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aidanchaser · 1 year

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Thank you @mlsecretsanta for organizing such a fun exchange and all the hard work you put into making sure the event went off without a hitch. It’s always the work we don’t see that makes the work more fun for everyone, so thank you so much!

I got @lynnimaybe as my giftee! Your prompts were so overwhelming in the best way. I had to do everything in my power not to let this fic snowball into a 50k+ series. Instead it’s only 12k and 3 chapters. Much more manageable. Merry Christmas! I hope you enjoy it.

Thank you to @aliblujay for a wonderful beta read. Excellent help with tense and pluralization.

Rating: T Word Count: 12k Giftee Tags: Ladybug/Chat Noir, Felix/Lila, Chloe/Kagami (intended but never explicitly stated oops but it’s real I promise), Hurt/Comfort, Fluff/Angst, Home from University Internships, minor s5 spoilers (I haven’t seen s5, but I reference a couple of things I’ve picked up on just from being on tumblr) Additional Tags: Alya/Nino, Identity Reveal, Christmas Presents, Post-Hawk Moth Defeat, New Villains, College-Aged

Read on Ao3: The Distance Between

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Chapter 1

Marinette rereads the message three times to make sure it’s appropriate before she copies it out of her notes app and pastes it into her messages.

I’m almost home from New York and wondered if you wanted to meet up while I’m here.

After her third read, she decides that it’s too personal, too much pressure on him. She tries again.

Did you decide on your plans for Christmas?

But she reads this one twice before realizing it offers nothing. It’s too casual.

My parents would love to have you over on Christmas if you’re not doing anything else.

That’s better. It’s not about her, so it can’t be too forward. And it’s not too much pressure, she hopes. She may not have asked her parents if Adrien can join them for Christmas just yet, but she knows they would be appalled if she hadn’t said anything, rather than surprised that she had.

She searches the crowded Metro car around her for something to distract her, but even making silly smiles at a toddler peering at her over his mother’s shoulder isn’t enough to keep her anxiety from spiraling. Because she can’t stop wondering, what if Adrien says no?

And, perhaps even worse, what if he says yes?

And his reply, which is neither, is somehow the worst:

Thank you.

And nothing else.

Marinette quickly exits the message to type a response in her notes before she dares put it in the messages. She has regretted too many texts to take the risk of actually sending what she’s thinking.

I just thought My parents like you were concerned that you’d be alone. I’d like to see you too, even if you’re not available on Christmas. Even if you’re not available on Christmas, it’d be great to see you before I go back to New York. I miss you. We should catch up.

Marinette rereads it one more time. It’s casual, comfortable, and a little condescending. She edits out the “alone” part of the message to My parents and I would like to see you. That’s better, short, simple, to the point. No pressure. Not too intimate. Not too much of anything.

She copies, pastes, and sends.

The Metro comes to a stop and Marinette slides her phone into her purse. Though it isn’t quite as bad as rush hour in New York, Marinette directs her full attention on getting in and out of the Metro safely. The crowds are thinner, but everyone is burdened with holiday packages, and Marinette has taken too many spills across stone and tile alike to risk losing focus.

But as she climbs the stairs, her phone buzzes in her pocket and she very nearly goes sprawling. The handrail saves her. She waits until she is safely on flat ground again before desperately digging her phone out of her pocket.

I’d like to see you, too. Glad you had a safe trip home.

Marinette’s heart thumps loudly. He wants to see her.

She types It was a safe trip, but a long one! I haven’t had to spend the night in an airport before, but I wasn’t going to risk missing my spot on any waiting lists after they canceled my first flight out of New York. They really wanted me to check my bag, but I was not going to risk your present getting lost in transit. into her notes app, but she doesn’t dare send it all. It sounds like a conversation, and Adrien’s been so hard to draw into a conversation ever since his father’s arrest.

Instead she sends, Hope you made it home safe from Venice? She doesn’t want to overwhelm him with herself and her own problems, but she wants to know he’s okay.

When she arrives at her parents’ bakery, her phone buzzes and she pauses, hand halfway to the door handle, to read his text.

Got in last night.

She doesn’t have time to open her notes app to draft a reply before she is swarmed by a bone-crushing hug and lifted off her feet with such force she assumes its her father. But the high-pitched squeal that accompanies the hug means it can only be one person: Alya.

Marinette squeals back and hugs her best friend as tightly as she can. As Alya sets her down, she sees Nino standing just behind her, arms spread wide. Marinette hugs him, too.

“What, no scream for me?” he grins.

“You know I missed you,” she says and kisses his cheek.

And though Marinette has a million questions for Alya and Nino, she has to say hello to her parents first.

The bakery is swarmed with customers, as it always is on Christmas Eve. Marinette had planned to get into Paris yesterday afternoon so she could help with the sales, but holiday travel plans are a terrible thing, especially internationally.

Despite the booming business of the day, her parents hold her long enough to ask her about her internship; she gives them all the positive updates. She asks them about news at home; they tell her about all the local gossip that filtered through the bakery doors: André is finally retiring his ice cream stand, Chloé Bourgeois has a girlfriend, and Kitty Section is going on tour again next year.

And finally, just as she’s reaching for an apron to help, her mother shoos her upstairs. “You must be exhausted; you’re not working after all that travel.”

“Twenty-four hours in an airport?” her father adds. “Absolutely not. Straight to bed with you.”

Marinette protests that she slept on the plane, but her parents are uninterested. She is sent away to rest.

Marinette, however, is not going to bed. She’ll get there, eventually, but first she has to talk with Alya and Nino away from where her parents can hear.

Her friends follow her upstairs, and as soon as Nino closes the trapdoor to Marinette’s childhood bedroom, Marinette is swarmed by the kwamis of the miracle box. Their squeal of excitement rivals Marinette and Alya’s.

“I missed you guys, too,” she assures them with a laugh, and takes a minute to nuzzle Tikki’s cheek in particular. Once the excitement from the reunion has settled down, Marinette turns back to Nino and Alya. “You really don’t have any news?”

Alya shakes her head. “Six months and no signs.”

“Nothing about the peacock or the butterfly miraculouses,” Nino frowns. He doesn’t mention the miraculous of destruction, but surely that’s been as fruitless a search, too. She stalks the Ladyblog for updates about their radio silent friend or the missing kwamis, though she knows Alya would text her anything before it made it to the blog.

“We’re sorry, Marinette,” Alya says. “We really thought we’d have something for you by now.”

“It’s all right. You’ve done your best.” She falls back onto her bed, suddenly bereft of any desire to unpack her things. The kwamis jump down beside her, a tumble of soft fur and static electricity.

“How’s the city treating Scarabella and Carapace?” she asks.

“It’s fine,” Nino says. “Everyone misses Ladybug and Chat Noir, but they like us well enough.”

“Not that there’s much for us to do,” Alya sighs. “Saving kittens from trees and helping people cross the road—you know, normal hero things. No villains to fight.”

“Which is a good thing,” Nino points out.

Alya shrugs.

Marinette runs her finger along the stitches in her pink comforter. She doesn’t know which is harder to bear: that the peacock and butterfly miraculouses are still lost after all the work she and Chat went through to save them or that Chat has really quit being a hero.

Six months ago, they faced Monarch, formerly Shadow Moth, formerly Hawk Moth. Six months ago, they learned that Monarch was Gabriel Agreste. Six months ago, Gabriel Agreste was arrested and Ladybug and Chat Noir were lauded as heroes.

The butterfly miraculous, however, had vanished, and the peacock along with it.

Once it was over, Ladybug and Chat Noir sat in their favorite spot atop the Eiffel Tower and watched the sun rise over the city. For Ladybug, it was a wonderful new beginning. Yes, things were unfinished, but Monarch had stalked them for so long. This still felt like a victory.

But Chat Noir was quiet, somber.

“Do you think…” Ladybug paused to evaluate her question, then plunged ahead despite her misgivings. “Do you think with Monarch gone, it might be safe to tell each other our identities?”

She expected it would cheer him up. She thought that, after four years of working together and him begging to know the truth, he would be thrilled to hear her offer it. And she was desperate to know him truly, even against her better judgment.

But instead he drew his knees tighter against his chest. “I don’t think I’m ready,” he said.

“O-oh, okay.”

“I… might need a break from this.”

“Oh.”

And that was the last time they spoke.

With no villain in Paris and an internship offer in New York waiting for her response, Marinette finally gave into Alya’s plan and handed over the earrings. Alya promised to be the best pinch hitter for Ladybug there would ever be, and swore that she’d recover the missing miraculouses by the time Marinette returned.

Alya pulls her earrings out and hands them to Marinette. “Sorry I couldn’t fix it all for you.”

Marinette hesitates. “No, Alya, they’re yours now—”

“Oh, you’re giving them back,” Alya grins and forces the earrings into her hands, “but I thought you might want a turn before you go back to New York.”

She does miss being Ladybug, and she has missed having Tikki nearby, but it won’t be the same without Chat Noir. “I could take Mullo instead. The three of us could still go out together.”

Alya snaps the Fox Pendant around her neck. “I had better take Trixx out before he gets himself into trouble.”

Trixx flies in an excited circle around Alya’s head. “Yes! Let’s go!”

“Not right now,” Alya laughs. “But we will get in a few runs as Rena Furtive before Marinette leaves. I promise.”

Maybe it’s the warm snuggles from Tikki. Maybe it’s the company of good friends. Maybe it’s having her familiar miraculous returned to her ears. Whatever the reason, Marinette manages to pull herself to her feet to unpack. She will be home for a few weeks, which is plenty of time to settle in. Or, perhaps more accurately, just enough time to settle in before she has to pack up again.

❖❖❖

It’s late that night, long after a warm Christmas Eve dinner with her parents and grandparents, before Marinette finally has a few moments to herself—well, as to herself as she can with the Miracle Box in her room. Alya insisted she keep it for the night, and Marinette guesses Alya was eager for a break. She’s happy to oblige. There was something lonely about living in New York with a roommate who came and went at all hours of the night. She’s missed having a flurry of friends to come home to.

Marinette pulls on her coat and slips upstairs to her rooftop balcony. She’s also missed this view. Paris’ lights aren’t all that different from New York but it feels different. The rooftops here are more intimate, older, and worn with familiar paths.

Tikki follows her. “Are we going out?” she asks, and Marinette hears the hope in her voice.

“It’s Christmas Eve. We shouldn’t.”

“Rest is important, Marinette, but you've been away a long time. It's okay to say you missed us.”

Marinette laughs. “Of course I missed you, Tikki. I missed everyone.”

For the most part, there has not been much time to miss her loved ones. She is used to being overworked and overwhelmed and New York is no different, even without her additional responsibilities as a hero.

But the day her father called to help her schedule a flight home for Christmas, Marinette’s heart began to ache with a longing to be home, and it has not stopped, even now that she is here.

Because she isn’t quite home. Not quite yet.

“Tikki, spots on.”

And Tikki goes with a smile, as if she knew this was exactly what Marinette came up here to do before Marinette knew it herself.

But even as the familiar magic settles into her bones, the ache in her heart does not quite fade. She leaps aimlessly across the rooftops, wishing it could all feel like it once did. She hears the jingle of a bell not far off and her heart lurches, but when she seeks out the sound, it’s only a decorative reindeer harnessed to a child-sized sled, left out in the soft dusting of snow that has begun to fall.

Otherwise, the city is quiet.

Though she has never been one for notoriety, she makes sure to call down greetings and well wishes to the people who are strolling the streets and enjoying the city’s holiday lights. She waves and smiles as they excitedly shout that Ladybug is back, that their hero is home. It isn’t the praise or recognition that she wants; she just hopes that word will reach him, wherever he is.

She stops at the Eiffel Tower.

When she is Ladybug, heights mean nothing to her. Falling and flying are as natural as inhaling and exhaling. She holds onto the iron rod above her head and leans out, looking at the city below. Its lamps glisten like starlight on the surface of water, much like the ocean she has stared across longingly from the other side, wondering if he stops to think of her as much as she stops to think of him.

If he is going to come find her, he will start here.

“Well isn’t this fortuitous,” a voice behind her murmurs.

Her heart thrums excitedly. It’s him, it’s his voice—but when she turns, Chat Noir is not behind her.

He has golden hair, like her Chat, but his eyes are hard and icy blue. Her heart stutters into an old nightmare, but no, this boy is not dressed in white. He wears a suit of pale blue with a deep violet button up visible beneath it. The tie knotted at his collar is bloodred and in place of a tie pin, he wears a brooch in the shape of a peacock’s tail.

The mask over his black-rimmed eyes is violet with feathers coming off the ends, their red, unblinking eyes as intimidating as his own cold blue ones. They’re a perfect match to the feather-shaped panel of the folded fan in his hand.

Ladybug takes a step backwards and her foot reaches the edge of the tower.

“I do love that we’re going to get a shot at the original instead of some knock off,” another voice says, high and feminine. A young woman drops down from the iron network of beams above them and lands in a graceful flourish. Her soft pink and orange skirts flutter like wings softening a landing before settling neatly around her feet. The bodice of her dress is a pale lavender, and her mask, like the young man’s, extends far beyond her face. But instead of ending in marks like a peacock’s feathers, her mask curves into the shape of a butterfly’s wings. She wears a purple brooch in the shape of a butterfly at the hollow of her throat and carries a cane tipped in amethyst.

Ladybug unclips her yo-yo from her waist. “Unless you two are going to politely hand over your miraculouses so I can return them to where they belong, I’m not sure that we have much to say to each other.”

“There’s no need for a fight,” the young man says.

“But I would love a fight,” the woman protests, lifting her cane as if it were a rapier. “How about it, Ladybug? Woman to woman?”

She plunges her cane at Ladybug’s chest and Ladybug knows she could move out of the way, but she doesn’t. She lets the attack knock her off the edge of the Eiffel Tower. Falling truly is no different from breathing for her, but her assailant, surprised to find the attack has landed, stumbles. Ladybug sees the young woman just barely catch herself on the iron beams and is disappointed. She uses her yo-yo to snag a beam of the tower, swing through and up, and lands behind the boy dressed in the peacock’s glamor.

She wastes no time. She launches her yo-yo with an intent to tie up the young man and drag him towards her. He sidesteps her attack and catches her yo-yo on the end of his fan. She pulls with the hope of disarming him, but his grip is strong.

“You could hand over your miraculous,” he suggests, “and tell us where to find Chat Noir.”

“Or don’t,” the woman says, only a small tremor in her voice after her near-fall. “I’d much rather see if you bleed first.”

She rushes Ladybug, full of an anger familiar after hundreds of fights with Monarch’s akumas and sentimonsters. It’s blind rage, formless and reckless. This woman hates her, and Ladybug hasn’t a clue why.

She’s forced to release the peacock’s fan to defend herself. She does think, a bit sadly, that perhaps it was a good thing Chat Noir declined her offer of sharing their secret identities. It means that even if she is to lose this fight, she has nothing to give these people to help them find her partner. Her former partner.

But she’s not going to lose this fight. She may not have been Ladybug for a few months, but she knows her strength and she knows her magic. The woman with the cane does not seem to know what to do with her weapon. She swings wildly, alternating between using her cane like a club or a sword. Ladybug ducks and side-steps her attacks easily. If the young man would bother to intervene, it might be a more challenging fight, but he seems content to stand to the side and watch his partner embarrass herself in her anger.

Ladybug’s yo-yo string finally snags on the woman’s cane. She yanks it towards her and tears the staff from the woman’s grip.

“That’s mine!” The young woman snarls and grasps desperately for her weapon, but the boy clicks his tongue against his teeth with the sort of sound one might reserve for a toddler throwing a tantrum.

He plucks a feather from his fan. “If you’re done throwing your fit, perhaps we could move onto the main event.”

The woman takes a step away from Ladybug with a furious frown scrawled across her face. “Fine.” And she certainly sounds like a petulant child who has just been told she can’t leave the table until she finishes her dinner.

She taps the brooch at her throat and a pale lavender butterfly flits out from her chest. The boy blows on his feather and the two magical creations swoop off the edge of the Eiffel Tower. Ladybug does her best to snare them in her yo-yo, but the boy throws his fan in an expert arc, striking her yo-yo from its path. His fan falls from the tower and the feather and the butterfly disappear into the night.

“What do you even want? Who are you?” Ladybug asks.

“I did ask politely for your miraculous,” he says, “and Chat Noir’s, but you’re right. It was quite rude of us not to introduce ourselves. This is Bella Moth, and you can call me Flourish.”

There’s a crash from the street below and Ladybug knows she needs to investigate, but if her years facing Hawk Moth and his subsequent forms taught her anything, it’s that an opportunity to meet her enemies in person is rare and she should not waste it.

“Go on, Ladybug,” Flourish says. “We’ll see you again—after our creations defeat you, and we take your miraculous.”

She thinks he ought to take a lesson from his predecessor as she is trying to do, and recognize that this strategy has ended in nothing but stalemates for the heroes and villains alike, but there’s a scream from below and Ladybug cannot ignore people in danger. She leaps from the ledge and plunges to the street below. She takes Bella Moth’s cane with her.

As she lands, she finds where Flourish’s fan has fallen. She grabs that, too and turns it over, examining it even as she runs towards the sounds of a monster tearing apart the streets of Paris. The fan looks identical to the one Mayura once wielded, but it’s clear that neither of these miraculous users are her.

She and Chat Noir never found proof that Mayura was Nathalie Sancouer, but it was not hard to put together once Gabriel Agreste’s identity was revealed. Nathalie was tight-lipped about Gabriel’s secrets, but Ladybug wonders if it might be time for another chat with the woman.

She finds the battle easily. A boy astride a senti-reindeer, whose red nose is glowing so brightly, is using his new powers and the help of his creature to fire deadly lasers at shop windows. Ladybug tries, first, to talk the boy down from his anger. She learns that he has decided to call himself Reign-deer, and he plans to destroy Christmas because his mother had to work, so he’ll be alone for the night. If he can’t enjoy the day, no one can.

It’s been a long time since she’s had to fight an akuma, and longer still since she’s had to fight one alone, but she still remembers how to use her Lucky Charm. Though it takes her a while to figure out what the red, black-spotted banana peel is for.

She notices the teddy bear dressed like a nurse that the akumatized boy clings to like a life preserver. In his other hand is a jingle bell, which he shakes each time the reindeer fires a laser. It’s not hard to guess that the powers of the miraculouses are stored in these objects, but it is hard for her to get close to the boy without getting hit by the reindeer’s shiny red nose.

But when she sees the senti-reindeer stumble on a frozen patch of road, she knows exactly how to put her Lucky Charm to use. She does have a single moment where she considers how much easier this would be if she had the help of Cataclysm, but the self-pity is brief. She can’t afford it for very long.

She uses Bella Moth’s cane—specifically the crystal on top—to deflect the reindeer’s laser. The redirected beam strikes the teddy bear right through its scrubs, and a lavender butterfly flits out of the stuffing. The reindeer rears back and its rider tumbles into the snow. The reindeer’s hoof comes down on the banana peel, slick with fresh snow, and it splays out in the street like a newborn fawn. The jingle bell goes flying into the air and Ladybug uses Flourish’s fan to catch it. It lands on the edges of the feathers and rolls into her hand where she snaps it in two and frees the blue feather.

She catches the feather and butterfly in her yo-yo and bleeds the color from them until they are pure white. Once they’re no longer a danger, she releases them, and uses her Lucky Charm to repair the damage done by the red-nosed reindeer and his rider.

The crowd has questions and concerns and she does her best to assure them that she has it under control, that she and Scarabella and Carapace are all working together to keep them safe. She promises that she and her friends will catch Bella Moth and Flourish just as they stopped Monarch.

She doesn’t answer their questions about Chat Noir. Instead, she escapes as quickly as she can. They do not complain, used to Ladybug and her hasty exits, but they don’t seem to notice that her earrings are not counting down the minutes of her transformation, not yet.

Ladybug can feel the loss where she has spent some of her magic, but she does not feel any warning signs that her power is fading. She’d waited so long for this strength, to be old enough and strong enough to no longer be bound by a single use of her miraculous’ power, but she had given it up by the time she was strong enough to hold it. At least this means she still has time to face Bella Moth and Flourish.

But when she finally reaches the Eiffel Tower, the new villains are gone. Then the cane and the fan she carries vanish suddenly and she knows there’s no hope of finding the villains now.

Something lands behind her with a thud, and Ladybug turns, fists closed in anticipation of a fight—but it is not the return of Bella Moth and Flourish. It’s only Carapace.

Rena Furtive melts out of the shadows just behind him and, without warning, pulls Ladybug into her arms.

“We got here as quickly as we could,” Carapace says.

“We’re sorry it wasn’t quickly enough,” Rena Furtive apologizes. “Are you okay?”

“It’s just my luck that two new villains decide to announce themselves the day I get back,” Ladybug says, and tries to make it funny, but her laugh sounds a bit more like a sob. She doesn’t even realize how overwhelming tonight has been until she hears it in her own voice.

Rena Furtive squeezes her shoulders tightly. “It’s not your fault.”

“It’s got to be a coincidence,” Carapace says confidently. “Maybe they’re also in town for the holiday.”

“But who are they?” Rena Furtive asks. “And what do they want?”

Ladybug tells them what she knows. It isn’t much, but it’s enough to make Rena Furtive’s brows furrow beneath her fox-like mask.

“Blonde?” Rena asks.

Carapace frowns. “No.”

“Why not?”

“We’ve talked about it before, and the answer is no.”

“That’s not a why.”

“I’ve told you why.”

Ladybug listens to this back and forth, feeling a bit like a ball at a tennis match. She has no idea what this argument is about, and she can’t manage to get a word in to interrupt.

“He got home yesterday,” Rena Furtive says, “and a new villain shows up today? Is that a coincidence?”

“Yes,” Carapace snaps. “It’s completely a coincidence.”

“Is what a coincidence?” Ladybug finally manages to ask.

“Adrien Agreste,” Rena Furtive says. “Who else would have ended up with Gabriel’s missing miraculous?”

Chapter 2

Adrien ignores the first alert on his phone. He has his tongue between his lips and his hands tangled up in a golden, sparkly ribbon. He has been fighting with this bow for fifteen minutes, and he is not going to give in now.

But when his phone beeps a third time, he picks it up.

At first, he’s disappointed it isn’t Marinette texting him back. Then his heart leaps into his throat as he realizes it’s a Ladyblog alert.

Ladybug is home.

Adrien very nearly bolts for his dresser to dig out the small black jewelry box he has abandoned in his sock drawer. He’s stopped by the news alert that appears at the top of his screen—not from the Ladyblog, but because he has his phone set up to alert him of any news articles that use the word “akuma” or “sentimonster.”

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reign-deer Rampage Reined in by Red-Spotted Hero blips at the top of his phone screen and he has hardly clicked on the notification before a new one appears: Ladybug Warns Citizens of Paris About New Villains in Town. Adrien quickly opens that one instead.

His stomach turns as he reads what little details Ladybug was able to give. It isn’t much for anyone else to chew on—Bella Moth and Flourish, the new wielders of the butterfly and peacock miraculouses—but for Adrien, it's nauseating.

His desire to see Ladybug is lost in that nausea, in that toxic pool of guilt that boils over in his stomach. He can’t face her, not after how dramatically he failed her. And now, to know that the lost miraculouses have ended up in the hands of two new villains?

There’s a reason he gave Plagg up and disappeared to Venice for two months.

He’s so caught up in his own agony, he doesn’t hear the click of heels on tile harmonized with the creak of mechanical joints announcing Nathalie’s arrival. He’s startled by the sharp staccato knocks on his bedroom door and hastily shoves the collection of half-wrapped presents under his couch as she opens his bedroom door.

The bottle of wine he bought for Nathalie rolls right on through his couch and stops at her feet. She glances down at it briefly, nudges it aside, and crosses the room to him.

Nathalie has known him too long to be put off by messes, and too long to be surprised that he’s bought her a bottle of wine for Christmas. He hopes she’ll at least be surprised by the dinner reservation in Shanghai.

“Good. You’re here,” she says by way of greeting, and sits down on his couch. She hands him a leather-bound folder, the sort she keeps memos in, but it’s Christmas, and there shouldn’t be any reason for memos.

“Where else would I be?” he asks. He takes the folder from her but he does not open it. He was very clear with her that he was not going to do any work during Christmas. He also remembers telling her to take the time off.

Since he is being stubborn, she opens the folder up for him. “I’ve prepared a statement for the press about Paris’s new villains. It only needs your signature.”

Adrien stares at her in surprise. Nathalie has managed to get a statement together before he’s hardly begun to process the idea of new villains in Paris. Prepared for everything is sort of Nathalie’s job, but he can’t help but wonder if she knew about these new villains before they had made their appearance.

Though it feels like putting his hand in a tiger’s mouth, or dropping his heart into a vat of acid, he has dared, a few times, to ask Nathalie if she knew the truth about Hawk Moth, or if she had ever helped Gabriel with any of his villainy as she had helped him with everything else.

“I only ever helped your father manage his business,” is as much as she has ever said. Except once, she added, “Do you really think if I had known what he was doing to himself, I would have said nothing?”

Adrien doesn’t really believe her, but he has no one else to turn to, not really.

Shortly after Gabriel’s arrest and formal charges were filed, his father lapsed into a coma. The doctors have no explanation, but Adrien managed to find a second opinion in a friend with a bit more knowledge of what happens when someone uses too many miraculouses.

Plagg could not say he had ever seen someone collapse from using too many miraculouses at once, but he was aware that there are side effects from overuse of a miraculous or combining too many powers of the miraculouses at once. He also mentioned that using a damaged miraculous could put the user in a similar comatose state, though Adrien still doesn't understand why Plagg included that detail in his diagnosis.

It’s hard to know which would be the worse way to spend the holiday: his father languishing in a hospital, all but brain dead, or having to face his father in a cell somewhere with the unasked “why” as impenetrable as the iron bars and glass barrier between them.

So Adrien lets Nathalie stay—after all, who else has the knowledge to keep the Agreste brand running after such a scandal—but he has kept his eyes and ears open for signs that she might be hiding the lost butterfly and peacock miraculouses.

The saying is “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” though Adrien wishes he’d minded the first part a bit more closely.

His gaze lingers on Ladybug’s name in Nathalie’s press statement. I am glad to know that Paris’ hero is home again, and I wish Ladybug the best of luck in hunting out these new villains, though I know that she does not need it. Guilt bubbles up from his stomach to his throat, burning him from the inside out.

He’s always known that it’s his fault that Ladybug left Paris last fall. He had pushed her so far away that she’d passed her legacy onto Scarabella, and he’d let Carapace step into his place without protest. They’ve done a lot of good for the city, even without a villain to face. He’s dreamed of joining them a few times. He watches them work to save a kid or a cat and he twists the space around his finger that used to hold a silver ring.

He’s accepted his fate as a sort of penance for missing all the signs of his father’s villainous secrets. He was a hero; he should have seen it sooner. Instead he and Ladybug took years to realize that Gabriel and Hawk Moth were one and the same.

Adrien signs the statement, and though he knows it's a grievous sin to work on Christmas, he says, “Maybe change it to Ladybug and Scarabella instead of just Ladybug. And we ought to use a picture of the Ladybug statue for the socials.”

“Noted. I’ve already picked one out.” She takes the folder back from him, but she does not leave. She hesitates in the middle of his room.

Adrien can’t imagine what she’s waiting for. If she dares to say anything related to work or managing his father’s company—his company—he considers what it would cost him to fire her then and there.

“Do you have anything you want to tell me, Adrien?” she finally says.

He thinks of the black and red jewelry box tucked away in his sock drawer and the silver ring inside. “No.”

She still waits. When he does not offer anything more, she asks, “Is there anything you want to ask me?”

He has a dozen questions, a hundred, a million things to ask. He keeps his voice as even as he can as he says, “Nothing I haven’t asked you before.”

She still waits. He still says nothing.

“I was many things for your father,” she finally says, “but for you, all I have done is to look out for you.”

It is hard to forget that Nathalie is the one who enabled his escape to school all those years ago, an action that changed the course of his life irrevocably, and brought him some of the greatest joy he has ever known.

“If you need a confidant,” she adds, “I am an expert at non-disclosures.”

“No, thank you.”

She waits another moment before, in a turn that Adrien finds uncharacteristically blunt, she says, “If you are Flourish, you do not have to tell me, but I cannot cover for you if I do not know what you are doing.”

Adrien considers the possibility that Nathalie could be Bella Moth. Who else would have ended up with his father’s miraculouses? But if that’s the case, wouldn’t she know who Flourish is? Or is it possible that Bella Moth and Flourish as unaware of the other outside of their personas as he and Ladybug are?

Instead of denying her accusation, Adrien asks, “Like you covered for my father?”

She does not respond to this. She only waits, and Adrien wonders if this is what she did with his father. If she waited and waited for Gabriel to tell her the truth. If she suspected—she must have suspected; no one spent as much time with Gabriel as she did—and if he is wrong for leaping at the chance to blame her.

It is not as if she did anything less to stop Gabriel than Adrien did.

Adrien’s shoulders drop in defeat and the cool exterior he’s been trying to hold onto melts. “I’m not Flourish,” he says. “If you’re asking me, though, does this mean you’re not Bella Moth?”

“I cannot imagine how I would have the time,” she says, which isn’t a “no” exactly, but Adrien considers how close he and Nathalie have become in these last six months. She knows his schedule down to the minutes written in for bathroom breaks. It would be hard for her to slip away to be a villain just as it had always been hard for him to slip away to be a hero. Hard, but not quite impossible.

Adrien searches for a pin at Nathalie’s throat and wonders if it is hidden under the cuff of her turtle neck or tucked beneath the lapel of her blazer. He sees no sign of it.

“I’m leaving, then,” she moves on breezily, as if interrogating him was just one of the many tasks on her todo list, squeezed in between the press release and her Christmas vacation. “I’d encourage you not to leave the house without a guard. There’s no telling what people will think of you after tonight.”

Adrien knows there will be people who put together the timing of his return home and Flourish’s arrival in Paris, but he won’t ask the Gorilla to work on Christmas, and Nathalie is right to tell him that he shouldn’t go alone. He could send his friends their presents via courier, instead of delivering them in person like he planned, but that defeats the purpose of his gifts. He wants to see his friends. He owes them after how he has treated them over the last six months.

Because after Gabriel’s arrest, he didn’t just push away Chat Noir’s friends; he pushed Adrien’s friends away too.

It was just so easy to be busy. The press wanted him. The lawyers wanted him. The doctors wanted him. And he didn’t want to think.

His friends were kind and comforting, even when he smiled and promised them that he was okay. He saw them when he had to and avoided them when he had an excuse. His text history is full of broken engagements and broken promises.

He didn’t even go to Marinette’s going away party last August. Nino showed up to drag him away from a dining room of thick fountain pens, thicker stacks of paper, and an even thicker crowd of lawyers, but Adrien simply couldn’t get away. He promised to catch Marinette before she left, but he didn’t manage that either. He didn’t even tell Nino he was going to Venice for a photography project until he was already across the border.

He does want to be with his friends. His texts aren’t a lie—he wants to see them. He wants to know how they’re doing, what changes are going on in their lives, but he’s afraid of the questions being returned back to him. He’s afraid they might ask him all those questions he can’t answer, all those questions he’s afraid to know the answers to.

Questions he thinks he might be able to answer if he thinks long enough and hard enough, but he’s not ready to do that.

And maybe if he can prove that Nathalie is Bella Moth, he won’t have to.

He doesn’t know why she’s waited six months to reveal herself, and he hasn’t the faintest idea who Flourish is, but he doesn’t need to know the details. He just needs to get the butterfly back and beg for Ladybug’s forgiveness.

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Adrien says. He, too, has become an expert at P.R.-level vagueness after working so closely with Nathalie. “Do you have plans for your time off?”

“I thought I might take a trip to Shanghai.”

Adrien manages a straight face for a moment, but he can’t even bring himself to feign an interested, nonchalant question. He fumbles under the couch for the card he’d put together for Nathalie, complete with all the information about the restaurant and her accommodations for her trip. “Someday I’ll surprise you.” He hands the card over.

“Someday you’ll remember that I’m the one who approves every dollar you spend.”

“Next time I’ll remember to ask Nino to put it on his credit card.”

There’s a hint of a smile on the edge of Nathalie’s mouth. “If Nino Lahiffe has a credit card maximum high enough for how much you like to lavish me, his career as a film director must have really taken off.”

“Not yet, but it will.”

“Then I await the day,” she says, but with all her usual enthusiasm, which is to say, hardly any at all. She picks up the bottle of wine that had rolled to her feet. “This is mine, too, isn’t it?”

“Enjoy,” Adrien says, and leans back on his hands.

She tucks it and the press release under her arm. “Thank you. Merry Christmas, Adrien.”

His heart lurches at her tone. It’s as close to affectionate as Nathalie ever comes. He wonders if she really meant it when she said that all she had ever done was look out for him.

“Merry Christmas, Nathalie,” he says.

As soon as she is gone, he pulls his presents out from under the couch. There’s a new pair of designer shoes for Chloe, an original Degas sketch for Kagami, a new hi-def camera for Nino with specs Adrien has tested himself, and a new tablet for Alya. Nino has always told him that he does too much when it comes to gifts, but Adrien doesn’t have an appropriate frame of reference. Even after six years of gift exchanges with Nino, Adrien still can only think about how much he wants to give to his friends and never considers how much it costs.

Comparatively, Marinette’s gift is nothing. It cost Adrien very little, particularly when held against the other gifts, and yet this gift is more than he has ever given to anyone. He decides to finish wrapping the others before he gets back into a fight with the glittery bow that he has picked out especially for her.

There’s a soft creak behind him as he’s taping the wrapping paper around the frame he’d purchased for Kagami’s gift, and he shivers as a chill slips into his room.

Adrien turns to see that one of the panels of his large bedroom window has slipped open. He knows the catch is weak from years of sneaking out as Chat Noir, but he can’t remember it ever opening on its own. He gets up to close it and has to pull over a table and stretch to reach the fastener. He’s used to having a bit more height in his jump when he is Chat Noir.

It closes easily, and though the latch is certainly not as snug as it once was, it seems secure enough. If the wind is pushing it open, though, the latch will need to be replaced. He makes a note to himself to fix it before Nathalie notices.

Once Adrien has finished wrapping Alya’s gift, he returns to the bow on Marinette’s present. The glitter has already transferred to each of the other gifts, and he’s fairly certain its embedded beneath the skin of his hands by now, but he refuses to be defeated.

He tries until he gets desperate enough to pull up a video online of how to tie a nice bow. The video is helpful, but there’s an odd squeaking noise in the background. It doesn’t bother him, exactly; it’s just a little distracting.

He manages to get the bow as neat as he can, and he thinks that while it isn’t up to Marinette’s standards, it’s really not bad. She’ll be nice about it, anyway. She always is. And as he sets it aside he hears a squeak again.

He can’t blame his phone for it this time. He surveys his room, wondering if it's possible that he has mice. It had been a concern when he had first started keeping cheese in his room, but Plagg was quite good at keeping them away. He hasn’t had cheese in his room for months, so why would they be here now?

Adrien follows a squeak to his desk, but he does not see anything. He does notice that the cabinet next to it is cracked open. Is it possible Plagg woke up without him, found out he was gone, and rebuilt his horde?

Adrien peers inside the cabinet, but he sees nothing unusual. The cabinet still smells, though, and Adrien thinks he’ll never be free of Plagg’s Camembert curse.

He hears a squeak again, this time from his dresser. He turns and trips over his desk chair that was definitely not right behind him a moment ago. He would swear it’s moved specifically to be in his way.

He pushes himself up, but not before he catches sight of something small and gray disappearing behind his wastebasket. It’s not a mouse, though. Mice don’t move on two legs.

“Ma—” he stops himself before he reveals anything that Adrien Agreste is not supposed to know. “Multimouse?” he asks.

The small gray figure peeks her head out from behind the wastebasket. Her dark hair is streaked pink and pulled back in a bun, and Adrien is positive that this is Multimouse, and he knows that Multimouse is Marinette, but why is she here and small and—

There are more of her suddenly, gathering back together, and before Adrien quite understands what is happening, Multimouse is sitting at his desk chair and he is still on the ground at her feet.

She presses her hand to her head, as if her mind is still gathering itself together, then her eyes flick directly to his dresser. Adrien follows her gaze and sees his sock drawer cracked open just enough for a small version of Multimouse to slip through.

Adrien glances guiltily at the pale white line across his ring finger, a scar of happier time, before he knew just how badly he had screwed up.

Multimouse says nothing to him. She stands and crosses to his dresser.

“Wait,” he tries, but she reaches into his sock drawer and pulls out the familiar black and red hexagonal box he had tucked away months ago.

Adrien kept Plagg around for a while before pushing him away, too, just like he’d done to all of his friends; having someone around at the end of the day, someone he didn't have to explain anything to, had been nice at first. He and Plagg didn't speak much then, but they were together, at least. Then Scarabella came on the scene and Adrien, with no preamble nor apology, formally returned his ring to its box. What was the point in being Chat Noir without Ladybug?

He bites his lip as Multimouse turns to face him.

“I defended you,” she says, and there’s something in her voice that’s utterly devastated.

Adrien uses his desk chair to help himself to his feet. “Mar—Multimouse, I’m sorry…”

She doesn’t look at him. Her eyes are solely on the box. “Why?” she asks.

“I thought…” He swallows down his guilt but it pushes its way back up regardless. “I didn’t know.”

Her gray-gloved hands grip the box as if she’s got her hands around his throat squeezing the life out of him. “I told Rena she had you all wrong. I told her it wasn’t like you to do this. I told her I’d look just to make her feel better, and now…”

Adrien thinks of the gift he’s just finished wrapping, and how it was intended to be all the vulnerable parts of him laid bare for Marinette in a way he hadn’t trusted with anyone else just yet. He trusted her because he knew that she would understand him. But he doesn’t see how she’ll be able to understand this.

“Does Ladybug know you’re here?” he asks. “Or did Scarabella send you?”

Multimouse hesitates. She chews on her lower lip with an indecision that is just so full of Marinette that Adrien’s heart finally manages to surface above his guilt and pain and he steps closer.

She misinterprets his approach and steps away, lifting the jewelry box out of his reach, or at least, as high as she can. She’s small; he is not. He could try to grab the box from her, but he doesn’t.

“I am sorry,” he says. “I just… can you tell Ladybug that?”

She doesn’t acknowledge his apology. She still won’t even look at him. “Where’s the other one?” she asks.

He doesn’t answer because he doesn’t know how. “The other what?”

“Your partner’s.” And now she looks at him, but there’s so much anger in her glare that he steps away from her.

He can only stare back at her, utterly bewildered by both her question and her anger. His only partner is Ladybug, and doesn’t she know that?

“Who are you talking about?” he asks.

“Bella Moth.”

And all of the guilt, all of the heartache, and even all of Adrien’s love for Marinette turns as cold as the ice in her voice. His shoulders tighten and his jaw clenches. His tone shifts to match hers.

“You think I’m Flourish?”

“Why else did I find a miraculous jewelry box in your room?”

He’s never felt so utterly betrayed. Not even when he discovered the truth about his father. It’s one thing for Nathalie to suspect him, Nathalie who knew his father and went through it all before.

But this is Marinette, and she mentioned Rena and surely Carapace was a part of this—and Adrien knows Rena Rouge and Carapace are Alya and Nino. He doesn’t know who Scarabella and Ladybug are, sure, but how could his best friends have ever suspected him of being a villain? He’s guilty of not catching his father sooner. He’s guilty of letting Ladybug down, but not of betraying her trust in this way, and he can’t believe Marinette and his friends think he would have.

Multimouse looks at him and he glimpses, just beyond her anger, the same heartbreak he feels.

He considers, briefly, asking her to flip the catch on the box, to look inside before she leaves. It’s a simple enough request, but his heartbreak is too great.

And, anyway, isn’t this his fault too? He pushed his friends away. Why wouldn’t they turn on him?

He sees movement in the corner of his eye as a violet butterfly squeezes through his loose window pane. He doesn’t know which of them its coming for, but he’s not going to let it take Marinette, certainly.

He lunges for the box in her hand, and they both tumble to the ground. The catch on the jewelry box unlatches as it hits the ground and Adrien yanks the ring from it.

“Plagg,” he says, even though his kwami has hardly begun to form, “claws out!”

He has not even fully adjusted to Plagg’s magic as the violence of chaos settles into his bones before he calls on that power.

“Cataclysm!” he shouts as his hand closes over the butterfly. It crumbles to dust in his hand.

Multimouse covers her mouth in horror as she looks up at Chat Noir, but he does not know which part of this revelation is the most horrifying for her. Is it knowing that Chat Noir is Hawk Moth’s son? Is it knowing that her best friend, who she’s just accused of being a villain, is one of Paris’s heroes? Is it knowing that he knows who she is under that mask?

He looks out the window for Flourish’s feather to follow Bella’s butterfly, but he sees no blue feather flitting near his bedroom window. He flexes his hand, surprised by the strength of the magic left in him. He does not feel his power draining, and wonders if he could call on another Cataclysm, should the villains show themselves.

“Chat…” Multimouse says, but he’s not ready for her apology.

He is careful to keep his voice even, because it so desperately wants to break—everything in him wants to break. “Ladybug can find me if she wants.”

Chat Noir leaves through the loose window, wishing he felt better about his return to this freedom he had denied himself for so long. He uses a search for Bella Moth to distract from his heartbreak, but it’s hard to say how close she was when she sent off her akuma. His father managed to curse half of Paris without leaving the house. Bella Moth might be miles away, sensing the pulse of heartbreak and anger throughout the city with the power of her miraculous.

Whoever she is, he thinks she’s very rude to try for two akuma attacks on Christmas Eve. It’s just poor sportsmanship on her part. Maybe there’s no feather to go with it this time because Flourish has better manners.

His search is, as he expected, fruitless, but he doesn’t take himself home rightaway. As much as he wants to curl up in his bed, apologize to Plagg, and sleep his way through Christmas, he knows that it is past the time to explain himself to Ladybug. He’s been avoiding her since she offered the truth of her identity.

He’s been avoiding the truth about everything for so long.

He climbs his way up the Eiffel Tower and stares out at the city, glittering with its holiday lights.

The truth is, he knows why his father did what he did. It’s not hard to guess what his father wanted the miraculouses for, what his father’s wish would be. He also knows that his father must have suspected that he was Chat Noir at least once. But Gabriel never trusted Adrien enough to even ask, to even hint that maybe Hawk Moth’s wish would be good for them both. He knows that if he could ask his father why, Gabriel would say that he had been doing it for the both of them.

But Adrien doesn’t think he would believe him.

He sinks down onto the tower’s highest platform and draws his knees up to his chest. Ladybug will find him. And if she doesn’t… Well, then he supposes that will be answer enough for how she feels about who he is.

Chapter 3

He’s waiting on the very ledge she waited on when she first arrived in Paris, entirely unchanged from the last time she saw him. He’s seated with his knees drawn up to his chest, green eyes glittering in the evening light.

For a moment, Ladybug thinks this could be the very night they saw Gabriel arrested. The last six months could have been a terrible dream and she is about to step back and start over, as cleanly as if Fluff or Sass reset time to take her back to their last meeting.

But she knows that’s untrue. She knows that the last six months happened, just as much as the last six minutes happened, and she has to face the consequences for that, too.

She steps lightly, but loud enough that he knows she’s coming. She doesn’t want to startle him.

He doesn’t even turn around.

She sits down beside him. She sets the two Christmas presents she’s brought with her on the edge of the platform, careful not to knock them over the edge. She’s not certain that she’ll use them, but she wants them just in case this all goes well. She’s still unsure where to start.

He’s the one who breaks the silence. “Did Marinette tell you everything?”

She doesn’t answer, because anything she could say to that would be untrue. Instead, she says, “I understand a lot more now than I did before.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

Ladybug bites her lip. “Multimouse wasn’t lying when she said she defended you. She and Carapace were adamant that you couldn’t be Flourish. But you know Rena, she always wants to be thorough.”

“I thought I knew Rena.”

Ladybug tips her head at that, unsure what to make of the tone in his voice. He knows who Multimouse is, but she can’t think how he would know Rena and Carapace’s identities. He offers no further explanation, so she decides she might as well begin with her apology.

“A long time ago,” she says, “like, a few years ago long, not miraculous long, I faced an akumatized version of you.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“It was… another timeline. Bunnyx helped me. I don’t want to talk about the details—” She chews on her lower lip again, wading through the trauma of facing Chat Blanc to pick out the parts she wants to make sure Adrien understands. “—but the akuma attack was so bad that we had to reset time itself. The thing we had to change was that Adrien Agreste figured out who I was. I used to think it was just that Adrien—” she hesitates before amending, “—you told someone by accident and the secret got out. And then, after we caught Hawk Moth I wondered if that accident was telling your father. But I never, for even a moment, considered that you might have known that your father was Hawk Moth, that you might have intentionally told your father to help him. I’ve always trusted you, Adrien. And I’m sorry I doubted you tonight.”

She keeps her eyes on Chat Noir, wondering if he is going to accept her apology. She won’t blame him if he refuses.

He doesn’t look at her. Instead, he watches the city below.

“You said Rena insisted on being thorough,” he finally says, as if she had not just shared one of her most traumatic, vulnerable memories with him. “What was your opinion?”

She takes in a long, slow breath. She knew that she would have to do this. It’s not how she has imagined it after all these years, but there is no other way to be honest with him, and she is never going to repair the break between them without honesty.

For an answer, she tugs on one of the two wrapped Christmas presents she’s brought with her for this apology.

“This is for you,” she says.

He has to let his knees go to take the gift from her, and part of him seems to uncoil. Curiosity glints in his eyes alongside the heartbreak. She resists the urge to reach for his ears and see if she can elicit a purr from him. She’s going to have to let him be vulnerable on his terms, not on hers.

His claw-like gloves cut through the velvety green ribbon and tear the red wrapping paper. The box inside is about as big as his lap, flat, and plain white. He lifts the lid and pulls back the tissue inside to reveal a white silk blazer, and embroidered down the lapel on one side is a pattern of green and pink geometric shapes and flowers.

He stares at it for a long moment. She can tell by the way he runs his hands over the stitching he recognizes what it represents, but she had expected a stronger reaction from him.

“Marinette made this?” he says, and she waits for him to correct himself to ”You made this,” but he does not.

“Designed after the good luck charm.” Ladybug pulls the second gift into her lap. The gold glitter of the ribbon dusts her thighs. “Can I open your gift?” she asks.

He looks at the box in her lap, at the tag attached to the glittery ribbon that reads To: Marinette and From: Adrien. He glances down at the box in his lap. He looks back at her as she bites down on her lip, afraid she is being too subtle.

“Oh,” he says.

She waits for him to properly process it. It took her long enough to understand and she had watched him transform in front of her.

“But—wait, no,” he shakes his head, “I’ve seen Multimouse and Ladybug together. You can’t be both.”

“Trixx helped cover for me,” she said.

He sets her gift aside and stares at her, frowning like he’s trying to see through her mask. “You’ve been Marinette the whole time?”

“Yes.”

“So you… you quit because you went to New York? You didn’t quit being Ladybug because of me?”

She fidgets with the ribbon in her lap, ignoring the way the glitter coats her gloved fingers. “It was… lonely without you. It made the decision to pass my miraculous onto Scarabella easier. But no, I didn’t quit because of you.”

Chat Noir purses his lips in his own bit of indecision. Finally, he says, “You should open your gift.”

She tugs on the ribbon. It takes her a moment to figure out how to undo the complex knot, but she’s always enjoyed puzzles.

Once the package is free of its glittery trappings, she peels back the paper to reveal a photography book. The cover is a photo of a row of colorful houses on the waterfront. She opens the book and flips through photographs of Venice’s architecture and artwork.

“I liked the color there,” he says. “I thought you would, too. And…” He reaches over to her lap and flips towards the back of the book. The pictures in this end of the book are no longer of artwork and architecture. They’re of people—or rather, they’re of people’s clothing.

The photographs must have been of people posing in front of the water or a marble statue, and some still are that—full-body shots of models in motion—but some of them have been cropped down to just a sleeve or the lines on a bodice or the cut of a neckline. She knows Adrien must have an eye for fashion photography after all of his experience in the industry, but she can’t help but marvel at the way he’s captured the weight of fabric, the contrast of color, the structure of the ensemble, the complements of the patterns—it's the kind of things she would look for.

“I left because of you,” he says.

She tears her eyes away from the book to meet his and she has never wanted more desperately than she has in this moment to actually see him beneath his mask.

“You went to New York and I couldn’t help but feel like you were leaving me behind. Not like you abandoned me or anything, but that you were growing. You were pursuing your dream. And Nino got into film school and Alya sold her first article and I… I was still doing all the same things I was doing before. I wanted to do something new. I wanted to grow with all of you. So I left. I wanted to keep up with you.”

“And?” she asks. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

He shrugs. “It was… lonely.”

“I was lonely, too,” she admits. “I kept busy to forget how lonely I was.”

“That sounds familiar,” he says. He kicks his legs against the iron beams holding them up. “I’m sorry,” he says.

She shakes her head. “No, you have nothing to apologize for—”

“I doubted you. I thought… I thought you would blame me for not catching Monarch sooner. Or that you’d think I was responsible somehow, and that wasn’t fair of me. I should have trusted you. I should have trusted us.”

She leans her head against his shoulder. “No more doubting each other. No more doubting ourselves.”

He stiffens at first, then he leans back against her, until they are exchanging each other’s weight as easily as they had exchanged gifts. Somewhere in the distance, a clock strikes midnight.

“Merry Christmas, chaton,” she murmurs.

“Merry Christmas, my Lady,” he replies.

He looks down and she looks up and then before she quite realizes what she’s doing, she presses her lips against his.

It isn’t her first kiss with Chat Noir by any stretch, but it is her first kiss with someone who knows she is both Marinette and Ladybug, and she knows that he is as fond of all of her as she is of all of him. He’s not just her partner, not just a boy she used to have a crush on, not just a dear friend she has been trying to keep afloat with casual, emotion-free text messages. She finally realizes the weight of all of those things put together and it leaves her a little dizzy.

He pulls away and there’s something mischievous in his grin. “You’re bright red.”

She’s warm, despite the cold night, and doesn’t even have the sense to be embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Adrien.”

He presses his lips against her cheek and keeps his face close against hers as he murmurs, “We finished the apology bit.”

“I was a bad friend,” she says.

“Marinette—”

“I was trying to be careful to give you space, but I should’ve trusted our friendship. You didn’t have to go to Venice alone. You could’ve come to New York with me. Or gone to school with Nino, or —”

He drops his head against her shoulder like her apology is wearing him out. “We were both distant. You did it because you wanted to look out for me. I pushed my friends away because I didn’t know how you could stay friends with someone who was so close to a villain. You had to think me an idiot for not noticing, or in on it because I had noticed—”

“We would never think that of you—”

“I know.” He presses his lips against her neck and a shiver runs up her spine.

She recalls her restraint when it came to scratching his ears, her withholding a desire to touch him so he could process his feelings. He wishes he would show her that same restraint, but his hand slides up the curve of her back, pressing her against him. He breathes in deep and lets it out slowly. His breath is hot and wet against her ear and it’s not just her face that’s warm. She’s warm all over. She decides she doesn’t need to talk through anything anymore, she just wants more of this.

She tightens her hand in his hair and his throat rumbles with something so close to a purr she cannot help but laugh. She feels his smile against her neck.

“I know I said we finished the apology bit,” he sighs, “but I’ve got one more to do.”

“What for?”

“Plagg. He’s going to be insufferable. I left him in a sock drawer for months.”

“You might deserve whatever he does to you for that.” She stifles a yawn and he pulls away.

“Sorry,” he says, despite their promise to be done apologizing. “You’ve had a long day—travel and an akuma fight—I should let you get some sleep.”

“I don’t want to sleep.” She knows once she drops Tikki’s magic, all the exhaustion of being human will settle in again, but right now she feels like she could stay awake all night. She wants to stay awake all night. She’s afraid to let him go and find out that this was all a dream.

He takes her hand in his, running the pads of his fingers against her palm like he’s committing the shape of her hand to memory. Though she just had the thought that she didn’t want to be human again, she is desperate for them to drop their magic and touch properly.

“I’ll come over tomorrow,” he promises.

“But there’s so much time between now and tomorrow,” she protests.

After six months apart, she can’t stand to face another six hours without him.

“You need to spend Christmas with your family.”

“And where am I going to spend the night?” she asks.

Now his face turns red beneath his mask and she grins mischievously at him. After years of him being the forward one, she’s happy to flip the script on him.

“Are you asking?” he says, like he can’t quite believe her.

“Are you inviting?” She bats her eyelashes in an attempt at flirtation, but it feels silly. She bites down on her lip to hold in a laugh.

“Well… I could. Nathalie is gone for a few days. We’d have the whole house to ourselves.”

She thinks of him going back to the house alone and her desire to go with him doubles. “So… are you?”

He stands and pulls her up with him. She drapes her arms over his shoulders and leans in until their noses are touching. She takes a deep breath in then pulls him into a kiss and pulls him off of the tower.

They’re falling. They’re kissing. They’re breathing.

❖❖❖

Christmas morning arrives faster than either of them would like. There are a few evening apologies dashed off once the masks drop. Adrien has to apologize to Plagg, who demands reparations in pounds of Camembert. There are also apologies made to Alya and Nino through the screen of Adrien’s phone. Adrien apologizes for pushing them away just as he had Marinette; Alya apologizes for ever suspecting him of being Flourish. Nino apologizes for failing to mention that he had once told Adrien about Carapace and Rena Rouge’s identities. Marinette and Alya forgive him, but it’s one of the more shocking reveals of the night.

And finally, Tikki and Plagg are asleep and Marinette and Adrien are truly alone and there is not much more to say to each other. They press themselves together, hands touching hands properly, her calloused fingertips brushing up his bare arm, his soft hands tugging her chin closer, lips crushed together in such a seamless union that they can’t help but wonder if they’ve been doing this forever, if this moment is the only moment of time that matters, like infinity stretched out into the past and future.

The sunrise doesn’t break it, but the sunrise is closely followed by Adrien’s phone buzzing on his nightstand.

He ignores it, but they call a second time.

Adrien, hands reluctantly daring to brave the cold beyond the blankets, fumbles for his phone long enough to catch the side button and dismiss the call. Marinette presses herself closer to him.

The phone buzzes again and they both groan loudly.

“It’s probably Alya checking on my honor,” Marinette grumbles.

“Or Nino trying to be a nuisance,” Adrien sighs and grabs the phone.

It’s neither Alya nor Nino. It’s his cousin.

Marinette dives under the covers as Adrien accepts the insistent call.

“Good morning, Félix,” Adrien says, in his best attempt at wakefulness. “Merry Christmas.”

Félix sounds plenty awake, voice crisp and cool as the winter outside, and he looks plenty awake in the video, sitting outside, wrapped in a scarf and coat with the lazy sun coming up over the park behind him. “Sorry to wake you,” he says without a hint of apology. “But I got into Paris last night and thought I ought to see you. Mother has a gift for you.”

Adrien stares up at his phone screen. “You’re in Paris?” but even as he says it, he knows it has to be true. If it’s only just sunrise here, Félix can’t be in dark, gloomy London at the moment.

“I came to visit my girlfriend, but I thought I ought to make time for you, too.”

“You have a girlfriend?”

Félix turns the camera and a young woman leans up against him. Her long, reddish-brown hair is tied in two loose tails on either side of her face. She’s wearing a pale pink scarf, pinned to an orange blouse, and Adrien stifles a gasp.

Lila Rossi slides her arm around Félix’s and smiles into the phone screen. “It’s been far too long, Adrien. How are you? We’d love to spend Christmas with you! Just tell us when you’re ready for us to come over.”

“I didn’t even know you were in the country,” Adrien finally stammers out. “I was going to spend Christmas with Marinette’s family.”

Félix and Lila’s polite smiles flicker in matching scowls, but Félix quickly smooths it over. “That’s alright. I’ll be in Paris for a while. I’ve got some business to take care of. We’ll see you another time, Adrien.”

“Merry Christmas!” Lila says effusively as Félix ends the call.

Adrien drops his phone on the nightstand and stares up at the ceiling.

“Lila?” he asks weakly.

Marinette crawls out from under the covers to join him. “Lila,” she confirms with a fair amount of acid in her voice.

“I suppose it makes sense in a Merteuil and Valmont sort of way.”

Marinette doesn’t get the reference, but Adrien’s head has always been full of an absurd amount of niche information, so she trusts it's an accurate comparison.

And suddenly Bella Moth and Flourish makes sense. Félix, who had stolen the miraculouses from Ladybug, surely could have squirreled the peacock away from Gabriel. And Lila, who had weasled her way into Gabriel’s company, must have slipped the butterfly away for herself. But how did they manage to find each other and what did they want with Chat Noir and Ladybug’s miraculouses?

Marinette slides her hand into Adrien’s. It doesn’t matter, not really. They’re stronger today than they were yesterday. They’ve become Chat Noir and Ladybug again, and they’re even more than that now.

“I think we’ll manage them easily, between the four of us,” she says. “We know who they are, but they haven’t any idea about us.”

“It’s a nice change,” he says, and smiles at her.

She kisses him again and even though they need to tell Alya and Nino about what they’ve learned, even though they need to freshen up before going to visit Marinette’s parents, even though there’s a new battlefield awaiting them in the fight against Bella Moth and Flourish, they let their kiss unwind into another moment of infinity.

All the worries will still be there on either end of this kiss, but at this moment they can set those worries aside. They’ve got time. And even when the kiss does reach its end—though they both feel as if it could not possibly come to an end—they’ll still have each other. And they’ll still have more moments like this.

#ml secret santa exchange #ml secret santa exchange 2022 #miraculous ladybug #miraculous ladybug fic #christmas fic #lynnimaybe #mlsecretsanta

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tulakhord · 1 year

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got tagged in SOOO many tag games by @raylangivins asdfghjkl thank u ilu here are like, half of them lmao.

(1) shuffle your on repeat playlist and post the first 10 tracks stupid girl - garbage salt and vinegar - lights DIP N DRIP - cobrah disturbia - rihanna this hell - rina sawayama deep end - catty night crawling - miley cyrus feat. billy idol messy - kiiara jet black hearts - abigail barlow dancing on my own - robyn (2) a questionnaire!

Tea, coffee, or soda? coffee > everybody..... i do love tea tho. Dogs or cats? dogs bc one's sitting on my feet rn and he's pretty cute so. Can you play any instrument? forgot all the piano i once knew oops What's your sun sign? sagittarius for me as well! ♐️♐️ First song lyrics that pops into your head? how will i know if she really loves meee 🎵 Do you have any tattoos? not yet! indecision etc etc Favorite place you've travelled? british virgin islands What's the last movie you've watched? i literally do not remember but i'm seeing the d&d movie this weekend lmao What languages do you speak? only english, i'm pants at languages :( much like the instruments question i forgot the other ones orz Do you have any hobbies? omg so many, i love doing things lmao. rn i am actually doing campaign prep for ttrpg things while i watch hockey and fill this out, which is a whole category of hobbies by itself (writing! mini painting! drawing! map design! terrain builds! etc etc.) You can hang out with one fictional character for an hour, who do you choose? i was gonna be saucy and pick someone hot or someone whose brain i want to dissect like a formaldehyde frog but actually it is toothless i wanna go flying with the flying doggo Compliment yourself: i cooked a delicious dinner tonight! (3) ao3 first lines tagline

Rules: Share the first lines of ten of your most recent fanfics and tag ten people. If you have written fewer than ten, don’t be shy and share anyway (spoiler alert: rules are made to be broken…)

"most recent" i have published uhh nothing since 2021 hockey hols oops. i should maybe. fix that. anyway the point is that some of these are from my drafts folder ayy:

The chatter starts up at the end of every season, and every off-season Mat runs the fuck away to get away from it.

There’s three shadows standing over Eddie when he comes to, curled in on himself on the ground and damp with his own sweat.

The last dragons—barely hatchlings—die at Dragonstone. Perhaps it's only fitting that the last dragonspawn do too.

“I used to think about it,” admits Trevor. “You making me sorry for it.” (x)

Leon makes all his biggest mistakes in Las Vegas, and tonight is no exception. The team is flying high off a win they didn’t expect—off a win, strictly speaking, they did not deserve—and the music is good, and the lights are low, and the drinks keep coming. (x)

Raff is in the Dallas hotel room, and Joel didn’t invite him—didn’t expect him—but holy cannoli is Joel glad to see him there. (x)

The first thing to understand was Raff didn’t have a heart. (x)

As far as Jack was concerned, Taylor Hall could take his Nantucket wedding, his signed contract in Boston, his Biosteel invite and his mostly working body and all the other hallmarks of his happily ever after—and shove it up his own ass. (x)

He had made a conscious choice not to tell anyone about the situation, and indeed, not to think about the situation any more than could be helped. This had worked well for the past several years, except that it meant that Auston had not thought twice about extending the invitation for Dylan to join them for two weeks in Scottsdale. (x)

They’d tracked the old legends from planet to planet, each one emptier than the last: graveyards with no graves, detonation marks from imperial explosives scouring ancient stone, each once-sacred place swept clean of its history. (x)

tagging 10 of you i've seen in my notes lately, do one or two or all of em: @maddiebuckley @bluewaterhigh2005 @tobysziegler @st-louis @xreveux @parisebuyout2021 @chevalric @joeslie @marmolita @townhulls @bigbrotherlouis

#tag game #rpf courtesy tag #mo — i tried to do the comfort character game and legit could not lmao

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greatsylveon2007 · 7 months

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Rules: shuffle your 'on repeat' playlist and post the first ten tracks, then tag ten people.

Thank you @thegreatmaddu for tagging me and allowing me to ramble about music <3

Tried my best to explain my thoughts on each song but my thoughts are not comprehensible to anyone including myself so I apologize in advance

My thoughts are also.. kind of long, oops

1 - Sharks - Imagine Dragons

"You're hot, then you're cold, you're a light in the dark, just you wait and you'll see that you're swimming with sharks"

I didn't realize I listened to Sharks so often.. oops. If I had to guess I would say it's definitely because of the instrumental, especially towards the end, don't get me wrong I like the lyrics and the vocals, but the instrumental right before the last chorus sounds awesome imo

Surprised that out of all imagine dragons songs I know, this is the one I listen to the most apparently,, that was unexpected tbh

2 - Doubt Comes In - Hadestown

"i used to see the way the world could be, but now the way it is is all I see and- (Where is she? Where is she now?)

HADESTOWN GRR

This was the song that introduced me to Hadestown I am so normal about it

Idk the vocals are so perfect and I think that the instrumental going on for a lot longer than it does in the rest of the Hadestown songs really shows how oddly silent the journey is for Orpheus. I adore how, despite the fact that Eurydice is literally singing right behind him, he can't help but feel like it's all a trick by Hades, The Fates voices are also so haunting in this one?? Even in like Wait For Me they don't sound like that for me, I love it, they sound amazing 100% of the time but this time they killed it

Orpheus and Eurydice's parts have such a contrasting vibe too, I can listen the colours of their verses what the fuck

Great song super recommend

3 - If It's True - Hadestown

"I believe that we are many, I believe that they are few (we're standing, we're standing, we're standing) And it isn't for the few to tell the many what is true (we understand him)"

Hadestown again,, I have so many feelings about this song aaaa I actually first heard a parody of it in a Shrek 3 video, so hearing the exact same melody and part of the same lyrics on stage was definitely a shock and it took a while for me to process LMAO

I REALLY like this song, it helped me write a character of mine and I just adore the build up as Orpheus starts a riot, the way the workers start singing louder and louder, the lyrics in general and Reeve Carney's voice are phenomenal, I adore this song fr fr

4- Who is She? (Reprise) - Centaurworld

"Who is she? She's the ghost of the girl I used to know. Who is she? She's the echo I'm chasing"

ONE OF THE BEST CENTAURWORLD SONGS MY OPINION IS THE ONLY RIGHT ONE - If I had to rank it it would be like, around the top five..

I listen to this song a lot while I'm having my Hope brainrots because this song represents her so well, I can't talk about it because it's spoiler territory though, I really should start Storm of Shadows 😔

Anyway uhh I love the way they incorporate lyrics from Who is She, What if I Forget Your Face and Rainbow Road into this, and Glenn's voice is so good I love everything she sings in, the instrumental also sounds like really odd but in a good way? I can't tell if it's a darker version of the instrumental of a previous song or not but it definitely gives off those vibes

5 - True North - Vocal Line

"We never learned to use a compass, we never learned to read these maps, we always yearned for far off countries, we never found a straight way back"

OO I listen to this one solely because of a Paranormal Order OSNI campaign PMV idea I have.

The song itself rocks though, the singing voices are so good, the way they're just so calm is kind of haunting in a way? Like the male and female singers always switching between each other and there being (I believe at least) always at least two singers singing the exact same thing at once just gives off a feeling, a good one probably, but definitely a feeling

6 - That Me Is Not Me - Tryhardninja

"Doppelgänger demon in disguise, eyes appear in shadows in the night, evil never dies, it multiplies, multiplies, lies"

"Oh so you're a Mandela Catalog fan-" no, ok so, you know how I just said True North is because of a campaign of Paranormal Order... This song is because of the Quarentena campaign KAMKDKSOS

THIS CAMPAIGN IS SPOKEN IN ENGLISH PLEASE CHECK IT OUT I AM STARVING FOR PO HUMAN INTERACTION

Anyway I've been blasting this song since the first episode on the 25th and it's a certified banger

Oh right the song, tryhardninja's songs just have a very specific vibe that I really like and I cannot explain, I really like his voice and the way he sings stuff idk,, I don't have an explanation for this one I just vibe really hard with it :)

7 - Epic III - Hadestown

"King of shadows; king of shades; Hades was king of the Underworld. But he fell in love with a beautiful lady; who walked up above; in her mother's green field; he fell in love with Persephone"

This is my uhhh third Hadestown song.. I promise I am normal about Hadestown (I'm a liar)

If I had to rank every Hadestown song ever this would be a strong competitor for first place ngl ngl..

I love how the song is cheerful and magic while recounting the first meeting between Persephone and Hades, but turns slow and melancholic as it leaves that memory and goes back to the present.

The way Orpheus uses his feelings for Eurydice to relate to how Hades felt about Persephone, even going as far as using lyrics from his duets with her makes me feel, and the ending where he says things about Hades that drove Persephone away that COINCIDENTALLY are also things about himself that drove Eurydice away it's just so AA

The show really hyped up this song and it absolutely delivered, makes my brain feel many things

(This is my way of begging you to listen to the Hadestown soundtrack)

8 - I'm glad you're evil too - Rachie, PalmMute

"We laught while staring down the void, and cry while listening to vocaloid, two lonely and broken souls messing around with their lives"

This song is just really sweet I like it :) Vocaloid and vocaloid covers just have this very specific vibe

This song is extremely Spook and Chaos core I love it so much I want to draw them being happy forever

To me Rachie's voice just sounds really good with the lyrics and the song is just sweet, it has an energy I cannot put into words and I'm just very normal about it. One of the few songs able to out "memes" into the lyrics and not sound funny

9 - The Goose & the Wren - Hop Along

"While the outcry of 20 men, run from the nearby batallion; as if we avoid their light, then we might make it home tonight"

Another song I keep replaying while thinking of an Paranormal Order PMV (specifically the OSNF campaign hehe)

I don't know I really like the more simple vibe of it? I especially like the singing voices not being your typically smooth crazy beautiful voices you normally hear in music, it gives it a very unique energy that I really like! It sounds like a group of friends singing with each other, I like that :)

10 - Not Evil - The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

"I'm Queen Watevra Wa'Nabi, the most least evil person you'll ever meet; and if you make eye contact with me, I totally won't have you executed immediately"

While I was flying to the USA the plane I was in had The Lego Movie 2 and I had only watched I think the second half of it by that point so I decided to check it out, tragically this song got stuck in my head 😔

There is no deep super analysis/personal project reason I like this song, Tiffany Haddish is simply killing it and I like how it sounds (the animation definitely helped too)

I uhhh definitely do not know 10 music nerds on this site and the ones I don't know I have no idea if they have Spotify or not..... Don't feel obligated to do this 😔

@rosia4309 @cristallun @crysolis @i dont know anyone else lmaoo

#sylv rambles #hadestown

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bumblerhizal-art · 1 year

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Seven Snippet Sunday

I define snippet a touch loosely here. I think it's still Sunday at least. While i'm now starting compiling this post, it is at least. No promises for when i finish. But seven? Seven is dead-on.

Got tagged for this by @heniareth a short forever ago and tagging you back in return as well as @icylook @wild-houseplant and @scarletkilometers

The first six are coming from Novhen's prelude rewrite and the last one from shortly after. It's been in progress for a while, but i don't think i've posted any of these before. If i have, oops. Because of how i skip around writing, there are bits from all over the story so fic spoilers ahoy probably, but it's about the journey not the destination, y'know? Especially for a rewrite like this is

CW: Alcohol (#2, 4), Death (#5), Implied Sexual Assault (#5)

<1> Starting with a bit of "All or Nothing" foreshadowing

"You have no idea how lucky you are," Shianni twirled her dress. "The outfits, the music, the wine. It's a whole party all about you! Well, one-quarter about you." "So now you want to get married?" Novhen said. 'You do know what comes after, right?" She rolled her eyes. "Of course I do, and I'm sure I'll figure something out to get around it when the time comes.” "By which you mean you'll make me figure something out?" Shianni waved her hand flippantly. "Same thing."

<2> Those kids i missed on my first playthrough you get to tell the story to

In the dead of night long after the city's nobles had drifted off into their whiskey-scented sleep, she sent a prayer to the Dread Wolf and melted into the shadows-- "Who's the Dread Wolf," Sera interrupted. "One of the old elven gods from before the fall of the Dales. He was the god of rebellion," Novhen explained. Sera wrinkled her nose. “How many years ago did you say this story was?” “Not that many,” he answered. “There are still elves that worship the old gods.” Efraim raised his hand. "But I thought Andraste freed the elves. Shouldn't she be god of rebellion?” Novhen said, "Yes, she freed us, but she wasn’t a god. And the Chantry folk really don't like it when you say that. She was a prophet, remember. Now, are we ready to continue?" They nodded. "Good," Novhen said.

<;3>

"C'mon, wasn't it worth it to see their faces light up?" Soris shrugged noncommittally, "I guess. We should go find the rest of the wedding party." Soris began walking out of the alley, leaving Novhen to catch up. He teased, "If that's your attitude, let's hope your bride doesn't want too many kids." "I have to agree with you there," Soris laughed awkwardly. "What about you? Going to give Uncle Cyrion the army of grandbabies he's been begging for?" "I thought I made myself clear. The moment you turn your head, I'm climbing the wall and finding the Dalish." "You haven't left yet."

<;4> Back to the break in! I know i've posted scenes near this one

The guard tried to say, "What do you want?" But as his speech was garbled by sleep and, by the smell of it, alcohol, what came out was "Wharryawan?" "Could you tell us where Lord Vaughan's room is?" Novhen said. The guard lazily looked him up and down. "And who are you?" "We're the new help. We were supposed to start today." The guard snorted derisively. “Wish they would tell me about these things. Go find somebody else to hold your hand. I have a station to man.” “Right. Sorry, ser,” Novhen said apologetically. He grumbled and crossed his arms as he leaned back in his chair. Already, he was nodding off once again. "Load of good that did," Soris mumbled. Novhen gestured for him to keep quiet and opened the door. He made no special effort to open it quietly, which was just as well as it would have squealed no matter how he opened it. The guard shifted in his seat and barely opened one eye. Seeing nothing unexpected, he went back to sleep. He wouldn't remember them by the time he woke up.

<;5>

Novhen stared at him. "Fine. Give me 40 gold and the women, and I let you live." "No, no, you misunderstand. 40 gold and the girls return alive tomorrow. I can't leave my guests without entertainment. What kind of host–" An arrow sprouted from Vaughan's throat.

<;6>

"Where are you going?" He had been spotted. It wasn't Duncan's voice. It was that recruit from Redcliffe. Alistair was his name. "I just need to take a piss," Novhen said. It was only half a lie. Alistair visibly relaxed, "Oh, okay. Just stay in range of the fire. You never know what could get you at night." Novhen grunted affirmatively and trudged away from the camp. If he ran, Alistair would be ready to raise alarm immediately. It would take less than a minute for Duncan and Riordan to begin pursuit. If this were Denerim, he'd be able to shake them without problem, but this was as far from Denerim as he had ever been.

<7> Hey, this one isn't from the rewrite. What's up with that?

The messenger said, "Warden-Commander, the Arl of Denerim requests the presence of Warden Tabris in his tent." The hairs rose on Novhen's neck, but he remained still. If he had not already been identified, he would rather not give it away in his reaction. "What for?" Duncan asked coolly. "He would not say, ser." "Well, I'm afraid that unless the arl is willing to disclose his purpose, I cannot help. All of my Wardens are already preoccupied with more important matters." The messenger squirmed in his boots, "I understand, ser, but the arl was quite insistent that I fetch him." "And you will find me quite insistent that I cannot allow that," Duncan answered firmly.

#wip #seven snippet sunday #novhen tabris #he loves his alienage so so so much #also i imagine the chantry being particularly on guard about elves calling andraste a god herself #they'll tolerate some heterodoxy but not that #especially not from elves #probably going to refrain from wips from this fic for a while since i've already shared so much and it's in an awkward place rn #but i hope to publish it soon

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mackenzielovee · 1 year

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I posted 4,384 times in 2022

That's 3,617 more posts than 2021!

3,725 posts created (85%)

659 posts reblogged (15%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@mackenzielovee

@goldenjo

@r0und3bitch

@lovedetlost

I tagged 4,079 of my posts in 2022

Only 7% of my posts had no tags

#ask! - 3,291 posts

#anon - 2,152 posts

#ambivalence hcs - 1,337 posts

#<3 - 525 posts

#ss<3 - 219 posts

#xoxo - 110 posts

#rafe cameron - 99 posts

#rafe fic - 99 posts

#rafe obx - 99 posts

#rafe cameron imagine - 99 posts

Longest Tag: 92 characters

#pls help me the creative juices arent flowing but i can't move forward until this is written

My Top Posts in 2022:

ambivalence epilogue: falling - rafe cameron

a/n: omg wish i could tell you how nervous i am about this shit lmao i really hope you guys like this , pls leave me a comment as always and let me know what you think! sorry its so long oops

Summary: Rafe Cameron gets everything he's ever wanted in twenty short minutes.

Warnings: swearing, underage drinking, mentions of blood, mentions of a car accident, many poorly researched little things that i won't put here bc spoilers

Word Count: 9.3k

series masterlist

my writing

"Rafe?"

You yell out for him the second you enter the foyer of Tannyhill, shopping bags in one hand and keys in the other. He'd given you a key months ago, under the pretense of watering the plants in the kitchen during the days that everyone is at work. Rose had raised an eyebrow at him and Ward had rolled his eyes, but they didn't protest. They love you too much.

"Y/N?"

Rose steps out of the kitchen and into the hall, smiling when she sees you.

"Hey, Rose," you smile, walking toward her.

"Hey, girl. Come on in. He's out back, he said he'll be in soon."

You follow her into the kitchen and set your shopping bags down on the counter, placing your hands on your hips and giving her a look.

"His project, again?" you question.

"Oh, yeah. Ward and I have been officially banned from the entire backyard."

You laugh, "At least you know what he's doing. He won't tell me."

Rose smirks, then raises her hand to her mouth and acts like she's locking it up. You take a deep breath and shake your head, failing miserably at persuading intel from her.

"Sorry, honey. Swore me to secrecy," she smiles sadly.

"It's okay, I get it," you sigh.

She chuckles at your dramatics, then steps to the fridge and pulls out a drink for you and one for herself. After ten months of being with Rafe, you still can't get over how he keeps the fridge stocked with your favorite things, even though you've told him a million times that it's unnecessary.

"So, what's in the bags?" she asks.

"Midsummers prep," you take a deep breath, reaching for one of the bags, "I picked up the necklace Mom ordered for me, and I had to get Scott a tie bar. Oh, and look at what I got for Rafe."

You reach into the bag and pull out a box, handing it to Rose. Her eyes widen when she opens it, glancing up at you with a sappy expression.

"Y/N, these are beautiful. Does he know that you got these made for him?"

You shake your head, "It's a surprise. He hates the cufflinks he has now."

"He's going to love them," she gushes, "You should see the way he's freaking out over his tie. It hasn't arrived yet, and I think he's about to go into cardiac arrest."

"It's over a week away," you laugh.

"Try telling him that."

See the full post

859 notes - Posted January 5, 2022

parenthood: an ambivalence continuation

okay i'm probably more excited than i should be :) i decided to make this into a whole series (thank you to those who recommended/agreed) and i'm so excited because i don't have to let go of these two (three) yet! i hope you enjoy this, i know i will <3

be sure to read ambivalence for background + all of the post-epilogue blurbs to catch up if you haven't already!

part one: fully invested

part two: playing defense

part three: it's a...

part four: resilience

part five: unconditional

part six: new beginnings

part seven: ingenuous

part eight: resolution

part nine: growth

part ten: bliss

part eleven: inclination

part twelve: lucky

part thirteen: invidious

part fourteen: rectify

part fifteen: real life

part sixteen: dissension

part seventeen: complications

part eighteen: a balancing act

part nineteen: rivals

part twenty: intemperance

part twenty one: muddy waters

Blurbs

cotton candy mouth

a wife’s intuition

thanksgiving day

Mini Drabbles

connor clinging to y/n and wanting rafe to leave

See the full post

1,011 notes - Posted April 7, 2022

tutoring — rafe cameron

a/n: this is the filthiest thing i have ever written. all thanks to my girls @r0und3bitch and @lovedetlost , i love and adore both of you , thanks for being you !

warnings: all of them. im serious. SMUT (PinV sex, dirty talk, daddy kink, manipulation of reader, degrading language, dom/sub dynamics)

It was supposed to be an innocent night. You’d told Rafe to come over to help you study for your finals, given that he’s a math whiz and you aren’t. He’d entered your apartment with textbooks and a pencil behind his ear, but the smirk is what gets you.

He’d helped you with four problems before, somehow, you found yourself perched in his lap, your dress bunched at your hips by his large hands. Your clothed core grinds against his as you cup his cheek, kissing him like it’s your last time.

You break the kiss and moan against his lips, rutting your hips into his faster. He combines the fistfuls of fabric into one hand, then uses his free one to palm your ass as he guides you.

“Fuck,” he mumbles, “You’re supposed to be studying, baby. Tucking that pretty lip between your teeth while I tell you you’re doing a good job. You like when I tell you you’re doing a good job?”

“Mhm,” you whine, “I like—I want—”

Rafe’s cruel, low laugh brings a tint to your cheeks, the kind that makes you feel embarrassed. He notices as you slow your movements, leading him to rut his hips up into you. When you let out a loud, uncontrolled moan, he smirks.

“No wonder you needed my help,” he teases you, “Just a dumb little girl, huh? Don’t worry, sweetheart. Daddy’s gonna take care of you.”

He kisses you again before you can say another word, seemingly doing his best to try and swallow you whole with the aggressive way he takes your mouth. You’re too lost in his kiss to notice his fingers loop through your underwear and yank it off, dropping the soaked fabric onto the couch beside him.

“Daddy,” you plead, sitting back on his knees as you take in his swollen lips.

“Don’t worry, baby,” he repeats, “I’m gonna take real good care of you. You see, good girls don’t make their daddies wait. Good girls also do their studying before playtime. Now, I know you worked that pretty little brain extra hard on our math problems, so that counts. But you’re not gonna make Daddy wait, are you?”

You bite down on your bottom lip as you shake your head, your eyes wide and pouty as you lean forward.

“No, Daddy, m’sorry,” you mumble.

He brings you in for another kiss, “Don’t be sorry, honey. Come here.”

You sit up on your knees again and let him guide your hands down to his belt buckle, where he nods for you to undo it. He sits up just enough for you to pull him out, eyes widening slightly at the length and the girth of him. You swallow and shake your head after a second, knowing you can’t make him wait any longer.

“Spit on it,” he demands, “Don’t make me ask again.”

You nod, “Yes, sir.”

You lean forward and let your spit fall from between your lips, watching how it floods Rafe’s already leaking tip. Slowly, Rafe guides your hand over him, helping you rub your spit down his shaft.

“That’s it,” he grins, “Good fucking girl. Get me all ready for you.”

“More?” you ask him, looking down at his wet, hard cock.

“Yeah, baby, more,” he nods, brushing hair from your face and tucking it behind your ear.

You spit on him again, rubbing it up and down with both hands this time instead of one. Rafe throws his head back on the couch cushion as you stroke him, drawing even more precum from his tip.

“Fuck,” he moans, “That’s so good. Take your dress off, come on.”

You do as told, removing your hands only for a moment to pull your dress over your head. He grins as you do exactly what you’re told, nodding his head slightly in approval. You bask in the slight nod of praise, wanting more from him. Your hands return to his cock and he grunts when you squeeze him, twisting your wrist and watching his face contort as you do.

“Shit,” he grunts, “You wet for me, baby? You think Daddy can just slide right in? Or do I have to work you open? Make you take me?”

You shake your head slowly, knowing that he knows how wet you are purely by the way you’re leaking on his jeans.

“I can take it, Daddy,” you whimper.

He smiles, “Gorgeous, filthy thing. C’mere. You talk a big game for such a little girl.”

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1,017 notes - Posted July 25, 2022

a series of attempts — bucky barnes

Bucky comes to you with everything — everything but his true feelings. He likes his sweet, little, innocent girl. Until you choose not to play the game anymore.

warnings: swearing, manipulation on bucky's part, kissing, smut (at the end, you'll see it coming — dry humping, kissing allusion to more)

You’d never pegged yourself as one of those people who went to bed early. You’d never been too particular about it at all — you went to sleep when you wanted and that’s that. Although you had your share of late nights, getting older and settling into a steady job brought out the most adult-like tendencies in you.

Which is why you find yourself ready to assault whoever is on the other side of your front door, brutally pounding on it and then switching to the doorbell when that attempt deems unsuccessful.

“What the — Buck,” you groan, letting your face fall into your hands, “Seriously?”

He smirks, “Hi, sweetheart.”

Even at three o’clock in the morning, you feel your heart soar at his raspy, tired voice. When you look up at him again, you take in his appearance. He’s been beaten up pretty bad, but the blood dripping from his knuckles tells you that the other guy looks worse. Of course he does. Bucky doesn’t play around.

“What happened to you?”

He laughs now, stepping closer to the threshold of your home, as if he expects you to step out of his way so he can enter. Instinctually, you do, naturally letting go of every feminine instinct you possess when he’s within ten feet of you.

“Comes with the job. You should know that by now. Clean me up?”

“Uh — yeah. Come in,” you reply, stepping aside so he can enter.

He smirks as he passes you, taking in your little outfit with no subtlety whatsoever. His eyes wander down the front of your tank top and once he’s past you, he tosses his head over his shoulder to check out your legs in your sleep shorts. You swallow down your objection, feeling the need to please him, especially in his state, and follow him into the kitchen.

“Well?” he turns to you, looking handsome as ever in his bloodstained button-up.

You freeze, “Well, what?”

When he chuckles, you feel yourself shrink. Bucky’s always had a way of making you feel small, but not necessarily in a bad way. You almost feel as if your brain shuts down when he’s around, like you automatically know that he’ll do all the thinking for you. That he’s there, so you’re safe. Provided for. If only you were spoken for.

“You’re playing nurse, baby. Tell me where you want me.”

He watches your throat constrict, but says nothing. Instead, he just allows the smirk to grow on his lips.

“Hop up on the counter,” you say, your voice hoarse, “Let me get my kit.”

He watches as you hurry off to collect your first aid kit from your bathroom. You grab it from under the sink, then take a quick glance in the mirror. It’s fine. It’s Bucky. Just relax.

But it’s impossible for you to relax around Bucky. He’s been dangling himself in front of you for the better part of two years; teasing you and haunting your dreams all while you refrained from confessing just how much you love him.

You’d given up on anything happening between the two of you when he hooked up with your best friend at your birthday party last year. To make matters worse, you’d been the one to catch them — in your home, no less, but thankfully not your bed — and you’d cried for days. Not that Bucky knew that. He knew you were pissed, sure, but he didn’t know why. And the why is the most important part of it all.

You stop when you pick up your lip gloss tube, then toss it back down on the counter. Yes, Bucky checks you out from time to time, but he always has. You just assumed that based on his lack of attempting anything, he didn’t find you appealing enough. That thought alone could make you tear up.

You hurry away from the mirror and back to the kitchen, freezing in the doorway when you take in the sight in front of you. Bucky’s button-up rests folded up in his lap, leaving his perfectly carved, tan chest on display. That smirk spreads across his lips again, and sometimes you swear you could just smack it right off.

“Sorry—” you blurt, “I couldn’t find the kit.”

“Here I was thinking you were getting all prettied up for me,” he teases.

You let out a weak and unconvincing laugh as you open up the kit beside him, removing the materials you need.

“It’s three in the morning,” you remind him, “You get what you get when you show up at this hour.”

He laughs like he can’t help himself, then turns to you, so close you can feel his breath, “I always like what I get, no matter what time it is.”

You recoil when the scent of alcohol hits your nose, and you realize all too quickly what it means.

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1,578 notes - Posted July 8, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

loveless — bucky barnes

synopsis: hating Bucky Barnes is easy. Sleeping with him and keeping the feelings away proves to be much more difficult.

warnings: swearing, slight mention of anxiety symptoms, SMUT (oral: f&m receiving, PinV sex, unprotected sex, breeding kink, slight orgasm denial, degrading language (not to reader), kissing)

His eyes are darker than usual today.

That’s the first thing you notice as you sit across the table from him, glaring at him with a clenched jaw. He’s glaring right back, neither of you trying to pay attention to your boss as he goes through the quarterly figures.

“Got it, Barnes?” Tony’s voice brings both of you out of your hateful gaze.

You watch as Bucky clears his throat and looks over, nodding his head, “Yeah. Got it, boss.”

“I’m sure you do. You looked very engaged,” Tony mutters sarcastically.

Bucky laughs at that, “Oh, I was. In fact, Y/N’s got some ideas to increase sales this quarter. She was telling me about them last night—”

“When I was working late,” you cut in, not wanting to give the wrong impression, despite knowing Bucky’s actively trying to make you look bad, “Bucky came into my office to drop off the expense reports, and—”

“And, we got to talking,” Bucky takes over, “Tell him your great ideas, Y/N. I especially like the strip poker idea. For charity, of course.”

“That’s enough,” Tony glares at Bucky, “Y/N, any real suggestions?”

You swear your blood stops in your veins, because no, you didn’t have any real suggestions. In fact, part of this job makes you feel like you’re drowning, and the ability to think outside the box is far out of your reach when you can barely think inside of it.

“Um,” you stutter, listening to Bucky chuckle victoriously across from you, “Sir, I—”

“No, then. Great. Let’s move on. Rogers, how are things on your end?”

Your eyes close under the embarrassment and you're sure you look about as incompetent as anyone can get. After a moment, you look over to Steve, who’s preparing to speak. He gives you a compassionate smile, which you return. He’s always been nice to you. Your first day on the job, he walked you all the way to Tony’s office. He brings you coffee from the breakroom frequently, and he always backs you up in meetings when he can tell you’re nervous. Your favorite part about it all is that he doesn’t have to do any of it.

Bucky rudely clears his throat, earning your attention back. You narrow your eyes, trying your best to show your annoyance in one glance. He just smirks and raises his elbow up on the arm rest, waving his metal fingers at you.

Once the meeting clears, you take your time collecting your things. Bucky escapes without a second thought while Steve hangs around, giving you a gentle and reassuring smile when you stand from your chair.

“Strip poker, huh?” he teases.

You roll your eyes, “I never suggested that.”

Steve laughs easily, leading you out of the conference room. He holds his arm out, allowing you to walk through first, and the blush that rises to your cheeks doesn’t go unnoticed, you’re sure.

“I know you didn’t. Bucky’s brain is… unique.”

He watches you smile as he walks by your side down the hall, where you spy Bucky himself, leaning against the wall and flirting with Tony’s intern. Your eyes roll once again as he leans in closer, grinning like a fool as she smiles up at him with hopeful eyes. You’re sure he’s loving it.

“It sure is,” you mutter, “How’s Sam?”

“He’s good, you know, he’s spending some time with his sister and nephews…”

Steve’s voice trails off in your head as you pass by Bucky and his beloved intern. You catch his eye as you pass, glaring at him. He smirks, his eyes shamelessly checking you out even while he’s in the middle of flirting with another woman.

“Excuse me, sweetie,” Bucky mumbles, pushing himself off the wall and following behind you. With a smirk, you start swaying your hips a little bit as you walk just to fuck with him. You hear a groan from behind you, which widens your smirk greatly. “What are you two gossiping about up there?”

Steve sighs, “Do you have to be a dick every second of your life?”

“Makes things more interesting,” Bucky shrugs, “Hey, great idea in the meeting today, Y/N. I really enjoyed that panicked look on your face at the idea of disappointing Tony.”

Before you can muster up a response, Steve stops and turns around, setting his wide palm on Bucky’s chest.

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1,865 notes - Posted July 14, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review

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note-boom · 2 years

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Getting Around Here...

All right, we’ve reached the point where I’ve been told I have 1000 posts on here, so I’m gonna make a navigation/what’s this blog about post so I don’t go insane...

What’s This Blog About?

Basically this started as a realization that I was saving way too many BSD-related links on the app I use to keep track of all my obsessions, reactions to things, etc. So I figured a Tumblr blog would be the solution, and now this is my archive of things I would usually just save as a link elsewhere (plus some thoughts of my own to spice it up a bit.)

Navigation Stuff

Now how do I tag things for future explorations?

Fandom Tags: #bsd, #bungo stray dogs, #bungou stray dogs (will be updated if I switch/tack on other fandoms)

Character Tags: In general, I just use [acronym] [character’s most used name]. Like #bsd atsushi. Sometimes, I use two like #bsd edgar allan poe/#bsd poe or #bsd gogol/#bsd nikolai gogol but only when I’m not sure what their most used name is. There’s also #bsd characters (for unnamed characters or just incorrect quotes) this one (when there are too many characters to tag) and group specific tags (armed detective agency, port mafia, bsd guild, soukoku, shin soukoku, there’s no naming consistency)

Meta Tags: #bsd musings (for literally anything that contemplates bsd) #bsd theories (for theories, specifically) #character analysis (metas about characters)

Specific Media Tags: #bsd official art, #manga things (anything that features the manga panels) #anime things (anything that features anime screenshots and the like) #light novel things (anything referring to the light novels) #stage play things (anything featuring stuff about the stage play) #bsd fanart, #bsd edits, #bsd gifset, #bsd fanfic. Of course, there will also be tags for the light novels specifically, which is usually just bsd [light novel name], and wan.

Additional Tags: #humor, #alternate universe, #crossover, #random fandom spamdom (generally fandom related either because of my tags or the post’s contents itself) #bsd fandom slander (mostly a subset of humor that lovingly slanders the characters) #not fandom spam (has nothing to do with the fandom specifically) #spitting nonsense (my posts) #rambling in the tags sorry (when I get a bit TOO carried away) #note re-reblogs (currently nonexistent but the time will come...i advise blocking this tag lest you wake up to find 50 posts rereblogged because I didn't want to queue them...)

Spoilers tags will be tagged bsd spoilers (for all of them), manga spoilers/bsd manga spoilers, and anime spoilers/bsd anime spoilers.

In (Rambly) Conclusion

Why am I writing this like a three-point thesis...ah never mind.

And that’s how I sort out my obsession with this stupid show. If any other piece of media seizes me by the throat like BSD has, then I’ll probably start posting about it here (but my fixations are usually short lived and thus onto main sideblog they go).

I tend to...ramble in the tags a lot, which I mildly feel bad for (there’s a reason why I generally just privately save things). So if you’re seeing this because I spam reblogged you and you wondered who in the world was crowding your notifs with tags, I’m sorry. I also try not to crawl out of the tags too much, though, just do so if they don’t fit my rambles (oops....)

I try and lessen the blow by slapping most everything on the queue (but I don’t tag what I queue, let there be CHAOS), so maybe that helps a bit?

That said, I DO love tags, so feel free to spam reblog whatever you want from here and comment-tag as much as you want...I LOVE seeing people say stuff (whether I agree or not, this IS just for fun). I don’t usually use the comment/reply section or the like button because I don’t actually do anything in my main blog (I just work off sideblogs, heh), so I’ll likely abuse the reblog button a lot or just hope my vibes of appreciation are psychically felt.

OH RIGHT!! Asks are always open. Feel free to scream at me about literally anything, ask anything, or share cool links and shiny stuff I can reblog/save (the last one especially because I am a magpie of fandom things). I generally have to be asked things to talk about them, so I do warn you that the right ask can really get me going.

And with that, back to spamming I go!

#spitting nonsense #to those of you who reached the end of this post i am shaking your hand #also some additional stuff?#i cope with liking bsd by bullying everyone as much as sobbing over them #and....honestly i cant think of anything #edit: bullying everyone meaning bullying the characters....should have clarified

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organchordsandlightning · 2 years

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tagged by @bluejayblueskies and @tired-beholding-bitch (a month ago. oops.) to find the words shadow, hand, love, pause, care, and heavy!

throwing these under a readmore - spoilers for Malevolent EP25!

care and hand (lucky double whammy!) from a fluffy-one shot were John and Arthur hug for the first time

Why did you shake my hand? When I first came back?

Some water stuck in his trachea. Arthur coughed, each movement making his head pulse with pain. “I was relieved to see you!” He exclaimed, a little hoarse. “I thought I made that clear.”

Yes. I know that. But why did you shake my hand?

That was much harder to answer. “Well, it’s what people do after not seeing each other for a long while.” He could anticipate the next question. “Some people like physical contact, I suppose. Whether it’s a reassurance, a-a symbol of care, a sign that you see them as equals …”

Which one was it for you?

Arthur had to think on it a moment. “All three. And a comfort. While I didn’t relish the thought of losing the hand again, it was worth it to have you back.”

A comfort, John mused. Arthur could feel his pointer, middle, and index press against his right shoulderblade. His little finger hung limply against the back of his shirt.

shadow from a game you’re destined to lose, a sequel to a Malevolent AU I’m working on:

Concern made John’s brow furrow. “Did Arthur seem like the sort of person who would?”

“I wanna say no.” Parker seemed disconcerted by the thought. “Arthur was my best pal. He was a good guy, John, he worked harder than anyone I’d ever met and if you could make him laugh, you knew he’d die for you. But when a guy keeps so much of his life in shadow, you end up wondering what he’s hiding in there.”

“Okay.”

“I just –” Agitated, now, Parker went on. “I just don’t want you thinking that I, I was scared of English or anything. Maybe it wasn’t like how other people operated, but we made it work. I didn’t have to know everything about him to trust him, and I –”

“Parker.”

heavy from a TMA Uni AU that I’m chipping away at!:

“I, ah. My girlfriend and I … my girlfriend broke up with me. Um, it’s why I had to move.”

Oh.

Oh, fucking … yeah. Obvious. Or, at least, Martin should have thought about it before then. He saw students loads and they often pretended like he wasn’t there. Plus, so many students cried in the bathrooms, especially when he needed to clean it.

And it wasn’t all relationship stuff. Classes were stressful (Martin imagined), plus there were the usual sorts of tragedies that could strike at any time. It was just. A lot of relationship stuff.

He had to say something. The air was heavy, and Jon looked like he expected to be called a naughty boy.

pause from a Malevolent post-25 angst piece

“Cultist? My boy, I am no more a cultist than Prester John. I am simply doing what is best for this town. Can’t you see that?”

“What is best, what is best, I am sick and fucking tired hearing about what is best! You don’t know a god damn thing, Daniel, and you certainly don’t know what is best!”

“Daniel?”

The slip made Arthur pause. Just as his arms were numb, he felt like he’d scarcely been able to feel his own mind for hours: the words came tumbling out like a waterfall with hardly little to catch them. Of course this wasn’t Bella’s father, Arthur knew that, and he couldn’t fathom why his brain had volunteered the name so readily.

love from, curveball, a Sheridan Tapes Season 2 fic

He separated from Bill and brushed his sleeve over his eyes, taking Bill’s hand with his free one. “You … you look like hell, love,” he tried to joke, even if it was absolutely true and not the least bit funny. “Come on, you should sit.”

Bill obeyed. He was hunching his shoulders, head held low. That wasn’t Bill. Bill was the guy who looked up posture videos. Bill was the guy who went on walks around the department to make sure he wasn’t too sedentary.

alas, i won’t tag anyone because i think most folks have been tagged at this point! but thanks for the nudge y’all, it was fun to push through my folders!

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roaringheat · 4 years

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It's 5 am and ive finally finished all the side quests i had in Outer Worlds which means im gonna have to stop stalling and just go do whats probably the start of the end of the main quest oh no

#acro posts #outer worlds liveblog #im gonna do that tomorrow tho #ive been doing all those sidequests for a couple days nows cause most of it was running back and forth all over the place #i also got all the ship decorations!#at least im pretty sure i did like i looked up a guide and all that to make sure i didnt miss anything #normally id prefer to just find cool shit like that naturally #but ya know the whole 'do everything u want to do before continuing' thing made me want to get as much shit done as possible before going i #hopefully theres not too many side quests ive missed #its weird seeing it so empty tho lol #the whole entire time im doing all these sidequests ive just been thinking:#'phineas got literally captured and sent to this terrifying prison and your over here playing fuckin dress up with a fashion designer'#oop now i gotta tag this as spoilers lmao #anyway like im VERY excited to break him out of prison so i cant wait #like i honestly have no clue how this is gonna go but im a big mixture of anticipation and dread #ill def post about it once i finally do it tomorrow #outer worlds spoilers

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makeste · 3 years

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BnHA Chapter 301: All My Todorokis

Previously on BnHA: We learned that when a bunch of superpowered villains are suddenly set loose with nobody around to stop them, things get fucked pretty quickly. Old Man Samurai and a bunch of other useless people decided to make “I pretend I do not see it” their new mantra, and resigned. Endeavor had a moment of despair on account of being crushed by the guilt of having ruined the lives of himself, his family, and basically everyone else in the entire world. For various reasons the heretical notion of “person who has done bad things feels sorry for doing them” sent fandom spiraling into a meltdown, so that was fun. The chapter ended with the entire Todoroki clan descending upon Enji’s hospital room to have a dramatic chat about Touya and All That General Fuckery.

Today on BnHA: Horikoshi is all “here’s the story of how Baby Touya slowly went insane trying to win his father’s love.” It’s a tale full of subverted expectations and heartbreaking inevitability, and also like twenty panels of the cutest fucking kids who ever existed on planet earth, who are so fucking cute that I can’t stop thinking about their cuteness even with all of the horrifying family tragedy unfolding around them. It is absolutely ridiculous how cute they are. Touya is out here pushing his tiny body past its limits because he inherited the same obsession as his dad and neither of them can put it aside even though it’s destroying them, and yet all I can think about is Baby Shouto’s (。･o･｡) face. Anyways what a chapter.

so I have to confess that even though I managed to avoid being caught off-guard by the early leaks, the number of people reblogging my Endeavor posts from earlier this week and using the tag “bnha 301” kind of gave me an inkling that this chapter will include more Tododrama lol. that said, I don’t know anything else about it, so we’re still good spoiler-wise

AHHHHH FLAHSBAKC AHHHH. omg I know I typoed the shit out of that, but I’m just going to leave it lol I think it’s fitting

holy shit holy fuck. so this is Rei and Enji’s first meeting, then??

yepppp, oh shit

so wait, I know this is not even the slightest bit important, but are they meeting at Enji’s home or Rei’s? because I always figured that Enji was the one with the super-Japanese aesthetic, but maybe that was Rei’s side of the family all along

(ETA: from what I found during my very brief google search, omiai meetings are often held at fancy hotels or restaurants, so maybe that’s what this is.)

there’s such a period drama feel to this setting. like it’s so outrageously formal fff how can anyone stand this kind of atmosphere though seriously

OH THANK GOD

I mean they’re still stiff af but at least they’re not rigidly sitting in seiza and staring at each other unblinkingly anymore lol. Enji’s actually got his hands in his pockets now. why is this somehow almost cute

oh damn it’s the flowers

Rei seems so subdued and it’s so hard to get any idea of what she’s actually thinking. I want to see her side of this dammit

but anyway, so at least from Enji’s perspective it seems like even though the marriage was arranged and he picked her because of her quirk, he still loved his wife and wanted to do right by her. the fact that he was watching her and noticed that she liked the flowers, and remembered that detail for all these years -- there’s a reason why Horikoshi’s showing us this. we know what’s going to happen later on; we know how much fear and violence and breaking of trust is coming up ahead, and while it may seem like this scene is serving to soften Enji’s character further -- which to be fair it is -- it also helps drive home the full impact of his abuse. that it’s so terrible not only because of the trauma of the abuse itself, but also because of the way it retroactively destroys all of the good things as well. this could have potentially been such a sweet scene, but it’s inescapably tainted by the knowledge of what’s to come, at least for me. and that’s just brutal

anyways, shit. is the whole chapter going to be like this?? feel free to toss in something I can actually make a joke about sometime, Horikoshi

oop, back to the present

omfg lol

“are you all right” “NO I’M NOT ALL RIGHT WHAT THE FUCK.” “oh, right, because of all the stuff that’s happened with me abusing you and you having a mental breakdown and being hospitalized for ten years and then our son coming back to life and killing thirty people, right, right. I almost forgot.” whoops

omfg you guys I’m loving this new and improved steely-eyed Rei. I’m loving her a lot

and what do you mean “part one” fkjds how long is this going to be. TOO MUCH DRAMA FOR ONE CHAPTER TO HANDLE

oh, hello

yeah I’ll say you did. didn’t seem to bother you much at the time, though

HMMMMMMMMMMMM

Dabi Is A Noumu intensifies even further. anyways though would you fucking look at this boy lounging on this moth-eaten couch doing his best DRAW ME LIKE YOUR FRENCH GIRLS impression wtf

Dabi what if you actually had killed him??? what would you feel?? satisfaction?? regret?? anything at all?? tell me your secrets goddammit

who are you talking to buddy

Fuyumi-chan, Natsu-kun (is it common for brothers to address each other as -kun?? can’t recall seeing that in many other anime, but hey), and “dot dot dot,,,,,, SHOUTO” lol thank you so much for this bountiful heaping of Tododrama Horikoshi we are blessed

AH, WHAT DID I SAY THE OTHER DAY

ULTIMATE MELODRAMATIC THEATER CHILD. “I’M JUST GOING TO LIE ON THIS COUCH SHIRTLESS AND ALONE AND MAKE SPEECHES TO MY FAMILY MEMBERS WHO AREN’T THERE AND SAY THINGS LIKE ‘WATCH ME IN THE PITS OF HELL’ WITH A STRAIGHT FACE BECAUSE NO ONE’S THERE TO JUDGE ME.” WELL JOKE’S ON YOU MISTER CHATTERBOX BECAUSE I AM IN FACT JUDGING THE SHIT OUT OF YOU LOL

(ETA: and on a more serious note, it’s interesting to see that “look at me”/”watch me” theme being used again though, because we see that same sentiment uttered repeatedly by the younger Touya in the flashback. well kid, you definitely got your wish at last. don’t know what else to say.)

OKAY HORIKOSHI HAS DECIDED THAT’S ENOUGH FUN, TIME FOR MORE FLASHBACKS

oh my sweet precious lord

just as cute as we left him. giving us a child this cute when we all know full well what’s going to happen to him is just unspeakably cruel though

HOMG

I’m fucking speechless. you broke me, congratulations. what am I even supposed to do with this

I can’t get over this. moving forward my life will be split into two distinct parts, B.P. (Before the Pout) and A.P. (After the Pout)

and meanwhile there’s ALL THIS BACKGROUND ANGST BUILDING UP, AND I CAN’T EVEN FOCUS ON IT. Touya’s arm and cheek are covered in bandages (I’m guessing this is shortly after that “ouch!” panel we got some chapters back), and Enji is deliberately avoiding training with him because he doesn’t want him to hurt himself further. I can’t fucking get over the irony that all this time everyone thought Touya had died because Enji pushed him too far in his training, and it turns out that it’s the opposite -- the tragedy ultimately happened because he didn’t want to push him. but I’m jumping ahead of myself though I guess

by the way,

remember this?? just wanted to remind you that it exists just in case you forgot

so now someone is talking and basically saying that Touya is the exact opposite of what Enji was hoping for when he decided to start playing with quirk genetics

-- okay hold up

...lol no, never mind. for a second I thought “holy shit he looks kind of familiar WHAT IF IT’S UJIKO OMG” before I remembered that Enji would have recognized him during the hospital capture mission if that was the case. so NEVER MIND, PROCEED

IMAGINE THAT, ENJI DOESN’T QUITE SEEM SATISFIED WITH THIS SUGGESTION OF QUITTING NOW

(ETA: how the fuck did this man go around saving 62 towns in a single day what even is All Might.)

[clicks tongue several times] trouble a’brewin’

MEANWHILE BABY TOUYA HAS UNFORTUNATELY INHERITED HIS DAD’S STUBBORN STREAK

KLDIHWOEIJFL:KSDJ

!!!!!!!!!!!

oh my god. oh my god. what is this chapter. WHAT IS IT

so now Touya is all “YOU JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND MY MANLY DESIRE TO BURN MYSELF ALIVE” well you got her there champ

THEY’RE TOO CUTE. OH MY GOD. HIS FURIOUS LITTLE TEARS. HER CHUBBY LIL FACE. HIS STUBBY LIL FISTS. SOMEONE HELP ME

also are they just home alone lol or what. “hey Touya, you’re what, like six now?? do us a favor and look after your baby sister for a couple hours for us would you? make sure not to set yourself on fire or anything.” WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG!!

now it’s nighttime and Enji and Rei are arguing, presumably about his decision not to train Touya anymore

whew. okay. so, a couple of things here

1. first of all I think this conclusively shows that Enji really was trying to do the best he could for Touya. he stopped training him as soon as he realized it was hurting him, but Touya was still determined so he tried to make it work anyway, and even visited doctors to try and figure out if there was anything they could do. then, once they were absolutely sure that it wasn’t going to work, he tried multiple times to explain to Touya why they had to stop. he didn’t just abandon him out of the blue, which is really important to note. “no matter how much I tried telling him...”

so yeah, that debunks another common fandom accusation. so by the time he finally makes this decision, which we all know is going to turn out horribly, it’s basically because he’s already tried everything else he could think of. which, by the way, still doesn’t mean he handled this right. but at the very least he was taking Touya’s feelings into account and he was trying, and he didn’t just abruptly toss his son aside (at least not yet)

2. buuuut, then there’s this panel right below all that

which is the other side of it. if he’d just quit like the doctor person advised him to, that would have been the end of it. Touya would still have been upset, but he would have eventually gotten over it and the family would have moved on and possibly even been happy. but what happens next happens because Enji can’t let go. he still has this maddening urge to surpass All Might, and so he and Rei keep having more children, and then Shouto is born, and Enji finally has a kid he can start projecting all of his hysterical ambitions onto once again, and everything starts spiraling out of control soon after

though p.s. none of that is Shouto’s fault though!! he’s one of the few good things to come out of this whole mess and I’m very happy that he exists. the tragedy is that his dad fucking lost his mind over his quirk and fucked everything up. but that’s on him, not Touya or Shouto

anyways, SLKFJLSHGLKJL

I CAN’T FUCKING TAKE THIS YOU GUYS??? LOOK AT THAT LIL BUTTON OF A NOSE??? I’M LOSING IT HERE???

AND TOUYA JUST SEEMS DEVASTATED OMG

because children aren’t stupid, after all. he understands that his dad is still looking to surpass All Might. and so he feels like a failure, and feels like his dad is trying to replace him because he wasn’t good enough. and even now, isn’t that what the adult Touya is trying to prove?? that he was good enough after all?? “I’ll show you what happens when you give up on me, dad”?? “I’ll show you what I can do”?? fuck my life fuck everything

AND YOU CAN SEE THE TOLL THAT IT’S ALL TAKING ON REI GETTING WORSE AND WORSE AS WELL OH GOD

really nice touch here with the panel outlines becoming all shimmery from the heat of Endeavor’s flames (and/or becoming more unstable as the family gets closer and closer to their breaking point). but man, Horikoshi I can’t handle this, please show us more cute kids or something I can’t

GKELKWFJLDKSHFLKL

WITTLE BABE. BEEB. BUBS. SMOL. lkj; oh ouch a piece of my heart just detached and latched onto him huh look at that

TODOROKI “I’M SO SMALL AND I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT’S GOING ON AND I DIDN’T ASK TO BE HERE” SHOUTO AHHHHH

crazy how they all just seem to know right off the bat lol. kid doesn’t even have object permanence yet, let alone a quirk. but do they care?? IT’S THE HAIR, RIGHT. WE’RE ALL THINKING IT, I’M JUST GONNA COME OUT AND SAY IT. they knew the minute they looked at him lol

AND MEANWHILE TOUYA IS OFF HAVING UNSUPERVISED TRAINING/CRYING SESSIONS IN THE MOUNTAINS OR WHATEVER, AND, UH OH

are those blue flames yet?? they seem pretty close

(ETA: this is one of the few cases where the manga being in black and white is infuriating lol.)

OH MY GOD AND STILL

so it’s not like he was so disinterested that he didn’t notice what was happening, and he was still trying to stop it and get through to him. trying to reassure him that it wasn’t the end of the world and there were other things he could do with his life, but this one particular thing just wasn’t going to happen

fucking hell. it’s agonizing seeing how close they actually were to fixing it. if he’d only said the right words, or if he’d realized at this point how destructive his obsession could be to his kids, and backed off from putting that same pressure on Shouto. we came so close to possibly having a happy ending

AND ALSO THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING BUT PLEASE LOOK AT HOW TOUYA IS LIKE THREE AND A HALF FEET TALL AND HIS DAD IS LIKE NINE AND A HALF FEET. Touya barely comes past his knees flkjlkg. the Todoroki household must have been so filled with like plastic stepstools to reach the bathroom sink and all the little baby toothbrushes, and baby gates to keep the kiddos out of the important grown-up rooms and stuff. and also days-old half-empty cups of water and stale crackers and hot wheels and my little ponies strewn everywhere

“BUT EVERYONE AT SCHOOL SAYS THEY’RE GONNA BE HEROES” a wild Deku parallel appears?? how bout that

I know this is like a pivotal moment in the Todo Tragedy and all, but fucking look at this lil dumpling

“sup bro, it’s me, the manifestation of your fears of inadequacy and lack of fatherly affections. a GAAA. ba-baAA-baa [gurgling baby sounds]”

OHHHHH IT’S THE SOUND OF MY HEART BREAKING OH NO

HE WANTS TO BE LIKE YOU ENJI. good lord somebody please just get this family some therapy

“DAD YOU IGNITED IT IN ME” flkjslkj nope, nope. not ready for this pain here

baby Shouto, would you like to weigh in on this affair? “DA!! ba-ga-daaa, [pacifier chewing noises]” oh my, you don’t say. so insightful for one so young

OH MY GODDDDDD

IT’S SO DRAMATIC BUT ALL I CAN THINK ABOUT ARE THE SHOUNEN WOOSH LINES SURROUNDING FOUR-MONTH-OLD SHOUTO LOL HE WAS LIKE THIS FROM BIRTH OH MY GOD I AM DYING HELP

SHOUTO YOU’RE RUINING THIS ENTIRE CHAPTER!?!?!

“yo, the fuck kind of family was I fucking born into” oh, son. if you only knew. IF YOU ONLY KNEW!!

(ETA: lmao I got so distracted by the ridiculous cuteness that I glossed over the fact that Baby Touya seems to possibly be aiming at him?? it’s hard to tell because he’s also super out of it from heatstroke and may just be losing control in his attempt to show off his upgrade.)

ANYWAY THAT’S THE END EXCEPT WHAT’S THIS LAST LINE OMG

ffffff. and we’re in for ANOTHER chapter of this next week?? MORE drama?? MORE BABIES?? MORE OF EIGHT-YEAR-OLD TOUYA’S SLOW DESCENT INTO MADNESS. MY HEART CAN’T TAKE IT, BUT ALSO YES PLEASE SIGN ME UP

#bnha 301 #dabi #todoroki touya #endeavor #todoroki enji #todoroki rei #todoroki shouto #todoroki fuyumi #todoroki natsuo #bnha #boku no hero academia #bnha spoilers #mha spoilers #bnha manga spoilers #makeste reads bnha

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envythepalmtree · 3 years

Note

fma blogs to follow?

Ooh I've actually been planning on making this post for a while too!

Art blogs that ID their own posts that you should follow

@morningsaidthemoon - does ids in alt text! I really love their pieces - they're kinda soft in like. color and lines? and tender if that makes sense. Multifandom, they tag fandoms.

@mildly-artsy - @mildly-nerdy's new art blog! also does them in alt text. Her lines are so clean and I love how people look in her style. Mostly FMA.

Other blogs that write IDs and/or look through the notes for IDs (that you should follow and reblog the IDed version of posts)

@liathgray - they're the author of Blackwell Springs, an extremely popular fic I have not read yet, and the A Hop, Skip, and a Jump series that I'm very much obsessed with. Multifandom, they tag fandoms.

@nerdywriiterchild - bro I love their xerxes fics so much 😔 Multifandom.

@xingeseprince - IDs almost everything. Good descriptions! Sideblog, all FMA.

@princess-of-purple-prose - the meme ID person! (They're one of the people who started a huge doc of ID templates for memes to save people spoons, which is cool.) Multifandom, tags fandoms, mostly not FMA.

Other art blogs I love

I wish I could tag like. every one of my art mutuals but alas I'd be making color of the sky 2.0 😔 So sorry if I didn't tag you, I'm kinda just scrolling through my following list and picking urls at random here, all of you guys are amazing!

@chewytran - their royai college au!! is so cute!! All their royai stuff is just. chef's kiss. Art sideblog, mostly FMA. Other fandoms are tagged.

@wawayu - their use of light and colors man!! Art sideblog, majority FMA. (Also. check their notes when rbing their art because I rb and ID like. everything they post lol)

@neorei - their homunculi art!! Wish I had art-critic-training (is that a thing) so I could properly express the emotions that their art invokes. but. ahh it's so melancholy and kinda abstract, the kind of art that you could find different meanings in. Sideblog, all FMA.

@fmamangacaps - Photoshop counts as art. Their cleaning up of manga panels and tagging system is a godsend.

@humming-fly - you probably already follow them but their team greed comics are just so funny!! I always have at least one of their pieces in my drafts that I'm procrastinating on IDing lol. Multifandom.

@pumi-envy - just. lots of art of Envy. Sometimes I'm looking through the Envy tag and the majority of it is me and this artist. I love that for us. Their style's super cute. All FMA. (again. check the notes on their art 'cause I reblog and ID everything they put on my dash)

One of those Royai writers whom posts from me and my positivity blog mutuals always seem to make it to

Don't ask me why this is a category, it's just funny to me when my positivity blog posts or posts from my positivity moots make it to Royai tumblr.

@firewoodfigs - Xingese squad!! Her prose is beautiful. So poetic and meaningful. And her poetry?? is gorgeous. Ownvoices Xingese Roy content 💚 Mostly FMA.

@lantur - wrote delicate. Go read it right now if you haven't (but also tw for parental abuse and older military officers taking advantage of mentally ill young women while they commit genocide together) Multifandom, fandoms are tagged.

@hanamuri / @royriza - literally the sweetest person and runs like 4 blogs which is iconic. Her psychoanalysis of FMA characters is super interesting. All FMA.

Other writers I love

I have a habit of reserving way too many books from the library meaning that I haven't gotten around to reading most fanfics yet, oops. That's on me.

@ta1k-less - I adore her writing style!! Fun fact, one of her atla fics was probably the first multichap fic I had finished in roughly five years. She's very funny. Love how she fleshes out Ishvalan culture. Also draws sometimes and has started IDing her own art. Mostly FMA, multifandoms, tags fandoms.

@edisacornball - boomer he knows Edward very well, if that makes sense. Like, reading his fics I can tell that he understands Edward as a character very well. His Edwin fics are great. Has been in the FMA fandom for 15 years or something, which is crazy to me. Multifandom, mostly FMA.

@calangkoh - metas count as writing. So not a fic writer, but their 03 metas are wonderful. Obvious spoilers for 03 if you haven't seen it yet. Sideblog, all FMA.

Well fuck, now I'm realizing that I haven't gotten around to reading any fics from the vast majority of the writers I follow. Y'all are such lovely people sorry I still need to read your fics!! I gotta update this list once I get my act together and clean up my AO3 marked for later list, lol.

#fullmetal alchemist #fmab #fma 03 #masterpost #ask #anon #aure speaks

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washymylifeaway · 3 years

Text

SunaOsa fanfic recs: valentines edition~~

SunaOsa is one of my all time favorite ships and this past month, there has been/was an exchange going on between writers (here is the link) and artists (separately) and because I don’t have a life (or maybe it’s just that SunaOsa is my life LOL), I’m here to tell you some of my favorite fics from the pile :D However, as much as I love a ship, sometimes fluff is too asajndajnd so mind you there will probably be a lot of good fics missing just cause I couldn’t get myself to read more fluff (or angst) LOL (IM SORRY but sometimes I also just can’t motivate myself to read a fic no matter how good it looks OOPS).

As always, please check warning and tags before reading any of these fics, and take care of yourselves!!!!

In no particular order (jk the order is last updated haha) tho my favorites will have *** next to them :)

***glass stained black by unrequitedangst (E) 31k // Mafia AU’s are some of my favorite kinds of fics, and this one did not disappoint! The character development of Osamu is really legit and despite being mafia, it’s not that heavy or angst of a fic (but you should still definitely read tags and warnings first). It’s an Osamu heavy fic, and if you’re into reading him being stupid, go right ahead LOL.

redux by catalysis (T) 2.3k // ngl I hate break-up fics with a passion truely (when you can’t handle fluff or angst what to do) but I liked the concept for this one hehe (so I made myself suffer LOL). It was short, but cute !!! and the unspoken words really hit me in the FEELS (so what I’m dramatic fight me LOL).

Impropriety by DeathBelle (T) 5.7k // royalty~ I love the banter between them in this fic and we DO stan respectful Osamu yes we do <33333 The relationships between not only SunaOsa but SunaAtsu (because even though it isn’t really SunaAtsu best friend agenda, I can delude myself into think it is okay :/) are done so well and so nice he’s mean Osamu is best Osamu.

***what are you waiting for? by Slumber (T) 3.7k // MIGHT BE MY FAV FIC FROM THIS EXCHANGE!!! It made me cackle and I love how they learn new things about each other!!!! Like the development is so good and Suna is really doing the MOST!! Also, I love recursive endings AHHHHHH!

agape by sketchedsmiles (T) 11.7k // soulmates, then they were SOULMATES! (ik that’s not how it goes but pls just humor me LOL) This fic really depicted Osamu’s insecurities/internal turmoil/overthinking really well and the realization he has vs Suna’s AHJAFKASFJ. I love confident Suna.

fireside by tartaglia (starkartifices) (T) 3.6k // we do love the subtle flirt flirt don’t we hehe ;) It’s short, it’s fluff, and it’s funny - what more could you ask for? Also whats a vigilante fic if there isn’t at least one pun about being a vigilante LOL.

Over and Over Again by tookumade (G) 6.4k // I would like to order one reassuring, reliable Miya Osamu for myself please and thank you :((( The way the relationship is so GOOD like both Suna and Osamu pick each other up and they know the other has their back ajfhkajdfl. I would purchase all the onigiri with the deal Suna was proposing ;) Onigirintarou.

from here to eternity by TheGlovedArtist (T) 6.6k // I for one am a big fan of mythology and stuff (heroes of olympus but like IDR any of the plot LOL) so of course I read this fic. The snark appearances of Sakusa and Komori gave me LIFE and the difference in descriptions from Astumu and Kita cracked me up. This is another respectful Osamu fic (yes I love these) and in this one it was a ‘I save you as much as you save me’ type beat LOL. Gotta love rings.

***Subtle Inarizaki Dating by sifuhotman (T) 15.2k // THIS ONE. Even if you don’t read the whole thing, I beg of you, please, I AM ON MY KNEES, read the SID for Astumu. It is worth the loss of all your brain calls I guarantee it. It made me giggle so freakin much. Suna might be an A-Hole but he’s OUR A-Hole <3

Forever Begins with 8 Seconds by subtlehues (T) 3.9k // FLUFF hehe, I love their dynamic in this one it’s very good and cute and everything great! Also, I am all for the head cannon that Suna cannot cook, yes pls. Also SUPERPOWERS whooooooooh.

***try again, and again, and again by rosegoldwriting (T) 2.6k // SOULMATES! If you ever wanted a specific soulmate AU! for SunaOsa look no further, it probably comes out LOL. I love this concept of them just being like ‘WTF’ everyday, it gives me life. Also, count how many soulmate AU’s you recognized because I just thought about it and I think it’d be fun LOL. (I went back and I think 11 but I’m not sure LOL)

let us burn by SilverMoonT (G) 13.5k // I am always up for a nice vampire Osamu and witch Suna (which believe it or not, is my second one because I read the other one by this writer LOL) This one is more Suna POV and it really goes into his fears and desires, and I like the way Osamu pushes him to live more freely.

***reasons to microwave an elixir by spiritscript (T) 8.2k // THIS ONE. UGH I love, and it’s funny and cute and it EVEN HAS CRIME (kinda not really but yes)! I love the quiet moments they have and the PET AHHHHHHH! We love medic Osamu :DDDDD But also the betrayal and the sparring (and the irony at the end LOL) AJSKJNFK.

we fall between by stringendos (T) 14.7k // honestly the entire time I was just screaming at my computer, begging for them to hurry up and realize, but alas this is a ~slow burn~ for a reason and the tag ‘exes who act like theyre married’ really is the reason I read it and I do not regret LOL. Also bless Matsuda and stan her.

All the Time in the World by minie_ai (M) 8.8k // we love immortality! Denial! And Suna mentally filing away blackmail against people (namely Astumu) LOL. Running away from your problems is always the answer (I am saying this is a not sarcastic manner because I too, run away from my problems LOL) but ramen is ALWAYS a good answer. We love ourselves some emotional constipation LOL.

***none but you by broikawa (T) 7.2k // everything is a competition always LOL, not that I’m complainin but still LOL EVERYTHING. I really love this one because I love the progression and cock-block SakuAtsu hehe. I love them being synchronized idiots <3

it all comes back to you, (my home) by iritaescents (T) 4.5k // FOREVER, WE STAN FOREVER. Anyway, LOL this was is very very cute and fluff and not slow burn, it fast burn LOL. It’s a cute fic to read and it even has our favorite, now say it with me SOULMATES LOL.

Can't help falling in bed with you by tirralirra (T) 6.7k // here we see a 5 + 1 with points for the title (I think it’s very funny LOL my humor is bad ;)) Not that it really needs extra points because it’s a great fic in itself LOL but I really liked the title so I felt the need to share this with you all (OOPS). This was so cute, and the + 1 is HILARIOUS.

It’s no longer up :(((((( -> love's consequences by xginpuff (T) 6.5k // WARNINGS AND TAGS been a while since we had an angsty fic in this list (LOL the way I just tried to avoid all of them hehe). I read the tags but ngl I was still surprised later LOL maybe I’m just dumb, but anyway IK it starts out a bit confusing, but after you read more, you’ll get into it!

***sunagashi by bastigod (T) 9.8k // if there’s anything I like more than mythology, it’s folklore LOL. I love this fic and the plot is written so artfully AHDSAJN. Also the scene with the Ume-chan and her comment (so snarky I love). Also they way I went through so much trouble trying to figure out the kanji LOL (SPOILER it’s miyarin hehe)

catch me (while i'm still runnin') by lunarins (T) 4.3k // first and foremost, may we have a moment of silence for Komori and his eyebrows..... Continuing, this fic was so good because I love a good heist hehe. Their slight of hand abilities really doing the most LOL, and the ending OMG. I love the way the writer added in how they appeared to others during the heist, it really made it so good! Ugh to have a painting class and almost die LOL.

***if we get this right by Slumber (G) 5k // OLD FRIEND plsplspls I love this fic and I love how Osamu slowly relearns who he knew Suna as AHHH. The ending, again UGH, I really loved it and their banter with one another.

The Study of Suna Rintarou by DeathBelle (T) 6.1k // PLEASE the way Osamu kept getting offended omg. But also the effort Suna puts into getting to know Osamu, I was in ~love~. Read to me Osamu, READ TO ME. But also the Osamu is an oblivious MF agenda is alive and well within this fic hehe.

Take a Hint by pancake_surprise (G) 2.3k // ok so I had just read a tumbr post about the one bed thing and then I saw this fic. It was like the stars aligned okay? I was like, ig I HAVE to read it now hehe. But seriously read it, it’s cute and like everything else, of course there’s a challenge to be made LOL.

Heatwave by pancake_surprise (G) 2.1k // the way they were dating without knowing they were dating man. The tag ‘Didn't Know They Were Dating‘ more accurate than the ‘first dates’ one LOL jk but actually tho am I kidding? It’s the first official one IG. LOL anyway, we do love the doin of the defining of relationships. Yup.

If you made it all the way down here, CONGRATS LOL. Like I said, I didn’t read all of them (sadly) and these were the ones i did read LOL. I might add more depending on whether I can motivate myself into reading fics I know will be good LOL so we’ll see heh. Honestly, I thought I was gonna get word counted, but YAY we finished (for now hehe). Also sorry for any possible typos (is this no beta we die like men?) I’m running on 90 min of sleep so my engrish be strugglin LOL. Be safe and wear masks :)

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redstaratmorning · 3 years

Text

Headcanons and Musings of Pirate-y And Plunderous Proportions: Astarion Says What

Synopsis: Random musings and ramblings regarding and spawning from the differences between how Astarion says just one word, depending on your choices—“What?” This got very long and touches not only on Astarion’s difference in presentation in aforementioned moment, but also some discussion-thoughts to chuck onto the dashboard regarding some other elements of Astarion’s content thus far in Early Access, and some thoughts to add onto others’ speculations and wonderings (I did not save sources so pardon the lack of proper citation, oops. We’re going informal here anyway.) Spoilers for Chapter 1 BG3 scenes, plot, etc, under the cut in case someone hasn’t filtered out the tags. Trigger warning/content warning: some discussion of heavy topics is mentioned and explored, including starvation, abuse/torture, and trauma. Other topics of note for summarization include speculation on Astarion’s largely unknown as-of-early-access background and a touch of his possible pre-vampire morality leanings, possible mental state/trauma reaction in a couple of scenes, and vague speculation on Larian’s gameplan for Astarion’s arc ending. Gather thy party and venture forward, for here be dragons and lots o’ text, matey! [/stereotypical pirate accent]

“What?” Just that one word, between the goblin party and the tiefling party. If Larian keeps the body language and tone presentation more or less where it’s at now in Early Access, they are worlds apart and delightfully up for interpretation of just what’s going on in our favorite vampire spawn’s head. This won’t be an in-depth post about all the tonal and body language differences, just picking out a few due to personal constraints (ie too broke to buy this game currently.) Edit: And also a lot of other thoughts and ramblings tacked on, lol. On the one hand we have him at the goblin party, where he seems much more superficially comfortable there, knows what’s going on and knows what to expect—it feels like he’s done this kind of scene a hundred times before. The comfort of familiarity. Did Cazador throw “parties”, much like how he “invited” Astarion to dine with him? I wouldn’t be surprised if he mingled at regular dinner parties either before his turning, or perhaps after when he’s ordered to hunt for Cazador’s evening repast. I doubt the goblin party has anything as potentially horrific as what Cazador would have lined up on the nightly basis, which is why Astarion isn’t aggro’d: he’s in a position of power at this party after all, not a powerless one. A conquering hero, as he describes the MC. A Precarious position, as it turns out.

Circling back to that one word though, the way he says “what” in that scene after he propositions the MC and the MC picks the “Maybe. If you say please” line feels like Astarion’s response could be interpreted as pretty abrupt. On guard, perhaps, squaring up, offended, even perhaps lowkey challenging/hostile. Expressing social displeasure and possibly staring down the MC mayhaps? Could be, especially if Astarion’s body language remains as it is rigged now in-scene with that step forward, his shoulders shifting, the lack of a smile, that assessing glare, all combined with that flat tone of voice. The animation could just be temporary and subject to change, but if it does end up as more or less the final version of that moment’s depiction, it’s pretty interesting as a shift. I’d read it as potentially “not actually truly comfortable in this situation, just familiar and numb to it all”, especially when combined with some of his other earlier potential lines at the goblin party, such as the following: Astarion: So, what are we drinking to? Other than a pile of corpses. MC: That’s not funny. Astarion: Oh don’t be so sour - It’s a party. You did what you had to. Don’t be ashamed that you did it well. MC: I wish things had turned out differently. Astarion: And I wish I was drinking out of the skulls of everyone who’s ever wronged me. Life is tough. Although that’s not to say we can’t have a little fun. This supports the whole “has been through his personal hell and has adapted to survive it albeit not unscathed” story Larian seems to be going for with him quite nicely in the little tells and details. A sort of “take what joy you can even amidst the dark situation surrounding us” trauma-induced adaptation, coupled together with actual enjoyment on his part for killing. It’d be easy to say Astarion is moreso in his element at the goblin party, and to a degree he is—it’s one he is well practiced with in his current mindset. Compare now how he acts at the tiefling party—we can all agree he’s not having a good time, our friendly neighborhood vampire sulking in particular over the fact that “there’s a worm in [his] brain, [he’s] surrounded by idiots, and all [he] has to drink is wine that tastes like vinegar.” But the delightful thing is he’s complaining so vividly about it. The wine likely is worse at the tiefling party, seeing as they’re refugees, and the goblins had previously captured a duke whom they likely stole loot from and under orders from Minthara et al stored said goods elsewhere for a later date (likely some of said goods were consumed at the party if it happened. Edit: Shadowheart’s drunk dialogue at the goblin party mentions the goblin’s wine there being good, poor dear. Fascinating hints at her story and character in that scene though.) This is assuming Astarion is drinking wine at the goblin party, of course. He may very well be drinking something red and full-bodied there, just not made from grapes. But even in his complaints and presentation, he seems arguably more relaxed and less on guard compared to his demeanor at the goblin party. Let’s be honest, he doesn’t view goblins as equals or stimulating company judging by his various voice lines expressing his disdain, distrust and overall low opinion of them as vermin among other things. The fact that he’s willing to call the tiefling refugees idiots while in earshot of them? Definitely doesn’t respect them as a group—though he has a less negatively opined line regarding them earlier on if the caged goblin (Sazza) is killed,—which is not surprising given that MC and company at the time of the party just saved them from certain death. Astarion’s reaction however also reads as potentially at ease enough to say what he’s thinking. He’s not going to get murdered for saying so, and there aren’t any punishing power games at play with the refugees and do-gooders he’s found himself surrounded by. There aren’t any hedonistic shenanigans going on and the drinks are terrible, so it’s not an entertaining party for him, but one could make an argument that Astarion might actually be feeling more secure or at least less threatened-as-is/was-his-accepted-ongoing-norm there. Which might mean he’s feeling quite out of place, or even just not...entirely engaged with what’s going on around him and even within him as far as emotional states go. Would he casually pull the same stunt at the goblin party? If you’re a bastard to him, yes, but that’s not in the same emotional vein as his dialogue during the tiefling party at all. Loyalty from the goblins is fickle, the goblins worship the Absolute and those that are chosen by the Absolute—so long as said Chosen remain powerful enough to subjugate them and is in favor. Astarion knows this kind of power structure well: ruling by fear and power. With the tieflings? It’s not superiors-and-subordinates, it’s just...people. People celebrating surviving an event that could’ve very well and most likely would’ve ended in their deaths. Will he get to celebrate like that one day? That could very well be a painful and bleak thing to consider, and not something he wants to contemplate as of yet, based on his dialogue lines that demonstrate his fear of Cazador. How’s he supposed to get lost in the fun and revelry if the wine doesn’t even taste good to him? I don’t know wines, but I’m guessing from what little I do know and what I’ve read of flavor descriptors for wines hyped as good, it might actually be bad wine based on the adjective “sharp” when mixed with the rest of the description if the MC takes a sip. Sharp seems to suggest too many tannins, or maybe improper storage so the wine actually did turn to taste a bit more like vinegar, or maybe not enough sugar in the grapes used, perhaps? To be fair, I do believe there’s a non-conversation line somewhere of Astarion’s regarding solid food tasting terrible to him, but I can’t verify that so a pinch of salt there. Still, if his taste buds are aligned with regular living mortal ones for wine at least, RIP Astarion, he’s stuck with a terrible drink for the foreseeable night. Unless, of course, you know. ;D Compared to the tieflings, the goblins as a whole? As a group they’re a scraped together army of pillagers hungry for destruction and spoils. They don’t have ANY loyalty to you—in addition to being willing to betray you via murder immediately despite working with them when Sazza first brings you back to meet Minthara, there’s also when Minthara potentially opts to try to kill you post-goblin-party. If you persuade her not to, Minthara does mention “do not return to the goblin camp, as far as they were concerned you were destined to die tonight.” This is not a group to get chummy with, obviously. Doesn’t say good things about the Absolute’s followers in general, either, or the Absolute depending on if Minthara’s being honest about the Absolute intending that the MC dies after razing the grove. Minthara could just be lying to serve her own ends and is out to destroy any rivals for the Absolute’s favor, after all, I can’t verify that from dialogue exploration at present. So it’s not surprising that this is not a group Astarion is going to let his guard down around I’m sure, or around an MC that sided with the goblins, because fortunes can shift like the wind in a scene like that, and I think his utter lack of surprise at Minthara trying to kill you all (whether or not the MC had a romp with her) is potentially spawned because he recognizes this fact. He’s been here before, in another time, another place, with different faces, but he’s seen this play before. And the MC is just another face for the same old role of a player in this rat race for power when they side with the goblins, aren’t they? The difference this time though is: will they succeed and make it to the top? Is Astarion betting on the winning horse, or not? Far less reason and far more motivation to not be emotionally invested in anyone or anything around him because it’s survival of the fittest, and the most ruthless will be the ones who win—the MC just reinforced that perspective for Astarion, in slaughtering the tieflings. But Astarion isn’t fully corrupted yet, despite however much Cazador has twisted and tormented him so. Isn’t it fascinating, that the MC, one of the first people Astarion can actually interact with relatively freely without Cazador’s puppeteering influence hanging over him quite so acutely, is someone who might very well and very likely will have a huge impact on how Astarion develops and sees the world? For better or for worse, the MC will shape all the companions’ futures and perspectives it seems, depending on their choices. On a meta note, isn’t that thrillingly fascinating and engaging work by Larian Studios? Bravo, honestly. Continuing, for Astarion this could very well just feel like a better but complimentary and thematically continuous segment of the nightmare that is his existence under Cazador as it goes on: he’s a vampire now, and the world is only ever a power struggle between the strong and the weak, and he knows better than to ever be weak again. Kindness and virtue belonged to Before. Before he died, before he turned, before he was taken. Those are things in stories and fairy tales now, that belong to other people, other places and times, other lives—things that belong to the living, not the undead. Sentimentality, more universally-accepted morality, all of those Good™-aligned or softer feelings can feel like they have no place in his world now, on this darker path. But he knows what they are, not just in theory I think, but also perhaps knowing from memory and experience, however distant and faint. The way he speaks on many occasions has subtext that could very well suggest he wasn’t without a better side through implication and emotion. Which is not to say I think he was a shining paragon of virtue before he died—guessing based off of the dev team’s writing of him so far, I’m expecting nuanced and complex but ultimately very human (or elf if you’re being fantasy-based technical) morality with both merits and flaws, for polarizing opinions in the fandom. That being said, I’m holding off judgment on what kind of person he was before he was turned for now despite reading about pre-early-access, preliminary ideas the dev team had for his background. The reason I’m waiting to see what the dev team puts into the game for his backstory of Before, is because some of his datamined lines could be taken in a couple of different ways, and some of his emotional responses as is currently don’t track as truly Machiavellian or I’d say malevolent in nature for manipulation or otherwise. Granted, not all Evil™ acts stem from intentions to be malevolent. Sometimes people do evil both in-game and in life without really intending to, or recognizing that they do, nor seeing the harm they have caused or will cause (I’m looking at you, Mayrina.) Manipulative yes, but so far it’s looked like it’s for defensive purposes in a world that is out to hurt or kill him if given any opportunity whatsoever. Personally I actually wouldn’t even say he’s been really manipulative at all, but your mileage may vary. He lies because he’s afraid you’re going to murder him for being a vampire, and because he doesn’t want to reveal the cause of two centuries’ worth of trauma to someone he just met and likely can’t predict if they’re emotionally safe for him to interact with. Note: “emotionally safe” does not necessarily denote being sympathetic here, so much as “will their response cause me pain in some fashion?” from Astarion’s point of view, which does not necessarily require the MC to be mean to him though obviously that wouldn’t help. We touch upon why sympathy can hurt later on in this essay. And why would he expect sympathy in the other instance, regarding revealing that he’s a vampire? How often would we not murder strange vampires we just met in DND-worlds? Is that not a common response and practice in Faerun for the most part? They’re on the list of acceptable prey for a monster hunter to be kidnapped and taken to who knows what fate (probably nothing good we’re sure), and who would come rescue them? In all actuality: No one. If he wasn’t a companion he’d easily just be one more random encounter to kill—as he and all the companions are in the right circumstances, *cough cough* like when sacrificing anyone to Boooal *cough.* Astarion’s had little cracked moments where he seems to be showing genuine vulnerability, and I’d say he likely displays real genuine emotion plenty of times, just not all the time. While the vulnerable moments could be a ploy, were he the type to actually be fully acting, I’m disinclined to bet that he’d act in the way he does during those moments if he planned them out or even improvised. It could be a mix of both, where it’s both true but also an act of manipulation. Were it the last option, that would require more exploration of his character in various situations to determine imo. I still doubt that though. I think he’s a little too raw and real in his pain, anger, and aggression to say he’s being malevolently manipulative at the end of the day, at least thus far in chapter one. The MC’s choices may change and influence that, on the Evil™ route. I’ve been following some of the fantastic dash discussions on Astarion’s reaction to when the MC tries to comfort him (because of course I have, I’m here for BG3 content and Astarion content especially, aren’t we all here for the same party in his tag? Also hello fellow Astarion stans! :D I hope everyone’s having a good day), and if some of these datamined lines from Pjenn’s blog post are actually implemented and kept as canonical [link], specifically the ones Astarion says regarding heroes, I do think it ties in very strongly with some of what other folks have said regarding his recoiling reaction. Copy-pasted the potential dialogue lines of interest below: Astarion: Heroes. |said with disgust| Astarion: Heroes had two centuries to save me from my torture, but not one came knocking. Astarion: The strong had two centuries to pluck me from torture, but no one came. No, it was the mind flayers that rescued me. Astarion: I spent centuries as the victim of a corrupt man. It was the mind flayers that plucked me away from that. I very much enjoyed all the takes on Astarion’s potential motivations in his response, and I do want to chuck another idea into the fray that supports the vein of ideas that have him being truly afraid and then angry at the MC in that scene, with the speculation including those possible hero lines above as influence. Specifically, I’d like to bring in an outside comparison to part of Molly Grue’s reaction to seeing the Unicorn from The Last Unicorn animated movie for the first time, transcribed below: The Unicorn: I’m here now. Molly: [Bitter laugh] Oh? And where were you twenty years ago? Ten years ago? Where were you when I was new? When I was one of those innocent, young maidens you always come to? How dare you. How DARE you come to me now, when I am this. [begins to cry, heartbroken] Consider Astarion being shown kindness when he is now away from Cazador, not fully free or safe yet but not currently actively fully suffering Cazador’s torment all up close and personal. Consider that only on that very night before he was snatched up by the mindflayers, which might’ve been anywhere from only a day to a handful of days before this conversation about his nightmare, he was going out to falsely smile and lure some innocent—(“No innocents. You have my word.”)—or perhaps not so innocent, beautiful soul back to Cazador’s mansion to very likely die or be turned. How often must he do so? Is it every night he is ordered to go out and condemn someone else to that unfortunate fate? Do you think Cazador killed them cleanly? Quickly? Why would he, instead of agonizingly grinding out any last traces of sympathy his spawn might have through the guilt that they are the ones who “choose” who suffers and likely dies at Cazador’s hands that night? To give the illusion of choice is one abuse/torture tactic that can be used to break a soul that we see often in games: choose who suffers or dies. Cazador is unquestionably a personality who enjoys the psychological aspect of tormenting his victims, as evidenced by giving Astarion the “choice” to be either flayed or to “dine” on a rotting, dead rat, as well as other mentions of how he puts thought into torturing those around him. Astarion is still so fresh from his torment,—torment that is still technically on-going with the very real threats of resuming once more—he is emotionally bleeding enough arterial blood at the seams to fill a sea. His actions, words, and emotions so often metaphorically smell of blood, and not because he’s a vampire and the traditional role of a vampire being a predator among humanoids ironically enough, but because being a vampire spawn means Cazador. And Cazador means horror. Astarion has survived, yes, and it’s been hell. He’s still in hell, because he isn’t free yet. Not truly. It’s a desperate gasp of air, this taste of freedom, to dream that he could be free of Cazador. Imagine his feelings when he’s now in something like freedom, a reminder of what could be, what his life might’ve and likely was like once upon a time, an uncertain here-and-now where he has the possibility—just a possibility, and an unlikely one at that for most ordinary or less-than-ordinary people, not a certainty—of being free, and he’s just admitted to the horror that is Cazador. Admitted in this moment how much Cazador frightens him, how much just the thought of Cazador frightens him, how much the possibility he might be sent back to his master and having his previous tormented existence resumed truly frightens him. And the MC reaches out in sympathy. In acknowledgement that what Astarion has been through is horrifying. To look at this horror and say it is pain, and terror, and awful, that it isn’t normal. It isn’t something to ignore. It isn’t something to pretend is just everyday same old, same old, to numb and take off the edge as much as one can. That Astarion’s pain and fear aren’t to be sought out for entertainment or at best to be willfully neglected in an act of malice. That stark moment of contrast, like night and day, could bring the pain of two hundred years crashing down inside his head, all compressed into one moment. Feelings he tried so hard to survive through, ignore perhaps, suppress: fear, helplessness, loneliness, misery, anger, sorrow, hatred, pain, anxiety, distress, need. Memories, of so many instances that hurt in that moment and then continued to hurt for so long afterwards. How much must it hurt him, wound him, to lift his head for air and have a perspective outside of his suffering that is sympathetic...but knowing that nobody came to save him. That perhaps, no one ever will, if he loses this so-called freedom and is dragged back under. That those that care, cannot help you. And that those that can help, do not care. Why would anyone help him at this point after all? He’s a vampire spawn. A classically defined monster in the eyes of society, and he knows it. (”I’m not some monster!” / ”At best, I was sure you’d say no. More likely you’d ram a stake through my ribs.”) He must have been truly desperate in his starvation to chance anyone finding out he’s a vampire in the party. Not surprising, he can’t rest at the end of the day like the other companions can. He has to expend extra energy at that point to find food discreetly after fighting all day, and subpar food at that. (”Animal blood tastes like muck.” verification needed, it’s a conversational line in some branch of the morning-after he asks to bite the MC the first time) He’s not eating breakfast, snacks or lunch during the day, and he isn’t guaranteed to find food while hunting in the woods. Game might be scarce, he can be wounded or exhausted after a long day of fighting, and he wasn’t starting out in the peak of health to begin with either. He is a vampire spawn yes and apparently can take down large game such as boars to drain them, but that is a rough existence to condemn anyone to mechanically speaking. He knows what he’s risking, regardless of his int stat. But he takes that risk anyway. The character who is so survival driven, risking a very high likelihood of expulsion at best or death as the much-more-likely worst outcome of this attempt? His bite isn’t painless, and pain can wake a person up readily enough if they aren’t a deep sleeper, and how deep a sleeper are most people when in an uncertain and unfamiliar wilderness, potentially while hungry and cold, with the fretting fear of a agonizing death looming over their head? Even accounting for a lack of mental clarity from hunger and exhaustion and other factors, I find it deeply unlikely that Astarion is unaware of how big a risk he’s taking with the odds are stacked against him, rogue class or not. And even if he’s just thrown out of the group? He’s alone. Vulnerable. A target to be hunted by a much bigger, meaner predator. One that won’t kill him quickly, we can guess. His odds are much lower, on his own. Specifically his odds of not being dragged back to Cazador...assuming the MC doesn’t just turn him over to Gandrel. How terrifying is it to imagine that your suffering will never end, to be told it will never end, and then you are reminded of what it is like to not suffer for a time. To have felt the painful hope that maybe there is a possibility that you could escape an existence of torment...but knowing you very well might not? It is desperately bleak. It is no great leap of the imagination to hear Astarion saying—(or more likely thinking because this would be terribly vulnerable...but he might say something when pushed because he’s so full of sharp edges and bleeding insides still)—something similar to Molly Grue’s line in his own fashion, is it? Astarion: “[Bitterly laughing, mockingly so. As he speaks his tone breaks, an edge of raw, desperate hysteria slipping through, attached to centuries of pain turned to anger] And where were you two hundred years ago? A hundred years ago? Where were you when I still desperately thought in the deepest parts of my heart that someone might come? When I still had hope? Astarion: [his voice turns low and venomous, raising in volume and accusation before finishing with a break on the final word “this”, a tonal admittance of how distraught and self-aware he is of what he’s had to do, of what he’s had to become to survive] How dare you. How DARE you say this to me now, when I am this.” (the above lines are entirely fictional and are not from any in-game, data-mined, or otherwise official source or content) He’s been made to do so many terrible things, even just based off of the few lines we have heard in early access he’s been through so much horror. An hour of torture, a day, a month is so incredibly long. It can have such lasting impact on a person—PTSD, as we know it in this day and age. A year? Five years, ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred? An elf he may be, but from a human perspective...he’s been tortured for lifetimes. Even as an elf, two hundred years is a long time. More than long enough to seriously alter how someone’s brain works—people are both amazingly resilient, but also so incredibly fragile. Cazador has had all this time to play with Astarion’s brain, honestly I find it impressive Astarion has any sense of self left after all this time. That he’s still driven to survive, that he still feels anything at all. (”It doesn’t look broken. But then again, none of us do.”) It doesn’t surprise me that he’s intensely bitter when encountering the “paladins” of Tyr—(ie Anders and company if you know who I mean—and was that a Dragon Age 2 reference? If not that is an amazing coincidence with the whole Anders-Justice-Vengeance-Demon thing there)—if the MC asks something to the tune of “Don’t you wish someone had helped you when you needed it?” Oh. Oh that had to be a painful question for him. Astarion had his basic needs denied and abused, to ask if he wished that someone had helped him when he needed that and more, and no one came? Why was he denied but the paladins get help? Why does he have to be the hero when no one came for him, when no one very well might come for him when he might still very well be in dire straits in the near future? I can see the possible desire to inspire sympathy intended in the question from the MC, but it can be so utterly without sympathy to ask that in some contexts, and in Astarion’s case it is. He was being abused and controlled without any way out—Anders and his cohorts opted into the deal with Zariel for personal reasons, not as far as I know under threat of imminent death, and they are relatively capable of fulfilling their end of the bargain barring their current injuries at the time. They certainly have more freedom of choice than Astarion and other vampire spawn ever did, and they were not being tortured right then and there. Warlocks, referring to Anders and co., might even have the option to get out of deals, a la Wyll’s personal questline hook thus far. Astarion can’t get out of his servitude from Cazador. Cazador holds all the cards, makes all the decisions, has all of the power. To compare Astarion’s situation to his face with that of the “paladins”? I’m surprised he wasn’t spitting fury, honestly. They still have normal elements to their day to day life, despite their devil’s deal. They are not being tormented on the daily—yet. They are not in hell—yet. They can get out. They have the possibility. A possibility Astarion didn’t—until now. And isn’t that the most fucked up thing, that it wasn’t a force of Good™ that saved him, but an even bigger monster than Cazador himself? He was saved—by mindflayers, intending some fate that was likely worse for him than before. Even when the Absolute’s hand begins to be revealed in all this, he is still a pawn among monstrous masters. What heroes there are in the world, won’t come for him. They never did before, and they didn’t now. Heroes are for other people, for realities aside from his own. They are for other people, living Other lives. Not his life. Forces of Good™ swooping in to save the day, to correct the wrongs of the world and to make things Right™ just isn’t his normal. Not anymore, if ever it was. His normal was warped by Cazador a long time ago. Is it a stretch of the imagination that if Cazador twisted “dinner” to be a choice between consuming a rotting, putrid rat corpse or being flayed on a nightly basis, turning “poetry” into the memory of a “sonnet” carved into Astarion’s back with a razor over the course of an entire night full of Astarion’s own pained screams? Is it hard to imagine that Cazador also took pleasure in turning other ordinary situations one might encounter in normal life into nightmare versions as well for Astarion and his other spawn? One illithid mind-power option shows Cazador controlling Astarion by holding his chin, though without any further context. Cazador wouldn’t have had to do more than that to invoke terror, after a certain point in time. It seems highly unlikely the gesture wasn’t followed up with more pain, though. Perhaps in that moment when he speaks of his nightmare in the first conversation and the MC reaches out to him in sympathy...Astarion was reminded of something. Multiple somethings, multiple moments, when Cazador reached out to him oh so casually, and it ended in pain and terror. The way the camera is framed as of the current time in early access, the way he flinches away crying “No!” so quiet and low, his eyes wide and staring just so, how he goes so far as to pull back almost entirely out of frame and the camera slowly pans to follow him? Perhaps that is just a stand-in scene, but as it is, even now, it emphasizes that he is I would argue genuinely afraid, and reflexively responding in what is likely his first opportunity to freely respond to his traumatically induced fear. The first opportunity where he wasn’t supernaturally compelled to do exactly as Cazador ordered him to, the first opportunity where he was likely not going to be tormented further for expressing his fear, for having his main tormentor laugh and delight in his distress. The first instance where he for a split second let his guard down, and didn’t expect to be hurt—until the MC reached for him, echoing possible memories of what happened last time someone (Cazador) did that. It’s not Cazador reaching for him. But...it is not Cazador. He doesn’t have to worry about Cazador hurting him right that second, but...will the MC hurt him, like Cazador did? Will they make it look like they’re going to help him, that he can trust them, and then betray him? (”How can you be so cruel?” / “It [Raphael playing games] reminds me of Cazador, taunting his slaves with hope when he knew the game was rigged.”) But they scared him. They scared him, and perhaps for a moment he was back there, in another time and place, where he knows, where he remembers, vividly, perhaps even recently, what normally would have happened to him. And how dare they make him feel that. (“I can do without reliving that particular night, thank you.” [Nightmare about Cazador dialogue, a separate scene if you miss the insight check from the first post-nightmare camp discussion I believe.]) He’s so raw and upset, both aggressive and defensive when he speaks about his nightmares in quite a few of his lines, asking and waiting to explain just why his nightmares are truly so terrifying, especially in the second-nightmare conversation. The way he speaks there, and in other scenes, makes me very disinclined to interpret him as actively intending evil in general so much as having been shaped to be ruthless through a centuries-long trial by fire that he isn’t free and clear of yet. Based off of how he reacts on more than one occasion, I’m personally inclined to take a leaf from Wyll’s book and say I do think he has more than just potential to be good. “Good™” being relative of course to his situation and undead-life—Astarion has GREAT potential as a character to explore not only what it means to be Evil™ aligned, but also what people on the meta perceive as evil, as well as what prejudices we may carry from that labeling. He is I think very much an excellent walking morality test and ironically a mirror for the player’s character. What kind of person is the MC, in how they treat and interact with him. He is a complicated and morally-entangled character, and it is so very easy to only read him in the here and now within the stark, daylight context of societal’s average norms without looking at the very real, very recent nightmarish Twilight Zone reality he’s lived in that echoes through his words and story thus far. It’s a marvelous bit of echoing reality and real life here by Larian, truth be told: how do you tell people about your life, when it’s been a ceaseless, unending nightmare? With smiles, witticisms, and the occasional polished lie that bleeds out pain, for some folks anyway, including Astarion. He says he’s having more fun at the goblin party, but at the tiefling party? That’s probably the first time he’s been at a normal party where he hasn’t had to obey and fear Cazador’s orders and inevitable torment during or afterwards. That’s the first time in his entire undead existence when he’s been in a social situation like this without being afraid, hurt, or manipulated. It’s not a fun party on its own by his standards, but it is a safe party for him. In a way though, safety can be boring. A luxury, yes, but in this case? For him, boring. And boring...might very well be irritating, in an anxiety-turned-irritation fashion, because he’s not being tormented right this very moment. He should be finding something to enjoy, because in his normal everyday routine? In the day to day that he would expect, that his subconscious expects out of habit? Opportunity for any form of enjoyment must be rare indeed, twisted and tainted by Cazador’s ever looming shadow over every minute of Astarion’s vampiric existence so far. It could be anxiety-inducing, to not seek pleasure or some form of happiness or comfort while there is opportunity for it, in what one perceives as a respite from constant, on-going suffering. (”Why do you insist on exhuming the past?” - when you ask about his past in camp, after you know he’s a vampire. An unpleasant reminder of an unpleasant past, why would he want to dwell on it? He has enough pain to last him multiple lifetimes. Literally.) From the deep, deep depths of prolonged suffering, it can potentially take a great deal more intensity of sensation to feel anything at all, let alone something approaching happiness. (”For the first time in two hundred years, I felt happy.” [presumed Astarion-origin line after drinking from a sleeping companion] / “I feel strong. I feel...happy!” [after MC succeeds in persuading Astarion to stop drinking from their neck after giving him permission to do so.]) This isn’t even taking into consideration how vampirism might have impacted Astarion’s psychology on a metabolic/biochemical level, so to speak. Where Larian goes with that is still to be determined, though my money’s on they give him more a murderous edge and natural inclination—not unlike a Beast-lite version of bloodlust from Vampire: The Masquerade— but still keep his core traits very much human rather than supernaturally-alien/2D-cut-out-monstrous. (Or elvhen, if we’re being fantasy-world-linguistically technical here again.) Touching on the matter of monstrous behavior though...It is a powerfully understated moment of casual cruelty that Larian allows the MC to decide once and once only, if Astarion may also drink from people or only animals. It’s so fitting I don’t believe it to be coincidence that he was a magistrate in his backstory—isn’t the MC passing a judgement too on him, a sentence to change his life for the foreseeable future, possibly forever without realizing or perhaps not caring about the full extent of their actions? And one cannot forget Wyll’s comment about the rat diet. Oh, can you not hear the resonating parallel real life pain from how those ignorant of another’s hurts might unintentionally mock the person and hurt them so? How some might apply their own morality from their own life experiences, without looking at the full extent of the consequences of their actions? A life and perspective that more likely has never been tested under the lash and upon the rack of some of life’s worst possible realities? Even if Wyll and the MC don’t mean to be, it is so very, very cruel. It is beautifully painful, Abdirak and the goddess Loviatar would be proud. (”My mind is finally clear. I feel strong. I feel...happy!”) To be denied not just better food, but the ability to think clearly, to feel well, the actuality of being happy as a norm? It is so very hollow an existence to feel so constantly weak of both body and mind, and oh isn’t it just the richest thing, that an MC might echo Cazador’s choice and power over Astarion thusly? It’s enough to make one laugh an Evil Laugh™ of appreciation at just how unthinkingly, horribly cruel a person can potentially be while playing a Good™ character. This is actually a level of genius on Larian’s part that I wonder how many in the audience will actually look at and appreciate the subtle horror of. The horror that we do this too, in real life, sometimes without ever knowing the seemingly small, far-reaching ripples of harm an unthinking phrase or comment can do when we don’t take another’s reality into consideration—that we don’t know what it is we don’t know. It is a fine piece of storytelling, to offer up a story with so many facets to reflect upon. It’s so beautifully crafted that Astarion speaks and dresses like a noble, that he can so easily be perceived as a person of privilege at first glance should one merely look at some of his surface behaviors and inclinations—remnant trappings of his distant past most likely, from once upon a time. It’s a delightful reveal and subversion that he, I think we can safely say, isn’t that. Perhaps he was, once, but he isn’t at this point in his life, not anymore. Appearances are deceiving, and doesn’t that just tie so nicely right into some of Astarion’s potential themes and behaviors? The lies that crack open as truth and pain come bleeding out from underneath? I do wonder how many of Larian’s audience have known hunger—and not known when the next meal will happen, what it might be, if it will have strings attached? The kind of hunger that follows you everywhere, that roots down into your bones and hollows out a home there forever more? It changes how a person sees things, how they act, how they think, even when they’re removed from being hungry all the time. One doesn’t need to be skin and bones to feel like one is starving constantly,—(I very much enjoy that headcanon just to clarify, I’m not intending to throw shade in any of this or future rambling)—to be kept on a hollow diet of empty calories that are enough to keep your heart pumping, but your body struggles because it doesn’t have the nutrients it needs in the amounts it needs? To feel your mind fog over with exhaustion and blanketed despair, a primal and low level desperation whittled down into a tired and numb, anxious background static from adrenal fatigue? Miscellaneous aches, pains and problems that seem unrelated but in reality, if only you knew, were because your body can’t function the way it should ideally, because you don’t have what you truly need? A very real problem in real life, for far too many people. And oh, the beautiful, casual, so very human monstrousness Larian lets us exercise here, knowing or unknowing. It is such a powerful, understated cluster of ideas. And I think Larian knew—someone on the dev team did their homework on both traditional starvation but also what one might call masked-starvation as no doubt other tumblr folks have also speculated, just based off of what we’ve seen and because of that Happy buff Astarion gets when he uses his Vampiric Bite ability in combat. It fits right into his whole theme of “what makes a monster and what makes a man?” (Sing the bells of Notre Dame~♪) But not necessarily asking that question only of him. Rather, asking it also of the MC. This fits into the game’s whole theme with the tadpoles, the choice of using the power and turning into “Something More Beautiful” as Minthara put it, of taking the darker path, it all fits so very well. I just want to applaud this because it’s not a major story-beat moment. It’s a companion-side-quest moment. It’s going to be for the most part seen as a combat-game-mechanic and head-canon defining moment, deciding if Astarion may feed on people or not. I doubt we’d see Larian actually changing Astarion’s demeanor much in how he delivers lines with a “allowed to drink people blood” code flag, as cool as that might be. It very well could factor into later outcomes but for voice acting I doubt they’ll make an entire second/third/etc set of each line spawning from that one seemingly small choice. It makes me very hopeful that Larian can handle such weighty themes so deftly thus far—we’ll have to wait and see if they can stick the landing once the game is finished, but boy oh boy their nuance and delivery so far is strong as steel and sharp as a double-edged sword right out of the gate. The studio is in a fantastic position to explore and to challenge people’s thoughts and ideas regarding character builds like Astarion’s imo, depending on how the dev team chooses to play it out. Seeing some of Gale and Shadowheart’s dialogue trees from the goblin party, I have high hopes that the dev team will allow a great deal of exploration and flexibility all across the moral spectrums, not only allowing us the option to drag the more seen-as-good-aligned characters down paths of moral corruption,—(note: I’m including Shadowheart in more neutral-ish territory for now but the fact that she seems to feel emotionally ill—guilty, one could say—at the goblin party and is busy trying to get drunk to drown that feeling out suggests to me she Definitely does have a more good-aligned moral compass to a nuanced degree)—but also the chance to drag more seen-as-evil-aligned characters along the path to more traditionally good endings and persuade them to see the benefits of playing nice with others per more classic Good™ societal rules (subjectively speaking ofc.) But Larian is also in a very precarious place too—speaking strictly of just the one character as the focus of this essay, Astarion resonates very easily through that very real fear, pain, anger, bitterness and so many other emotions as a result of what he has survived, is still surviving through, and struggling against: trauma. How bitter indeed would it be should a character—that people with very deep, real pain can relate to—not get at least the option for a well-crafted, hopeful and merciful epilogue? Oh the sympathetic pain that Larian could reap could be pain of the very worst kind, if they condemn him to only death and darkness with bleak endings that lack nuance and care. I’ve seen some posts where people worry about Astarion not potentially having a good ending, with possible unspoken implications that he might be railroaded into betraying the MC. I’d like to say that I think a lot of his subtext, even looking at the instances where he lies and the datamined details of the voice-acting-directions, would run counter to railroading him to only ever betraying the MC. I think straight betrayal is going to run as mostly antithetical to his core themes in a way. He might betray your MC—but it will likely be because the MC betrayed him first in a myriad of small ways, or in a big way. Approval-rating-system based choices are a very real possibility too, separately or as a part of the equation naturally, in addition to your major in-game choices. That would also include the scenario of betrayal through using the tadpole powers enough to be mind-controlled into having no will of his own, much like the other characters, including the MC. I do think we have plenty of good, solid reason to be very hopeful that he will have a possible good continuation—not ending. A continuation where he manages to free himself from Cazador with the help of his companions or perhaps dare he even say friends, manages to begin the process of healing the immediate pains of his trauma and learning how to truly live with all that he’s been through and all that he’s done, to have the possibility of not only living but living both happily and well for the most part? Who knows what else Larian Studios might have in the works for him and the other companions, as well as the MC and the story of Baldur’s Gate 3. But good outcomes for all seems like it very likely could happen, for all of the companions. His wiki page’s summary tagline hook in particular offers up that implied promise from the developers to the audience, I would say, “Astarion prowled the night as a vampire spawn for centuries, serving a sadistic master until he was snatched away. Now he can walk in the light, but can he leave his wicked past behind?” What that promise is, varies from creator to creator. In this case, based on the wording, I would say that potentially implies a satisfyingly well-crafted and engaging story wherein we find out and determine if the answer to that question is yes or no, and in a DND-based RPG full of choices that have an impact on the people and world around you? In a game genre that has a history of multiple, varied endings for your companions based on how you play? That checks out. Larian so far has been handling things admirably well in my opinion, and I’m willing to invest emotionally in this story they’re telling with the trust that they will deliver a good continuation and conclusion. But on the off-chance that somehow Astarion’s endings all turn out painful and tragic on the meta for the fanbase, that the associated intentional or unintentional messages wound and grieve those who recognize and resonate most strongly with the pains he has felt? On that off-chance, in that instance where we are left bereft and disappointed because of what happened to him or any of the companions or the story itself should somehow things go awry, then it would be your right to ask Larian the very same question Astarion asked you once: How can you be so cruel?

#bg3 #baldur's gate 3 #spoilers #bg3 spoilers #Astarion #character study #long post #very long post #eXtreme rambling ahoy #speculation #congrats if you can read this all #totally understandable if it's too much text tho #it's long enough and rambly enough that it wandered away from the limits I intended #because I have FEELINGS about this gremlin vampire man #cackles madly #maybe the vampire will stop haunting my brain for a bit now #I have other things to do #aside from writing long contemplation pieces #prepare the angst-grapple-hooks crewmates #why yes I'm going to make silly jokes about pirates and sailing and the like #no I do not have any depth to my knowledge base about such things #I just like their hats man #arr #also not looking to make anyone feel bad or invalidate their hcs or opinions #just want good vibes for all #and more cakes for all #metaphorically speaking #the cake is not a lie tho #well #metaphorically it's not a lie

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