. I was exhausted. Don't know why. I actually got sleep last night. Can too much sleep make you more tired? Oh well. Gonna get more.
More footsteps pass the tiny pick up zone, but these ones pause before backtracking. I look up to see Shane Omen.
Because who else?
I lower my head again, too tired to deal with this.
"Yo, space dyke." Shane doesn't seem to happy to not get a reaction out of me. "I'm talking to you."
"Sure you are." I feel like I should be running, but my brain is sluggish and I don't feel any fight or flight kicking in. When I would normally be up on my feet, creating as much distance between us as possible, I'm just trying not to fall asleep.
I have enough energy left in my brain to know being unconscious around a giant, especially Shane Omen, isn't the smartest idea.
"Space Dyke." There's a hand reaching for me.
That makes me flinch backward but- its too late at this point.
Is it bad to call this interaction familiar at this point?
Because it was.
I made a noise of surprise as Shane grabbed me off the platform roughly. My hands weren't pinned at my side this time, as I fruitlessly tried to push his fingers off of.
They wrapped around my entire body even pinning my legs together.
"Shane, please!"
"Are all tinies as rude as you? Never respond when they're being talked to?"
"Shane-"
I was not in the mood. My body felt as though it would shut down at any second and this interaction was frankly sending me into overdrive. My brain was panicking, trying to stay awake, trying to find the strength to fight back, trying to find energy where there was none.
"I always find it amusing. You tinies are so big and bad with giants. But when you're alone- look what happens." Shane's fist tightens.
"Where's you giant, huh? Isn't that something you freaks do? You try and twist our words positively? Embrace it? Hate to break it to you, it doesn't seem to be working. You're still a pathetic annoyance."
Shane's right. Where is Damian?
"I could drop you right now," Shane says, and my blood runs cold. "It'd be ruled as an accident. They don't check the cameras about these things. You're just a tiny. You freaks fall off ledges all the time. Your name would be in the school newspaper this month and then never spoken about again."
Shane's grip loosens and while it's normally a welcoming sign, I struggle to find purchase, grabbing at his fingers, not wanting to fall.
"Shane, please."
"Please what?"
“Please, get your hands off my tiny."
Both Shane and I turn to the new voice. I could cry in relief. There stood Damian walking down the halls. He looked pissed but I knew him long enough to see he was as scared as I felt.
Damian never said 'my tiny'. I called him my giant, sure, and he knew I was his tiny, but he always said despite it being embraced among tinies, he felt like he was taking ownership of a valuable life. Which was totally valid and I understood, but to hear him say it now put a smile on my face, despite the situation I was in.
The smile didn't last long as Shane's fingers once again tightened painfully around my body.
"And why should I?"
Damian was in front of us now. Shane wasn't short, but he wasn't tall. Damian was tall. He glared down at Shane.
Holy shit.
None of my giant friends were fighters. Yeah, Cady has verbally chewed out some people, Gretchen has paid jocks to beat up others, but none of our giants were physical. But right now? Damian looked fully ready to throw hands.
"Please hand me Janis." He held out his hand expectantly and for a second I thought Shane was just gonna comply. His grip loosens and his hand moved forward slightly before pausing. "No."
Shane said it with the authority of the girls on TikTok who bully people in the comments, saying no and throwing a heart emoji after.
"I'm sorry?" Damian's voice was low. Like the night Cady threw the part, but this time he wasn't trying to hide his anger or keep calm. "I heard what you said. About dropping her? Yeah, I think it's clear I'm not gonna let you do that. What you said counts as a threat by the way. If Janis wanted to report you, they'd check the cameras and you'd get into some serious trouble."
Shane seems metaphorically cornered for a second. Only a second.
God, I'm so fucking tired. I just want to be in Damian's pocket, where it's warm and safe and I can sleep, god damnit.
I can't tell if it's the total exhaustion or Shane's tight grip on me but my vision feels like its fogging up-
Oh my god, I can't breathe.
How fucking tired do you have to be to notice you're not breathing?!
I let out a very incoherent plea and both giants look down at me.
"You're hurting her."
"Am I?"
"Knock it off dude. Let her go that's not funny."
"Let her go you say?"
The fingers wrapped around me are suddenly gone as I let out a gasp of surprise and for air. Shane Omen fucking dropped me. Wow.
I didn't fall far before landing on another hand. I knew it was coming but that didn't make me any more prepared as I land with an ungracious thump.
I'm not held by Damian for long as he gently places me on the tiny pick up zone. As much as I love Damian, I'm grateful to be back on solid ground as I stumble backwards leaning against the wall.
"What the fuck is your problem, Shane." Damian isn't bothering to hide his anger at this point.
Shane takes a step back, his hands going up in defense. "Chill dude. It's just a tiny. I don't understand why you get so upset. You're like the only one who gives a shit about space d-"
Shane didn't get to finish his sentence as Damian suddenly swings his arm, fist connecting with jaw.
I jump back, out of surprise more than anything.
Holy fuck.
I suddenly felt a lot more awake and in tune with the situation going on in front of me.
Damian never got violent. He was always the teddy bear friend. But this teddy bear had one good right hook. Where did he fucking learn that?
My illusion of big scary Shane Omen is broken as Damian towers over him, Shane bending over, hand on jaw. If anything, it's Damian who looks scary right now.
That's something I never thought I'd say.
Damian shakes his fist out like he's trying to flick away the pain. "Don't ever talk about Janis like that again. If you or any of your friends use that nickname again, I'll-"
"We won't!" Shane is quick to reassure. "Swear on it, dude. Uh- Damian. We- we won't."
Damian doesn't seem convinced at this as he continues to glare at Shane. Shane turns to me and I instinctively flinch back. He raises his hand in defense.
"Sorry- Janis."
I don't think I've ever heard Shane call me Janis before? It's always been space dyke. Woah.
"I'm," Shane points behind him, skittishly. "I'm gonna go now, so-" He doesn't finish his sentence, just turns and speed walks down the halls.
The second he's out of slight, the pressed lips and stiff posture fade and Damian looks a lot more- well, Damian.
"Are you okay?" His voice is back to a hushed concern. I jump regardless.
"I'm fine. Now." I say slowly. My brain feels like it's rebooting from what I've witnessed. It needs time to let the files load.
Damian punched somebody.
Damian punched Shane Omen.
Shane Omen was scared of Damian.
Damian Hubbard the dude who wouldn't hurt a fly if he was paid to, punched Shane. Omen.
And it was equally a mix of badass and scary.
I never thought I would call Damian scary. He hates being viewed as scary. And for the most part, he's not. But that? That was scary even if it wasn't directed to me.
"Janis?"
My head snaps up. Damian looks nothing like he did thirty seconds ago. Now he stood timidly, like he was afraid to move and set me off. "I know you don't like yelling. I'm sorry."
I nod. "Thank you for coming when you did."
I pushed down all uneasiness I had. It frankly made me feel guilty. It was just Damian. He wouldn't hurt me. I didn't think he'd hurt Shane Omen either but-
No.
It's Damian.
"You really had Shane ready to piss his pants," I say lightheartedly. "It was tits, dude."
Damian chuckled nervously. "I just saw him holding you and I got so nervous and I-"
"Hey hey hey-" I rush to the edge of the platform. "I'm here right now. I'm okay."
Yeah, it was pretty scary watching Damian tower over his peers aggressively. But it was also badass. And if Cady did the same I'd be gay. But the Damian I'm seeing right now? That's my best friend who would never hurt me. That's my platonic soulmate who goes out of his way to keep me safe.
Which he was doing earlier, just in a new way.
Damian scoops me up, holding me to his chest. I can feel his heartbeat slightly faster than normal.
He was as worried as I was.
Just being held by Damian and the familiarity of being safe was all I needed for the exhaustion to set in again.
"I'm gonna fall asleep." I mumble.
Damian laughs. "That is why you called me to pick you up, right?"
"Yeah," I say sleepily.
Damian shifts me into the familiar chest pocket and there's some rustling as I assume he puts on the whit pin before we're off.
There's a couple of things we should talk about. Like him punching Shane Omen for starts. Or Damian calling me his tiny for the first time. But right now it's nap time.
Back to Damian's English where I can fall asleep without worry of Shane. Not that I think I'll be worrying about Shane for a while.
bear told me i write shane omen well and i guess that just means i make a good fucking villain lmao- also was damian at least a little in character? i tried.
@realmisspolarbear @musicallygt @smallsoysauce
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1063
survey by pinkchocolate
Have you done any of the same things as me this year? (2020 edition)
Planned a shopping spree with a friend?
Visited a shopping centre/mall?
Malls are extremely commonplace here and honestly they already serve as the main tourist attractions if you find yourself in Manila, which is why Manila has never been a popular tourist destination itself (foreign tourists usually head to neighboring provinces, which is smart on their end). I’ve been to malls at least 20-30 times this year, but that’s only because of the pandemic. I probably go close to 50-70 times in a normal year.
Had lunch with a friend?
Yeah I caught lunch with Angela a couple times at the start of the year. I had a one-photo-a-day gimmick on Instagram, and I’m pretty sure I have a photo of her in there during one of our lunch dates.
Ordered pizza at a restaurant?
Again, at the start of the year. Gab and I loved Italian restaurants so we definitely ordered pizza several times.
Been in a department store?
I needed to briefly enter one a couple of weeks ago to look for gift wrappers.
Bought pretty new lingerie?
Had coffee with a friend?
Yeah Gab and I had study dates at coffee shops every single week. Now, obviously, I just take myself.
Bought DVDs?
Had a cold?
Bought toiletries as a gift for someone else?
Had dinner in a restaurant with your family?
Yeah I’m fairly certain we did this at least a couple of times between January and early March. The last time I dined in anywhere was a month ago, but I was only with my parents and my siblings didn’t come along.
Had one of your kitchen appliances break?
Our plumbing is a little fucked in general and sometimes we’ll have minor leaks on the floor. My dad’s knives have also gotten a bit dull, so I got him a new knife set for Christmas. But no damage to appliances.
Watched a movie at the cinema?
Struggled for food when the panic buying began?
We struggled in that it was a bitch to enter the groceries at first. My dad did the grocieries for us during that time and that was back when they strictly enforced the number of people allowed in the supermarket at one time; and no matter how early he queued, there was always already a line that got there before him. He’d wait around three hours and once he was finally let in, a bunch of alleys or sections in the grocery would already be empty or at least close to becoming empty.
We never went hungry or had to skip meals or anything like that, but I do remember having to make do with lesser-known brands we never used before because sometimes those would be the only options left at the grocery.
Wanted to hug a friend, but didn't because you had to social distance?
I hugged Angela when I saw her a couple of days ago, and I also hugged Gab when we were still together.
Felt afraid of Covid?
My fears over it have tamed over the year, to be honest; but I’m still wary, of course. I hate it when people stand near me and I follow the safety protocols everywhere I go.
Felt afraid to leave the house?
Only during the peak of the virus, from March to around May or June. Nowadays I kinda have to go out every now and then for the sake of my sanity.
Deliberately avoided watching the news because it made you feel upset?
I mean I took up journ lol so I always watch the news, no matter how upsetting it can get. The one and only time I remember asking my sister to switch the channel was when there was a report on animal abuse.
Had to cancel plans for your birthday?
I didn’t have plans for it in the first place, or at least I didn’t have the chance to make them yet, so I’m glad there was nothing to cancel.
Spent your birthday at home?
This was the only choice I had. My birthday fell on the most serious and strictest phase of the quarantine, and this was back when nothing was open yet.
Collected a parcel from your doorstep?
Online shopping is a norm for me now, lol. I used to not trust it, but now I probably buy at least one item a week.
Eaten an entire box of chocolates in one day?
I don’t even like chocolate that much. That sounds so uncomfortably sweet.
Drank fruit flavoured cider?
Eaten birthday cake?
Sure, we had cake for my mom’s, my aunt’s, and my cousin’s/godson’s birthdays.
Had a grandparent move into long-term care?
My remaining grandparents are all fortunately still very healthy.
Kept a journal of your thoughts and feelings during lockdown?
This is technically it, whether’s there’s a lockdown or not. I tried starting a journal after my breakup, but I couldn’t keep it up because my wrist strains easily from handwriting now, hahaha. I find that doing surveys suffice.
Had distressing dreams/nightmares related to the pandemic?
No, but about other pressing events in my life.
Felt concerned about your financial situation?
Not mine but my family’s.
Returned to a social platform that you took a break from?
I left Facebook for a few months after the breakup. I’m back on it again because I had missed the memes, but I also want to permanently delete that account for good, open a new one, and just add the people I want to keep having in my circle. Like I love Gabie’s family to death but I don’t see the point in being Facebook friends with them still, and it actually feels kinda awkward now still seeing them on my list. Idk. We’ll see. I might keep my account or start a new one altogether.
Missed a past hobby or interest?
I mean I missed going to malls and bars and going out with my friends, if that counts as an interest. I had to do much less of that this year.
Started a new hobby?
I started doing embroidery about a month ago, and a few days ago I started working out. My body is as sore as all fuck, but at least it makes me feel good about myself. For the new year, I also plan on starting a skincare routine after 22 years of not doing anything with my face lol and maybeeee start experimenting with coffee and buy different kinds of beans just because?? Idk, I have a lot of cute hobbies planned out for next year haha I’m excited to see how it goes.
Joined some new Facebook groups?
Both for work and personal purposes, yep.
Made some new friends online?
I definitely like that I’ve become closer and more familiar with the survey community here. I feel like I barely interacted with anyone pre-Covid, when real life was still a bit more hectic and when it was more difficult to find time to relax and sit down and read everyone’s answers. I also became friends with Justine, Angel, and Bianca when I started as an intern at my workplace.
Felt annoyed because you saw someone without a mask?
Everyone wears a mask in public, and there are always people assigned to monitor and lightly scold those stubborn enough to take their masks off. So this isn’t the case, but what I do find annoying is when people stand or walk too close to you. Just last week at the grocery this lady was close enough to be breathing down my neck when I was lining up at the cashier; being non-confrontational for the most part, it felt like being in the deepest pit of hell.
Felt like people were staring at you when you wore a mask?
I feel like people are more likely to stare at people who DON’T have a mask.
Bought new stationery?
My sister has tons of stationery in her room for whatever reason; when I need one to write short notes or letters, I just ask for some from her.
Video-called your extended family and friends?
For sure. We did this a lot especially during the earlier parts of the year.
Written a letter to someone you missed?
Disagreed with the behaviour of a friend?
Felt surprised when someone wanted to be your friend?
No one directly said it to me; but as an intern on my first day of the job, it was a really pleasant surprise to find that the co-interns I was going to be with weren’t boring, unemotional cogs who just aimed to do work. They were HILARIOUS from the get-go, was confused as fuck about work, and I could see they just wanted to make our tiny intern family a close-knit and happy group, to which I gladly agreed and went along with.
Bought a new pair of shoes?
I got new shoes meant for my first job interview, but I haven’t gotten any brand new sneakers in a while :(
Replaced some toiletries that you ran out of during lockdown?
I guess? Toiletries are necessities, so.
Bought some new books?
I read new ones, but I didn’t buy them. Some I saw copies of on the internet; one was given as a gift to me.
Bought new cosmetics?
I don’t use those.
Received a belated birthday present?
Received a present from a friend overseas?
Discovered a new author that you liked?
Felt like you were drifting away from people you were once close to?
*A person. Yeah, well.
Found out that someone you knew had contracted Covid?
She’s a mutual friend from my high school days. We aren’t close but we’ve kept in touch by still following each other on social media. She wrote about her experience with Covid on a blog entry.
Realised you had formed a deep connection with someone?
I got a lot closer with Andi both because we had to work together for our thesis and because they were there for me, unconditionally and untiringly, when I was coping with my breakup and was in rough shape.
Worried about the financial situation of someone close to you?
Of my family, like I said, yes. We had to sell the Vitara because the money that pours into the household monthly isn’t enough to keep paying for it. To be fair, that car was a very big impulse buy by my dad, so we didn’t and don’t feel too bad about losing it hahaha.
Let your guard down to someone?
I don’t think so. I was on red alert this year since Gab increasingly broke my trust.
Had an issue with something on social media?
Yeah, but I don’t want to get into it. That was such a long time ago and is so irrelevant now.
Felt disconnected from others?
I deliberately did so three months ago, so much so that I had acquaintances I barely talked to since graduating talk to Andi and ask where I’ve been.
Changed your internet provider?
We’ve had the same one for like 8-9 years now. It works pretty okay for five people who stream videos all day, so we haven’t felt the need to switch.
Felt fortunate/thankful?
I mean I’m here, scar-less, and happy with myself on December 31, 2020, right?
Tried some new foods that you enjoyed?
Baked sushi is so fucking good.
Re-read a book that you loved?
Crazy Is My Superpower by AJ Mendez (aka my favorite girl wrestler, AJ Lee) is always a good read to come back to.
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The Last Rose - Chapter Six
Here’s chapter six for all of you. Please enjoy and reblog!
X_0_X
If she closed her eyes, she could imagine she was just like the flowers in the garden, rooted in place for all eternity. The sunflowers she’d known for longer than memory had long since wilted, but the husky remnants remained, despite the spider lilies springing up like weeds in their place.
Move.
The hinges squeaked quietly as she pushed the door open, the key gifted to her slotting with a click into the lock without protestation. Professor Oobleck had been kind, keeping an eye on the old cottage while she was away. She knew that Zwei would be happy with him – they got along better than she could have dreamed.
Dust coated every surface. The living room reeked of old must and decay. Once, it smelled of rose petals and lilac, and sometimes the sour bite of liquor.
Keep moving.
His room was empty. And clean. So was Ruby’s. So was Yang’s. Of course they were. Never did the house sparkle and shine as much as when Taiyang had something to worry about.
She could still see the spots on the wall, ever so slightly off-color where paint and spackle had been used to fill in the holes they’d created as children. There was the dark spot on the rug where she’d spilled grape juice as a little girl, Taiyang never did manage to scrub that away.
And there, the pictures they’d taken together as a family, for the last time. That one of herself, hard at work in the forge creating her beloved weapon. And there…
…
She left the house not long after entering, eyes wet and heart clenching underneath its icy shell. The letters clutched in her hands, unopened. Retrieved from the safe, where she knew they would be. She didn’t have the heart to read them – nor to stay another moment in that place.
Not home – not anymore. Dust, where did it all go so very wrong?
…Where did she go, now?
…
Is home a place? Patch was home, once. I felt safe there. Safe and secure and loved and surrounded by people I could call family. In our little cottage, I could believe that anything was possible, and that the world was just waiting to open up before me the moment I stepped out the door.
It’s not home now. Not anymore. Probably not ever again.
I’ve heard that home can be a person. A bond. That our loved ones are what make a home what it is. Something in that seems right to me. Fitting, I guess. But… where is home for me, then? Is it possible to not have a home at all?
…I’m sorry. I hope I’m not too late. The questioning, the doubting, it never stops. It’s like a disease, and no one has a cure.
So much has changed… and certainty feels like it’s in ever smaller supply.
Ha… Answer me this, if you’re so smart: whether home is a place, or a bond… whatever it is… to where have I returned?
X_0_X
It was like walking through a dreamworld.
Ruby numbly chewed a mouthful of fresh greens, served to her with a flourish by a smiling Ren.
Just like she’d expected, it was delicious. The Mistrallan’s skill in the kitchen was as of yet unrivalled by anyone Ruby knew, and his nutritional acumen was (now) supplemented by a pounded-in knowledge of what actually tasted good, courtesy of Nora.
It didn’t cure her of her daze, but it certainly gave her the excuse she needed to process everything that had happened since she’d left the flight.
At first, she’d been beyond delighted.
How long had it been since she’d last spoken with her friends face to face? How long since she’d last gotten to hear their voices, feel their warmth, bask in their familiar presence?
After prying her redheaded limpet away from her, ribs and weakened arm protesting all the while (“Nora! Air! Need! Please!”), her elation came crashing down around her ears with the abruptness of running headlong into a brick wall
Yes, Ruby; how long has it been since you last came to visit your friends?
‘How long have you been hiding away in Mistral? Running away from your problems? Don’t you think they’ve missed you? After all this time?’
‘Shut up,’ she told that part of her, firmly.
That was beside the point. She’d been dealing with those sorts of doubts for years now; they were secondary to the real revelation.
Nora, Ren, they were here.
She hadn’t seen her friends in… seven years now? It felt like longer.
Ren’s hair was trimmed short, shoulder length and tied back in a stylish ponytail. Nora was as infectiously bubbly as she remembered, sporting a few crow’s feet around the eyes but otherwise untouched by time. Both fit and hale and almost exactly as she remembered of them from before.
More than that, the two were obviously happy.
She could see it in their eyes. Ren’s glowed like lotus blossoms in the morning sun, Nora’s like glistening ice. In every movement, every loving glance, Ruby could read the contentment they held for themselves. Each marker a testament to the life they’d built for themselves here, without her.
She touched Crescent Rose’s folded-up length at her side, where she’d leaned it against her chair. How long had it been? Had they been so happy when she’d left?
Ruby felt like an intruder.
She couldn’t help it. She couldn’t. It would have taken the power of the gods to stop the inevitable conclusions from making themselves.
She should have been at their side from the beginning, growing comfortable in this new city that had sprung up from the ashes of the old alongside them. They had all been a team – family, of a sort. Inseparable. Unconquerable. Loved.
She should have been there – shouldn’t have missed all that time, shouldn’t have run away, shouldn’t have let old arguments fester for so long…
But she had, and still they were happy.
Was… she even needed here? Wanted, even?
They’d been family, but her leaving had severed that connection. Ruby felt the tattered ends keenly, deep within her soul.
The entire walk home, listening to the two chatter on – well, Nora mainly chattering, with Ren contributing in his own sedate way – every rationalization she’d made over the last decade, every justification for missing out on another week, another month, another year of her friends’ lives was shoved into the light and she was numbed.
She was uncomfortably reminded that she’d just left other friends behind, and might not see them for just as long. Maybe longer…
Dust, was there nothing she hadn’t fucked up?
And being the wonderful human beings they were, too excited by her return and too kind to try and peer deeper into her troubled soul, husband and wife were both oblivious to her inner discomfort.
Nora slammed her open palm down on the dining table. “We have got to take you out around the city, soooo much has changed since you were last here!”
“Since so much of the population fled during and after the Fall, a lot of room has opened up for immigrants and entrepreneurs to set up shop and fill in the niches left behind,” Ren explained.
“Like that one lady with the huge boobs and six secret boyfriends down on Fifth street! She makes the best pastries – the way she uses cinnamon is just di-vine~!”
“Nora, that’s uncharitable.” Ren frowned disapprovingly. “She’s only cheating with the one other man, not six.”
“And how do you know that, mister? I didn’t take you for a gossip-monger. Do I need to be worried about the neighbors knowing about my delicates?”
“Only the ones you leave out on the floor for too long. We’ve established that not picking up after yourself is grounds for retaliation long ago.”
“Oooh~ Gonna punish me, Renny?”
“Nora! Not in front of Ruby!”
Ruby… stared.
She had no frame of reference anymore; it had been too long.
The banter, the mischief… she didn’t remember it coming so easily. It was bizarre to see Ren of all people firing back without hesitation, to see the lightness in his bearing, the openness of his expressions... And the loving glances… The joy…
Her stomach twisted in on itself; it was a struggle to continue chewing.
She’d expected a deluge of memory upon her arrival. That she would drown in the prickly, painful nostalgia that would surely rise up to envelop her. She’d expected anxiety, nightmares, residual grief, and whatever else she’d shoved to the back of her mind over the last decade to rear its ugly head, and that that would be the worst of her problems.
Part of her even expected arguments. Surely, they would have words for her for leaving… words that wouldn’t have fit into a letter. Surely…
The last thing she’d anticipated was the disconnect.
Since stepping off the platform she’d been beaten over the head with little else but how unfamiliar it was. Everything was different.
This shop that was once a clothing outlet was now renovated into a flower shop. That storefront was converted to a new set of apartments. The docks were now the lifeline of the city, where before they’d been little more than an afterthought compared to the grandeur of Downtown and the airport.
And though she had felt the eyes on her as she followed her friends back to their home, her weapons marking her as a huntress as surely as the predatory grace she walked with, compared to the familiarity she’d experienced in Mistral, they were not kind. They were strangers’ eyes, questioning the outsider and her purpose here.
Who was she, to walk among these people like she’d earned her right to live here?
Ruby was the intruder in their midst. It was an alien, uncomfortable situation, not felt for so many years...
She was used to at least being trusted in her role as a huntress. She was the Reaper. A guardian. Aegis of the people, fighting for them because she thought it was right, and recognized for that.
That was not something she doubted.
…Was it?
Her eyes flickered shut and she took a breath. No. She wasn’t doing this. ‘You will be okay,’ She told herself, shutting down the train of thought. ‘You just got here. You never expected it to be easy.’
She did not doubt her role. She wanted to help people. That had never changed.
The people just didn’t know that yet, just like they hadn’t in Mistral before she’d proven herself. It would be one of the first things she rectified, once she was better recovered.
If she were to stay here – if she was to continue her work here – she had to have a good rapport with the civilians. She’d need to find contacts. Friends. The people had to know their sentinels, their guardians, as she had to know them.
‘Know the people you’re protecting. You’ll fight harder for ‘em that way.’
“Ruby?”
A heavily calloused hand waved in her face, mere inches from her nose. Ruby jerked back, eyes blinking their glaze away rapidly. “Sorry!”
“Don’t be,” Ren said, frowning. “You seemed deep in thought. May we ask what’s on your mind?”
“Ah…”
Tell them how desperately awkward she felt? That she was in the middle of a crisis of faith? That she had no idea what to do with this strange otherworld she’d found herself within? With these new people? Them?
Nora picked up on her hesitation faster than Ren. “Sorry Ruby,” she said, frowning. “This is probably all really overwhelming for you.”
“We don’t want to overload you,” Ren chimed in.
“Right.” Nora nodded emphatically. “Especially since you’re still recovering and all.”
Dust, she didn’t want them blaming themselves. “I’m fine,” Ruby protested, a pink tint entering her cheeks.
“Pssssh.” Nora exchanged an artfully exaggerated glance with Ren. “Bags under your eyes.”
“Movements kept to the bare minimum.”
“Doesn’t look like you’ve gotten a shower in a few days,” Nora sniffed.
Ren nodded. “You’re free to use ours before you head up to the school if you’d like, by the way.”
“And by ‘if you’d like’ he really means you really should take us up on it because you look like death warmed over.”
“Nora.”
She shoved Ren’s shoulder playfully. “Oh pish! You might be too polite to say it, but Dust knows a lady could use a shower when she’s not at her best. Warm water and a good scrubbing does wonders for the spirit!”
“You guys,” Ruby interjected, thumb fidgeting with her silverware, rubbing a single spot until it started to gleam. “I’m fine, really. I don’t want to put you out, or to make you worry, or…” she paused. Wait. “Do… I really look that bad?”
Nora held up her hand, three fingers extended. She didn’t do much to hide her pitying expression. “Three out of five, honestly. You don’t look awful.”
“But maybe a good soak would do you good,” Ren finished delicately.
“Oh.” Ruby swallowed. Well then. “I, uh. Might take you up on that then.”
Now slightly ashamed (Dust, was it really that noticeable, or— well, they were huntsmen…), Ruby hid herself in her salad. She was fine.
The dressing was good. She half-decent in the kitchen herself after so long cooking her own meals, but she seldom got to experiment with some of the more ambitious flavors she tasted here.
This was fine. Just fine.
And now the other two seemed much more attuned to her discomfort, sharing glances while Ruby avoided their gazes. Were they afraid? Worried?
Damnit she’d wanted to avoid this.
“Soooo.” Nora broke the silence. “Find anyone special while you were in Mistral?”
Her hand paused midway between bowl and mouth. “Um, no.”
“No pretty thing able to keep your attention?”
…She hated small talk. “No, not really.”
‘Please leave it,’ she implored mentally.
Ren coughed, stepping in for Nora. “If I could ask you something, Ruby?”
“Sure,” Ruby mumbled awkwardly. “Go for it.”
“Well,” he glanced at Nora. “You never said in your letter. We figured, after so long, there had to be a reason for you to change your mind… but, what made you decide to come back to Vale?”
“Was it work?” Nora added, head tilting to the side. “We thought you’d taken time away from hunting after your ordeal.”
“Or that you’d had a falling out with someone back in Mistral.”
“But then we found out that Sun was one of the people taking care of you while you were recovering – and couldn’t think of anyone else you mentioned in your letters that you were close to.”
“So…” Ren trailed off.
“What brings you home, Rubes?” Nora finished.
Ruby ground to a halt whilst they spoke, forced to think by the question; one she didn’t have a clear answer for herself yet. There was so much.
Why?
There were too many emotions tangled up within her for it to be simple.
She hoped to discover a new purpose, for one. Padma’s words had stuck with her that far.
Hopefully she’d manage to find some closure with the city she’d left behind so many years before, if she could manage it.
Maybe, if things went alright, she might also quell some of her doubts – some of her shame, the guilt of leaving behind her family for so many years, if that much was even possible after so long.
But…
But telling them all of that; telling them the reason behind all of that – that she’d been torn down to her lowest point in nearly a decade, and that she still didn’t feel anywhere close to recovered – well…
She didn’t want to intrude.
Some of her feelings crystallized. This was a personal journey for her. Ren and Nora were clearly happy. They had lives. A home. Jobs they enjoyed and a family together with their daughter.
All the things they’d ever wanted since they were left alone together as children.
She would not put that in jeopardy.
So, she lied.
“Nothing like that,” Ruby said, carefully.
‘Be confident, be purposeful.’ Those were the first two secrets to a good lie. Ruby took care not to over-act, while also pushing the emotion she wanted to convey into her words.
They were huntsmen, they would see through all but the best. “I thought that after my accident I should come see you all. My recovery’s been pretty slow, and winter in the city wasn’t doing me any favors, so it seemed like a good time. I’ve missed you all a lot since I left.”
The third rule recommended sprinkling in a little truth. She did miss them all. It was good timing to spend her recovery among people she could catch up with after a long time away.
She’d just…
She’d never had that extra push to come back before. All of that was true, except that she’d never stared mortality in the face so clearly, felt it sink vicious claws into her soul and hold tight. She’d never seen it etched so clearly in her wretched reflection before, so much irrefutable evidence of her failure to stand on her own two feet as an adult.
There was motivation, and there was motivation.
They only needed to know the first kind. The second she would hold close, lest it ruin the fragile hope she nursed deep within.
And it worked. Beautiful, wonderful, trusting people that they were, it worked.
Nora smiled softly, dimples showing themselves as she reached across the table to squeeze her shoulder. “We missed you too, Rubes,” she said.
Ren mirrored her, a silent but firm presence, and their hands on her shoulders filled Ruby with a fuzzy warmth at odds with the chill she felt in her heart.
It would be worth it. She would get better and make it worth all the pain and dishonesty.
Not wanting them to question her further and feeling heavy with another new doubt pressing on her shoulders, Ruby quietly pushed her bowl forward, thanking Ren for the delicious meal.
At a simple request, Nora cheerfully directed her up to the bathroom where she began to strip out of her clothes to wash and at least fix one of her concerns for the day.
She did not notice the perturbed glance that Nora shot at her back before the door closed, wondering where the cloak that usually rested comfortably across her shoulders had gone.
When she stepped under the steaming water, Ruby had no idea that the couple was deep in conversation at the table downstairs, meals entirely forgotten and frowns pinching their faces with concern.
While she was busy pondering her own life’s choices, husband and wife were busy asking themselves an entirely separate question.
What had happened to their friend?
X_0_X
‘It’s a wonder Roman Torchwick wasn’t ruling over the city wholesale with this one as his right hand.’
“Seriously not helping right now,” Oscar Pine muttered to the second presence in his mind, rolling his eyes as a split second of warm amusement leaked over.
He didn’t need the distraction right now, thank you very much!
Older, stronger, and debatably wiser than he had been several years ago, Oscar was well-versed in the art of the chase. There were only three tenets one need follow: Don’t exhaust yourself with an ambitious, unsustainable pace, don’t break line of sight, and remember to breathe.
‘Bonus points for minimizing collateral damage.’
“That was one time!”
His mark dashed off down one of Vale’s many dingy alleyways, breaking his second rule temporarily before he made the sharp turn after her.
‘The Society for the Restoration of Vale’s Parks and Services, evidently. You didn’t really have to detour through those freesias, did you? They were coming along so wonderfully.’
Well it wasn’t his fault his pursuit of that particularly slippery thug led through that park, now was it? He’d had to apologize for weeks before the chairman stopped sending him those passive-aggressive letters.
Even no he still got the occasional dirty look from a ‘concerned citizen.’
But of course, he was only doing his job! Never mind the full breakfast, sometimes you had to break a few eggs to make an omelet! Never mind that Vale was a city where those eggs were already broken, rotten, and smelling like a pub dumpster after a Saturday night! No, protect the damn flowers, Oscar.
‘Well, they were particularly pretty flowers.’
He got a laugh from his other half as he cursed under his breath again.
This particular area of the city – formerly a part of the Residential District, now long since walled off from the recovering city – was grey, crumbling, and still suffering from a Grimm infestation.
There were rocks all over the streets from where some random explosion or flying chunk of lead smashed into some building, or where some overenthusiastic huntsman had ripped open the streets. Oscar was forced to detour around several impassable obstacles – each time losing just a little more ground.
It was enough to drive him to distraction. Rock. Rock. Pit. Oh look, there were a few Boarbatusk – better get out of the way before they bowl you over! He was too fast for nuisances like those to catch him unawares, but he just knew that his running straight into them was anything but an accident.
His target, Bianca Corallo, was a wily, mischievous sadist. Just the sort to get a laugh out of him staggering into the middle of a Grimm ambush.
‘You know she doesn’t like being called that,’ Ozpin chided.
“Don’t… really… care!” Oscar panted, sprinting up a flight of stairs after the last glimpse he’d gotten of her fleeing, colorful form.
Unfortunately for him, Corallo was small, fit, fast, and slippery like an eel.
One of Vale’s many, many criminals aspiring to fill the void left behind after Roman Torchwick’s empire crumbled around the rest of the city. She’d risen to power through an ample and often arbitrary application of brutal force, ambitious heisting, and balls of steel.
Unlike most of the scum and scrabbling thugs he usually had to contend with, she was also unique in that she was actually having some amount of success in taking over from her old boss.
Hence, the chase.
He reached the third floor just in time to see the flash of wild, multicolored hair vanish through one of the many gaping holes in the side of the building. Cursing, he pressed himself further, dipping slightly into his aura to soothe the complaints building up in his thighs.
‘You shouldn’t have skipped leg day.’
“Shut. Up!”
Oscar turned his fall into a tight roll, compacting his body tight against itself to disperse the force. Thankfully, the ground was relatively free of rocks. Less thankfully, Corallo was nowhere to be seen. “Fuck!”
‘Do you kiss your girlfriend with that mouth?’
“What happened to you being a wise, immortal being?” Oscar demanded, not for the first time, his mind working overtime. “Did all that go away when you got shunted into permanent shotgun?”
‘I prefer to think that I’m more like the little light on your shoulder, actually.’
“Hilarious. What do you recommend, then?” He didn’t have time for this. He scanned every direction, hoping to catch some sign of Corallo’s passing. Too little dust on the ground to note any footprints, and she was too savvy to leave a noticeable trail through the rubble.
‘I recommend you duck.’ And suddenly Oscar was in motion, Ozpin smoothly taking control like a hand slipping into a glove.
The bullet that whizzed over their head was nothing more than an afterthought as they whirled and set themselves in a solid fighting stance.
Glass shattered above them and they instantly looked up to meet Corallo’s dichromatic, mocking eyes. In one hand she held her parasol – frilly, white and pink like you’d see on some vapid little girl’s doll. In the other, a long cane lightly smoking at the tip, which she swiftly recombined with her parasol to form a single piece.
She tucked her weapon under her arm, giving her hands the space to gesture at him rapidly. ‘ME LOOKING FOR, GEARHEAD?’
“Corallo,” they growled.
‘FLATTERED,’ she signed, fluttering her eyelids. ‘YOU MY NAME REMEMBER.’
Oscar took control back from Ozpin, the rush of sensation barely even fazing him after so many repetitions.
“It’s my job,” he said. His lips curled downwards into a dark frown. “We’ve been through this before. Surrender and I can guarantee you a trial before you are sent to prison. Fail to stand down and I am permitted to use however much force I deem necessary to eliminate you as a threat to Vale’s security.”
Which was to say he’d probably be forced to kill her, if he couldn’t effectively cripple her in some way.
Vale was a changed place from before the Fall, after all. The law didn’t have time to fuss around with criminals when every day was a struggle to fend off the ever-encroaching Grimm. With every day a new vicious scrap for each and every block, the people – and especially the huntsmen – had quickly lost any and all patience for the unnecessary wrongdoings perpetrated by other humans.
With people like Corallo? Oscar could do essentially whatever he’d like.
He had standards though. Standards he anticipated seeing return to the rest of the force, once he could properly weed out the unscrupulous members.
Standards that, unfortunately, made seem like he had his cane shoved up his ass when said aloud.
‘Oscar,’ Ozpin sighed dramatically. ‘We’ve practiced this. You need not sound so stuffy. What happened to all of those action films you’ve been watching with Amaya? Take a leaf from their book.’
Corallo evidently agreed. ‘CAN YOU BORING LESS? ME THINGS BETTER COULD DOING.’
‘Fuck both of you,’ Oscar sighed.
The things he did for this city…
With a tiny flick he set off the beacon at his waist – specific to huntsmen working outside the secured sectors so that backup could be summoned where it was needed within minutes. He just had to keep Corallo distracted until backup arrived. Or take her down himself, if he could manage it.
She caught the motion and shot him a mischievous grin, dropping down to his level, knees bending slightly to distribute the force with a minimum of effort. ‘YOU FIGHT WANT?’
He reached behind his waist and grabbed the preternaturally familiar hilt of their cane, extending it to its full length with an elegant flick of the wrist. He’d practiced for hours to get that just right.
‘Vain.’
‘Ass.’
Complain about his stuffiness when he read their rights, moan about the time he spent trying to work on improving his cool factor, whine, whine, whine, whine, whine. There was no pleasing millennial disembodied soul-companions.
‘Add an extra splash of caramel to our next cocoa and we’ll talk.’
‘If you shut up about my caffeine shots, then deal.’
‘Acceptable.’
Corallo was oblivious to their internal dialogue, circling opposite of Oscar while his body simply went through the motions of tracking her movements.
The benefit of having two souls in one body was, at its most basic, parallel processing. Even splitting some of his attention between the fight and Ozpin, both of them were carefully analyzing their foe, drawing on past experiences, comparing those to what they knew of the tricky crime boss, drawing up tactics and discarding them just as quickly.
It began suddenly.
Corallo’s body shattered with a surge of flashing light only to reappear behind him. Her parasol swept downwards like a bludgeon. Oscar twisted in place, cane swinging up to deflect it off to the side, pulling his leg up and bending laterally to deliver a powerful kick to her abdomen.
Corallo used the blow to disengage. Her aura flashed faintly, dispersing the force with the same ease Oscar would dispatch a mosquito. Her parasol unfurled to drain her momentum – one of her favorite tricks, he knew. He’d thrown her off of several buildings and tried to slam her into plenty enough walls to learn that gravity and inertia meant very little to her.
The world slowed. Negligible damage, for a first clash. They were just testing the waters. They’d done this enough to know each other well, the others’ fighting style. It was almost a “Hello” between officer and kingpin. Did you get enough sleep? Eat a good breakfast? Did you do you warm ups?
‘I’d certainly be disappointed if we died because you skimped on your calisthenics. Oh, what a thought.’
‘Shut up.’
Corallo was certainly up to her usual standards. Even as the watched each other, mirrored predators eyeing the other, her smirk faded just a little. Her eyes gaining the sharp glint Oscar knew so well. The bloodthirst roiling just below her skin.
This time Oscar took the initiative.
Corallo’s eyes narrowed, so slow. Her fingers tightened. Oscar’s footsteps rang with his heartbeat, the world draining of color as his semblance activated.
Time dilation – fitting for a successor to someone of Ozpin’s reputation. Useful for battle, where it gifted him with a great boon in the extra time to consider his options. Sadly, his body was caught up in it as well.
If only – he’d be unstoppable otherwise.
‘If that were the case, I do believe Ruby would be after your head for absconding with her semblance.’
‘She could use the competition!’ Oscar retorted; eyes locked with Corallo’s. He also – ironically – had to be quick. It would be a shame to drain himself prematurely by abusing his ability.
Twitch. Twitch. Shoulders tensing. Her eyes flashed understanding. She knew him. His abilities. What he was doing. She would play unpredictably, just to throw him off. She would block, block again, most likely duck out of the way and disengage. Force him to exhaust himself, not let him get a single hit in.
They’d see about that.
The world resumed its usual pace.
Regardless of his inability to include his body in his semblance’s effects, Oscar was fast. Blisteringly fast. Only Ruby, Ren, and a few very other select huntsmen were capable of keeping up with him when he had his blood up.
Corallo was one of those few.
He swept his cane around, forcing her to contort herself backwards to avoid the strike. Her legs lashed out, he skipped backwards. With a series of incredible gymnastics, she leapt back on him. From the front, the sides, from above. She was a whirling dervish – where he put forth his strength she melted away. Where he defended, she refused to meet him.
In that was she was a wraith. Untouchable. Devious. And absolutely vicious where she caught an opening.
But he was a wall in his own right. He didn’t take everything she dished out, he caught it, pushed, shoved, and redirected. He and Ozpin combined were capable of vast feats of skill – their strength was their mind and the finesse they brought to the battlefield. Unpredictability was met with precision, and for a time they were matched.
They knew to respect her abilities. She knew enough to be wary of his.
Unfortunately, she knew she was on a timer and broke the stalemate with characteristic bluntness, shattering a few dozen feet away and drawing her gun-cane from her parasol.
‘Ugh.’ Ozpin gave the mental equivalent of a scowl. ‘She’d going to make you use it, isn’t she?’
The first shot shattered the asphalt where Oscar had been standing been mere moments before. The ammunition, Fire Dust – he could feel the heat from a dozen feet away. ‘You know, not everyone is happy smacking things around until they give up or pass out, aura or not!’
The second shot whizzed by his head – Oscar didn’t bother wasting energy getting away and bent his head to the side. The heat of the shot made his aura above his ear flare into visibility – protecting him from the burn he’d have otherwise received. He shoved his long coat to the side, hand wrapping around the lacquered wooden stock of his little baby.
‘It is a perfectly serviceable tactic! Miss Xiao Long just corrupted you!’
Oscar snorted and drew his weapon from its holster, appreciating for a moment the satisfying weight in his hand. ‘It’s an extra tool in my pocket. I would think you’d appreciate that!’
The third shot he swatted aside with their cane – his pine green aura flaring at the very tip to avoid detonating the shot on contact. The abandoned storefront it sailed into was reduced to rubble by the shockwave unleashed – Lightning Dust at its finest. In the same motion, he raised his other arm and took aim.
KA-WHUMP!
Corallo shattered away from her perch, now crumbling into assorted cobblestone, shattered glass, and shrapnel. ‘Perhaps… but did you really have to go with a shotgun? It’s so… blunt.’
‘I told you, I’m not trading Fidelis for a pistol!’
Corallo was on him in moments, taking advantage of his reduced versatility now that both of his hands were full, and refusing to let him re-holster and regain his edge.
Her parasol jabbed into his guard repeatedly, the sharpened tip doing work drawing energy from his aura reserves. Each pinprick threatened to bust through and pierce flesh as he was forced to fortify each miniscule spot.
He had his own advantages as well. Devoid of other options beside tossing it aside and opening himself up for a new salvo of ranged attacks, Oscar worked to get every ounce of use he could out of it. ‘Blunt’ or not, a shotgun at close range was a force you had to respect.
More than once Corallo was forced away just to avoid her aura getting perforated with a spray of raw Dust-shot. But after a minute of fending her off Oscar realized with a pause and tightening of his eyes that he could not yet hear the sounds of approaching airships, nor the telltale beep of his beacon alerting him that backup was fast approaching.
‘Where are they?’
His lips pulled into a scowl, and he shoved Corallo away, gaining himself some breathing room.
She flowed with it, coming to a stop with a flick of her parasol and letting it rest on her shoulder unfurled. The motion was just a little too smooth – a little too smug. ‘COMPANY EXPECTING, GEARHEAD?’
‘I have a bad feeling about this,’ Ozpin hummed.
The world greyed. He needed time to think. He was running low on precious aura, but he had the feeling Corallo didn’t intend to freely gift him the moment.
‘Thoughts?’ Oscar asked, mind racing.
He was not long in waiting. ‘She likely predicted this confrontation before she initiated the heist,’ Ozpin mused.
‘Which means she’d also put countermeasures against interference in place.’
‘Most likely. On the one hand it eliminates the probability of her being overwhelmed by superior force. Her favorite kind of fights are personal one on one duels – her records show a dearth of drawn-out, gang-style fights since Roman Torchwick’s demise. Too messy.’
‘And most of her operations involve concentrated, precise heists instead of the kind of multi-level criminal enterprises Torchwick favored.’
The old kingpin’s records pegged him as very comfortable working with his army of grunts and underlings – taking advantage of their numbers and rudimentary skills to supplement his own fairly mediocre abilities. Torchwick’s mind and charisma had been his greatest assets.
Almost the complete opposite of his protégé. She was cunning like a fox and deadly as a striking King Taijitu, but her strength was in her ability to crush her opponents beneath her foot like pathetic insects. She was prodigious among huntsmen – hence why she’d avoided capture for well-on two decades.
‘Indeed,’ Ozpin mulled. ‘She also enjoys fighting you. Much as she enjoyed fighting Commissioner Greyson before he was forced into retirement. Skilled opponents in general appear to be her favored prey.’
Which meant that…
‘And we’ve fallen into the trap.’
The world sped up as Oscar released the spell. Corallo was already sprinting toward him, rapier drawn from the depths of her parasol and glinting polished silver in the bright light of midday.
He was tired. She was fast. He was younger than her, but she had all the powerful vitality of someone half her age. Somehow, despite the multiple hits she’d taken, and all the times he’d drawn the flashes from her aura, she managed to ignore her fatigue and come at him like someone fresh to the fight.
A breath before she reached him Oscar dropped Fidelis and brought their cane up in a defensive posture.
Just in time.
Oscar was forced to draw on every iota of their shared experience as Corallo came at him in a whirling fury.
Unlike before she did not disappear at random, forcing him into constant motion just to keep up with her evasive tactics. Instead she just attacked. Vicious thrusting attacks like before – draining him shockingly quickly of his failing aura reserves – supplemented by powerful cutting slashes that he was better able to parry to the side.
He put in a few of his own hits – the pain of which he could see reflected back at him from her dichromatic eyes – but most of his energy was dedicated to keeping her away, keeping her back, keeping her from turning him into a living shish-kebab.
‘They’re still not coming,’ Ozpin muttered in the back of their mind, trying hard to keep the edge bleeding into his mental voice from distracting Oscar from the melee.
Deflect! Deflect! Oscar lashed out with a lateral kick - ‘Get back, bitch!’ – but his eyes widened as Corallo whirled to the side and seized his leg in a vice grip, ripping him off his feet, and threw him off to the side.
‘Shiii-iit!’
He slammed into a wall. His aura held, just barely, but he had only a moment to process before Corallo was on him and her rapier stabbed forward through his aura and sonofamotherfuckerthatHURTS!
‘Oscar!’
Ozpin took over from Oscar, blunting the sensation of the full foot of cold steel piercing their midsection before it could punch through Oscar’s synapses.
They could even feel the reverberations as the blade struck stone, an ominous hum all the worse for being felt so deep inside. The elder huntsman grabbed the weapon’s hilt – trapping it, out of Corallo’s reach – their other hand dropping their cane and lashing out to seize Corallo’s throat in a chokehold.
They lurched forward – both souls cringing inwardly as the pain in their side flared unbearably – and Oscar blindly joined Ozpin in bringing their weight down on their opponent. Their other hand left the rapier to join the first, and the added strength forced Corallo’s smaller hands to drop her weapon entirely to fight back. They could feel her clawing at their wrists, nails sharp and drawing blood and struggling against the inevitable as they throttled her.
Her lips worked furiously, gasping for air. The nails dug deeper, her unassuming strength showing in the bruises she created on their skin, seeking desperately for a weakness. To exploit. To break their grip. But she found none.
Her eyes flashed – cold, angry, no – raging – a cornered animal fighting for survival.
Some of her strength slackened and they allowed themselves to hope, just for a moment—
‘Almost… there…’
—But all too suddenly the weakness vanished – shifted as instinct gave way to intent. Corallo’s grip changed, her fingers grabbing their wrist like a vice, her abdomen tensing, her legs tucking in against her stomach as she tensed and shoved!
They went sailing over her head to land hard on the ground. Oscar cried out – lancing agony shooting through them as the rapier dragged on the asphalt and ground and cut against their innards.
For a moment, they simply lay there. Their body alive and burning with pain. Their minds a rushing tempest caught along in it. They could hear the sounds of Corallo retching behind them, her heaving, labored gasps. She wouldn’t take long to get back up – unlike them she still had the aura reserves to spare on healing.
Their heart pounded. Their breath was a harsh rasp. Blood soaked hot and thick through their clothes, fast enough for their self-preservation instincts to start flaring.
They had to get up.
Get up.
GET UP DAMNIT.
‘Fuuuuuck that hurts!’ Oscar groaned, rolling to their side and taking a bit of weight off of the blade. He froze again as the burn turned to lightning – gravity pulling the heavier hilt down and momentum shifting the blade along with itfuckfuckfuckSTOPTHAT!
‘Dust, why does this hurt so much!’ Oscar demanded blindly. ‘Is this supposed to be normal?’
‘This is…’ Ozpin grunted. ‘Not… The worst… I’ve gone through… Unfortunately… But quite normal… As far as impalements go…’ He seemed to be recovering much faster from the shock than Oscar. ‘They are… almost universally unpleasant… But at least nothing vital appears to have been hit... This time…’
Fair enough, but that wasn’t much of a mercy right now. He could be grateful for small mercies later when he had time to work through all of this. Time, and the benefit of painkillers. As well as twenty hours of solid rest to regenerate his aura.
And probably a good surgeon.
But right now? He could cheerfully throttle Corallo again in retaliation.
‘Can you take over?’
The older soul did, wordlessly, moving their body inch by labored inch as Oscar retreated into the distant mist of their shared psyche to regain his bearings. He would normally be okay with taking a heavy hit. He’d managed before. Multiple times.
He’d never been impaled before, though. He needed a moment to process that.
Corallo didn’t intend to give them that much, however. Just as Ozpin managed to force them to their knees, they registered the sound of her approaching footsteps and had only a moment to register before she was at their side, her hand wrapping around her rapier’s hilt one last time and yanking it out.
To her credit, it was fast.
Such fine distinctions were – in that moment – lost on the two huntsmen. But it was something. Ever the stoic, Ozpin refused to howl like Oscar wanted, but their trembling increased to a wracking shiver-shuddering.
‘Beep! Beep! Beep!’ Their beacon chose that moment to start registering approaching reinforcements.
‘Great timing guys…’ Oscar muttered, reaching feebly out to their body to start contributing once more.
Dust almighty it hurt but he was prepared now.
Ozpin surrendered the reigns as soon as Oscar had a sufficient grasp of himself to keep from curling up into a little ball once more. Nevertheless, he wrapped their arms around himself – noting distantly the steady stream of hot, sticky blood spreading from the wound. He pressed down harder, hoping to stem some of the flow.
It worked, to an extent. Assuming Corallo didn’t kill them outright, they had a decent chance of surviving the blood loss. That was somewhat comforting.
He looked up and met her eyes, hoping to see some hint of her intentions. She was as unpredictable in reputation as she was a fighter. They knew there was every chance her whimsy might be a boon to them. That there was every chance she would leave them alive, even if just to guarantee a future rematch.
Her smirk was missing. One hand rubbed her throat sympathetically, massaging the damaged tissues even as her aura shimmered over the dark bruises quickly forming. Oscar knew that the damage would quickly be repaired – but the blood that actually caused the discolored spots would take a little longer to vanish.
Aura was more efficient when it wasn’t attempting to dispose of waste material. It took more energy than someone in the middle of combat was normally willing to waste. The fight might have been over, but Corallo didn’t strike Oscar as the type to care too much about such superficialities.
Her eyes never left them.
Ozpin was far better at reading others than he was – such things were never very high up on his list of priorities. But even Oscar could see the wariness etched on her face.
‘You surprised her,’ he told Ozpin.
‘She thought you were defeated. She didn’t expect such swift retaliation.’
‘Her mistake.’
They didn’t have it in them to repeat that feat. Their remaining strength faded with each beat of their heart – each spurt of blood leaving their body and wracking it with pain.
Oscar let their shoulders slump just a little, chin dipping to Corallo in a gesture all huntsmen knew well: ‘You’ve won. For now.’
There was the smirk again. ‘GEARHEAD DONE NOW?’
“You’ve won,” Oscar repeated, an edge to his voice. “Stay and gloat – and get arrested for your troubles – or get out of here. You’ll slip up eventually.”
‘AND GEARHEAD THERE WILL BE. ME SURE.’
He narrowed his eyes but said nothing. She knew him well.
Corallo sniffed – a movement pantomimed to resemble more of a snicker. Though he could see how delighted she was with her victory – her teeth flashing just a little too much, a bounce in her step despite the fatigue she would be feeling – she still kept a fair distance between herself and him.
Ironically, in victory she was less arrogant than before the fight began. Ozpin fed him his own observations: the genuine cheer in her eyes, the imperceptible sway to her hips as she twirled around, her smirk was gentler – no, softer.
He didn’t think Crema had a gentle bone in her body.
It was a good look on her regardless. She was proud, but it was the delightful pride of a student succeeding where they hadn’t expected to. Ozpin knew that look well enough to recognize it on sight.
‘She would have made an interesting student.’
‘Glynda would hate you for thinking it.’
‘True.’ The thought amused Ozpin so much in spite of himself he didn’t quite care. Or perhaps it was the relief; they would live to see another day.
‘Beep! Beep! Beep!’
Corallo’s eyes dropped to his waist, noting the quickening flash of the beacon. Her time was up.
She clipped her parasol to her waist – the better to free up her hands and gave Oscar a mock bow. ‘WAS A GOOD FIGHT. ME LOOK FORWARD TO YOU HEAL. REMATCH.’
“This isn’t a game,” Oscar scowled.
‘NO? MAYBE. BUT FUN!’ She smirked and blew him a kiss. ‘BYE BYE!
She shattered away, her false-reflection dispersing into glistening shards.
The moment hung for a while before Oscar sagged and gingerly lowered himself to the ground. His knees ached and his side had begun to settle into a steady, painful throb punctuated with the sensation of superheated needles sinking in every time he moved their hands. ‘Well, that went about as poorly as it could have.’
‘Cheer up, Oscar. You got a few good licks in.’
‘Thanks. I’m comforted. Really comforted right now.’
‘But look on the bright side, you’re not dead!’
‘I will be once Amaya hears about—’
The air above them shattered once more, and Oscar craned his neck to see what Corallo wanted now, mere moments before his backup arrived.
It wasn’t anything much. Her hands flew, and as he realized what she was saying Oscar groaned.
‘Told you.’ Ozpin chuckled despite himself.
‘Shut up.’ He was so done for the day.
‘AND REMEMBER NEXT TIME, GEARHEAD. MY NAME NEO!’
X_0_X
The airspace around Beacon Tower was crowded with a dozen cranes gleaming all manner of rainbow-hues.
It had once been the pinnacle of Valean architectural achievement and host to one of Remnant’s precious CCT nexi, making it the backbone to modern society, the flow of information between the four kingdoms, and lasting peace.
The Fall broke that backbone, and Vale had been reduced to a crippled kingdom in exile.
The last time she’d seen it, only the floor of Headmaster Ozpin’s office and all below remained – the entirety of the clock and bell mechanisms above it lay scattered across the campus’ grounds like discarded toys. It remained the emblem of Vale city, only then, instead of a symbol of strength, knowledge, and cooperation, it had represented failure. Decay. Ruin.
But now? Rebirth, it seemed, had come to Beacon.
Whining machinery broke the tranquility of the grounds. The gruff calls of shouting foremen echoed off the buttresses and towers and walls that made Beacon a fortress in its ancient heyday. Power tools roared, fastening rivets, tightening screws, welding, splicing, repairing, building.
Construction equipment marred the vast, green lawns of the campus grounds, either filling up corners with assorted dusty bricks and raw material or laying on the grass unused for the time. Discolored patches revealed where some of the pallets had once rested; the earth was misshapen with tracks and ugly holes, and in many places besides the grass was dried out and rotten.
The gardens, which had once been world famous among botanists for the skill and care that went into their upkeep, had been left to seed, and were now overgrown with tough, thorny weeds.
Ruby could even spot a few of the places where marks of the Fall remained visible: there was the spot that a Paladin had crumbled to the ground and crushed a façade. There was the pit where one of the transports disabled by the Griffon horde had crashed. There was the spot she’d carved Crescent Rose into the stone tile path to halt her momentum after an Ursa Major slugged her in the gut, and the scorch mark a few feet further down; where she’d sent herself flying back at the beast.
Beacon tower itself, surrounded by colossal, smudgy, colorful steel cranes – each hard at work lifting up the vital machinery, electronics, and raw material necessary to restore functions to the CCT components left in ruins – seemed to wear a cast of iron, propped up but never quite giving the impression it was fully defeated.
The tower stood tall. Like the rest of Vale, it too was healing.
She ignored Ren’s hand on her shoulder, her hand clenched at her side missing the familiar weight of her scythe – she’d left it behind with her other things – because, despite it all, she could only feel the deep ache within her chest.
Despite it all, it was still beautiful. It was still Beacon Academy.
And all too suddenly, she was elsewhere. Elsewhen. A faded tapestry spreading out before her, the colors muted, the sounds dimmed.
She was running after streamers of long silver-white hair, the splash of scarlet something she was distinctly not used to seeing flare out behind silver-shod feet. “Weiss! Get back here with my cloak! I didn’t say you could—”
“HEY! LOOK EVERYONE! I’M RUBY ROSE! I CAN’T STOP RUNNING AROUND LIKE A CHILD BECAUSE I’M HYPERACTIVE AND LOVE BEING A PAIN IN THE BUTT TO MY TEAMMATES EVEN THOUGH I SHOULD BE ACTING LIKE A RESPONSIBLE HUMAN BEING!”
“I told you!” she shouted back. She hadn’t meant to forget! “I’m sorry for forgetting to tell you about the due date getting changed for our project! Weiss!”
Her prey – the heiress-turned-dirty-thief – turned back to shout over her shoulder. “I CAN’T HEAR YOU BECAUSE I’M TOO BUSY BEING RUBY RO— ACK!”
Ruby winced as her partner went skidding along the grass. That had to have hurt…
She eyed the damage with apprehension. No doubt she’d have to spend a good hour working the stains out of her gorgeous signature cloak…
Oh, and Weiss too.
“Oh Dust, Weiss! Are you okay?!”
The heiress groaned pitifully and spat out a mouthful of turf. “…Ugh… Heels… Were a bad decision…”
Ren gave her a little shake. She’d been rooted in place far longer than the expected ‘dewy-eyed nostalgic glance’ really called for.
“Ruby? Are you okay?”
‘No,’ she thought as the ache in her chest deepened. ‘I’m not okay.’
She’d been seeing ghosts since she walked out of the door, the sights and sounds and smells a threshold into a past that existed only in her memories.
“I’m fine, Ren,” she answered aloud. “Just… remembering.”
The skin between his eyebrows scrunched up subtly. “Do you need a minute?”
She needed a lifetime. “No, let’s go.”
Ruby pulled up her leaden feet and there were no more questions.
Ren led her along, though Ruby could remember very well where she was going. The teacher’s lounge had not moved since the Fall – it was still up the central staircase, a left and then a right, and in the room with the glass panes to the left of the door.
She would never forget it, what with how many times she’d chosen (been forced) to appeal to her professors for help when the workload became too much to handle. For the same reasons, she knew each individual route to the staff’s personal offices as well.
It wasn’t anything a normal student would struggle with. Part of her still felt a touch of shame for that. Beacon was a rigorous institution – far more so than the smaller schools scattered throughout the kingdoms – and mediocrity was weeded out from the beginning.
For someone skipping two entire years of content, though? For someone as young as she’d been, and as disinclined to the mountainous class work?
It had been overwhelming, hence the need to ask for assistance when her team couldn’t buoy her up anymore with study sessions and crash courses in all the material she’d missed out on.
But she was distracting herself.
Ruby was going to meet her professors again.
Her old professors, who were now strangely enough her colleagues.
And what had changed with the older men and women (woman – she’d heard that Professor Peach returned to her native Vacuo after the Fall) she’d looked up to as her mentors? Would Professor Port still be boastful? Was Glynda turning grey? Had anyone thought to give Oobleck decaf? Would they have advice for her?
Everything else was already so different. How could she hope to keep up with it all?
“Ruby!”
Silver eyes widened and she flinched. A new-old doubt flared.
She’d almost forgotten about Jaune. Or, she’d almost convinced herself to not think about him, but now it was too late for that.
There was only one question she had for him: would he still be angry with her?
Before she turned, the memory of their last argument flared.
…He cut her off mid-sentence, torrential blue eyes cutting through her fury like a blade. ‘STOP!’
He turned away from her, leaving her with fists by her side, fury and shock ringing like the burst remains of pounding artillery in her ears. So much she could say – so much she wanted to say; to scream at him until he understood, or until she could make him understand!
He struggled for words, however, clearly disinterested in what those things were, before finally, through clenched teeth, his voice ground something substantial. ‘I can’t—’
His fists clenched, his metal gauntlets creaking.
‘No,’ the last of the control slipped from his voice; a hidden fuse finding hidden fuel. Ruby’s blood chilled as he turned to look her in the eye. ‘Get out… Now.’ His voice rose to a peak, until he was shouting. ‘Get out. GET OUT!’
And eyes wide, her hurt and fury drowned out by fear and shock…
—He’d looked at her like they’d never be friends again—
…and the remainder quickly chilling to the bone, Ruby turned and fled.
It was a physical effort to fight the nostalgia of the moment and turn toward him. Her feet were fastened to the ground. Her blood was cold. Her heart raced; for a moment Ruby feared it might drag her down into a raging sea of primal fear and panic again, and that this time she might not be able to haul herself out.
It echoed: was he still angry with her? Why wouldn’t he be? What possible difference could time make? Distance? It was Ren and Nora, but worse, she couldn’t lie herself out of it she couldn’t this would go so badly she—
She was afraid to have an answer so soon.
It was far too soon – there was far too much, could she even hope to—
She found herself crushed in an embrace.
Strong arms, muscles corded like steel wire, the faintest hint of sweat and apples; the remnants of a day training in the yard, or demonstrating in a classroom.
Ruby looked up to meet the sapphires twisted upwards in a giddy smile.
“Jaune!” she coughed, struggling for breath. “It’s good… to…” Okay, not working. She couldn’t breathe! “You’re squeezing a little too hard, Jaune – too much armor!”
She punched his breastplate ineffectually – it was heavy, polished white steel trimmed with bronze – and he got the message. Her ribs breathed a sigh of relief.
“Sorry! I got excited,” Jaune laughed. He reached out to grab her shoulders, giving them a squeeze. “It’s just been so long!”
“Yeah, it has,” she rasped, eyes wide and fingers clenched as roiling emotions frothed within her. Her eyes were trying to bend the world into the shape of a fish-eyed lens; no doubt in league with her raging pulse.
She fought them back. Now was not the time to break down because her body decided she could have an anxiety attack.
Not now.
‘Dust…’ she growled to herself. ‘Compartmentalize. You’re going to drown if you keep this up…’
Stop. In. Out. Breathe.
Again.
They were staring.
She breathed anyways.
In… Out…
Ruby recovered enough to look back up at Jaune. And immediately her head tilted to the side as she properly looked at him, underneath the gleaming shell he’d encased himself in.
He’d… grown. Not in height – he was a tall man already, towering nearly a foot over her head even with the benefit of heels back in their Beacon days – but rather in bulk. The arms that had been her prison mere moments before were thicker – and covered as they were in polished white plate had all the appearance of a knight snatched straight from the old tales. The same went for his chest and upper waist.
No scars she’d never seen, hair still the same, short, choppy length, and his chin covered in a fine layer of stubble… Her brow furrowed, finding his waist. Crocea Mors seemed to be in fine condition, all of it gleaming white steel contrasted against the softer, decorative bronze crossguard.
Too clean. Too solid.
Everything told her that Jaune was in fine form. Probably hitting his stride as a huntsman and equipped with the best arms and armor Remnant had to offer. Now that he had a daily serving of students to keep up with, and skilled colleagues to hone himself against, he would be more formidable than ever as well.
She saw before her a huntsman ready to meet all the trials and challenges thrown his way, standing leagues above where he’d begun so long ago… But…
Wait. Her eyes narrowed.
Where was the sash?
Her eyes flicked upwards, lips parting slightly to demand an answer, and met his eyes at last.
Cold-cut sapphires.
‘GET OUT!’
The question died in her throat.
He stared back, giving her the same examination. His brow was tight, the joy draining, making way for concern. His lip curling downwards. His eyes on her shoulders, on her waist. The beginnings of a scowl pulled down her own lips. She felt a chill she hadn’t with Ren and Nora.
Something flickered deep inside those sapphires; something dark and wary, yet it was tempered by something else. Something hard, yet strangely hesitant. Like she was staring into the eyes of an animal not yet sure it was ready to approach. To trust.
Cold-cut sapphires, boring into her feeling them on her back as she fled on aching feet. Down that endless stairwell through those crumbling halls – away. Far away. Far enough not to feel those eyes on her any more, never feel those eyes again, the judgement, always staring blue green gold grey brown red go away she could still feel them on her go away go away GO AWAY!
‘Dust!’ Ruby stuffed the rising tide back down. She was suffocating again, her pulse beginning to race, to undo the work of the oxygen she’d taken in.
The questions finally started to pile up, more than just the one.
What could she say? After so many years? She could feel his silence like a physical wall, or a chasm between them. His judgement, the hidden predator in the shadows, his anger. How could she break this… this barrier between them? Had she let the old wound fester too long?
What could she do?
…Fearfearfear go away go away GO AWAY!
…They’d been best friends. Leaders together in their school years and sharing the role in Mistral. They’d seen some of their highest highs, and some of their lowest lows together.
Sometimes she’d felt like she’d known him like she’d known her own team. She’d known what to say to wind him up, make him laugh, frown, sag or smile. And she’d known he could do much the same with her.
What did he see in her now?
“So!”
They both jerked.
Ren stepped between them, putting an early death to their not-a-standoff. “I have no desire to intrude on you two catching up,” he said (too) lightly, shooting Ruby an apologetic look. “I’m sure there’s plenty to talk about! But I don’t believe we should keep the faculty waiting?”
He phrased it as a question, but Ruby and Jaune stared at him in silence until the Mistrallan started to fidget. Given it was Ren they were talking about, that was quite the accomplishment on their part.
Another moment passed and Ren’s smile grew more brittle. He spread his hands, his expression turning just the tiniest bit pleading. “Guys?”
Ruby shook herself. “Right.” Now wasn’t the time to question whether or not her friend was still her friend. Poking that Ursa could come later. “You’re right. Faculty. Gotta meet my new colleagues, right Jaune?”
She hid her hesitation behind a smile, lightly jabbing her elbow into his arm. She pretended not to notice the slight flare of aura as she hit armor and pins and needles shot up her arm.
His aura. A white veil that whorled and danced like light through water. A manifestation of the inner self – the soul – that only flared as a defensive measure.
His smile was just as plastered as her own. “Right.”
Her stomach twisted.
Later.
Ruby pulled her lips wider and twirled her finger. “Lead on, Ren.”
As they fell into line behind Ren, they listened to him comment – at first warily, but with growing confidence – on the current state of affairs at Beacon and how far the repairs were coming along and oh there’s the thing An was going on about! Ruby steeled herself while only listening with half an ear and ignored the confused, intense stare burning into the back of her head.
This was home now. She would make sure of that. Everyone felt uncomfortable and nervous moving into a new home, right? Everyone dealt with these messy, painful emotions when they met up with old friends, right?
The traitorous part of her mind wasn’t so sure.
‘Welcome to Beacon…’
X_0_X
Neo’s throat still twinged with the echoes of faded pain as she stepped out of the shadows behind a few of her subordinates, the faint illumination given off by her semblance hidden away behind a few strategically placed shipping containers nearby.
Those, she’d decided, would always stay far enough to avoid giving any eavesdroppers an easy chance to listen in, but close enough to make her quiet entrances possible. After all, how could she possibly be expected to get rid of one of her favorite pranks?
She stepped between them on silent feet without preamble.
Her lieutenant – a short, meek looking doe-faunus with her lower face hidden away behind a grey scarf – yelped and drew her weapon before she realized just who it was that appeared out of nowhere. “Boss!”
Neo hid her smirk and pretended not to notice the pistol just a few inches from her gut. Appearances and all that. ‘STATUS REPORT?’
“I, ah, sorry Boss! I, we—”
Neo rolled her eyes and whacked the girl over the back of the head.
She’d picked her right hand well enough – she’d never be cut out for combat or intimidation, but when Neo wasn’t fucking with her, she had a sharp mind. Her innocent looks distracted from her cunning, and the ruthless intelligence she had sequestered away for Neo to exploit.
The girl had a terrible stutter though, when she was caught off guard. Woe to be her, it amused Neo to no end.
The girl coughed awkwardly. “Um. Status report. Right.” She straightened. “While you were out chasing down Pine, we completed the heist. During the crossfire with some of the PD we lost one of the containers of Dust, but the rest is already on its way out of Vale to our warehouses down the coast.”
‘TRACKED?’
She nodded. “We’re sure. It was too public an operation to avoid. Do you want us to remove the tracker and reroute the cargo, or let it sit?”
‘KEEP. WE GIVE RIFT NICE SURPRISE. THEY LOOK FOR DUST, THEY FIND DUST. THEY FIND CHARGES, FIND OUT WE TRICK THEM. THEN THEY WONDER WHERE REST IS. FUNNY, NO?’
Rift was one of the many smaller cities scattered along Sanus’ northern coast, nominally under the jurisdiction of the kingdom of Vale. In the aftermath of the Fall they’d enjoyed a long decade of functional independence. The coastal city, situated as it was at the mouth of an inlet and partially dug into a tall, stony mountainside, was an excellent hub for black market activities, being near enough to Vale for the survivors to take advantage of (or flee to), and near enough to Vacuo’s primary shipping lanes to receive a steady influx of materiel and restricted ‘merchandise.’ With the labyrinthine tunnels running deep into the hills, it was also a smugglers paradise.
Neo’s operation had several warehouses in the city that the Vale Council was keenly interested in. Riftan officials, on the other hand, were more than happy to leave them untouched as long as no exceptional cause for raids was given – the underlings she’d set to manage the branch were generous in their donations to the city council, after all.
With the tracker on the cargo, the Vale PD would have their excuse to conduct their raids. They would find it chock-full of smuggled Dust. They would find several IEDs scattered through the warehouse. And Neo would laugh at the collective coronary they would suffer, knowing that they would only discover how much of it was counterfeit days after the fact, while the legit score was far away.
All according to plan.
She profited, Rift would receive a messy reminder that her operations were not to be touched under any circumstances, the Vale PD would be further frustrated and – if fortune was kind, down a few officers – and she could rest satisfied, knowing she’d managed to infuriate Gearhead Pine even further. Four birds, one stone.
Roman would have called it an efficient use of resources. Neo just preferred using explosive stones. It worked either way.
That left one more thing. ‘DAMAGES?’
“We’ve reports of three civilian casualties. One is already slated for release from the hospital, the other two died on-scene. We’re in a bit of trouble with the locals in Slate District; couple of our contacts are saying they’re cutting ties on account of it.”
Neo touched her chin in thought.
Only three? She’d been expected upwards of a dozen when she planned the operation out. The death toll being so low was either good luck or spoke to her underlings’ restraint.
…
Probably the former, now that she thought about it.
Right then. The second tidbit was more important though. Contacts didn’t grow on trees. ‘WHY?’
“One of the women killed was pretty well-liked. Fancied herself a humanitarian. Had some cash from an inheritance she liked to spread around. Doesn’t seem to be more than that.”
Neo cocked her head to the side, running it all through her head and ignoring the wary glances her lieutenant exchanged with the other grunt beside her. Worried she would be frustrated by the setback? That she would take it out on them?
Hmph. ‘FINE. FIND NEW CONTACTS OR GET OLD ONES BACK. WHATEVER MEANS. ME NO CARE.’ Her subordinates had so little faith!
While annoying, those were acceptable losses, and inevitable when her operation slipped up.
Killing important people always created complications. Resentments, grudges, even vendettas if she were especially unlucky – those were the kinds of things she would be displeased to hear about. A few lost contacts was fine. She would lose some maneuverability in the short term, a bit of lost profit, but that would be made up once the Dust sold.
Simplicity itself. A good day’s work – and she got a good fight out of it.
Her hand rose to rub at the tender skin where Pine had throttled her.
A good fight indeed. She’d never in her wildest dreams thought to drag such an immediate, violent response from the polite, by-the-books huntsman. Never.
Honestly, she’d been astounded for just a few seconds before she regained her bearings at the buried rage – the ancient fire glaring down at her – and the iron-hard fingers cutting off her oxygen supply.
The reason was simple enough: Neo lived for moments like that.
She would have never thought to prepare for such an eventuality. It was never in the cards. For just a few moments her blood had thrummed, and she’d felt that ecstatic tingle of joyful life as she threw him off of her and regained the dominance she pursued in a fight.
‘Ah, Pine,’ Neo thought with a soft smirk as she gazed down at the map of Vale spread out before her. ‘You’ll be worth seeking out again. I can’t let you get away from me that easily.’
She refused to let such talent escape her. Nor would she let him cool his heels forever – she’d made that mistake once with the last Commissioner and didn’t plan on repeating it. Allowing Pine to go soft would be like letting an exquisite wine go to waste on a trashy frat party.
In fewer words (and without the hangover); a disappointing waste of potential.
“Boss?”
‘WHAT?’
Weren’t they done yet? She was well aware her lieutenant was still speaking, going over the numbers, the stratagems that would further her growing criminal empire’s prospects in the ripe little gem of Vale, and the double-dealing and underhanded tactics. All the things Neo didn’t give a damn about.
They were all well and good, as far as she was concerned, and they had their place, but she delegated for a reason. Neo was no Roman.
She was happy to leave all of that to her lieutenant and be the unfailingly deadly, terrifying kingpin. After all, who was a bigger target than the lynchpin holding it all together?
That was exactly how Neo liked things to be. Bigger target, better enemies, better fights.
“There’s one more thing, rather unrelated. You asked to be kept abreast of all huntsman traffic in and out of the city?”
‘YES.’ She motioned impatiently for the girl to continue.
“We received reports from our contact in Mistral United Airlines that three have crossed the border into Vale. One is already departed to Vacuo, the second is visiting relatives in the Port District, but the third…”
Neo snatched the memo from the girl’s hands, breaking the seal and scanning over the contents.
Interesting…
‘WE HAVE SOMEONE IN BEACON?’
“Not at the moment. They’re notoriously strict about their security. We’ve been making inroads with some of the construction crews, but Atlas screens everyone working there on account of the CCT.” Her lieutenant seemed more than a little put out by that fact.
That was a shame, but it certainly made the game more interesting.
Ruby Rose – Little Red the Reaper – was here in Vale? After almost ten years sequestered away in Anima? That was news Neo hadn’t expected to see when she’d woken up that morning.
Oh, she’d heard about Ruby. Her reputation as a huntress was as terrifying as it was enticing.
A child prodigy in her field, entered into Beacon by age fifteen against all of her peers. By all means an exceptional student in everything save her academia, and a scythe-wielder at that? Taking up that weapon, one of Remnant’s most difficult to master, took moxie that Neo could appreciate, and further, hope she’d one day encounter again.
After all, their last duel on the Vindicator, for all the tension of the situation had added to the encounter, had left something to be desired for Neo. Ruby had been young, then. Untried. Neo had been able to sense the potential there, but it had been of-yet unrealized. The girl had been easy pickings for someone of Neo’s caliber…
Well, she should have been.
And yet Neo lost, and Roman’s death had been the result.
…Fingers closing around her throat like a vice – she couldn’t breathe she stared up into the green-hazel-gold-flecked eyes of her opponent her enemy and glared she struggled against his hands pulling scratching clawing but she couldn’t breathe and—NO. THINK. She paused. Her eyes narrowed. She seized his wrists and squeezed, bunched her legs up to her chest and SHOVED…
Her lips quirked.
…The girl clung to her weapon over open air, Gryphons swarming below her. She would die once Neo cut her. Maybe she could do it slowly. One finger at a time, relish in the fear growing in the girl’s eyes as she lost her grip and vanished into the abyss of Grimm. Maybe she would survive their vicious swarm and hit the ground – it would be a quick death, at least. Quicker than the alternative.
Roman monologued behind her but Neo didn’t care. The whole world dropped away as she held the needle-tip of her blade at the girl’s throat. It would bloom sweet red when sh— WHAT THE, NO!
The smirk turned to a nostalgic smile.
…Neo clung tightly to her parasol, fending off the occasional Gryphon too stupid to realize she was a huntress with a weapon in hand, falling or not. The Vindicator died above her, and she watched as Little Red rode her scythe like a pogo stick through the air to the ground.
Roman would be dead, then.
She didn’t like the way her heart panged in her chest at the realization. His charming smile, his charisma, the kindness hidden behind the mercenary exterior…
She knew it was there; nothing else could have brought the kingpin around to taking in Vale’s lowest rat. To teaching that rat how to live, to love, to breathe combat. She’d become his hand, but he’d become her reason to live. All of that would now be gone with him…
Alani, her lieutenant, droned on beside her as Neo reminisced.
She owed quite a lot to Roman. Odds were that she would have perished from malnutrition had he not stepped in for the pathetic little mute shivering in the gutter. In retrospect it was quite the unusual gamble for the kingpin to make. She’d been stunted already. She didn’t know how to communicate. Young, and a vacuum for precious lien – at least before she started making her own money. She’d hardly been prime underling material.
But he had. And she grew. And he died. And Neo had Ruby Rose to thank for that.
…It was a tiny grave, unfit for someone as ostentatious as Roman. A simple headstone. “HERE LIES ROMAN TORCHWICK. LEADER OF MEN, FEARED BY HIS ENEMIES, MAY HE REST IN PEACE.” She didn’t know what dates to append to the stone, so she’d left it blank. Let those who found the tiny copse of trees think he’d lived a long and happy life. That he’d been buried in the middle of nowhere because it was actually a special spot for him. That maybe he’d met his first lover here. Or emerged from humble beginnings from a life in the woods.
Something more impressive than the truth. The truth kind of sucked…
Neo sighed.
She still sometimes visited that grave, but not often. She’d long since moved on. The faint grudge she’d considered nursing so long ago faded away with the knowledge that Ruby Rose was far away and suffering her own tragedies.
That was just karma, as far as Neo was concerned.
She had an empire to build and enemies to fight. Life went on.
But now an opportunity had fallen right into her lap, just as she forced her most recent rival off the playing board. That changed things.
Neo lifted her hand and slashed it across her torso. ‘STOP.’
Her lieutenant fell deadly silent.
‘BRING MY GOOD PAPER. AND PEN,’ she ordered.
“Right on it, boss.” The second underling disappeared into the warehouse.
Alani cocked her head nervously. “Do you have a letter to send, Boss?”
Neo had no intention of involving the girl in this, however. ‘INVITATION. NEED TO KNOW BASIS.’
This fight would be hers and hers alone. Oscar Pine? He was a formidable opponent with fewer scruples than Neo had been willing to give him credit for before that day. He was fast and wielded a weapon not dissimilar to her own, and he was still someone she would certainly relish fighting again when the time came.
But the Reaper?
Neo rubbed her hands together. ‘I’m going to have fun with you, Red.’
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[REVIEW] Final Fantasy VII: Remake
WARNING: This review contains spoilers for both Final Fantasy VII (1997) as well as Final Fantasy VII: Remake (2020).
Introduction
Before I get into things, I feel like this review deserves a little bit of context.
Final Fantasy VII (1997) is my favorite video game of all time. As a kid, I liked my Game Boy games; Pokémon Red and Link’s Awakening were good fun as I passed summer days at my grandparents’ house. However, it wasn’t until I played Final Fantasy VII that I fell in love with video games and realized the platform’s potential as an art form. The game packed a full and impactful punch – a vast and varied world to explore, an engrossing and gripping story, characters whose lives are changed forever, stunning graphics (at the time), a simple yet deep combat system, and a new way of keeping things fresh at every turn. All of this spanned across four discs and fifty hours of a completely riveting gaming experience.
Video games have been my foremost hobby and passion since my first foray into this wonderful adventure, and thus it isn’t a stretch to say that Final Fantasy VII helped define who I am as a person. So, let me be the first person to say that I was nervous when Final Fantasy VII: Remake was announced. I wasn’t one of those people who obnoxiously kept asking for it, nor did I even really want it. The odds of this remake meeting the sky-high expectations set by the original were astronomically low, and the thought of recreating my first love in a modern gaming culture where games are more popular, more culturally relevant, and more heavily scrutinized than ever before was downright terrifying. Imagine that the thing you loved and championed for the most was vilified in the social media era. Indirectly, the part of you which that thing helped to define would be vilified, too. If, in the middle of the remake’s development cycle, Square were to suddenly announce that the plug was pulled on the project and it would never see the light of day, I wouldn’t have been upset because I was so fearful of being disappointed. Nothing could have eased this fear – not the news of the old guard getting together to make this game, not the breathtaking visual previews, or the overwhelmingly well received gameplay demo. I needed to see for myself if Square could re-capture lightning in a bottle.
The point that I’m hoping to illustrate here is that this isn’t a Kingdom Hearts III (2019) situation where Square could have put prison gruel on my plate and I’d still eat it up like a well-seasoned filet mignon simply because I’m happy it exists. Quite the opposite, in fact. Upon popping the disc in, I went in with a strict and critical mindset because this game had to be absolutely stellar; anything else would be a massive disappointment.
With that set up, and a thirty-eight hour escapade from the Sector 1 Reactor to the highway out of Midgar in the books, let’s get into it. I’ll be covering and assigning subjective scores to each of the following categories: Visuals, Sound, World, Gameplay, Characterization, Story, Ending. At the end, I’ll deliver concluding thoughts and attempt a final subjective score.
Visuals
We’ll start with the bells and whistles. Visuals, and then sound.
I’ve always been one to say that graphics are a low priority in the world of video games, that the “game” part is what should grip you moreso than the “video” part. In fact, I haven’t adhered to this more loudly than when defending the 1997 original because no game has been subject to more “polygon graphics” and “Dorito hair” memes.
All that said, good graphics are one hell of a cherry to have on top. And this game’s cherry is a sweet one.
Square Enix has always been at the forefront of graphical prowess for pretty much their entire history; they tend to set the bar in this department when it comes to a new Final Fantasy installment and this remake is no exception.
It’s pretty simple here: Everything. Looks. Fucking. Amazing.
We’ll start with the character designs. All stay true to the original; the biggest liberties that Square decided to take were Barret’s sunglasses to highlight that renegade, demolitionist aesthetic (he may or may not wear them indoors a bit too much, but I digress) and Tifa’s new stockings and sports bra underneath her iconic white tank to give her more of that sporty, martial artist look. Both are welcome additions. Zooming out and taking a look at the entire cast, everyone looks absolutely brilliant in their 2020 self.
Facial expressions, lip syncing, and body language are of course impeccable and life-like for all characters throughout the game’s entirety. It’s important to note, too, that Square pushed the envelope so much on these character models that it’s often hard to distinguish whether or not in-game models or pre-rendered models are being used in cutscenes.
Animations both in battle and out of it are extremely fluid and well-done. Battle particles and visuals are flashy and distinct without being overbearing or stealing the limelight away from the gameplay itself. Between Kingdom Hearts III and now this game, it’s probably fair to say that all of the chatter surrounding Square’s adoption of Unreal Engine 4 can now be put to rest.
I’ll cover the visual quality of Midgar itself in the “World” section, but as you can probably imagine, I was blown away by that, too.
Visuals Score: 10/10
Sound
Let’s begin with the voiceover quality (I played in English). This is actually a harder obstacle for Square to tackle than people realize, I think. These aren’t brand new characters. People know them already. The original game’s dialogue was done completely in text, so if you’re Square, you face this challenge where your players have a distinct voice in their head for these characters based on their appearances, backgrounds, personalities and choices of words. Can you capture that exactly?
I think Square did a great job, for the most part. You can hear Cloud’s fake apathy, the sincerity underneath his front of not caring. There’s a distance and mysterious quality to his voice that I think is so essential to his character. Barret is likely the weakest in terms of vocal performance; when he gets loud, I can’t get the Internet’s early comparisons to Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder (2008) out of my head. However, when speaking at a normal tone, and especially when speaking at a somber tone, I think he’s absolutely perfect. Gruff and tough, yet absolutely empathetic and passionate. Tifa likely has the strongest vocal performance, perfectly capturing a character who is pensive and struggling to identify what’s right amidst the chaos around her while being put in the position of needing to be the voice of reason. Aerith’s voice is higher pitched and carries more whimsy than I had imagined, but I also really like this version because it paints Aerith as this ordinary, innocent and playful woman which is true to her initial characterization before we find out that she is connected to something much, much deeper. The rest of the characters are voiced beautifully, from the Shinra crew, to the entirety of Avalanche (shoutouts to getting Badger from Breaking Bad to play Wedge, how absolutely perfect), to the random scared citizens we meet amongst the slums.
Moving onto the soundtrack... just wow. Nobuo Uematsu, you brilliant son of a bitch.
I’m of the opinion that Final Fantasy VII boasts the second best soundtrack in the franchise, second only to Final Fantasy IX (2000), and I really didn’t see where it had room to improve. Imagine if all of The Beatles were alive and said today, “Yeah, we’re going to remake Abbey Road, and make it even better.” Like... how? How do you improve upon a masterpiece? The potential and possibility is just outside of our comprehension, right? And yet, they would probably find a way.
Similarly, in a 2020 landscape in which Nobuo has a lot more tools, tricks, and experience up his sleeve, he managed to churn out a reimagined soundtrack that builds upon the core strengths of the original to create something new and grand. For example, from the jump, we can compare the Bombing Mission tracks. The original is fantastic, and a classic – a spunky baseline combined with anxiety-inducing synth horns create the perfect ambience for the mission at hand while setting up Midgar’s feel of a grungy, electric city. Nobuo’s version for the remake utilizes a sweeping orchestra to create the exact same feeling but with a much fuller sound fitting for a modern game.
Of course, plenty of new tracks were created for this game as well such as the score for the Wall Market sections, and certainly deserve their place amongst the old songs that we fell in love with before. Because of this, no two areas of Midgar felt the same (which can happen in a world where everything is called a sector and a number), and areas from the original took on that received their own theme took on a life of their own. Finally, the collectible jazz tracks were an amazing touch that provided an alternative look at the game’s iconic themes without breaking the immersion of the world too much.
A few of my personal favorites from throughout the game:
The Airbuster – A remake of Final Fantasy VII’s boss theme, and it just... slaps, as the kids say.
Critical Shot – An alternate battle theme that we first heard in the trailers which was simply a lot of fun to fight to
Tifa’s Theme – Seventh Heaven – The iconic piano track blossoms into a wonderful and iconic orchestral experience. Beautifully done.
Aerith’s Theme – Sector 5 Church – This one’s a bit of an outlier; it’s not actually listed on the FF7R OST and is in fact original to Nobuo’s Final Fantasy VII piano collections, but it’s the perfect example of music tying a ribbon onto a scene. Cloud falling into the Sector 5 Church and meeting Aerith is something I’ve seen countless times, but I was still moved to tears by how beautifully everything comes together.
On Our Way (Collectible Jazz Track) – We get the Kalm theme early with this one. Man, oh, man that saxophone.
Sound Score: 10/10
World
To be honest, it was basically a given that Square was going to nail the bells and whistles. Square-Enix games rarely, if ever, disappoint in the audiovisual department. With those out of the way, we can start moving to the meat of the review: How well did Square-Enix recreate this iconic world? In the case of this edition of the Remake, did they manage to bring Midgar to life in an acceptable way?
I’m going to make a confession. After the bombing mission, I felt bored. In fact, I turned the game off and called it a night. This isn’t to say that the bombing mission wasn’t recreated beautifully – it certainly was – it’s just that I've been conditioned by the original game to associate Midgar with being this slow, uninteresting opening act of the Final Fantasy VII story and that the bombing mission is just the first step to leaving Midgar so that I can start the real adventure.
And then, I got to Sector 7.
Holy shit.
I hadn’t really put much thought into how many levers Square had at their disposal to bring Midgar to life. Sector 7 served as the first of many slaps to the face that absolutely nothing was off limits, and whatever Square was going to touch was turning into gold. What in the 1997 edition was simply one screen with the bar, a couple shops, and an apartment or two we could enter was transformed into a full-on city. A grid of streets, avenues, and alleyways littered with townsfolk whose conversations about recent plot points we could overhear as we passed by, which created a pulse within the slums. A bevy of different stores and buildings to explore. A fresh cast of characters and NPCs to converse with which deepened our connection to these slums. And the plate. I could talk for hours about this – in the original, such a big deal is made of the two layers of Midgar, and how the top plate on which the privileged live blocks out the sky and pollutes the air for the slums below. But we literally never see the freaking thing because obviously, how could they show it in a top-down view? And yet, in this remake, it’s very much omnipresent. The steel sky of dread and inequality spans omnipresent across the slums we traverse (I unashamedly spent a legitimate five minutes just staring up at it, like “Holy crap. There it is...” as if I were a kid catching Santa Claus on Christmas night).
And of course, Sector 7 was just the tip of the iceberg. Sector 5 got a very similar treatment in addition to perfectly recreating Aerith’s house while capturing its vibes of being a diamond in the rough. Shinra HQ was downright gorgeous and more grand than we could have imagined. Something that stood out to me was Square’s ability to expand on areas from the original Midgar that were total afterthoughts – the journey from Sector 5 to the Sector 7 playground which in the original was a couple unremarkable screens became a winding stretch worth hours of exploration, puzzles, and battle. Other originally miniscule areas like the train graveyard, the sewers underneath Wall Market, and the climb up to Shinra HQ all got a similar treatment. Square didn’t stop there, either, introducing new areas such as a brief foray to the suburbs topside of the plate which showed new light upon this electric city. Honestly, what floored me the most was just how much life there was in all of Midgar. The conversations that the city’s inhabitants in virtually all areas that we pass through served to not only give Midgar a heartbeat, but also to make us as the player truly feel the gravity of our actions.
Truly, Square’s brilliance shone bright here – the bland and boring original Midgar only served as a blank canvas for the city to be invigorated in grand fashion for this remake.
World Score: 10/10
Gameplay
This is possibly the most important section. All the bells and whistles about this game are great, and the setting was recreated beautifully while capturing every vibe of the original and then some... but in the end, this is a video game, and aesthetics and soundscape don’t mean anything if your game isn’t fun.
Square-Enix had a monumental challenge before them when having to come up with a combat system for this remake. On the one hand, you have the classic Final Fantasy ATB system which longtime fans of the series absolutely love; this rewards tactical thinking, preparation, and methodically planning out and expending turns and resources to reach the outcome that you desire. On the other hand, turn based combat isn’t exactly premium gaming in 2020. I’m a Final Fantasy purist and even I can admit that. We’re just not as limited anymore. Developers have the ability to create these fantastic action-based games with better responsiveness, flow, and hitbox/hurtbox technology than ever before, and this style of gaming is obviously a lot more appealing and rewarding to a wider audience of players who frankly know better in this day and age.
So, Square did their best Dora impression and said “Why not both?”
And from it came perfection.
Yes, I said “perfection”. Square was somehow able to find a way to make old school and new school tango, and they are wonderful dance partners.
A brief summary for those who are out of the loop: In a normal state, combat plays a lot similarly to a lot of action-based games we know and love today (think God of War, Kingdom Hearts, Dark Souls). You can move around freely, guard, dodge, and attack to your heart’s content. There are elements here that are absolutely necessary in a modern video game that were missing in the original Final Fantasy VII: Constant engagement. Real-time skill expression.
The traditional Final Fantasy players don’t get left out either. By playing through combat normally – attacking, blocking, and dodging – the player builds up their ATB gauge. Once their ATB is full, they can enter Tactical Mode, which slows down time dramatically and allows the player to use their character’s skills, magic, summons, and items.
And the absolutely beautiful thing? You need both standard play as well as Tactical Mode to succeed in combat. The necessity of standard play is obvious – you need to be able to run around, attack, and defend to thrive in combat. But you won’t get anywhere with tougher enemies just by whacking them. You need to use your ATB gauge in order to pack a significant punch to enemies, to discover and exploit their weaknesses, and to heal up your party.
Speaking of the party, I deeply enjoyed being able to switch seamlessly between controlling the party members with the push of a button. AI-controlled party members’ ATB gauges fill up more slowly, which means constant switching, assigning ATB usage, and moving to the next party member are key to maximizing effectiveness. Hooray for even more avenues for skill expression!
And let me just take a second to gush. Perhaps my biggest criticism of the original Final Fantasy VII is that literally every character is pretty much the same in battle. Yes, their base stats vary slightly, as do their Limit Breaks, but aside from that, with enough materia and stat increase item shenanigans (and it doesn’t take much), every character plays and feels the same in combat.
Square completely shattered that criticism in this remake. Every character feels unique and satisfying to play:
What’s remarkable to me about playing as Cloud is how well Square nailed the speed at which he plays at. ‘Cause think about it, right? Dude’s holding a sword that weighs 80-100 lbs, so his attacks and moveset have to be able look and feel like they pack a heavy punch. But at the same time, we know that Cloud’s no rook, and he has some dexterity and speed to him. To find this balance, his combos from beginning to middle a great tempo and good flash, and they finish with a visible powerful and empathetic smash.
Tifa is far and away my favorite character to play as. Honoring her Final Fantasy monk inspiration, Square designed Tifa in such a way that she feels like she came straight out of a fighting game. Lightning quick, an emphasis on combos, and get this – you can animation cancel. As an example, I was fighting a boss and already had Unbridled Strength (damage boost) and Haste (ATB buildup boost) activated on Tifa. I dodged the boss’s frontal cleave with Focused Strike, strung some basic attacks together, threw in Overpower which links with your basic attacks, and finished by using Whirling Uppercut then canceling the landing animation by using Divekick. That’s. Insane.
Square nailed Barret’s awkward role as the supporty-ranged tank. His damage isn’t great, but he plays at a safe range and is your best bet to take down units at a far distance. He has some ridiculous HP and defensive stats and is a solid magic user so he was honestly great to switch to when my higher DPS characters needed a breather to get healed up.
Okay first of all, thank God they gave Aerith a magic-based ranged basic attack. The sound of her whacking something in the original to the tune of, like, 12 damage will haunt my dreams forever. Aerith feels fantastic to play as well. I draw comparisons to the Final Fantasy XIV black mage – switch to Aerith, set up an Arcane Ward (doubles spellcasts!), don’t move, and watch as her ridiculous magic abilities burn enemies down. She’s also great to leave on AI-controlled standby so that she can attack safely from a distance and heal up the party as needed.
The battles themselves were great; each boss felt unique and had a weakness to discover and exploit. Seamlessly weaving in cutscenes and dialogue added a cinematic flair that was just another cherry on top of an amazing combat system. The typical monsters and trash mobs that we came across were all unique as well, and their variants encountered later in the game added twists of required tactical thinking.
I have only a couple points of discomfort with the new combat system, and they’re both very minor ones. First, the fact that skills/spells (and even Limit Breaks!) can be interrupted by enemy actions could be extremely frustrating – especially if there were larger amounts of enemies present, your character could get juggled quite easily. Filling up your ATB gauge and readying a skill just for it to be interrupted because some demon hound ran up and smacked you in the head has to be the least “Final Fantasy” feeling ever. That being said, this is easily where you can throw the term “skill expression” right back at me. The second point of discomfort is that enemies were very clearly agro’d to whoever you control as the player. This made playing a ranged character like Aerith annoying at times, because, dammit, I just want to DPS without hordes of monsters running at me! Again, “skill expression” is a double edged sword, but I found it a little strange that enemies would drop what they’re doing, stop fighting Cloud, and start running at Barret just because I switched to him.
Zooming out to other facets of gameplay! I really enjoyed how materia was implemented which may just be a derivative of how smart the combat system was that Square created, but I think Square really hit the mark of having to carefully plan out your party’s materia loadout and envisioning how it would execute in battle. The weapon level-up system adds an extra layer of depth and reminds me of Final Fantasy IX’s skill learning system, which is great. Finally, the large amount of minigames and side quests available added a good deal of variety to the game, without being overly complicated or time consuming.
This was probably the most enjoyable game in the Final Fantasy series from a pure “this is a fun game” standpoint.
Gameplay Score: 10/10 (would honestly be an 11 if such a thing were real)
Characterization
The Final Fantasy series is typically at the top of its class for its character building and development, but I was still slightly nervous heading into this remake that Nomura wouldn’t recapture that magic accurately. Maybe I was conditioned from Final Fantasy XIII (2009) and Final Fantasy XV, but I was especially worried about Cloud. “Please don’t make Cloud this typical brooding, angsty emo Final Fantasy protagonist,” I remember thinking to myself. Because that’s not who he is. Cloud Strife is a dork. He’s a dork who adapts incredibly poorly to new situations and puts on a front of apathy when uncomfortable, but he doesn’t hate the world.
I should have put more faith in the fact that the original game’s character designer became the remake’s director. For the most part, I truly feel like the cast’s Act I character arcs played out and were shown as they should be. Cloud starts out apathetic but that front really begins to melt after he meets Aerith. Aerith herself comes off as this fun and innocent girl but progressively drops more and more hints that she’s part of something much bigger. Barret begins as the loud and rambunctious leader figure which gives way to a total empath who’s still trying to process just what he’s been caught up in. Tifa is shown with her typical slow and steady struggle to come to terms with what has to be done to make things right in the world after traumatic childhood events made her averse to it all.
The rest of the cast’s characters were painted beautifully. Sephiroth made more appearances than normal in this Midgar section (more on that later), but we still don’t understand a word that’s coming out of his mouth. We see the distinct division in those under the Shinra umbrella between those who have morals and those who sip the Kool-Aid. We’re introduced to a new cast of characters in the slums who are working tirelessly to make life better for those around them despite being dealt a terrible hand, and they function to strengthen both the main cast and the story as a whole.
A particular gem that I was delighted by were the interactions between characters. The original was somewhat limited in this department, but we can visibly see the cast grow closer as the remake goes on. Cloud goes from being disinterested and saying “For a price” to any request that Avalanche have for him, to selflessly agreeing to help Barret search for his friends and family post-plate drop, to poking fun at his old self in front using his old “For a price” motto. Additionally, because the areas of Midgar to travel between locations were expanded immensely, things like conversations between characters with no other purpose but character development were added in as we made our way through these winding stretches. That’s a huge advantage that a modern voiced game has over the original that had to use text for dialogue – we had to literally stop everything in order for an interaction between characters to occur. Now, they can just be thrown in wherever. We see more high fives, cheers, ribs, jokes. hugs, and tender moments than ever before. And to me, what this establishes for the cast as a whole is such a beautiful change of pace from a classic Final Fantasy game. This isn’t just a collection of individuals with aligning goals. These are friends.
This in particular makes me really excited for future installments; we now have evidence that these characters are everything that they should be. That baseline allows for more interactions and development, and even the most hardcore old school Final Fantasy VII fans will get to know and enjoy these characters on a deeper level.
Characterization: 10/10
Story
Too often did I get one of my friends to try the original Final Fantasy VII, hoping they’d fall in love too, only for them to lose interest before leaving Midgar because that part of the game is downright boring. Everything is dark and dreary, we don’t really care about the people of the Slums so we don’t feel the empathy to want to help them, the story crawls along, the deaths we see are of characters we only knew briefly, and all of it seems for naught because we find out Sephiroth is the much bigger threat; not some greedy electric company.
But much like with the design of Midgar itself, I hadn’t really put much thought with just how much they can build upon that unexciting first act.
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So ordinarily I would put something like this on my Twitter, as that’s kind of turned into my personal vent/diary platform as of recent, but this is going to be much longer than Twitter can allow, and I need to write this all out without losing my train of thought. It’s gonna go behind a Read More, and I’d like to request that you only read it if we’ve been mutuals for a while, and only if you really want to. I’m not expecting any response, hell I don’t want any responses, I just need to put my thoughts down somewhere, and if I put it in a Google doc or something I’m gonna come back to it later and dwell on it, but if I just put it somewhere and immediately delete it, I’m not going to be able to talk to my therapist about it on Monday. Anyway, content warnings abound, as I’m gonna be talking about depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicide, covid-19, stalking, emotional abuse, and a pretty negative experience I had in a partial hospitalization program at a local mental institute. You’ve been warned. (Also for those of you who are new here, “ignore me” is my personal rant/vent tag, feel free to blacklist it to avoid seeing future posts like this)
So. Here’s a brief recap of the past year and a half in my life.
Back in October of 2018, my best friend went through a very bad breakup with her emotionally abusive ex, while another of my friends was struggling very much with his mental health and attempted suicide. I was miserable working at Target and was gearing up to return to school in the Spring. I had also had feelings for the friend who went through the breakup, and she sort of had feelings for me, but she also had feelings for the other friend, and I had some vague kind-of feelings for the other friend as well, so in December we all decided “fuck it, let’s all date.” I won’t recap the full details of the relationship but it was a goddamn shitshow. His mental heath continued to deteriorate and he wasn’t seeking treatment for any of it, her mental health was extremely poor as well as a result of two years of emotional abuse and extreme codependency issues, and my mental health suffered greatly because of the expectations placed on me, as well as his frequent mood shifts where he would go from wanting to spend the rest of our lives together to, at one point, telling me things in an effort to get me to hurt or kill myself. Not a good situation by any measure. School was good, though, and the two classes I took last Spring were excellent, and I was ready to go back to school full-time in the Fall. Flash forward to September of 2019. My mental health is terrible, though my academics are very strong. I decide, after a few specific incidents, that I can’t be in the relationship with the both of them anymore and break up with him. A lot of bad things happened. She ended up leaving him as well. Then, about a month later, she left me as well and moved out of the state with someone she had met on OKCupid only a few weeks prior. At this point I need to take a medical leave of absence from school and move back in with my parents because I’m so depressed and traumatized that I can barely function. You see, since breaking up with him, he had been harassing me, even after I had attempted to get the police involved. He would call me, text me, make new Facebook accounts to send me message requests, anything to try to get in touch with me. So with all of this happening, and with me basically unable to do anything, I decide to look into a partial hospitalization program at a mental institution not far from where I live. Insurance covered most of it, my parents said they’d pay for the rest, so I started the program in early November. Ordinarily it’s only a three or four week program. I was there for at least 5. It was essentially a day program, so I would be there from 9 to 3 every day Monday to Friday. It was a really great program, except for a few things. Firstly, because it was a program both for mental health and addiction, a lot of the programming wasn’t really applicable to me, as the only thing that I’m addicted to is sugar, and I have no plans to break that habit. There’s a history of temporary psychosis caused by mind-altering substances in my family, and I don’t want to even find out if it applies to me as well. I barely even drink. So anyway, I was one of maybe three people who was there exclusively for mental health, so my options for programming were a bit limited, until a bunch of us complained about the repetitiveness of that aspect of the program and they switched things up a bit. Unfortunately it was at the tail end of my time in the program, so I didn’t exactly get much benefit from that. Secondly, and more importantly, close to the end of my time in the program, one of the mental health workers, a pre-doctoral intern who was running most of the “classes” that I was in, said a few things to me that were really frustrating and upsetting. Firstly she said that “ADHD doesn’t exist, it’s just a reaction to trauma. Too many kids are getting diagnosed with it when they just have regular attention issues, and in adults a diagnosis is almost always accompanied with trauma. And of course people are going to perform better when they’re on a stimulant.” Which. Is wrong on so many accounts. First of all, it’s overdiagnosed in the wrong people and massively underdiagnosed in the people who actually have it, especially young girls. And secondly, of course it’s paired with trauma when adults are diagnosed with it. They’ve had to deal with it for their entire lives up until then without knowing why they couldn’t do things the same way as everyone else, and there’s also a lot of trauma in general that comes with having ADHD considering how many people say “Oh, you’re just not trying hard enough” or “You’re just making excuses,” not to mention the self esteem issues that come with it. And thirdly, yeah people will perform better when on stimulants, but does taking a stimulant make everyone else tired? Cuz it does for me because it lets me slow down my brain enough to actually sleep. So yeah, that was fucked up. But the second thing she said was probably worse, and it didn’t actually occur to me how much this impacted me until earlier today when I realized something, but I’ll get to that realization soon. So it’s my second-to-last day in the program. I had gotten almost no sleep the previous night because I had a massive panic attack right before bed because my asswipe ex messaged me some really fucked up stuff. So I’m way out of it, and my ability to concentrate is pretty shit. I’m doing my best, though, and I’m paying attention to the discussion. We were talking about the parts of the brain and how they’re impacted by trauma. There were a few times during that day where I had forgotten words but still knew what I was talking about, and at least one of them had happened in front of this woman. So she asks “Does anybody know what the part of the brain is that connects the two hemispheres?” I say “Oh, I do” cuz I do know what it is, but for the life of me I can’t remember what the name is. (It’s the corpus callosum.) So she looks at me and says, out loud, in front of the entire group, “You know, it’s okay if we don’t know everything.” So I get all flustered and embarrassed and mad at myself because, in my ADHD people-pleaser brain, the teacher just failed me in front of the whole class and now they all hate me. So I don’t say a goddamn word for the rest of the day, and the next day I leave without saying goodbye to that one woman, after leaving a glowing review in the exit survey. So the thing about this that’s really fucked up is that like two days before, I sat down with her and told her how I have a lot of specific trauma around rejection and failure, especially relating to my dad and how he constantly asserts that I don’t try hard enough or that I need to do better, shit like that. Like, that was a major theme with me the whole time I was in the program. It was like, getting over the intense rejection of my best friend/girlfriend running away with a guy she just met, and my relationship with my dad. That was it. (Of the two, the one there that’s still a major thing in my life is my relationship with my dad. At this point, she can fuck off with whoever she wants. I’m more pissed at her than anything else now.) So for her to turn around and embarrass me in front of the entire group like that, when there was solid evidence that a) I did know what I was talking about and b) I was having a very off day was really messed up. In thinking about it, there was quite a few messed up things that she did in the last week or so that I was there. Probably more during the rest of my time there but I don’t actually remember most of it because working on your trauma can be traumatizing itself, go figure. Anyway, I had almost completely forgotten about that until earlier today when I was thinking about how I was getting much more sensitive to rejection and perceived failure recently than I was before all this had happened. Part of it is probably my increased estrogen dose fucking with my mood, but the majority of it, I think, stems from that one incident of her pretty much violating my trust and invalidating me in front of like twelve people that I really trusted and felt close with. Fucked me up, yo. Anyway, so I leave the program and start working for my dad at his machine shop. Things are going super well, I’m making a fair bit of money, keeping in touch with my friends as best I can, and doing my best to avoid my ex harassing me further. About midway through December I change my phone number so that he’ll stop calling me (he had several ways to get around me blocking his number), and in the middle of February I change my name on Facebook so he won’t be able to find me and send me more message requests, cuz there’s no way to stop that from happening either, and the police were useless because “I wasn’t in any physical danger.” At this point he had moved away from my town, presumably back with his parents but I don’t really know, and I really don’t care. So he messages my siblings on Facebook trying to get my phone number, and then somehow finds my Facebook again and sends me a picture of him cutting his wrist. So I get fed up, go to a local domestic violence prevention nonprofit, talk with one of their advocates, and file a restraining order against him. It gets approved, and the messages stop. A court date is set for us both to meet with a judge to discuss everything and see if it needs to stay in place or not or whatever, and for about 2 weeks everything is great. Then covid-19 starts hitting. I get what was probably just the flu or a cold or whatever a few days before the court date. Then the state that I live in announces that most court hearings are postponed until mid-April. I check on the website and find that stalking and domestic violence, among a few others, are exempt from this and will be going on as scheduled. Because I was recently sick, I call the courts the day before and ask if I can appear over the phone. They say yes, it’s all good, great. So the next morning I call in and things get moving. It turns out that my ex didn’t show up to the hearing, even though he definitely knew about it. So I talk with the judge for a few minutes and we decide that I don’t need the restraining order anymore because he’s not likely to start harassing me again, and if he does I can always get a new one or get the police involved. And so far I haven’t heard a peep from him so I’m assuming that chapter of my life is closed for good, which is excellent. But then more things start to close down, and my dad basically tells me that he doesn’t really need me at work and it’s best if I stay home. So since then I’ve been staying at home. It’s been 15 days total that I’ve been home, with only minimal trips to work for an hour here and there. And I really don’t do well with isolation. It’s not all bad, because I live with my parents, so I have some social contact, but as was mentioned above I don’t exactly get along with my dad, I don’t have a lot in common with my stepmom, and my grandmother is a grumpy old lady who isn’t very good for conversations about much else than knitting and Jeopardy. I’ve been doing my best to stay in touch with folks online, and it’s been decent, but it’s still pretty rough. And when Animal Crossing came out and all of my friends started playing it, I started feeling even worse because I’m poor as shit and don’t even have a Switch, and they’re fucking $400, which is a whole student loan payment for me. So I’ve been pretty miserable the past two weeks. To top it all off, I have to register for Fall classes next week, and I don’t think I can even imagine that far into the future right now. The world is supremely fucked, and there’s almost no way that I’ll even be able to afford to go back to school. I’ll probably have to drop out entirely. For at least a few years. And I’m really not ready to give up on school right now. Like I said above, I’m really sensitive to failure, and this is the third time I’ve tried, and failed, at college. And I’m getting real frustrated about it. The first time it was my ADHD, which at the time was undiagnosed. The second time it was mental health and my asshole ex harassing me. Now, when I finally have my ducks in a row, it’s money. The one thing that no amount of treatment or medication or court hearings will change. Plus there’s all the political bullshit going on still, and the impending collapse of society as we know it, and any number of other global crises (yes, that is the proper plural of crisis) going on. Oh, did I mention I’m an empath and the moods and emotions of the people around me, and of the world in general, pretty heavily impact me? I’ve been able to tell when some massive tragedy occurred even before the news story breaks. So yeah, all in all I’m doing about the worst I’ve been doing since high school before I was on antidepressants, and it’s really hard to see any end to this tunnel. I know I’m one in several hundred million people who are struggling right now, and I’m lucky that I’m at least moderately healthy with a steady place to stay and things to eat, but goddamn if things aren’t shit for me right now. Like I said, I’m not looking for any kind of response, and if you even read all of this I’m legitimately surprised. I just needed to put this all down somewhere because keeping it in is getting to be almost too much.
Don’t worry, friends. I promise you I’m safe. I’m just scared, lonely, and really lost right now.
I love you all.
#ignore me#i promise you I'm safe#don't worry about me#and if you are worried send me a message like tomorrow or something and I'll prove to you that I'm safe#long post#don't reblog
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This Is New
Prompt: Write something about a Edward reader fluff stuff if u can
Warnings: Slight violence, swearing, ending in fluff
A/N: 350 FOLLOWERS!!! Thank you so much! This is an old fic that I actually really like—I can’t let the celebration go without at least something lmao. Hope you guys enjoy it! :)
The sun spilt orange hues over the cloud spotted sky. What a contrast to the motives of your plan.
"This is gonna be hard, you know," you said to Edward as you climbed the stairs to the helm.
"This is new, yes, but there is nothing the two of us can't do!" You rolled your eyes teasingly. "Don't worry, lass; the documents will be ours very soon. In the meantime, tell us what you can see with a bird's eye view."
Your eyes followed his gaze up to the Crow's Nest. "Will do." With a light jog, you headed towards the lift, calmly snapping the rope and rushing up to the top of the mast. The adrenaline had started flowing. You scaled the last few bits to the top and looked back down to Edward, giving him a small wave.
You preferred it up here; the scenery really was beautiful. You should remember to bring your sketchbook next time. "Be ready, lads!" Edward called, and you looked to the fort, which seemed impenetrable.
Oh well, let's see what happens.
[#^•^#]
"Brace!"
"Shit!" You once again fell backwards, but this time slid through the railing of the nest, and you were now clinging on for dear life at an awkward angle. There were no footholds or anything you could steady yourself with. "Fuck!" You swore again, trying to lift yourself onto the platform. It was too twisted to reach for anything.
"Y/N!" That was Edward's voice.
"Yeah?" You called down, adjusting your sweaty grip.
"I'm coming! Hold on!"
"Well, I haven't got anything better to do." That last part was whispered under your breath. To your relief, Edward came relatively quickly.
"Here." His hand locked onto your wrist and as you let go he pulled you up. He was holding onto a length of rope to prevent himself from falling as he held onto you tightly. "Are you okay?"
You glanced at the blisters beginning to form on your hands. "Perfect." You smiled. "Thank you." You planted a quick kiss on his cheek.
Even though you've been lovers for a few short months, you still made him blush like a schoolboy.
A sudden rumble unsteadied you. "Dock the ship!" Edward demanded. "Let's go get those documents."
The damaged fort made for an easy entrance when following the rest of your crew through the rubble. The sight before you was utter chaos, with brawls and sword fights left, right, and centre. "There!" Edward pointed to a set of double doors around three stories up.
You followed him to a wall behind the mess. "It's way too high," you sighed, looking up at the daunting stone.
"'Too high' my arse," Edward scoffed. "Here." He firmly planted his feet and made his hands form a secure foothold for you.
"Thanks." You grasped his shoulders, placing your foot on his palms, and was about to pull yourself up when you locked eyes with his. His eyebrows squinted in a daring fashion. Without hesitation, you pecked his lips with a hidden smile. As you pulled apart, Edward smirked.
"What are you waiting for, lass?" His eyebrow cocked with subtle sass. You rolled your eyes jokingly and pulled yourself onto his shoulders. You still couldn't reach.
"You need to give me an extra boost!" You called. "Now!"
You never heard him break a sweat as he gave you momentum to leap the small distance to grasp the slightly slippery stone. Pulling yourself over the ledge, you turned around to reach for Edward's hand.
He backed up a few paces, before launching towards the wall at a lightning fast pace. You grasped each other's wrists tightly as he came thundering up the stone rather supernaturally.
Whilst you were in the process of pulling him up, you spotted a soldier heading right towards the two of you– and you stuck on your stomach with Edward around three meters off the floor (he was very skilled in wall running) was not the preferred position to be in.
"Look out!" You both yelled at each other. As if you were gazing into a mirror, you took out flintlocks and shot at the opposing threats. It was only after you took notice of both your guns pointing behind each other that you began to laugh.
You looked behind you. "My hero," you grinned, hinting at sarcasm.
"Just pull me up before my arm falls off!"
You did as you were told with ease, only hindered with slight difficulty; you and Edward were as strong as each other. "Great," you huffed. "Time for the easy part."
Edward followed you up the walls to the floor with your destination. You gestured Edward to freeze his movement whilst you peered over the top. Strangely, there was no movement outside. "Come on," you whispered, hoisting yourself up.
Edward grasped for your robes as he clambered up after you. "I don't like this, Y/N," he breathed.
"We have no choice. We'll take it as it comes, alright?" You didn't give him a chance to reply as you unsheathed your sword and headed to the door. Edward huffed in slight irritation at your eagerness, but followed nevertheless. It just didn't sit right with him.
You took a deep breath, and when Edward readied himself, you kicked open the doors, sword in your hand and a gun in Edward's. you sliced through the first man to aggressively approach. Edward mowed down everyone except for the commanding officer– the one you needed.
"Hello, mate," Edward chirped, voice laced with a sarcastic undertone. "We've come to collect something of ours." His flintlock twirled around his fingers expertly. The officer calmly raised his hands. This made Edward uneasy, but he made a good job of hiding it.
"Please, help yourself. I only ask for one thing in return."
"I'm not giving you anything," Edward sneered.
"Are you sure I can't... change your mind?"
Arms came at you from behind. One came around your neck while the other clutched at your free arm, holding it behind you. Your sword clattered to the floor. "Shite," you whispered.
Edward swung around and pointed his gun at your captor. "Let her go." His glare sent chills down your spine, and he wasn't even looking at you. You could feel muscles tense behind you; it made a smile crack at the corners of your lips.
The officer pulled out his own flintlock, aiming it at Edward. Every time you tried to struggle, your choke hold tightened. Edward pulled another gun out of his holster, holding one at each head. "What do you want?"
"I want the map to the observatory."
"What are you talking about?" He lied. "I don't have a map to an observatory."
"I think we both know that's not quite true." He clicked his fingers, and the man holding you pulled out a blade and held it to your chest. "Be a good man and put down the guns."
Edward slowly bent down and dropped the firearms to his feet, holding his hands up as he straightened. The officer gestured at the guns, and Edward reluctantly kicked them aside. "Now, what does our new helper look like?" He was circled by this new threat. The officer stopped behind him, and Edward could feel his hand clutch the fabric on the back of his head.
He leapt into action the minute his cowl slipped over his face. His elbow connected with the jaw behind him, using his other hand to sharpen the blow with force.
That was when you took your chance and stomped on your restrainer's foot, distracting him from your head butt. You disarmed him easily from then on and threw him to the ground.
"Y/N! We need to leave!" Edward had picked up his flintlocks and holstered them, ushering you out the door.
"But the documents!" You pleaded.
"Forget the documents! We need to go!" He pulled you by the arm into the light of the setting sun.
"After them!" You didn't stop to look around as you and Edward headed towards the ledge and leaped, limbs flailing more than gracefully through the air. An explosion went off behind you, and Edward came to shield you protectively, holding you close. You braced yourself for the landing and it wasn't a disappointment, but Edward's arms immediately detached from you.
The few moments under the water were too calm, not to mention freezing cold. It took a few seconds to get to the surface, and you gratefully inhaled the oxygen once you got to the top.
You looked across the water, searching for Edward. "Ed!" The lack of fabric over your head was a relief; it would have made you colder.
You waited...
And waited...
And waited...
He shot up from behind you, sputtering out any water. "Are you okay?!" You asked worriedly.
"I'm fine." you swum the both of you against the slippery cliff, clutching at any handholds.
"Are you sure?"
"Fire in the hole!" Debris exploded over the ledge and Edward brought his body over yours– one arm around your waist whilst the other held onto a spare hold above you. You both closed your eyes at the inevitable splash that sent chills down both of your spines.
"I'm pretty sure a trickle just went down my neck," you laughed. Edward kissed you behind the ear in response.
"I'm glad you're alright," he turned your head slightly and moved his own to align in front of yours.
"I love you," he muttered, free hand cupping your cheek.
"I love you too." Your forehead and noses touched, and you would have loved to stay in that moment forever, if it weren't for your compromising position.
"There!" Edward pulled you under the water, completely depending on his reflexes. He gestured you to follow. When you couldn't expel any more time underwater, you tugged at Edward's foot and pointed upwards, quietly moving to the surface.
You luckily arose in front of the Jackdaw, where Adéwale was waiting for you, a rope hanging off the side. You wrapped one arm around Edward and the other around the rope while the rest of the crew pulled you both up.
The moment you got on deck you collapsed with exhaustion. "Son. Of. A. Kraken," you sighed.
Edward fell next to you. "That didn't work out as well as I imagined."
You rolled on top of him and hugged him tightly. "No, but if you're good, these next few hours might be."
#assassin's creed#assassin's creed imagine#assassin's creed oneshot#x reader#assassin's creed x reader#assassins creed x reader#edward kenway#edward kenway x reader#edward kenway oneshot#edward kenway imagine#assassin’s creed x f!reader#edward kenway x f!reader
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An apology, but a story.
Okay guys, sorry for uh, talking so much about Pillowfort lately. I do mean it when I say I’m still here to stay until Tumblr totally dies, and I know I’ve been posting a LOT of PF content, but I’m also trying to help tailor an environment over there where this fandom can thrive. Add in momma’s heart attack and coma and my dash has been a hot mess and bare bones of my usual content, and I apologize.
But at the same time I’d like to sort of tell a bit of a flashback story of social media, fandom, and why I really do hope the best for Pillowfort. Some people are too young to remember the slow death of Livejournal, and I’m having like, flashbacks from that. I wasn’t in SPN fandom itself at the time but I was on LJ, so if you’re
worried about your friends leaving
intent on sticking to tumblr hell or high water
kind of upset at some friends trying to manage both
Let me give a little bit of history to explain what people are doing right now and why.
Long long ago, in a digital world far away when the internet still screamed at you when you connected to it, fandom wasn’t really globalized like it is. Twitter didn’t exist. Eventually Facebook was a hot new commodity not everybody adopted immediately. Tumblr wasn’t a sparkle in anybody’s eye.
Fandom was mostly relegated to php forums and places like Livejournal. Livejournal proved to be -- at the time -- one of the best methods to engage in fandom. You could have your own journal, but you could also join communities with your account and comment on long discussions.
There were weaknesses of this to be sure. Notifications were pretty raw to nonexistent compared to how we know of them modernly. You had to basically manually check the comm to stay on top of things, and what was said in that comm was choked to that comm. Now, that had its strengths: you could control the community and posts, ergo minimizing flame wars, but it made fandom a bunch of pigeonhole wings and, to be honest, echo chambers. Lots of things got missed, overlooked, and what have you. And god help you if you pissed off a big name fan in your wing that owned one or most of the communities you went to. Replies and the ilk were pretty limited on what you could do, too. But it was something. It was more than just a standard forum. You could still try to cross-engage.
Then came the LJ Purge, which... is pretty much identical to the Tumblr purge. New rules banishing NSFW to the depths of the internet, some out of control censorship, targeting all LGBT content no matter how pure as NSFW and explicit -- you name it. They didn’t really have wildly out of control filterbots, that’s a new modern invention just to shit in our bin a little better, but you get the idea. What happened -- and is still, more quietly, now that the shock has passed -- to Tumblr is what happened to LJ. People lost mountains of work.
Now, LJ didn’t die overnight. It died over the course of a few years. Some people left fairly quickly, others tried to stay aboard. For example, Destiel fandom was fairly young at the point the LJ Purge kicked off, and were already sort of outsiders among the fandom newsletters that were more Gen or Wincest doused at that point because -- well, duh -- they had a several year running start on that platform. The communities, as above, were really regulated. There just wasn’t room to breathe. Sure, they had their own comms, but once material started vanishing, they were much more eager to, en masse, migrate to a new platform. And yes, some stayed behind longer, because people, even in shipland, aren’t a borg.
Other communities, like gen or Wincest, stayed behind longer. They had years of built up work and huge communities they were attached to there and it was a lot harder for them to let that all go. But it didn’t get better. More quietly, once the hysteria ended, people just lost their will to continue to use livejournal and they more dribbled across.
Some went to Dreamwidth back then. Some went to tumblr. Long term, tumblr worked for everybody until now. Dreamwidth was pretty much Livejournal, minus censorship, plus a few bells and whistles but it worked for a few people, but let’s face it -- that’s not where central fandom ended up.
Now, people are talking alternatives. Some are saying to go back to Dreamwidth. I refuse.
Because there’s a reason it wasn’t the most successful platform in the past and we’ll go back to completely segregated fandom like before and
because certain aspects of fandom that DID go to Dreamwidth and stay there, have still been there, and are a huge thorn in the side to almost anyone with their head screwed on straight, Destiel fandom or not. J2 tinhats are the eternal asscramps of the fandom and they’ve squatted on dreamwidth for their crazy ass tinhat page for years, god knows they probably went to adjacent communities, god knows how ingrained they are into it, and I am NOT willing to deal with that level of horse shit again.
Pornhub tried a grab, that didn’t work, as it shouldn’t, for a list of reasons as long as my arm; Mastodon was suggested, but has a huge issue in some of its other channels that people don’t want to float in the vicinity of.
And then there’s Pillowfort.
So look, Pillowfort is young, it is a smolbabe. In a few months it went from 4K users to 25K users and is growing innumerably by the day. Its servers are struggling. That turns some people off. I get that. But that isn’t permanent.
So first of all, early pioneers are what make migrations work. Just like LJ had its initial members, and then tumblr had its early migrators, places like Pillowfort can be the same. Dreamwidth already has its foundations. That’s redundant, and foundations I’m not even going to touch, much less the regressive, divisive form of communities that will segregate all of us again. It’s fine if you aren’t one of the first people to take up the platform. The people ahead of you will start laying down content and communities and, if it works out, you can join in when you’re ready.
So what makes Pillowfort so fucking special?
Okay, so check it out. On tumblr, we’re used to reblogging shit into the bowels of the internet. As Pillowfort grows it, too, has that capability with some differences.
The boldest difference is that when you reblog, your opinion doesn’t get attached to the end of the post. It just reblogs the base post. Some people initially complained and thought that was the loss of a feature but came to realize it’s a blessing.
You see, that means someone can’t kidnap your post with a shitty opinion to reblog it to their friends with a shitty opinion that all attach their heckling shitty opinions. Like, let’s say it’s someone that’s Destiel fandom reading this. Ever had an anti shit reblog your post and it run wild? Well, now, if they try to reblog it, all they reblog is... your Destiel post. Thanks for that.
So how do we actually say what we need to?
Well, fam, it incorporated elements from LJ/DW, in having threaded replies. Multiple threads if so needed. The threaded replies are capable of housing just about anything an OP has. So a blog post has, alongside Like/Reblog notifications, comments. Open the post, read the comments, start an actual conversation with some merit. Did some douchebag come to spam your comments since they can’t reblog? No problem, delete their shitty comments and block them, problem solved.
But it doesn’t end there.
See, like LJ, PF has communities. While your post can reblog just about anywhere just like on tumblr, you can blog or reblog them into the communities you follow. Anyone following that community, whether they follow you directly or not, gets that turning up in their feed, maximizing your spread. So sure, it’s a young platform and you only have 20 followers or whatever, but if you make a general Supernatural style post and blog it to the SPN com, 300 people (at current) see it. If you post something to the Destiel comm, over 200 people see it. It’s a way to even find new accounts and friends.
If you don’t like something that’s turning up in a community, you can blacklist shit. And/or find a more appropriate community if it gets out of hand to you.
When you make your own communities you can have internal discussions or blog in/out posts, you can set rules, promote moderators, remove or ban problem users, and generally control the flow of your community to keep out shitlords. But, if for example, you subscribed to a community that turns out to be secretly run BY a shitlord because, IDK, maybe they don’t like that you think Sam is bi or something, most of these communities are large and blog in/out/engageable enough that you won’t lose your contacts, you WILL find your people over time, and you won’t be completely choked off to a singular abyss.
So the base beat is
PF treats every single post like any root post on an LJ/DW comm, but is able to be reblogged from/to communities or your own blog page as freely as tumblr. PF takes the best concepts of current and previous fandom platforms in its base application and lays a groundwork that literally all of us can prosper on if it survives and continues.
But that’s the catch.
And it’s cool if you aren’t ready to completely take that leap yet. I get that.
“I kinda like PF but it doesn’t have X feature-”
Okay look, PF is a smolbabe, like I said. It’s in beta. The thing is, they’re adding things every day. They have a dev list like 2 pages long for goals and things are getting crossed off and added like, biweekly. It might already be on their list to add. And if it’s not, guess what?
The staff actually give a shit and react to questions and concerns. There’s entire beta groups to talk about features with bugs, and/or features that should be added or adjusted. There��s a comm to talk directly to the staff about things.
A small, young platform needs people willing to be out there saying what would improve the experience. So if you go there, you’re not just fandom pioneers, you’re social media pioneers if you so choose to be. It’s not mandatory. You can just fan in your space how you want. Or you can go to the beta groups and staff groups and tell them what you think would improve the experience.
And again, it’s okay if you aren’t willing to move right now.
I’m not moving entirely. I’m double blogging, and will return to my regularly scheduled blogging on tumblr here soon, now that my life is calming down and I got most of my PF heavy lifting out of the way. But I want to make a nest in case this does pan out to be the next forward horizon, rather than taking a step back to something like Dreamwidth that segregates us all again. I want to help them build that platform.
But I’ll still be here with you guys.
But if you’ve felt like friends are abandoning you
Please try to understand the history, please understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and just try to encourage them to cross blog where you can/will engage. And if you’re feeling daring one day? Try to poke your head into PF.
I have one remaining key that I’m willing to give a really good fandom creator. I gave one to a meta-mind and I’d like this to go to a heavy, inclusive gif creator, because that’s still a sparse art on PF. You’d be the belle of the ball just for crossposting your work, in a place that DOESN’T have a threat of it getting deleted when tumblr throws a hissyfit. Just post on both. Tada. Suddenly you’re the popular kid.
If you’re interested, if you poke your head in, check my recent post listing communities that are growing rapidly and the ilk to know where to get your feet wet. Or send me a DM. I’ll help.
We good? Cool.
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well this has basically become my diary blog because its gotten to the point that i feel like i can’t talk about my problems on any platform that people might actually fucking see them on
But anyway, today’s random stress rant is about being trans masc/trans male and the way that makes me feel like I can’t voice my fears, frustrations, and concerns. This is actually compounded by the fact that I’m white passing, thin, and can sometimes actually pass as male.
There’s so many positivity posts about how being trans, being non-binary, etc isn’t just “thin/white/masculine”. And I’m here for it. I really am. I don’t want a world where only people who look similar to me are taken seriously about their identity. I make sure to take time to recognize the struggles of those less privileged than me and recognize their triumphs (especially by liking a thousand selfies because OH GOSH ARE YOU PEOPLE ABSOLUTELY KILLING IT OUT THERE I LOVE YOU)!
But then every time something goes wrong within the trans community, I see it blamed on passing/white/transmasc folk. I’ve seen it several times now, with varying degrees of vitriol. I don’t... blame anyone really... Maybe it really is our fault (”our” used loosely because, despite my general passing as white, my father is black). I don’t really know because, while I do consider myself to be somewhat connected with the trans community, I don’t go out of my way to be a fan of other trans people by the virtue of them being trans (in large part because I spent a few years deeply ingrained in fandom of certain Youtubers and ended up meeting them in person and finding out they were all either racist, apathetic, or abusive (or all three)). So who knows. Maybe it is only the white and passing trans men who turn truscum. I guess I personally would not know (and perhaps that in itself is a privilege).
I guess what I’m kind of trying to get to here is that I still don’t know how to come to terms with being part of an oppressive group within an oppressed group. It’s always been like this where... things absolutely do hurt and affect me, but I’m instructed not to say anything about it because I’m still less hurt than others.
As half black, half white but white passing... racism directly affects me and my family whom I love. But I can’t say anything because I look too white to be offended by this stuff. I’m not allowed to explore my black identity because I’m too white and would be an invasive pest. I sometimes hate that my parents didn’t just marry within their own races so I’d at least know where the fuck I stood with all this rather than exist in this eternal racial limbo of “too privileged for this but too affected by that”.
As trans masc, there’s obviously the constant debate over if I have male privilege/how far that extends (to the point that I don’t honestly know and I’m so new to existing fully as male that I haven’t been able to make the determination myself as it doesn’t feel like I’m being treated differently yet). I’m not allowed to mention bathrooms. If I do, I get met with this overwhelming positivity that makes me want to fucking vomit (yOu CaN dO iT HuNnY JuSt Be CoNfIdEnT!!!) or I’m rebuked saying that trans women have it worse. WHICH THEY DO AND I AM NOT TRYING TO DEBATE THAT AT ALL. However, the result is that I can’t talk about how much I fear making eye contact with other men in the bathroom. I can’t talk about how I pray to the fucking gods that there’s no reason at all that I would have to open my mouth and say something out loud while in the bathroom. I can’t talk about how I fear going to the bathroom with my male friends and family members because I don’t want them to speak to me while other men are present. I can’t talk about how much I fucking dread the day someone finds out I’m not cis in a public bathroom. Being called out for it isn’t necessarily the issue. It’s the fact that cis men are fucking dangerous. They’re violent and cruel and dangerous and any one of them could be the one who wants to hurt me or r//pe me for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. With the wrong body. But, oh no, I can’t talk about that because I do pass pretty well. And I’m not as obvious an “intrusion” as other people might feel. And I’m not the right gender.
As a thin person, I can’t speak on body positivity. Despite how the bullying I experienced for most of my school years revolved completely around my appearance (including the fact that I am so deathly thin). I can’t talk about how shameful it felt to be told by my friends (friends used loosely) that they were going to tie me down and feed me unhealthy foods. I can’t talk about how constantly aware I am of how very small and very VERY vulnerable I am. My body makes me a target, and this isn’t just a distant fear or guess. I’ve been assaulted because my small form makes me an easy target for violence. I can’t talk about how, now as a man, I feel shame over my tiny frame and the way it makes it impossible for me to shop for men’s clothing. I can’t talk about the embarrassment of shopping in the “boys” section and praying to god they have a shirt I can wear that doesn’t have fucking dinosaurs on it (I like dinosaurs as much as the next guy, if not more, but I want a dress shirt that makes me look like an adult thanks).
I JUST FEEL LIKE EVERY ASPECT OF MY LIFE HAS SET ME UP TO BE IN A SITUATION WHERE I’M NOT ALLOWED TO COMPLAIN BECAUSE I DON’T HAVE IT AS BAD AS OTHERS!
This doesn’t even touch on mental illness yet, but I don’t want to get into that because I’m still trying to figure out this whole fucking thing and I just don’t want to dig myself a deeper hole right now because it’s a constant stress and FUCK do i just wish i knew what was going on for sure already
I’m really trying my best not to end off this rant by saying “but it’s okay” or some other variant. Because I do that all the time. I’ve internalized all of this and now I silence myself on important matters. Or I make light of them. Or end off my complaints by saying “well someone else has it worse”. Yes, that’s true, but sometimes I need to own my own pain. I need to make that the subject, not the billions of other people who are, yes, also suffering. Sometimes I should be the focus, right? At least to one person? At least to myself...
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February 8th 2021
It might just be the time of year, but I find myself getting discouraged easily. It’s compounded by the fact that we’re coming up on a year since my job sent me home and everything that’s happened since then. The simple fact of the matter is I’m not where I want to be at almost any category of life you care to name. I’m currently making about half of what I was pre-May 2020, I’m struggling with staying in a creative mindset, I’m not necessarily hopeful that I will be able to realize a key hope of mine to regain the position I was previously in, and I’m not finding anything equivalent out there that I can do despite the experience. It leaves me in a pretty depressing place, and I’m not sure what my next move is. So when this happens, I try to move out of the mindset of what I can’t do to figure out what I can accomplish. I believe it starts with talking about the things I am passionate about. Demonstrating some knowledge. Possibly not being so unassuming about it?
A lot of the past year had to do with how my friends stayed creative and productive during the pandemic, and now I may be best served by turning this camera inward. Let’s see what happens.
After I wrote the above, I fired up my Feedly reader, and Seth Godin’s post today is very timely indeed.
So, let’s consult the imp in the back of my head that wants to know what the bleep I’m going to do to turn YET into DONE. I think first we have to define what DONE is, and I’m finding that a little hard to do at the moment. It’s a Jackson Pollack splatter of thought about what I don’t want to be doing anymore, and very little thought about what it is I would rather be doing, and whether I can do it for a living. Nothing new here, this has pretty much been the case for a few years now. I need to put these thoughts together. I don’t want to take phone calls anymore. I do want a job in a creative field. I want what I create to be able to help people. I want to be able to live comfortably on the fruits of that effort, which means not only the bills are paid, but that the wife and I are not worried about health insurance, and that the kids are taken care of.
So, maybe that’s what done is. If that’s true, then the next question—my favorite—is ‘What’s Next?”. What I’m about to write is the first time I’ve ever written this answer: I don’t know. I don’t know what the first step is, and if I don’t know what the first step is, I can’t figure the next one. Marie Forleo likes to say “Everything is Figureoutable”. I sure hope so, because being stuck in this place is a goddamn exhausting place to be.
Of course, as I said at the beginning, it could just be that it’s January and it’s cold, and that I hate everything right now. It feels like more than that, but maybe it always does and I’m not remembering it.
Oh, You Didn’t Know?
Joe Budden, who up until a few months ago had an exclusive deal with Spotify, is moving his podcast to Patreon. The Verge has some comments from Budden:
He says he proved the model, along with the potential of his audience, but didn’t want Spotify to use his fans and reach to prove the platform’s own worth and make money.
“For many years, the record labels and the system that I come from tricked us into thinking they were doing us a favor by capitalizing off our talent and basically loaning us money, and that’s been the standard the entire time,” Budden says, adding that he already knows how that system worked out for creators.
When Budden announced his split from the tech company, he said Spotify was “pillaging” his audience and only cared about how his show contributed to Spotify overall, not about his actual podcast.
Budden was a recording artist before he was a podcaster. If he’s aware that the record labels played games, I can’t believe he didn’t see the obvious. Streaming Services aren’t exactly known for treating artists differently, for a start, but let’s address what I think is the elephant in the room, which is the question of whether or not what you had was actually a podcast, because I think that question is fundamental to the problem Budden experienced. A podcast is not exclusive to a platform, and I’ll argue that point until I’m blue in the face. If I can’t subscribe to your show on a different platform than Spotify, then you don’t have a podcast, you have a show on Spotify. Spotify might have a big user base, but that user base is all you have. Spotify’s Q4 2020 earnings state that they have 345 million active monthly users, and that only 25 percent of those users listen to podcasts on the platform. That’s around 86.5 Million, and trust me, they’re not all listening to Joe Budden. Yes, he’s got a lot of downloads, but what he’s got on Spotify is all he’s going to get by staying there. Patreon is a huge and smart play, I wouldn’t be surprised if he goes 3x on listeners and money at the very least.
(Note to self, get back on Patreon, it’s about to blow up.)
The Clothes Suck Anyway
Ah, exposure. SO great for paying bills, only the complete opposite of paying bills.
One of my favorite Twitter accounts is @forexposure_txt, and they receive posts every day from creatives who receive requests, demands, and straight-up meltdowns from people who believe it’s ok not to pay a creative for their work. However, in some cases, there’s the odd post about a company that lifts a picture, alters it, and uses it on their social media without attribution. Take, for example, Meg of Margate, a photographer who discovered a fashion brand called Ted Baker (no link, I’m not enabling this behavior) lifted a photo, photoshopped it, and post it on their Instagram “for engagement”. When called on it, they offered Meg a 200 dollar gift card from their store, which she declined. They then stated they didn’t have the budget to pay photographers, so they deleted the image.
Fine, but let’s be clear about what really happened here. A fashion brand that declared revenue of 617 million pounds in 2019 used a picture that didn’t own to drive traffic to their brand. They got likes and engagement for hours on that post. Then they told the photographer, sorry we can’t afford it, and just deleted the post. Ted Baker made money off that stolen picture, and they probably will have no liability for screwing a creative because it costs money to take people to court.
If this doesn’t make you angry, it should.
This seems like a good place to link to one of my favorite talks by Mike Montiero, “Fuck You, Pay Me.”
More Instagram Stuff
Instagram is now conducting a test to remove the ability to share feed posts within Stories:
You would assume that a lot of Stories updates are re-shared feed posts. The fact that Instagram is willing to reduce this seems like a positive sign for its development focus - but it might also indicate that people are viewing Stories less as a result of such shares, which has prompted Instagram to take action.
I can tell you that many of my stories are photos from other accounts that I think are amazing, and I do that to encourage my followers to follow them. If you remove the ability for me to do that, then I have to resort to a third party program—Repost—to post them to my feed, and I don’t want to do that. My feed should be for my pictures. I hope what they’re driving at is removing the ability to share one’s own feed posts as Stories, and I would completely understand why they feel it’s redundant. That’s not how I read this story.
In other Instagram news, it looks like IG and Twitter might be burying the hatchet soon and allowing integrations again:
That's an even bigger integration. As noted by Jane Manchun Wong, Instagram hasn't provided direct Twitter integration since it disabled Twitter card preview support back in 2012, which makes it annoyingly difficult to share content between the two apps. Now, it seems they're mending bridges, which could facilitate not just tweets in Stories stickers, but wholly new integration options which would enable direct sharing of Instagram posts to Twitter as well, fully integrated and formatted in-line.
That's not part of this proposal, and it may not ever be. But it would definitely be handy - and with Twitter seemingly now more open to such, it could pave the way for improved connection.
If true, this would look a lot cleaner than the screenshots we’re all doing right now anyway. Honestly, this horse has been out of the barn so long it’s dying of exposure.
Shot of The Day
#Joe Budden#Spotify#Patreon#Ted baker#For Exposure#IG Stories#social media#Twitter#Integrations#Winter#Seasonal Depression
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