#i read a fic the other day where someone does this that would generate insane discourse if it were widely read | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

gaywizardzone · 3 months

Note

deliriously in love with your dgm fanart. i stumbled into a full course buffet. exquisite, splendid, 10/10 no notes. do you have any DGM fic recs, bc i have suitcases full of DGM recs,

ok first of all thank you so much!! dgm is i think the thing i've drawn the most fanart for in my life cumulatively? in many bursts of insanity over the years. lol. so i have a lot of fun drawing it and i'm very honored that you like what i've made so much. also re: your other ask my worstie and collaborator ozwuv and i are working on it together since you sent it to both of us (we made a joint google doc to combine our perspectives lol) so the answer might not come from me but you'll get one!

second of all i am kind of an old livejournal era hag in terms of my taste in fanfiction in general and my history with this series in particular, so there are exactly three things in here that are less than a decade old and two of them are from 2016. naturally this means that a lot of it is now divergent with some details of how the plot and characterization and etc has actually gone (sorry to everyone back in the day who thought kanda was looking for some missing sister or something. one truly could not have possibly seen all of that coming). that said they still hold up to me in terms of general character dynamics and being fun and well written and such. recommendations also depend on what you like! i will generally not put that much shipping in here because there aren't that many of those i've read and would recommend in the first place (no hate to our strong and beautiful yaoi warriors, i used to read nearly anything back in the day, it's just that not too much of it has stuck with me) but there are some things that are so iconic to me that i could not in good conscience not include them. lots of this is kanda-centric because i like him :) putting it all below the cut

Hard Living by metisket - the aforementioned ship fic that's too iconic not to include. changed my brain chemistry when i first read it many many years ago. i seriously considered making it the only thing i put on here for a second just for the bit. To Me this is actually such a classic that it transcends shipping. the humor is very sharp and funny and i'm so in love with the concept of dying young for them meaning getting old early first and having to deal with it all together. they're so damn hilarious. it should happen to them. it does in my dreams. it never will but in my head there will always be a world where it does <3 i love to draw fanart of them as old decrepit men at 35 and maybe i'll post some of it someday. obviously it was written pre-alma so you just have to accept that it's wildly inaccurate in that regard. anyway pretty much anything this author has written for dgm is really good, i will put a few more metisket favorites on this list but check it all out even if i didn't include it. also this particular one is the inspiration for my most favoritest kanda fic <3 below

Blooming From the Mud by zarinthel - this is not just me shilling fic by someone i know. i am an absolute kanda diehard and this is really THE fic for me in terms of like hitting all the things i love about him. zar number one kanda understander. incredibly funny and compelling i don't care if you don't know anything about bleach (i don't either i haven't read it since middle school) or that you haven't read the fic it's inspired by (though you should) or that it's unfinished. you all should and in fact must read it. kanda's life is both so sad and so hilarious because of how sad it is and his pov here is just so excellently funny because he really is such a funny individual. also not a slash fic though it does really highlight how close and kind of insane his and allen's relationship is in a way that i find extremely delightful and accurate and just wonderful. they make me sick (positive). really good. so if you're a non shipper but you care about them you should read it and if you're a shipper you will also certainly enjoy it anyway so you should read it. truly for everyone!

Chimera Obscurant by moonsheen - i tend to struggle with most kanda/alma fix-it fanwork i've encountered despite loving them dearly because i rarely feel like anyone evokes the way their relationship is both strong and a bit unsettling (at least to me) without swinging around into being too edgy (i fully admit i have not explored super deeply because i get frustrated easily so i'm sure there are things that would appeal to me that i'm missing). this is one of the very few things i've read for them that i've been like yes i think this is beginning to get at the kind of atmosphere i want to see. if i remember correctly this was written before kanda came back to drag allen into accepting support and friendship so i'm just like "oh whatever" about its incompatibility with that. fanwork for ongoing stuff truly creates divergent timelines in my head. anyway this is the most nsfw thing that will end up in here and it's not particularly explicit, but heads up that it is there in case you're averse to that

In his Heart by harukami - another kanda/alma but just kanda technically. i read this and was so delighted that i made a :D face in real life. i've assimilated this into my worldview like i think this is something he would do. he's crazy like that.

Economies of Scale by liketolaugh - last kanda and alma one but this one's here less for the romantic aspect and more because i'm so endeared by the idea of fresh out of the lab kanda being so angry and miserable but also completely blindsided by all the stuff there is in the world. ten year old who is learning about so many new animals. really funny and cute and sad.

siblings, probably by scarlet666 - this one's for the kanda and lenalee enthusiasts. the best friends lovers. i love them so dearly i put the level of energy people usually put into shipping into their bestie-isms so naturally this was for me. huge shoutout to this person for writing 20k words about them if nobody else in the world has my back i know they do. i have the memory of a goldfish and this is long enough that i can't really scan quickly to refresh my memory and make more detailed comments but i know it deserves a spot on here. my note from when i bookmarked it just reads AUGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH but i never leave a comment in that field at all usually so that speaks volumes i think. life is so beautiful sometimes. peace and love on planet earth <3

Welcome Home by metisket - for the rest of this list i am about to hit you with the metisket beam. the author whose work i most fondly remember from my youth by far, which means that's what's stuck with me and what half of my recs will be. i love this one dearly because i love a normal person perspective in insane anime settings type of fic and reever is so delightfully normal and longsuffering and also funny as hell. love how his relationship with komui is in this. not a ship fic and am not recommending it as such but it did make me in the back of my head go "komui/reever is almost like roy/riza without the war crimes for people who are cringefail mad scientist enthusiasts." sane responsible second in command type slash babysitter who is devotedly loyal to crazy irresponsible boss but also wants to kill him a little bit. they're so great to me

Growing Up by Accident by metisket - just so kanda and allen and the way their relationship is. having the exact same feelings about something but approaching it so differently that they want to attack each other. love them 4ever. the way metisket writes allen's internal voice is also delightful to me (like not JUST here but in general). he's so jaded and funny. probably my favorite allen to read out of anyone who writes him ever. and kanda is always just so...kanda.......<3

Sand Castle by metisket - (smiles and blood leaks from the side of my mouth) i love you allen walker. i love this look at allen's growth pre-series from cross' perspective and how he managed to become the hilarious twisted convoluted wonderful little freak that he is. allen is so.....everything to me truly i would never have it any other way. really kind of darkly funny but also like agonizingly emotional. delightful

Mask and Mirror by metisket - love this take on what the inside of lavi's head is like, and also the way all the character dynamics shine through even in such a short thing, they're all so wonderfully cute and funny. the sense of humor is really great. lenalee didn't even make a real appearance but even the brief mention of how she and kanda are had me giggling.

in the circus series by metisket - certified classic. i love timcanpy pov and this whole thing is just so emblematic of my fond memories of old dgm fanworks. i love anything that highlights the way they're all just so immensely fucked up to the point that it's actually incredibly absurd and funny. i'm pretty sure metisket's LJ has more mini outtakes from this series but i'm too lazy to dig through the dgm tag right now so i'll just link it so you can do it yourself if you're interested.

lastly if you're looking for someone to share your recs with you're free to! i am on a personal level picky as hell and my taste in styles and approaches to fanwork was forged in the livejournal mines and has not evolved with the times LOL but i also don't judge <3

#asks #i think this is the first ask i've ever answered on this blog lol #congrats you get to find out i'm extremely wordy #well maybe this look at my taste can provide you all some insight on my approach to dgm fanart <3 i guess

20 notes · View notes

shockwavve · 7 months

Note

Inspired by your recent tags…

How do you prefer to see Shockwave written, and why?

(I’m especially curious about IDW and TFP.)

Sorry I've had like 3 asks sitting in my askbox for forever now bc school has been kicking my ass 😭😭 but that post came up on my dash again and reminded me to answer this--

BUT UHHHH, so tbh I very strongly see Shockwave as either aroace or demiromantic & demisexual... like. Pretty much all iterations of him, ESPECIALLY IDW and TFP. TF:A is pretty much the only exception to this in which I could see him being closer to just allo... but still somewhere on the demi spectrum... and a loooot of ways I see him written in fanfic makes him very uhh... hmm how do I explain... doting?? Or very Affectionate or... well, all the things people like in a fluff fic.

And yanno that's fine, maybe that's some people's cup of tea but it's not mine. To me, Shocks is very very stoic and dry, even in relationships. I don't even like seeing him in the "stoic person who is soft with their s/o" trope because I just don't think Shockwave is a soft person, in any meaning of the word.

I could see him maybe, like... being slightly less stoic and more introspective and TALKATIVE with someone he likes... and LESS RUDE skdndks and more willing to spend time with them and LISTEN. That's how I prefer to see him written. Someone who is still very quiet and introverted and keeps to himself, even around the people he loves. Like, you know, sometimes he'll have days where he just... needs to be alone and needs you to leave him alone and if you want to be his partner you gotta be okay with that. But he'll also give you more time, speak softer, ramble about the things he's working on, have MORE PATIENCE with you, and... I think he would be more touchy in a very gentle way, like he's studying you.

But outside of that, any kind of gushy or lovey shockwave that says anything even somewhat adjacent to affectionate that isn't something ridiculously stiff like "I find you less miserable to be in company with" just rubs me the wrong way and gives me ick. I think the most affectionate thing I could see him saying is in whump. Like, a moment of desperation that could make him say "I need you", but I think "I love you" is not something he's ever going to be comfortable saying - he shows it, not says it.

TF:A Shockwave is the only one I can make an exception for but it's just because that boy is fucked up. TFA Shockwave is not capable of a healthy relationship SKDSJJDBSKSNS. He's either going to be controlling and possessive in a snakeish and insidious kind of way, or absolute unquestioning devotion. I just don't think TF:A shockwave is... like... as a PERSON capable of being in a healthy relationship unless he went to fucking therapy or had some kind of redemption arc in which case I would place him back in demi territory that is similar to the other descriptions I was talking about earlier.

Writing in GENERAL, without shipping involved? IDW shockwave is fucking insane. He is so so manipulative. He has a million equations and plans going on in his head at all times and he can and will save everyone for better or for worse - and he doesn't care what it takes to get there. That man isn't capable of any emotion except for pursuance of a goal, and maybe anger. Or, if he does feel emotion, it's very very dull and diluted. If he had it restored I think it would destroy him. I read a fic once where Rung accidentally restored his emotions and that one is very very good, I like that shockwave quite a bit.

TF:P Shockwave I think experiences emotions very much, but has a tendency to hide them because he's a very internal person. I don't think he will ever verbally express it, though, unless you REALLY piss him off. For the most part he's very stoic and blunt, and doesn't sugarcoat things... so he will be rude sometimes, but won't go out of his way to be. Some people write him way too cruel and it also rubs me the wrong way... but I also don't like seeing him written too nice either. He's doing his own thing and could really care less about what's going on around him, except for maybe Soundwave who I think he could work well with because of the matching intellect, and Megatron who I think he honestly just works with for the reliable material and the praise (and to piss off Starscream, who annoys him.) I think he can be petty, but doesn't go out of his way to be. I think he values his experiments very much, though, and sabotaging him is a surefire way to get him to try and kill you.

Basically, overall: unless we're talking about TFA Shockwave (who is goofy and cruel), I like a shockwave who is aloof, dry, passionate about what he does to a fault, doesn't talk a lot, respects those of similar intellect, does what he does either for knowledge or to pursue some "greater good", and isn't needlessly cruel. He can show some emotion but not too much, and expresses himself mostly through body language and actions, not words.

#shockwave #sorry this took forever and is just me rambling--

37 notes · View notes

aihoshiino · 4 months

Note

okay so no idea how i should refer to myself as so: hi!! im the person who had way too much fun writing ai/nino toxic yuri on ao3! i was gonna just lurk (me, tumblr account with privated likes, reblogs and follows) BUT how could i with the promise of people being normal about fictional unhealthy gay women. idk if this is the optimal way to communicate i use tumblr with the sole purpose of following 4 people and digging up ai content

i am honestly so flattered (but also kinda upset at the lack of content on them aside from my own 1k word long oneshot please keep recommending if you find more stuff on them) that you enjoyed and recommended my fics considering i just straight up had no clue where i was going: okay so top priority i want them to kiss —> but also with how things are nino would probably lash out (read: bite) —> ai would be hesitant but also is so desperate that she’d still accept it happily —> this will fuel ninos idea of ai being the perfect, invincible idol —> and then i ran and tried not to trip with the rest

your translations of the side stories and blog was probably what helped me get in to oshi no ko again because even though i am still not over ai being dead i can now listen to someone talk about how great and tragic and sad and miserable she was along with all the other characters so thank you again!

also that ask for ai/nino toxic yuri visions was me lol, thanks for talking about my fic despite how short it was <3, i might de-anon myself at some point but rn im too shy for that

woof, this got a bit long. anyways love wins fr, if there was ever a day where i participate in an onk shipping war it’ll be on the side of them

LMFAO OH MY GOD I'M SO SORRY TO HAVE JUMPSCARED YOU WITH YOUR OWN FIC 😭 WHAT A THING TO SEE ON YOUR OWN DASH....

that said it does make me so happy every time I hear people saying my relentless oshi no posting stands out to them to the degree that it does lol. I guess I'm in a similar place as you where, as happy as I am for it, it does make me a little sad that it feels like there's such little fan interest in lengthy meta and discussion on Ai herself outside of some really banal, surface level stuff. To a degree, I get that with other characters having so much more time on the page and having ongoing arcs to speculate about, but Ai is sooooooooo fascinating to me and it really drives me insane how often I see people make zero effort to engage with her arc beyond her utilitarian function in the story. It also really bums me out how often I see her get reduced to just a stepping stone in the arcs of other characters — even though the manga is literally shaking you right now and begging you to understand and empathize with her more than ever, I straight up see people cheering and crowing about Ruby 'surpassing' her or 'becoming the true Ai' as if this is a good thing and they are not completely fucking missing the point lmao.

ANYWAY!!!! That's enough grumping because the actual point of this response was to say: the Ai posting will continue until I am physically forced to stop!!!! I have so many thoughts about my wife constantly and if I do not share them I will explode!!!

(ps anon pspspspsp if you are ever feeling brave enough to unanon pls feel free to just send me your discord or your socmeds off tumblr if that is less intimidating for u.... honestly that goes for all my oshi no moots in general Please Talk With Me In DMs About My Wife)

#oshi no ko #oshi no posting #if ai has one million fans i am one of them if ai has no fans then i am no longer of this earth

8 notes · View notes

oh-snapperss · 1 year

Note

hey hi! i loved your work on cysm (have reread it twice and cried a lot) but i was wondering if you had any tips on writing etho and bdubs individually and how they interact with each other? working on my first project for them that's set in an alternate universe and i really want to get it right! thanks a lot hope you have a good day

hi anon!! thank you so much, i'm really glad that you liked cysm that much omg

hmmm ok i have a lot of thoughts so i'm gonna do my best to make this as comprehensible as possible:D

I'll start with Etho. One of the first things I noticed while writing CYSM and learning how to write Etho was his voice and his speech patterns, and how to transfer that onto a page since I didn't want to just be like "He spoke with a Canadian accent," and leave it at that when in my fic, Canada isn't really even a thing.

He has the signature "oh, snappers!" (hehe), he'll say "buh-bye!" and when he's exasperated or about to laugh or smile you can tell based on his tone. And he's got the "no-ho-ho-ho" he does when something goes wrong and his voice goes up a few octaves.

Depending on what content you're basing Etho off of, his personality also changes. If you're basing your writing off of his early days (so, Mindcrack and that era), I noticed that he's a lot quieter in general. If you're writing based on Hermitcraft, he's a lot more open.

A lot of people write Etho as cool and mysterious and slightly terrifying, and I think he can be depending on the au (e.g. @bananasofthorns' god au, where he's part of the void, you can read that au here and I adore those fics) but... a lot of the time Etho is just a guy doing a thing. He's ridiculously smart and entirely a wet rag.

In short, he's quieter, he's making fun of you without you realizing, he's got no idea what he's doing, and he's a genius.

And now I'll shut up about Etho and move on to Bdubs.

he's just a little guy! little skrunkly moss man!

Once again, depending on what era of content you're basing on, his personality would be slightly different. For the purposes of this, I'm gonna assume we're talking hermitcraft/traffic series and go from there.

god. where do I even start. Bdubs has a habit of giving his loyalty and love to anyone who will have him. We've seen him do it time and time again-with Scar in season seven, Cleo in third life, Ren in the current season as kingmaker, even Sausage now in Empires--Bdubs has this want to be wanted and given attention, and he'll swear himself to someone if that's what they can give him.

And he always goes back to Etho. At the end of it all, it's Etho Bdubs returns to.

He's loud, he cracks jokes, and I think he has a tendency to live in denial, especially when the end is near and everyone knows it. In canon, an example of this would be when it's the end of season eight and everyone else has left, but Bdubs is ignoring the giant rock hurtling towards him and filling the sky in favor of "claiming" all of the server as his own. In last life when he turns red the final time, he doesn't really accept he's red (ex. of this in my fics would be the moment in cysm when even Etho's accepted his fate, and Bdubs goes back into denial).

Bdubs will be incredibly kind while telling someone their build sucks. He's up front about things and a terrible liar.

The two together? oh god okay here we go. i'm going to have to put this post under a read more i think. whoops.

They can't take things seriously. It's rare they manage to have an entire conversation without skirting around anything deep and I think they leave a lot unsaid. It's easier to speak in actions then define it in words, and I think they've been doing that a long time.

Bdubs is the louder one, but Etho will drive him insane (it's his love language I think). They love each other but they'll never say so to each other, not really.

I think the best example of showing that I have isn't in cysm, but in I love you, I made you tea. They always leave SO much unsaid and it drives me INSANE.

Bdubs will brag and put on a bigger front than he actually has. Etho will go along with it, and tease him relentlessly.

Anything to keep the heavy topics at bay.

and now! moving on to love languages!

i think my sibling @oceans-swim worded it really well earlier so i'm gonna just say what they did SLDJKFSKLFJ

etho tends to show love to bdubs through acts of service, and bdubs shows love to etho with physical touch and words of affirmation?

another way i like to write them and affection--bdubs' love language is like. he loves attention and etho will give that to him, while etho is more reserved and bdubs will just love him anyways.

in a way i think sometimes that can actually maybe cause a problem because i think they both show love the same way they'd like to receive it but... that's just not what tends to happen? it really does go back to the lack of serious, non-joking communication. it's not an issue until you as a writer make it one LMAOOO

and uh. that's about all i got! maybe. hopefully. i really don't ever shut up about them. i hope that helps you! best of luck with your au!

#etho #bdubs #ethoslab #bdoubleo100 #ethubs #hermitshipping #laurie thoughts #thanks to tuna and ghost for also giving thoughts on this:D

64 notes · View notes

blorb-el · 2 years

Note

Hello! What are the things that you'd like to see (or see more) in a Superman story?

o/ !

hmm, fanfiction or canon? Because in fanfiction... we're all here for fun, and I'm more interested in reading something the author's genuinely interested in writing. What I want out of canon Superman stories is pretty different than what I’m looking for when I fire up AO3. That being said, here is a long stream of consciousness of fanfic concepts that are currently living rent free in my brain. at least the sfw ones lol

there was An Art gremlin did a while back of Bruce tearing up when Clark was washing his hair and tbqh i think that would go both ways. the idea of an invulnerable man being treated softly drives me insane

superbat hand kisses. do i even need to elaborate. i will (threat)

i love plotty long world built alien space mission fic, which I realize is hard to write, but I love it anyway

Kryptonian. I know the grammar is hard and the vocabulary is sparse but I would be willing to beta or translate lines of dialogue if anyone wants to include Kryptonian in their fics...

(clark and diana teaching each other kryptonian and themysciran greek…)

general Kryptonian worldbuilding. I am on the verge of trying to encyclopedia precrisis Krypton just so people can throw in tanthuo flez or :dhosurro.

also kryptonian myths, ethics, nicknames... like just tossing it out into the wild that zhor krigia means bright heart... clark calling kara kir-a as a pun on bright... kara calling clark kahl-te...

also alien biology but that’s a given with me. still. had to throw it in

i know i'm superbat on main but. good clois content...

good kara content................

kara where she shows up and is markedly Other and. everyone is at first confused (’that’s not how kryptonians are’) and then slowly realizes how much clark masks...

ABOVE ALL ELSE. COMPETENT SUPERMAN. PLEASE.

how many languages does Superman speak? Can Superman pull a child out of a mudslide in rural India and reassure her she's going to be all right and help her find her parents - in her own language? (yes. ideally he should be able to.)

the adventures of insomniac superman. precrisis the man only sleeps 1 hour a day. granted lots of time is taken up studying aforementioned languages but. 3AM clark sitting in an all night diner in texas because there was a robbery nearby and he needed to not to be alone wanted coffee afterwards. clark watching the earthrise standing on the moon. sunlight tasting different at different altitudes.

(clark bringing a moon rock back to bruce like hey thought you might like this)

you know those fics where clark meets the batfam and like. learns to get along or whatever with them. that but in reverse. give me bruce wayne learning how to tolerate the menace that is jimothy james pulitzer prize winning photographer turtle boy menace olsen

young clark reading. actually clark in general reading but especially young clark reading, trying to understand his place in the world. Superman should have an opinion on Nietzsche's Ubermensch.

clark as a chaotic good person locked into a society and a role that demands lawful goodness of him

well thought out implications of growing up with superpowers. not to toot my own horn but this post i did from a while ago explains why the concept of infrared vision still lives rent free in my head

i am ALWAYS trash for listening into people's heartbeats. it makes no sense auditorially but neither does superhearing in general. read this fic diptych from bruce and then clark pov it's about their twinned nightmares and listening to heartbeats and overhearing bruce crying and the hurt of privacy invasion!!! then go read the first one in the series. wah.

The Call from Batman Black and White has a pretty garbage Clark but the idea that sticks in my brain from that is when Clark is afraid he’s just another tool in Bruce’s utility belt. chefs kiss. god i love angst. not the time to angst when someone’s bleeding out clark but god i love it anyway. anyway fic of this scenario (Clark is Bruce’s absolute last resort and he has to call on him) but not bad

crossovers... get flashpoint kal some HELP that man needs HELP

GET DCAU CLARK SOME HELP THAT MAN NEEDS HELP. PLEASE PEOPLE. WATCH STAS’S APOKOLIPS ARC SO YOU WILL UNDERSTAND HOW BADLY THAT MAN NEEDS HELP.

just because bruce timm was not going to address clark being essentially sexually assaulted during that arc doesn't mean we gotta leave it alone

anyway basically. just. good characterization. or. i’ll settle for interesting characterization at this point. my personal standards of clark characterization hinge on my three favorite Capital S Superman Stories: birthright, all-star, and miracle monday. if a fic has just one of the aspects of those characterizations I'm content. I would elaborate on that but this is already too long.

#jellyfitzjelly #thank you for the opportunity to ramble #hmm mostly #superbat

108 notes · View notes

freckliedan · 14 days

Note

omegaverse mention!! i will now be a lil insane about omegaverse in your inbox if you don’t mind

a/b/o is so fun and good when you’re willing to play in the space! exploring it outside of pairings is very fun for me personally. omegas getting their own version of the alpha voice?? high enough level of distress not only causing scent to sour but also damaging the scent glands from the amount produced?? betas actually getting animalistic traits instead of just being normal humans?? all very good and fun!! playing with pairings also fun omega/omega good great learning things about themself through the other love that for them alpha/alpha good yes power struggle maybe trying new things yippee! i don’t have anything for beta pairings actually i don’t see them much and also i feel like the few i have seen tend to lean more normal and i like my omegaverse in the werewolf animalistic traits realm what is even the point if you don’t get to make your characters purr

anyway while typing all that i realized i might have a slight special interest in omegaverse also sorry for getting incoherent there at the end head empty no thoughts only omegaverse fanfic i’ve read. in conclusion the autism won i hope you have a nice day

anon thank you for being the realeat motherfucker in my askbox you get me!!!! i have a slight special interest in omegaverse (& mpreg generally) too, ESPECIALLY things that get really creative with it. i'm less drawn to werewolf leaning things but it's not that i dislike it, i just like other things so much!!

i especially love fic that gets INTERESTING with the nonhuman traits. there's an old destiel fic i read that does LOADS of legwork and gets into flock dynamics bc everyone has at least one set of wings?? pinnacle of going the distance.

or like!!! a fic i once read had betas as adaptable; their sex characteristics would adapt to be either more omegalike or more alphalike based on who they ended up mating with. and fic that gets into what transness and queerness look like in omegaverse worlds are my FAVE FAVE!

i've read and enjoyed omegaverse that does like.. reverse power dynamics for the worldbuilding as a whole, where omegas tend to have institutional power/be more dangerous. done right that shit SLAPS!

the two most interesting mpreg fics i read this year? neither of them were omegaverse. one was eggpreg where EVERYONE regularly laid eggs & everyone's eggs could end up fertilized by semen OR by vaginal fluid, not just by being penatrated, and then you had to tend to the egg for months as the baby grew? and the other was a truly balls to the wall bonkers (<-compliment) concept where instead of it being werewolf vibes there were. marsupial biological traits AND eggs and that coexisted in a world with normal humans, complicating things immensely?

anyways. god. there's so much room for cool worldbuilding in omegaverse. i have a couple long time mutuals on my other main blog who i've discussed like. an omegaverse setting where people have truly any assortment of sex characteristics and you cannot assume what reproductive parts someone has just from looking at them. we might do something with it someday.

life could be a dream. and werewolves are hot.

#jam replies #anon #omegaverse #mpreg

3 notes · View notes

decepti-geek · 2 years

Note

Also like. Where did multishipping go. It was good why did it go anywhere. "This pairing is better than [popular pairing] you should ship it instead" why not both! What if they are both good! Plus if someone likes one of the characters in your favorite ship they might very well get interested in it and start making content for it too... as long as you haven't made them feel bad by calling the thing they like bad and positioning your favorite ship as opposed to it. I know that you know this I'm just yelling

I honestly do think the whole shift towards 'ship this not that' and the decline of multishipping really does boil down to entitlement!!! (the exclamation marks are cause im angry about it). That's pretty much my read on it. Like, I think possibly the thing that makes me angriest about modern fandom is the way that people sort of just... expect the art/fic they want to exist? It's different, imo, when you have artists or writers complaining like 'what do you mean i actually have to WRITE/DRAW the thing if I want it to exist???' - like, that's tongue-in-cheek. They (we) KNOW we can't expect anyone else to do it.

And I think there was originally like, people would go 'someone write a fic where...' and it was basically a joke, and kind of a way of indicating 'free plot bunny here for anyone who wants it.' But over time I think the use of phrases/posts like that has become less and less ironic, and more sincere, and even where it is ironic I'd argue that that phrasing still kind of contributes to an environment where fic writers are increasingly seen as Content Machines as opposed to real people behind a computer screen. Just, something about the imperative tone of it.

And as far as that applies to people just... talking about the stuff they like, I think that's the part that almost confuses me the most. Because I know we all go scrolling through tumblr searching for stuff to entertain us, but at the end of the day a lot of what entertains us is just other people talking about/discussing the things that THEY like. Just... the general idea of demanding 'stop talking about the thing you like and start talking about the thing I like so that I can be entertained' is insane to me. People are just doing what they like to do. If what they like to do is actively hurting other people then sure, absolutely, speak up about it. But if you just don't like it... idk, I'm sure you, nonny, would not but like general you - would you stand up in the middle of a coffee shop and yell "I can hear FAR TOO MANY conversations about people's jobs going on right now! I want to be hearing about people's favourite foods instead, because that's what I'm interested in!"

No, you wouldn't, because that would be rude beyond fuck.

#fandom #fanfiction #fanart #fandom culture #anonymous

56 notes · View notes

landoncrris · 2 years

Note

I think we should all take a deep breath :’) we’re not sure about anything. could be someone else’s phone, or even if it’s his, could be a picture of his family or even just the tower bridge in general if it means something special to him. i really doubt he’d go out having a girl on his lockerscreen like that because people text him all the time and since he doesn’t have dnd on, we probably would’ve caught it in a video/picture by now. also, are we not forgetting he has two phones? maybe that’s his “second” one and so the background is nothing personal. also you all coming in here to say things about him in such a negative note all because you caught a glimpse of a phone in a video is kinda…. weird. i don’t mean to sound rude but we’re definitely looking into it too much!! the only real “ick” anyone mentioned was anything he did in miami, and that’s most likely because we hadn’t seen that side of him yet. it’s a normal “shock”. if he likes his tattoos then leave him, him getting his teeth whitened is nothing of an ick, in fact he’s taking care of himself and I myself have done that in the past because of how insecure i was. anything he does to make himself feel good, why do people attack him instantly. not every single thing has to be an ick but people exaggerate and i’ve only seen this behavior on his fanbase. weird. he also might not know about his friends’ behavior on the internet, I don’t do a social media checkup when I meet someone to know what they’re saying online. he’s also extremely nice to probably see past it. also, some of the things you talk about happened years ago. he has been through so much ever since, it doesn’t make sense to analyze his past like that. i would cry if people ever went through my old pictures because that was reallll cringe. it’s normal. it frustrates me that people don’t think about what mason would feel/think about if he read any of these. his photoshoots? how is that an ick. he’s working. if it’s about the outfits, you know who you should be taking about. but also, if you just don’t like him then just say that (?) it’s infuriating to be his fan sometimes because he’s clearly just young and having fun whenever he can and he honestly deserves it. have you thought about how serious this season was and all the work he’s put in? helping carry a struggling team along with some of the other players? getting hate comments all the time? and the second he gets to relax and go out a bit you call it an ick because he’s finally been able to let go for a few days 😭 come on, if it were my fans i’d go insane probably. you find icky anything that’s not to do with him being your ideal boyfriend, that’s wicked. some people need to realize he’s a real person and not a fictional character we read in fics (even though all his fans’ fics are so so great, specially here on this blog!!) so i guess I just wanted to get that off my chest. some people are too sensitive and he could breathe and they would call it an ick. you found the word and ran with it 😭 love your blog lia, love that you’re so mature. I love your answers all the time but i don’t think i could ever put up with some of these anons. so i’m grateful you’re so mature and definitely such a great writer!! this was never targeted towards you but yes to some people who come in here every now and again and criticize mason for being a real human being and that just annoys me i guess, because i wouldn’t like people doing that to me. so just relax, breathe and enjoy his new content, he looked great in monaco :) x

i definitely agree with you at most things!! i do have to defend some people tho because they didn’t say those icks because of the lockscreen, they sent them to me because i asked for it, because in the end i was the one who freaked out about that video :) the teeth whitening itself isn’t icky in my opinion, it’s the picture of it i posted where you can see how he got it done. which is still no excuse i really get your point but it does look funny why lie. on anything else, i really agree!! maybe the reason why so many people try to find ‘icks’ about him is because we describe him as so perfect in fics that those things stand out more? of course those fics aren’t reality and we should know that but i also know how hard it is to remind yourself that that’s not who he really is why lie. and what you said about me and my blog, genuinely thank you so so much!! i really appreciate it and i’m glad that you think that way xx

7 notes · View notes

blackdevilwhitedemon · 1 year

Text

Old Voltron YouTuber AU Thingy

I’m purging old WIPs that never went anywhere rn. This one is old, like 2017-2018 I would guess. I ported it over from my phone notes to Google Docs in like 2019.

Anyway, this one was not bad so I wasn’t fully sure if I should delete it so I thought I'd just dump it here. I couldn't bring myself to finish this/write more for it. VLD is an IP that the fandom ruined for me. :(

It’s not like anyone will read it and if someone does, if you want to use the AU for smth; go ahead. Just credit me somewhere and send me a link!

(There’s also some fandom lore and in-jokes in here that reminds me of the old days. I miss those days in the VLD fandom when it wasn’t a toxic cesspool,,,)

Youtuber AU So, I see youtube AUs of Voltron on Tumblr quite a lot. And I wanted to make a youtube AU fic for a while now, but never got around to doing it. Therefore I'm just going for it now, also I'm basing this on this post. http://lipsticklounge.tumblr.com/post/156847673083/youtube-au-where-keith-has-an-insanely-popular#notes And part of a different post I don’t think I can find which has Pidge guest star in Keith's videos and what Pidge does. But first here are my ideas for the youtube thing. I want to write them down first and then make a chapter. So this is basically this is an infor thing. Alright, here we go. -Shiro has a channel called SpaceDad (originally just Shiro, but he changed it after his viewers dubbed him Space Dad since he made quite a few space-inspired makeup tutorials and he loves talking about space) He mainly does fittest videos and make-up tutorials. And generally about health (mental health too). His channel got more popular as he started to post story time videos as well. He has some interesting stories to tell considering... -Keith's channel is called CryptidHunting. -Lance is a vlogging channel and his username is Sir Lancelot. However he calls himself Lancey-Lance. He has the most subscribers out of everyone. (This is referring to the fact Lance is the most popular character in the fandom.) -Katie has a tech channel where she reviews programs and technology. She also does tech support for her viewers so her fans are loyal. Her channel is called Pidge Gunderson. Because you know...why not put a fake name as her username? Her fans call her Pidge as they don't know her real name. And she had told them before that Pidge Gunderson is not her real name. There was this point in time where there was confusion on what pronouns Pidge went by. ((This is a parallel on what happened in the fandom.)) At first it was mostly he or them bc everyone in her vids used 'he' pronouns. But after she made a vid with her saying she's a girl everybody in her vid just used her name. (Pidge.) So her fans started using more they/them/it and some started to use she. Recently her friends have been using she pronouns for her and as such her viewers shifted accordingly. -Keith does theory videos and talks about conspiracies. Katie is a guest star in quite a few of them. This boy loves mothman. His fans have this inside joke to draw art of him and mothman. (You know, because this fandom loves Keith x Mothman and that fact was just too funny not to put into this fanfiction.) And at first he was really confused, but eventually he owned it and made jokes about it a lot. Hell, one video was even him pretending to be dating Mothman. It got 134k views within a month and that actually scared him. (Of course, Lance was the one who was in the Mothman costume. He was paid in garlic knots.) -Hunk has a cooking channel and does techy videos. He also has a bunch of shit-posting videos with Lance. He likes making parodies and funny videos with him as well. And they will post one part of the video on his channel, the other on Lance's. So, collabs basically. -You bet your ass Lance had a bunch of makeup and skin-care videos. He probably has quite a few videos where sponsors send him products for whatever and he gives people his honest opinion. Sewing tutorials. Lance has sewing tutorials and you can't tell me otherwise, he's going to be knitting as well. -Keith has a Calico cat named Red. Lance has a Russian Blue named Blue. Hunk has a All of the cats are female. Sorry, we've been led to believe that for such a long time, I can't look at them otherwise. It makes me uncomfortable for some reason??? So yeah, all girls in here. -Allura's dad and his friends (the other OG paladin besides Zarkon) owned the cats, they all died in something I guess. So...Allura gave them away to the gang??? Her mice are still her pet mice. -The two alien caterpillars Pidge kept are...well...I don't know yet...but the family dog is still in this fic as well... Wow, that means Pidge has like...4 pets in total. -Allura has her channel and so does Coran (albeit he doesn't post very often). But we'll get to that in the story. ----I'm basing off who has more subscribers based on how popular they are in the fandom, so... Lance Shiro Keith - Allura (she almost has as much as he does, she just has a little less) Pidge Hunk Coran (don't worry Coran, you're still my favorite character) Allura and Lance are together in this fic. I've been shipping it since season 2 (very low-key shipped in back in season 1, but my love didn't really grow for it until around season 3) and I've never written a fic with that ship yet so...yeah. (However, earlier I did plan to write a bunch of Voltron dabble ship-fics and Allurance is one of them, but I haven't gotten around to writing that one yet.) And yeah. Alright bye, see you guys in chapter 1. ((Before we get in, may I just say that I literally wrote the entire beginning and more of this chapter. I didn't like it. I hated it, it was too choppy, too stiff in my opinion. I hated it and felt I made Shiro and Keith too out of character. As such I deleted all of it but the video title and stats. And rewrote it in Lance's POV at a different place, time, setting. I basically just scrapped the whole thing and redid it. I'm much happier with this version. :) )) SpaceDad posted a new video! Boyfriend Does My Makeup! Posted 49 minutes ago Views 14k Like 2.6k Dislike 223 Comment 789 'HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN DATING THE CONSPIRACY THEORY GUY WTF' Lance couldn't help but chuckle at the all caps comment. It was funny. He liked funny. Who didn't? He would say Keith, but he knew for a fact that guy actually had a sense of humor. It just was usually buried, but he knew he had it. Otherwise he wouldn't have asked him to dress up as mothman in one of his videos. Keith has some weirdass inside jokes with his fans. Anyway that wasn't the point. The point is, is that Shiro's newest video was well...shocking to a lot of his viewers. That man had the funniest freak out comments under his video right now. Of course, Lance had to scroll through quite a few homophobic comments and gay-slurs, but it was generally funny. People just didn't see this one coming. Then again they never announced they were dating to the world. People just knew they were friends, they co-represented each other last year. And now people knew they were a couple. Finally. Lance was getting real tempted to say something to his viewers. "What are you looking at?" Hunk's unmistakable voice cut through the lanky boy's thoughts. Oh. He hasn't said anything to his friends yet, hasn't he? A smile fell in place in lieu of an answer as he turned off his phone and set it down on the table. He picked up his latte and took a sip. Cold. Just how he liked it. "Nothing much. Just reading through Shiro's comment section of his latest video." His ocean blue eyes wandered over to the Japanese man himself. Shiro gave him a nonchalant look back, a flavor water bottle in one hand, and the other arm around Keith. "Oh, do you mean the one with Keith doing his makeup?" Hunk's eyes widened and he turned towards Keith. "No offense dude, but like, I cried. You have no idea what you're doing." Keith raised an eyebrow at Hunk's comment. "What, and you would have?" He kept his arms crossed, not bothering to touch his tea. Shiro laughs at something Allura said, but Keith's not really paying attention to him right now. Hunk rolls his eyes and jerks a thumb in Lance's direction. "Keith, I'm best friends with this guy. Do you need any more prompting?" There's a 'hey!' coming from Lance. It is ignored as the two boys carry on their conversation. Keith shrugs off Shiro's arm to lean closer to Hunk. Shiro just readjust himself and sets down his bottle, folding his hands and placing them on top of the table. "No, fair point." Keith grunts. "But, why the hell would I know anything about that? I don't even put on my own eyeliner. Shiro does it for me. I don't really care for it." His face scrunched up in thought. "I mean, it looks nice but..." Keith gets back a hum from Hunk. He does get where Keith is coming from, but that doesn't excuse him. Allura, Lance, and Shiro are all kinda like beauty gurus. In their own ways, that is. Allura would probably be the closest fit to the internet's definition of a beauty guru. Regardless, he should still have a shred of knowledge about makeup. Then again, why is he judging him on this? It's kinda frivolous. "Alright." He settled the conversation. Lance turned to look at the youngest person on the table, Pidge. Or Katie as her real name is. However that was information only they should know, her fans only knew her as Pidge. Though they were aware that that wasn't her real name.

At the moment she was sleeping, using her arms and Lance's jacket as a pillow. Her already finished cup of coffee rested in its finally resting place. The trash.

She's been asleep for a while, tired as always, because that's how she is. Over time both Shiro and Keith draped their jackets on her as blankets, and just to add to the contributes of clothing on her, Allura added her scarf as another pillow. Nobody bothered to wake her up. LetPidgeSleep was a hashtag going around with her viewers, so they might as well follow along with the trend. Also he was pretty sure if they were to disturb her, she would kill them. "Honestly, have you guys checked the comment section of that video yet? They're shook." Lance grins at his friends, and finally Allura and Shiro pay attention to his part of the table. In fact, he has the attention of everybody at the table. Except Pidge, she's still sleeping. Pretty good tho, 4 out of 5. "I can't believe this is how you two revealed your relationship to the world. That was anticlimactic." "What do you mean 'aniticmaxic'?" Keith seemed to glare at him from his seat, his posture was sloppy. His glare had no true malice towards him, just irritation. "What I mean is that, guys could of been more, I don't know." Lance gestures with his hands across one end to the other. "Been more flashy with the way you did it, especially considering the fact that you guys kept this information from them for soooooo freaking long." Shiro leans back more into his seat, crossing his arms comfortably. He had this grin on his face people tend to have before they say dumb shit. "That's the point. We talked about how we wanted to tell the world about our relationship." He uses a hand to gesture to signal back and front between him and Keith. "We settled for a nonchalant approach and 'my-whatever-does my makeup' videos are trending now. So we thought, why not do that?"

Lance rolled the reason around in his head for a bit. Yeah, he a point. Being nonchalant about it would look much more humble rather than other ways. But it could've been done via an introduction video. “Nah,” he concluded, “can't say that I agree with you-” Keith groaned, “but I can see where ya coming from.”

“That's fine.” He shrugged, checked the time, and tapped () shoulder to ask her/him to wake up Katie.

I just edited little mistakes, the last sentence was the messiest. Seemed like Keith was gonna tell everyone it was time to leave and have someone else to wake up Pidge. But past me didn’t decide who that was gonna be, clearly. Lol

Idk why, but that makes me laugh for some reason.

#vld #voltron #Voltron legendary defender #voltron au #youtuber au #Allurance #sheith #textpost

0 notes

damixnpriest · 2 years

Note

Is everything changes worth reading? I took a brief look a while ago but i didn't have the stamina for it.

this is a very complex answer to what is probably a pretty simple question but also i have quite intense feelings about this fic.

if you are easily triggered by discussions of rape or physical abuse, depictions of emotional abuse, and probably depictions of abuse specifically in a health care enviroment, this is not ideal for you. like just off the get go, this fic can be a HEAVY read.

that aside, i love EC. i love that it's SO long, i love what it's about, i love that someone truly took the time to do this degree of research and actually write this. i have a lot of feelings about fanfic in general but EC really encapsulates everything i love about it. i've done a pro and con list because a) i think it's handy to know what you're going into ans b) i love talking about EC.

(this is.... uh.... long) (no real spoilers, just some insinuations)

pros

one of the best depictions i have ever seen of the reality of mental illness. there's no fix. there's no quick solution. and even if there is a small hint of 'love fixes all', it never actually does. seb has ptsd, and he relapses several times. he gets frustrated over it. it's incredibly imperfect and actually, extremely real. recovery is portrayed much closer to reality than i have seen in almost any other form of media hands down. i suppose the downside to this is that the narrative of recovery can be quite arduous to read but as i'll discuss below, if you read EC the way i do (and assume others do) that's not an issue.

(also: recovery from physical injury??? miss georgia where did you get your medical degree i have to KNOW)

the attention to detail is genuinely?? insane?? and again, yes, having every detail mapped out (like, down to each overtake) can be a slog to read but it's so real. in other stories, if a character is eats toast instead of cereal for breakfast, chances are, there's a reason, but there's a real sense of the natural chaos of life in EC because characters have bad days and think random things and have preferences that never impact the story, they're just... there. this is probably not to everyone's tastes but i find it utterly fascinating to see all the aspects of people written down and documented and maybe mentioned?? a million words later?? it's such a strange way to write but it's SO effective.

speaking of: the characters are imperfect in a way that never suggests that they are morally evil. real people have awful thoughts, they think bad things about their coworkers and daydream about shagging the neighbour. in one scene, seb's parents react BADLY to a bit of news and it's awful and uncomfortable to read but it's never suggested that they're bad people for it.

oc's that i genuinely dont know are real people or not until i google it because they're so well developed.

THE SLANGGGGGG. fuck my entire ass, georgia_k either grew up in a british-german-aussie household or has done enough research to qualify them for an honourary doctorate from oxford. the consistent use of british slang from british characters and the way mark and seb slowly start influencing each others's language i am simply in fucking awe, tolkein is writing notes as we speak.

lewis hamilton characterisation that lewis hamilton himself could not write. crazy because he's a side character but they really nailed this dude in this fic.

cons

the quality of writing isn't the best (up to chapter 120 - this fic has been written over eight years so i fully believe and have seen the quality get better which makes sense because who doesnt improve over a decade and honestly my fics from eight years ago i would rather die than let see the light of day so this isnt really a criticism)

the characterisation of some of the characters is.... not to my tastes. mark especially. that being said, if you like martian and you like hurt/comfort, this would not be a deal breaker. it's not how i envision some of them to be, but it's very cathartic to read.

the sex scenes are...... also not to my personal taste. also why did georgia_k decide that seb cannot ride dick??? like he fully goes for thirty seconds then his legs give out fgdfgshsj sorry but why did they do that professional athlete so dirty like that

the way the pov changes either once every 1000 words or once a paragraph can be extremely jarring.

none of this negates the fact that this fic is longer than seb's ass in thicc, however, i encourage you to look at EC less like a book and more like a tv show with a million series. you really?? dont have to read the whole thing?? there are natural breaks in the narrative that you can very easily stop at without actually missing out on anything. my first read i think i got to chapter 100 and then lost steam. when i went back to reread, i only read up to the 'get together'. the next time, i skipped to another major plot point and started there. dont be intimidated by the length, be intimidated by how much you're going to be invested in mark webber's fictional house keeper visiting her son in canada over the holidays.

TL;DR: fuck yeah you should read everything changes

thank u for enabling my nonsense <3

#friend tag #everything changes #jay.txt #now THIS is shitposting

40 notes · View notes

juniorgman187 · 3 years

Text

Be Forever Young (Reid Fluff Fic)

Summary: After Penelope’s resignation from the BAU, she attempts to set up her tech protégé, Reader, with Reader’s intellectual match yet much older counterpart - Dr. Spencer Reid.

A/N: The POV switches between Reader and Spencer, just use context clues to detect who the narrator is. Pairing: Fem!Reader x Spencer Reid Content Warning: 21 year age gap, headcannon proposal Playlist: Cloud 9 by Beach Bunny Word Count: 6.1k

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*

Prologue

Events like these weren’t exceedingly rare. They weren’t anything like Halley’s Comet, by any means, where it only happens once in your lifetime - if you’re lucky. But they weren’t exactly sunrises - something that you can count on occurring every day without fail.

The best celestial phenomenon I could compare it to are blue moons. Rare enough to still have an element of surprise when they came, but not so rare that I should never expect them.

These ‘blue moons’ are actually the events in which I meet an intellectual match.

It’s not too often that I find a mind quite like mine, so you’ll forgive me for the reaction it elicits to watch them transcend the physical level and connect with me on the psychological one. There’s only been a handful of people who’ve ever had the exact standard of aptitude to be permissible into this metaphysical world with me, but now - there’s a handful and one.

The newest addition to the list is her.

_ _ _

Getting a word in edgewise when it comes to a conversation with Penelope Garcia is nearly impossible. Getting a word in edgewise when it comes to a conversation with Penelope Garcia about Dr. Spencer Reid is impossible.

I couldn’t tell you when the first time she brought him up was, but I could probably tell you just how many times since then she’s mentioned him.

A trillion. At least.

For months on end, he was the only thing she would talk to me about. Morning, noon, and night. Every single day she’d gush about him with the same unrelenting zeal as she had the day before and the day before that. It was both scary and impressive how she never seemed to run out of good things to say about him.

“You would just die for his apartment. It’s got this super chic dark academia thingy going on. You’d be really into that,” she would say. Or something to that effect. I was never really listening.

Not that I wasn’t interested in learning about Dr. Reid - I was very interested in him.

As a superior.

I first learned of him when he taught my Psych 101 class. Freshman year me was simply enthralled with him as a speaker, probably due to the charm of his awkward humor. I found it eerily relatable and touching, in a way. That was probably my favorite class, minus the assholes who made it less than enjoyable at times. (That’s a story for later).

The next interaction I had with him happened not even a year later when he came back after temporarily teaching to sit in on a philosophy class. Even though he was only auditing the lecture, whereas I was enrolled in the course, he ended up sitting in the seat right beside me. Had he not been gifted with an eidetic memory - a fact I found out during one of my obsessive research sessions - I doubt he would’ve even remembered sitting next to me.

Our shared field of work helped to bring us back together repeatedly throughout college. I would run into him at seminars, workshops, once even at a library where we were both looking for the same book.

But for the most part, our relationship was parasocial. It largely consisted of me learning from him at a distance. I would use his brilliant research to support my own assignments, read the books he recommended, audit the classes he would teach.

Rather than accurately interpreting my very limited, very professional connection to Dr. Reid, Penelope was deliberately using it as ammunition for her arsenal of reasons why I should consider dating him.

“You guys are basically already friends, and nothing is cuter than the friends-to-lovers trope!” Now that she actually did say, and the only reason I remember it verbatim was it was so outrageous I couldn’t not remember it.

And probably because she just said it to me right now.

“We’re not friends! We’re ... acquaintances. Colleagues, if you will.” My attempts to gain distance from Penelope and this topic of conversation were crashing and burning. The more I tried to walk away from her, the faster she would chase me. It was inconceivable how she managed to do that and continue to pelt me with her perky persistence.

“Even better! You know I’m no stranger to workplace romances.”

That I did. One Derek Morgan or one Luke Alvez ring a bell?

“Dr. Reid and I don’t work together,” I reminded her, if only to burst her bubble of insanity.

“Exactly my point! If you two don’t work together, then there’s nothing keeping you apart.”

I was stopped dead in my tracks, almost causing Penelope to trip since she was right on my heels.

“Nothing? Really? Try 21 years.”

That surely kept us apart.

Our age gap was one of those glaring disparities Penelope couldn’t wave away with her magic wand. Frankly, it wasn’t an age gap so much as it was an age Grand Canyon. He was a whole person of legal drinking age older than me!

Hell - our age gap itself was older than me!

Maybe there weren’t any contracts or agreements or supervisors to keep us apart, but there was still one significant thing doing that.

Time. Arguably the most important thing you needed to get right for a relationship to work.

If there were any chance that he and I were good together, that was squandered by our divergence in age.

Right person, wrong time ... but wrong time by more than two decades.

I could see the smallest fragment of hope wither away in Garcia’s eyes, and it actually hurt to have known that I caused that. Her voice was more solemn when she said, “You don’t have to date him, I just want you to go on a date. Get to know each other better. Who knows? You might finally graduate from colleagues to BFF’s.”

Not that I was seriously considering the possibility of growing closer to Dr. Reid, but there was one question lingering in my mind.

“Does he even want to go on this date? Have you asked him how he feels about it?”

Part of why I was wondering was on the off chance that she’d tell me he had the same objections towards this that I did, which would be good news for me since it would mark my reluctance as a sound judgment. If there was anyone whose opinion was worth something, it was his, right? After all, he was the provable genius in the same compromising position as me.

“Trust me, he’s been dying to do this.” In spite of her preface to trust her, I didn’t. I couldn’t be sure if she was suggesting that he’d been dying to go on a date with me or if he’d been dying to go on a date in general.

No offense to him, but I guessed it was the latter, and if that was the case, he was only being a team player because she hadn’t told him it was me she was setting him up with. Already suspecting that I’d probe further to navigate through her vagueness, she cut in with one last Hail Mary. “One date! That’s all!”

Whether you believe me or not, 100% the only reason why I said what I said next was to put an end to this madness. “Fine. I’ll go.”

Maybe 99.99%.

_ _ _

I never knew how I could lose so much time. Sure, if anyone asked, I could probably account for everything I’d done in my day, second by second. But still, there was this cloudiness, a fog, inhabiting my brain, casting this haze on whatever else dwelled in my mind, too.

I couldn’t focus on anything for more than 4 seconds at a time, and while that wasn’t incredibly concerning for the average human, it was disconcerting for me.

What was going on?

What is going on?

“What’s going on?”

Suddenly, a hand began to wave in front of my face. “Yoo-hoo? Anybody in there?” JJ wondered aloud, causing me to realize it was her voice that asked the question from before.

“Yeah, sorry,” I shook my head to regain some clarity, but that did me no good. My foggy brain still remained. It goes without saying my words were worth nothing as well. JJ saw right through me in a way that never failed to scare me shitless. I could never conjure up a lie good enough to follow that look she’d give me. So I settled for the truth. The question that cast the haziness in my brain to begin with.

“What do you think about me dating again?”

If I thought that first look was bad, then the one she was giving me now was something of a nightmare. At least with the first, I knew what she was thinking. With this one, I hadn’t a clue.

To relieve us from some of the insufferable silence, I found myself speaking again in my defense. “Garcia mentioned something earlier about setting me up with someone and it got me thinking.”

Thinking about Max that is.

Being my most recent girlfriend, it made sense why she was freshest in my mind. That being said, we’ve been broken up for 14 months, which in any other context would seem like more than enough time to start dating again, but therein lies the catch.

We didn’t just break up. She said “no” when I asked her to marry me, which, if you ask me, is one hell of a way to break up.

So from that perspective, it obviously begs the question: is 14 months too fast to move on from something like that?

JJ sharply inhaled. “Well, are you ready to start dating again?”

I still didn’t have an answer for that myself. “I don’t know. There isn’t exactly a rulebook on how long you have to wait until it’s socially acceptable-”

“Lemme stop you right there, Spence,” She placed her hand on top of mine. “You can’t just do whatever statistics or studies or science say is right all the time. You not only need to be more in tune with your own needs but accepting of them, too. Screw what anyone else has to say about you dating again - including Socrates, including Einstein, including Aristotle ... including me. Do whatever you think is acceptable by your standards - not society’s. Do what you wanna do and I’ll support that.”

There was something special about having JJ’s approval. It was like getting permission to be excited, something I didn’t know I needed or wanted.

“I’m ready.”

Born ready, as Penelope herself would say.

_ _ _

I was starting to get suspicious that maybe I had an invisible string attached to me and on the other end of that string was Penelope. It was the only explanation as to how she managed to trail behind me at an isochronal pace. Perfectly equidistant, perfectly equal intervals of time. Must’ve been some form of magic that she was able to synchronize that connection for as long as she did as we pranced around the office, basically chasing me.

“Okay, I know the date isn’t until Saturday, but I really think we need to amp up your wardrobe choices ... like stat.”

Hearing that I was seeing my superior still didn’t settle well with me. I don’t think I could ever get used to the thought.

I should’ve been offended at her suggestion to change my clothing taste as it implied my stylistic choices weren’t up to par, but a part of me, a very small part of me, knew she was right. And just because I wasn’t keen on the idea of going on a date with Spencer didn’t mean I didn’t want to look nice for him for it.

“I’m assuming you’ve got some ideas in mind,” I said in a teasing voice, knowing that’s precisely why she brought it up.

“See! You are a genius! Exactly why you and Spencer are meant to be together!” Her exclamation was just as loud as it was outlandish.

“Alright, calm down sparky,” I shot a warning look. “It’s just one date - we’re not soulmates.”

Then, talking in the quietest voice I didn’t think Penelope was capable of speaking with, she said, “Not yet.”

I knew the minute I showed even the littlest bit of interest in Penelope’s fashion guidance, I’d end up draped in ruffles, sequins, glitter, tulle, rhinestones, or all of the above. Nothing again Penelope’s personal style - it’s just not mine.

I was scared to ask, but I had to know. “So what were you thinking?”

Before my very eyes, Penelope’s constantly-there smile transformed, something akin to the mischievous grin of the Cheshire Cat. “I was thinking …”

In a Mary Poppins-esque fashion, Penelope produced a dress that in no feasible reality should have been able to fit within that little Hello Kitty side bag.

I suppose it must’ve been absolutely backbreaking for Penelope to refrain from choosing a multicolor or at least pattern-riddled dress, so as compensation for the fact that it was only one singular color throughout, it had to be a bold one.

Red.

“Not too shabby, right?” Her eyebrows jumped on her forehead, knowing she’d made a good choice.

And a part of me actually died saying this, but it was pretty perfect.

_ _ _

My life didn’t flash before my eyes, per se, the moment I finally arrived at the delicatessen. It was more like a very specific, singular memory had flashed before my eyes.

That story for later? This is the one.

Psych 101 was my best class in Freshman year ... by a long shot. Come rain, wind, or snow, I was always excited to go. It was a standout course on its own, but not because it was terribly spectacular or the most fascinating subject in the world, but more so because of how it changed my own person. It challenged me, like all worthwhile things do.

There were more judgmental meatheads - boys, if you will - than not, who would jump down my throat for being a smart ass or a teacher’s pet if I so much as answered one of Dr. Reid’s questions. Par for the course, really.

As a result, I had a proclivity to avoid raising my hand. It wasn’t that I was hyper-fixated on managing my reputation, just that participating wasn’t worth the eventual harassment from my dimwitted classmates.

Nonetheless, one day, I felt compelled to answer Dr. Reid when he asked what our thoughts were about the sampled, pretense manifesto.

No one else was jumping at the chance to speak, perhaps they were just as cowardly as I was, and it was clear that he was going to stand there waiting until someone finally would. The silence was painfully awkward for everyone and so I felt obligated, as a student who was actually enrolled in the class for credit and not just to audit like 90% of the other girls here, to break it.

Slowly, ever so slowly, my hand hesitantly inched up into the air until it floated just high enough above the student in front of me’s head. As soon as I knew he saw it, I let it plunge straight back down.

“Yes, Ms. (y/l/n)?”

I could already feel the dirty looks and snide comments coming before I even said a word.

“I know we’re all collectively referring to this unsub as a man, and while that might just be a general assumption or Freudian slip perhaps ... I think the language is steeped in betrayal and contempt. And it would be ignorant not to notice how it reads more like the wrath of a woman scorned than your typical jilted male lover.”

“Lover?” Someone two rows back snickered quietly, clearly to mock my choice of words. I didn’t even have to look to know it was Brad who had said that. Nevertheless, Dr. Reid was impressed with my answer. His lips curved into the faintest smile as he nodded his head. If he had heard the commentary of one Brad Sterling, he made no visceral reaction to it.

With an extended hand, palm facing up, he gestured for me to, “Please. Stand up.”

I fumbled my way up and out of my seat to possibly delay the shit I’d get for this mere action.

“That, ladies and gentleman, is what it looks like to have courage,” He underlined his words with a grand flourish of his hand in my direction. “Putting yourself on the line even in the event you’ll be mocked and ridiculed or deemed wrong. That’s something you’ll need if you are seriously considering being part of the BAU, or the FBI at any capacity.”

My face was flushed from the acclaim he was showering me with. Suddenly, I was glad I volunteered.

Taking me completely by surprise, Dr. Reid wasn’t done yet.

“So, Mr. Sterling,” He began, directly calling out the boy in the back who without a doubt made the remark. I wouldn’t have had any reason to believe he heard it since his attention never diverted away from me long enough to catch the comment, much less the culprit. I wonder if he’d heard all the times Brad made jokes at my expense. Was he finally at his wits end with the sarcasm? “Make fun all you want, but might I suggest that if you like a girl, you do the opposite of that.”

His sickly sweet drawl was followed by a short wink at me as if to say ‘I have your back’, and I was lucky to have already been in the process of sitting back down because my knees would’ve given out underneath me from the sheer exhilaration of his praise.

The thought never once crossed my mind that Brad was so fixated on me because he had a crush, but it all made sense once it did. And if I didn’t know any better, Dr. Reid only humiliated him and brought it up because the realization dawned on him, too.

Was it possible that Dr. Reid was ... jealous?

In the spirit of complete transparency, that suspicion may have lit the tiniest wildfire imaginable in my chest. A wildfire that, even now, has yet to extinguish. Perhaps that little flame is the 0.01% of the reason I said yes. I could only imagine what kind of omnipotence it would soon gain if this date went well.

If he could light such an enduring kindle with simple praise, think about what would happen if he smiled at me. If he laughed at my jokes. If he held my hand.

If he kissed me.

Dr. Reid’s validation would be something I actively sought from all walks of life, I knew that much. What I didn’t know was how far that desire would take me.

I would have never guessed it would lead me here.

Standing in front of a fancy restaurant in a pretty red dress with the tenuous hope that the professor inside might just like it so much that he’ll end up liking the girl wearing it, too.

_ _ _

No matter how many times I adjusted the bouquet of poppies, they sat perpetually crooked on the table. Much like the dark gray tie around my neck that tightened around my throat with every passing second. I had to keep messing with it to loosen the noose-like grip it had on me. Who knew if it actually was becoming more restricting or it was the flourishing bundle of nerves in my stomach that made it harder to breathe.

I was never very good at lying in wait patiently. Especially if I was expecting something. Now that I was expecting someone? I could say with perfect clarity - I was not good at waiting.

I don’t wanna seem the way I do

Every time the door opened, my eyes flashed to it instantaneously. And every time it wasn’t her, a little part of me was disappointed. It was still too early to say for certain that she was standing me up, but my mind was doing what it did best. It wandered. There was nothing else to do after all.

Except maybe adjust those blood orange poppies one more time.

I’d picked them out specifically because Penelope slipped in a not-so-subtle comment about her dress being “a perfect match to the color of papaverales” - her words exactly. I thought if she went through that much trouble to find a color coordinated plant and say the scientific name for me to decode, it was worth picking up a bouquet of them on the way.

It was only the most ironic occurrence in the world that when I went to rearrange them one last time, I devoted my full attention to the action, missing the very moment I was on the lookout for the past hour and a half.

I didn’t even see her until the red poppies camouflaged into the identically colored setting of her dress.

Then there she was.

All the disappointment in the world was worth that first time I saw her with fresh eyes.

I was dumbstruck for a moment, long enough that it warranted an apology for not standing up sooner.

“(Y/n)! Hi!” I accidentally squealed. I couldn’t control myself, let alone control the pitch of my voice apparently.

I could see, in her, youthful naivete where, in others, I saw their age. She paradoxically had not aged a minute, and yet a new womanhood was piercing through her ultimately adolescent appearance.

“Hi, Dr. Reid,” She said through a laugh and a smile, shaking my hand politely and professionally. She was greeting me like I was still her professor and she’d just happen to run into me on an errand. Next, she’d be attempting small-talk for as long as it took for me to let her go.

Unfortunately for her, I had no plans for that.

But I’m confident when I’m with you

“Please, it’s just Spencer,” I reminded her, hoping to break down that governing image of me she surely maintained.

“Spencer,” She tried again; doing it more to be obedient to my instruction than to satisfy her own desire. It sounded so unnatural to her, just as it did to me. I found it adorable, actually. It seemed like she was breaking this unspoken, and very much illusionary rule to say my first name. “It’s nice to see you again,” She added after I pulled out her chair for her.

“Is it?” I asked when I rounded the table to get to my seat. “I get the feeling you’re a little disappointed.” The only reason I pointed it out was that it was true, not just that I’d observed the notion grow more poignant in her face for the past minute.

“Not at all,” She shook her head, which luckily for me, drew a line of congruence between her body language and verbal language. At least, she was being truthful. “It’s just that I’m sort of embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed?” I repeated in astonishment, unable to cultivate a list of reasons that would justify her feeling that way. I couldn’t think of a single thing I’d done to provoke that emotion, and it nearly broke me to consider her internal being substantiating it.

“Embarrassed isn’t the right word, but I can’t find a more accurate one for what I’m feeling,” She shied away from my eyes when she lowered her head as she spoke.

“You could try to explain it to me?” I offered gently. It took an overwhelming amount of self-restraint to not offer my hand with it. It would’ve been so easy to slide my hand across the threshold to enter her territory of the table, but who knows if doing so would just make her that much more uncomfortable.

“Well for one thing, I don't really go on dates,” From this alone, I could already relate to her enough to laugh at the fact. “Don’t laugh at me! You know how dangerous first dates can be,” She swatted her hand in my direction to chastise me.

“I do! I do! I think it’s really good that you’re protecting yourself to the point of avoiding dates,” I was teasing the implication that she wasn’t asked to go on very many, which was thankfully delivered well enough to make her laugh again.

“Hey! Many people have wanted to go on dates with me, thank you very much. You included.”

“Me included.” I nodded in approval. We sat in a short period of silence while we exchanged one soulful glance, borne from the insinuation of what I just said.

“And for another ... I respect you too much as a figure of authority to see you in that way.”

_ _ _

“In what way?”

Rather than tossing me a lifeline, he was feeding me to the sharks. Forcing me to dive into the deep end. He wanted to see me struggle to stay afloat in the sea of his sticky toffee eyes. He knew I'd get suspended in them when he gave me that look. How much I’d be willing to get lost in them just so I could wander in the depths of his honeyed orbs for a little bit longer.

That look ...

“You don’t find it weird?” This was the most honesty I could’ve demonstrated.

“Find what weird?” For someone with such a high IQ, you’d think he’d be quicker on his feet.

“This! You - me. On a date!” I gestured to the space between us. “You’re ... well frankly, Spencer, you’re old enough to be my father.”

“Does that make you uncomfortable?” He genuinely cared about the answer.

“Only in theory. Not in actual life,” was the most precise response I could give.

“So what is making you uncomfortable?” Again, I could tell my answer mattered to him.

“You were my professor once, and now I’m just supposed to go on a date with you and see you as my equal when I’ve spent the entire time I’ve known you, putting you on a pedestal? Do you know how much pressure that puts on me? To be perfect?”

“Who says you have to be perfect? Who says you’re aren’t already?”

That one caught me off guard. I had to gulp down the lump of shock.

“You think I’m perfect?”

“That, or you’re pretty close to it.”

Lately all I feel is bad and bruised

I could’ve smiled, I could’ve thanked him, I could’ve fallen at his feet and thrown my dignity down there along with it, but I just laughed. I laughed.

“That’s ridiculous! You barely know me.”

“You’re wrong,” He simply replied with a firm shake of his head and a cavalier sip at his drink. It showed just how confident he was in his answer. How cocky he was.

“How am I wrong?”

He cleared his throat as though he were preparing to deliver the world’s greatest speech. Then, he leaned forward, motioning with his fingers for me to do the same.

“If I’m remembering correctly, which you know I am, you were the student who had the gall to raise your hand and correct me on my gender identification of the unsub, right?”

The second the sentimental thought, ‘aww he remembered’, came into my head, it was soon followed by, of course, he did, idiot. Eidetic memory, remember?

Tired of tripping on my shoes

“What does that have to do with me being perfect? Or so you claim?”

He was piercing deep into my eyes now, his gaze overwhelming my senses and sending shockwaves akin to the feeling of butterflies everywhere … and I mean everywhere.

“Bravery is the audacity to be unhindered by failures, and to walk with freedom, strength, and hope, in the face of things unknown.”

I recognized the quote as one of Morgan Harper Nichols, but the words went right to my chest like they were his own.

That damn wildfire just got a whole lot bigger.

“I’ve always thought about how if I could be unfazed by failure or even just the prospect of it, if I could just be strong enough or have enough hope to face what I couldn’t predict, I’d be set. I’d be golden,” He paused. “I’d be perfect ... but you? You, little one, have already got that figured out. So whether that means you’re perfect on your own because of your bravery or you're a perfect match for someone fainthearted like me, is up for you to decide. Whichever interpretation of being perfect you choose would be correct, but you should know - I meant both either way.”

But when he loves me I feel like I’m floating

When he calls me pretty, I feel like somebody

Even when we fade eventually to nothing

You will always be my favorite form of loving

“Do you want to get out of here?” He asked when he finally refound his voice.

“Since the minute I walked in.” I replied after refinding mine.

_ _ _

“You always take girls to your apartment on the first date, Doctor?” Asking this in the name of taking a jab at him was the most clever way I could think to conceal my underlying motive of trying to gauge how giddy I could let myself feel about the fact that he’d taken me to his ‘super chic dark academia’ themed residence - Penelope’s words, remember?

“Well, in my abundant dating history,” He sarcastically began, “I can’t say I ever have, no. You’d be the first.”

That shot another quick bolt of lightning to the wildfire in my heart that I’m ashamed to admit made the heat reinvigorate. The flame must’ve been too much for my chest to contain so it had to relocate to my face, where my cheeks were left to burn under his gaze and thanks to his admission.

I was the first.

He must’ve seen the glint localizing on my countenance and decided to speak on it. “Why does that amuse you?”

“I don’t know,” I dumbly but truthfully replied. He didn’t need any more information to get his answer, though. Because even if I didn’t know what amused me about being his first, I never denied that it did, and that was more than enough confirmation for him.

“You promise to be here when I come back?” He wagged a cautionary finger at me like it might persuade me to stay and hold me accountable if I didn’t.

Spencer needed to go into his room to collect an item that ‘shall not be named’ but was apparently essential for our super secret plans tonight (secret to even me) and he was leaving me in the living room while he did so. I guess being the initial girl he took home on a first date was okay, but being the initial girl he took into his bedroom on a first date was crossing a line.

That was alright with me, though. I was in this for the long haul.

“I promise I pose no flight risk, Your Honor,” I taunted with a coy tone. “But I can’t promise I won’t snoop around some.” Hey, at least I was telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

“Snoop around all you want,” He laughed ruefully, demonstrating an openness I quite envied and admired. “You’ll probably learn a lot about me that way. And you won’t even have to talk to me to do that!” I knew he was only saying that out of self-deprecating tendencies he harbored, but I couldn’t help feeling that a small part of him actually believed that I wasn’t interested in talking to him.

“Spencer, you know I do like talking to you right?” I caught him just before he ran into his room. Already halfway in the door, I could still catch the megawatt smile on his face.

“So stay then,” His smile grew impossibly bigger. “We can talk all you want when I get back.”

The door closed, and then suddenly reopened to let just his face through, a face that said, ‘Don’t go anywhere.’

After a few minutes of loudly sorting through his room, I heard the sanctimonious cry of victory. “Found it!”

I could hear the little pad of his feet and he happily trotted out of the room. “Ta-da! My stargazing kit.” He said it as though he were introducing the basket he was holding to me, and me to it. Like it was a real person he wanted me to know. I almost felt obliged to say, ‘Hi stargazing kit! It’s so nice to meet you. I’m (y/n)!’

“Let’s go,” He smiled, reaching for my hand.

I unabashedly took it, because although it meant that I was truly leaving his apartment, I had a very strong feeling that I would be back here again one day.

_ _ _

We were lying there on this big quilted comforter that was stashed away in that stargazing kit of his, staring up at the sky, drunk on the sound of our occasional fits of laughter.

“It’s Earth Day, you know that?” I wondered aloud in a state of complete euphoria.

“I actually did,” He said through a sheepish laugh, almost as if he was admitting the knowledge of it against his own will to protect my fragility.

From out of nowhere, there was a small tug on the skirt of my dress. I looked down to find Spencer’s hand there, playing with the fabric until it lay perfectly on my leg.

I coughed to possibly relieve the tension brewing in my loins. “So then you know the Lyrid meteor shower is tonight,” I moved the tiniest bit closer to lean into his touch.

“At exactly 4:33 a.m,” He moved too.

“Is that why you brought me here? To watch the shooting stars? To make a wish?” I thought for a second that I would appear exceedingly childish - more so than I already did being 21 years his junior. But he didn’t judge me at all for the kid-like notion of making a wish on a shooting star or the implication that I still believed in those things.

In fact, I piqued his curiosity, telling by the way he moved only his head to the side to watch my reaction. “Say I did. What would you wish for?”

In the throws of dreamy elation, I softly murmured the only honest answer. “To be older. But not the unfulfilling 9 to 5, loveless marriage, ‘I do my taxes for fun’ older. I want to be old in the ways that the stars and the sky are old. I want to be infinite.”

“...To be infinite.” He whispered my wish back, sounding sort of in awe of me.

Just then, the overhead horizon grew larger. With no buildings or people to block the view, it was just us, the stars, and the sky. I could actually feel that I was lying on a planet. It was so wide. So infinite.

“Can I hold your hand?” I asked softly, in a manner so vulnerable it scared me.

Without any words or hesitation, he put my hand in his.

“The universe seems so big right now. I just needed something to hold onto.” I explained quietly, practically with the hopes that he wouldn’t hear me. But he heard.

“I’m here.”

We didn’t know what was ahead of us then. We were just two people, looking up at the sky on a cold February night. We weren’t divided by power, or age, or space. We were ourselves and no one else.

My eyes fluttered shut again and a smile stretched across my face. “Stargazing was a good idea.”

The world and the sky and the stars and I - we were all infinite. I couldn’t have felt bigger in my own body. In the best way possible, I was taking up so much space. I was occupying the earth. I was made up of matter. I mattered.

Just as I began to open my eyes, I caught a glimpse of a fading shooting star. Though I had wished to be older, I still felt like a child. Then it hit me. I didn’t feel older because I wasn’t older.

I was infinite.

Yes, I was a child, but not in the pinch your cheeks, bottles and pacifiers, babyish way. I was a child in the ‘you have a life full of possibilities ahead of you’ way.

You are young. He tells me with his eyes. And that is a good thing. Be forever young.

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*

If you’re on this taglist, I strongly suggest commenting, reblogging, or liking!

CLICK HERE TO JOIN A TAGLIST

complete taglist: @muffin-cup @s1utformgg @no-alarms-no-surprises-silence @jemimah-b99 @justanothetfangirl @kylab @rainsong01 @calm-and-doctor @inkstainedwritergirl @rexorangecouny @ashwarren32 @carooliina @fortheloveofcriminalminds @watermelongubler @obsessedmaggiemay @k-k0129 @aperrywilliams @eevee0722 @spencersmagic @spencerreid-mgg @half-blood-dork @goldeng1rl8 @just-a-bunch-of-fandoms @random-human-person @masumiyetimziyanoldu @dreamer-writer-fangirl @kalamitykait @jinxy175 @apolloroid @spenxerslut @you-sunshine

#spencer reid #spencer reid fic #spencer reid imagine #spencer reid fanfic #spencer reid fanfiction #criminal minds #criminal minds fanfiction #spencer reid fluff #juniorgman187 #be forever young

303 notes · View notes

pockydays · 3 years

Text

unravel me

⤷ characters: tsukishima x gn!reader

⤷ synopsis: in which you notice tsukishima struggling to peel the tape off his fingers during study hall. what you didn’t notice, however, was how much he had the ability to find his way into every aspect of your life, until it was too late.

⤷ word count: 6.3k (longest fic to date woohoo!)

⤷ contains: fluff, slight angst, acquaintances to friends to lovers (?), mild language, my (insanely) wordy writing

⤷ a/n: i’m not even lying this took me weeks to write and it’s my baby :] most of the dialogue in this is probably hot shit but if you enjoyed please leave a like/reblog :3: mwah mwah ily all thank you for being patient with my slow ass <3 and thank you to my dear friend abby for beta reading the first chunk of this story, if you read this ily <3

You've always considered yourself as someone who wasn't especially generous. But you weren’t incredibly selfish, either. You were in some sort of grey area, too indifferent to care about what society says about people who aren't willing to go so far as to sell their souls to the devil for the common good. But you weren't heartless, either. You cared, usually out of mutual convenience. Isn't that what everyone does? Ninety-nine percent of the time, helping others (undeniably) involves genuinely good intentions, but they coexist with selfish motives as well. Then what about that one percent?

That one percent, in fact, came to you in the most inconspicuous of times: during mid-day study hall.

You found yourself going through the motions of your everyday routine: walking into the classroom, saying hi to your friend in the third row, putting your bag on the desk, pulling out your chair, sitting down, taking out your notebook and pencils, and waiting for approximately thirty-nine seconds until a (supposedly attractive, or at least according to whispers among your female classmates, which was bold of them to assume that he even liked girls in that way — you weren’t one to burst their bubbles) tall blond guy with glasses walked through the door, and greet him with a nonchalant "hey" and a wave.

And after that, if he responded with a slightly snarkier tone than usual, you knew he was having an especially bad day (more likely than not, it was because of the volleyball teammates he often complained about). But as for the real reason why, your guess was as good as anybody else's. He probably had piss in his Cheerios every morning and his trousers in a twist until the end of time for all you knew.

But today was slightly different than usual. For one, a full minute had already passed after you took out your pencils and yesterday’s chemistry notes, and there was still no sign of him. For some unknown reason, you couldn't stop the worry gnawing its way into your conscience. You rested your chin in one hand and drummed your fingers on the desk with the other, trying not to think about your classmate with a sharp tongue and a glare that could kill. Of course, trying to not think about something is a form of thinking about it, so that didn’t exactly work out.

The bell suddenly rang, jolting you out of your thoughts as well as your seat. Tsukishima Kei was now officially late, according to the school rules. Thankfully, your study hall advisor was lenient and understanding enough to not mark anybody late if they arrived within a reasonable time as to not tarnish their transcript, but you knew Tsukishima well enough to know that he wouldn’t care about a single unsavory comment that would only have the slightest potential to alarm admissions officers in those money-hungry institutions.

That was one thing you admired about your classmate. His ability to judge what things to put his effort into and selectively choose what he could get away with doing half-assed was unparalleled. As far as you could tell, volleyball was something he didn’t deem as worthy to put his all into. You weren’t usually wrong in such judgements about people, but then again, you’d only been right, let’s say, a total of three out of three times. You weren’t sure if it was considered a really good or really bad track record, so you’d always kept those sort of assumptions to yourself.

“Not going to say hi to me today? That’s awfully rude of you,” a voice said, out of the blue. You tense, wondering who had the audacity to call you rude.

“What?” you asked incredulously before you could realize where the voice came from. “Oh, it’s you,” you said, recognizing his inhumanly tall frame and the pair of white headphones around his neck. I should’ve guessed; of course only he’s brash enough to say something like that.

You rested your chin in your hands again, the tension in your body visibly dissipating. You were glad that it was just Tsukishima and not some other person, because they would be a pain in the ass to deal with. Plus, he was just about the only person you allowed to speak without a filter; one, because it’s fun verbally sparring with him, and two, it makes his stunned silence after you counter with an especially witty phrase all the more satisfying.

This time, though, he sat down at the desk to your left without a word. Usually, he would never pass up the chance to have another round of firing tasteful insults at you. Today was indeed slightly different than usual.

As he clicked the top of his mechanical pencil, you couldn’t help but notice a flash of white one his hands out of the corner of your eye. Did he always have that on his hands or was I just horribly unobservant before?

Leaning over to his seat at a dangerous angle, you asked, “Hey, what’s up with your fingers? You have leprosy or something?” in hopes of lightening his supposedly gloomy mood.

“Shut up,” he muttered irritably. “If I had leprosy, my fingers would’ve fallen off by now and I would’ve put one in your lunch as a keepsake,” he added. Shifting away from you in his chair, he tried as much as possible to make his (in your opinion, unconventionally lanky) body as far away as possible from your general vicinity.

“Okay, okay, geez! At least tell me, because now I’m curious and it’s all your fault.”

“If I tell you, will you stop bothering me?” he asked, rubbing the bridge of his nose in frustration.

“Maaybee...?” you replied slowly, trying to find an answer when a simple “yes” or “no” didn’t suffice.

“If you’re not going to stop bothering me, then I don’t have a reason to tell you, so no,” he frowned, crossing his arms self-righteously.

“Alright then, keep your secrets, mister. I don’t care whether you tell me or not.” Which wasn’t completely the truth, since some tiny part of your conscience thought that wrestling the answer from him was for the better. “But just know that I’ll continue to be my annoying self, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.” With that, you turned your attention back to your chemistry notes.

A few silent minutes passed before you leaned back over to his desk on the left.

“Hey mister, do you have some pencil lead? I think I ran out,” you whispered to Tsukishima.

He heaved what you thought was the biggest sigh in the universe before responding, “Point-five or point-seven?”

“Tsukishima, you wound me! I thought you knew that I write exclusively in point-five!” you exclaimed with a hand over your chest, feigning offense.

He rolled his eyes, and out of the corner of your eye, you saw him count out three pieces of lead. Three, that’s generous, you think to yourself as you suppress a small smile.

“Thanks, mister,” you whispered as you plucked the delicate sticks of graphite from his fingers. Taking a quick glance at his hands, you noticed that his fingers were wrapped in some sort of adhesive tape. Before Tsukishima could catch you looking for too long and make some snarky remark about how absolutely positively beautiful his hands were for you to be staring, you abruptly turn back to your notes and refill your (actually already lead-filled) pencil. If he wouldn’t answer your question, it wouldn’t hurt to take things into your own hands and figure it out for yourself, right?

You looked back to the notebook in front of you, but with your curiousity still unsatiated, you couldn’t help the thoughts bouncing off the walls of your mind, competing for your undivided attention.

Ask him about it! a voice yelled.

Mind your own business, you creepy fuck! another (particularly foul-mouthed) one screamed.

At this point, you’d probably read the first line of your notebook about thirty times without comprehending a single thing, so you decided to give up and resort to banging your head lightly on your desk.

Apparently, 'lightly’ was an understatement, because a voice on your left hissed, “What’s your problem?!”

Oops.

“Nothing,” you replied softly with your head still on the desk.

Tsukishima sighed in exasperation. “Well, now I’m curious and it’s all your fault,” he scoffed, using your own words from earlier.

Now it was your turn to sigh. Stubborn person number one meets equally stubborn person number two: one of life’s most aggravating experiences.

“C’mon, let me see your hands,” you demanded, your own hand outstretched. You’ll say ‘no’ no matter what I ask.

“No.” Tsukishima pushed his glasses further up the bridge of his nose and turned away.

Point proven.

You had always considered yourself to be somewhat generous when circumstances permitted, yes. But being yourself around others was something you considered yourself to be quite good at, as well.

Sometimes you imagined what it would be like if people’s hearts had metaphorical layers of thread surrounding them, winding, twisting, wrapping, and sometimes tangling around and around the ugliest, scariest, or most precious parts of themselves. The people you met would either unravel a bit of your heart, even if just a little bit, or they would cause you to wind the threads of your heartstrings even more tightly.

You had strings that were (sometimes laughably) effortless to unwind, but once someone got to the last layer of thread, they refused to unravel any further. In other words, you weren’t afraid to be ninety-nine percent yourself around everybody. But that one percent? You’d keep it safely tucked away behind the impenetrable fortress of that last previous layer of thread — for both the good of yourself and everyone else.

Sometimes, you also wondered what the threads wrapping around Tsukishima’s heart was like. Not because you particularly had more of an interest in him than your other classmates, but because he was a sort of enigma to you. You had countless questions: How hard is it to unravel those threads? and What lies beyond those tightly wound strings? and What did he have to hide that is so unsightly? et cetera, et cetera. He was a puzzle you wanted to piece together, although you weren’t sure what the finished product would look like, or if there even was a finished product.

You had a lot more questions about Tsukishima than you did answers.

You must’ve been deep in thought for a while, because it took an utterance of some rather coarse language to bring you back to reality.

“Fuck,” Tsukishima muttered, fiddling with the tape covering his fingers. It was evident, after about ten seconds of observing him, that he was getting nowhere. At this point, you were presented with two choices: to help him or to leave him to wallow in his own frustration and suffer. Admittedly, the latter option seemed rather entertaining, but for some unknown reason, you opted for the former.

“Here, let me help,” you said, hand extending in front of you as an offer. “You obviously aren’t getting anywhere, so let me put you out of your misery.”

“You better get it all off then,” he grumbled, outstretching his arm, letting it limply dangle in front of your face. Huh, I didn’t expect him to actually agree so easily.

You gently took his hand, and starting with his pinky finger, you worked your nails under the end of the tape. As the tape unraveled further, you couldn’t help but notice how elegant his hands were. They were long and slender in ways that yours weren’t — the magnum opus of all things relating to hands. If God played favorites, he certainly did when it came to Tsukishima’s hands. Geez, knock it off, you cringed inwardly. You’re literally worshipping his hands at this point.

“So, uh, why are your fingers covered in tape?” You hoped to break the awkward silence between the two of you, and asking him questions that he probably wouldn’t answer (especially to plebeians like you) seemed like the last resort.

“Volleyball practice,” he responded simply.

Oh. I didn’t expect an actual response.

“This morning? You guys sometimes have practice early in the day, right?”

“Last evening,” he corrected.

“You had these on your hands for that long?! I see you’re finally getting serious about volleyball, my dude, but you have to be able to ask other people for help." People other than me, but if I’m your last resort, then I’d be happily obliged to help.

Tsukishima scowled, which, thankfully, you missed, busy undoing the tape around his fingers. At least you didn’t criticize him for being hypocritical regarding his attitude about volleyball, which was relieving.

There was a substantial (and slightly awkward) pause as you peeled the white adhesive strip of cloth off of his fingers, working slowly enough so that it wouldn’t hurt, or so you hoped.

“There we go!” you exclaimed proudly as the last of the tape fell away from his fingers. He wiggled them experimentally, not unlike a newly hatched butterfly would flap its fresh new pair of wings.

“Thanks,” he responded curtly.

As if on cue, the bell rang, marking the end of study hall. It was time for chemistry class.

Over the course of your next class, your mind with occupied with thoughts that weren’t even remotely related to chemistry. You almost had a close call with the teacher when he called on you to answer a question, but thankfully, your friend sitting next to you whispered the answer in your ear — though not before giving you a quizzical look. You were too embarrassed to say that you were actually thinking about why the hell you actually agreed to help the guy sitting the next seat over whom you should have absolutely nothing to do with.

I did not just touch his hands no no no — I did not just hold hands with Tsukishima Kei — It wasn’t really of my own volition and he looked like he really needed help and I was feeling generous and it conveniently benefited the both of us, right? He got to finally be free from his misery and I— I got to touch his hands—

Your thoughts spiraled out of control as you buried your face in your hands, and perhaps some of the threads around your heart unraveled themselves that day.

Thus, after that day, your everyday routine changed in more ways than one. You would into the classroom, say hi to your friend in the third row, put your bag on the desk, pull out your chair, sit down, take out your notebook and pencils, and wait for approximately thirty-nine seconds until a tall blond guy with glasses walked through the door, and greet him with a nonchalant "hey" and a wave. If he still had tape around his fingers (which was quite often), you’d ask him if he needed help; he’d say yes, and you would spend the next however many minutes undoing the adhesive strips of cloth.

Today was no different. You carefully eased the tape away from Tsukishima’s fingers. When you got to the base of his ring finger, he hissed in pain. The skin there was red and raw as if it had been recently injured. Not as if, it had been.

“Sorry,” you whispered, wincing as if you were the one in pain. “How’d you get hurt?” This time, you were genuinely concerned for him, which was rare for anyone, especially him.

“The one time I put some more effort into volleyball as if it were actually worth something, it comes back to bite me,” he muttered, gritting his teeth.

You looked up from his hand.

“What?”

“I said, somehow I always give the things that I swear off from my life a second chance, it never, ever, works out,” he muttered through gritted teeth.

“Did anyone ever tell you that you can’t get better out of sheer will? You’re bound to slip and fall on your butt at least a few times. Or a lot,” you responded.

“Nobody told me that falling would hurt this much, though,” he replied. He looked off to the side, too embarrassed to meet your gaze.

“It’ll get better, trust me. You just have to get back off your ass and stand up.”

You left the conversation at that and continued undoing the tape on his other hand.

I want to kiss his hands like I’m greeting the crown prince of a foreign kingdom, you thought, lips twitching, fighting back a small smile.

Oh my God, stop it! you mentally slapped yourself. You had to restrain yourself from actually slapping yourself in the face. Meanwhile, the uniform you wore began to feel a bit too warm — it was quite convenient that Tsukishima couldn’t see your face at that moment.

Unbeknownst to you, however, Tsukishima's thoughts weren’t nearly as calm as his cool and collected exterior.

After all, what was he supposed to do when he could feel your breath fanning on his hands (could he tell you were desperately trying to keep them steady?) and your meticulous fingers on his?

I must be going crazy, he thought.

He imagines holding your hand, and not because of that dumb finger tape-

He shook his head, as if to dislodge the idea from his memory. No, I’m definitely going crazy.

“So, do you like him or something?” your best friend asked out of the blue during a sleepover, the both of you laying in the darkness on your sleeping bags.

“Who?” you asked, though you had an idea of who she was referring to.

“Tsukishima. That guy who sits to your left during study hall.”

“No, why would I like him? I mean, how can you even tell if you like someone or not. It’s not like there’s a radar that detects crushes and blasts ‘OH MY GOD YOU’RE HOPELESSLY IN LOVE’ on speaker,“ you replied dryly.

“Do you feel different around him?” she asked.

“As in the cliché symptoms of love that you read in romance novels? Like you feel like your heart is going to burst out of your chest and you have to clutch your shirt like it’s gonna pop out onto the floor if you don’t? If that’s what you’re asking, then no.”

“I mean that could be a sign, but you don’t have to feel like that to like someone. I mean in the way that you’re willing to show them who you really are, including all the ugly parts of yourself that you wouldn’t show to other people.”

Of course not! you thought to yourself. There’s no way I would fall in love with someone that I argue with for fun, right?

“Why do you always complain about those tryhards on your volleyball team? You can always quit, you know,” you asked after Tsukishima was in a particularly bad mood about something, presumably about volleyball (as it usually was). As per your daily schedule, you were unraveling his finger tape during study hall once again.

“Don’t they know that the more effort they put into something, the more it’ll hurt when they find out everything they believe in is a lie?” he asked.

You paused. Oh, it was an a genuine question, you realized. And he wants a genuine answer.

“Such as?” you asked, your mouth acting quicker than your mind. I probably shouldn’t have pried deeper into something that’s obviously his business.

He went ahead and responded anyway, but not before taking a deep breath.

“When I was little,” he began, “I looked up to my older brother a lot. I really respected him, you know? He was my idol; he was perfect and infallible in every way. He played volleyball in junior high, so it was only natural that I played the same sport he did. And he continued playing throughout high school, or so I thought.”

“Or so you thought?” you repeated.

“He lied to me.” With those four words, you heard years and years of resentment and bitterness through his shaking voice, barely above a whisper.

“To be honest, I should’ve expected it,” he continued, laughing humorlessly at himself. “I was too enamored to realize that when he was trying to stop me from watching his games, he was also trying to stop me from finding out that he was a liar. He wasn’t even a starting player. Instead he was on the bench, cheering for the team he was supposedly on.”

As those words left his mouth, you realized how little you understood Tsukishima. No, it was honestly ridiculous how you could consider yourself his friend when all you did was unwind strips of tape from his fingers for a mere few minutes every day.

Despite that, you held his hands a little tighter.

“If you don’t mind, I had a similar experience in junior high as well. This girl that I was really close friends with apparently had a huge circle of friends outside of school, and she would tell me and my other friends about all the rich guy friends she had and how well they treated her and shit. But I found out years later that they were probably all made up so that she could have something to tell us. So that she could keep us in her friend group. I realized they were fake.”

You let go of his hands, your arms limp at the memory.

“And how are you two right now?” Tsukishima asked. “Your relationship, I mean.”

“Surprisingly, we’re still on good terms,” you said. “She still doesn’t know I found out. But despite her pretending to be someone else in front of us for all those years, I still don’t think she’s a bad person. I’m actually kinda glad she got the attention she wanted. But man, the past still hurts like a bitch,” you chuckled in an attempt to forget.

“I see,” he replied. With that, you picked up his hand once again, continuing to undo the tape around the rest of his fingers.

That day, both you and the once unyielding, stone-faced Tsukishima left the classroom knowing just a bit more about each other.

You didn’t know that day that Tsukishima had his first real conversation with his brother after ‘the incident’.

He didn’t know you gave that friend from junior high a call for the first time in two years.

And the threads around your hearts unwound themselves just a bit more.

“No, I don’t,” you finally responded after a long pause. “I don’t like him in that way. He’s just someone I can rant to about the shit that happened in junior high—”

“Say that again, but slower,” your friend interrupted.

“He’s someone that I can rant to about all the... stuff that happened in the past,” you repeated. Did she not hear me the first time?

“Exactly, that’s my point,” she responded. “You never talk about those things with anybody, and even when I bring it up, you just brush over it.”

The weight of what your friend was implying took far too long for your brain to register, but when it did—

“Oh shit, I think I might actually like Tsukishima.”

It was in the classroom of your mid-day study hall where Tsukishima Kei stole your heart bit by bit through the conversations you had with him while unraveling his finger tape; it was where you opened your heart and he opened his.

“You and Tsukishima aren’t a thing, right?” a voice asked you out of the blue in the hallway after the dismissal bell rang.

“What?” you asked, turning your head to see who it was. You recognized her, although you struggled to put a name to her face. “You sit in the back of our study hall classroom, right? And to answer your question, no, we are not a thing.”

Such questions were becoming all the more frequent these days, and you had the same two-letter answer to all of them (although you secretly hoped you could answer yes, but how Tsukishima felt about you was a whole different story).

“Yeah, I do. But are you sure you two aren’t dating? Like you could just be going out with him and not know it,” she answered.

You held back a snort that almost escaped your lips.

“No, I’m sure we aren’t,” you said with a sigh, trying to keep your tone remotely cordial. “Besides, I’m not sure if he even considers me as a friend.”

“Oh, I’m sure he considers you as more than that,” she replied with a tone you couldn’t quite decipher. “Trust me.”

You barely knew her, so you couldn’t say how credible her statement was (though you desperately wanted it to be true). You glanced at the clock, itching to end the conversation.

“Alright, then. I’ll take your word for it. I have to get home now though, seeya.”

“Seeya around then,” she replied with a wave. Why does that sound strangely ominous?

“Bye,” you answered, too mentally drained from the conversations that began with the same question: ”Oh my God are you dating Tsukishima?” (Answer: no, no you weren’t). Nonetheless, you couldn’t ignore the nagging voice in your head that you haven’t seen the last of her just yet.

She appeared the very next day, in the same spot at the hallway after school ended. That’s... strange.

You decided to ignore how off-putting it was. Maybe it was her wide smile — so much so that you could see her dimples and her blinding white teeth. Or maybe it was the way she spoke, like she was trying to get something from you. Whatever it was, you didn’t have what she wanted.

“If you’re asking whether Tsukishima and I became a thing within the past twenty-four hours, then no,” you said in exasperation. She was now walking by your side with an odd spring in her step, a bit too close for comfort despite the empty hallway.

“No, that wasn’t my question,” she said with a chuckle. “You keep denying that Tsukishima doesn’t like you, but I think he does.”

You had to scoff at that.

“In what way?”

“In that way,” she responded with a knowing glance. “You’re already in the talking stage with him! He never talks to anyone other than that one friend he has, so I’d say you’re off to a good start.”

“And that totally means that he’s in love with me.”

“Please, don’t lie to yourself. You’ve gotten farther than anybody has, even if they tried for their entire life. How did you do it?”

But I didn’t do anything, you thought.

“I just talked to him about stuff,” you replied slowly. The look she gave you said go on, so you did.

“I just talked to him about myself and deep stuff and shi— and such. I really didn’t do much, so I’m probably not the best person to ask. Why don’t you try and ask his friend Yamaguchi?”

“No, I think I’m good,” she said with an unreadable tone. “Well I gotta go, so see you tomorrow!”

“....Bye,” you replied halfheartedly. You tried to shake the unsettling feeling from your chest, but you couldn’t help thinking, What if he does like me back?

The volleyball made a resounding smack against the court behind the middle blocker instead of his hands. Tsukishima clenched his fists, gritting his teeth. Another ball that I couldn’t block?

“Hey, use your smartass head for once and pay attention!” Kageyama yelled across the court.

Tsukishima ignored his taunts.

“Oh, the smart mouth finally doesn’t have any words left to say? Finally some peace and quiet,” Kageyama muttered.

Practice continued for far too long, but the whistle finally blew, signaling everyone that it was time to go home. Finally, Tsukishima thought. I don’t have to listen to the King spew nonsense anymore.

He and Yamaguchi gathered their belongings and made their way out of the gym.

“Something’s on your mind,” Yamaguchi commented as they walked back home side by side.

“No there isn’t,” Tsukishima replied a bit too quickly to sound convincing.

“Right.”

A long silence ensued, the two of them kicking pebbles on the road and twiddling their thumbs in the cool night air. The buzz of the electric street lamps felt much too loud, feeding off the tension in the air.

“How can you tell that you like someone?” Tsukishima was the first to break the silence, but it was the question, not the fact that he was the one that spoke first, that was more jarring.

“So I was right,” Yamaguchi responded after a slight pause. He fought back a small smile and added, “I thought something bad happened that I didn’t know about, but it turns out that you’re just in love.”

The taller one of the two sighed.

“I’m asking you to tell me if I... like someone in that way, not for you to tell me that I am, Tadashi.”

“I can’t make a judgement if you don’t tell me anything. Tell me.” Yamaguchi lightly punched his friends arm.

“There’s this... classmate of mine. They asked if I needed help peeling off my finger tape during study hall and I said yes.”

“I figured as such.”

“What?”

“You always come into first period with your fingers still wrapped but it’s gone by the time practice starts. I always wondered why but I never got around to asking you. But I’m even more surprised at the fact that you actually agreed.”

“Yeah, I surprise even myself sometimes,” Tsukishima deadpanned. “Especially the fact that it would become something that they would ask pretty much every day, and I would say yes every time. I just don’t know whether I have feelings for them in that way or not.”

“Well, do you look forward to talking to them everyday?” Yamaguchi asked.

Yes.

“Do you want them to know you for who you really are instead of what people think you are?”

Yes.

“Does your mind wander to them all the time?”

Yes.

“If you flipped a coin to decide whether you do like them or not, would your gut tell you the answer before you looked at whether it landed on head or tails?”

Yes, Tsukishima answered silently, knowing he’d finally have to accept the truth: he was in love and there was nothing he could do about it.

One thing you didn’t know about having a crush on someone was that you suddenly realize how often they appear in your life. You knew where you’d cross paths with him in the hallway before and after school, where his locker was, and worst of all, every goddamn love song reminded you of him.

Even all the little mannerisms people had circled back to him: your friend would push her glasses up her nose the same way he did. Your mother would furrow her eyebrows like him when he was thinking about a particularly annoying math problem. Your English teacher would spin a pen between his fingers, just like him (although you had to admit that you preferred watching the latter do so; his hands were prettier).

Maybe this was just some twisted manifestation of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, but your brain couldn’t recall enough content from psychology class to be sure. Either way, you were going insane.

That is, until one rather unremarkable day; there was nothing out of the ordinary. Everything came and went according to schedule — the same time spent with Tsukishima during study hall and the same boring class lectures. But as soon as the dismissal bell rang, you were surprised to find that the girl who would pester you in the hallway asking about you and Tsukishima’s relationship status (you still didn’t know her name) as if anything had changed (which it had not, of course).

Apparently, her presence had already become routine enough for you to notice her absence.

It was a welcome change, though; it wasn’t like you wanted her to be around. No, you absolutely didn’t need her nosy questions. So you just shrugged it off and made your way to the school’s exit like you normally did.

But a very familiar voice from a nearby classroom made your ears perk up — coincidentally, from your study hall classroom. You peered into the room from the doorway.

“Um, I think I like you, Tsukishima! I’ve felt this way for a long time and I just had to tell you!” The same boisterous girl who only had one topic of conversation with you (Tsukishima, of course) now had her hands coyly clasped behind her back, in all likelihood holding something meant for him.

As soon as you heard those words leave her mouth, the world around you seemingly ground to a halt — and so did you. As if your body stopped functioning for a moment, your heart stopped and your brain took much too long to process what she said.

What did it matter anyway? You didn’t take your chance and look where that got you.

You turned on your heel and half-walked half-ran outside the school.

The second thing you didn’t realize about having a crush on someone, you realized as you laid in the darkness in the middle of the night, is that it physically hurts. Someone might as well have put your heart in a jar of acid and screwed the lid shut — no matter how hard you tried, it still hurt. And hurt it did.

You felt a stray tear slide down your cheek, and you angrily punched your pillow. You didn’t even have the emotional capacity to be angry at the girl who confessed to him. It was too obvious that she liked him, from the way she would stand a bit straighter when you mentioned Tsukishima’s name to the way she seemed a bit too satisfied when you said that you weren’t dating him. Were you too much of an idiot to notice?

But most importantly, you were angry at yourself. Why were you crying over someone who you knew wouldn’t like you in the way that you liked him? Maybe you were too much of an idiot to not think things through; you’d just assumed that your feelings for him were so intense that he had to like you back. In retrospect, that was a stupid idea. But then again, in retrospect, you were the idiot all along.

It was in the classroom of your mid-day study hall where Tsukishima Kei stole your heart. It was in the same classroom where you got your heart broken for the first time.

The most annoying thing about the universe was that it was ruthlessly, unrelentingly cruel. The earth kept spinning even if your world stopped mid-orbit, too traumatized by loss to continue.

This was the brutal irony that you came to realize in the classroom where it all began and ended, supposedly. The very next morning, you had to pick your sorry self out of bed after however many hours of sleep you were able to get and go to school. And now half the school day had gone by — it was study hall time once again.

“Are you gonna help me get this off my fingers or not?” The voice that you wanted so desperately to get out of your mind after months of replaying in your head plagued you once again. Indeed, the universe was cruel.

“No,” you replied meekly with your head on the desk. “It’s been long enough for you to know how to do it yourself by now.”

“I insist.”

You hesitated. A second passed, then two.

“Fine.”

Ever since you realized your feelings for the other boy with a cold stare and an even icier glare, you couldn’t help but be hyper aware of yourself, and today was no different.

You could hear your own heartbeat in your ears. Could he? (It wasn’t that obvious, was it?)

You could feel yourself getting warmer by the second. Could he tell? (You were too busy looking at his hands; so let’s hope not.)

You knew that your heart was tugging you in his direction, urging you to do something. Was his doing the same? (You scoffed at yourself — you went over this last night and came to the conclusion that no, there was no way he could ever like you back.)

But maybe you wanted to be wrong this time. Being proven wrong wasn’t something you particularly enjoyed, but you would rather take the pessimistic point of view in this circumstance so you wouldn’t get hurt. And yet you still got your heart broken.

That didn’t stop your erratic heartbeat and staggered breaths whenever your fingers brushed over his, though. While slowly unwinding the tape down his fingers, you wondered how many threads he unwound from your heart for it to hurt so much when it broke. Too many for your emotions to be left undamaged by something like this, you reckoned. Not that it was his fault, of course. It was your own for becoming so naïve and vulnerable.

But, the universe was full of irony. While you had your head down, too embarrassed and dejected to say anything else, Tsukishima was thanking whatever gods existed that you couldn’t see how flustered he was.

Turns out, even people with hearts of stone can fall prey to the symptoms of falling in love. With a million thoughts collectively running through your minds, he was the first to blurt out:

“I think I’m in love.”

You let go of his hands, the loose end of the tape still dangling. There were too many questions raised at the utterance of a single sentence: With whom? When? How? Why?

Before you could organize your thoughts and form a coherent sentence — as if he could read your mind and peer into your soul — Tsukishima answered:

“With you.”

And as soon as the last two words fell from his lips, the last of the threads surrounding your worn, beaten hearts unraveled themselves, and fell away.

#tsukishima kei #tsukishima x reader #tsukishima x gn!reader #haikyuu fanfic #haikyuu fanfiction #haikyuu x reader #haikyuu fluff #haikyuu imagine #haikyuu oneshot #tsukishima fluff #haikyuu angst #tsukishima angst #tsukishima oneshot

330 notes · View notes

siennahrobek · 3 years

Text

Okay so like, I’m reading fics and stuff cause sometimes you just need to read some hurt comfort and Obi-Wan get a hug. Cause boy does he need it.

And I am absolutely flabbergasted by how many fics there are about Obi-Wan having to beg for forgiveness from his friends and family and even his men. Like. What. There are dozens of them. Anakin is all mad, Ahsoka is all mad. Cody is all mad. And okay, I get being upset and stuff. Like, that has got to hurt.

But first, he’s just doing what he can. They are in a war. Leadership is, like, a big thing. Even if it was his choice, it’s still his duty to protect the leaders of the Republic. Undercover work isn’t completely unpopular. It happens. (I won’t even go into his Palpatine manipulates everything. Jerk)

Also, I can’t imagine that they didn’t think about other options. Palpatine is really serious about not hiding and security and stuff. And why Obi-Wan?

One; he has the skills. he’s a great shot. We’ve seen this in varying episodes throughout the series. He does a great job against Mandolorians and even shoots one down as the guy was flying away. Remember in RotS? (Yes that’s later but still) he shoots Greivious what? Twice? Hanging off a ledge and doesn’t miss. He’s got the skills of a bounty hunter, no doubt. He’s an amazing hand to hand fighter, super charming (manipulative) and downright ruthless when necessary. He can’t use a lightsaber going undercover but he’s insanely resourceful (he did discover the clone army, Jango Fett, and Count Dooku and the Separatists on a tank of space gas) and some of his closest friends are shadows; Quinlan Vos and Siri Tachi. He probably picked up a few things from them too.

(I won’t even go into the kind of things he probably learned on missions with someone lie Qui-Gon Jinn)

I imagine the Council would probably look into a few people. But this a tad bit last minute; many knights are gone into war and I have no doubt shadows are on their own missions. This is a super high risk scenario and they need a charming and cunning warrior who can lie. I don’t know about y’all but that seems like Obi-Wan to me.

Honestly I kind of started ranting and forgot where I was going with this.

But anyways. There are a ton of fics that are Obi-Wan being hurt and yelled at for doing his job. Everyone is angry at him. Now, don’t get me wrong, I get people have individual tastes and tropes and such but for me, it’s so confusing. Because like, Anakin is immediately furious that Obi-Wan is alive. Shouldn’t he be freaking out super happy that his best friend/mentor/brother is ALIVE? I know I would be. Imagine; one of the people you love the most died and then a few days/a week later you find out they are alive? Man I would be so happy that I get to continue my life and relationship with them.

I get that anger is something Anakin struggles with. But he never really seems glad that his master is alive. I’m a tad more understanding for Ahsoka and I imagine that Obi-Wan would be more sympathetic with her since he died in her arms. That is something Obi-Wan can relate to painfully personally.

And the clones? I’m not entirely sure where they were exactly during this arc but out of anyone, soldiers and beings of duty, I think would be much more understanding. They are living and dying for the Republic. They follow orders. They know orders. I do not really think that they WOULD hold this against him. The clones are so used to death of their brothers and fighting on and receiving was little joy they can, whenever and wherever they can. I feel like they would be glad to see him alive, even if he did lie about it. They understand duty and doing what is necessary, or even if it isn’t, following the orders of superiors. Obi-Wan may be a high general but he still has superiors too.

I guess I would just like something where there is someone happy to see Obi-Wan, relieved that he is alive after this arc.

I guess I have some feelings about this haha

377 notes · View notes

ofmermaidstories · 3 years

Note

Gosh u make bakugo so in character it’s insane! Also do u have any fic recs?

Thank-you!! 🥺🌷🍊 we love that gremlin in this house. and i do!! i do have fic recs!! Are we looking for Bakugou/Reader spefific ones, or do we wanna branch out? I’ll keep it to Bakugou/Reader for the most part, unless an author I’m mentioning does another fic that I particular love. The following are some of my absolute favourites — I’ve reread them over, and over again, though they are, by no means, the end of my faves or recommendeds.

Explicit/Mature content warning, for most of these!!

from @makoodles, we have —

in bloom

general

Kirishima/Reader, one-shot

Your ground-floor apart is an oasis of plants and greenery that attracts the admiration of a local Pro Hero, on his way back and forth to work, everyday.

(this is so, so incredibly perfect — it is one of my all-time favourites, and is the reason i knew i wanted to write a flower-shop AU)

darling it’s better (down where it’s wetter)

explicit

Mermaid!Bakugou/Reader, one-shot

You’re caring for your Uncle-Not-Uncle Aizawa, in his sea-side home... and one day, you take the boat out. Downside: you very nearly drown in the following storm. Plus-side: You meet a merman! Who is kinda terrifying, not gonna lie.

(one of the first Bakugou/Reader fics I ever read — without having seen anything of the manga or show LMAO. Really set the bar, not gonna lie)

how to set fires by @hawnks

explicit

Bakugou/Reader, one-shot

You’re one of Bakugou’s early rescues; he never quite lets go of the feel of your hands grasping at him as you let yourself cry. And then one day you appear in his life again — as Kaminari’s assistant/best friend.

(GOD, this fic!! This fic. When it dropped I read it once, then went back and re-read it, and then immedately SCREAMED at my group chat - filled with my non-BNHA stan friends - about it, that is how good it is. Everything Hawnk’s writes has this like... trademark tenderness, it’s lovely, and the fact that Hawnk’s blesses us with it for Bakugou is just,,,, chef’s kiss.)

mine by @some-kindofgnome

explicit

Bakugou/Reader, one-shot

Bakugou has always needed to be the best; he shows you exactly how, after a Gala leaves him with nothing but his jealousy.

(It’s a PWP, but it’s very good,,, especially when it feeds us possessive, angry Bakugou.)

the sun has not yet fallen by @saintdabi

teen and up, angst

Bakugou/Reader, one-shot

You just want a little bit of the old Bakugou — he just wants some space. Frustrations bubble over, and things are said.

(I near cried LOL. I think it’s a very, very, realistic look at what it would be like, being with someone like Katsuki, who also works a high-pressure job — and the kind of fights that’d cause, when they can’t gvie as much of themselves to you as you want. It hurts, it hurts, but the first step is acknowledging the problem.)

now, @andypantsx3 is a fantastic source of BNHA/reader, lmao, and I couldn’t choose one so we have —

war paint

mature

Bakugou/Reader, chapters

Set in the same AU as Andi’s Cinderella Todoroki/Reader retelling, you’re the only child of a desperate family — so, in order to make enough coin to save the family farm, you disguse yourself as a man and join the Kingsguard. Pity Captain Bakugou is a suspicious piece of shit.

(one of the first of Andi’s I ever read, absolutely immersive.)

ab intra

mature

Shinsou/Reader, chapters

Someone is using their Quirk to hurt people, and you, a city detective, are at your wits end — and then in walks the secretive, wicked underground Pro Hero Hitoshi Shinsou. He’s obnoxious as all hell — and hiding something, something that could be important to this very deadly case.

(Apart from the trademark Andi steaminess, there’s a very real thread in this about trust, and what it means, and I find it lovely, set admist the suspense and excitement that it is)

cover shot (through the heart)

mature

Bakugou/Reader, chapters

You’re the well-paid but overworked assistant of one Bakugou Katsuki, model and international - and beautiful - meance. For four years he hasn’t been able to chase you away — and then he discovers a weakness of yours, wielding it with knife-like precision.

(Fucking hilarious. Between this and darling it’s better (down where it’s wetter) I don’t think I’ve ever laughed that much over a fic. I really admire humour in writing because it’s not a thing i can capture, LOL. But I’ve always enjoyed Andi’s Bakugou, because he is smart, and dangerous and sexy — and decisive in what he wants)

Bonus mention:

I Melt With You by art_deco_deity

NOT RATED

Bakugou/Reader, chapters

You’re a nurse who can take on other’s pain. Bakugou Katsuki crash lands on your balcony, and is, unfortunately, in a lot of pain.

(I’m still making my way through this, but ADD’s Bakugou is rough, mean — compelling. Reader wants to help, but often finds their buttons pushed)

there’s so many good fics out there!! these were a really, really select few that i enjoy. feel free to suggest others!!!

#ofmermaidstories-asks #fic rec #people are clever and create amazing things: writer’s edition #please read these some of these fics are the reason why i even tried writing mine tbh

298 notes · View notes

lokilickedme · 3 years

Text

Somebody help me chill, this is insane.

(under the cut because long and also pretty traumatic, for me at least)

Crazy neighbor, remember her? Her son destroyed a piece of equipment we had attached to one of our trees at the fenceline last week, she denied it and called us insane liars - that’s the most recent craziness in the ongoing saga of the neighbor from hell. I was sitting here reading my dash tonight and happened to glance over at the monitor for the surveillance camera husband got me the other day to watch that exact spot (where the equipment was smashed) and guess who I see bent over looking through the fence peering very closely at that exact spot? Neighbor’s equally insane son, who we know did the actual dirty work. And I, stupid like I am, took a screenshot of him and then immediately jumped up and ran outside in the dark in my pajamas (nearly 9pm, pitch black, their porch light is off because obviously they’re doing something they don’t want to be seen doing) and I ask “Excuse me, what are you doing?”

This lunatic immediately starts SCREAMING at me - I mean top of his lungs SCREAMING abusive threats, calling me a stupid psycho whore bitch, yelling at me to get my ass back in my house and generally just acting completely off his rocker unhinged nuts - and then his mother comes out and comes over to the fence and gets in my face while I’m just standing there and tells me to mind my own business. I say I am minding my business, I saw him looking through the fence at my property right where we had vandalism happen last week so I came out to find out why he’s interested in my property. She laughed in my face and said “No he wasn’t, he was standing right here looking at his phone like this” and she does this little pantomine of someone looking at their phone, which is funny because she wasn’t out there when he was doing it and there are no windows on that side of her house at all. I ignored her and asked “What are you looking for?” He kept screaming incoherent animal noises and insults from behind her so I asked again, “What are you looking for?” And that crazy woman grinned at me and said “We’re just looking to see what kind of new devices you’ve installed!”

OMG. She didn’t even take a breath in between lying and then contradicting her own lie. And she’s grinning smugly at me the entire time, gesturing around pointing at our property cams and mosquito light (it flashes and apparently she thinks it’s watching her) and my bedroom window - which means she’s been snooping. There is a cam sitting in my windowsill, aimed at the spot where the device was smashed. Every bit of this equipment is on our property, some of it behind a privacy fence. I tell her it’s none of her business what kind of devices we’ve got on our property, but she just yammers over me, and of course numbskull is still ranting like a psycho behind her, screaming at me to mind my own business and get back in my house and leave them alone. At this point he’s pulled out his phone and shoved it over her shoulder toward my face and is recording me, which is just...fucking hilarious...because I’m literally doing nothing but standing there in shock and awe at how nuts these people are, and he’s still screaming abusive curses and names at me while he’s recording.

Anyway, for about 4.5 minutes we stood there with them shouting over me (I know the exact time because it was later discovered that our doorbell cam recorded audio of the entire event) and a little ways into it he screams “I WILL TEAR YOUR FUCKING HEAD OFF!!”

At this point psycho woman finally turns around and says “Addison Case!” and pushes him back. He lunges at me and she tells him to go call the police (??what?? I mean...I wish he had...my phone was in my hand frozen solid, locked up because of the glitchy surveillance app I had to install to see the camera, or else I would have called them myself - but my god they really thought I was the one the cops needed to come for??). Meanwhile I’m just standing there on my own property in the dark in my pajamas, all 5 feet and 120 lbs of me, while this rabid animal - he’s a 21 year old college boy - is lunging at me and screaming nonstop, calling me a fucking whore bitch loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear it while his phone’s camera light is in my face blinding me. Crazy lady smiles that smug shit eating grin of hers and tells me to get back in my house, leave her alone, and move the hell away so she can live in peace.

Wow. Just...holy shit.

This is the person who has allowed her dog to attack my very small 8 year old son on our property and send him to the hospital with injuries last year, then attempt to attack him again 2 weeks ago (he is now 9 at the time of the second attack) - again on our own property (in our back yard this time, in our front yard the first time), has allowed her dogs (multiple) to bark all night long and keep us awake (she leaves them outside and then goes away for the weekend and they bark the entire time she’s gone), then she had her crazy violent son destroy the BarkBox we put in our tree on our side of the fence last week (we put it up as a humane way to get the barking to stop without having to listen to her call us insane liars every time we complain about it). Yet...she kept repeating over and over and over for us to leave her alone and stop harassing her.

All I could even do was stand there shaking my head. It was surreal. And frustrating, because they wouldn’t even let me get a word out without screaming over me, and she was doing that infuriating Karen thing where they shove their hand at your face and grin smugly while they’re telling you what you better do or they’ll call someone to make you.

I actually started laughing, it was so ludicrous. She’s committed all those vile offenses against us and we’re the ones that need to leave her alone. We’ve had to file four police reports against her and we’re the ones that are making her life miserable. I just can’t stop thinking about that Liar Liar movie where the repeat offender keeps calling his lawyer to complain that the cops won’t stop arresting him and the lawyer finally yells THEN STOP BREAKING THE LAW ASSHOLE!!

It’s just like that. My god.

SO -

She tells him to call the police again, and this limp dick shoves that phone light right up to my face and says “You think she’s worth calling the cops over? Look at her, she don’t look worth it to me.” And bitch starts laughing. My god, these people are subhuman, I swear. I’ve never seen anyone act like this in my life, over a person doing literally nothing to them.

So she finally orders her rabid son (who is just about foaming at the mouth, I swear he’s making these barking animal noises at me, it’s weird as hell) into the house and they walk away, with him still ranting like a madman until the door closes behind them. I immediately go inside my own house and call my husband, who was way out at the back of our property in our camper (he self quarantines each day after work out there to protect us because there have been a lot of covid cases at his workplace) and he didn’t know anything was happening. He immediately runs up to the house and I tell him I caught neighbor’s thug son messing around at our fence and that when I went out he threatened to kill me.

Tom grabs something - I don’t even know what it was, I think it was this piece of board that was sitting by the door, we’ve done a shelving project recently and a couple of leftover pieces have been there for a few days - and he stalks outside toward neighbor’s house. I hear him yell COME OUT HERE BOY!!! and I stg you guys, if I wasn’t on the phone calling 911 I might have thought about getting naked right there and then because damn.

So anyway, let’s not go there. This is serious by god lol (look for this to show up in a fic soon though because material like this doesn’t get handed to you for free every day).

I call 911 and say the neighbor’s son just threatened my life and for them to come quick because he’s still over there but I know he’s going to leave any second (this is his mom’s M.O, the two times the police have tried to go talk to her she gets in her car and leaves before they can get from my house to hers, and I know he’ll do the same because COWARDS). Tom comes back and says the little pussywillow wouldn’t come out of the house. He’s breathing fire, you guys. Pure fucking fire. I tell 911 to get somebody out quick before the kid leaves, and just about 2 minutes after I hang up he does just that - we see him blast past our house in his truck and he’s gone, and then the police arrive about 3 minutes after. I’m so mad I can’t see straight. If they’d been able to see him in the state he was in, they’d have arrested him on sight.

Two squad cars (big SUV’s) pull up and block her driveway with full lights flashing, which makes me laugh because suddenly we’ve got neighbors coming outside to see what’s going on. I meet the officers outside, and the crazy bitch next door does the same, yelling “Hello Officer!” and waving to them as they’re coming up to my porch.

They talk to me and Tom for a long time, I tell them everything that happened, they interview Big (he and Little were inside the open door and heard it all), we fill out our statements and talk with them more until one officer goes next door to talk to neighbor. We can hear her dripping her fake sugar and spice while they’re talking on her porch and my husband loses his shit - he heads toward her house and yells “We got the entire thing on recording, don’t even try to lie! Your kid, threatening to kill my wife?!?” (he’s referring to the camera in my bedroom window, which actually only recorded about 2 minutes because I don’t have it set up correctly yet, but they don’t know that). The officer yells at him to get back, which, yeah - he shouldn’t have done that, but for god’s sake the woman’s peckerhead son just literally threatened murder on a member of his family, this is the final fucking straw and he’s mad. And as he’s coming back across the yard the officer that stayed with me points at our new doorbell camera, just freshly installed as of about two weeks ago, and asks if it’s on. We haven’t even really figured out how to use it yet, but yes, as far as we know it’s on. The incident happened around the side of the house, but the doorbell records audio.

God bless technology.

I invite the officer inside the house and Tom gets his phone, pulls up the app for the doorbell, and starts skipping through the recording looking for the right timestamp. Up till this point all they have is me saying the guy screamed a lot of abusive profanities at me and threatened to tear my head off, and they’re taking me serious but probably not that serious, you know? Neighbors fight all the time, wars start over barking dogs, things get exaggerated, we’ve all seen the TV dramas.

Until Tom finds the segment on the footage and starts playing it to them on his phone. It’s kind of quiet because we were a good distance away, but you can hear the guy screaming just like I said he was. The officer asks if we have a speaker we can play it through so he can hear the words more clearly, because he needs proof of threat and that’s entirely in the words.

You guys, I’m tellin’ ya, sometimes you get a chance to fucking SHINE. My husband is a musician and this cop is asking him if he’s got a good speaker. So within minutes Tom’s got this huge venue-style amplifier designed for broadcasting music to the back wall of a freaking stadium pulled out into the livingroom and he’s hooking his phone up to it, and then he hits play and the other officer comes back from next door to join us and I can tell by the annoyed look on his face that neighbor bitch has likely charmed him and shed a plethora of persecuted tears and spewed her lies about how we’ve been harassing her forEVER and I think for a second that it’s a total loss now, he’s made his mind up in her favor.

And then...away we go. Tom cranks the volume on the speaker and they both lean in to listen closely.

Just about a minute into the recording they have their proof - thugnuts screaming I WILL TEAR YOUR FUCKING HEAD OFF!!!

Both officers nod, close their notebooks, and the second officer makes a phonecall while the first one turns to me and says “That’s terroristic threatening and it’s a class C felony. You’re going to need to go to the PA’s office with all the reports you’ve filed against them so far and all your evidence from tonight including that recording and hand it all to them. They’re likely going to issue a no-contact so that he can’t interact with you ever again.”

This is a victory, but it’s just the first step, and I feel sickeningly disheartened that it’s all in my lap to do everything. I want them to go demand his whereabouts from his mother and just go get his ass and haul him in. But no, I have a ton of legwork to do now because these horrible people won’t fucking stop.

After several more minutes of me asking questions about what exactly we need to do and where we need to go, etc etc (I’m competent but I’m also fucking rattled, someone threatened to kill me tonight and I’m blanking hard on the instructions he’s giving me) they finally wrap it up and leave. They’ve been in my house for a half hour waiting for me to finish filling out the report (I had to ask for more paper because honey I’m getting ALL the details in there) and I can just imagine how freaked out neighbor is when she sees what time they finally move their cars from in front of her driveway.

And now I’m coming down from the weird calm that I had through the entire event, and my heart feels like it’s going to EXPLODE. I had heart surgery two months ago, do I need this?? The pathetic part is that I know now just how stupid those people are, and I know this won’t be the end from their side by any means. We’ll start finding more stuff broken, or he’ll start climbing over the fence back at the back of the property to steal stuff from husband’s tool shed, or my tires will get slashed. These people are that dumb and hateful, they proved it tonight. He said if we had animals he would kill them, and then he made the same threat against me. How stupid does a person have to be to stand there with his phone out recording himself ranting and making threats against a woman standing in her own yard in her pajamas? Big tough man there. And his mama grinning at me the whole time, telling me I’m crazy and she’s concerned for her own safety because of me, while her son is standing right behind her threatening my life.

I’m just...my god, I don’t even know what to think. I thought people only acted like this in TV dramas, seriously. I’ve seen some shit in my life but this particular brand of stupid has up till now evaded me, but now it’s been in my face and I’m sort of in shock.

I don’t like guns. At ALL. Tom has always had at least one hidden carefully away, safely locked up away from the house, but now there are two inside my house in immediate grabbing range. He insisted that I let him show me how to use them. Rules were laid down for the boys - never touch, never, don’t even get close to them - and now there is a box of shotgun shells on my fireplace mantel and a singleshot rifle by the door. I hate this so damn much.

Don’t pick it up unless you’re ready to use it, he told me. Without even thinking, I said back, “If I touch it it’s getting used.”

I HATE THIS SO FUCKING MUCH

My god. I told the cops that the drug lord that lived over there four years ago was a better neighbor than this woman. They didn’t even laugh.

I guess they’re right, now that I think about it...it isn’t funny.

44 notes · View notes