it’s about running away and being chased and knowing when to surrender but maybe not how to surrender. it’s about chasing and chasing and chasing until you blink and realize that you went from being the hunter to being the huntee, like a looney tunes bit. except there is no laughing happening, and no punchline, and the anvil and grand piano and cruise ship landing on your head one after the other are simply metaphors. still painful, though. more than enough to send you spinning, or knock you flat, or weigh you down.
—
that is to say, on the topic of weird love:
love that is unconventional, bizarre, lacking rhyme or reason. perhaps off putting, though it isn’t really, or beyond any one name or title.
hanzawa masato hadn’t been expecting any love whatsoever. that it is unconventional (or bizarre, or off putting, or so on) is salt in the wound.
(not that it doesn’t suit him, he knows himself to be someone who is, in more than one manner of speaking, fairly weird. acknowledging this is further salt in an exacerbated wound.)
tangentially: hanzawa masato doesn’t ordinarily have any particular desire to die, but recent circumstances have pushed him to reconsider.
who made you feel like you have to handle things alone? did we teach you shame? do you think we don’t want to look after you anymore?
well, fine, “to die” is something of an extreme. he doesn’t think he actually wishes to die, doesn’t want his heart to stop beating or his neurons to stop firing. it just has to be a violent enough reset, send him back to a youth where he’d wake up every morning and choose to be busy as a fun pastime rather than a survival tactic.
not a snapped neck, but, well. whatever.
—
he’s back at the river. he never has his pant legs rolled up. it’s getting on his nerves.
the current is mild today. he can almost make out his face in the water, not that he wants to spend any time admiring his reflection. the sun’s beating down on him, too-warm on his skin. he inhales heat and regrets it.
his eyes reflected are wide open as they stare up at him. the reflection looks like it’s getting clearer.
masato doesn’t like that.
submerging his head, he figures that it couldn’t be any harder to breathe with water in his lungs than it is without.
—
sometimes, very rarely, when he has time alone with his thoughts, masato forgets how to breathe. becomes over-conscious of it and does it wrong, inhaling without feeling like enough oxygen is getting to his brain. his entire chest will move up and down but it feels like he’s dying.
to be frank, masato feels like he’s dying a lot. running on autopilot, it seems, is better for him in the long run.
but, well. that’s boring.
inhale for elastic muscle activation, exhale for large muscle contraction. draw your arm back, hit the ball.
breathe, won’t you?
leaving tashiro after club is easy. walking to the station to wait for the train is easy. clouds are gathering overhead. he rests his eyes awhile. rookie mistake.
his rib cage is rickety and the joints in his fingers have gone stiff. his neck has hardly any mobility to speak of. images like shadow puppetry are playing on the backs of his eyelids. weird love. mapping intimacy, tashiro drums his fingers on masato’s chest, where the bones of his rib cage jut out. presses down on the joints of each of his fingers until they pop.
stands behind him with his head in his hands and guides it just so until his neck cracks—
masato feels the train’s arrival in his bones. he opens his eyes. he feels geriatric. something about the barometric pressure.
tashiro-kun, do you know any chiropractors?
he squints at his phone, bleary.
with a license, he clarifies, unnecessarily.
—
masato is a little worried that he might have strange tastes.
—
it’s like this: being with tashiro gonzaburou is terribly easy for hanzawa masato when he’s not in love with him and wonderfully difficult when he is. this is an on-off situation. this makes everything worse. riddled with impossibilities—frankly masato’s convinced it’s a sickness. or a curse.
standing against the violent current with his feet planted firmly in the silt, masato ponders the symbolism at play. rivers representing cleansing, rebirth, the beginning of things. he, symbolically, watches a coffin bob apathetically downstream to his right. he, symbolically, wades with great difficulty to catch up with and lie in it. cleansing, rebirth, the beginning of things. destruction, also.
masato’s good with literature—the basis is that you cannot build upon what’s already been built. what existed must be razed to be remade. something must die to facilitate a rebirth. religious undertones abound, though flood myths are universal.
definitely a sickness; he wonders if there was ever any basis for this, before. he doesn’t really want to believe that tashiro was the first. selfishness. sickness. the sort of thing the river’s supposed to cleanse him of. what he should do is get out of the coffin, maybe swim around a little.
he doesn’t.
masato stares up at the sky above him, listens to the wood creaking around him. imagines he’s in a boat instead. a flood so great it threatens even the heavens—the rocking of his “boat” is making him a little, well, sick.
he jolts awake. riddled with impossibilities. weird dreams shouldn’t count.
they do, though.
he has reason to believe that the creaking of the “boat” was actually the creaking of his bones. he feels brittle enough to have earned the spot in that coffin. it might’ve been his all along.
he really doesn’t like that.
—
ah.
masato wants to live.
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re: sibling anon’s ask:
Imagine if said Creator had to leave Mondstadt early the next morning because their presence was requested by other nations. Poor boy would return, only to miss them again.
…I’m sorry, Kaeya…
- cryo anon
….no :(
he wakes up and you’re not there, it’s as if you never were, there’s no note or anything, he’s just.. somehow in his bed.
diluc says you left for liyue last night. he means after you took kaeya home, of course, but kaeya assumes he means prior.
how dare his mind think of you that way? think that somebody such as you would touch somebody as tainted and defiled as him? how dare he assume you’d be kind to a sinner as bad as he, how dare he think he deserved kindness from anybody but you?
it’s a bitter day, and he can’t help but think that he needs a drink.
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RIPTIDE SPOILERS AND THEORY
Okay so you know how Jayson didn’t want Jay to go to the Navy? What if it was a situation where he KNEW there was stuff going on, that people wanted a martyr and would do anything to get their way, and instead of for example, DOING SOMETHING, he does the selfish thing and prevents his kid from going into the Navy.
Which 1. is fucked up to me because imagine you come from a long line of painters and then one day your dad is like nope no painting for you only me and your grandparents and your sister and your cousins and your aunts and your uncles can paint but not you, you’re disconnected from the rest of our family and you aren’t allowed to do something you want. No matter what good intentions, that’s fucked up for a kid to hear.
And 2. it might confirm my theory from years ago where Jayson was actually in on it this whole time. He is far less removed this time and probably wasn’t the one to say the order but I think he definitely knew something was going on and turned a blind eye instead of doing something which would have saved Ayva’s life.
These are just insane ramblings because I am living for everything Ferin and these past few episodes have been watering me.
(I also think his preventing might also have something to do with Jay’s magic being different but we don’t know enough yet.)
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“You’re sure you want to do this?” | Moth Work
THE DARKROOM ISN’T HAUNTED, but a dead man owns it—and they know which one. It sits in the forest like a rejected organ, misplaced and veiny with perennials. Negatives and cigarette butts litter the entrance, clinging to the steel panel door. From an aerial, they might look like misplaced stars.
Harrison shoulders the door first, traps it open with his boot. Dust and sunrays rake his back as he combs through cardboard boxes and mountains of photo paper. Lonan follows silently, still wearing Harrison’s jacket. Trails of smoke from his cigarette catch in the negatives pinned up by clothespins, chemical peeling between layers of ink. In one hand he tends to his smoke, and in the next, lugs in the canister of gasoline they found in the cabin’s cellar. As Harrison fumbles for his flashlight, Lonan sets it down by the table, and it sloshes like the Pacific. He stares at his fingers, the tools, the opened bottles of developing fluid—anything but the pictures. Harrison clicks his flashlight on, and puts it face up on the table.
“You’re sure you want to do this?”
Spent the evening drawing a movie-still style image of Harrison in the opening scene of Moth Work! It’s been a goal of mine to do this for forever & now I can die happy lol.
Harrison & Lonan set out to burn down a darkroom (circa 2019).
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