#but there were so many terms that I Did Not Know
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Stupid teenager in love
Ace seems to be in deep denial about his feelings for the prefect. Everyone can tell the heartslabyul first year has feelings for the prefect of ramshackle but he’s still denying it! So, the rest of the first year gang take it upon themselves to help Ace come to terms with his feelings.
Ace trappola x gn! Reader
Genre: Fluff (shocker), the first year gang smacking some sense into Ace, Ace getting jealous, and um that’s it🤍
-
A loud cackle can be heard in the lounge as some people nearby glanced at their booth and some even gave them weird looks. The first year gang side eye ace. They were all trying to have a serious conversation with the red head but he couldn’t even take the situation seriously!
“Me? In love with the prefect? HAHA! Please as if!”
“We never said that you were in love with them”
“Oh” His face heats up before he quickly looks away.
“But you guys are making it seem like I am!” He says as he rolls his eyes.
“Yeah, but we wouldn’t be surprised if you were” It was Jack who spoke as he sighs and shakes his head. Ace just groans as he slumps further down onto the chair.
“Jeez why do you guys even think I like the prefect anyway?” Everyone looked at him in utter disbelief as he continued to talk.
“Are you being serious right now?”
“Yer so dumb it’s actually making my head hurt!”
“I know you’re dumb, but I didn’t know you were this dumb”
“Hey!”
“It’s a shame your parents have you as their child!”
“Okay that's so not cool!” He glares at them before getting up from his seat and grabbing his bag.
“I don’t know how many more times I have to say this but I’m only going to say it once. I don’t like the prefect!”
And he stomps off.
The rest of the group give each other a knowing look.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Yep”
“Uh huh”
“Unfortunately”
“He’s a stupid teenager in love”
“Agree” they all say in unison”
-
Giggles can be heard in the gym as Ace glowing glare is directed towards his upperclassman. The water bottle in his hand is crushed by how tightly he’s holding it.
“Jamil! You did really well in today's game!” You say as you hand him a water bottle. Jamil smiles and takes it from your hands. Thanking you before the two of you continue to talk.
“Oooo what’s got crabby so mad?” Ace was so busy glaring daggers at Jamil that he didn’t notice Floyd sneaking up behind him.
“Fuck off Floyd!”
“Eh? What did you just say?”
Shit
“Just leave me alone and go bother someone else”
“Mmm don’t wanna!~”
Ace just decides to ignore him as he continues to watch you and Jamil interact.
Why do you look so happy? And why are you being all touchy touchy towards Jamil?! Do you like him or something?
As ace continues to list off all the different possibilities about why you were so close to Jamil, that he didn’t notice the ball that was heading towards him at a ridiculously fast pace.
“Ace!”
“Ace look out!!”
He snaps out of his thoughts and his eyes turn to look at you.
“Huh?”
SMACK!!
The loud sound of a ball hitting something was heard in the gym as gasps echoed across the whole room.
Ace felt his whole face burn as he hisses at the impact of the ball hitting him. He groaned as he felt liquid fall from his nose.
“Ace!” He slowly opened his eyes to be met with your worried face.
He could feel his whole face flush
“Ace! Oh my sevens are you okay?”
“Floyd, why'd you do that?!”
“He was ignoring me and being rude!” Jamil just sighs as he massages his temple and sucks in a deep breath.
“Prefect, You don’t mind taking him to the infirmary do you?”
“Of course not! Ace c’mon I’m taking you to the nurses office!”
“Ughh”
“Floyd”
“Aww you guys are so boring and mean! It was funny!”
-
The trip to the nurse’s office was quick. You sat next to Ace as he held the ice pack near his injury. He was mumbling stuff under his breath as he stared into space.
“Ace”
Nothing
“Acee”
Still nothing
“Ace!”
“Huh” He hisses and holds his head as a massive headache forms. You quickly pass him a water and make- well more like force him to lay on your lap.
“What’d you do to make Floyd throw a basketball at you?” He scoffs as he rolls his eyes.
“I didn’t do anything!” He winces when he feels the headache come back again.
“Well you must’ve done something! He said you were ignoring him and being rude”
“What?!” He regrets it once his head starts hurting again.
“You should stop moving and shouting too much! That’s why your headache keeps coming back to get your ass!”
“Whatever”
“Anyways, what did you do?��
“I already told you, I didn’t do anything” he mumbles. Enjoying being able to lay down on your lap.
Wait what?
No he’s not enjoying it! He’s just trying to get comfortable!
“Mm that’s not what Mr mood swings said”
“Ugh I don’t-“ He stops his sentence once he remembers.
Right
He was to busy glaring daggers at Jamil that he didn’t bother paying attention to Floyd
“Fuck my life” He says as he closes his eyes.
You tilt your head in confusion before continuing to comb your hands through his hair.
It was silent. Neither of you were talking and the two of you didn’t mind that. It was rather a comfortable silence.
That is until the doors to the infirmary were slammed open.
“What happened?”
“Ha you dummy! What ya do to make Floyd throw a ball at you?” Epel laughs as ace glares at him.
“Shut up you dwarf!”
“Eh?! Oh you little-“
“That’s enough” You thank Jack as he just nods at you before looking down at Ace who was currently laying on your lap. He raises a brow before looking at the others.
Deuce, epel, and sebek give each other a knowing look before deuce smirks.
“I see you're doing okay now. Do you feel comfortable ace?” You can hear the slight tease in his voice as you only chuckle.
The red head only looks at him confused until he realizes that he’s laying on your lap. He quickly shoots up but later regretting it as the headache from earlier quickly rushes to him.
“Shut up!” He quickly gets up before stumbling out of the nurse’s office.
“What’s up with him?” You ask. The others just shrugged.
If only you knew
-
It’s been a constant battle with ace and the first years. They have been trying for the last couple of weeks to help Ace come to terms with his feelings towards you. But he’s just too stubborn!
He doesn’t believe he likes you that way!
You’re his friend! He’s the first friend you made when you first got here!
The two of you only see each other as friends!
Nothing more, nothing less.
Just friends
That’s what he likes to believe
He was still bitter at the way you were being all warm and cozy with Jamil BUT that’s because he doesn’t want you to replace him!
He definitely wasn’t jealous
Nope nada nu uh
Definitely not because of that
The walk to the mirror chambers felt longer than usual. He was busy scrolling through twsttok that he didn’t hear his name being called from behind him.
“Ace, don't make me throw something at you!”
Now that got his attention
He quickly turns around to only see you
You
“Mm? What do you want?”
“Ouch. You don’t want me around or something?” You joke and he just rolls his eyes.
“I was just teasing”
“Yeah I know” You walked beside him as he continued scrolling down the app.
“Where’s grim?”
“With the rest of the first years” He frowns. Weird, you never go anywhere without that furball.
“So why were you looking for me?”
“Hey I just wanted to spend some time with you” He felt his face flush.
Shit! Say something!
“Am I that charming that you couldn’t resist being away from me for too long?” He teases. He was trying so hard to not make it look like your words held so much power over him.
“Yeah you’re so charming that I can’t spend a second away from you”
His eyes widen
Okay he definitely didn’t expect that
You laugh as you smacked his shoulder
“What? You expected me to just stand there and say nothing back?”
“I well duh!” You rolled your eyes.
“No but seriously. I do want to spend some time with you”
“Well I can’t blame ya. I’m just toooo irresistible!”
“More like irritating”
The both of you laughed as you made your way to the mirror chamber.
Sevens, when was the last time Ace felt like taking someone out on a date and having the urge to kiss them?
His last relationship didn’t end all too well but with you. He just feels more…well alive.
But there’s no way in all of twisted wonderland that you won’t feel some sort of way for him.
“Y’know…I notice how weird you have been acting lately”
“Eh? Weird? Ugh, the weird one is you!”
“Shut up pea brain!” You smacked him as he only laughs.
You look cute when you’re all riled up.
“Anyways as I was saying! I noticed you have been acting rather strangely these couple of months”
“How?”
“Well for starters, you’ve been awfully clingy around me, you got ten times more protective, and you literally scare away every guy who tries to talk to me. Why’s that?” Ace's grip on his bag tightens as he tries to not look at you.
“Don’t know what your talking about”
“Oh c'mon you know exactly what I’m talking about”
“Nope. Not a single clue” You sigh as you stop walking completely.
“Ace” He stops walking and turns around to face you.
“What?”
“Why do you keep denying it?”
What
“What?” His brows furrowed as he frowned.
“Why do you keep denying that you like me?”
It’s almost like time stops completely. The two of you just stood there. Not saying a single word.
Until you spoke up
“Am I that bad or embarrassing for you to admit-“
“No!” You flinch at his tone and he immediately shuts up.
“No it’s not that! It’s just-“
“Then what is it? I've been waiting for a confession for ages yet you still haven’t told me anything!”
“Just tell me the truth. Do you like me or not?”
He just stood there. Shocked.
A flash of hurt was seen in your features before you sighed and turned around.
“Wait!”
You stopped and turned around to see Ace right in front of you.
Fuck it
“I do like you! I always have! I just never came to terms with my feelings because I knew you never saw me as something else but a friend!”
Fuck
Fuck
Fuck
He did it
He actually did it
And he could feel himself cringe at the cheesy words but he didn’t care.
He wants you to know that he likes you. More than just a friend.
You stared at him before you broke into a fit of giggles.
“Huh? What’s so funny?”
“I know”
“What” you smiled at him before booping his nose.
“I said I know. I always knew you liked me. I was just waiting for you to finally say something”
WHAT?!
“HUH?!” You giggle before kissing his cheek.
“It’s okay because I also like you too!”
Ace just stood there frozen.
“Finally!”
“Sevens you were going to give me an aneurysm with how long you took to confess”
“Congratulations trappola! You finally gathered the courage to confess to the prefect!”
“Congrats dummy”
“Yuck! All this lovey dovey stuff is making me sick!” Grim complains as he sticks out his tongue. You only giggle before looking back at Ace who was still lost.
“You okay?”
“Yeah I am….why didn’t you ever say you liked me back?”
“Because I wanted you to say it first. It took some pushing but you still told me first nonetheless” He just shakes his head before smiling.
“But I guess it wasn’t a lie when I said that I was irresistible”
“Ugh fuck off”
Now it was his turn to laugh
They were right
He’s just a stupid teenager in love
-
My very first fluff fic??😱 (I think… idk I forgot😭)
Anyways I just wanted to write something sweet and cute so I hope you guys like!🤍🤍🤍
#inuiiwonderland🤍#twisted wonderland#twisted wonderland x reader#twst x reader#twst x gn reader#twisted wonderland x gn reader#twst heartslabyul#twst ace#twst ace trappola#twisted wonderland ace#ace x reader#ace trapolla x reader#twst fluff#twisted wonderland fluff#twst imagines#disney twst#twst first years#twst deuce#twst jack#twst epel#twst sebek#twst grim
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No one asked but I have a take haha.
I have zero problem with buck and eddie being an item, the biggest problem I have is their stans acting the way they are now with the current storyline with tommy.
I mean, I hate to break it to the b*ddie st*ns but you can think your friends are hot and like, not want to pursue them, whether you realize you’re queer or not. The fans are undermining so much of the current storyline that it makes me sad.
Im as aroace as one can be, but also I have eyes lol. I see hot/attractive people, I of course can admit that they are hot/attractive. It doesn’t mean that I want to be with them specifically sexually or romantically.
Also, figuring out your sexuality is confusing and weird. I definitely thought I had a crush on a friend solely because they were a person I got along with and spent a lot of time with and thought that was what I was supposed to do (by the time I thought I was allo).
What I mean is that it’s not always black and white when it comes to what attraction is.
Another thing, and this is pure speculation on my part: the actors are VERY aware of b*ddie and know that it’s one of the biggest reasons people keep watching the show, so they might keep on stirring the pot a bit in the interviews because they know it can create enough buzz for the show to trend and make the network/producers/investors keep renewing it so they can keep their jobs for as long as possible.
Im not saying b*ddie fans are delusional or anything like that but I am really disappointed how many of them (or at least a loud minority) is treating the canon ship as if it’s a stepping stone for another that has yet to be fully confirmed on screen. Sure there are signs in retrospect, but like I said, you can think someone is attractive without wanting to be with them.
This whole thing of buck having always been in love with eddie irks me a bit as it falls in a trope I don’t personally like (someone sticking around because they are pining over their friend the whole time and the friendship is a stepping stone to romance). I mean, if b*ddie happens and it’s done well, I’m all for it. What I really don’t want to happen is the trope I mentioned above. If it’s meant to happen, the best way in my opinion is for the two guys to develop those feelings with time, not it being a realization that they were in love the whole time. Heck, there are dcoms that did friends to lovers quite decently in the past and it wasn’t a “it has always been youuu” situation.
In conclusion, the only thing we gotta take is what is confirmed on screen, in canon. If we are supposed to listen to anyone talking about ships and storyline is Tim Menear and the other writers. And what has been confirmed so far by Tim is that Buck was jealous of Eddie being with Tommy because he was attracted to Tommy without realizing it. In canon so far, that’s what is happening and you have to accept that. The story is about Buck coming to terms with his bisexuality and him and Tommy being in a romantic relationship.
#by the way I only censored b*ddie because the stans scare me#also if I didn’t make it clear in this long as post I ship bucktommy#I really love them together and I’d love them to be endgame#also actors can say whatever shit they want in interviews yall#they aren’t writing the show#just cause they are pro a ship doesn’t mean it will be canon#of course they can be#also also#this isn’t marvel#the network doesn’t care if they are spoiling or straight up lying#anyway I already talked too much#I hope I don’t get chased with pitchforks lmao#lety rambles#911#911 abc#oliver stark#bucktommy#tevan#firefly#firepilot
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"I wish I could've realised sooner that I loved you"
pairing: Sebastian X GN!Reader (no gendered terms used x)
summary: Just sebastian reflecting on his experience with the farmer and realising a little too late about his feelings for them
warnings: a little angsty but not really
A/N: first fic uploaded here! I saw the prompt on Pinterest "I wish I could've realised sooner that I loved you" and just wanted to write this so pls be nice or I'll bite x
He remembers the buzz that spread through Pelican Town about a new farmer coming to town. The excitement didn't grip him like it did the others. Instead, he just thought, 'Why the hell would anyone move to this shithole?'. But then came the day when you first crossed paths with him—or rather, when you sought him out, you sought everyone out, eager to make friends. You approached him with a bright look in your eye he couldn't reciprocate at the time. You asked questions, so many questions, though he didn't always bother with full answers. Yet, you didn't seem to mind, simply smiling in response.
In fact, you seemed to seek him out persistently, showing up wherever he happened to be. He couldn't help but wonder, 'Who the hell would want to hang out with me so much?' And hang around you did—always, it seemed. He had to give you credit for your persistence. It never occurred to him that you sought him out specifically, remembering every little detail he let slip during your conversations. Heck, he couldn't even recall half the things he shared with you. Conversation had never been his strong suit, especially not with someone new. It was just another trivial aspect of this mundane town.
And then, there were the gifts. Those moments when you'd approach him with that smile, hands hidden behind your back as you presented a small trinket, like a frozen tear he offhandedly mentioned he thought looked cool—a token of your affection. He didn't usually receive gifts, except from his mom or Sam on his birthday and Christmas. He never really cared for them either. It was a gesture that caught him off guard, and yet here you were, offering him one on a random day for no apparent reason. Little did he realize then how commonplace such acts would become, or how often you thought of him, or how much thought and care you put into each token you gave him, but he did always make sure to be careful when handling your gifts. And he had to admit, a small smile would tuck at the corners of his lips every time he looked at them, not knowing how much he would begin to treasure them. He had to admit, it was nice, you were nice.
You were an awfully good listener, and even better at making him talk, which was irritating. Given that you always talked to him, he supposed you rubbed off on him, it just seemed easier to talk about things with you. He wished he'd listened to those details more in the beginning, perhaps even given you gifts of the things you said you liked. It turned out he didn't mind listening to you; he actually enjoyed it. He remembers a lot of it, like how you wished you played the keyboard as well as him, and how he offered to teach you, light-heartedly but never did. He wished he did now.
He remembers how he got annoyed whenever you initially tried to talk to him, thinking you were just dragging on the conversation for the sake of it. That turned to confusion when you didn't let up, even after settling into town. He never thought those would turn out to be the favourite parts of the day, or that he would be the one seeking you out. He can't believe he used to be annoyed by it. Even worse, he can't believe how much he would miss it when you two would talk alone, at night, where he knew only you heard the things he told you. When he knew how much you heard him and saw him. How you always smiled and never laughed at him or judged him for wanting to leave this town or be alone.
Nobody saw him the way you did.
He noticed you smiled a lot. Who wouldn't, he thinks, with a smile like that? He doesn't know how he didn't realize it sooner, but seeing your smile so often left the image permanently scored in his brain. The corners of your eyes would crease, and you would tilt your head slightly. Such a stark contrast to him. Oh, he rarely smiled, not because he was sad, he just didn't find many things worth smiling for, which you often rolled your eyes at. He remembers how you called his smile nice and that he should do it more, but he didn't think he would. Oh no, he was not like you.
You smiled at everything, the little things and the big things and the things he found annoying. So much so, he even began to notice how you had so many different smiles. The one where you were happy, when you were excited, sarcastic, the big ones, the small ones, the forced ones, even when you were actually mad or sad or nervous. Even if it was just through your eyes, each subtly different, but he learned to notice. He had never noticed back then how the smile you showed him was different from the ones you gave everyone else.
Until they weren't.
And he never thought the day would come when he wished you'd only smile for him
He never imagined you actually liked him. Yes you were nice, you were lovely, in fact, but you were like that with everyone. He never really paid much mind to the way you blushed when asking him to dance with you at the flower dance. That stupid dance Mayor Lewis insisted on having that bored him to tears. He remembers at the time thinking he would've wanted to dance with Abigail if he had to, but now he can't believe he said no to you. How could he have said no to you? He thinks he would not mind if you asked again, to dance with you.
In fact, he doesn't think he'd mind a lot of things now that you were here. He stopped feeling so sick of Pelican Town, for one. He thinks he could stay, maybe on your farm. And he visited much more than he ever thought he would.
But now he notices how the smile you give him now is different than before. A subtle difference, but he could never forget it now. Now you gave him the smile you gave everyone else, just now noting they were different - warmer.
He wanted to go back.
Now he notices how you don't actively track him down the way you used to, thinking he’d hear you knock on his door the way you always did, at the time you alwasy did, and he finds himself wanting to do the same to you.
He doesn't know if he's being dramatic at first, but when you don't ask him to dance with you at the flower dance, his heart sinks a little. He thought to ask you, perhaps, since you were friends now. Yes, you were friends now, one of his closest friends.
Oh, but then you asked Sam next to him, and you laughed, saying 'it would be fun.' And then his heart doesn't only sink but full on plummets to his stomach.
You're right, it would be fun, Sebastian thinks. But the feeling of watching you dance with somebody else made him want to throw up, and he didn't know why…
Until he did. He didn't want to admit it to himself, but he did. How embarrassing, he thinks - he wished he realised he had fallen for you sooner, before you fell out of love with him.
#stardew valley#stardew sebastian#stardew farmer#stardew fanfic#stardew fandom#stardew valley fanfic#stardew valley sebastian#sebastian x farmer#sebastian x y/n#fanfic#x reader#sdv#sdv sebastian#sdv fanfic#sdv fandom
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Welcome back. You’re very informative.
I’m very confused about how numerous people, from you, to other antisocial people speaking from their experiences (some of which I learned are actually friends) to prosocial researchers of ASPD say that antisocial people see relationships as transactional. It’s not weird that you guys see it that way, it’s more like “and prosocials… don’t???” Because I’m certain I’m prosocial. I’m neurodivergent, sure, but no signs of ASPD. So, how do most prosocial people typically view relationships if they’re not transactional?
So I find prosocials and pwASPD both tend to think “but doesn’t everybody” when we hear this - it’s a super undescriptive term - but we’re thinking different things define something as transactional. We also see the reason for that transaction to be different.
From a prosocial generally, they’ll mean “I only want to be around people that ‘don’t drain my energy’, that don’t just take take take, that we mutually enjoy the friendship/relationship and want to be around each other”. That’s kinda their definition of getting something out of it, and they want everyone to get something out of it. If they’re draining you, they want you to be free of it so you can be happy, and the transactions involved can be purely emotional/vibes. The reason they feel this way is a desire for positive and enjoyable social connection; the consequence for an uneven/bad/missing transaction is discomfort and wasting their time in negative experiences and generally feeling bad in association with that person.
PwASPD see those transactions very very literally. There’s no vibes nor emotions in the transactions, those are either a reaction to the transaction or a bonus. We mean that we are getting something tangible or practical out of it. Rides, help with things we can’t or don’t want to do alone, sex, maybe even the social relief from the annoyance of “why don’t you ever talk to anyone?” coming from all sides. We also don’t always care if it’s even on the other person’s end. If they’re ok driving me everywhere/if they do it and don’t say or show they’re uncomfortable, then I will assume they are fine with that piece of the transaction. If I’m taking more than I’m giving and they seem chill with that then I’ll accept it. However, I won’t give them *nothing* and that’s because of our reason for transactions - it’s dangerous otherwise. First off, I have shit I need I can’t get myself as much as it sucks, so I need to be around people. But if we need something from them, what we learned in our childhoods is that we don’t get that for free. There’s always something over your head. A lot of pwASPD had friends or caregivers that would hold favors or even *basic, legally-mandated caregiving* over our heads as though we didn’t deserve it. Often our value was determined as a child by what we provided, and since children can’t provide much, we were worthless and not deserving of good treatment.
This is part of the reason (TW non-descriptive CSA mention, skip to the next paragraph if you want) that people thought ASPD was directly correlated with CSA for a long time - many cases of long term CSA come from either “I’ll give you x/do x for you if you help me with this” or worse, doing something first then saying “but I gave you X!/did X for you! I wouldn’t have if I knew you’d act like this”, often call us selfish if we tried to say no and maybe get aggressive or forceful after, and that is an easy lead-in to our view of interactions.
So a lot of us see it that if we want to be safe/know we can continue to get what we need, we HAVE to be giving them something. If you claim you like being around me “just to be around me” or worse that you’re willing to do something for me “just because I want to”, that’s not safe. You want something from me and I’ll give it to you - just tell me what it is. If you’re not telling me, that means it’s not good or you’re just gonna decide later that I’m selfish. You might hurt me to get what you want and justify it with this. Take something from my side so we’re even, because even means safe. Even means I get access to what I need and you get access to what you need - so now we’re both using this relationship/friendship/etc for something and you wouldn’t wanna mess that up by putting me in danger any more than I’d want to mess it up by putting you in danger.
Of course, not every prosocial sees it the first way and not every pwASPD had those experiences and/or sees it that way. But that’s what I’ve found to be common. If you see “they make me happy” as what your or their end of the transaction is, it’s definitely a prosocial response, maybe with the exception of thinking of it as “getting their brain to dopamine/oxytocin” vs caring how they’re actually feeling. If not, if you need it to be practical, that’s definitely transactional.
It’s important to note this is personal relationships with no practical consequences to ending the relationship - most people see relationships (platonic) with coworkers or managers as transactional and that’s a way I usually explain it to prosocials (“do you deal with your boss bc you like them or bc they sign your check - and would your boss keep you hired if you didn’t do your job because you make them happy just by being there?”). But with a romantic or sexual partner, a friend, etc. this is not a typical view of relationships.
That said - you can *absolutely* not have ASPD and have transactional view of relationships. It’s not a 1:1 thing there; not everyone with ASPD has it and not every prosocial doesn’t. It’s just a really common piece of the puzzle that is this personality disorder.
Edit: ack I’m so sorry I forgot to add the csa tw tags they’re there now.
Plain text below the cut:
So I find prosocials and pwASPD both tend to think “but doesn’t everybody” when we hear this - it’s a super undescriptive term - but we’re thinking different things define something as transactional. We also see the reason for that transaction to be different.
From a prosocial generally, they’ll mean “I only want to be around people that ‘don’t drain my energy’, that don’t just take take take, that we mutually enjoy the friendship/relationship and want to be around each other”. That’s kinda their definition of getting something out of it, and they want everyone to get something out of it. If they’re draining you, they want you to be free of it so you can be happy, and the transactions involved can be purely emotional/vibes. The reason they feel this way is a desire for positive and enjoyable social connection; the consequence for an uneven/bad/missing transaction is discomfort and wasting their time in negative experiences and generally feeling bad in association with that person.
PwASPD see those transactions very very literally. There’s no vibes nor emotions in the transactions, those are either a reaction to the transaction or a bonus. We mean that we are getting something tangible or practical out of it. Rides, help with things we can’t or don’t want to do alone, sex, maybe even the social relief from the annoyance of “why don’t you ever talk to anyone?” coming from all sides. We also don’t always care if it’s even on the other person’s end. If they’re ok driving me everywhere/if they do it and don’t say or show they’re uncomfortable, then I will assume they are fine with that piece of the transaction. If I’m taking more than I’m giving and they seem chill with that then I’ll accept it. However, I won’t give them *nothing* and that’s because of our reason for transactions - it’s dangerous otherwise. First off, I have shit I need I can’t get myself as much as it sucks, so I need to be around people. But if we need something from them, what we learned in our childhoods is that we don’t get that for free. There’s always something over your head. A lot of pwASPD had friends or caregivers that would hold favors or even *basic, legally-mandated caregiving* over our heads as though we didn’t deserve it. Often our value was determined as a child by what we provided, and since children can’t provide much, we were worthless and not deserving of good treatment.
This is part of the reason (TW non-descriptive CSA mention, skip to the next paragraph if you want) that people thought ASPD was directly correlated with CSA for a long time - many cases of long term CSA come from either “I’ll give you x/do x for you if you help me with this” or worse, doing something first then saying “but I gave you X!/did X for you! I wouldn’t have if I knew you’d act like this”, often call us selfish if we tried to say no and maybe get aggressive or forceful after, and that is an easy lead-in to our view of interactions.
So a lot of us see it that if we want to be safe/know we can continue to get what we need, we HAVE to be giving them something. If you claim you like being around me “just to be around me” or worse that you’re willing to do something for me “just because I want to”, that’s not safe. You want something from me and I’ll give it to you - just tell me what it is. If you’re not telling me, that means it’s not good or you’re just gonna decide later that I’m selfish. You might hurt me to get what you want and justify it with this. Take something from my side so we’re even, because even means safe. Even means I get access to what I need and you get access to what you need - so now we’re both using this relationship/friendship/etc for something and you wouldn’t wanna mess that up by putting me in danger any more than I’d want to mess it up by putting you in danger.
Of course, not every prosocial sees it the first way and not every pwASPD had those experiences and/or sees it that way. But that’s what I’ve found to be common. If you see “they make me happy” as what your or their end of the transaction is, it’s definitely a prosocial response, maybe with the exception of thinking of it as “getting their brain to dopamine/oxytocin” vs caring how they’re actually feeling. If not, if you need it to be practical, that’s definitely transactional.
It’s important to note this is personal relationships with no practical consequences to ending the relationship - most people see relationships (platonic) with coworkers or managers as transactional and that’s a way I usually explain it to prosocials (“do you deal with your boss bc you like them or bc they sign your check - and would your boss keep you hired if you didn’t do your job because you make them happy just by being there?”). But with a romantic or sexual partner, a friend, etc. this is not a typical view of relationships.
That said - you can *absolutely* not have ASPD and have transactional view of relationships. It’s not a 1:1 thing there; not everyone with ASPD has it and not every prosocial doesn’t. It’s just a really common piece of the puzzle that is this personality disorder.
Edit: ack I’m so sorry I forgot to add the csa tw tags they’re there now.
#tw mentions of sex#tw csa#tw csa mention#tw abuse mention#tw sa#tw sa mention#tw child abuse mention#tw child abuse#aspd-culture-is#aspd culture is#aspd culture#actually aspd#aspd#aspd awareness#actually antisocial#antisocial personality disorder#aspd traits#anons welcome
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Blood of My Blood: Never Loved
One more Blood of My Blood cinderblock for you @ibrithir-was-here and @animate-mush. Put on your most dramatic breakup song playlist.
Summary: Castle Dracula is abandoned. By son, by subjects, by its Master. The latter finds himself dwelling in the dirt and dark as he waits to strike the English shore once again. Thinking on traitors and thieves. And on his dear friend, who makes him bleed still into the grave earth.
Warnings for: Violence, coercion with and without hypnotism, and domestic abuse.
He woke with a draining ache behind his eyes. A worse one in his chest.
The surprise had gone out of this nights ago. Anger rushed over the sensation like a balm. More, he rushed toward anger. Spurred it, stretched it, wrapped it around himself like a gossamer membrane. It would thicken as the night wore on and his mind roamed its new gamut of bile and rage, snapping at itself until the sky overhead should have roiled in time with his internal tempest. But no. Only favorable winds here. Not that such winds were wholly necessary now. He and his grave earth rode a ship without sails. How fast the mortal mites and their innovations worked in this age.
Jonathan had spoken of traveling by one. An idle comment in their talks of England. One of many. The travel, the choice of estate, the precautions needed to counter the possibility of a second attempt to thwart the setting down of roots. Always in that measured way. Always with the mien of one laying out itinerary rather than laying the foundations of an invasion. Always looking his Master in the eye. Always with that sad grey shade in his pallor, the face of a man who hates his work and knows the alternative is worse.
Poor villain against his will. Poor martyr. Poor Jonathan.
Thunder grumbled high overhead. He heard voices through his box, warm bodies exclaiming and jumping. One of them was close. There was a spiced whiff of cigar smoke. A cheap odor.
Not like the ones you gave him. He dropped so many vices after the boy was born. Smoke and drink vanished from his lips overnight. Just in case they might have tainted him somehow. Spoiled the blood. You told him it was nonsense. Even she did. But he would not have it. Not until this year. He used his allowance for one single box of cigars; cheap, like the ones he’d had back in his shriveled nothing-life in Exeter. You caught him at it in January. Within the month he found the little box gone, replaced by a pack of Romeo y Julietas. One, maybe two a month since then. And what did he say when you asked him why? Why return to the habit now?
“Almost time,” he’d said. That’s all. “Almost time.”
He had pressed Jonathan on it. Oh, gently, gently. Barely a nudge of the mesmer; because he’d thought he already knew.
Jonathan had looked at him through the coiling smoke with those dead starlit eyes. The same glowing shade of the ghost-light on St. George’s Eve. And he had simply raised his hand to his chest, rubbing the place over his heart as if there were still a crucifix to wear there. Worry and sorrow had rolled off him like cologne.
“I may as well, Sir. I think I am saying good-bye to it this year. In whatever way.”
And oh! Oh, what an idiot child he had been in that instant! Later that night he had laughed aloud at himself. He had actually felt a pang of fear. Had even strained his ears to be sure of his friend’s heartbeat. It had drummed steadily enough, he thought. Mostly. Steady, but thin. Always thin, for the tide of his blood was necessarily fickle by his exsanguinations, but…
But you did not know for certain if there was some threshold near to being crossed. You’d never had a case like Jonathan Harker before you. Not even to experiment with. Why bother? You never thought in terms of keeping a single body as your reservoir when you were content to either starve or glut yourself at random. No one like Jonathan existed to you until he offered himself up as the living meal to you and two other hungry mouths for twenty years. And, childish thought, you’d wondered if he could do thirty. Longer. However long the charade could last before the inevitable came and you bled yourself back into him, feeding him from your heart’s blood to end the game of humanity and lock him in your thrall. And then, finally, you would get to see him drink. Master’s orders, my friend. Gorge yourself.
But that presupposed there would be no issue come the time of turning.
That this state, the ghoulish and gauntly haunting form that existed on the line between life and death, was not itself a spoiling factor in the process. Would the rules change if he died as this creature? Would he rise at all? If he did, would he be a Vampire or something else? Something still beholden to his Master only because he was chained by love and not the unshakable tether of being sired into undeath?
He did not know.
Having acknowledged that he did not know, he had almost ripped the cigar from his friend’s mouth so that he might force the man to drink from his veins that second.
Jonathan had seemed to read this in him. He tapped his ash into the tray with something very nearly like a smile.
“No, Sir. Not now. There is every chance I could be wrong. Perhaps it’s age alone whispering to me. Many men start to dwell on these things once they reach the 40-year mark. So I was always led to assume. For myself, I remain shocked that I have lived this long in the first place. I only feel as if there is now a clock ticking somewhere in all this. That it will end before the year is out because…”
He had paused to puff and shrug.
“…because it must end. Either because this state is finally preparing to collapse or because, with three adults to feed, I have begun to deplete too much to sustain the meals and myself.”
It was true. The boy was now a boy only in feeling. Somehow the calendars had piled up and the child was now a young man. Careful with his Papa—and no, even now he did not envy the boy learning his Lesson from his mother the night his adolescent hunger had slipped too far and left the man as pallid as his hair—but still taking more than he ever had in his boyhood. He and his mother had agreed in silence to feed a little less, alternating on their meals each feeding. Even he had stopped short of a full draught more than once. And it was not enough.
Still, Jonathan had been unperturbed. His Master had thought little of that calm. Time had not broken so much as smoothed him. An unfinished stone sanded and shined by a waterfall’s endless pressure until what had been his nightmare was reduced to mundanity. Ah, he woke to the New Year feeling that death was imminent? Hmm. A shame. May as well enjoy a smoke first.
Months passed since that scene. Though his blood did not change, his mien did. Each turn of the calendar’s pages brought some unknown weight down heavier and heavier on him. Distraction drew his attention away, his ghost-light eyes blazed like warning flares in the dark sockets, he lost himself for minutes or hours at a time at the desk, and once, in the far end of March, his Master had caught him weeping silently while eating. A tear would roll every few bites. Savoring and saying farewell at once.
Whether this unknown mortal clock really was ticking or not, his friend believed in it. Felt it was real enough to say his good-byes to human sensation. Such a fuss, his Master had thought. Tried to think.
You did try. Truly, painfully, you tried to make yourself laugh. Jeer. Hold to certainty and joy at the approaching finality. Humanity shed to give your friend his stalled eternity. Still, you caught yourself worrying. Wondering. What if something went wrong? What if something was wrong already? What if, ha, he was making plans to short you at the last? What if he had made plans with some conspirator in the towns to pierce his heart and take his head? What if the turning somehow did not take at all? What if, what if, what if?
What if indeed. You fretted so much over those months, old devil. You worried about every little thing that might go wrong before you made your move. Before you ended the game and took your prize and burned the nuisance of mortality on the pyre it deserved two decades ago.
The prize you never thought was waiting at the end of someone else’s long game.
He made a noise into the soil. A coughing bark of a laugh. Out in the cargo hold, the smoker stirred.
“Hello? You down here, Mikhail?” He leaked himself out of the box. Fog to flesh. The smoker squinted in the half-gloom, coming closer. “Hello?”
“Hello,” he echoed. The smoker swung around to face him. There was not much to face, as he stood still in shadow. He watched the man’s brow furrow. Trying to squint his way toward recognition.
“Who are you? One of Arnold’s new boys?”
“No,” he answered, stepping into the glow of the man’s lighter. The squint turned to a gawking mask of horror bordering on disgust.
“Jesus,” came out in a gasp that reeked of cheap smoke. “What the hell happened to you?”
“Trouble at home,” he admitted with a flash of teeth. Within a blink, he was tearing into the man’s throat. He inhaled blood and cigar fumes until he was iron-grey, until he was at his prime, until he was a youth. Hating the taste with every gulp. Unable to glut himself further, he sighed and twisted the man’s head off. The heart he tore out with more relish than he preferred to admit. He crushed all three pieces of the body as if crumpling paper and did not rise to the deck until he sensed it was unoccupied. Up he went, tossing the balled up remains into the waves. “My thanks,” he whispered after it.
The corpse had provided him with something like a lackluster disguise. A jacket to match the rest of the seafarers.’ He hoped the sight of it might let him go unbothered on deck. Though it was an easier thing to simply slip back down to the cargo’s shade, he wanted the openness of the night and the sympathetic frown of the moon peeking through the clearing clouds. He looked up to it now the way a drunken man sulked up to his barman. A barman who had waned a few phases since he was last seen.
The moon had been so full the last time he saw Jonathan. Rather, times.
Once while alive. The other…
“Which one are you, then?” Swallowing a curse, he slid his gaze to his right. A man with a flask stood there, pausing mid-sip to scrutinize him. His lip curled as he gestured with the liquor. “Who said you could have hair like that and work a vessel, eh?” He did not pause for an answer before shaking his head and taking a full drink. “Arnold’s getting sloppy if he’s hiring from…from…” A cloud of hazy concentration came and went on the ruddy face. “What? The Nordics? The Slavs? One of those lots with hair to their knees.”
He did not answer. Only looked again to the moon. He imagined the wedge of it gazed back at him with apology. The man blundered forward a step, reaching to take him by the shoulder.
“I’m talking to you, boy—,” A callused hand passed through his shoulder like mist. For it was. The flask made a tinny sloshing sound as it struck the deck. “Oh.” It was a small sound. The frightened moan of a child in a rancid dream. Feeling the moment warranted it, he turned his young man’s head to fully face the man. Letting him see the maimed display of the left eye. The dried maroon crust that streaked his cheeks. The man made another noise, even reedier. “Oh, Christ. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Arnold never said anyone died on this one. It’s too new, he said.” His throat worked like a thin tangle of pulleys. Bloodshot eyes bulged. “The Persephone’s only been on the water three years and no one’s ever…”
“Newness is no guarantee against death any more than age is a guarantee against foolishness,” he grated out.
“Right. Right, of course, apologies. I’ll just—I’ll just—,” the man didn’t seem to know what he’d ‘just’ for several tediously agonized seconds. But, between the drink and the rarity of the moment—How often did one cross paths with a spirit, after all?—his feet remained anchored. Then, “…How did you die?”
Of idiocy. Here and now. Requiescat in pace.
“I was betrayed. Over a woman.” Sour needles pricked along his throat. “Over a child. The years made me blind. Soft. Comfortable. So certain that all was in order, that I held everything in my hands. But I lived among thieves without knowing it. I woke one night to find all that was mine was gone, stolen, and the one I had handed my heart threw it away as though it were the sole piece of filth that could not be bothered with. And then…” He gestured to the mark upon his face. His eye now a ball of blazing arterial red set in a spray of wild scarring from the lightning bolt. Even after a deep meal, he felt that the damage had scarcely receded. Had he not twisted in time, the blast would have struck him square through his skull.
The wretched woman had fine aim.
And that’s not all she has, is it?
“Sorry to hear it, son,” came from his right. The man had retrieved his flask again. It winked like tarnished silver in the moonlight. Though his face showed a bleary bafflement as to what exactly the manner of death could have been, he went on, “And here I figured the worst that could happen to a man at sea was drowning.”
“Terrible ends can happen anywhere. But if it saves you worry, I will not remain on this ship forever. I will disappear once it docks in England.”
“Reckon you’re off to haunt the bastard who did this to you?”
“Not yet. First I must go to my son, who they sent away all oblivious to their work. Then,” his hand drifted of its own accord to his chest, dipping under the hanging coat to feel at the lump in a high pocket. It sat cold and out of place there, like an elaborate little tumor. Touching it brought back the pain to his chest and eyes. “Then I shall see to the traitors.”
“Cannot say I envy them.” Another sip, nearing the bottom.
“Few would. They thought me a monster to slay together. But they have yet to meet the worst of me. For they grew comfortable too, seeing me docile, hospitable, giving them my home and my love and a thousand allowances that no other in my life has ever wrung from me. Yes, I will haunt them. I will hunt them. And I will deliver to them a recompense so much worse than death.” The man was trying again to drink from his flask and finding himself thwarted. “Empty?”
“Afraid so. Do you ever miss that, being dead? Getting to drink?”
“No. I still drink. But I am full for the evening.” He bared his teeth in a gleaming crescent. Some of the man’s crewmate still stained his fangs. He watched the man’s face abruptly lose all its tint. “I am glad you got to enjoy your own. It is a rarity not to face this part sober.”
So saying, he plunged his hand into the man’s chest. He twisted out the heart with the ease of one plucking a ripe apple from its bough. The man croaked out only a small noise at this. Nothing more than a damp little bleat, smothered by the steady roll of the waves. He was still gawking at his heart in one clawed hand while the other snared him and hurled him overboard. The sound of the splash was nothing. Sighing, he shrugged off the apparently useless jacket and cradled the heart in it to prevent a drip. Back to the cargo hold it was. Down to the dark and the dirt and—
He left it waiting for you. Even in the midst of all the confusion, the haste needed to get out, to be gone, he made sure to leave it right there in the sow’s coffin.
The cold lump shifted in its pocket.
He bit down a curse as his eyes stung, burned, boiled.
A roost was made in the furthest corner of the hold. The heart sat in his hands. Huge and dense with old smoke and liquor and fatty seaside meals. He’d lied to Jonathan before, about how certain consumed vices changed the blood’s quality. There was no alteration in what it fed, but the taste shifted. Between the crewmate he’d siphoned and the swollen muscle in his fingers, he realized he was indulging in the nearest thing he had to slovenly eating after a hard day. He took an experimental taste of a ventricle.
Immediately acrid. A rich and awful tang that ran to the back of his throat.
Nothing like the spigot that had flowed for him like careful clockwork for two decades. So meticulously tended by diet, by caution, by the vessel it sprang from. Twenty years of ambrosia meted out in scheduled mouthfuls and the occasional drop snuck between meals, as was his right.
“No, my friend, not the wrist. The boy would know someone was taking extra. And from his own plate! So to speak. Undo your collar, you know she will not complain…”
And Jonathan had. The brilliant eyes sliding away from his Master as he stole one, two, three, four or more little tastes from neck and shoulder, collarbone and breast. A single sip from each bite. He had not even winced. Not until Jonathan’s Master brought his mouth up to his face. Printing the blood there like a girl with her kiss’ lacquer. It had taken his Master’s hand around his jaw to make Jonathan turn and face the second one, pressed into his own lips. Eyes shut against the threat of a trance, mind fluttering frantically out and away.
He had let him then, back in those early nights. Always so shy, his Jonathan. Even after the whirlwind of that long-ago summer, the thresholds crossed and barriers erased for the sake of playing his Scheherazade, still he quailed from the gentler edges of his better. Hiding up in his head or in his Master’s teeth or under the flimsy shelter of his duties whether they were self-assigned or not. Anything to not accept what lurked and grew under the veneer of mere surrender to an enemy.
Had that too been a trick? Laying bait the way his Master had once drawn the hunting dogs back to his genius loci with the woman already tainted?
A Wolf did not chase if the prey did not run. And he did love to chase. To play. Up to a point. He had tried more than once to smother the overgrowing feeling in him as the years marched and his friend continued to drop his eyes and tense away from tenderness. When that failed, he told himself it did not matter. He owned his friend through the woman and their son, and whatever performance he sought—the rent owed to many a charitable landlord, really—could be ordered from him.
And he had ordered it.
In specific, he had, on a particularly maudlin night, ordered his friend to kiss him as he would her. He would know the difference. He’d leeched through her senses on occasion when they were, quote, ‘alone’ together. Sometimes he thought Jonathan even saw him staring out of her eyes. Or else the woman simply gave him away by some private sign or other. Whatever the case, Jonathan had never once withheld his love with her.
So, the order. Out of curiosity. Out of boredom. An order given without even a trance to smooth the act, just to see how he would muscle past the walls of indignity and a lover’s loyalty as he had back when he thought he had been charming for his life in their supple sabbatical once upon a time.
Instead, a magic trick.
Between one blink and the next, Jonathan had been the self he reserved for the woman. Even the smile kept for her had been there. A necessary prelude to the hands that bookended his Master’s face and pulled him level. Just like that, there were their mouths together. Not the press of a patient doll’s lips as its owner mashed themselves there in pantomime of intimacy. If he had not known better—
But Jonathan made sure he did. As soon as the kiss elapsed, he’d receded into himself. Less a tortoise into his shell than a closing fist praying not to be pried open lest the treasure in it be snatched away again.
“Was there anything else, Sir?” asked in the rug’s direction. Shame and a miserable whiff of apology yet-to-be had stamped him. He would throw himself into making amends to the woman, of course. Whether or not he wounded her with tattling on this little service, he would meet her with whatever kindnesses he could muster that were not already given. It was one of many moments in which he was convinced that his friend would give of himself until he was down to bones and then try with his last breath to gift someone his ribs. “Sir? Am I dismissed?”
He was not. All at once, his Master had a list of tasks for him to perform over the course of days. Weeks. Months. A year and more. And was that not where the mistake of it all had begun? The willing leap at addiction? Commanding his friend, his immaculate actor, his Scheherazade, into a hundred little indulgences. And not just in matters of sampling each other. Sometimes he would wring whole nights out of the man, without even the boy to perform for, trapping him by the fire or in a moonlit room or down in that half-secret glade by the stream where they played hunter and hunted and hid together from the walls of domesticity, spurring his friend into the easy and smiling talk of companions, of intimates, of…
Go on, old devil. You can admit it. Why not? What point is there in pretending he did not perform so well as to leave you reduced to this?
Fine.
Talk of those in love.
Yes, he had used the exact word. More than once.
Do this, do that, do any and all these things as if you loved me. Just as you do her.
And Jonathan had. Always with the bracing misery before and the shuddering withdrawal after. But he served his Master’s wants. He did so with such an ease that his Master had invented half the trap himself; he had convinced himself somewhere that he was giving his friend permission to do what he truly wished to do, freed from the yoke of duty and fealty to the woman, to his morals, to his sanity. Yes, that was it. He was giving his friend release. Lifting away the leaden weight of his beloved martyrdom and letting him know, yes, it was alright, he could want something other than what was ‘right’ or ‘good.’ What had such scruples brought him besides pain? God and humanity no longer had a place for him or his family or his love; that bottomless fount that had more to give than his veins ever would.
Here, my friend, I will take it. I will catch it all as it spills. Love me. Love and be happy. It’s alright.
The cold lump in his pocket felt heavy and frigid as a glacier on his chest. Scrubbing his hand clean on the jacket, he fished the hateful treasure out of its home and glared at it in his fingers.
A brooch the size of a dove’s egg. Antique gold ringing a garnet of such brilliance it might have been frozen claret. Splitting it was an ornate dragon, rampant, seeming to cling to the stone like the mythic hoards of legend. One of few mementos kept in his bedchamber from mortal days and nascent immortal nights that had gone sour in recalling their joy. He had taken it from its hiding place of velvet, shined it until it glowed, and, at the end of another race through their wilds, another capture, another victory drunk from the won throat…
“You have been here five years. Yet still I get word that you are not always recognized as being in my service.” This was fractionally true. At least in the sense that he knew there was a certain level of laxness that existed between Jonathan and a handful of those he did business with in the towns. Little mistakes or a dragging of feet on assorted exchanges and services that his friend would try to paper over with excuses on their behalf.
Once, only once, he had even tried to get away with hiding a newcomer’s attempt to swindle him outright. He had only seen a tourist of means with an Englishman’s lilt and tried to rob him over a new toy for the child and a novel for the woman. Jonathan had not pushed back, only gutted his allowance while the seller’s neighbors threw their shocked and silent looks. Perhaps that would have been the end of it but for Jonathan idly mentioning the encounter to the woman as they shared his bed post-feeding, thinking little of it. His Master, listening through her, had thought otherwise. Enough to find and inform the seller of his misstep personally. The next time Jonathan went to town he came back somewhat shamefaced with a burden of extra wares given ‘as a courtesy.’ The peasants were careful to point him out to new citizens ever-after.
All this in mind, Jonathan had looked at him oddly over the excuse.
“If that is the case, it has not hindered me in any way. The people have been nothing but gracious when I come through.” Gracious and afraid, he knew not to say. His Master had shooed the words away like flies.
“You remain ever lenient, my friend. You would apologize to the wheels of a carriage as they ran you over. It is for your own good that you must wear this, lest you and your goodwill are trampled by the opportunists among the chattel.” Out had come the brooch. “You will have this visible at all times. Be it to clasp on your coat or wear at your throat. Do you understand?”
“Yes, S—,” A look was caught. No, no. He knew the rule out here. Away from mother and child. “Yes, balaurul meu, I understand.”
Not well enough, of course. Not even when he was made to sit still, his chin up so that his Master could pin the thing in place. No, he had not understood then. Not until the next night when he took his place in bed for the family meal. There he had sat, undoing his shirt collar—with the brooch nowhere in sight. Not before the feeding. Not after he buttoned himself up with strengthless fingers. Not even on his nightstand.
The boy and the woman had looked up with curiosity and ire respectively when Father hadn’t taken his usual leave for the saccharine post-bleeding period with Papa. Papa himself had looked concerned and lost. No one had made a mistake, had they?
“Father? Did you want to stay too?” from the boy. A thread of worry in his voice, as was natural whenever Father deviated from his routine, but far more of eagerness. Father so rarely lingered overlong with the entire family in the room. And, he would admit it, it stung to deflate the child’s hope.
“I am staying,” he’d said, “But you and your mother must go for a time. There is something important I must speak with Papa about.” There had been some bristling at that. But he had yanked the woman’s leash and the woman had taken the boy away by the hand, thinking soft assurances and lies at him until they were out of the tower. Jonathan, dear oblivious Jonathan, had peered at him with genuine confusion.
“What is it? Has something happen—,”
His Master had flung the full weight of the trance into him like a boulder. A boulder that became a crushing fist around the flailing mote that was Jonathan’s ostensibly free will. Having hold of it, he wrenched his friend up to his feet and prodded sharply at his mind until he turned to where he’d stored the brooch. There, the wardrobe. Go. Fetch.
Jonathan had managed two steps before the weakness of his emptied veins dropped him to hands and knees. He crawled the rest of the way. Staggered back upright. Worked the doors open and shuffled with trembling hands through the hanging clothes. Here was the coat. There, fastened at the chest, was the brooch. He fumbled at it with twice the difficulty of fastening his shirt. So much so that it pricked his thumb bloody and slipped through his fingers. He made a small despairing sound before falling back down on his knees, searching in the shadows and shoes for it. When his hand finally closed on it, his Master tugged again at his mind, ordering him back the way he’d come. Across the floor, up into the bed. Holding the brooch.
His Master tugged again. Jonathan held the brooch out on his palm. The one now striped and smeared from the bleeding thumb.
“What did I tell you to do with that, Jonathan Harker?”
“To—to wear it in town—,”
“No.” He’d paused to watch Jonathan’s face. The shift of expression that sketched such a perfect epitome of dread, especially in a bloodless face. “I said, You will have this visible at all times. And where was it instead? Thrown away, out of sight, out of mind. Is it not so?”
“N-No. No, I did not mean to—,”
“Must I make it simpler for you? The boy still has the collar he never bequeathed to the trapped wolf. I am certain it would fit you. The emblem would never be misplaced again.”
“Sir—,”
“Do you think I gave it to you as a whim? Another token to cast aside, to ignore like all the rest you are showered with all unconscious to, stewing in your precious stringency, self-deprived as a monk?”
“Please, I swear, I only thought—,”
“What? What did you think? Do tell.”
“I thought,” his voice caught and rasped, trying not to be a cough. “I thought it was meant for strangers. As something official, part of a uniform. I’m sorry, Sir, I didn’t know it was…” But here the words dried and his face showed again that crumpled confusion. The pain of a kicked dog unsure of what mistake he’d made, only knowing he had erred. Jonathan’s eyes had found his Master’s, as much plea as fear.
What? the look begged. What is this? What did I do wrong? I cannot act without my lines.
There was no questioning of his Master’s anger. Such storms were known to pass and one could only brace and weather them. This was all he knew.
But you knew better, didn’t you, old devil? It took you a moment to catch up to yourself. To truly admit it to your own mind, even knowing from what happy old era’s dust you fetched the thing from. You made no ceremony of it. You buried the giving of it in a disguise. But the meaning was there even as you fastened it to him without fanfare, without warning. All you did was stitch an importance to the ornament that was invisible to him. And look where it led.
Jonathan hadn’t blood enough in him to hold rigid as he usually did before his Master’s moods. He shuddered even as he fought to be still. Afraid. Cold. Eyes of pale blue glass pinned to his Master, searching desperately for a reason to it all, for the thing he must make amends for.
Still with his hand outstretched. The brooch in a bloodied palm.
Just as it is now. Here in the brine-scented shadows. It looked more precious in his.
It had.
Jonathan had kept the hand out even as his Master joined him on the bed. As his Master plucked the brooch up, tasting it clean of the red stain, then kissing away the same from the bleeding thumb. As his Master gently tilted the quivering chin up and fastened the emblem in its proper place. As his Master did not move except to close the last of the gap between them, stroking the white curtain of hair from his brow.
“I am sorry, draga mea. You did not know because I did not explain. It is too easy to forget you are the only one here who does not go walking into others’ minds. So often you fool us all into believing otherwise.” The stroking hand traveled down to trace Jonathan’s jaw. No longer shaking. Not as badly, anyway. “You did not recognize that it had a mate, did you?” Jonathan turned his head an inch, frowning. His Master tilted up his own chin. For a moment, more confusion. Then realization.
The stone worn at his Master’s throat had no beast stretched across the stone. His was a coil that encircled it entirely, an ouroboros of a dragon.
“I know that rings are the tradition. But you are a creature of loyalty and I did not wish to test my Harkers’ ire in demanding you remove the gold band for something of mine, be it a signet or a stone. This is as close as we can come the way we are. At least until the night of consummation. Baptism. Whatever you prefer.” He trapped Jonathan’s eyes with his. “When that time comes, we can talk of more classic rites, insofar as our arrangement allows for such things.”
Jonathan had nodded at this. Perhaps tried to speak. A ‘yes, Sir’ seemed to snag on his tongue. The shock was too much to work around on his own, so his Master hoisted him over it with a final hook of the mesmer and gave him words to say:
“Of course, balaurul meu. I look forward to it.” His mouth had snapped shut around the last word, pallid eyes huge and almost teetering in their sockets. He was shaking again. Ah, it was too much as he was, poor thing. His Master had left him swaddled in another blanket, asking if he was prepared to see mother and child now. Jonathan could only nod, his hand rising and falling away from the space before the brooch. As though he feared the thing would bite him.
Good.
Good enough, you reasoned. He would grow into it. He would accept it. He had accepted it already. Enough that you had to deal with a particularly entertaining round of aftermath from the woman’s mind. For all her collaring of herself when she had to grovel for something—and was her own peasant’s past not fine training there?—the Vampire of her could not be smothered when it came to theft. Not even sharing! This, when you could have ordered the ring off him. Could have had him write up divorce papers for the dead, if only as a prop to hang in the office. But then the boy would have questions. Perhaps even tears. Was Papa not allowed to love more than one parent? It would not do. To think you offered to let her be Maid of Honor.
Amusing fireworks had ensued.
They had cooled, he thought, as the years continued to stack. On and on until the end of their second decade made its way to them. Jonathan never misplaced the brooch again. The woman appeared resigned to joint custody of both her Loves in her sullen way. And the boy, his little diavol, barred from full knowledge and unhappiness, had grown to manhood under their care.
A fine excuse the latter had made.
He thought back to it now. That last scene with the grey and ghastly shape of his friend in his surreal mortality. Another cigar lit, the smoke curling out the library’s window. What a strange image he’d made. He had looked like…
A month or so ago he had found his friend thumbing through an American magazine of all things. Some publication or other that had made its way across the Atlantic and the Channel to join its English siblings. It had been one of his few vices over those latter years, catching up on the newsworthy pulses that beat outside their mountains. The American one had shown an advertisement at the back. A rather charming illustration of a man in what had to be a modern eveningwear suit. Arrow Collar and Shirts for Every Occasion the image declared.
Jonathan had seemed to be a macabre translation of the man posed in the picture.
Seeing this, an abrupt needle of mourning had pierced his heart. Twenty years of feeding had made his friend into this wasting enigma. Twenty years of allowing the arrangement to unspool on and on without end, simply for the fact of Jonathan continuing to breathe and bleed unimpeded, as if his will alone were enough to hold his half-life existence together. Twenty years of letting his friend’s incessant need to give of himself down to the marrow get in the way of sense. Of what was right. Of what was long past due.
How did you allow this? How did you agree to let this carry on so long? Look at him, look at the calendar. So many years lost in which he could have already been what he was meant to be. Why? For your agreement? For the charade of the bitter conqueror taking his consolation trophy? It made sense at the start, perhaps. Those early years of gloating. It was your due. But once the sting was gone, once it became clear what he was to you under the vitriol of old, what excuse was there to drag this on, to make a living ghost of him? What excuse is there now? Look at him, old devil. Look at him and think of what he could have been, should have been, for the last quarter of a century.
And he had. He’d stood in the doorway, staring, overlaying the haggard reality with what should have been. Here was Jonathan Harker, forever young, the flesh back on his bones, his eyes free of shadows and crimson as an opened throat. Jonathan Harker, still and strong, a beautiful killing thing like a spider waiting in its silk.
Instead, he was this. A ghoul waiting to find out the when and how of his death before the year concluded, seeming far deader than the thirsty revenants he called his family. The unfairness of it wrenched in his Master’s chest. Worse still was the hindsight of its pointlessness. As if this arrangement of the household had done anything but ruin his friend and cripple their son against the reality of the wider world waiting for them. He had even felt a twitch of pity for the woman, if briefly. She had lost her Love to the needs of their hunger and their Master’s whim, watching every year as that Love was shriveled and shifted into a wretched grotesquerie of what he ought to be. Her prized possession spoiled by mishandling and a refusal to simply tear their Jonathan free of his scruples and do what needed doing.
“Was there something you needed, Sir?” Jonathan had asked without turning. His eyes were on the moon. Full as a pearl.
“There was. Is.” His friend did not jump upon seeing him abruptly at his side. Nor did he turn his head. “You are almost replenished.” It wasn’t a question.
“I am.” A tap of ash. Still not taking his attention from the sky. “Did you wish to steal a drink ahead?”
“It is not stealing. Only taking what’s owed.” There was a soft sound of fabric pulling away. Jonathan had turned and froze. His Master had removed his own clasp and the cravat under it. Vest and shirt hung open. The skin above his heart was already cut open. “And giving what is long overdue.”
“Sir, that’s not necessary. Not already.”
“When, then? How much longer will you reduce yourself like this? They are beginning to go hungry even with your sacrifice, my friend. Mother and child both. But he is not a child anymore, is he? He is grown. He must feed as such. Yet he tries to feed only as a boy, just as his mother feeds in her little halved tastings. Even I have taken less than my share. All to bow to your craving for self-destruction. No more of it.”
“This seems somewhat—,” Jonathan first tried to sidle away from the sill, only to have himself caged back against the stonework by his Master’s arms, “—abrupt.”
“You have until you finish the cigar.”
“Case in point.” Another drag was taken, neither rushed nor prolonged. Jonathan blew his stream of smoke out into the breeze. Then, “Was that why you had so many of these on hand before? The food and drink and assorted sensory comforts?”
“Before?” Jonathan looked at him. Waiting for him to—, “Ah. Then. No, not precisely. There was an act to perform. Had it been Peter Hawkins there in your place, he would have had the same to consume before his…dismissal.”
“That’s what I mean. You were always planning to either ‘dismiss’ or ‘retain’ your solicitor of choice. You went out of your way to provide the equivalent cuisine and indulgences of a noble’s home, even when the reality of things had set in. I might have had, say, a week’s worth of fine dining and then bread and water from then on. But you kept at the kitchen regardless. Why was that?”
“To drop the quality would be to ruin the masquerade,” his Master said, wondering at the turned subject. Knowing not to be swayed. “Had you proven to be a lowly churl not worth my time beyond the completing of paperwork, you would not have eaten at all. The wolves would have had your bones for toys in the same week.”
“Mm,” another puff. Jonathan was halfway through. “My mistake, then. I had assumed you were interested in giving your pawn a long last meal before his life ended, permanently or otherwise. That or fattening the metaphorical calf. It was hard to imagine you enjoyed playing the role of host and staff without it being part of some standard habit.”
“So it might have been when you returned home.” Oh, only twenty short and endless years ago. Still with their enemies’ blood under his nails. Begging sanctuary for his Loves, bartering his own throat. Memories, memories. “For some reason, you seemed hesitant to trust my culinary skill a second time.”
“Yes, well. Blame that on a joke too many made about the wine and red meat on the menu. I’d not expected you to throw aside pretense to the point of…” Jonathan nodded at his Master’s bleeding chest. “…this.” More ash tapped over the stone sill. A third of the cigar was left. Jonathan’s eyes floated from the oozing cut to the moon. The effect erased all but the furthest edges of blue from his irises and made them into coins of silver. His brooch glowed like fire. “Do you know what I ate on my wedding night?”
Stop. Plug your ears. A trick. A trap. Laying bait again, old devil, do not listen, do not let him talk, do not hesitate, this is how he works, how he has always worked, how he has been the only one in all the infinite hell of your unlife able to steer the storm of you. In pain, in suffering, in servility or supplication, the silver of his tongue did more to tame you than any holy relic, and you knew it and you did not care, did not think to care, because he made himself satisfied with crumbs, with vapor, even when you tried to force bounty into his hands and down his throat, do not listen, do not wait, take him, own him, seize his mind and soul and senses now now now before it is too late—
But this was the bellowing of the present into the past.
All he could do in the ship’s dark was muffle his curses by biting into the bloated heart as the memory unfolded in all its hopeless reality.
“No,” he’d half-whispered to his friend. “You never said.”
“I had what I’d been having since I was taken in by the nuns. Broth and bread. Small simple soft things. I was half-dead then too, albeit in a different direction. Mina and I married and made love on my sickbed, in a rush of joy and tears and illness. I left our wedding venue with one hand in hers and another on a cane. Now I am here, twenty years on, with another marriage to begin in haste. The marriage that will also be my death knell. Lenore again, but without any hope of resting in peace.”
Jonathan watched his Master through his lashes.
“When I am drunk from a last time and I drink in turn, it will be the moment I say farewell to what is left of the good man who existed before I turned the kukri on those I trusted with my life and who I would have died to shield, had it not been for God putting my Loves on the same altar He set before Abraham. The last of that good man will die to the blood baptism, to an unbreakable chain of connection with what is reviled by the divine. Fickle thing that it is. But before I was a Christian, before I was taught the lie that God is absolute love, I already held Love as holy. I held kindness unto others as a mission. It hurt me then as it hurts me now to envision pain wrought on another without cause but profit or cruelty.
“But that feeling will be sunk into a spiritual chasm once I turn. Already I dropped a piece of it into the dark when I bloodied my hands. The rest will follow and I shall become a Judas not only to a select few, but to the whole of humanity. While I can see the logic in throwing myself into consummation for fear of turning back at the last second, I do not think I can stomach yet another threshold where I do not get to walk, but must hurl my way across. Another sprint, another crash into one world out of the last. I would ask—,” his throat had caught, eyes gleaming, “—I would like to have the day.” He cracked a sad smile. “St. George’s Day. A fitting hour to say good-bye to the good of me. And for our son’s birthnight, we shall have our last family meal. No meager shares. No restraint. I shall be too weak by then to hold off. And it will not be done behind closed doors. Behind my Loves’ backs, like another secret. Please.”
The eyes, the eyes, no power in them but what his Master put there, but they held and they drowned and pleaded for this, this last meal, this final allowance, and—
And you swallowed it. Inhaled it. Drank it from him like he’d slit himself open over your mouth. You did, old devil.
He had.
He’d looked his friend in the eye—eyes still vulnerable, still susceptible, still able to be hooked and pinned like the rest of him, ready to be stolen away into his thrall without another puff of the cigar left between them—and said, “Very well. But know that I will accept no hesitation tomorrow. No rescinding, no stalling, no last-minute dawdling. You make your good-byes to yourself tomorrow. Make your peace and apologies to the world if you must. But then I will eat the martyr out of your blood and fill the space with something better. Understood?”
“Yes, Sir.” This he said before taking his handkerchief from its pocket and wiping the dark smear from his Master’s heart. For almost a minute said Master held still enough to pass for a waxwork as Jonathan righted the shirt, the vest, the cravat. He took his Master’s brooch from a clawed hand that had turned suddenly feeble before pinning it to the silk. It wasn’t until Jonathan tried to pull his hands away that they were caught. “Was there something else?”
“Yes. You finished,” he’d nodded to the smoldering nub of the Romeo y Julieta, “and I will not go without something for my patience.”
“I need my hands if I’m to open my collar.”
“Everything I want is above the neck.”
“As myself? Or is this a commission, balaurul meu?”
“Surprise me.”
“Only if you do not bite your tongue.”
He’d not understood. Not until his face was brought down and he had seen the flash of parting lips and teeth and then—
You should have bitten your tongue. Should have trapped his head in your hands as he played at catching yours, should have bitten and fed yourself into him while he was snared. If he would dare lie to your face your deserved to bleed yours into his. Bastard. Delilah.
He thought these and a thousand curses even as he warred with the recollection of that taste, that consumption in two directions. What he had thought was a mere prelude to all the ages yet to come for them. Never thinking for an instant that it was only the last helping of honeyed poison. Even the sheepish fraction of a laugh that had left his friend was another dose of venom to numb him with.
“Forgive me. I just now imagined how we must look. An old man preying on the youth.”
“Indeed. You are still all but a gamin, draga mea. In any case, this is hardly novel for us, is it? Merely a change of position. A slow dance.”
“We must all be cautious about said dancing in England, you know. The laws are still—,”
“I am aware. Just as I know what lawmaking parties are at the top of my list to be invited to dinner once we secure the new estates…”
And they had talked. And talked. On and on toward the sunrise. Jonathan had insisted on taking himself to sleep lest he spend his grand farewell to humanity passed out the whole day. Away, Master, away. Shoo.
Off he had gone. Dense and careless.
Did you smell coffee on the way down? Did you? If so, did you think it only imagination or just shrug it away? Your friend, ever disdainful of wasting an hour. Fine, fine, let him wring St. George’s out in his way. What did you care? Fool.
The boy had still been up with his books and, he saw, some his Papa’s magazines. Odd. No less odd than seeing him return to the coffin rather than exercise his ability to doze where he liked; his miracle of a child, born alive and undead at once, able to sleep without a grave earth as bedding. Odd, odd. But he had not cared, had he? What reason was there to care when he had tomorrow night already dangling before his eyes?
The woman was already in her coffin, either sleeping or feigning sleep. He had not bothered to check. Had not cared whether she knew of her husband activity or not. If she now mulled the vision of her Master tasting what was hers, his, theirs, making plans for the future while she gathered dust in the chapel. How pleased he’d been. How sure.
“Father? Are you alright?”
The boy, the child, the son. His son. A young man who’d looked now so agonizingly like his fathers it sent a shamefully fond dart through his chest. Bless the fluke of the woman’s own features, kin of his kin, blood of his blood, by design or accident. He had smiled. Not grinned, not leered, but smiled with an ease he had forgotten he was capable of for so long. The look had made the boy’s face go even slacker with wonder.
“Yes, I am. Why do you ask?”
“You look different.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. You look…I don’t know. Not younger, but,” the boy had fumbled for a word, “lighter, I guess. Did something happen?”
“No. But something will. Ah-ah, no prying,” when the boy perked up in his coffin, “Go back to your books. You will know more tomorrow.”
“Alright,” came the half-false sulk. “Good-day, Father.”
“Good-day, diavol.”
And he had gone to bed in his tomb fattened on bliss and craving more.
And then.
And then.
Bastard. Delilah. Thieving scheming viper of a traitor.
So much accomplished and destroyed within a day and night. Oh, his treacherous Harkers. Had they only been loyal, been wholly his in mind as much as will, he would have drowned them in praise and prizes for such work against a foe. The patience of it all. The skill. The performance. It surpassed the immaculate and made him ponder for one dumbstruck instant in the midst of his rage whether they had ever been human and not some stealthy pair of incubi come to prey on him.
Such a theory was only an excuse, he knew. It would not do to whittle down their ability to that of mere imps. No, they were but a man and a woman, however altered now, and they had proved themselves to be of such sterling cores of concentrated resolve that their Master had laid barely a scuff mark upon their joint machinations all these years. Their labors had born an unthinkable fruit; one it would have doubly shamed him to behold had he been victim to anyone less canny. But no, no. He had harbored his Harkers for a reason. They were uncommon creatures. Singular. Rare pets he’d thought he could tame. And given another century, perhaps he’d have managed it.
But like the fool who mistakes a tiger for a housecat, he had let his guard down too soon. Too quick. A mere two decades. And now his beasts had bitten and torn and robbed him.
His boy, his son, gone inside a day. Shipped away and on toward the teeming masses of England. This alone had been enough to spur him on. Or would have been.
If not for the impetus that the clever sow and her stolen Lessons from the Mountain had brought down on his head. He had fled before the next bolt could strike. Running, running. Just as he had been running since missing the boy’s departure, since realizing he was the only one left in the castle.
What had actually come first? His mind still spun when he tried to concentrate things into a clear order. The entirety of that period was still a swimming blur in the way the events of a nightmare will reach the waking mind as disjointed pieces.
He had awoken to the nettling pressure of the wild rose upon his coffin lid. The annoyance, the struggle, the hard toss and soul-deep agony that had come with booting the thing off. The blossom crushed. A resignation letter crumpled under the cracked ebony of the lid.
He had known his son was missing.
He had thrust his mind throughout the castle and known he was abandoned in full even before he tore away the lid of the woman’s box.
He had seen the glint of Jonathan’s brooch left on her pillow.
He remembered a vision. Sent from her. Brief. Teasing. Baiting.
Jonathan looking upon her with exhaustion and exultation, with relief, with want, with Love. Drinking from her like a man in the desert finding his oasis. Just the two of them in that boxed dark of her coffin. Mere hours before he found them gone. Eloped. So to speak.
She had left a message for him too, though it had come later. The one that came firing out of the roiling sky he’d thought was solely his. Once again the bait had been too much to ignore, even in his hunt.
It had been him.
How long had it been since he’d first tried to claw his way back into the woman’s mind, into her senses? He could not say. Only that he had been shocked to find himself barred except when the moon was high. She had been hardening herself up from within. There was more of a fortress around her will within two decades than his first trio of Loves had built up in centuries. She had been playing lame all this time. Preparing. Working in the shadows cast by her the distraction of her husband. Sharpening herself all along.
What irony, that they had left Jonathan’s old toy behind. The forgotten memento left in its hiding place in favor of being out and away before their Master fell upon them. Before he thought to whip them into the chase after their child. He’d had the kukri on his hip when he came upon the mist. A tell-tale wisp made visible only by the flash of lightning.
You recognized the essence in it. You knew it and you knew what it would lead to. And still, old devil. Still you threw yourself after him, maddened as a Wolf outran too long by his prey.
Only now it was not a Wolf and a hare, a Wolf and a hart. This was the bitch’s dog, her hunting hound, made to race and tear and follow commands—but not his. Not directly. No lashing of his will into Jonathan Harker’s mind would slow him. No order, no threat, no curse found traction upon the spectral rush of him. Cloud and man and spirit and beast flitting away, away, away, a parody of the hunts of old down their hill. It seemed his friend had been playing lame too.
He knew the speed of the Vampire, as was natural. Man or woman, fit or ill before their change, would have roughly the same gait.
But where he and the woman held that equal speed, Jonathan Harker was lightning on the ground. What had he truly been before he was turned? What blight or miracle had he kept hidden under a guise of constant frailness? He had not cared enough to mull it then. It was simply another frustration for the pile. Another nettle, another spur. The whole of it grated to the point of torture as, idle as a child at play, Jonathan had slowed long enough to throw a look back over his shoulder.
Grinning. Mocking. And there, at last, his own internal voice flying back into his ex-Master’s face:
Have you truly grown so slow, Count?
Through trees, over hills, onward, away, steering him off course, away from where the coast waited. The ships. The boy on the other side of the Channel.
Again, you did not care. Once in bliss, now in wrath. You went blindly after. Never learning your Lesson, old devil.
I see you wear my knife. Is it for my head? Or is it just to let you pretend something of me will still hold you against my will?
His own mind had leapt out after the fleeting shape, all champing teeth and thunder. Not in words. There was too much anger to fashion into coherence. Only the intent made its way out. Hate-fury-hate-fury-hunt-catch-punish—
Mine!
It had slipped from him. Flown. Bright and cutting and horribly naked in what was both a craving and a declaration. Had his eyes stung? It did not matter. The thought-snarl came again.
Mine mine mine mine mine mine you are Mine as the boy is Mine as the woman is Mine and you You YOU were Mine first by right by claim MINE and I will not be robbed by her by you thief traitor bastard Delilah—
Here came an echo from the deepness of the past, that cruel Lesson that Jonathan had once taught them all as his preying family warred over the greater claim to him, tugging at his mind like spoiled children over the same plaything, and Jonathan had thought those horrid sharp thoughts, the woman think-scream-ordering…
You can't, Darling, no, no, no, never. Don't you take yourself away, no one can steal my Jonathan, not even you.
But now here he was. Jonathan stealing himself out of reach. Just out of reach. His claws had scraped the back of his shirt, a lock of his hair. Close. So close.
Never yours, Jonathan had thought back. Never. You knew it then, you know it now. If you were ever so oblivious as to think otherwise, my Darling would have been slain the moment the Conqueror became the Coveter. When it stopped amusing you to see us huddled together and instead began to fester. Red eyes turning green. Because you knew. For all you made us do, all you ordered from me, it was only possible because I belonged to my Love. First, foremost, always. While you were only ever the thief stealing from her bed.
A thunderclap above. A pounce upon the quarry below. Just slow enough. Just as they made it to the clearing.
They had tumbled and Jonathan had thrashed until he was pinned in the grass. His grin had curdled then, deforming into an expression barely an inch removed from that of a bat’s grimace. He did not look at his captor, but bared his teeth in feral loathing at the hands locked around his wrists. There was a hiss as the grips tightened; enough to have broken bones had he been human. Jonathan’s face contorted into a horror of twitching muscle, his fangs crowding with the spires of sharp neighbors that jutted out and snapped so close they might have torn a swatch of flesh from his ex-Master’s face.
“Off me,” came a glottal excuse for a voice. The quintessence of revulsion.“Off me get off me off OFF—,”
“No,” he’d grated back, daring the nearness of the rabid jaws simply to press himself nearer. The closeness itself seemed to repel another bite as Jonathan twisted under him. “I am Master of your Mistress, thief. I am lord of your lady. If she is above the Son, I am above All, and the moment I loop my thrall through her blighted skull, I shall make a noose of the collar your soul donned for her and drag you screaming by it.”
Thunder had rolled again. Louder, louder, until it had irritated. He could not hear himself aloud and was barely better in his mind.
Why so coy now, draga mea? You have missed the wedding night and your funeral! Not to worry. I have what you left for me. It will stick so prettily in your throat.
The sky roared. And its Master, its Weathermaker for over four-hundred years, puzzled at that. He was not ordering the tempest to make such a din. Under him, another change. Jonathan was still. The monstrous face smoothed. Still unhappy, but abruptly devoid of any emotion greater than disdain. Perhaps with a hint of disbelief.
“Even now you insist upon the act. I had thought you would finally drop your mask entirely for the sake of rage, but no. Still you insist on pretense as though sincerity were as great an anathema to you as Him.” The grimace shifted briefly to an upturned rictus. In a lilting voice, brittle and musical as tinkling glass, “You yourself never loved. You never love! Ha. Twenty years of playacting fooled me no more than it did them after half a millennium.” Jonathan’s face hardened again, the grin turned to a razor. “I will never return to your stage again, Dracula. No more acts. No more charades. No more using me and the imitation of affection as another thing to steal from her. We are all but finished with you.” His fangs bared to the gums with a smile. “Now comes the denouement, balaurul meu.”
Then, fired into his head:
This is the last time you will touch me.
And like that, Jonathan Harker was gone. Dissolved and slithered away with such speed he might have been a puff of smoke blown away by the storm. The thunder boomed again. Not by his will.
There was a sound almost lost under the noise. An animal’s cry. A bird?
He looked up, feeling the skim of something familiar—
Her, her, the woman, thief, wretched bi—
—and had only a heartbeat in which to notice first the silhouette of a great owl outlined against the clouds, then the bolt of lightning racing down to find him.
He had dodged. Not quite fast enough.
Not before the pain landed and made its home from face to neck to arm to everywhere, everything, every possible niche of being that could feel agony. A blast that would have killed a mortal man. Had it taken both eyes, the second bolt may have landed too. But he was not blind and so outpaced that one. And the next. The woman was trying to track his motion once again, the old reverse turned on her Master, but he threw up the wall of fire between them and shot away toward the waiting coast. Running from his own sky. His own creatures.
Now here he sat in the present. In the gloom and the sea-salt air, crammed hastily away with a bed of thin earth in a stolen crate, hunting after his own son while his subjects herded and hounded him, dancing through the gaps they had found in his grip upon them. The old tricks of his perished Loves who had known that his hold was not as complete upon a mass as he would have wished. Animal minds were simple to coerce. The Vampire was its wants before all else and that very nature could war with a Master or Mistress if the focus was split enough.
And his focus was in splinters now.
You would have laughed to see another suffer it, wouldn’t you, old devil? You took all that was hers once upon a time. Now she takes away all that is yours. Even your storm. Even the shapes of the animals. And him, of course. But then, he gave himself away. Is it not so?
“Silence,” he hissed to the cold mound of the heart. The blood was already starting to congeal within it. “Silence, damn you.”
If you have resorted to talking to yourself, you may do well to keep a diary of your own. Record your last nights for posterity.
He sat up quick enough to crack his neck.
I do apologize for the interruption, Jonathan hummed on. I can only assume you are terribly preoccupied. Either trying to pry into her head or trying to keep her out of yours. Even now, I remain banished to the outskirts of the conversation.
He felt himself smile for the first time in too many nights.
Oh, dear. His poor unschooled friend, who had not had needs or means to build up the walls as his wife had. Well. Let this be a Lesson for him then.
His own mind sprang upon Jonathan’s like jaws snapping shut. He felt the younger psyche spasm and raise phantom hackles at the intrusion. Scrabbling with an unpracticed grip at the Presence that bulled its way in, clawing, breaking, crushing his way across the waters that he could not pass in flesh, and then they were—
How do you like flying now, my friend? Everything you hoped it would be?
In the theatre of the mindscape he was launching himself and his catch back across water and shore and hill and mountaintop, wind whistling around false bodies. He was the Bat, Jonathan pierced a dozen times in his teeth. They were—
This is enough for me.
In the snow, the sun frozen an inch from setting, dead men watching as Jonathan brought down the kukri. Head, heart, limbs, over and over, carving and splitting. There was no collapse into elemental dust here. Only the mincing of a carcass. Even here, even wearing the skin of the living man he’d been, his eyes ran red. They were—
Ah, for a thief, still you go after too little. Let us at least be comfortable.
In Jonathan’s bed, each bite into his throat another night, and all those nights were his ex-Master’s. Kissing, mauling, drinking, sinking teeth to the gums. Only now his friend fought in his jaws. Jonathan’s teeth and claws tore at him as if he meant to shred him out of existence. To no avail. He was the practiced mind, the greater mind, greater will, and in mind and flesh his will was Law. But now he heard the whistle of air overhead, metal and timber swinging down. They were—
You still feel this one, don’t you? Mina feels the one in her throat on the same day it cut her. Does yours come like a blow at the end of each June? Again, Count, my apologies. You’ll not suffer the headache of me once your head is gone.
In the morning of departure. The shovel was in Jonathan’s hands, the edge bloody. No basilisk gaze pinned him now and his ex-Master’s brow was not merely scratched, but cracked like a grisly egg. The spade came down again. His ex-Master’s hand came up. They were—
But my friend, you know from experience how much I love to suffer you. To suffer for you. Saving—
In the ladies’ chamber, Jonathan torn out of three different suckling jaws as the dead Loves of old shrilled and grasped at him—
and sheltering—
In the grim first night, the woman in a deathly Limbo in Jonathan’s arms, the boy barely more than a twitching thought in her belly, on his knees, knife cast aside, bartering and pleading for the safety of his Loves, thankless and ungrateful already in his traitor heart—
and supporting you all this time. Even now! Do you think me angry for your little trick? Your theft? Your lies? Why, it is nothing but heartening! To think I ever worried you were too soft for the eternity ahead of you! You, so cunning and patient, laying your tripwire over twenty years’ worth of convincing me—me!—that you were a thing worth trusting. Once we clear up this mess with the boy and your pending penance, I could see you eating holes through whole countries with your sweet venom.
Jonathan was in his hand now. A cursing, struggling mote trapped in a fist the size of a small house. The hand tightened. Jonathan howled. Not with pain, for there was no real sensation here. But the revulsion was true enough. He fought and pried at the knuckles of his ex-Master’s grip as if trying to break free of a cesspit.
The fist broke into other hands. A hundred thousand flashes of as many memories, cold clawed touches finding him wherever they felt like landing. Not injuring, of course. Would he hurt his dear friend? No! Only come closer, draga mea, the better to see you, feel you, count your pulses, that is all.
Jonathan bayed and swung and shuddered in the flurry. Every forced turn of the head with a hand on his jaw. Every talon of a nail tickling along chin and throat. Every idle raking of hair or stroke of his shoulder. Every seized arm, caught hand, grabbed hip, rubbed back. All of these blasted Jonathan’s unvarnished hate and disgust through the shared plane of their mind. And the worst of them all had been—
There.
The window in the library.
Their last night as man and monster. When he had spoken his last lying promise and slipped it into his ex-Master’s mouth like candy. Only hate had been there. Hate, disgust, shame. The weight of it staggered.
He staggered.
Jonathan broke free, but did not run, pausing to bare psychic teeth.
I can feel your scandal from here, Count. Even had you been short all the hundred other evils I had to ignore, I think your hypocrisy alone would have nauseated me. How do you sit there stunned at the obvious? Did you seriously believe my mind so pliant a thing that it would ignore the cruelty you held over our heads at every hour and fool myself into think you capable of love? This, when we both know you only consented to the terms for the sake of my payment in pain. Another performance, meant to last all of eternity, as you reveled over how I sunk to nightly agony behind every measured word, every smile, every taste of me ‘freely given.’ Our precious little summer together made infinite.
Here was the crackling fireside, a client and his solicitor beside it, white hair and dark switched around again. One of the early nights to judge by the healing cut on Jonathan’s cheek, the newness of the shadows under his eyes. Eyes whose fear had been so carefully reined in as he’d goaded his host into talk of the land, of its history, of himself in the guise of ancestors. Rapt young thing. After, he had sat then as he sat now, trapped against the arm of the couch, his host almost crushing him into the tufting as the old devil purred incessant questions about what there was waiting for him in England. Were there others like Jonathan there? Ah, he should not build up his hopes too much, souls such as his young friend were a rarity in any place…
Now the pleasant-pleading eyes flamed. Running red again.
This here. Even before the Weird Sisters laughed the truth in your face and you insisted on a lie of a rebuttal. This game was the core of all the years to follow. And now you complain because I played it too well and ran away while you were having fun? Over four-hundred years old and still a petulant child throwing tantrums over a lost toy.
The castle fell away into the heart of a storm. Veins of lightning wound through the black of it as the ex-Master loomed over his subject, his vassal, his traitor, his—
A toy? This alone?
Jonathan was seized in thunderbolts. Marionette strings that burned scarlet.
This is what you think would earn my interest? My protection?
Jonathan bowed and danced and split his face with grinning as the strings pulled.
I could have that from anyone, Jonathan Harker. I could have had that from you for twenty years, no longer leaving the sword hanging above your head, but walking and talking you through every night while your mind sat bound and mute behind your eyes. I could have laughed in your face that November night after I had twisted your head off your shoulders and burned what was left of your wife on my fire. I would have too. If you were anyone other than yourself.
The strings were a net were a web. Jonathan strangled in it, unable to die, to move, to look away as the parade of that prelude to his life in Castle Dracula came and went before him. The deaths and undeaths, the pains and the promises. Mother and child, Master and vassal with the blood never clean from their hands.
All of this, my friend. All of this is because of you. You, who came to make the sale of Carfax. You, who refused to stay in your proper place among my lost Loves, waiting for my return and all the future I would bring. You, who set the hunting dogs upon me and so forced my hand with the woman. You, who faced the consequences of going among good men, pretending you were a mere hound instead of a jackal, striking them down for a Love you put above their mandates and their cherished divinity. You, who brought that Love to my door, groveling for the sake of your selfish heart.
You, Jonathan Harker. You are my equal in this ‘game’ you say I played. It is one impossible to play alone. If you had not baited me, not teased and strung me along, not made yourself into a vital thing to my heart rather than a mere curiosity, all would have ended swiftly.
Something shifted. He couldn’t say what. A tipping, a sliding. The fraying of some final tether left straining in his friend’s mind. Jonathan had despised his touch and shown it well enough. Jonathan had raged on behalf of his Loves and the slain and their life that would never be. Jonathan had even managed to offer wrath on his own behalf.
This was not that.
This was an incandescent, a righteous, a Holy conflagration of fury that turned the clinging threads to ash and boiled away the storm into a flaming void. For a moment, Jonathan was not Jonathan at all. He was only a blistering red light. The fire trailing behind him spread like wings, either those of Eros or one of the Fallen. Whichever he was, he seared in his ex-Master’s mind like a torch.
Your heart? YOUR HEART?
A hand of flame pierced him, cooking the centuries-old heart before it was torn out as a cinder.
Even now! Even in your own skull! Even with the stage forsaken and the audience of our son finally free, still you must shroud yourself in this act!? STILL YOU FEIGN KNOWLEDGE OF LOVE BEYOND USING IT AS COLLAR AND CUDGEL!?
Jonathan fractured then, an inferno of indignation and devotion, flaring with the memory of all he had cherished and loathed in his life. Mother and child for the former. His ex-Master for the latter. All smiled for, all made happy as he could endeavor. Yet only mother and child were given all of himself in earnest, their own love reflected back into him, keeping filaments of joy alive even as he brutalized himself with the conviction of his being a worse monster than they could ever be in potentia, deserving of nothing, of worse than nothing, of—
Flashes of his ex-Master, of his voice and embrace and the steady grinding away of his sanity and will and soul under the lord of the castle’s heel, crushed by the weight of self-loathing, dragged up and eaten again and again by the bottomless pit of his ex-Master’s want, of the threat that he must play the game or leave his family to suffer, of a conviction that all of this, every minute of every night, was no more than entertainment, a distraction to grow bored of and smash to pieces should he fail to cozen and serve and be a good Scheherazade ever-after. His penance for the dead men. For his wife. For their son.
That was all it was. All it ever was to Jonathan Harker.
The shock of it came on too quick and too heavy for its owner to catch before it tumbled into the mindscape. It shattered open as it fell and showed all that had been true behind its owner’s eyes. Twenty years’ worth of truth. What he had taken for truth.
The woman, no longer even dreamt of as a companion, but a brittle-bitter comfort. A sibling he had never asked for, but could not deny for her use in keeping his own barbs sharp and for the guarantee of what she anchored to him.
The boy, so suddenly grown, his love uncomplicated and real and awed, an experiment fostered and festering, burrowing into his Father’s heart as blithely as an insect left to gratefully build its nest in the home of a welcoming corpse.
Jonathan Harker.
Jonathan Harker.
Jonathan Harker.
The keystone against which the sheltering of mother and child, the performance played for the boy, the willingness even to entertain the farce in the first place, all leaned. Why? Why, when he would not have suffered any other victim, any other enemy, any other dear friend to wring such a feat from him like blood from a stone? Why, unless..?
He could not hide it. Could not bury it. Could not raze or deny or shred it into dust. It was too loud, too vivid, too strong. Too starved.
It lunged at Jonathan like its own living thing, an excited Wolf gone mad with hunger, seeing the only thing it wished to eat. Raced, leapt, pounced, dissolved into a frantically grasping wraith of red tears and a heart, unburned but hanging open and raw in its cleaved chest, coiling around Jonathan’s mind and forcing the reality of itself down his throat. Choking on it, the fire of Jonathan Harker went out. Only the man—what had been a man—was left. Staring.
Now would come the laughter. The insult. The dismay. The sour-mocking questions. Oh dear, old devil. Had he really tripped and fallen so? Had he really dared to think that the feeling was returned?
Jonathan, no longer flame or fury, only stood in the black of their shared mind. Still staring. Still…
The shock was not just his ex-Master’s.
The void cracked and splintered. Now. Now the laughter would come. Now another act. Now a sardonic bat of lashes, a false swoon, a coo of cloying flattery, or else the woman herself would dare to graze his mind with her own, the better to jeer alongside her Love, yes, yes, any moment now. Now. Now.
Count. I did not know.
The laughter did not come. No act. No sneer. Not even a ripple of disgust. Nothing. Nothing but—
I’m sorry.
The sentiment was attacked with a thousand tearing teeth. Shredded down to psychic atoms in the hunt for the disingenuous core, the hidden chuckle, the lie, the trick. But Jonathan was no less bare than himself in this space. There was no more to find in the sensation than the feeling itself. It repeated:
I’m sorry. And, just as sincere: I never intended to break your heart. Only to impale it.
The whole of it saturated with an honesty and apology that cut deeper than any bludgeoning of hate.
Sorry is not good enough, my friend. There is no taking it back.
Jonathan, a pillar against the abyss, nodded.
I know. Not for either side. I did tell you. This will end before the year is out. We shall kill you or you shall kill us. It is all that’s left.
Now came a laugh; a familiar hideous sound that unfolded into a trail of chuckling. Giddy, almost.
No, Jonathan Harker. You misunderstand once again. Yes, you and the woman mean to slay me at last. But I remain nothing but loving in my design. All that is left is that you kill me, or—
The void was gone.
They stood in the castle’s chapel. With the certainty of a dream, they knew that the boy was returned. Their only witness as he clung and wept over his mother’s coffin. She had been willed into paralysis by her Master, moving only to maim herself in the box or to gorge herself. Her meals’ dried carrion lay piled and broken around the coffin. The infants’ heads lined in rows while the tiny hearts were left to shrivel.
‘Please, Papa, you have to, please…’
And Papa was, of course. The woman’s Master had slipped the noose of himself through her at last, and now her orders were his orders, and the order was being carried smilingly out by their dear Jonathan. Pardon, his dear Jonathan. The picture of bliss despite his running eyes. Under his chin, the brooch shined. On his knuckle, the gold band had been replaced with a matching stone and clutching dragon. His vows, leaked through the permanent stamp of his grin:
‘I will never look at her again. I will never respond to any word from her. I will speak of her only as if she were dead. And I will love you as you are owed. I will be yours alone. Always. This I will do, or she shall never leave the box or know a moment without pain again. Te iubesc, balaurul meu.’
‘Te iubesc, draga mea.’
And then they were together, in the snug gloom of the great coffin that had been built and delivered in secret months before, undetected in the same chamber as the kukri. Two Grooms lay within it, one joyous and one merely smiling as he wept a stain into his Master’s breast and eternity finally began.
This is how our game ends and the next begins, draga mea. There are consequences to becoming what a monster loves, by accident or intention. He crushed Jonathan to him in their box, hissing. You stole our son. You stole my heart. You stole yourself. I will have all back in time. And you will never slip free again.
For just a moment, he felt it. Fear breaking through Jonathan’s miasma of shocked anger and distaste. But it was not the whole of him. Horribly, cruelly, crawling up and out from the center of his friend, was that unbroken condolence.
Again. I am sorry, Dracula. This will not come to pass. And even in the dreams where you paint this future as reality, you will still have my sympathy in this single thing. Your love is only a chain. Never an embrace. Only a noose, not a held hand. Our son is perhaps the first and only soul to love you without coercion, and he does so only because we spent his life hiding the worst of you from him. You will shatter that illusion if you think to steal him back. And then what will be left? Only this?
Jonathan’s hand was on his cheek, sweeping away something damp.
I had thought your pretenses only another knife to twist in us. But the performance was for you as well, wasn’t it? It was as close as you could get.
Jonathan was crushed again. Tighter, closer. Enough to snap an ordinary man in half. The arms, illusory though they were, trembled.
Do not dwell like this. You have your conquest to think of, don’t you? Your march on the Living? Return to that, if it helps. You are four centuries deep in this existence. Twenty years should be nothing to scrape aside. We were a distraction, all of us. Let us go. Let us be enemies. It will hurt less.
There was no need for breath here. No more than there had been a need for breath for anything but speech since the day he ceased to live as a man. Despite this, he buried his face in Jonathan’s neck, his mouth opened to bite, but releasing only a choked and shaking sound. It was followed by more. Then:
I will—I will conquer. I will slaughter. I will rule. But I will not be alone. If I must have you all on tethers, so it will have to be. You should not have made me happy, draga mea.
There was no true contact in the mindscape. No touch, no sense. He shivered just the same as Jonathan’s arms slipped around him.
I promise to make you very unhappy once we cross paths in person. My hate is rivaled only by my Love’s and her endings for you are as imaginative or worse than my own. In the interim, I shall do my best to gain your hate, Count. But that shall be another time.
There was a change. A softening in the phantasmagoria of the dark as the characters in it began to lose their edges. He grasped at Jonathan all the tighter.
I have not dismissed you. It is a long way to England yet. I hope the woman is satisfied with riding the rest of the way with you in a coma.
The thoughts leered, but the intent begged. It wound around Jonathan in a serpent’s coils, holding, clutching, trapping—
Let me go, Count.
No.
Tighter and tighter on the disintegrating form, becoming a cage, a coffin, a clutching fist, a dragon winding around and around its treasure, no no no, mine mine mine—
Before it’s too late.
No!
Within the mind and above the Persephone, thunder cracked and lightning struck. A great, blinding, devastating bolt. It had her voice and a single message to share.
MINE.
And with that, he was back in the cargo hold. The sailor’s heart had been crushed to pulp in his hands. His fingers and eyes ran with the same scarlet runnels. Above deck, he felt the riot of a storm that was not his battering the ship. He cursed and threw himself out to it, wrestling until dawn to hammer the weather smooth again.
In another patch of water, under the same voyeur moon, the Aurora cruised on under a starlit sky. A girl and her young man stood on the deck, her hand over his as he gripped the railing so hard it bent to the shape of his fingers. The young man’s eyes snapped open, lungs jerkily refilling with a gasp they’d not yet learned was reflex more than need.
Jonathan?
“I’m fine. …How long was that?”
Less than two minutes.
“It felt longer.”
It’s like that. Even when conscious, it will try to drag things into dreaming. Ever a showman.
“Did you trace him? Do you know which ship?”
Yes. The Persephone. Our ports won’t be far apart.
Her smile curved, red as rose petals, thorn-sharp.
And I believe their vessel has hit some stormy weather just now. Though it is endeavoring to ease the worst of it.
“Do you need..?”
No, Darling. I only press when I feel it slacking. It will be wrung out by the time it reaches shore. I will merely be peckish.
Her smile dimmed a shade as she searched her husband’s face.
Are you certain you’re alright?
“I am, Mina. Even if I weren’t, we could not risk it being you. Not while he’s still scrabbling to take your reins again.”
It showed you, didn’t it?
“Showed what?” Mina looked at him. Read him. Turned over the stone that her husband had freshly laid over the revelations bled out into his mind. “Ah. That.”
That. Was this what hurt you in there?
“I am not—,” Her hand went to his cheek. A rust-colored drop was swept away. “Oh. I thought I felt lightheaded.”
Do not distract. Was learning it what hurt you?
“It did not hurt. Only shamed me, somewhat. It casts a different light on his pending demise.”
A slaying made into euthanasia?
“…That is certainly a word for it.”
There are few others to choose from. Extermination. Justice. Recompense. Safety. But, in its thinnest terms, yes, euthanasia. I would not be surprised if he welcomed it in the end. I think I would.
His hand seized around hers.
“Why?”
She smiled back. The ghost of the living girl made its edges soft.
You would not understand. You do not know what it is to love and be loved by you, Jonathan. To imagine the latter was a lie? Worse, a lie you assumed was known by the one who loved you? I do not know if I could suffer it. More, you remain Love himself. Coveted and giving and, even for the Thing we hunt, pitying. For you champion the feeling in its own right, even as you did not guess that you were more to the Thing than a trophy.
They were silent for a time. Feeling the creep of dawn coming for the horizon. Jonathan looked to her again. Searching.
“Mina. Did you know?”
The possibility occurred to me. It did not mourn the Weird Sisters for more than a year, despite their time with it. Lucy it was bitter for losing only because she was the first conquest of a new land, slain before she could be enjoyed. I, the supposed new companion, was relegated within months to an afterthought. No more or less than a necessary evil in its mind—the hostage there to keep you there. With it. And it speaks volumes that it kept even a fraction of its word to you at all.
It could have taken you at any time, Jonathan. Pounced and bit and fed and turned, all with no one to stop it. But it didn’t. Not merely to see you suffer through the performance as you had before, but because it wanted to hide in the fact that you had free will. That you were immune to all but the most superficial pulls of the mesmer rather than the permanent leash upon my mind. It wanted you free and human and in its company, ‘of your own choosing.’ Or near enough. I can think of no reason for it beyond the Thing hoping for the act to become real.
“I cannot tell if that’s a mark of insanity or sadness.”
Perhaps both. And you do not have to cover yourself in barbs here, my Love. There are things we do not wish on enemies, even if they are deserved. That being said—,
“My plans have not changed, Darling.” He leaned his face into her palm, smiling. “We will dance on his ashes for what he’s done. For what he means to do.”
When we finish, we can pour what’s left of him upon a garden of wild roses. Perhaps it will carry some peace after him.
The rest of their conversation was not in words. It carried on even as they pressed their lips into the perfect mold of each other’s, the tableau of them spied only by another couple who thought they must be their elders as they went along to their own room.
“Now when was the last time you kissed me like that?”
“Oh, hush. I’m sure it was only yesterday I did. Sometime after the banquet, wasn’t it?”
“Mm.”
“And anyway, it’s not the sort of thing for our age, dear. These young people are growing ever brasher out in the open.”
“Yes, in public, on a boat. Most brazen. Lord knows there’s scads of witnesses…”
Daybreak came and the storm departed with it. The one in the sky, at least.
Down below, in the dark, in the dirt inside a box, a smaller tempest raged. Tried to rage. Tried to hold to thunder and lightning and hail. But the death-sleep melted it down into its truer shape, freed from the whipping of desperation in the guise of anger. The grave earth became rosy mud as new tears rolled. Between this and the toll of keeping back the storm, even nursing from the crushed heart had barely helped in stalling the change. Black hair had turned to iron, iron to ancient white.
Dreaming dragged him down and away from his own will. Through the foam of futures yet unborn, through the penalties and precautions yet to be inflicted, all the way to a moonlit window in the library. His friend stood before him. Alive and undead. Wasted and hale. Blue-eyed and red. Cold lips smiling and pressing into his. Joy frozen in place.
In the world outside his mind, the cadaver of an old man moved just enough in his bed of soil to hold the brooch tighter. Enough so that the clasp split his skin and poured ichor over the golden dragon and its treasure. He did not feel it.
But wept just the same.
#this AU has wrung four novellas out of me#I pray this is the last or my hands will be reduced to nubs#anyway#for maximum ambience imagine Dracula rocking back and forth in his dirt box listening to Annie Lennox's “Love Song for a Vampire”#but this time with the (grudgingly) appropriate Harker swapped in#he's about there#blood of my blood#dracula#dracula bad ending au#jonathan harker#mina harker#quincey harker#my writing
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Content warning for talking about nsfw topics and mention of suibaiting
I use the term 'schizo' here as a shortening of 'schizophrenia' this is just for ease of writing as I'm mentally exaughsted. I do not condone people using the term 'schizo' if they're not schizophrenic.
Okay I'm far calmer now but I feel this needs to be stated because I genuinely can't believe so many are tolerating this behavior.
Minors SHOULD NOT be posting kink art, at all. Especially they shouldn't be showing it to other minors regardless of if the work is 'sfw'.
The fact I've seen several people tolerating a minor making inflation and weight gain content and calling those against it fatphobic genuinely disgusts me. A person is not fat phobic for criticizing a kid making kink content.
The excuse that it was just comfort stuff doesn't work either because not only were hastags for the kinks themselves used, but an art piece reposted on that account was actual genuine fat fetish artwork. Terms like Vore, and talking about wanting to make a vore piece were also mentioned. Vore is inherently a kink and exclusively a kink for being eaten alive. Kinks themselves can be coping mechanisms so trying to claim it is such doesn't change that it was kink content. Regardless you would've been actively putting yourself in harms way for creeps who did view it sexually to interact with you.
Lilith you, and your friends, actively were harassing Haz for criticizing(justifiably) vaguely what you were doing. I especially do not like how you actively tried to paint an anonymous person sending asks that can be literally anyone, hell can literally be you because you can send anon asks to yourself, as if the Anon was Haz with literally 0 proof. I'm genuinely pissed that you only apologized to me, which you did after I made it clear to you I DO NOT WANT an apology from you as I WOULD NOT forgive you. I especially won't forgive you after you attempted to suibaited me to attempt to guilt me into forgiving you. The timing of that post being MINUTES after I told you explicitly to leave me alone for like the 5th time and that I just calmed down from a panic attack makes me come to that conclusion that was what you were actively doing.
I could genuinely be misinterpreting but this is still how that came off.
I am schizophrenic, I'm public about this fact, you knew this fact. For those who don't know, Schizo is not just seeing things. Its a disorder that severe paranoia, delusions, etc. Stress induced episodes are possible.
Your actions already triggered my paranoia really badly. Especially after the suibaiting, Suicide is already a massive trigger for me.
I genuinely cannot believe some of you are supporting a person who actively already harassed one person and spread a blatant lie about them, that posting fetish content knowing it will be seen as such, but also actively was triggering a person's mental disorder ignoring the person's pleads to be left alone.
Also DO NOT blame Haz for me finding your kink account for fucks sake. Haz was not why or how I found it, I found it because YOU reblogged it onto your OWN MAIN BLOG. Stop blaming Haz for literally everything. Quit acting like you're some victim in this situation. And get my god damn name out of your mouth. I'm not speaking about this any further and will go back to regularly posting after this. I only made this because this seriously needs to be addressed and y'all need to quit condoning this behavior especially since I know at least some of you are my same age or close to it. Deer Ragdoll you are not exempt either which is why this is being posted on twitter too, I know you're still on your accounts just because you deleted your tumblr doesn't mean I don't know you have a Twitter and can't see that you're still retweeting things. You both need to be held accountable for this genuinely disgusting behavior.
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hi <3 so i’m on my like 5th reread of red is the color of sinners and i know the term rent free has kind of lost its original meaning now, but when i say i think about this fic series CONSTANTLY, i need you to know i think about it daily. i genuinely think i’ve thought more about this fic and it’s universe more than any other fic i’ve ever read :’) that being said i have a couple questions!! so i know you have a lot planned for this series and i was wondering when jason knows matt is DD and starts helping him out more on missions and stuff like we’ve seen him start doing as his guy in the chair, do you think if they were doing field work matt would learn tactile signing to communicate with jason? i feel like that would be sooo cool to see and also it feels like another step of trust between them with how almost intimate the act of needing to physically touch someone or even hold their hand to communicate is. also as someone who is also obsessed with hellblazers apprentice, im curious if you’ll drag constantine into this fic? i’m not sure if you think he would really have any place in this AU, but it would be fun to see a little cameo, i love their dynamic. anyways i have so many thoughts about this series, i sometimes just bounce it around like a ping pong ball in my head throughout the day and i can’t wait for more! <3
You have no idea how long I was reading this ask. Legitimately, I was laying on my bed and kicking my feet while giggling like a school girl.
As for your first question, in field work is gonna be a bit ;)
Tactile signing (which I did not know that was it's proper name was so thank you for that bit of info!) would definitely be something that Matt and Jason would use. Honestly, how I see their ways of communicating is very diverse. Later on, it'll be revealed that Matt can pick out some signs thanks to his enhanced senses, but they have to be ones Jason does a lot, don't have a lot of nuance requirements (ex. smaller motions or an expression), and it's still a mix of context clues (i.e., conversation topic, others' responses to them, etc) when he's translating them. Otherwise, they'd use tracing when they're close by. Matt and Jason would also use morse code to communicate (Matt has to learn it and Jason has to kinda relearn it/brush up on it).
As for your second question, I may or may not have some ideas I've been toying with...
Here's a lil snippet as a thank you for the ask.
(Rough draft atm so ignore that it's not up to my standards >_>)
#jason todd#batman#dc#red hood#red is the color of sinners#dc comics#my fanfic#matt murdock#daredevil#netflix daredevil#marvel mcu#mcu#marvel#nmcu daredevil#daredevil show#john constantine#hellblazer's apprentice#hellblazer comic#hellblazer#jason peter todd
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Ep 25: Live Through
@trigun98watchparty My time has come.
I watched "Live Through" in Japanese and English for this recap. For science. It's not because this is my favorite episode, no. That has nothing to do with anything.
--How did Milly and Meryl get Vash away from LR? Does 1 ile = 1 mile? Did they swipe Legato's Cinderella coach?
--that floppy hair *swoon*
--Some have criticized Meryl for ducking outside as soon as Vash begins to talk. Perhaps that is merited, and she does carry a good measure of guilt for following him, but it felt to me more like she wanted to give him space and / or privacy. Having loud emotions all over the place is frowned on in Japanese culture, and Meryl is very, very polite. Maybe she just doesn't know what to do and panics (Vash has not always been encouraging in terms of having her around, in general). Either way, it tears her up inside to hear him wailing in despair.
--Obviously Meryl has been home tending to Vash while Milly works. It's nice to see Meryl recognize that Milly is busting her butt, but she doesn't know how to address Milly's feelings, either.
--Vash should not be up and about - he's weak and feverish and not a little delirious. Good thing Milly can carry him.
--Get in there, big sis, and tell Meryl it's okay that she loves him. She's absolutely right in that Legato would have found a way to make Vash shoot him whether or not the two of them were involved. Never hold back in matters of the heart.
--My favorite scene. Meryl, alone in the light of the fifth moon, diligently mending Vash's coat. She wants to put him back together and make him whole again, even if she gets hurt in the process. She's desperately in love with him, and she holds the kind person he is close to her heart... but he was the one who put the hole in the moon. How can she reconcile that?
--Vash does look happier.
--He tries to pet the kitty, and Kuroneko gives him a swat, which some interpret as the Trigun Goddess telling Vash to get it in gear. This is incorrect. Cats are just assholes.
--It didn't stop with Legato, now, did it. Knives is pressing harder.
--"Sound Life" must be a song they teach in NML kindergarten. Many people seem to know it, including Kaite and Meryl. (the lyrics really need to scan better, it's so awkwardly phrased)
--This scene is such a tough one. It's lovely - two lovers out under the stars, right? And Meryl is so happy that Vash is considering staying with them. But it's also plain to see that he might have given up. It would be easy, wouldn't it? Let the girls take care of him while he hides. Don't do anything, and wait for an answer.
--What were you doing up so late, Meryl? (we had some ideas)
--There's no way that the townspeople could have captured someone like Vash if he hadn't let them do it. He's so broken that he won't fight back. He's a sinner now, like Knives, like Legato, beyond redemption.
Except...
...Knives assumes that Vash would sacrifice himself for everyone else. Someone else sacrificing herself for him had never been part of the equation.
--So many have stopped believing in Vash, or he thinks they have. They turn their backs on him and he accepts it as the normal course of things. Jessica's crush was childish (I was gonna marry Luke Skywalker when I was four, just saying) but even she ran away after what happened to the ship. That's why it's so important that Meryl loves him. She has made her decision, and she's steadfast in it.
--Maybe Vash doesn't realize how much she loves him until she puts herself between him and the gun, and he hears Rem's words from Meryl's mouth and sees Rem one more time. If Meryl still loves him, then Rem can still love him too. Mistakes happen but you can learn from them, and if you have the right people in your life, they will love you through your mistakes and help you to make it better.
--And finally, Vash realizes that Rem's words apply to him, too, and that he is no less deserving of a second chance and a future than any of the others he's impressed those words on. Does that make Meryl the analogue to Alex? I think it does.
--Awww, such a sweet snuggle. And then Vash has to go doof it up like normal and Meryl has to freak out like normal. It's their love language. (TBH I'd punch my husband too if he rubbed his stubbly face on me like that.)
--What happened after that? (we have some ideas)
--Vash gets ready to go. Seeing him wash up and shave is oddly pleasing, a reminder that despite his Plant-ness, he's a regular dude who has to wash his face and brush his teeth and get haircuts and have breakfast and do all that human stuff.
--Meryl wants to say something to Vash, but she's gotten wiser too. She recognizes that even though there might be a lot that she wants to tell him (and, I think, he might want to tell her too), stating her feelings in the open would be a distraction (or even a burden) he doesn't need right then. Milly is right. There will be time when he gets back.
It doesn't come through in English, but he's so gentle with her in Japanese. He knows what she wants to say. In his own way, at that time, he's saying I love you too.
--Vash takes WW with him, with Milly's love and blessing. May you go with God's protection.
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As much as they hate Alphys
She DID try to help
I mean, to be her advocate
The DT Experiment did work for a moment (still risky tho, not denying that)
But the instant regret of making the Amalgams was too much to handle
I mean, if you were in her situation, what WOULD you say to the ones who donated? What COULD you say?
"So I brought back your loved ones but they melted together"
(Still stupid of her to hide it but still, when you got high expectations, you can fall far and hard when you fail)
So uhh
Sorry for the rant but
Will they EVER forgive Alphys?
she did try to help but also… her cowardice and inability to own up to her own mistakes resulted in family members being separated and in the dark, and monsters wandering an old dark lab area for years and forever changing their psyche…. she tried but she hurt so many people in the end that can never be reversed
all she had to do was be like “i may have celebrated too early, heres exactly what happened to your family, you can still come see them if you want” bc like… their family still would’ve loved them probably and they deserved to know no matter what happened. doctors send premature hopeful messages to patient’s families all the time, alphys just wasnt strong enough to own up to that
in terms of the uty cast, i dont think ceroba will ever forgive her; ceroba is already EXTREMELY tentative with letting her look at kanako and clover under intense supervision, but like. she is Not letting her kids be with alphys again, even if she knows alphys wont do anything again. she also just tends to hold grudges in general LMAO. kanako just hates what alphys did to her, and as a kid i think she hates her, but i think as she grows up she realizes that. alphys did the best she could and tried to give kanako a good life in the labs. still bitter and resentful bc there was no need to keep her there, but accepting that alphys did try her best to take care of them and had good intentions going in. she wasnt expecting anything that happened TO happen. i thunk kanako would forgive, but never forget the torment she was put through due to alphys
#asked and answered#monster clover au#mcau lore#im no alphys hater i prommy#but a lot of the uty wharacters hate a particular dislike (to be nice) towards her HDJFKF#also i feel like w alphys in particular a lot of people are like ‘what would you do in her shoes?’ when the question is really#‘what would you be feeling if you were in the amalgamates shoes?’
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🔞 Just Fucking Write - Day 94 🔞
Prompt: Straight Sex (blame @m-is-mickey for the suggestion) - Juyeon x Giselle (Aeri)
Tags: Unprotected sex (wrap it up, kids), lewds/nudes, oral sex (f receiving), squirting, multiple orgasms
A/N: I picked Aespa’s Giselle because she & Winter did a TikTok with Juyeon & Eric. My other option was Illit, but shockingly people get their asses on their shoulders if you ship a legal member of a group if there’s any underage members. Whatever. All of Aespa is legal. Let’s move on, shall we? This is separate from both the Hyunjin & Jumil Cheating Universes.
Aeri-bae: WYD? 😘
Juyeon picked up his phone when it went off on his bedside table.
Juyeon: Lying in bed. Why?
A pause.
Aeri-bae: Naked? 😏
Juyeon snorted.
Juyeon: Has anyone told you that you think like a guy?
Aeri-bae: Regularly. Wanna fuck then get ramen?
He definitely couldn’t turn that down. Half the group was out of the country and everyone else had gone to bed. He could leave without being interrogated. The girls had just moved into a new dorm and all of them knew to turn a blind eye when Juyeon showed up.
Juyeon: Be there in 10
Aeri-bae: Make it 7. I’m soaking my sheets already
Juyeon’s cock stirred at the thought of Aeri with her pussy out and dripping. Juyeon grabbed a sweater, his wallet, and keys and was out the door. If the traffic was in his favor and he caught the bus at the right time, he could get to their dorm in 7 minutes. Everything worked in his favor. Jimin opened the door and rolled her eyes when she saw him.
”You know where to go,” she sighed as she let him in.
”Thanks,” Juyeon grinned. “We’ll try to keep it down.”
”I got earplugs after last time,” she replied. Juyeon went down the hall and knocked on Aeri’s door. He heard rustling then she peeked out from behind the door. “Close your eyes. I have a surprise.”
”Okay,” he agreed and she pulled him into her room by his wrist.
”Open,” she said. He opened his eyes to see her standing in front of him in a black lace lingerie set. There were no panties, just a garter belt, and the bra barely qualified for the term.
”Holy fuck,” he breathed.
”I want you to take some pictures before we get started. Something we can both enjoy when we can’t see each other,” she told him.
”With what?” He asked dumbly, still trying to take in the sight in front of him. He noticed a distinct glisten on Aeri’s inner thighs.
”Your phone works, doesn’t it?” She teased.
”You want me to take pictures of you in lingerie and have them on my phone?” He asked.
”In progressively less and less lingerie to be specific and I can show you how to encrypt the folder,” Aeri replied. “All the other boys were very enthusiastic.”
Juyeon knew they weren’t exclusive. They’d agreed on that early on.
”How many others?” Juyeon asked.
”Four, but you’re my favorite. And the only one I let raw me,” She grinned, climbing back on the bed. She made a point of crawling so he could see how wet her pussy was. He was dying to get a taste of her before he fucked her.
”I’m flattered,” he said as he stripped to his underwear.
”You should be,” she replied and leaned back on the bed. Juyeon began taking pictures as she posed. Then she reached back and pulled the bra off, leaving her tits exposed.
”You -,” he began.
”Keep going. I’m gonna be naked by the time this little photo shoot is done,” she said.
“Okay,” he nodded, already starting to feel pussy drunk and he hadn’t even touched her yet. Juyeon kept taking pictures until Aeri was completely naked and reclined on the bed, casually rubbing her pussy.
”Let me see,” she held out her free hand. Juyeon gave her his phone and she swiped through the pictures. “You’re also a better photographer.”
”Thanks,” he said as she handed him his phone back.
“Have I tortured you long enough?” She asked.
”Please let me taste you,” Juyeon whined, his dick hard enough to cut diamonds, but still in his underwear.
”Take off your undies and you can have my pussy,” Aeri replied. Juyeon almost fell off the bed trying to get out of his underwear and not lose sight of between Aeri’s legs. She laughed. Once he finally got them off, Juyeon plunged his face between her legs and began licking and sucking. She tasted like honey and it was addictive. She dug her fingers into his scalp and moaned as he licked every drop he could get. He stuck his tongue in her cunt and began fucking her with it.
”Fuck, Juyeon, I’m gonna fucking come all over your face,” she panted, bucking her hips in his face.
”Do it,” he pulled back for a moment. Then he resumed his position between her legs and kept tongue fucking her until he felt her thighs start to shake. Then her pussy started to flutter around his tongue. A few seconds later, she was dripping come all over his nose and mouth. Aeri had thrown a pillow over her face to muffle her cries of pleasure, mostly so she wouldn’t get bitched out by her roommates later. Juyeon sat up and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. She hadn’t fully come down from her first orgasm before he slid into her tight pussy. Even fucking four other guys hadn’t loosened her up. The fact she stayed tight was part of the appeal. She wasn’t as tiny as some of the other girls he’d fucked, but she was the one he kept coming back to. Tight, sexy, and not afraid to tell him exactly what she wanted.
”Should I make more of a mess of your pussy?” He grunted as he thrust into her.
”Fucking ruin me,” she pulled him down into a kiss. It was more teeth and tongue than was comfortable, but Juyeon enjoyed it anyway. He sat back on his heels, pulling Aeri up on his lap. He took her waist and began fucking her on his cock.
”Shit, what the fuck,” she grunted as he manhandled her.
“You said ruin you,” he smirked.
”I did, didn’t I?” She grinned. She tilted her head back, exposing her neck for the taking. No marks. That was the only firm rule in the industry. Juyeon wanted to mark her up. To show the other guys he was her first choice. Instead he had to settle for mouthing at the smooth skin as she bounced on his dick.
”Ready to come again?” He asked against her throat.
”Always ladies first,” she teased.
”And more than once if I can arrange it,” Juyeon added.
”Finish me again,” Aeri kissed him again, this time with a little more finesse. He reached between them and teased her clit with this thumb. He felt her body momentarily lock up, then she was coming again, her face buried in his shoulder.
”That…was cheating,” she panted when she finished.
”No, I just know how to properly pleasure a woman,” Juyeon teased.
”When you put it that way,” she kissed him. “Ready to fill me up?”
”Been ready,” Juyeon leaned her back down and balanced himself on his arms before fucking hard into her again. It wasn’t long before he was coming hard and fast into her pussy. He pulled out when he finished and admired the mix of their come oozing out of her red and swollen cunt.
”Can I take a picture of this?” He asked. Aeri looked surprised for a moment, then handed him his phone.
”Naughty boy,” she giggled, spreading her legs wider so he could get a good shot. He showed her the pictures when he finished. “You’re definitely sending me those.”
”Of course,” he grinned. They stared at each other for a moment like there was something more to be said.
”Time to clean up and get some food,” she said. She passed him a box of tissues as she pulled on a robe to go to the bathroom. Once they were as clean as possible and redressed, they left for the 24 hour ramen spot a few blocks from the girls’ apartment. Juyeon found himself holding Aeri’s hand. They probably should’ve worn masks or something else to obscure their identities, but it was 2am and they were both still fucked out. Dating “scandals” had been rampant recently even if it was just two idols of the opposite sex having a normal conversation.
Maybe in a different life, Juyeon thought to himself as they took a booth in the back. Aeri was about to pick up the menu when Juyeon stopped her.
”I want to get a picture of this, too,” he said.
“Seriously? I’m wearing a flannel and my glasses,” she huffed.
”Maybe I want a PG picture I can show my friends when they ask about who I’m seeing,” Juyeon said.
”Fine,” Aeri posed and Juyeon took the picture.
”Perfect,” he said and showed it to her.
”Thanks,” she tried to hide a blush and failed. “Now let’s order. I’m starving.”
#just fucking write 2k24#minors dni#crossover ships#Juyeon x Giselle#the boyz fanfic#the boyz smut#aespa fanfic#aespa smut
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Hi! So I saw your post about wanting to talk about Will Solace (me too queen, me too) so what are your headcanons? Or funny little tidbits about him and his friends? Love your blog!
OF COURSE THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS ASK!!! to hear that someone genuinely loves my blog is so surreal cause like??? You like my blog?? Where I literally just say what's on my mind and ramble???
(P.S. TO ANYONE SEEING THIS!! IF YOU WANT HEADCANONS FOR OTHER CHARACTERS JUST SHOOT ME AN ASK!!!! I WILL HAPPILY ANSWER THEM ALL :DD)
Okay without further ado, here they are!!!
My Will Solace headcanons! ☀️
He has curly hair! Think somewhere between 2c and 3a
Speaking about hair, his hair is naturally brown and he dyes it blonde
ANOTHER HAIR ONE but he has a very extensive hair care routine! You'd think he would have very damaged hair because of all the bleaching, but that shit is SOFT
Only uses feminine floral perfume cause it smells better (hes right. it does.)
Despite insisting on healthy eating, he survives off of random snacks and red bulls
Loves indie pop and jazz music but does listen to a lot a country as it reminds him of his mother
Hopeless romantic. He will cry to laufey.
90% of his closet is made up of incredibly cheesy dad joke t-shirts.
Wears lots and lots of bracelets! All very mismatched in terms of colour and texture, but it adds to the charm (or so he says)
His hair is just long enough to put in a very short ponytail when he works (but a few loose curls always slip out)
He sticks out his tongue when he's concentrating on something
Clarrisse practically adopted him as her honorary little brother and he went to her highschool graduation!! (she totally did not cry when she saw him. nope. not at all.)
everyone at camp owes him atleast 5 favours except lou ellen because she somehow never gets injured??? Cecil on the other hand, owes him about 13 favours.
Friday is the apollo cabin's game night, and he NEVER wins (kayla swears austin is cheating, but hes just really good at monopoly.)
the cabin is always spotless because he despises stable duty
(This one is canon but not talked about enough) when he said he's horrible at every apollo thing except healing, he was not exaggerating. an absolutely horrid singer and he would miss a target 3 metres away.
okay that was a lie because he can manipulate light.... to a certain extent. he's working on it he swears!!
One of those people that are incredibly insistant about wearing sunscreen even tho he doesn't need it himself
And now for some angsty ones because I know you all love them:
A very obvious one, but he has pretty bad PTSD.
I'm pretty sure this one is canon, but he saw Lee die in botl (i have had a oneshot idea about thia for months, but i literally never finish oneshots so theres no point in trying to write it ☹️)
A lot of people thought him and Lee were biological siblings because they looked so similar and also because they were super close
him and Micheal were also really close, but they were a lot more distant after Lee died and they never really got to reconnect
Post botl, the apollo cabin had about 17 kids. 3 survived the battle of manhattan.
has a really bad habit of overworking to distract himself
Way too many scars for a medic. (He won't admit where he got them from, or why most of them are on him arms.)
Okay, that's all for today!! I hope you enjoyed those headcanons :)
Once again saying this but if anyone reading this wants some headcanons for other characters please please leave me an ask 🙏 love you all okay bye bye
#pjo hoo toa#pjo#percy jackon and the olympians#hoo#toa#headcanons#will solace#will solace angst#clarisse la rue#cecil markowitz#lou ellen blackstone#apollo cabin#cabin 7
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THE FUNGI IN SKY! OK, so first of all, they're shelf fungi, and second of all, they're polypores, which goes without saying because all (or most, I have no idea what's up with Oyster Mushrooms) shelf/bracket fungi have pores instead of gills! I don't know what this could possibly mean for the plot, but it's verry interesting!
#On that note#i don't know a lot about fungi either#but by God do i wish#once i tried doing light research#but there were so many terms that I Did Not Know#and those terms led to more terms and led back to the other terms#leading me around through several thousand rabbit holes where some were also the ouroboros#sky cotl#sky#sky children of the light#sky: children of the light#mushrooms#fungus#mycology#fungi
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When I tagged that post about objectifying athletes by making them wear shorter shorts with "early 2000s renault", it was specifically because of these pictures
+ tennis because they belong here too
#you know what i realized?#2000s renault are what current ferrari wish they could be in terms of thirstposting#you cant OUTDO the DOER#but seriously asking politely#why did 2000s renault have so many slutty pictures of their drivers LMAO#was it just the causal effect of suddenly having absolute dreamboat fernando alonso on their team?? but seriously LOL#like those 2004 miami pics...what incited them to think 'we need to put our driver fernando in a slutty outfit w his abs out'#+ were the renault boys the og gym thirstposters ??? omg#also way sluttier than any modern gym mirror selfie like cmon short shorts...thighs fully spread towards the camera...bro...#specifically fisi in these pics is rly doing the most could those shorts be any shorter???#also hehehe those tennis pics i am so in love with them like genuinely obsessed with them#btw i was gonna include these in a comp post of fisi and nando pics i like which i would *eventually* like to make#but after seeing that textpost i think they deserve to be on their own#f1#formula 1#fernando alonso#giancarlo fisichella#renault#formula one#fa14#we do a little bit of f1#btw these are from:#2005 australian gp
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a little sad that tomorrow is the new seasons finale
i hope they continue making it into the future tho since its such a fan fav/cult classic and they seem to being getting good reviews
i mean i cant speak for everyone but ive been really enjoying the new episodes and really dig the new animation which ive heard mixed reviews on that too
ik the limited animation is what made “aqua teen”, “aqua teen”, but this is a nice change i mean some like it; some dont and thats fine we dont ALL have to be satisfied with it
really truly hope this isnt the end tho 🙏🏻
#like ppl were psyched abt the new movie last year and the new season so i really dont know why they wouldnt keep making it#i mean matt and dave have stated MANY times they dont own the show so its really not up to them to whether or not they can keep going or no#they did a bunch of interviews before the new episodes came out saying ‘keep watching them over and over so we can make more’#ik they were joking but ive been rewatching them all not just so they can keep at it but bcuz i genuinely like the new eps#and it is a proven fact in the tv industry that views do matter sometimes in the terms of whether or not to keep going on with a show#i guess we really just have to wait and see what happens tho#and we still have tomorrows ep to base this on too#athf#aqua teen#aqua teen hunger force
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ORAS could have been so good if the gameplay had just been overhauled properly.
#Stupid shit#Pokemon#Like!!! It has AMAZING visuals/redesigns/environment designs/music/writing/the BEST random encounter system in the series#But its post-game is absolutely uncomparable to the original with the exception of how *cool* the deoxys encounter is#And the gameplay does not hold a fucking candle to the original at all.#It's one of those pokemon games you just blow through and that unfortunately makes it not as fun and also relatively forgettable#God... but what could have been if they cared enough to preserve what the original had in terms of gameplay#Like I played Alpha Sapphire and Emerald at around the same time over the last year or so. Revisited them together.#And ORAS did so fucking well in so many ways... and yet Emerald was way more memorable#So many battles in the original games actually mattered and had to be thought about with genuine strategies if you didn't just grind one mo#In ORAS literally none of it matters. There is zero challenge whatsoever.#And I KNOW I know it's because game freak realized that they were releasing this game to a market of kids with 'no attention span'#So their goals were different#But man does it make for a shit turn-based RPG to approach things that way.
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/obey me! vent/
#jessamine rambles#before i start. pls keep in mind that this is fully subjective and could just be a 'me' problem. i just want to get this off my chest#ngl i've been contemplating on whether i want to stop playing obey me. both the og game and nightbringer#idk i've been playing the game since its first month and while it's given me a lot of joy + memories + chances to befriend other ppl. i'm#pretty burned out. not to mention TIRED of my consistent disappointment with the game#the main story.....where do i start?? i actually enjoyed s1-s3 despite my qualms with the fillers and pacing but s4 disappointed me. i was#rlly looking forward to simeon's storyline and the new characters but ultimately. the devs tried to squeeze too many things into one season#not to mention that there is a notable difference in how the characters are written. i.e. beel's hunger and asmo's beauty#being watered down to running gags instead of the complexities explored in the old dg stories and chara songs#gameplay-wise. i was there when the devs raised the rewards price of the event urs and removed the demon ssrs completely#but nightbringer was the last straw for me. the amount of time it takes to grind for two games. knowing that the og app has essentially bee#abandoned by the devs?? not to mention that while the plot is interesting. i haven't touched the main story ever since the coma arc#i will give credit to the devs for improving the event stories by choosing to focus on 1-2 demons. but it has always felt like a quantity >#quality situation. esp if i were to compare it to my other fandoms#it also doesn't help that i'm currently at a point of my life where i'm questioning if i could use my time on obm for better things#seeing how the game is giving me less reasons to believe it is worth my time#idk this may also be a short-term phase since i DID get back into twst after a long hiatus and i recently got into whb#which btw has felt like a breath of fresh air despite my frustrations with the bugs and current gacha#but yeahhhh........as much as i love the obm characters and fanfics. i'm just tired#at this point i feel like the only reason why i still play the game is due to the nostalgia and so i don't waste the years of grinding#aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh#this is what i get for being the type of player who only plays a few games so they can rlly dedicate their time and passion to it#that's all
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