#also I apologize for the amount of ellipses that i use
Text
Isekai-ed into Hawk's Life
Hawks x gn!winged!Reader
Warnings: ⚠️ Death!(at very beginning, it is an isekai), mentions of death throughout, some angst(??maybe not yet??), slight cursing
THIS WILL NOT FOLLOW A SPECIFIC TIMELINE IN THE MANGA
(so sorry i just, love, love, the idea of having wings)
(this is all my art, it is on IG, im just too embarrassed for people who know me irl to potentially find this xD Even though none of them have tumblr 👀 if you somehow recognize it...props to you?)
_________________________________
tbh, I can’t decide if I want this to have more than 1 part.
Word count: ~1,800
_________________________________
You were on your way home from a long evening at your part time job. Before that you had already taken 2 finals that morning too.
You dragged your feet, exhausted, as you headed towards the crosswalk. Stopping at the edge as the traffic light turned green, you decided to pull out your phone and decided to watch a speed paint from your favorite artist who recently released a new video.
It just so happened it was a Hawks speed paint 👀
The light turned red and you slipped your phone into your pocket as your started to make your way across the street
little did you know this would be the last time you'd cross the street
A wild driver came barreling down the road, no regards for civilians or traffic lights, probably drunk or high or just someone out for blood.
You stood there like a deer caught in headlights as your life flashes before your eyes
You can barely comprehend what's happening as you felt pain engulf your body and suddenly you were unconscious
________________________________________
Keigo tiredly stumbled into his large apartment, kicking off his shoes and shrugging his jacket off by the door
He wants nothing more than to just flop down and pass out. The HPSC has been giving him hell lately about god knows what.
He let out a long sigh and headed towards the bathroom to do his nightly routine
As he finishes up, he drags his feet towards his bed and flops down face first into the comfort of his pillow and sheets
Keigo falls asleep almost instantly after getting into a comfortable position, worn out from a long day of work
What he wasn't expecting was a loud "thud!" coming from the main room. He jolts up from his bed, feathers ready to attack.
*******
Reader's pov(?)
*******
You groaned as you hit the floor. Your head was spinning and it feels like a truck just hit you
oh wait...
You suddenly became more alert, looking around in a panic, expecting to either be on the road and injured or in a hospital of sorts. What you didn't expect was a wooden floor inside of a random apartment.
You felt around your body for any signs of injury, but all you found were a set of wings on your back- wings?? Hold up. Why did you feel wings what kind of sick joke was this?
Your thoughts were racing as your breathing picked up. What was happening? Didn't you just get hit by a vehicle? Why are there wings in your back? Where are you even?
Feeling around in your pockets, you found your phone and whipped it out, trying for anything. You turned it on, the harsh light of it illuminating your face, you tried to send a text to your best friend, but alas, it wouldn't go through. Actually nothing on your phone seemed to work. You checked your location settings, for some reason it said Musutafu, Japan.
Wasn't....Wasn't that the location that most of Boku no Hero Academia took place?? This can't be right, this has to be a dream right? There's no way that you could have actually ended up here unless...
Then it hit you.
You read your fair share of isekai series back when you were alive in your realm. Mostly manhwas of characters getting reborn into another person's body, but, never actually reincarnating as yourself into another world.
That was the only thing you could think of. You must have been reincarnated into the Boku no Hero Academia world. Except as yourself.
In all honesty, this is not how you thought you'd go out. You didn't know what to expect after death, but this definitely wasn't it. After all, this was a fictional setting, wasn't it?
Well, not anymore because now you're living in it! Smh.
That would also probably explain the wings on your back. This was you now. You have a bird quirk.
Now, all you have to do, is figure out where the heck you are.
Just as you are about to stand up, feathers zip towards you, pinning you to the ground
You hear footsteps begin to come towards you. You don't know if you should be scared for your life considering you've already died once or ecstatic because, you knew for a fact, this could be none other than Hawks' apartment.
The winged hero finally emerges and stares down at you, crossing his arms over his chest.
He says in a low, gravely voice from sleep, "Who are you, and how did you get into my home?" You stare back up at him and nervously chuckle.
"I'm not sure you'd believe me if I told you." You nervously sigh out.
"Try me." He demands, sounding a little more irritated now. You sigh in defeat and start to explain your situation.
"Do...do you know what an isekai is?" You said sheepishly while turning your gaze away from his. He kind of gave you a confused head tilt and just a vibe that said “No”. You sigh again and explain it to the best of your ability. Hawks becomes more and more interested and confused as you talk, but nods a long slowly.
“So...you were reborn here, but as yourself? Wait- does that mean you died before!?” He asked, disbelief and fear ran through his eyes. You looked at him in bitter amusement.
“Apparently I did. The last thing I remember of my world was getting hit by some truck or car. The dude clearly did not know how to drive. I had the right of way I was pretty sure at least. I mean, the light was red, usually that means pedestrians can cross the street? And plus he was going wayyy over the speed limit,” you begin to ramble on, the reality of actually dying setting into you. Hawks noticed the panic beginning to set into you and released you from his feathers. He crouched down next to you and grabbed your shoulders gently.
"Hey, hey, hey, look at me, you're ok now, right? You're here, and not dying in the middle of the street still. You're here. In Musutafu," he said trying to calm you back to reality. Well, what was your new reality. Your mind was racing. Trying to put together a coherent thought.
You look up to him, with a panicked look still in your eyes, thoughts started to come out of your mouth as your brain was trying to catch up with the situation. "I'm... I'm in Boku no Hero Academia and, and you’re Keigo... standing... right in front of me..I have wings. I have wings? Jeezus I have fucking wings. And I’m dead in my own world. I don’t know anyone, well, wait, technically, I do know people, just-Oh gods! I’m so sorry, that name slipped out! I- I, I’m really sorry Hawks." Even in your wild state, you noticed Hawks tense up at the sound of being called Keigo by a total stranger, and were able to get out an apology. That was progress? You were slowly coming back to reality.
Hawks froze up a bit at the sound of hearing his real name mentioned. At first he wasn't sure if he believed your tale of the isekai situation, but after this he might have to reconsider it. He opted to shake off that weird feeling for now and focus on different matters.
" I-I don't know what I'm supposed to do now? I have nowhere to go or to stay. I'm in a whole different freaking universe! My phone doesn't even hardly work here. And I have a pair of wings on my back!" You puffed them out angrily. Hawks glanced behind you and his eyes widened a little. You in fact, did have a set of bird wings. Kind of owl like wings. Not near as big as Hawks', but definitely big enough to fly you around.
Before Hawks could process the words coming out of his mouth, he was already asking you, "Would you maybe like to stay with me? I can help with your quirk too." He glanced away awkwardly. You looked towards him in disbelief.
"Dude, are you sure? We literally just met like 10 minutes ago? I mean, I'm all for it, I have nowhere else to turn to, but if you really really don't want me here, I will politely step out of your life." You so badly wanted to accept his offer on the spot, but being the considerate, mostly sensible human you were, you gave him the option to back out. Hawks shook his head.
"No, no, it's alright. You can crash here. Uh- I mean- stay here! Sorry!" You giggled at his comment.
"Well thank you very much!"
"It's all good. I have a spare bedroom you can occupy for the time being. I'll give you some clothes to sleep in that'll hopefully fit. Accidentally bought a couple things in the wrong size without looking. " (a/n: just...just assume its your size, or oversized, whatever's comfy idk) He jumped up and headed towards his room to grab you the clothes. You still sat on the floor. Still amazed at everything that was occurring.
Hawks walked back into the room and tossed you the clothes. "Hey uh, you know, you can get up now, sorry for holding you down earlier.."
You blushed and scrambled to stand up, "Oh no! It's ok! I understand. This would definitely warrant that kind of action. Some random stranger crashes into your apartment at like 1am. I completely understand. Honest."
He let out a small laugh and wearily brushed his fingers through his hair. The adrenaline of everything finally wearing off. He could feel the tiredness setting into his aching muscles again. “Ah, well, I’m going to head to bed now. The room is down the hall at the very end that you can stay in. I’ll take you out training tomorrow evening if that’s alright?”
You gave a nod of understanding and followed him down the hallway. “Goodnight Hawks,” you sang as he walked into his bedroom. He gave a hum of acknowledgment and closed his door.
Making it into what was now your room, you changed out of your clothes so fast, eager to rid yourself of the past hours events.
Not gonna lie, you could not figure out how to properly get your new wings into the shirt, even with the holes and snaps in the back. Your mind was too exhausted to even process this new skill. So you ended up going to bed without the shirt on and just settled for putting the sweatpants on.
You figured it’d be good to just pass out asap. You were sure if you tried to recount the recent events, you’d spiral into a panicked mess.
You shut your eyes tightly, willing yourself to sleep, trying to only think of positive outcomes for the future. But to be honest, you didn’t know enough about anything in this realm to think rationally about anything good.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I prooobably didn’t proofread this as much as I should have
#hawks x reader#hawks x gn!reader#hawks x winged reader#bnha x reader#bnha x gn!reader#bnha x gender neutral reader#keigo x you#takami keigo x reader#keigo takami x reader#ahHHHh i really hope this ok???#feedback might be nice? idk Dx#I'm still not in the flow of fanfic writing DX its been 5 years#geeeeZ#also I apologize for the amount of ellipses that i use#thats just how I text/talk kinda#isekaied into hawks life
154 notes
·
View notes
Photo
Ch.728, pg.4
Ahaha count - 4
The return of ahaha! I can’t believe she literally only does it four times, that’s a lot lower than I was expecting
In this moment, Monet is revealing to Viola that Doflamingo’s coup has begun, and as stated earlier, her laugh here feels grim and sardonic. However long she’s been Viola’s attendant, playing the role of her servant and possibly friend, she now drops the act to reveal where her true loyalties lie
The fact that Monet is using her more grim laughing style (complete with ellipses) suggests that this isn’t a moment of sadism for Monet. She doesn’t take joy in Viola learning the truth, but it’s not in Monet’s nature to apologize for a betrayal she was planning from the beginning
Could her usage of ahaha over ufufu imply some regret for her actions? Some attachment to Viola? We may never know for sure, but Oda definitely gave Monet two laughs on purpose, and has gotten a surprising amount of mileage out of them when subtly characterizing Monet
On another note, you can also see the gate’s guards buried in Monet’s snow, most likely dead, possibly killed by Perpetual Snow or a similar technique
Honestly, seeing Monet’s silhouette standing in the snow over defeated enemies...even so small in the panel, it’s a bit of a cool image, I would love to have gotten a closer look. Maybe it’s more focused on in the anime, but I’ll likely never know (unless Oda forces me to keep true to my word that I’ll watch the whole series once Monet comes back...)
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
find the word tag CLXVI
I thought I was missing a letter in there. is this how far I’ve regressed? I’m also watching bridgerton compilations because I can’t bring myself to actually watch the show but regency gossip girl is too tantalizing to totally ignore, apparently. from timespace, because why not. @spacetimewraithwrites
hope (anxiety story)
With a colossal effort, Aiden pushed all of his contrasting thoughts to the side and opened his mouth to say, "Okay."
There was a lot of weight behind that one word and even he wasn't sure he knew what all of it boiled down to. Was he giving in to hope? Was he just accepting her apology? Was he trusting in her offer of being there for him? Was he open to her being around? Aiden knew it could be any and all of those things and didn't feel like going through them at the moment.
As soon as he'd said that one word, Ree's face had lit up like she'd suddenly discovered a long-lost treasure. Her smile struck his heart in a way he couldn't describe, but he thought that it was a good one.
forward (anxiety story)
"Okay." His whisper brought a wave of relief over the two of them. He could see it in the tension leaving her shoulders. He could feel it in the way he ignored his sidewalk bruises to cling onto her fingers.
"Okay," she whispered back, leading him forward. Aiden didn't know he was doing or what she was doing or if she knew what she was doing, but the hesitant spark passed between them through their hands felt more right than wrong. Aiden couldn't think straight, so he didn't try to argue with it. He was scared. He was tired.
He was empty and Ree's hands were full. It didn't make sense and Aiden believed in it completely.
style (more anxiety story)
Theo’s head knocked into his gently before he stood and dashed off to the kitchen. It was only after Aiden stood up himself and was pulling on his first boot that it registered. Theo had given him a kiss.
A tiny, barely there kiss on the side of his head, but still. A kiss. But this was Theo. Theo probably kissed all his friends like that. It seemed to be his style. But a kiss. Aiden put his fingers to the spot. Huh. Somebody had kissed him, willingly. Like, like they had a great amount of affection and just wanted to show how much but be discreet about it. Huh.
level (youth story)
Daniel smiled gently up at Nyks. “I think that’s just how love usually is, darling. Learning to give what we can is part of growing and loving.”
“Can you come up here and hold me?”
“I can do that.” Daniel propped himself up on his elbows and shimmied along the bed. He stopped when he was level with Nyks and let him roll over into his arms. “This is something I can give you.”
“It’s a very good thing,” Nyks said. “And I can give you the same in return.”
wilt (ellipses of thoughts .01)
I emptied my intentions into the lake where I slept. if the morning is ugly I’ll dive back under. are there roses that bloom brighter if no one can see them? I think I heard them bleeding. the artist can wander but if the stories are gone, the lake will swallow me and I’ll drown, and the legend of the roses I will never live down. they died to see me living and I left them to wilt. my intentions were benign, but they don’t exist. I’ll sleep again knowing that I can’t hide my guilt.
child (prologue, 2020)
Has summer ended?
It must have, for I am no longer a child
I’m left spilling ink over all that I own
I wish someone had told me I’ve grown
But I look back on my penmanship
I should’ve known
home (youth story)
“Do you guys want to come over for dinner? My mother isn’t home and I don’t want to be lonely.”
R let Nyks play with his fingers while he perched next to him on the arm of the chair. “You sure you want all of us coming over? Would you rather just steal Nyks so you can cuddle him to sleep tonight?”
Daniel nodded, not even trying to deny it. “Yeah, but Evie loves eating my food, and if Nyks comes over he’ll tell her about it, so before I hear any complaining about favoritism, I’m formally inviting you first.”
“I accept,” Nyks said happily.
down (youth story - fun fact: this dialogue exchange was had between my coworker and me. guess who was Nyks.)
"Oh." Nyks sits next to Mark with a soft thump. "You are very tired."
Mark blinks at him, slowly lifting an arm. Nyks quirks a little smile and scoots under the offered arm, resting his head against Mark's shoulder. "You can tell?" He hears Mark ask, his voice not indicating anything.
"I was being cute on purpose and you didn't laugh. You didn't even smile. So you must be tired."
Mark shifts, peering down at Nyks. "Sorry?"
heavy (smoke and sunglow, 2020)
Sometimes I’m heavy and sometimes I’m weightless
There is no distinction to mark the exchange
The sky remains just as grey and the cracks in the pavement remain
around (anxiety story)
Aiden opened the door of his dorm building at 4:13am to a very floppy Theo who promptly pulled him back up to his room and collapsed on his bed. Being still somewhat asleep, Aiden didn't bother thinking anything of it and just plopped down beside him and blinked sleepily, for a few moments, watching Theo's chest rise and fall. Then an arm reached out and hooked around his waist, making Aiden smile as he rolled toward his friend.
... “You're my teddy bear so be quiet and teddy-like."
Aiden was already falling asleep, so this sentence made perfect sense to him.
@zmlorenz @shellyscribbles @ink-fireplace-coffee @inkovert @woodlights OR ANYBODY: collapse, fall, faint, sleep, awake. bonus: nightmare, dream.
5 notes
·
View notes
Note
Hi anon again. I used ellipses, didn't know. I'm sorry. I don't remember what I said exactly but in short part (1/2) was me lamenting how I discussed a Star Wars book on reddit and mentioned, among many other things, that it was sexist. I've been insulted by everyone who bothered to comment for two days now and I'm just tired of this hatred, and rudeness, and hatred of prequels, and hatred of Jedi. And I know it's kind of my fault because
because I should have said it in a gentler way because people like this book and I offered them. But to be honest they got to me. I didn't think they would, but they really managed to hurt my feelings. And I know I sound like a teenager and not an older woman that I am, but I am just so tired of all this negativity and people's first reaction to be cruel. I am glad your Tumblr exists. Sorry for dumping all this on you.
2/2) And they just got so personal and insulting... they got to me. I didn't think they would, but they really hurt me. I just want to crawl away and enjoy Star Wars on my own. I am so tired of insults and attacks about a fictional work that should bring us joy. But I also want to share with others and I just keep on coming back for more. I sound like a teenager finding myself, but I'm an old woman, I should know better. Sorry to bother you but your Tumblr feels like a refuge sometimes. - D.L.
I’m glad you came back (tumblr is strange, if you don’t know about these things--BECAUSE TUMBLR NEVER TELLS US THESE THINGS, WE HAVE TO FIGURE THEM OUT FOR OURSELVES--there’s no need to apologize, we figure these things out as we go!) but I’m very sorry that you’ve been going through this.
As someone who’s been hurt by a lot of the shitty things people have leveled at me in this fandom, my advice is based on what helped me, but hopefully it can help you as well. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t (it may not for everyone!), I still offer you my sympathy and empathy both. First off, give yourself permission to be hurt and upset for awhile, take that pressure off yourself to just get over it, because piling extra guilt on will only make it longer. Recognize that you’re human, you’re going to go through these feelings, it’s part of being a regular thinking person and is the first step to being able to let go.
Second, after you have some time letting yourself be upset about it, recognize that these are people who are not worth the time and vulnerability from you. It still burns when they react like this, Star Wars is a hell fandom, but ultimately they’re not the people you really care about their opinions of you.
I get that it’s hard for people to hear criticisms of their favorites, literally everyone is like that, especially when we disagree on what constitutes “valid criticism”, what is valid for one person to level at a book isn’t going to be valid for the next person--the trick is in respecting boundaries, that you can’t overwrite the other person’s view of it, just as they can’t overwrite yours. And resorting to personal attacks and personal derogatory commentary (which happens a lot in this fandom) is a really shitty thing people do that you have to figure out how you want to deal with it--do you want to fire back? do you want to rise above it? do you want to leave? I ask these honestly, there’s no right or wrong answer, only the one that will work for you. (It’s a question I ask myself a lot. Is it fair that people make shitty vague blogs about me? No, but they’re going to do so anyway, so what’s my response? What can I handle? What do I want to handle? What’s my response, given that I probably cannot change this about fandom.)
Maybe you were more aggressive than you had to be, but that’s still not a reason for them to respond with personal insults. The only thing that’s on you is to decide what amount of this kind of reaction you can/want to handle, not that you’re responsible for other people’s shitty behavior.
One of the major ways I dealt with fandom being so overwhelmingly anti-prequels and anti-Jedi is that I set up my camp here on tumblr, I established my boundaries, I enforced them hard (mostly through blocking because I was not up to pushing back for a long time, but occasionally talking about my personal experiences, being as careful as I could not to be pointing fingers at people, but truly speaking of what it meant for me in my position and what I was going through, trying to always recognize that other people are allowed to disagree with me about opinions on fictional things and they must be respected for that, even if I strongly disagree with them, just as the reverse must be true--or at least I must demand it in interactions I have) and it’s worked out really well.
Not everyone in this corner is going to agree with everything I say, I disagree with other pro-Jedi fans on some things, but they’ve been really kind and gracious about seeing things differently that even if it’s something I feel very strongly about, I respect that they disagree and I hope I give that back to them at least half as much.
That’s generally my advice--seek out the people you know who also find that book sexist and talk about it (while allowing room for people who disagree, because it’ll make you happier in the long run, as well, but that they do so in a civil sort of way) or make your own posts talking about it, simply because you want to talk about it. When I started writing pro-Jedi posts, I knew I had to do it because I wanted to do it, not because it was going to win me internet points or whatever, I had to be willing to do it in a vacuum (another question I often have to ask myself: “If this [project] gets crickets/some sort of bad response, would I still have enjoyed the process of doing it?” and it’s helped me a lot to be honest in that answer) or just seek out people who seem like they’re doing the same thing you want to be doing, redirect your efforts into things you enjoy doing in this fandom, because I promise that “I am spitefully going to double down on how I view this thing” can eventually turn into “I love talking about this thing in this vein just because I love it!” if you focus on what you want to do.
And also remember that there can be very cool people on reddit (or any other social media place) but there can also be fucking awful people who are going to be fucking awful and it’s normal that it hurts when you get blasted by them and it’s normal that you want to retreat into a refuge for awhile, I fully support that. Find what makes you happy, whatever that is, and just crank up the “I love this thing so much I’m gonna BARF RAINBOWS about it!” to the max it can go. It’ll make you feel better after awhile. (But give yourself the freedom to be hurt, take that burden off yourself, face that part of it, and eventually it gets easier to let go of it, I hope. *hugs* I don’t know if any of this was helpful, but at the very least you have my sympathy and my empathy for how shitty fandom can be sometimes.)
32 notes
·
View notes
Photo
my favorite part of the week when a new prodigal son episode drops: my commentary on the latest gifset i created :)
above are four gifs that i made as either alternative colorings (malcolm and ainsley’s respective gifs) or bonus/extra gifs in case one of the ones i intended to use didn’t fit the “vibe” (martin and jessica’s respective scenes). did not intend that the entire whitly family would be on this gifset pero it’s nice to see the family back together ☺ lemme just say that the extra bonus gifs that i made...the way i didn’t end up using them like they were made because i feared i didn’t like some of the colorings for the gifs and you know how when you upload them to tumblr, the quality changes. so they were a rush job and i didn’t really like how they came out and maybe it’s a blessing in disguise. reason why i didn’t use the alternative colorings for the whitly children is because i thought the one i used for malcolm was way more richer in color whereas ainsley’s had too much warmth.
now i did end up using two different psds for this gifset. no, i didn’t mashup any of them because one of them was more of a brightening psd and though some of these scenes (if not most) have you holding up a flashlight to see what the hell is going on, the brightening was a bit...harsh if it wasn’t a scene that was in the dark. luckily, this brightening psd worked harmoniously with the primary psd and it was super seamless in being a cohesive set. now, i actually only used this brightening psd twice...can you guess which ones i used it on? answer in the tags xx
i would show y’all my notes that i wrote but they are mainly notes for dialogue gifsets that i hope i can create (i’ve been hella out of practice and i know the standard fonts and size has changed). going to check the tag just in case nobody has already made it because i don’t wanna spend a copious amount of time on a set and have it already been done. ANYWAYS! where to begin about this episode...it wasn’t heavy in “aesthetic” shots and like i stated before, the coloring of the scenes was kinda...not very good </3 BUT! there were some interesting shots and if the gifs framing seem the same....apologies but they were literally the only ones that grabbed my attention. the thing i am noticing about prodigal son is how they like to frame two people in a scene and they love to do over the shoulder shots. there is probably like one or two token aesthetic shots and like....boom. also, i do wanna note that i try to avoid the gore-y scenes like the victim’s body and any sort of heavy blood. i don’t want people to be turned off or scared by any of my gifsets when they’re not looking for it so i wanna respect anyone who reblogs and likes my content!!
gonna need the prodigal son team to like....help us content creators OUT because damn!! it really is hard to color without losing the integrity of the scene. you can brighten a scene, you can darken a scene, but you lose a lot of what makes the scene. from a few tags on my gifsets, people like how i recolor a scene, and i am always like thank you !!! 🥰🥺💖 i try really hard to get the best out of psd and the scene <3 however, i fear that my preference for warm tones over cool tones might hinder me. listen, i do experiment with different colorings but my gosh, my brain sees warmth and goes brrr and i want to branch out and do something new but MY GOSH !! WARMTH!! and in a show like prodigal son, it feels a bit like out of the ordinary, and i like that. i really like that i put something that is missing. maybe next time i will try cooler tones but i don’t make any promises :(
and that does it for me!! i think i wrote everything that i wanted to...WAIT! now, i do have to admit that this gifset was indeed a rush job. i downloaded the episode while watching “big sky” and it was growing late and i hadn’t been online in awhile so i had to catch up on everything when i intended to rewatch the episode that night. anyways, as soon as i ate breakfast, i was watching (a little bit of skimming) this episode and finding scenes to make gifs of. i really wanted to write down the dialogue of the potential gifsets then kinda, turned my brain off a bit for the aesthetic gifset. so then i started making these gifs and photoshop was being SUPER slow so i was like only able to make two to three gifs at a time (i would have to exit off, task manager snipe ps, then take a break bc my ass hurt then go back at it). so when i finished, it was getting closer to six pm which is my maximum cut off so i can do (please don’t laugh or @ me) some “decompression time” that goes from between 5 PM to 10 PM (sometimes, like this past time, starts at 6 PM and sometimes it ends at 9 or even 8:30 depending when i stopped being on the computer) where i don’t go on social media. i am radio silent in a lot of my socials besides twitter (follow me @/castieIsgf that’s an uppercase “i” instead of an “l” :3c). anyways, so i was rushing to get this shipped out and i slapped the gifs into random positions not really paying attention where and...yeah, i should’ve just slowed down!! i’m not mad or upset at the arrangement pero i’m kinda like mmmm!! lemme move swap the placement of these two gifs...but that’s water under the bridge!
also, this might be a little silly pero if you see me with just one tag of commentary on my gifset and it doesn’t have...panache or energy, it’s because i am restraining myself 😭 i want to so DESPERATELY react to my own gifset or react to the episode itself but i am afraid that having a lot of tags, especially if you have a lot of words in them, it overwhelms tumblr?? and makes your post not show up in the tags?? listen, i have seen people have over 30 tags and their post still shows up in their respective places but honestly, i do not wanna push it AT ALLLL so i limit myself to one tag, no exclamation or questions marks, no uppercase letters, no ellipses, NOTHING like it’s SOOO hard i feel like i am being censored 😔 PERO I WILL MAKE DO!!
#sorry if i typed a lot i just have a lot to say#answer to my question: it was martin exercising to destiny's child and ainsley in her dad's study#goshhhhh this is so....much like somebody tape my mouth shut i have too much to say sometimes over something that doesn't need that much#explainiing screammasjdksajkldsa#maybe i should've watermarked these....nah it's whatever if u like them thank you <33 they're like the scrap pieces of cake they're still#good!!
3 notes
·
View notes
Text
in the shape of a star (3/5)
Pairing: Terra/Aqua
Rating: T
Word Count: 8,765
Summary: What they need to rebuild their home was to be more honest. Aqua hoped for the best when she told Terra about the Guardian, and it threatened to tear their walls down.
Read on AO3
A/N: SO MANY THANK YOU'S AND I LOVE YOU'S TO @holyteapotofrussell WHO BETA-READ THIS FOR ME. Also I'm evil for writing this, I know. It'll get better, I promise.
*****
nobody
Waking up was always disorienting, maddening even.
Aqua was going to mumble that she needed five extra minutes. She deserved as much, but the shake on her arm was warm and gentle… she would even say loving, and she didn’t want him to let go.
Terra knelt by the couch where she took refuge. They had adopted the habit of sleeping in the Master’s old office every night right by the fireplace, where she dreamt better. Sleep became safe enough for her to stay, and Terra was now the one who started his day earlier. Somehow, he snuck her out of his arms with finesse, each and every time, that she’d never even stir.
In the sunshine, his eyes were bold.
“Good morning,” he said softly. His smile was a welcome sight. She’d grown to need it every time she opened her eyes in order to breathe steadier, and with every cycle of the sun coming up over the mountains, she’s forced to muster enough strength to keep herself from blurting out such a delicate truth.
Fighting Heartless was easier than this.
“Morning,” she hummed, rubbing her eyes.
His smile tightened, weaving shut whatever bad news he carried with him.
“I didn’t want to scare you,” he said. He wasn’t talking about shaking her awake - the way his throat gripped his voice said so.
Aqua immediately stood up, tiredness forgotten. “What happened?”
His lips quivered. “Ven won’t wake up.”
She bolted out of the office, through the hall to the western wing, down the bridges to the tower where the bedrooms were. It all passed in a blur.
She stormed into Ven’s room. He was sound asleep in bed, his breath inaudible and unmoving.
“Ven.” His skin at least was warm, though he looked otherwise. “Ven, please. Please wake up.”
She whimpered, she cried, she whispered. He wouldn’t listen.
And he was all by himself.
When Terra followed inside, she was ready to throw chairs over. “Where’s Cheers?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does that mean?” she snapped. Not even the boom in her voice woke Ven up.
“Aqua,” he whispered, coming close to her, brushing his fingertips on her forearm like she was a wounded animal. He kept so calm. She was envious of that. “I don’t know.”
Meltdowns came in two storms: like thunder, explosive and loud and terrifying, unable to be calmed until it passed, hurting anyone unlucky enough to be exposed. If not that, then like the rain, building into a downpour, enough to flood someone’s face, and keep them weighted underneath the surface.
Aqua experienced the latter, hunching over her shoulders as she wished she never learned how to cry. She crawled onto Ven’s bed to settle by his side, holding a hand over his heart, which still thrummed under her palm.
Terra joined her by taking Ven’s other side, and rested his hand over hers. It wasn’t as warm as it was just several minutes ago.
“It’s all my fault,” she said, sweeping Ven’s hair out of his face. “I took too long to save him.”
“Then it’s mine, too.” He stared long enough for her to be swallowed by his eyes, which were glassy. “I was idle when I should have-” he gulped.
They’ve had this conversation before, and no amount of repetitions or apologies would change anything.
Still, he finished the one thought he repeated the most. She could recite the words for him: “I should have saved all you, and I did nothing instead.”
If conversations went in ellipses, Terra and Aqua always took the same orbit and never crossing over into the details. Sometimes they got close enough to finally spill, only to back off. Sometimes they never even came close. It was always about I should have done more and skipping over This is what happened to me.
She sighed, taking two of his fingers with two of hers. When words wouldn’t suffice, or refused to come, they carried a language in their hands.
It’s okay, was what she said through them this time.
She wondered if time would be generous enough one day to wipe their minds and give them a fresh start. “What are we going to do?”
He gave her a gentle squeeze. “We’ll figure something out,” he said. “We’ll do whatever it takes, go wherever we need to go.”
When it came to the well-being of other people, Terra was always the most confident, the most faithful, the most daring. He never offered himself the same kindness.
“What if we can’t-” she started.
“Aqua…” He stroked her thumb with his, and she shushed, feeling Ven’s heart thump under their grip.
There was a swoosh and a sparkle that lit up the room. Chirithy landed on the bedside table from wherever it came from, like nothing was amiss.
But Aqua wasn’t going to let it get away with anything.
“Where were you?” she growled while she rolled over from the bed.
Terra stayed behind and carried Ven’s into his arms.
Chirithy twitched its ears like it wasn’t sure what it heard. “Why are-”
“What did you to him?”
It hung its head, a deep pout into its eyes and two paws gnawing at its chin. “I sent him a dream,” it squeaked.
“Excuse me?” she spat. Aqua had prepared for nights when something would go bump in the dark. The only thing that surprised her was that it happened in the morning. She was ready to protect her family, marching up to Chirithy and about to grab the creature when Terra-
“Aqua,” he called gently like he was cooing her, with a smile that told stories of compassion while Ven slept soundly in his arms. He didn’t judge her, he never did. “Don’t.”
She could but she didn’t, not with Terra looking at her like that, like he understood that it would only suck her into a black hole if she continued.
Terra wanted peace, and she complied.
“I came back so he would follow me,” Chirithy said, twiddling its paws. Its ears drooped down, and its voice trembled. It actually started to cry, with mewls as sobs. “He will wake up, I promise.”
Aqua’s breath shook with all her pent-up anger, which was at war with reassurance and guilt.
She didn’t mean to make it cry.
Terra said, “If he- When he wakes up, we need to act normal. He’ll get scared and will never want to sleep ever again.”
Aqua drew a long, long breath. Terra was right. The only reason Ventus was able to doze off these days was because of Chirithy, when getting him to stay in bed beforehand was a marathon of hours that ran late into the night.
She shot Chirithy a glare instead of speaking, dabbing the tiniest of tears out of her eyes. Terra was breathing harder than usual, and that was because he was also taking a risk in trusting Chirithy.
Then there was a sharp inhale, and a mumble. Ven.
“Wha-?” he drawled, his eyes too groggy to register who was holding him. “Why-"
Terra was better at hiding his feelings, and he dodged the onslaught of teary relief taking over him by rough-housing Ventus to consciousness.
“Umf, Terra-”
“That’s what you get,” Terra said, making a mess out of blond hair.
“For what?"
“You were snoring really loudly.” Terra finally let him go.
Ventus pushed him over (weakly, nothing could really push Terra over), and rubbed his eyes hard enough to make them red.
It was time to play along. Aqua smiled to fake it, and glided over to the bed, finding a particular spot that acted as a barrier between Chritihy and her dear, dear friend. “We should have used one of those gummi phones to record you.”
At this, Ventus stuck his tongue out. “Do that and I’ll never let you in my room again.”
It seemed to have worked - knowing him, he’d expect both of them to snicker behind his back. Lying was a tiny cost for the greater good.
“Where’s Cheers?” he asked, surveying the room, and it honestly made Aqua’s heart drop.
Chirithy waddled over, settling into Ven’s lap. “I had the craziest dream last night.”
“I told you.” Chirithy wiggled its ears, taking its place in the middle of a reluctant family, and Aqua wondered if Terra felt like his choice in the matter was stolen from him, too.
“Tell us,” Terra said softly, like nothing bothered him. He’ll have to teach Aqua his ways later.
Something far away made its way to Ven’s eyes as he recalled it. “I was in an underground city - no, not underground. It was underwater. And there were people there I recognized, but I couldn’t tell who they were. I didn’t know their faces.”
What was more threatening than Ven’s coma was the idea that Chirithy tried to take him to strangers.
Ven lit up. “Sora was with them. I saw Sora!”
Aqua and Terra exchanged brief, uneasy side-glances. It had been several weeks since Sora’s disappearance, and neither of them had traces that could lead them anywhere.
“What did he say?” Terra asked.
“He asked if I was okay,” Ventus said, a warm smile gracing his face. “That was it.”
Maybe Chirithy did Sora a favor.
Ven watched Aqua, leaving behind his thoughts. “Is everything alright?”
“No,” she sighed. “I mean- yes. We’re just running really late.”
“Oh, shit!” (Language, Ven, said Terra.) He threw himself off the bed as soon as he got the reminder. “Sorry! I’ll eat breakfast right away and get ready. C’mon Cheers.”
Like nothing was truly wrong, Ventus rushed out of his room with a cat that wasn’t quite a predator trailing his feet.
Aqua breathed hard. “Do you think-”
“Maybe,” Terra said.
“What Cheers can do...”
“It’s a little weird.” Terra gazed at her, gently stroking her arm. “He’s fine now.”
“But-”
“I don’t think Cheers meant to hurt him.”
Aqua smiled but it contorted into a grimace that strained for control. “I’ve changed too much,” she said. She never trusted anyone again. She got too hot-headed and protective of her loved-ones to her detriment, and she refused help worse than she used to.
“You’re fine the way you are. I’d rather have an Aqua in my life than somebody else.” He scoffed like what he said wasn’t a big deal.
She took his hand to acknowledge his compliment, squeezed it to tell him she appreciated it, and slammed it onto the bed sheets to tell him he needed a new friend. He chuckled.
Then she let go, as she always did when there were things to do and reasons to get away from intimate conversations that could change the course of their friendship forever. Those were dangerous waters, and they needed to tread carefully.
But Aqua only made it to the hallway when she gasped sharply, the air turning cold enough to slice her throat.
At the end of the hallway - the opposite direction that Ventus and his Chirithy took to get to the kitchen - was another.
Its back was to her, its cape as red and pink as a bodily organ, its fur a plum purple. She didn’t have to look into its face to know it might be rabid. She didn’t have a clean history with their Chirithy, but this one was definitely not friendly, and it invaded her home.
“What’s wrong?” Terra asked, rushing out of Ven’s room.
She took one glance at him and then back - and the dark Chirithy was gone. “It was right there.” She pointed.
Terra stood in that direction, and cupped her chin to bring her to him. The way he looked at her - sometimes it was inconvenient to deal with how well he could read her. “Aqua, there’s nothing there.”
“It was another Chirithy.”
“Okay.”
She shook in his fingers, and held his wrist tight enough to make him pay attention to every single little word. “I’m not crazy.”
Terra traced her jaw to cup her head with both hands, his breath deep enough to lure her to follow his rhythm. Forehead to forehead, his eyes demanded her attention. “You’re not. I’ll make laps around the castle to make sure. You get dressed, we have a lot to do today. Let me know if you need help.”
With that, he rubbed her cheeks with his thumbs and left her colder than she was in his proximity.
It certainly never was in her plans to let him in that way. Before, the thought of him dressing her was… embarrassing yet safe, maybe exciting a little. Now it just made her blush.
But blushing was a minor thing in comparison to how her heart leaped right now, and the feelings she always knew she had were threatening to betray their little secret.
Aqua peeked into her room first to make sure the mirror was still covered, exactly the way she left it, before stepping inside.
~*~*~*~
The trick to facing her fears, Aqua thought to herself, was to keep breathing.
She kept hers steady with every stride, maintaining a momentum that led her forward while she left everyone else behind, including Ienzo, who was supposed to be her guide. If she slowed down, even for a second, who knew what kind of thoughts would invade her mind.
Around the corner was Ansem the Wise’s office. It was a little messy, but the old man wasn’t keen on dusting old and painful memories just yet when his team was so focused on improving lives for the future.
Aqua wasn’t expecting anything when she entered - certainly not the giant painting of Terra’s face.
Yet it wasn’t Terra’s face. He wouldn’t look this serious, this arrogant, this distant from whoever it was that painted this portrait, his white hair styled with so much gel that it looked oily.
It made her angry, and soon Terra was going to catch up with her.
“Fire,” she hummed with a low voice, her fingers outstretched as she heated the fibers that brought those colors together until they burst through brown eyes, and false-Terra’s face was no more.
“Whoa,” Ven’s voice said behind her, watching the show. “Aqua, that isn’t ours to mess with.”
She knew that. Certain things just seemed trivial, silly even, after the years she’s had. “It’s not good for Terra to see this.”
Ienzo was the next to enter the room. He stammered at the sight, and readjusted his already impeccable collar to compose himself. “I suppose we do not need it anymore,” he simply said, and Aqua felt justified.
Terra was the last to come. The first thing he noticed was the smokey soot littering the ground under an empty frame. He smirked - there was no telling if he knew what it used to look like, but considering that no one in the room talked about it (like it never existed in the first place), he let it go, taking one look at Aqua like he knew she was to blame.
What was more important was behind the frame: a secret passageway to… a field of underground containers. It was gross to see, violating almost, like they were designed to hold bodies (hearts, more likely).
It also led to a room full of computer screens, where Ienzo gestured to Terra.
“I already know how to get to the bottom floor,” said Ienzo. He typed several passwords into the computer. Whatever they hid down below was well guarded. “But I have never, in all my life, been able to access that final room. None of us have. If what you say is true…”
“It is,” Terra said. He had his arms crossed but his naturally polite smile glowed with ease. Ienzo flustered at the sight of it.
“T-then I should be able to access it.” Ienzo focused strongly on the keys below him, before commanding it to do something with a final touch of a button.
Whatever machinery he summoned was loud, and the floor under her vibrated ever so softly. An entrance through the floor opened far from them.
“Are you all ready?” Ienzo asked.
The smile on Terra’s face - the one he wore for the sake of saving face when he dealt with strangers - fell completely, dragging his eyes down to the floor.
“Aqua,” he called, approaching her. For a moment, she thought he was going to take her hand, but he stopped himself short.
They were in public.
Instead, he traced her hand with his gaze, before following her arm to her eyes. “I don’t…” he started softly, quieting it into an almost-whisper. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to go down there.”
If Aqua was honest, she had been dreading this day. She couldn’t gauge how Terra would behave: whether he would get hysterical, or turn stone-cold, or disappear altogether.
So this, this, she appreciated. And she was proud of him for recognizing it before throwing himself head-first against a brick wall of triggers.
They preferred touching a private act but Aqua decided to risk it: she graced two of his fingers with a firm clutch, taking a moment to consciously ignore how the others avoided to witness. “I agree.”
Terra let himself breathe. Funny how sometimes the act of drinking air made them feel unsafe. “Riku and Isa are waiting for me outside. I’ll be with them,” he said.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of Aqua,” Ventus said.
“Then she’s in good hands.” To her, he said, “You’ll feel better with a Keyblade.” With that, Terra let go, hesitating while turning over his shoulder, and taking it slow to leave the room.
Ienzo cleared his throat - he did that too often, and Aqua had half a mind to advise him to drink water. “Well, onward and downward I suppose.”
“Do you not want to go?” Aqua asked.
Ienzo was usually so sweet, it was hard to see how aloof he became. “Of course not. You will see why.”
The passageway that led downstairs spiraled into darkness, as though the lights from above couldn’t reach. Traversing them was enough of an exercise, and every once in a while, Ventus would complain: Are we there yet? Who was stupid enough to design it this way? Whatever is down there better be worth it.
When they finally reached the door, it was worth it to Ventus, who awed and poked his head through immediately. It was just one hallway, its white walls pristine as though the last person who left it behind had scrubbed it of all proof of activity.
But a mass of darkness stained its walls, unseen to the naked eye but it lingered all the same. To Aqua it was sickening, and the hand to her mouth didn’t quell the nausea.
“Down here,” Ienzo said. He was acting more and more like a zombie with every step he took.
“What were these rooms for?” Ventus asked.
Aqua knew Ienzo had history here. Of all the darkness she faced and inhabited inside her own body, she could never imagine how to make peace with the horrors made with his hands. How to pay for them. How to amend.
Ventus could never understand Ienzo either for this exact reason, and she hoped that would always stay the same.
“Experiments,” Ienzo said. He offered nothing else.
So they walked in silence. Some of the shut doors had peep holes with bars that blocked views. Aqua could make out that some of them had machinery inside, whereas others were empty. Ventus had to jump and grab the bars just to see - his imagination had much more fun than either of theirs.
At the end of the hallway was another shut door. Aqua nearly called it Terra’s door, but he’d be sick if he was here, too.
Ienzo approached a keypad, activating it based on Terra’s instructions. The door slid open with a hiss, and all three of them just stood there. Neither volunteered to go in first.
“After you.” Ienzo waved his arm out, and she wished he didn’t.
Inside was another white room, but it gave her a horrid, frigid deja vu.
Energy radiated in chains, from the throne at the center outward to the walls. This room… it was almost an exact copy of the room she left Ventus to sleep in years ago. How this was possible, who knew he was there to begin with? Who tried to find him?
Thank goodness he was safe all this time.
“Aqua,” Ventus called, “look!”
Swept and left to the side was a heap of blue metal, the only color in this cold room.
And if Keyblades had faces, Aqua wouldn’t know if hers would welcome this reunion.
“My word,” Ienzo said. “Never in my wildest dreams would I have considered this being here.” The way he said it sounded like he was just as creeped out as she was. “How fortunate for you, we were about to seal this entire floor forever.”
She raced to her Keyblade and stopped herself just short of embracing it.
Did it want her back?
Stormfall was the extension of her heart and very soul. If she was afraid of it, then surely…
No, sentience of a Keyblade didn’t work that way. She had to believe that.
“Who built this?” she asked as she knelt to her knees.
“Xemnas.” By now, Ienzo had stopped smiling, had stopped being warm and inviting, like he stopped realizing there were reasons to continue living.
Yes, she knew of Xemnas. She recognized a face out in the desert the very last time she fought thirteen darknesses. Then they all perished before she had a chance to speak to him.
Thinking about it, would she even had wanted that?
What would she have spoken with him about? Here was proof that he still had attachments to people he didn’t really know that well or understood, and here she was without the foggiest idea of who he was.
The only thing Aqua wanted back the first time she saw him was Terra, plain and simple. Xemnas stole a body, stole a face, did unspeakable things that Terra wasn’t capable of doing, and she wasn’t sure if any of that was worthy of forgiveness.
If Xemnas somehow missed her presence, missed Ventus, or wished for a better life, she wouldn’t know. Or maybe he was cold-hearted to the end.
Even if she found it in her heart to befriend him, there was no denying Xehanort’s influence and how dangerous that was.There was no way she was going to accept a single strand of white hair on Terra’s head until he was old enough to grow them.
… She remembered now. Sentience of a Keyblade was the reflection of her relationship with herself. And there was nothing to be proud of.
Therefore, her Keyblade couldn’t be proud of her either.
“What was he like?” Ventus asked.
“Xemnas?” Ienzo cleared his throat. Again. It took him several moments, a string of loud breaths to find words to describe such a person, and Aqua brushed her fingers against her blade, a soft, tender energy to the metal as it woke up and recognized her.
“He wasn’t someone to be crossed,” Ienzo finally said.
Ventus sighed. “Guess I wouldn’t have liked him.”
She grabbed the hilt slowly, trying not to offend. It’s so much lighter than the Master’s Defender.
With Stormfall in her hands, she trembled harder than ever. If this was what it felt like to be whole, then it dug a new void inside of her, her body betrayed, her senses violated, and there wasn’t a spell in the world that could clean her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to it, softly enough that only Stormfall would hear, thinking about the last person who held it in his hand. “I did it for him.”
Calm embraced her. Stormfall didn’t regret it either.
Ienzo chuckled, not paying attention to what Aqua was doing whatsoever. “Xemnas never smiled like Terra, that’s for certain.”
“Enough about Xemnas,” Aqua said, shutting them up. In a time like this, when she needed to coax her Keyblade home, the last thing she needed to think about was a stranger, much less a clone.
It was bitter, maybe even dejected? It was her heart, so Stormfall would always be hers.
And it was just as much Terra’s. If he had to use it to protect himself, Stormfall would have agreed. Those bonds were the point of a Keyblade.
She willed it to stay with her - it didn’t respond like Master’s Defender, which was always ready to protect, a simple testament of a father.
Stormfall had a different perspective in life - it was always ready to attack.
Aqua decided for now to keep it in her hand, let it get used to being held, let it learn what it felt like to be home again.
Afterward, she focused on collecting every piece of her armor with her free hand, leaving no scraps behind as it easily made its way back into her skin and into her heart, waiting for the next time she needed it.
“You’re not in the least bit curious?” Ventus asked her.
He was still on about Xemnas? “No.” She stood up, taking her route out of the room.
“But-”
“What’s in the past should stay buried there.” She didn’t mean for her voice to echo through the hall. “He’s gone. He’s no one. We have Terra back, that’s all that matters.”
Aqua didn’t like the look he gave her - shocked, a little anxious, pitiful. But he understood when he nodded, letting his initial distaste for her reaction melt away into something much more accepting. He was truly the only one of the three to have a level head, much smarter than either of them give him credit for. This was the benefit of keeping a childlike wonder of the world - it made him stronger than anyone else.
“You’re right,” he said. “Come on, this place sucks. Let’s get some fresh air.”
The trek upstairs was more tiring than the other way, and Ventus complained with every step.
~*~*~*~
Outside was a different story altogether. Aqua still had Stormfall in her hand, the sun getting ready to rest on the peaceful city of Radiant Garden. But there was still some bustle, the clash of metal and the sparks of magic slamming against each other.
She and Ventus walked down the castle steps that led to where Terra, Riku, and Isa sparred in the gardens beyond the moat. Aqua stopped to watch; it had been a while since she studied the way Terra fought, and if he didn’t know she was peeking into his private training, then he wouldn’t mind.
Terra moved as she always knew. He was precise, commanding of his space. He conquered when he invaded the gap between himself and his opponent, he was hard to knock backwards, and he was graceful in the control he had of his body. He was beautiful.
Isa still had his giant cleaver - if he would eventually agree to a Keyblade, the only person he wanted to bequeath him was Lea, who still had a long way to go before he had the privilege... but maybe it didn’t matter since their bond was stronger than tradition. If Terra was aggressive, he didn’t hold a candle in comparison: shockwaves and blasts and ruptures that engulfed the entire garden and whatever else that fit the definition of excessive outbursts. This was what Isa always knew, and once he had a Keyblade, it would be interesting to see just how useful his skills would be. He’d be able to cover wide surface areas, perfect in protecting others.
Then there was Riku, quick and efficient and stronger than he looked, parrying attacks with simple strikes. He was only flashy when he needed to be, preferring perfection of technique. It made sense why they chose Riku, all of them having been witness to an invasion of darkness within their bodies, all of them having to rise above it in their own ways.
Riku egged both of them on, paying particular attention to Terra.
There was a lot of, Come on, Terra.
And, You can do this.
Plus, Don’t be afraid of yourself.
The more Terra listened, the more a black slickness flickered off his skin. Riku was teaching him to control the darkness that would forever be a scar.
Aqua told herself she didn’t mind that.
Then a hole of darkness opened in the ground, and she lurched forward, nearly vaulting onto a steppe just above her. Terra was going to be swallowed again, and this time he jumped in on his own accord.
She was about to yell, but Riku wasn’t disturbed by it. Great, was what he said, and he circled the perimeter with the expectation that something was coming. Isa was unsure of what to do, keeping still as he looked over his shoulder and by the trees.
A hole opened right under him, to his dismay, and Terra bolted out of it, thrusting his power upward on an Isa who was ill-prepared.
And Riku congratulated Terra for finally accepting such a technique with professionalism.
It made Aqua whimper for a bit, enough for Ventus to rush over to her side, asking her what was wrong.
“It’s…” She didn’t continue. It was like watching that thing, that Guardian all over again. That was what it loved to do in a fight: creep and wrestle and catch its opponents by surprise with no mercy.
It never left Terra. Was he even aware of it?
Of course not, she never told him.
“I’m fine,” she said to Ventus, straightening herself up. “It just surprised me, that’s all.” She gave him the most genuine smile she could fake, and it seemed like he accepted it. It seemed.
Sparring was finished for the day, and Terra rested his giant Keyblade onto his shoulder as he heaved with breath and chuckled, like it was the end of a pleasant few hours of hard work. Riku was much more distant - Sora’s disappearance had been a heavy weight, and conversation with him was like talking to a wall half the time, but he responded when he had to.
Isa said something with a very serious face, and Terra and Riku melted into laughter.
Aqua didn’t even notice that Naminé was there, sitting on a stone bench to watch them fight while she drew sketches of their postures. She was also one who was hesitant about taking a Keyblade, but if she decided yes, she wanted Terra’s blessing.
Naminé had Chirithy by her side, and carried it with her when she was ready to join the conversation. Could the all-knowing cat ever sense that she wasn’t created in a womb?
“We’re having dinner with them downtown,” Ventus said.
“Huh?”
“We were invited.” He rolled his eyes. “Don’t you open your gummiphone?” He flipped his out and scrolled through text messages. “You should get on top of that, we’re going to look like old people to them.”
“Okay.”
“Lea will be there,” he said like it was incentive. “And Kairi, and Xion. Roxas, too. Everyone. It should be nice.”
There was a nagging feeling in the clutch of her diaphragm that Ventus was implying she should get out more.
Sure, she could handle it. She could push back the memories of shadows, and of giant demons with horns and bindings on their mouths from her mind for a couple of hours.
~*~*~*~
Aqua took plenty of time to spar by herself. Stormfall was a bit of a hassle, and Ventus, as her student, was sometimes the victim of heavy handling when Aqua never meant to.
He laughed about it, said her Keyblade was just as snippy as she was.
So she cut half her days between her apprentice and herself, while Terra continued his private lessons with Riku.
Her boys expected that she would suddenly turn over a new leaf with her reunion - as though all the things she feared would magically disappear. They didn’t. The only person that drew away the nightmares was Terra, and that was because they continued to sleep together in the Master’s office, legs finding spaces in between to settle for the night, and arms resting under torsos and heads since the couch was so small. Under his chin and against his chest, Aqua would always be safe.
She tried to turn off lights by herself, daring to sit in a dark room for ten minutes. She still couldn’t bring herself to do it.
She tried to look at her reflection in the mirror, but she wouldn’t pull the bedsheet off of it.
And Aqua promised herself she would be braver the next day, the next morning, the next hour.
But at least she didn’t consider herself a coward. It wasn’t like she wasted twelve years for nothing. She just needed time.
Terra had been busier with Merlin’s lessons but he still kept his promise with coming home before the sun set completely, though now he often rushed into the workroom, tucked at the back of the castle where machinery and hand tools were stored.
It was where she initially welded all of their Wayfinders.
Terra was there tonight with an apron on, his quartz crystals shaped in hexagonal styles, with each end pointed and pretty. He hustled with mixing water on his sandpaper, and scrubbed away at each side of each crystal before starting the tedious process of using the polish.
“Knock knock,” she said, tapping the doorway. “How’s it going?"
He mumbled something - such a Terra thing to do when he’s obsessed with getting something right. He twisted over his shoulder to give her the least bit of acknowledgment before going back to his work. “It’s going,” he repeated.
Aqua crept over his shoulder to see him overwork as he continued torturing himself with the details. “What are you aiming for?”
He sighed. “Merlin said lots of things, one of them being that if I actually want to put magic into the crystal, then I would have to give it my all.”
She rolled her lips inward and shrugged. “I told you crystal activation was difficult.”
“Mm.”
“Why did you even start with this?” She stopped herself from asking, Shouldn’t you have chosen something easier?
Terra took a moment, letting the sandpaper hang in his hand. “I asked for it.”
“Why?”
“Because…” He searched the room, and when he found his answer, he didn’t look at her. “I wanted to prove myself.”
She murmured, “You’re always pushing yourself so hard.”
He nodded in return, and went back to his work.
“So how far did you come?” she asked.
Terra exhaled with frustration, and left the sandpaper on the workbench. “I can’t get any of it right.”
He had demanded to learn these lessons on his own only because his pride was on the line, and she wished she could tell him that she could be proud for him, just as he was, without embarrassing him.
But Aqua couldn’t help herself. Seeing Terra this frustrated was entertaining.
“Do you want some tips?”
He rolled his eyes at her and studied her face. “...Sure.”
With a pep in her step, she took one of his more polished pieces of crystal since it was more prepared to capture power than the raw ones. “Merlin teaches like a wizard, not like someone with a Keyblade.” She twirled it in her hands. “Crystals are like permanent storage for magical commands, so he’s correct that you’d have to give it more intent in order for it to activate, right?”
She held it up in the air to let the light flash on its surface. “Our Keyblades are an extension of our hearts. As children, we don’t know what they’re supposed to look like, not until we figure out who we are and begin to decide what we want for our lives. Then they take shape. They represent us, and take a solid form when we’re asking and ready for the burden. It doesn’t take from us, it becomes us.
“But foreign objects aren’t like that. They don’t have connections to our hearts, so we literally have to give a piece of it to them.”
She paused. This was why she never performed such rituals. She needed her Keyblade completely whole, giving her all the freedom to perform magic however she wanted.
“Terra, you will literally cut your magic into tiny slices to put inside. Are you sure you want to do that?”
He shrugged one shoulder and answered, “Yes,” like it was no big deal.
“Why?”
He took his crystal back, caressing it before going back to the polish. “Like I said, I need to prove myself.”
“For what, though?”
He smirked, long breaths drawn out between words. “I’ve always thought that I was someone special because the Keyblade chose me. After what happened… if I may be honest… sometimes I wondered if it was really a blessing after all.”
She hummed. It was all too familiar, more than she wanted to admit. “I had wondered the same thing.”
“Well…” Something that had nothing to do with her drew a hopeful smile on his face. “I want to do something special again.”
“Okay.” That was as good of an answer as she was going to get.
With her approval, he beamed. It reached his eyes and for the first time Aqua grasped just how important this was to him, even if she didn’t understand. In time, she figured she will.
For a moment she watched him buff the crystal with polish, his lips moving with silent words as he tried again and again to transfer a part of himself into its core. After too long, he decided he couldn’t do it, but she didn’t expect him to be able to succeed the first time.
“I can’t wait to see what you’ll do with it,” she softly said when he tried for the last time.
It was exactly what he needed to hear, and he dropped his work, catching her gaze with gratitude in his tired smile. They stared at each other like that, his hands messy and hers leaning on the workbench, eyes taking in information that was familiar, like the color of their irises, and how they looked when they were happy and quiet and comfortable.
But her eyes took in new information too, as newly discovered tenderness churned in her belly the more she lingered into his pupils. She noticed lines in his irises that she had never noticed before.
His eyes flickered.
He gripped a fist to throw away his nervousness before wiping his hands with a rag. Then he cupped her face, and for a second Aqua prepared for something she’d been hoping for.
Terra took his other hand to brush through her hair, and she led an uneasy breath to steady. Maybe she was silly for wanting to touch his lips.
“I’m still no good at it, huh?” she asked, her heart screaming at her ears from how close he came.
“Not. At. All.” He smirked to do away with his shaky breath, parting her hair the way he recognized her.
Ventus, however, was the master of worst timing, and he barged into the room like he had no idea how hard his best friends were struggling. “There you guys are. The sky is clear tonight.”
Except he wasn’t dumb. “If you could stop touching each other for at least an hour, maybe we could hang out and stargaze like we used to?”
Terra stammered. Terra let her go. Terra wiped his hands on his apron, and Aqua brought hers to her face to hide her blushing.
Ventus had reason: twelve years apart, and she’d never want to miss stargazing with her two best friends ever again.
They huddled at the front steps of the castle - Ven with Chirithy on his lap, and Terra by Aqua’s side, leaning on one arm with a suggestive distance between the two of them.
The stars gave their blessings in a sky void of clouds, which was rare so high in the mountains. Hikes in the Realm of Darkness had left Aqua wishing for a night exactly like this.
“When I was asleep,” Ven said. “I flew to the sky to reach them.”
“Excuse me?” Aqua said.
“In Sora’s reality.” Despite how insane the subject matter sounded, Ven talked about it like they were at a simple dinner party. “Do you have any idea what kind of awesomeness I was doing in his brain?”
Terra snorted.
“One day, I was breathing underwater,” Ven continued. “Then I was chasing rabbits. Another day, I was petting cute creatures. I played cards with monsters, and went to Halloween parties where I dressed up to look scarier, and I fought pirates and-”
“You mean Sora did all those things,” Terra said.
“Well, yeah but… it seemed real to me.”
He grinned and Aqua couldn’t feel anything but grateful to Sora. It was the one reason why he wasn’t as messed up as she was: Ven had plenty of reminders of what awaited for him when he woke up. He had hope. He had Sora, and there was no one better to spend twelve years with.
“I want to do the same one day,” Ven said, his eyes locked on the stars above. “Have crazy fun adventures. Turn nightmares into dreams.”
“Turn nightmares into dreams?” Chirithy asked, as if the concept was foreign.
“Sure.” Ven leaned backward on both hands. “I want to be like Sora. I want to teach people that they don’t have to stick to their fears, and that they can do whatever it is they want to do, especially if it changes their circumstances.”
He turned to Terra and Aqua. “What do you think?”
Aqua was proud of him.
“Just don’t disappear on us,” Terra said, ruffling Ven’s hair into a flattened heap of hay. “Or you’re grounded.”
“Worse will happen to you if you keep ruining my hair,” he muttered, restyling his bangs.
Chirithy said nothing.
But as fast as Ven got excited, he retreated into reflection. He shifted uncomfortably on his step, and twiddled his fingers. He prepared a question that Aqua had been waiting for him to ask, but he never quite found the time or place to do so. Perhaps that perfect moment didn’t exist.
“What was it like for you guys?”
She had spoken little of the Realm of Darkness. Refusing to stand in the dark or to look into mirrors gave her boys enough of an idea of what it was like, but she had described it in simple terms: lonely and sad.
Terra rubbed his chin, and Aqua really wanted to know about his experience. Since she never spoke about herself, she never asked him either.
“I was angry all the time if I wasn’t crying,” Terra said. “I couldn’t see anything, and if I heard voices, I barely understood them.”
All of them sat still, under stars that stopped guiding their hopes, even though they were free and safe now.
“I would see orbs sometimes,” Terra continued. “Sometimes I got weird feelings, like I was going to die if I tried to fight it, and…”
He inhaled sharply like he said too much. “I begged a lot for it to stop,” were his final words on the subject.
“I begged a lot, too,” Aqua said. They looked at her now, almost leaning forward to listen for more. “I saw lots of different worlds, but they were empty. The environment would change for the purpose of getting me lost, and there was a lot of traveling with no one to talk to. That’s if I wasn’t fighting Heartless. Sometimes I wanted to disappear forever.”
She thought about certain things, and never offered words on them. Instead, she said, “You know, sometimes I saw the both of you.”
“For real?” Ven asked.
“Yeah.” She rubbed the side of her neck, her other arm huddled around her knees. “Then you disappeared. Neither of you ever said anything, but I would talk to you anyway, pretending you could listen.”
They stared at her.
She scoffed. “I know it sounds silly, me talking to myself.”
“Not at all,” Terra said. “Don’t say that again.” His voice quivered, and she expected him to apologize, but he wouldn’t do that in front of Ven - that would upset the boy the most.
Ven fussed in heavy guilt, barely able to look at either at them. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”
“There’s no reason to feel bad, Ven,” Terra said. “It’s… about time we were open about this.”
Ven nodded to himself, staring at grass. Neither of them had any idea how to move the conversation forward. Should they talk more about it? Should they change the subject?
Aqua didn’t think she’d ask Terra for more information, just to spare him the agony of remembering it. Knowing Ventus, he probably would never breach the topic again because he cared about them too much.
There were things they’d never forget and perhaps those were conversations they would only have alone.
“I’m…” Ven started, and Aqua’s heart didn’t have the strength to witness his discomfort. “I think I’m going to get chocolate milk or something. Maybe some cookies? Anybody want some?”
Again, he still didn’t look at them. He deserved some homemade cookies.
“Sounds delicious,” Aqua said.
“You always make the best cookies,” Ventus mumbled as he walked past them and up the steps, Chirithy trailing along. Those two were never apart, and sometimes Aqua wondered if her post-darkness existence could never suffice in comparison to the friend he used to have.
It made her feel awful, even though he never even implied the thought.
“Maybe it will get easier,” Terra said, rubbing his forearm, glancing at the stars where he found no solace.
“You mean talking about it?”
“Sure. Maybe.”
Silence, as quiet as the wind kissing the flowers, as stoney as the stars above them.
“I’m so sorry,” Terra said.
“I told you before,” she said, near a whisper, “I don’t blame you, and I don’t regret it.”
“It sounded terrible.”
“Yours did, too.”
“Maybe. You’re so strong, though. You’d be the only one out of any of us to survive it.”
Again, a silence tight enough to burst.
And Aqua did burst. “I just wish you guys wouldn’t-”
She stood up before she continued, about to walk back to the castle.
“Wouldn’t what?” Terra asked behind her.
“Nothing, I was thinking out loud.”
He stood up as well, following the few steps she took until they were equal. “If I made you uncomfortable at all-”
“No. You didn’t. Don’t worry.” She hugged herself, her hands warming bare shoulders.
Terra frowned, leaning back from her for a second. “Aqua, didn’t we agree not to hide things from each other anymore? To be more honest?”
“It’s not what you think, Terra.”
His eyes whimpered, pleading for her to rest his anxiety and the stars only knew what else he was blaming himself for in his mind.
Then he scoffed, wiping his cheek with his hand, letting himself smile his thoughts away. “Nevermind, I shouldn’t be asking, all things considered.”
“I just-” she started.
Terra was so close to her, within a hand’s reach. Yet there was a wall between them, one she built out of bricks made of refusals and assumptions. If she was going to tear it down and let him finally step through, then she needed to commit. So Aqua steeled herself for the demolition.
“It’s not true that I’m strong,” she said, tears already making their entrance.
It shocked him. “You don’t have to be so hard on yourself.”
“Let me finish.” She breathed hard, her heart wrenching and telling her to quit. “I fell, Terra. Darkness overtook me for a moment, before Riku and Sora found me.”
“What?” he gasped, blood leaving his face. He had no idea. She was grateful Riku respected her privacy enough not to gossip. “Aqua, I’m… ugh.” He held her by the arms, rubbing them, nearly about to embrace her but thought better of it. “I’m so sorry,” he choked.
She couldn’t expect there was anything appropriate to say.
“How did it happen?”
She flinched, and reminded herself that she committed.
It took some time before she spoke. Terra didn’t press her and he didn’t ask the question again. He only stayed still, waiting for her to talk.
“Xehanort’s Heartless was there,” she said.
Already, his tears dried up, his eyes widening. The hold on her arms slackened.
“And he summoned that… thing. The Guardian, I think is what it’s called.” Her voice was steady, detached from her body, like it abandoned her.
She didn’t need to say anything more, what with the way Terra’s breath thrashed.
He let go of her.
“That was you?” he rasped.
Then he yelled, stumbling on the steps when he walked backward away from her.
“Terra.” She reached for him.
He recoiled, completely dodging her hands as he picked himself up on his legs and ran right into the castle doors before desperately grasping at their handles.
“Wait, Terra, it’s fine.”
“How can you say that,” he wailed. “I-”
He stopped, his lips quivering. He tensed when she tried to step closer, keeping his arms within, with grips that strangled the door knob. She almost expected that he was about to punch his way through.
“I hurt you, and there’s no forgiving that.”
He slammed the door in her face, and she dragged it back out to follow him inside. “Please don’t turn your back on me,” she said softly enough that he wouldn’t hear her. “Not again.”
Yet Aqua stopped herself short, watching him storm down the hall until he turned right and disappeared around the corner. What he said pounded in her ears. The way he cried it spoke of damage, of humiliation, of hatred.
Not for her, he could never hate her. But she knew him too well, and she couldn’t tell her body to stop crying at the thought that he hated himself so much.
“You okay?” Ven asked behind her. He had a plate with neatly stacked cookies in his hands, Chirithy riding his shoulders with both paws dug into his hair.
She looked away to wipe her eyes with her wrist.
“Yeah,” she said, then rubbing the excess on her pants.
“It’s a little late anyway for cookies,” Ven said, his voice the only real presence in this empty entrance hall. “I’ll turn off the lights, no big deal.”
“Ven-”
“Cheers makes a good sleeping buddy if you want.” He looked up, and Chirithy wiggled its snout affectionately, squeaking.
“No, but thank you.” She said. She sounded dead. “I’m fine, really.”
He pouted, but let her slide. “Holler if you need anything?”
“Okay.” She clasped her hands together. “Thank you.”
“I’m sorry, Aqua.”
“Yeah.”
Terra wasn’t in the Master’s office, and the hearth felt cool even though it was lit. Terra wasn’t in the kitchen, drinking tea to soothe himself to sleep. He wasn’t back in the workroom, throwing himself into his crystals to ignore everything around him. Nor was he in the training hall, sparring senseless.
She found him in his bedroom, his door locked. He sobbed, and his howling was muffled, as if he was letting it all go into his arms, rested on his table.
Aqua’s chest caved into itself at the sound, making it hard for her to breathe.
She wanted to knock, to tell him that everything was okay. She was fine, she made it out of the Realm of Darkness and the past was the past. She wanted to ask him if he could help her bury it for good. The only thing separating them now was a thin block of wood.
But she did nothing, sneaking away from his door so he wouldn’t hear that she knew.
She left him hoping and praying to the stars that Terra would tear the darkness out of his heart to throw away in those crystals for good, so they wouldn’t be haunted by it anymore. She wanted him whole.
All that was left for her right now was her own bedroom, and she crept her door open just enough to stick her hand through and turn the light switch on. She peeked with one eye to make certain that her mirror was still covered.
It was only then that she entered, preparing herself for whatever chaos waited for her in sleep tonight.
#terraqua#aqua#terra#ventus#chirithy#kingdom hearts fanfiction#kh fanfic#for once i'm actually proud#my fic
37 notes
·
View notes
Text
Goretober Day 17- Eyes
Shit this keeps going so fast. At least this was a day I was really excited to write, despite it still ultimately being late. Also prepare to drown in ellipses because that just happened for some reason.
Today might not be a surprise, but today’s characters are Baiken and Anji! I’ve been positively dying to do something with these two, and this seemed very appropriate. (Apologies in advance Rex I can’t write them as good as you but I hope you still like it)
When Anji had watched Baiken fall and not get up, for the first time in a long while, he didn’t know what to do.
The fight had been downhill ever since they’d started. For all their confidence and self-assurance, they had known that they were walking into one of the biggest Gear nests on earth. On purpose. Allegedly even Kiske and his army had barely been able to make it out alive when they walked in on accident.
At the time, it had only encouraged Baiken more. “Of course they did.” They had said, with a confident glimmer in their one good eye. “Panicking and running around like a bunch of headless fucking chickens. We could do better, just the two of us.”
While there wasn’t exactly much of a way to compare that sort of thing, Anji couldn’t say that they were doing well. They were used to Gears. They’d killed hundreds, all on their own. But here, a hundred had all come at once. Then another hundred. Then another. Their numbers only seemed to grow as they fought their way to the center of the nest, in the hope of finally destroying whatever was at the center that was making all these damn things in the first place.
Anji had feared that the battle wouldn’t turn out in their favor, even before the endless waves had begun wearing them down. Maybe it was his own doubt that had ultimately crippled their efforts. Maybe it didn’t matter. All that mattered now was that he only had Zessen to protect him, at least one of his feet was broken, and that Baiken was lying completely helpless out of his reach.
Something snagged against his back, tearing his sleeve and making a jab of pain run up his spine. Anji managed to blow it back with a hard swipe, but the movement immediately made him flinch from how it aggravated his back and foot. Dammit, why had he let himself get distracted? He wouldn’t be any use to either of the if he was dead.
He could hear his heart pounding in his ears as he tried to shove everything in between him and his companion out of the way. On more than one instance, it resulted in more cuts and scratches on his arms. His lenses had been shattered, so everything was slightly fuzzy and out of focus. But Baiken’s pink-and-crimson smear on the ground was clear to him, especially how the red was slowly overtaking the pink.
“C’mon, get up! Don’t tell me you’re down for the count already?!” They would have thumped him over the head for saying something like that, but if that was what gave them enough energy to keep going, so be it. Anji dragged them to their feet, tossing a limp arm over his shoulder before trying to break out into a run with the energy that he no longer had. The Gears continued to try and pile on the both of them, and all Anji could do was knock them away with the one fan in his one free hand and hope that he was running in the right direction.
“Baiken?! Baiken, come on, wake up!” He shouted, legs burning from the effort of dragging the extra dead weight with him. “Say something!”
“Mh...will you shut the fuck up already?” An irritable voice slurred out by his side.
Anji felt like crying, for a number of reasons. He tried to channel that energy into running. The Gears were gradually lightening up as he ran. There were still a few that he was narrowly outpacing but the rest were either already dead or bored of them.
“Baiken, can you hear me?!”
“Anji…?” Baiken’s voice was as gruff as it always was, but there was something else mixed into their tone. “Anji, where are you?”
“I’m right here, Baiken, I’m-” At first he attributed it to delirium and blood loss. As the two of them lurched forward, Baiken’s blood-drenched bangs plastered against their cheek and he realized that he could no longer make out their one good eye from a long set of talon marks that had ripped a good chunk of the flesh away.
He failed to ignore the cold dread that was seeping into his body at the sight. The lack of focus on his surroundings resulted in something catching under his boot and tripping him up.
The two of them hit the rocky ground hard. Anji cried out from the force, latching onto a spot on his chest that he was sure now housed at least one broken rib. He couldn’t get his legs to work well enough to stand up again. With one arm, he could barely manage dragging his beaten-up body over to Baiken.
“Come on! Baiken, please, wake up!” He shook their limp body, struggling to think of anything else to do. A few stray Gears were approaching what had now become a very easy meal. Their claws were remarkably sharp, and there was nothing separating them from the injured humans aside from a few hundred feet…
...and a cartoon bomb?
The object in question exploded before Anji could properly process the sight of it. The force blew his hair back and sent a nasty headache pulsing through his temples, but when the smoke finally cleared, the Gears had vanished.
“Did somebody call a doctor~?”
A massive, lanky silhouette fell over Anji. He wasn’t sure how to name the emotion he felt when he saw Faust landing on the ground in front of him. It seemed there was no need to, anyway. As soon as he caught sight of them, Faust immediately got busy carefully picking them up in his long arms.
Anji lacked the energy to object, even if he wanted to. The ensuing feeling of traveling through a warp added a dose of vertigo to his headache, and the concept of passing out was becoming more and more appealing. The only thing that kept him from it was Baiken. He tried to keep a close eye on their limp body, unable to tell if they still breathed with all the movement and his hampered vision.
The door dropped them off right outside a small building in a place he didn’t recognize. Or had Faust walked part of the way? Maybe he had blacked out for a moment. It was hard to remember.
The world spun again, though thankfully into something soft and comforting. He watched the man carry Baiken to a different bed, laying them down much more carefully. The doctor was saying something that he could only half make out. Broken things, drugs, blood-
“-need to get to work immediately. Going to sedate the both of you, so you don’t injure yourselves more-”
“W-wait, stop-” Anji spoke up.
“Yes?”
“You have to do something for me.”
“What is it?”
…
“WHAT?! You can’t be serious, you’ve already lost a significant amount of blood!”
…
“Are you sure? I can’t be certain if this isn’t just the shock talking. Do you know what you’re asking me to do?”
…
“...Very well, then.”
There wasn’t much more that he could do in such a state. Anji had somehow managed to cling onto Zessen through everything, and he thumbed over the patterns carved in the wood as several stings of pain worked their way up and down his arms. From the brief moments of coherency, he could see Faust doing the same to Baiken, setting up a blood transfusion, and injecting in whatever cocktail or drugs would be enough to keep them alive and unconscious. He didn’t worry about the details. He was already past that point.
He let his eyes rest for a moment. When they opened again, Faust was standing over him with a long syringe. Or was it a cable? He couldn’t make out the details.
“I’m going to sedate you now, Mr. Mito. I’ll ask you one last time, are you sure that this is what you want?”
Somehow, he managed a frail nod. “If it’s for Baiken, then I would never joke about such a thing.”
Anji wasn’t really sure what happened next. He could feel his mind unraveling, ultimately crumbling underneath him and leaving him to fall into the blissful darkness.
++++++
“God...f-fuck, Anji, what the hell?”
Even while half-asleep, Baiken knew how to be angry. And they liked to think that they had a good reason to be. It felt like a truck had run them over, and as much as they blinked, everything seemed to be dark. Had the building blown a fuse? Served them right for staying at that shitty rickety motel-
“You're awake? Ah, and already kicking. I shouldn't be surprised."
“Fucking-” They hissed, cutting off when they realized that they recognized the voice. “You?! Why the hell are you here, demon?!”
“Please, Baiken, I have to ask you to relax.”
“Why the fuck should I!?”
Faust huffed. “Well, you’re going to tear out your stitches, for one. And I can’t exactly take off the bandages with you moving.”
With a great deal of reluctance, Baiken let their muscles relax. They immediately noticed the pain lessening as they did so. Footsteps approached on their side, and hand began peeling back the fabric that had been wrapped over their face.
“There we are!” Faust announced cheerily, pulling off the last of the gauze. “And looking remarkably well, too! I was a bit concerned about performing so many emergency procedures, but-”
“You WHAT?!”
He recoiled, raising both hands in a calm gesture. “Everything is alright, I promise. You were simply in such a poor state when your friend arrived, I was a bit worried you wouldn’t pull through.”
Friend...? “Damn that bastard, where the hell is he!?” They tried to shout, but the dry throat made it crackle pathetically halfway through.
Faust tilted his head, gesturing with one hand. “What are you talking about? He’s right next to you.”
Their head snapped towards where he was pointing. Anji was motionless in the next bed over, swathed in white and thankfully hooked up to fewer machines than they seemed to be. Hell, he looked to be in pretty good shape, all things considered.
At least, that’s what they wanted to say, until they noticed the web of bandages covering the right half of his face.
“Is...is he okay?” Baiken didn’t care. Not really. Anji was good at getting himself out of scrapes, so if something major had actually happened, then it was probably his fault. Yeah. Not something they had to worry about...
Instead of replying, Faust approached with a hand mirror, which he offered up. “I think this should do the job well enough.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” The samurai snapped. “Wasting my time, more like.”
Still, Baiken stared into the mirror. Disheveled pink hair framed their face, same as it always did. A few more bandaged spots that would probably leave scars, but they’d seen worse. A single eye stared back at them...
...had it always been brown?
A few strangled Japanese curses creaked out in a familiar tone. Baiken immediately dropped the mirror and threw the sheets back.
“No, no, don’t do that!” Faust cried, as thought it would stop them. “You shouldn’t be standing- !”
In a flash, Baiken climbed on top of the man, dragging along an IV drip and several ECG sensors that had disconnected from the force of being pulled. The movement had torn open a few stitches, and red blotches were soaking through the bandages, but all they focused on was grabbing Anji by shoulders and shrieking bloody murder.
“WHAT DID YOU DO?! WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO?!”
“Heh heh. You’re up. Good. I was worried…”
It didn’t quell their anger. “You DUMBASS! I never would have asked you to- !”
“I knew you wouldn’t.” He replied quietly, removing himself from their grip and sitting up in bed. “I did it because I wanted to.”
And in a moment, the anger turned into something else. Anji managed to catch Baiken as they slumped.
“Y-you didn’t…”
“Heh. It’s all better now, see?” Anji grinned, laughing a laugh that wasn’t nearly as aggravatingly bright as it normally was. “Now we match!”
“You idiot...you fucking idiot…” Baiken weakly smacked his chest, shoulders shaking with tears that refused to fall.
“Isn’t it nice, Baiken? Aren’t you happy…?”
8 notes
·
View notes
Text
Swamp Thing 1x04 Thoughts
Because I just have so many thoughts about last week’s episode and felt like jotting them down. Spoilers for Darkness on the Edge of Town and possibly future episodes.
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying every episode-with the first episode remaining my favorite-though this one felt like the weakest of all of them. I enjoyed the concept of a “Monster-of-the-Week” episode with some details influencing future plots, but I felt as though the execution was slightly uneven.
The main issue I had with the episode was actually related to the CDC, Abby and the Green Flu Progression. Last week Harlan was infected and yet he was oddly absent in this episode. Those infected were also given immunosuppressants previously and yet there were no other details presented beyond some of them being better and the CDC packing up, but not declaring that everything was resolved.
The Green Flu was something that drew me in in the first episode, its mutation properties, the inability to prevent its spread and yet the latest episode made it seem like mostly a non-issue. I’m assuming that Alec’s presence and the retrieval of the accelerant may have calmed the Green down, but I hope it’s not a completely dropped plot and that the infected have more of a role to play in the rest of the series.
Abby’s behavior in the episode was also slightly frustrating. She knew that Delroy had scratched Lucilia and yet neither of them thought about possible isolation given how Delroy behaved after he was scratched. Or possibly calling Matt to give him a preemptive warning. Her approaching Lucilia later, despite knowing that she couldn’t hear or see her, could have ended up going so badly.
Which brings me to the end of the episode. Swamp Thing once again resolving the conflict in the episode for the third time was helpful, but if it continues it could become repetitive. But given that he is the main character of the show and most everyone else has no clue regarding how to deal with the more supernatural aspects of weirdness influencing Marais, it may be unavoidable.
Now, on to things I enjoyed.
Avery remains manipulative slime and it’s interesting to witness how he jumps from person to person to get what he wants. His faux-emphasizing with Maria about Abby’s return stirring things up, his attempts at apologizing to Abby while stonewalling her, his efforts at charming Lucilia because Maria was neglecting him and finally him circling back around to Maria and using Susie to loosen the purse strings. She wouldn’t let such an unfortunate child possibly die, not when there was no one else who could help her.
The situation with Susie is tragic on its own and ultimately unhealthy for Maria. I don’t see things ending well, especially if “Shawna” decides to take action because Maria is more interested in tending to Susie then listening to the poison she drips in her ear to sow discord.
I really hope nothing happens to Liz or Margaux, especially since the former’s pressure on Gordon and the latter’s discovery of Alec’s boat wreckage could draw a vast amount of negative attention.
Doctor Woodrue continues to be a fascinating character. Of course, we all know that he’s going to share Abby’s “discovery” with Avery, but the fact that he was willing to work with her, as opposed to just criticizing her and his genuine interest in his work is nice to witness. It also makes me wish we had more time with Alec the biologist before his transformation/death. I do wonder if Woodrue is going to attempt to synthesize something to cure his wife’s illness and have things go horribly wrong.
But that could just be the body horror fan in me wanting more nightmarish creations.
Seeing the figure I assume to be Anton Arcane was also a treat. Before I learned of the cancellation, I was hoping he would be set up as the villain next season and though that won’t be happening, it was neat to have him pop up. Hopefully there will be enough time to dive into at least some of his history with Abby before the season’s end.
The scene with Abby and Alec at the end was also sweet. The shipper in me was quite happy. I do wonder if Alec saw anything when he was host for the darkness, but then again, he’s already somewhat trapped in a waking nightmare. I’m hoping Friday’s episode taps into that a bit more, as the second and third episode did a great job at depicting some of his horror and uncertainty pertaining to the situation.
Are his parents alive? Does anyone else know he’s “dead?” Can he leave Marais? Has he even tried? Does he just wander the swamp all day narrowly avoiding the people working there? With luck, we’ll eventually find out. I do kind of wish they had keep his slower manner of speaking from the third episode, as it reminded me of his “voice” in the comics with the ellipses.
All in all, I look forward to the rest of the season and hope for the best.
6 notes
·
View notes
Text
22nd January 2019
Author: Ro
Admin’s Note: The following work is the first part of a series of letters exchanged between Todoroki and Izuku. The rest of them will be linked when they come out! :D
Letters Across the Ocean (a story told in letters, in four parts)
________________________________________________________________
January 22, 2XXX
Dear Todoroki-kun,
I found it amusing when you first told me that you’ve made a habit of writing letters to your mom. You could have defaulted to using your phone, since it was more, well… timely. Convenient, even. At the time, I kept my opinions to myself because I felt that if your mom hadn’t, then someone else would have already asked why you chose to go down the traditional route. I didn’t want to be that person who rained on your parade, even if only in jest or in genuine awe. (In short, please don’t be that person to me. I expect you to not laugh at this.)
Did you know that what you did was simply one of the coolest things I’ve witnessed a hero do? Not everyone would be willing to show vulnerability through a gesture that was positively sweet and romantic. I was guilty of that, because I was young and thought it wasn’t very manly (in the words of Kirishima-kun) to write Mom letters. It didn’t strike me as something I should actually sink my teeth into. But I’ll confess: it also made me a bit jealous. For a time, I beat myself up for having been one-upped again. Why didn’t that occur to me first? How could I have not considered writing letters to Mom and stuck to the sleepy phone calls and rushed morning texts? It was petty before, but it’s even pettier now, I find.
I never quite understood the appeal of the letters, at least in full, until you lent me your notes that one time I booked a three-night stay at the school clinic. I remember leafing through them, even the parts I didn’t need because I was snoopy like that, and I still am. Your handwriting varied from day to day, and call me on being presumptive but I was really touched when I realized how much more organized the notes were during the days I was absent. That was so considerate of you. (If I’m wrong about all this and I’m just in over my head… let’s both agree to blame it on the hangover induced by Recovery Girl’s get-well kiss.)
I remember thinking how one’s handwriting could hold so much character, and as I perused your notes, I began wondering what your mom saw beyond the words that you wrote on the pages. Did you write that week’s letter in haste? While you were on the train from internship, running late for your hospital visit? Before you went to bed? Perhaps you scribbled some random thought while you were nodding off in class. (I’d caught you one too many times, especially during exam week, so please don’t even try to deny.)
In your little way, I suppose you were subconsciously trying to tell her stories that could be missed from words alone. You didn’t want to be contained by the pixelated characters that a swipe on the screen could produce… No amount of emojis or exclamation points could have told your mom how you were feeling while you wrote to her, or how eager you were to share a dream that the moment you woke, you picked up the pen before you could forget.
You probably missed her so much you felt the need to catch up in a way that allowed you to speak to her like you were face-to-face. Instead of your voice, your words—whether haphazardly penned or not—served the purpose of filling in the silence of her hospital room. Struck out words could be where you would correct yourself in a conversation… commas for pauses, ellipses for thoughtful silences… and places where the ink was thick enough to bleed through the paper would tell her you stuttered or lost a train of thought that you never recovered.
Having said that, in case you still haven’t understood (which is very unlikely), let me spell it out for you: I miss you. I picked up the pen because I felt the need to talk to you as though you were here with me, and I thought you would appreciate a handwritten note, since imitation is the greatest form of flattery. There’s something about the intimate feel of letters that makes me feel at ease. It’s like I’m chatting with you again, only braver and less nervous because now you can’t ask me questions that make me stop and ponder the meaning of life while in the middle of lunch rush, because you’re insufferably cool like that. Not that you ever interrupted me whenever I rambled, because you’re also cool like that. (And if it turns out that all I said prior were mere projections, well, please do me the favor of never correcting me like you would even though your bluntness is one of the things I find endearing. Let me live the fantasy that I got you right, down to a tee.)
I’m writing this letter on my bed in my apartment in California. It’s two weeks too late as a birthday present, so let me apologize for that first. Second, let me apologize for ever thinking it was cheesy when you did this for your mom because truth be told, I feel liberated by writing all of this, not that you wouldn’t know that. You’re the pioneer, after all. Lastly, please forgive me for choosing to write you like this, as though I was making an entry in my hero analysis notebook. Think of it as me thinking of you fondly, or at least, one of the random memories that stuck, taken from the cache. Before this one, there were several drafts, of things I’ve been up to and things you might be interested to hear about, but none of those really matter, I think, since they’re nothing that you wouldn’t get wind of in one way or another. I know you’re keeping track, because I do, too, and while we’re friends, we’re still rivals. I’ve got my eyes on you.
There’s no telling when this letter will reach you, but when it does, please don’t feel obligated to write back. I know you’re busy, and the monthly texts and calls are more than enough. It’s just that I was finally able to catch a break, and it’s nearing midnight, and I’ll probably regret this in the morning, but I’m feeling like it, really, because I’m guilty that I never got to send you a present. What kind of friend does that, anyway? There’s simply no excuse for that, is there?
Anyway, I could go on, but I’m just rambling at this point. I hope you’re doing well, whatever you’re up to right now. (I’m doing this backwards, aren’t I? I’m really sorry!)
Happy birthday, Todoroki-kun!
Take care always!
- Midoriya Izuku
________________________________________________________________
Would you like your work to be featured in the 365 Days of TodoDeku Project? Apply here! (≧∇≦)/
#Story#Letter#dashinaname#TodoDeku#365DaysofTodoDeku#TodoDeku365#365 Days of TodoDeku#tddk#Shouto Todoroki#Todoroki Shouto#Izuku Midoriya#Midoriya Izuku#Boku no Hero Academia#BNHA#My Hero Academia#MHA#Todoroki x Midoriya#Shouto x Izuku#TodoIzu#long post
27 notes
·
View notes
Text
Creating a Recipe Infographic
11.09.18
We were given the task of creating an infographic based on a recipe. We had to create this graphic using absolutely no words, only assets we can make in Adobe Illustrator.
I couldn’t really think of any recipes, so I searched around Google to find something I thought I could make work. I stumbled upon a recipe for a basic burger, I thought it had just enough content where I could make an infographic that wouldn’t be too difficult or look too convoluted. I realised a few hurdles I would need to overcome, like the ingredients - some I thought would prove difficult to create without the aid of words or a more complex image of the particular ingredient. For example, the 3/4 teaspoons of freshly ground black pepper and seasoned bread crumbs. For the most part however, I thought the actual instructions would not pose much difficulty, I had a few ideas already of how I could go about digitising them.
First of all, I opened up Adobe Illustrator, where I started working on the ingredients. I thought a good place to start would be the 1 1/2 pounds of ground beef. I ignored the latter part of the ingredient (”at least 80% lean, a.k.a. 80/20″) because I didn’t think it was necessary enough for the graphic, that and I didn’t have any ideas on how I would make that. To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what ground beef looked like, so I looked it up and realised what it was instantly. I thought about how I could make it work, so I decided to go with making a top-down view of it in some kind of packaging. (Future me writing: I’m aware it doesn’t look too much like ground beef, and more like a microwave, as pointed out. This will be addressed at the end.) Anyway, I just made some red squares and elongated them to make them look like strips. I couldn’t have them literally next to each other since then it would just look like one big clump. Next I created an egg. Not much to talk about there really.
Now for the smaller and in some cases, more difficult ingredients. I thought about how to make bread crumbs and ground black pepper (which I had to look up again). I decided to simply make little circles, and arrange them in an orderly fashion (again, this is changed at the end since they look too uniform and neat for what they are). As for the whole 3/4 thing, I just put three of each on one side, separated by a line and then four of each on the other side, just like a fraction, but with little icons instead, which I think works. As for the Worcestershire (phew, thanks auto correct for that one) sauce, I just took the head of the spoon that I made, which are just kind of semi circles with a handle which I created using the pen tool, and duplicated it and changed the colour to brown, since it’s apparently brown, I wouldn’t know, I’ve never had it. Finally for the ingredients, I made some salt, which was easy enough, and then I did pretty much the same thing I did with the smaller ingredients, except this time I made four of them and then just made the top right one look more faded so that you know not to use four, and only three. The last thing I did in this update was create the box which contained the ingredients, which makes them look so much more organised than if they were just on a white background.
This next update includes the process of the creation of the grill. I chose to make a barbecue-looking one so that it was understandable what it was. It’s made up of some rounded elongated squares, some circles and then some lines across the top of the grill which were just duplicated them over and over until I got a nice even-looking amount. The horizontal lines are closer together because of the angle at which they’re being looked at. Just a bit of extra depth I was going for. As for the part about the grill being set to high, I had a couple ideas of what to do, like having the flames get bigger and bigger, though I settled on having it go from a yellow flame to a very red flame, which was supposed to symbolize it getting hotter, which I’m not too sure translated over as well as it did in my head. Then I just added some crosses over the first ones, because they’re wrong, and then for the last one I placed a tick under it. Finally, I made the box behind it a pink colour, just keeping with the warm colours, like with the first box.
Next was what I thought would be the fun part, and it was. I had to create some hands placing each ingredients into the bowl, and somehow I managed to forget probably the most aesthetically pleasing ingredient, the egg. Probably because it was separated by the line which I added, I must have wrote it off as not being an ingredient. Anyway, for the hands, I just made some shapes that looked like eggs actually, then made them a bit longer, and added some lines on them to show that they’re fingers. I added some thumbs and then added another line on the left hand coming from the thumb, to show that one hand is facing one way, and the other, another way. I think I did this part very well, personally. Oh, I also made a bowl, which is just the spoon head again, but bigger. Lastly I added a green background, I’m not sure why, I wanted to keep with the warmer colours, but pretty much every colour merged with the colours already existing in that panel, such as the brown liquid, and the outlines of the hands.
Now I had to show how to actually cook them, which I did by bringing back the grill, without the wheels this time. Then I made the meat by using the rounded square tool again, and added some arrows I made using the pen tool, to demonstrate that you need to flip them over once they’ve cooked on one side for four to six minutes, which I tried to show with the timer thing, I added 6 lines, and then put a line underneath which went from one to four. I think it’s a bit obscure, and you most likely won’t think ‘oh, that means four to six minutes!’ but I couldn’t come up with anything better, especially considering the space I had to work with. Finally, I duplicated the hottest flame from the panel above, and then placed it under the grill. Then I added the pink box, again, from the panel above.
This was the last panel to make, and I had fun making it. It wasn’t anything difficult to portray, though I did ignore the whole “remove from the grill” since I thought that would be common sense. Apologies if you actually followed these instructions and were lost, though I would think that you’d be lost from the get-go since you probably can’t tell what the little circles in the ingredients panel are. Anyway, I made some bread for the four burgers, and arranged them on a plate, created with two elongated ellipses. Then I created some bald heads who seem way too excited to be receiving a plate of burgers. They were fun to make though, I just made an ellipse, then a semicircle coloured white to portray teeth, and then some eyes, with little segments cut out, which I think look good. I duplicated those hands, and made them smaller to make them look like they were the hands of the head in the front. Again, I gave it a green box, to correspond with the one above it.
Final Recipe Infographic, with Tweaks
After I finished this, I decided to make some revisions, since they were pointed out to me, but I also added some of my own tweaks to some parts. Firstly, I’ll talk about the ground beef that I mentioned way earlier. I thought I would make the lines a bit wavy, which I altered by going to object>envelope distort>make with warp. Afterward, I duplicated the packaging that I’d created, and placed it over the top with an opacity of 20%, to make it look as though it had a kind of film over the top of it. To further this, I added some shines on the film, which I think looks really good personally. Though it may still look unrecognisable sadly. Continuing with the ingredients, I made the crumbs and the black pepper more messed up, so that may help with the understanding what exactly they are, though I doubt it. I changed the Worcestershire (thanks again, auto correct) sauce to a slightly lighter brown and added a shine, I sure do like my shines. I think that helped a lot with making it look less like the piece of meat between the bread, and an actual liquid. I did the same with the second panel, where the hands are dropping off all the ingredients. Speaking of, I added that egg that I’d forgotten about, and I think it definitely adds to the whole panel. Finally, I moved the panels around, so that it was like a checkerboard, and the green and pink were opposing instead. I also gave all the boxes some gradients, which may or may not actually look better.
Anyway, I think I was relatively successful in making a distinct infographic which shows you how to make a basic burger. Though I just couldn’t think of better ways of portraying certain things, due to the limit of words and also the space I had available to me.
1 note
·
View note
Text
Chapter-by-Chapter, The Naming, Chapter 2
Hey y’all, my friend @wizardheart83 is doing this with me! Go look!
Wizardheart83
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 1 of mine is here, and the intro is here.
I think how much of Throne of Glass were covering per chapter of Pellinor varies, but still.
Pellinor
True to his word, Cadvan sends the dogs off with a few words. It confuses the men with the dogs, who still can’t see Cadvan and Maerad. We get some background on bards themselves and the magic they use, and the briefest outline of the story of The Nameless One, who does technically still have a name only it has no power over him and therefore he can’t die. Maerad is skeptical about this whole name-eschewing business and says so, but Cadvan is serious. He goes on to mention The Great Silence, when there was no singing or at least no Singing, and Hulls, which are essentially ringwraiths but more numerous.
Eventually Cadvan gets snippy with her when she asks if she could be a bard (“Didn’t you hear anything I told you?”), but he apologizes and explains that he’s been fighting evil shit for a really long time and is currently holding off whatever’s in the Landrost (the mountain) by sheer force of will, of which he’s running out. They realize Maerad can help, but Maerad is reluctant after the first time they try and it’s pretty scary. He points out that living is a priority, so she tries again and it works better. They make their way slowly out of the valley and eventually into a forest, out of the valley.
Throne of Glass (4%-6-ish%, or pages 17-27 so we can stop at the end of chapter 4)
Prince Dorian offers Celaena the chance to be King’s Champion by winning a competition. She snarks that he should just skip the competition and hire her because she’s the best. Evidence is not provided. She bargains with Dorian despite the offer coming from his never-argued-with father the unnamed King of Adarlan. She bargains the term of service from five years to four. She thinks that she wouldn’t survive another year in Endovier anyway, but if the guards are under orders to keep her alive and didn’t even decide otherwise when she was murdering loads of them and the Eyllwe prisoners are so dead-set on keeping her alive AND she remains to unaffected by her imprisonment, I question the assertion.
Oh also, those Eyllwe people? They are the bulk of the slaves, and they are brown people from the one brown country. None are named.
Celaena decides to act like a middle-schooler wanting five more minutes of sleep when the captain of the guard comes to get her from her now nice room to set out for her freedom. She eventually dresses in a ‘fine riding habit’ that somehow fits her perfectly. She goes out to ait for the prince and is mobbed by friendly dogs that belong to the prince. Dorian can’t believe they’re being so friendly. She must have fed them. She does not respond until he asks if she’s ever going to talk to him, at which point she says “I’m afraid your questions don’t merit a verbal response.”
In fairness, I think I said exactly that once in middle school.
We are treated to more of Celaena’s murderous impulses and complaints about everything. She badgers the captain of the royal guard, Chaol. The chapter ends as they stop for lunch.
THE CONTRAST.
Honestly the first thing that comes to mind is that animals love both protagonists in theory, but Maerad, who has seen dogs chase down and tear apart runaway slaves, is terrified of them. Celaena apparently likes them, though we know nothing about the dogs she spends a significant amount of time with except that they exist and adore her. It’s part and parcel of the book, really. The vast majority of people adore Celaena, she talks about caring for them so much, they don’t get names or are referred to by epithets. Same old, same old. Celaena’s journey, though she’s chained, involves good food and horses and being ineptly flirted with. Maerad’s involves a grouchy dude who has enough travel rations and constant walking. This is not actually a reflection on the characters, but it is interesting from a writing perspective to note how much of Celaena’s suffering is treated as so much window dressing while Maerad is still struggling. We also see a demonstration even this early on of Maerad’s power, untrained though it is, and her strength of mind, which is very trained: she basically tells a (morally grey) mountain to fuck off, thanks.
Maerad is shown being wary of Cadvan for many good reasons, but in large part because he is an Adult Male, when in her life (aside from her minstrel teacher) men have been shown to be bad news for women even if she as mostly protected by Gilman’s supersticion. Out here there is no superstitious owner to keep her mostly safe: there is only this new man who she has never met and tells her he (and probably Maerad herself) can do magic.
Celaena is not wary at all of anyone, despite telling us at some point (I think it’s later in the books though?) that she was deeply disturbed and forever changed by the rape and murder of an Eyllwe woman who helped her her first night. We never learnt eh woman’s name. She is only ever mentioned again when Celaena says she made sure to murder the guards who did it later, when she’s on a murder spree already.
Celaena, like Maerad, is also protected in her slavery by an authority: the king wanted her to suffer a long time. Since we never ‘see’ her dealing with the mines it is difficult to conceptualize what she did suffer, especially since her personality remains utterly unchanged from The Assassin’s Blade collection of short stories.
This is turning into a treatise on why I don’t like Celaena or how her books handle her. I’m trying, okay?
In short, Maerad’s freedom feels earned and unsimplified. Celaena’s is, as usual, handed to her on a platter complete with hot dudes and snark.
This chapter of The Naming contained 12 pages, 1 fragment, 5 em-dashes, and 4 ellipses.
The equivalent percentage of Throne of Glass contained 10 pages, 17 fragments, 16 em-dashes, and 10 ellipses.
21 notes
·
View notes
Text
Soulmate AU Polyship LesRuSteSebJo Christmas Headcanons
Alternatively- A list of incredibly specific holiday-themed AU headcanons made for a gift exchange!
EDIT: Putting this under a cut since it’s really long and I wasn’t thinking about it earlier.
SET-UP
- Everyone is born with a small counter(s) on their left wrist, displaying the amount of time they have left before they meet their soulmate. It displays the number of years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds until they met them.- When someone meets their soulmate, the counter disappears and is replaced by a heart - and the shift can be physically felt, so it's difficult (if not impossible) to miss having met your soulmate for the first time.
- Officially 'meeting' a soulmate tends to manifest as either eye contact or direct physical contact with one's soulmate, but either way the contact has to be direct. Meeting them over the internet or through a penpal program doesn't count (though there're various websites designed to help people find their soulmates based on the times left on their counters).
- If someone's soulmate hasn't been born yet, the counter is replaced with a string of dots, similar to an ellipses.
- Some people think 'soulmates' are limited to just two people, but there're actually many Soulmate Groups, where three or more people are soulmates with each other. Members of Soulmate Groups have multiple counters (one for each soulmate they're destined to meet) arranged from soonest to farthest away. Polygamous marriages are legal and fairly common as a result of this.
- If someone's soulmate(s) dies before they meet them, the counter grays out and becomes only zeros. If they die after having met them, the heart becomes a broken heart.
ACTUAL HEADCANONS
- First off, alternate universe where Leslie and Ruben aren't sharing a body or something because... reasons. Okay, now onto the headcanons.
- The group is gearing up to have their first Christmas together as a proper group.
- Juli was invited (by Seb and Joseph) to stay over for the holidays, and despite being reluctant, Lily's relentless puppy-dog eyes got her to cave and agree to come.
- Ruben was initially a little sour about the whole affair, having a distinct disdain for anything remotely related to religion, but ended up mellowing out a little when he saw how excited some (read: Leslie and Lily) got in the weeks leading up to it.
- Stefano was openly and inexplicably bitter toward the entire concept of the holiday from the very first of the month. He outright ignored any attempts to get an explanation, but when his attitude suspiciously does a 180 immediately after the 22nd (i.e. his birthday) passes, the rest of the group suddenly realizes what was going on and groans/rolls their eyes at how unbelievably petty he is.
- He claims to have no idea what they're talking about. He's lying, of course.
- Everyone in the group is hard to shop for, since most of the things relating to their interests are things they'd rather get themselves/things they already own.
- The only exception is Lily, she'll be happy with almost anything they get her. She does, however, have a neat little Christmas wish list, with things like 'colored pencils' and 'a pet' written in multi-colored crayon.
- Seb and Joseph shop for Christmas gifts together (except what they get for each other, obviously).
- When asked who they're buying the kids stuff for at the store, everyone in the Dad Squad says its for their daughter - they all consider themselves as Lily's dads, even though Sebastian's the only biological parent in the group.
- The downside to this is that they all have very different ways they think Lily should be raised, and those ways often conflict.
-It took the combined efforts of Seb, Joseph, and Juli to keep Ruben from telling Lily that Santa Claus isn't real.
- Lily already knows. She's known for over a year now, but she's pretending not to because she doesn't want to make her dad(s) sad.
- Ruben has no interest in decorating the tree and Stefano gets banned from helping after trying to put what looked suspiciously like human remains up as decorations, so the bulk of the decorating falls on Seb, Joseph, Lily, and Juli.
- Lily, however, manages to get Ruben to join in and put exactly one (1) ornament on the tree. He goes back into the shared bedroom to read immediately after, but she's still so happy about it.
- Leslie's never messed with Christmas decorations before and the others are nervous about leaving him alone with so many sharp and/or breakable objects, especially with his history of panic attacks, so any decorating he does is closely supervised. He doesn't mind (or rather, doesn't really notice the distinction), and he and Lily end up having a lot of fun wrapping colorful lights and garland around the tree.
- Joseph put an Elf on the Shelf in the living room to encourage Lily to be good. The next morning it was found hanging from the ceiling fan with a note stapled to its chest.
- 'Put it back up. I dare you.'
- No one ever figured out who did it, but there was a strong suspicion that the culprit was either Ruben or Stefano.
- It was Juli. She saw it out of the corner of her eye when she was headed to the bathroom in the middle of the night and almost pissed herself. And then she got revenge. And the Elf on the Shelf was no more.
- On the night of the 23rd, it starts snowing, and it doesn't stop until nearly 10 AM the next morning.
- Everyone bundles up and they all go outside to have some fun in the snow (with varying degrees of willingness). It's kind of a disaster.
- Lily tries to build a snowman, but then Stefano steps in and tries to get her to be more creative with it. Which is sweet, until he starts trying to make it look like its head is half cut off, at which point Sebastian and Joseph intervene.
- Seb viciously lobs a snowball starts a snowball fight with Stefano, and in the end Joseph, Juli, Ruben, and Lily end up getting dragged into it. Seb, Joseph, and Juli end up on one team while Ruben, Stefano, and Lily are on the other.
- Leslie stays on the sidelines, keeping himself out of trouble and also making little mini-snowmen to line the back porch with. They're all a little lopsided but that somehow makes it even more adorable.
- Joseph and Ruben are the strategists for their respective teams, and end up taking the whole thing way too seriously as they try to out-calculate each other.
- Team KCPD try to take down Stefano first, thinking that he'd get annoyed and give up after enough snowballs to the face, but it just makes him better at dodging.
- For the most part, no one bothers Lily, even as she pelts Team KCPD with lumpy little snowballs.
- Ruben spends almost five whole minutes sitting behind a tree and packing a single snowball together for maximum damage 'aerodynamic quality.' It ends up hitting Seb square in the jaw. He accuses Ruben of trying to break his nose, something Ruben doesn't directly deny.
- "What're you talking about, Seb?"
- Juli 'accidentally' hits Stefano in the crotch, and while Sebastian's laughing at the face he makes Ruben hits /him/ directly in the face with a huge snowball. Literally makes him eat snow.
- All things considered, the fight gets out of hand and some muttered apologies are exchanged after the fact.
- Ruben mostly stays inside after the fight, since he has trouble with temperature control due to his burns and doesn't want to risk catching something. He got so caught up in what was going on that he forgot to take his body's limitations into consideration, and immediately goes to correct that (mainly by changing into warm, dry clothes). He still watches the others from the window, though.
- Lily, Leslie, and Juli (whom was dragged into it) make snow angels together and then help each other up so there aren't any hand/footprints ruining them.
- After a few hours out in the snow, the whole group ends up going back inside, to avoid getting sick.
- Joseph, as the designated Team Mom of the Dad Squad, makes hot cocoa for everyone.
- Later that night, all seven of them sit down and have a Christmas movie marathon. Ruben isn't really interested in any of them and mostly reads through the movies, but the others are glad he's there.
- Leslie falls asleep in the middle of one of them and ends up slumped over against Joseph. Stefano takes a picture of it when they aren't looking.
- Lily ends up falling asleep too, and at that point they all quietly agree that it's time to wrap it up.
- On Christmas day, Lily woke up at 6:30 in the morning and immediately ran to go wake up the Dad Squad.
- Joseph had been up for half an hour already and was in the kitchen making red and green pancakes (food coloring), bacon, and eggs
.- Ruben was also up, and was sitting in the living room, watching a show about medical anomalies.
- The three remaining dads were promptly woken up by Lily and dragged downstairs to where the gifts sat under the tree.
- Joseph tried to insist that they have breakfast before opening presents, but Seb tells him they may as well do it now since Lily won't be able to sit still until the gifts are open.
- The gift opening is only about 13% disaster.
- There're two unsigned gifts under the tree - the first is addressed to everyone in the Dad Squad, and upon unwrapping it they find a large bottle of cranberry-scented lube. No one asks who put it there but everyone has their own suspicions. Most of them suspect Stefano.
- They're right. He thought it'd be hilarious to see everyone's reactions and he was right. Lily's too busy with her own presents to notice all her dads silently imploding.
- The second unsigned gift is addressed specifically to Ruben, and inside is a little tube of burn cream. There's a long moment of uncomfortable silence before Ruben says something.
- "You're about thirty years too late, but thanks anyway." It's the most sarcastic tone they've ever heard him use, and that's saying something.
- Seb was behind that one. He thought it'd be a lot funnier than it turned out to be.- Lily made little arts and crafts things for all of them. Origami flowers, little dolls and animals made from clay and/or popsicle sticks, drawings etc. It's adorable.
- Leslie made everyone sugar cookies (with a lot of help from Juli), which turned out a little misshapen but still tasted good.
- In an unexpectedly sentimental gesture, Stefano made a photo album full of pictures he'd taken of their little family over the past few months and addressed it to everyone. Many of the pictures are candids none of them realized he'd taken at the time, like a picture of Joseph, Lily, and Leslie baking together or one of Seb and Ruben curled up together on the couch. There are even a few from the past week or so, indicating he'd been adding to it right up until Christmas.
- Everyone gets really sentimental about it and they spend a good ten minutes flipping through it.
- The only one who got an individual gift from Stefano is Lily, whom received a sketchbook and a set of high-end colored pencils. She's already putting them to good use by lunchtime.
- Juli wasn't 100% sure what to get anyone, so she mostly just got them clothes - sweaters, scarves, etc. Seb ends up with an ugly sweater with reindeer and snowmen on the front, which everyone immediately pressures him into changing into. Even he admits that it's hilarious.
- Ruben gets almost everyone practical items he knows they'll get a lot of use out of; a trench coat for Seb, a glasses cleaning kit for Joseph, photo development chemicals for Stefano, a sweater for Leslie, and a pair of gloves for Juli. Lily, by contrast, gets a junior science kit that no one quite knows how to feel about.
- Joseph does much of the same, getting everyone things he feels they'll be able to use.- Lily put 'a pet' on her Christmas wish list, and The Dads deliver - they get her a hamster, complete with a cage and hamster food. Joseph gives her a mini-lecture on responsibility and how she'll have to be the one to clean the cage, feed it, etc. She only half listens, mostly just excited to have a pet.
- The hamster is a Teddy Bear hamster, and Lily names him Yogurt. It's adorable.
- After the present unwrapping is over, Joseph drags them all into the kitchen for breakfast, which has gotten cold and has to be reheated. Lily sneaks bits of pancake into her pockets to give to Yogurt later.
- When everyone gets through with breakfast they all occupy themselves with their presents, trying on gifted clothes, and in Lily's case playing with toys (and Yogurt).
- Joseph and Stefano drop a few hints to Juli during lunch, and she ultimately gets what they're trying to communicate.
- After lunch, Juli takes Lily to see a movie under the guise of 'girl time', so that the Dad Squad can spend some 'dad time' together. Immediately after the car pulls out of the driveway, they all head to the bedroom and give that new cranberry lube a test drive.
- By the time the girls get back, the Dad Squad has already gotten cleaned up, though they all still smell suspiciously like cranberries.
- This is also the point where they realize the entire living room is an utter mess of torn wrapping paper and empty cardboard boxes which they can no longer ignore.
- ~Cleaning Time with Joseph and Stefano~
- Lily, Seb, and Juli get roped into cleaning, too. Leslie falls asleep on the couch and Ruben picks up exactly what part of the mess is his fault before walking away to read the dense medical text he got. They do get it done, though.
- Dinner goes much better than anyone expected. Seb, Joseph, and Juli all work together to get the actual food made and nothing gets burnt. Other than Lily sneaking more food into her pockets for Yogurt, things pass relatively uneventfully, and after some precarious and slightly questionable stacking methods, all the leftovers get put away.
- The whole group ends up falling asleep on the couch together at 10:30 while watching a made-for-TV Christmas special, with the photo album left open on the table.
BONUS:
I was gonna add a set of images (made in XNALara) to go with the headcanons, but I ran out of time and only got two done out of the 4-5 I was planning :’) But here they are anyway, since I didn’t want them to go to waste!
Enjoy!
#i was debating on whether or not i should tag this at all but fuck it#LesRuSteSebJo#SteSeb#RuSeb#JoSeb#the evil within 2#the evil within#Ruvik#Ruben Victoriano#Sebastian Castellanos#Joseph Oda#Juli Kidman#Leslie Withers#Stefano Valentini#Lily Castellanos
19 notes
·
View notes
Note
which parts of acowar did you dislike/didn't sit so well for you? i don't want you to get hate or anything but like what did you wish sjm didn't do? x
Hey Nonnie!
Ok. This turned out to be a REALLY LONG list so I’m putting it all under a cut, that way people don’t feel obligated to read this if they are tired of ACOWAR hate.
If you are one of those people that are really tired of ACOWAR hate it’s totally ok to just scroll down, you do not have to read this.
Here we go…
1) Mor.
I feel that she was so mistreated in this book. Even in the beginning when Rhys pulls the whole Eris scheme on her and letting her in the dark??? Why? I don’t understand. Why couldn’t he just sit her down before the meeting, explain the situation and ask for her input? Or at least let her know what is happening and give her the choice to stay if she is not ready to face what is possibly the two people that hurt her the most in her life.
It felt so OOC for Rhys to do that to her. SJMaas is always reinforcing how good he is for always giving everyone a choice, but with Mor that didn’t happen at all. Not only was it cruel to put he in that situation, but as his third, she should have known. She is the Queen of Hewn city she is supposed to know these things before they come into action.
I hated so much the way she came out. Don’t get me wrong here, I was so so happy to see that we finally get LGBTQA representation, but it was executed so poorly. I mostly agree with what a lot of people have been saying, it felt like a last minute decision on Maas’ part.
I was also really sad that with the way it was written it almost makes it seem cruel that she didn’t tell Azriel about it for all those years. I just really really hate that? I am not supposed to blame someone for not coming out, everyone takes their own time until they feel comfortable enough to take that step. I feel like it was not ok for SJMaas to write her into that situation.
And plus it was just kind of unrealistic?? I remember someone on Tumblr pointing this out, now I can’t remember who, but are you really trying to tell me that Mor kept this a secret from her cousin the deamati and her friend the shadowsinger and spymaster for 500 years!!?? They should have found out by this point honestly.
2) The Resurrection
This is more of a personal pet peeve than anything. Maybe this is because I watched TVD for so long, but I really, really hate when people come pack to life like that. It’s fine when it’s someone that was never introduced to the story and was believe to be dead, or when we don’t know for sure if they are dead but when someone drops dead on the ground I expect them to stay dead.
I could swallow it when it was Feyre back in ACOTAR, I cringed when Jurian was resurrected but I draw the line at Rhys. It felt like cheating, and that’s not something I want to feel a few chapters before the book ends.
3) Tamlin
Tamlin was a wild ride. His character shifted so much throughout the book, and I understand a fair amount of that is due to the fact that we read the story through Feyre’s point of view. I really wanted to see some closure on the Tamlin plot line. He was such an essential part of Feyre’s arc, and he kind of got brushed to the side in most of ACOWAR. I really wanted to see a scene when they sit down and talk about what happened, I wanted him to recognize his mistakes and perhaps, I dunno apologize. I felt like Feyre still needed to say a few things to him to truly move on (same goes for him honestly). Obviously she has no obligation to have a conversation with her abuser if she does not feel like she is ready, but I think that it would have been a good way to complete her arc.
4) Lucien
Why did she get rid of him???
I started resenting Lucien a bit after the end of ACOMAF but I was so sold on him again by the start of the book.
Again Why did she get rid of him??
He had so much to add. why???? It felt like a cop out for not having to deal with elucien in this book.
His absence made me sad :’(
5) The Threads
I know, I know, this is just the end of feysand’s arc and there are going to be more books, but the number of unanswered questions I have is very annoying. I have more questions now that I finished the book than when I first started.
There are going to be more books but that does not change the fact that this is supposed to be the closing book in a trilogy. She should have ended a few more threads instead of leaving it all so open. ACOWAR almost felt like a week second-book-in-a-series. it felt more like a bridge book than the resolution to this section of the story.
6) Papa Archeron
Although I did appreciate that he died and stayed dead, I wish SJMaas had explored his relationship with his daughters a bit more. I wanted to see his reaction to them being Fae, or the inner circle’s reaction to meeting the man that gave up on their High Lady when she was a child. It would have been such good character conflict. I also felt like the Archeron sisters deserved more closure than just a last minute funeral.
7) Mor & Nesta
Why was Mor so mean to Nesta???
That felt so OOC of her. Can she not see that Nesta is going through some shit right now? They all expect Nesta to be very cruel and cold (which I would even argue is just a front [Feyre had literally told Cassian before that she thinks is a front but anyway not the point]) but I really didn’t expect Mor, a 500-year-old woman who has also seen some shit in her lifetime, to act that way to someone. She could have really used Mor’s help. Mor has no obligation to be there for Nesta when she is very rude towards most of them, but it would have been nice to see that friendship blossom.
8) Explanations
This point kind of relates to the previous point on threads. There was so, soo, so much thrown into this book, and not much of it was explained. People have already mentioned the lack in world building in the magic department, but even the subplots were lacking in context and explanation.
The continent territories that were briefly mentioned were just that, briefly mentioned. I don’t really know what the king’s Ravens were all about (why were they called the Ravens? why did they look like all black and white? was it coincidence? was it just for the aesthetics?) The cauldron was also not developed enough for something that is so significant in the story, we still don’t know what power Mor holds, (The power of truth?? What does hat even mean?) and apparently Azriel can turn into shadows, I think, but like how ???? how did he become a shadowsinger? do the shadows speak to him? And Elain being a seer? Was that explained? How do the death gods work? I thought they couldn’t die. I mean obviously not.
SO MANY QUESTIONS
9) Moriel
If you were a Moriel shipper you are put in a position where you either resent Mor’s sexuality (WHICH IS NOT HOW PEOPLE SHOULD FEEL, SPECIALLY FOR A BOOK THAT IS SOLD AS YA, A GENRE THAT TARGETS A YOUNG AUDIENCE) or you feel like your feelings toward the ship are/were invalid.
Moriel, to many of us, was written with the intention of being end game. I don’t think it was even a question for most people. It was almost heartless to give so much hope for a ship and then completely squash it, I don’t think that it was fair to the readers. She should have hinted at it a little more or just written this situation differently so that this didn’t happen. It was sad to see that something that was supposed to be such a positive representation, this strong independent woman that is also a member of the LGBTQ community, get caught in the middle of this. Sarah should have written this better.
10) Feysand
It was nice to see feysand happy but I wish we still got some development in their friendship. They have only known each other for a year, they have only really gotten to know each other 6 months (ish), I felt like their relationship could have been further explored maybe bringing in new sides to their personality.
11) Grammar and Diction
Ehhh well, there is definitely some improvement to be done in this section. It wasn’t horrible and it didn’t damage my understanding of the plot or the character but I have to agree with what people are saying, this book was severely under-edited.
The most prominent things that drove me insane were the sentence fragments, the use of –dashes– and …ellipses… in almost every page. Oh and the diction. The diction especially though. The one that stuck out to me was how many times she use ‘the former and the latter’ in her sentences. It is a good way to describe thoughts or action, but not when it is used every 3 chapters (I have the ebook, I checked). In my version of the book there is even a quotation mark missing (page 461 I believe). I understand that mistakes happen especially when writing a book this size, but this is a sequel to a best-selling series, and she probably has a whole team of people helping her with things like this.
Again, it just felt lazy. For a best-selling author, she should not have mistakes like these in her work. It became such distraction that I am now writing about it.
Anyway, this got a bit long but here are my 2 cents. I hope I didn’t offend or insult anyone, and if I did that was never my intention.
#acowar spoilers#anti acowar#writing this was so therapeutic honesty#I literally feel lighter#ask#anon
64 notes
·
View notes
Text
Title | she breaks me up, she lifts me up
Description | Prompt: April showers. High school AU. Childhood friends, Caitlin and Barry become estranged after their first kiss. Barry struggles to find his way back to normalcy for both of them, whether he wants it or not.
A/N: I love this fandom too much not to join in on the fun with this fluff piece. The OC inspired this one-shot from the episode, The Rainy Day Women. Also, click the title for a pretty sweet song.
-
‘Whatever you’re selling, I ain’t buying, Allen,’ Caitlin snaps, with teeth gritting.
She’s aggressively moving past him and anything else in her way, trying her best to evade him through the rush of their peers on their way to second period class. He pants after her, ‘Cait, this is different. If you could just give me a chance–’
‘You had your chance and you blew it.’ She doesn’t give him an edge in the conversation, and she clearly wants to end it. Her concentration is to her AP English class and she quickens her pace up the flight of stairs before them.
‘I know’, Barry agrees and he almost trips over his own feet on the final stair. ‘But, please–’
She steers a teetering platform sandal around, rooting her smaller yet intimidating frame in front of him, and he holds onto the railing to avoid being thrown down the staircase. The closeness, the tiny and almost indistinguishable freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose, gets to him. He can’t help his eyes wandering down from the fury in her eyes. It makes him gulp a dry lump in his throat.
The curve of her cupid’s bow. The tickle that erupts in an infectious giggle from the same lips. The tiny smile she makes across his own lips when they…
She must notice his staring. She points a finger to his chest, but she retrieves it before she touches him, ‘Don’t!’
He shakes his head. ‘I know I blew it, Cait.’
‘You have no idea, no idea,’ she puffs out audibly, cradling her books tighter to her chest. ‘It was humiliating.’
Caitlin Snow, for all the bruising words she’s landed and all the bluster she had shown him for the better half of the week, deflates. Finally, she mirrors how he feels or rather how he’s been feeling in the past several days.
Exactly, one week ago, when the girl of his dreams hadn’t decided he was persona non grata, Caitlin kissed him.
‘I’m sorry,’ Barry tries earnestly, hopefully. ‘But, I broke up with Patty right afterwards. I swear, I had meant to do it before you…’
The curve of her smile on his lips. The turn of her mouth, from sweet to concern. The realization and hurt in the swell of tears at the corners of her eyes.
The last thing he wanted was to complicate this friendship, even if he had always wanted more. At least, when it was a silent wish, it didn’t cause her this much pain. So, his chest tightens to see her furrowing brows, the difficult way she attempts to piece her thoughts together. ‘You should have told me Patty was still your girlfriend and you should have told Patty the truth before I did what I did.’
She only grants him a few furtive looks, no doubt pulling back her punches and jabs to his pride, but she settles on stalking off instead.
Not since kissing him, and letting her indulge in his selfish want of their ill-timed first kiss, he’s left dumbfounded.
He should have told his then-girlfriend, Patty, that he had been harbouring a crush on another girl all along. If he had to honest, it was always Caitlin, for longer than he can recall starting to notice the opposite sex.
Though, more importantly, he should have told Caitlin that he wasn’t exactly single and only estranged with Patty before Caitlin found him in a crowd of their closest friends to express everything he had only dreamt of expressing to her.
He should have found another way to make amends besides blasting Caitlin’s voicemail box full or visiting her home when her mother had insisted over and over again that her daughter was ‘out’.
And every rejected apology has him tracing back his steps to that damn kiss…
The wind knocked out of his lungs after the shock of her scolding him after he confessed of his mistake. The humiliation he felt for her and not for himself when she met Patty’s eyes on her way to escape him.
‘Leave me alone,’ she had raged and meant it when he chased after her.
Numb from his toes to his fingertips, he conceded and watched her leave him.
-
Patty, Caitlin and Felicity are in a study group. Cisco repeats via text, Patty, Caitlin and Felicity are laughing, chatting and enjoying each other’s company.
And they’re not being weird, Barry texts back. They’re not talking about…
Nope. Cisco spares him a humourous emoji.
He erases and texts a few words before settling on, I hope it’s not weird.
They’re not mourning your loss, and this time Cisco does send him some choice animated faces. They are the stronger sex.
The lack of response does make Cisco sympathize. Does it mean anything if Caitlin tends to start staring contests with Patty when she’s not looking?
You’re just saying that, comes his quick reply.
I guess it could mean anything, but…Cisco builds suspense with more ellipses.
Cisco…
You could wait and see what that means.Cisco ends the dramatic pause and Barry decides to take at least one win against the insurmountable losses so far.
-
But, he was never good at waiting, and he’s in motion again.
It would have been one month of their friendship of being intact and unscathed if they hadn’t kissed, if he hadn’t royally messed up their perfect situation. He wonders if he hadn’t ruined their chances, would Ronnie have happened?
Focus, he repeats secretly to himself. One foot in front of the other.
His one tracked mission takes him to the library, where she’s bound to be. There, he’d take his mother’s encouraging words and tell her, ‘against all the odds, even for our friendship back, give me one more chance.’
He makes it to the non-fiction literature section when he hears the infectious laughter that habitually has him grinning, but he quickly falls short of his sure footsteps when he hears someone else joining her.
‘What do you think? My family would love for you to join us for the holidays…’ Ronnie, of course, sounds confident in whatever he’s asking her. ‘It’d be a perfect way to introduce you to my parents too.’
‘Ronnie, do you think it’s too soon? I mean, it’s been a couple of weeks.’
‘If anything, come for the cruise food–the pizzeria there is bomb.’
‘Costa Rica…’ she pauses, and it makes Barry’s stomach churn tortuously while he listens on. ‘I can ask my parents,’ she finally relents.
Friendship, no, he regards his mother’s advice. He was never able to focus since Ronnie started to naturally appear at Caitlin’s side more and more. Now, he spies the way he looks at her, and he knows exactly what Ronnie’s thinking; Ronnie doesn’t want friendship any more than he does himself.
‘Allen!’ Felicity practically blares into his ear, catching him off guard, and he dares to peek through the shelves and books that separate Ronnie and Caitlin from himself–they spot him.
‘Cisco said he saw you making a beeline to the library. I need help with chem homework, can you help me during lunch?’
‘Um…’ Barry nervously taps his fingers on the back of his neck, and then imitates the same tempo under his jittery feet.
‘Barry?’ Caitlin comes around the corner. Concern etched into her features, and at least it’s not rage like the other interactions he’s found with her before.
Worse still, Ronnie joins them with a similar amount of pity in his stare.
‘Hello? Crisis here. The quiz is tomorrow, Barr.’ Felicity is confused, though nonplussed by the tension practically radiating off of Barry and Caitlin’s staring and ineffective starting and stopping of their thoughts.
It’s his turn to walk away this time, his stomach and heart pulsing in time to his fleeing steps.
When he arrives at home after a tortuously long day, he does so as discreetly as possible, feeling guilty because he doesn’t have the heart to tell his mother that her pep talk came of nothing. So, he tiptoes past the living room, where his parents nap in front of the television, and bolts as quickly as he can up the stairs to his bedroom.
Staring into the backyard, he watches the pittering and pattering of droplets splatter across his window. It was a mistake, of course, to brood this way. It was April, and the week long rain showers constantly reminded him that Caitlin loved to stay in when it poured. She liked the white noise and cozy days in bed, she once told him.
Because he hadn’t stopped ruminating yet, his thoughts trace back to the embarrassing exchange in the library. The way she obviously felt pity for him after finding him lurking behind a bookshelf, and it might have been amusing for Ronnie. Though he doubts someone as friendly and amiable as Ronnie could think so cruelly. God, he wanted to hate the guy. At least.
And because his thoughts surely didn’t need any more encouragement, he wonders if she’s peering out of her own window at this very moment. He even dares to conjure up a daydream of Caitlin saying ‘no’ to Ronnie. His brain floats with images of a sunset and Caitlin washed in its warm light as they share the view of an open sea.
-
‘These impromptu visits aren’t getting old, are they?’ Barry stalls by her bedroom door, knowing he’s trying her patience.
‘Well, as much as I’ve enjoyed pretending that I’ve been ‘out’ every time you’ve made these visits, I actually am tired of meeting this way.’
Before she closes the door on him, he tries and fails eloquence, ‘But–I–hear me out, please.’
‘You have two minutes.’
‘Well, you see, I could skip some talking points but then it wouldn’t make the kind of impact–’
‘One and a half minute left.’ She taps at an imaginary watch on her wrist.
‘Alright, let’s expedit this. I can do that,’ he puffs out a nervous laugh, and continues with his eyes closed as though he’s envisioning his words, ‘you’re my best friend. You have always been, no matter what.’
Nerves on fire, he opens his eyes, and she’s unfolded her crossed arms. His heart eases at the sight of her expectant gaze. Regardless of being estranged for some time, he is reminded of the fact that she is his best friend. He knows this look, among many others, with her eyes, the warmness and the open book way about them. And this look she wears now says she is listening.
‘I can’t imagine how the rest of our senior year is going to be if we continue the way we are now. Cait, I miss my best friend. Your laugh, your eyes going wide when you’re stressed, the way you make toast. Your opinion, the only one that matters to me. God, you’re right here and I still miss you.’
Maybe she’ll want to hear him say that he wants her too and spring forward the same way she had last time…
Except, there’s always an except. On her bed, in neat folds and piles, are her belongings in two separate luggage pieces.
‘Wow, you’re really going on that cruise.’ He can’t look at her when he assumes this.
She seems to ignore him. ‘Did you come here to say anything else, Barry?’
It’s strange how much of his resolve crumbles as he focuses on her sandals and sun hats lining her carry-on case.
‘Barry,’ she persists, forgetting her countdown altogether. She’s all ears now, and yet he can’t focus on her, but on her obvious intent on leaving for sunny days on the decks of a luxury cruise with Ronnie.
‘You should bring some SPF.’
‘Barry.’ Her annoyance is bubbling up again.
‘Safety first, right? I don’t see that in there.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yeah, don’t forget that.’ He inches away from her as he explains a few more facts about sunblock. Soon, he’s backed up against the wall down a hallway facing her bedroom and nearly knocks over a nearby vase.
She doesn’t say goodbye, but folds her arms again before she shuts the door after him.
-
‘Quit staring at your phone and make the call already,’ Cisco grouses. ‘We both know you won’t stop moping if you don’t decide.’
Guiltily, Barry finally acknowledges his promise to Cisco of a bro-to-bro, uninterrupted conversation about his missed connection at the Central City Mall. The One, Cisco described a sultry encounter with a mysterious brunette in a photobooth.
‘After I make this call, I promise I’ll give you my undivided–’
‘We’ll see,’ Cisco waves him off and busies himself with turning on the PS4 to kill the time before Barry returns.
Taking in a deep breath, Barry dials her number as he finds privacy in the adjoining room. While it rings, he almost hangs up a few times before he is interrupted by Caitlin’s voicemail message.
Today is the day Caitlin joins Ronnie on a two-week cruise, off into the sunset he imagines with a discernable sharp pain in the centre of his chest. The pain twists deeper when he decides her messaging system is a sign. With a few hours left before she leaves, as Felicity had pried to find out for him, he resigns.
‘Hey!’ He dials back with the ingenuine pitch in his voice. Clearing his throat, and trying again, he continues, ‘Cait, I, uh, hope you get this before you leave…’ He takes another measured breath. ‘I just wanted to say that I hope you have a good trip. I mean, I hope you and Ronnie have a really good trip. I know you might not believe me, but, truthfully,’ he takes his time to say his next few words, because it takes all of him to not be selfish again.
He could start a heartfelt speech about their friendship spanning their childhood having everything to do with how happy they could be. He could mention that Ronnie doesn’t know her as well as he does. He could start naming all her favourite book titles and the times they spent under the abandoned bleachers on the far side of the old football field, talking about nothing and everything.
But, finally, he reminds himself why he made the call in the first place, and he squashes the small voice that goads him on. ‘When you come back to school after break, I want you to be happy, with whoever you want to be happy with.’
He hangs up and finds Cisco lying face first into his couch.
‘Well, you need to fix this.’ Cisco he mumbles into the cushion he’s molded his face to.
‘Fix what?’
Without lifting his head, Cisco points to the racing lines of static across his flatscreen television. He mumbles again, something indecipherable.
‘What?’ Barry sighs audibly.
Cisco whips his head out of the cushion, ‘I will not be denied this one pleasure. You owe me.’
‘It’s pouring outside, can’t we just wait until it dies down?’
Cisco answers him with a thrusted hand grasping at a familiar piece of bright red and yellow polysynthetic material.
‘Where did you find that?’ Barry snatches it away from only seconds of recognition.
‘Your mom says you don’t have an umbrella or a raincoat. And since you need both hands to fix the satellite outside, you can at least keep your head dry.’
‘This,’ Barry staring at the unraveling memory from his childhood. ‘This is a Halloween mask that I can’t even tell fits.’
‘Halloween mask? Watch your mouth, that’s a silver age superhero. My personal hero–’
‘The Flash.’ Barry finishes for him as if he’s heard plenty of this tirade before.
Barry trudges outside in a mask he’s sure was more for Cisco’s enjoyment and less for his own comfort, and peers through the dark mesh of the mask’s eye holes to view the satellite dish in question.
As his clothes soak in the rain, distracting himself with the grey, temperamental skies, he decides he deserved this.
This is for ruining the rare gift of a friendship that has almost lasted his childhood.
This is for ruining his chances with a heartbreakingly beautiful, intelligent, kind girl–the girl.
This is…
From where he stands, on a step ladder he’s sure needs to be thrown out after this use, and through the dark mesh, he sees someone walking up the footpath to his front door.
‘Patty?’ He calls through a cupped hand at the side of his mouth. ‘What are you–’
‘Why haven’t you told Caitlin yet?’ She shouts, clinging tightly to the umbrella in her hand.
‘What–’ He tries to shout but she stands in front of his step ladder now, motioning him to come down. He follows her furious pointing to the bottom of the last rung of the ladder.
‘Why haven’t you told her about our break up? Are you a masochist?’
He tries to explain further but then she thrusts the umbrella underneath both of them, and gestures for him to take his mask off.
‘Why didn’t you let her know that you only spared me a real break up until after my sister’s wedding that day.’
‘Does it matter? I still lied…to both of you.’ He shakes his head, and knows that she’s as well meaning as Cisco and Felicity have been, helping boost his morale about his impossible situation with a girl who, for all he knows, is already stepping foot on an international cruise, walking hand in hand with a more deserving companion. He imagines the luxury ship putting even more vast distance between them.
Only, this girl that stands next to him now, with the hem of her skinny jeans growing wetter and wetter by the seconds he lets pass to think of her sacrifice here, is struggling. He knows the way her words, hesitant and tempered since their break up, means she’s hiding what it actually means for her to be in the pouring rain to call him out on his feelings for another girl.
‘I’m sorry.’ His guilt intensifies by the millionth time he realizes he never deserved someone like Patty Spivot or her undying affection for him.
‘Like I haven’t heard your ten voicemails and how many times Cisco has spoken for you.’ She adds with a small, ironic smile, ‘It did hurt, Barry. Could you have been honest from the start? Sure. But, I guess it hurt a little less because I knew about Caitlin all along. I was kind of relieved when you finally told me.’
He helps her steady the umbrella barely shielding her. ‘So, why doesn’t any this, what is supposed to make sense, your understanding or your helping me, feel right?’
She shrugs, ‘I guess, it’s all in vain because you won’t just tell her the truth. Or, she won’t tell you the truth. I don’t know. All I know is I’m soaking in the rain and you won’t make up your mind.’
He tries to retort, but she cuts him off, and he has to focus on her new, intent glare. ‘You’re a good guy. You have impeccable timing,’ she can’t help but giggle here, ‘but you are a sweet, decent guy. You let her go just because you thought it would make her happy. So, don’t stand here in this ridiculous rain and make me look like an idiot. Don’t waste what you meant to do in the first place, don’t waste what happened to us or how incredibly cool I’m being about this, and don’t waste how she obviously feels.’
‘How she–’
‘Of course she still wants you!’ She exasperates. ‘She hasn’t even left with Ronnie…she ended it, and Ronnie left.’
‘It’s true, his solo pics on the MS Saint Lucia are all over the ‘gram.’ Cisco calls from the front porch, twizzler between his teeth. ‘Go get her, and wear protection!’ He smirks as he gestures to the mask in Barry’s grasp.
‘What about your thing?’ He asks Cisco, sheepish.
‘You mom just invited me for pot roast, you’re forgiven for now. But you,’ he points a half eaten twizzler in Barry’s direction. ‘Owe me a big one.’
His phone buzzes in his pocket, and for the second time today, he takes signs from the powers that be with even more fervent belief. Especially since Felicity writes three punctuated words: Go. To. Her.
In retrospect, the bike wasn’t a very good mode of transportation to choose, as he grips the soles of shoes to the pedals below him. Every turn makes him wish he had pleaded his father for the minivan instead.
But, he was desperate to not lose his footing on the winding pedals of his bike or precious time. Another block past his neighbourhood would lead him right to Caitlin’s.
So distracted with his drenched state, the speech he’d been mulling over and the way his feet keep tempting him to slip, he almost misses the rev of an engine following close behind him.
It lurches to a stop once he does and the rapid beating in his chest suddenly shoots up to his throat. Through the windshield and as the wipers make the vision clearer, he sees Caitlin parked on the side of the road directly behind him.
Her bewildered stare does nothing to make him move. He only stares back, and pants from exhaustion. It takes Caitlin stepping out into the rain in what he assumes is the summery dress she meant to wear for balmy, tropical weather to make him move.
Jumping off his bike, he walks right up to her, opening an umbrella above them.
‘Barry?’ She seems puzzled.
‘Yeah?’
She points to his face. He attempts to rub off whatever is distracting her on his teeth and then it clicks, and he peels the Flash mask off.
‘How did you recognize me?’ He wonders, smiling because half of a hazy memory comes to answer this.
‘How many halloweens did you insist on wearing that costume?’ She asks her own self-answering question.
Silence falls abnormally quick between their soft laughter. The downpour surrounding them does little to distract from this, and it’s maddening.
Maddening because silence had never been a problem for them, it comfortably came and went in everything they did together. In fact, when it was time to study, pause from a phone conversation or eat at the diner across Cisco’s house, it gave Barry a chance to glance. It gave him time to contemplate and realize and fall for the girl before him now.
But, now, he wonders if the look she’s offering him means she hasn’t completely forgotten those feelings too.
‘You didn’t go,’ he hopes he sounds sobered by this fact and not completely mad with excitement. Though he can’t help a smile prickling to emerge on his lips.
‘Of course, I didn’t. I was headed for your place instead.’ She sighs, a watery-eyed smile spreads across her face. She clings to the umbrella he holds now, holding his grip within hers, coming closer, bumping her sneakers against his.
There’s that closeness again. She doesn’t give him a chance to concentrate elsewhere, and only at the tiny freckles, the gleaming in her eyes, and how sincerely happy she looks.
‘I can explain everything, I mean it.’ He offers, cautiously.
‘You can and you will.’ She tells him matter-of-factly. ‘But, for now, is it alright if I kiss my best friend? Or, is there anything else I should know? Because I swear Barry if–’
He’s too gleeful to wait, nods and shakes his head to answer both her queries, while dipping low to meet her amused lips. The umbrella wobbles slightly as Caitlin adjust her height to tip toe to meet another deeper kiss.
Another maddening silence falls between them, though one he welcomes.
End.
35 notes
·
View notes
Link
MOUNT RUSHMORE NATIONAL MEMORIAL, S.D. — At the foot of Mount Rushmore and on the eve of Independence Day, President Donald Trump dug deeper into America’s divisions by accusing protesters who have pushed for racial justice of engaging in a “merciless campaign to wipe out our history.”
The president, in remarks Friday night at the South Dakota landmark, offered a discordant tone to an electorate battered by a pandemic and seared by the recent high-profile killings of Black people. He zeroed in on the desecration by some demonstrators of monuments and statues across the country that honor those who have benefited from slavery, including some past presidents.
Four months from Election Day, his comments amounted to a direct appeal to the political base, including many disaffected white votes, that carried him to the White House in 2016.
“This movement is openly attacking the legacies of every person on Mount Rushmore,” Trump said. He lamented “cancel culture” and charged that some on the political left hope to “defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.” He said Americans should speak proudly of their heritage and shouldn’t have to apologize for its history.
“We will not be terrorized, we will not be demeaned, and we will not be intimidated by bad, evil people,” Trump added. “It will not happen.”
The speech and fireworks at Mount Rushmore came against the backdrop of a pandemic that has killed over 125,000 Americans. The president flew across the nation to gather a big crowd of supporters, most of them maskless and all of them flouting public health guidelines that recommend not gathering in large groups.
The discord was heightened as the Trump campaign confirmed during the president’s speech that Kimberly Guilfoyle, a top fundraiser for the campaign and the girlfriend of Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr., had tested positive for the coronavirus while in South Dakota. Both Guilfoyle and Trump Jr., who serves as a top surrogate for the president, are isolating themselves and have canceled public events, according to Sergio Gor, chief of staff to the Trump campaign’s finance committee.
During the speech, the president announced he was signing an executive order to establish the National Garden of American Heroes, a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the “greatest Americans to ever live.”
Amid the campaign headwinds, the president has sharpened his focus on his most ardent base of supporters as concern grows inside his campaign that his poll numbers in the battleground states that will decide the 2020 election are slipping.
Trump in recent weeks has increasingly lashed out at “left-wing mobs,” used a racist epithet to refer to the coronavirus and visited the nation’s southern border to spotlight progress on his 2016 campaign promise to build a U.S.-Mexico border wall.
The event, while not a campaign rally, had the feel of one as the friendly crowd greeted Trump with chants of “Four more years!” and cheered enthusiastically as he and first lady Melania Trump took the stage.
“They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive,” Trump said. “But no, the American people are strong and proud, and they will not allow our country and all of its values, history and culture to be taken from them.”
Republican Gov. Kristi Noem echoed Trump’s attacks against his opponents who “are trying to wipe away the lessons of history.”
“Make no mistake: This is being done deliberately to discredit America’s founding principles by discrediting the individuals who formed them,” she said.
The small town of Keystone, which lies a couple of miles from the monument, was buzzing with people Friday hoping to catch a glimpse of the fireworks and the president. Many wore pro-Trump T-shirts and hats. Few wore masks.
“This is going to rank up in the top Fourth of Julys that I talk about,” said Mike Stewhr, who brought his family from Nebraska.
Mike Harris of Rapid City, who said he was a Republican, wore a mask and waved an anti-Trump flag. He also was sporting a handgun on each hip. He said he was worried the event would spark a COVID-19 outbreak.
“I think it’s a bad example being set by our president and our governor,” Harris said.
Leaders of several Native American tribes in the region raised concerns that the event could lead to virus outbreaks among their members, who they say are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 because of an underfunded health care system and chronic health conditions.
“The president is putting our tribal members at risk to stage a photo op at one of our most sacred sites,” said Harold Frazier, chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe.
Some Native American groups used Trump’s visit to protest the Mount Rushmore memorial itself, pointing out that the Black Hills were taken from the Lakota people.
More than 100 protesters, many Lakota, lined the road leading from Keystone to the monument holding signs and playing Lakota music in 95-degree heat. Some held their fists in the air as cars loaded with event attendees passed by. Others held signs that read “Protect SoDak’s First People,” “You Are On Stolen Land” and “Dismantle White Supremacy.”
“The president needs to open his eyes. We’re people, too, and it was our land first,” said Hehakaho Waste, a spiritual elder with the Oglala Sioux tribe.
About 15 protesters were arrested after blocking a road and missing a police-imposed deadline to leave.
Several people who once oversaw fire danger at the national memorial had said setting off fireworks over the forest was a bad idea that could lead to a large wildfire. Fireworks were called off after 2009 because a mountain pine beetle infestation increased the fire risks.
Noem pushed to get the fireworks resumed soon after she was elected, and enlisted Trump’s help. The president brushed aside fire concerns earlier this year, saying: “What can burn? It’s stone.”
Trump has presided over a several large-crowd events — in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and at an Arizona megachurch — even as health officials warn against large gatherings and recommend face masks and social distancing. He plans a July Fourth celebration on the National Mall in Washington despite health concerns from D.C.’s mayor. Trump and Melania Trump plan to host events from the White House South Lawn and from the Ellipse.
___
Madhani reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in Washington and Todd Richmond in Madison, Wisconsin, contributed to this report.
0 notes
Last Seen Blogs
softneomiro
._._._.
stayffree
lost in you
checanty
Jana Heidersdorf Illustration
babyminssii
-ˏˋ꒰ 𝕡𝕣𝕠𝕞𝕚𝕤𝕖 𝕞𝕖 ♡ ˎˊ˗
cheaki
Untitled