These were supposed to be college au doodles but it derailed into being aleduncan doods

Penciled Lines

(Cross-posted on ao3, if you prefer to read it there. Reblogs still appreciated!)

Missa wakes up, and he thinks he might be doomed. This doesn’t scare him nearly as much as it should.

Missa is awake early—by his own metric, anyway. His nocturnal nature causes “early” for him to mean “early night” and not “early morning.” Regardless, “early” means that Philza is not asleep yet, still going through his nightly rituals. “Early” means that Philza is sitting up in (his? their?) the bed, pillows propped up behind him, notebook in his lap, sketching away.

And when Missa wakes up to the soft scritch-scratch of a charcoal pencil on textured paper, his forehead just so happens to be brushing Philza’s hip.

Missa can hardly breathe.

Oh no.

He knows that if he gives any indication that he is awake, Philza will stop sketching, close his notebook, shift himself over until he is politely seated on his side of the bed, and greet Missa with a friendly smile. Philza has done it before, when Missa wakes up early. That’s how Missa knows he’ll do it again.

Thus, Missa can hardly breathe—his breaths have to be the slow in-out of sleep. He can’t so much as twitch, either. He has to keep quiet and play dead or else he’ll be found out. Seen. Caught living the lie.

“Husband,” Philza calls him. They’re not married. They share a bed. They’re hardly ever in it at the same time. They have a son and a daughter. Neither of them know Missa very well. Philza has had an extra set of armor and a skull on his backpack for months, waiting for Missa. Missa doesn’t even know Philza’s last name.

Philza is a good man and a good friend—and Missa doesn't deserve him. Still, he takes what he can get. Curls around it. Hoarding every innocent kindness Philza extends like a starving creature: the generosity of a backpack fully stocked with equipment; the trust Philza places in Missa to watch the kids when he’s asleep; and now, the courtesy of not moving his hip from Missa’s forehead to ensure his “sleeping” isn’t disturbed. Missa clutches all of these little offerings in his greedy claws and hugs them into his chest, even as the guilt eats away at him.

Because, regardless of the lack of mutual feeling, he loves Philza. He loves him so, so much, and that is why he is doomed. He can’t afford to lose what little he has. He can’t cross that line. 

So Missa lies beside Philza, forehead pressed against Philza’s hip, pretending to sleep so he can imagine that they’re not just lying in bed together, but lying in bed, together; and later, when Missa truly wakes, he will sit on his side of the bed and look at Philza’s face soft with sleep and think about how lucky he is that he still has a side-of-the-bed to begin with.

Missa doesn’t mean to drift off. When it starts to happen, he’s hopelessly torn between shaking himself awake and thus giving himself away, or remaining how he is, silently fending off the inevitable. In the end, Missa clings to that scritch-scratch sound of Philza’s pencil on the paper for as long as he can before the fog at last pulls him under. 

Eventually, he dreams. In fact, he dreams of the calloused fingers he dreams of every night, hands like his own, an artist of Death, cradling and shading the contours of his face—a softness dashing charcoal across his jaw, and over his cheekbones, and perhaps on his lips, too, if he’s lucky. Defining every edge of him.

~*~

A deep sigh. Phil stops sketching as Missa shifts in his sleep. He tilts his head up so that the tip of his nose is now just nearly brushing against Phil’s hip. The motion disturbs the wild splay of his dark hair, revealing more of his face: eyelashes, cheeks, warmth. Tender blush of something Stygian and otherworldly. New.

Phil’s lips tilt upwards. He turns to a fresh page, and he starts again.

Utterly Defeated (Patreon)

//zeus week day 7 - party

you're invited!!

OC ROLL CALL!!!

aidma: @eye-cri

gladys: @gladdygirl18

wren: @demonidoodles

katia: @nitia95

xavier: @magikchicken

lillias: @dark-wizardess

this was also just an excuse to draw a lot of ocs LMAO i hope u all don't mind <3

You ever just want to talk about Bertl,

beej should celebrate the day he came back to life and died again like you do with a birthday except instead of throwing a party he holds a funeral because he never had one since he was born already dead

like he has seen many from staying alone in the graveyard for such a long time and always wanted one because he saw all the people reunite to say nice things about the guy that passed away and showing love for them and he was like oh yes I want some of that lmao doesn't get that it's supposed to be sad...

on the contrary he's never seen a fun birthday so he doesn't care for that but he does want his funeral to have party music and refreshments and for people to dance so he pretty much wants a birthday party with eulogies he's very confused

and like... people saying nice things about him in speeches sounds very cool and great in theory until it actually happens and he has to leave the room because he doesn't want to show them he's tearing up and he kicks dirt in their eyes as he walks out

⭐✨ yuus socials

five comfort characters, five tags

thank you for tagging me @its-tea-time-darling ! This was easier than I thought, hahah!

Uhtred (The Last Kingdom)

2. Gladio (Final Fantasy XV)

3. Alexander (Guild Hunter Series)

4. Shay Cormac (Assassin's Creed)

5. Tibarn (Fire Emblem Path Of Radiance/Radiant Dawn)

No Pressure Tags: @captainkilly, @bitchofdarkness, @naps4bats, @bouncehousedemons, and @crookes-library. Have fun lovelies :D

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Ok i kinda want athena to be there in final panda for many reasons but one is to see if i can fit in her ripping prometheus/azem's liver. For Reasons.

abt ur reblog abt fandom stuff, i will happily oblige to ask if ur brain gave u anymore thought of the no apocalypse junpei finds quark au? love love love aoi's role in it and i think abt it a lot so im curious! literally happy to listen to anything abt it this is my entire shit

Oh!!! Sadly I don't have much on it, no, but I do have the initial little exchange that made me think about it, a lot of times my brain just runs with a back and forth dialogue and if I like it I write it down and only if I like it a lot do I go back and write down the descriptors and rest of the context to how the scene plays out in my head but it's sadly not happened to this as fun as it would be of a scenario to think about my brain checked out after I wrote down Aoi being super embarrassing to Akane by talking about when she was a baby and bossing the two around cause they called him in to babysit for being the only one there who knows anything about tending to another living being

Okay actually I read the thing again and apparently I thought of this as an au on my version of the au where the kurashikis don't do any of the vlr or ztd stuff and just work with sois on random esper stuff after a couple years so they don't have to be on the run anymore but they still have more restrictions than other agents, so there's a little joke that's like hey do you this violates probation? And idk there could be a plot there somewhere also they're at least in their late twenties by that point if not early thirties and Junpei and Akane aren't married cause this isn't canon they don't get officially hitched as soon as they look at each other again

I guess I'll add what I actually have here, hold up I'll give the bare minimum of context so they're not talking in the void

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Once the door cracks open and Akane gets up in a huff to greet her brother with one rant after another, none of which Junpei even directs his attention to or try to follow, he gets up from his seat carefully. Holding a little blond baby draped in a single blanket they had lying around in his arms.

Aoi already got the heads up of what's happening from Akane earlier, although she didn't sound as eloquent as usual. Tenmyouji was out and somehow came across an empty lot which somehow had a baby crying in it and somehow it wasn't just him hearing things but an actual child that was abandoned there when he went to look.

And somehow, he thought bringing the kid home with him was the most logical course of action, which Akane couldn't agree with less. There were a thousand other ways he could have helped and as far as she's concerned this is one of the worst ones.

Before they could get into an even messier argument the crying started up again and she elected to call her brother in for backup before she had a Moment™ over how irresponsible it was for her stupid fiance to come home with an infant when he has yet to successfully keep a plant alive on his own.

Despite how set off by such an unpredictable event his sister was, Aoi wasn't seeming terribly unsettled. In fact after he's done helping Akane cool off and sending her to take a breather along with a glass of water for herself, he walks up to Junpei rather giddy. Which Junpei will never get used to seeing from him. He'll much less get used to hearing him make a high pitched voice as he leans in to lend a single finger for the baby to grasp with his whole entire chubby little hand.

"Aww... where did this little guy come from?" He spends a little bit like that, Junpei also smiling fondly while Akane, from far over the corner table, silently judges them both. It's late at night and she got herself coffee instead of plain water. Then Aoi's voice goes mostly back to normal, dropping harshly to an incredulous tone as he pulls his face away like he didn't want the infant to notice the change in tone. Although, his hand doesn't move away. "Seriously though, are you guys gonna keep'em?"

"That's the idea!" "We're *not* keeping it!"

"Ah, I see what the emergency really is. You needed a babysitter while you tear each other to shreds, I mean, sure, at your service. Hey, hold like this." With that Junpei's arms are free, he does watch for what his brother-in-law to be shows him to be the correct way of properly resting them over the shoulder and then how to support the baby's neck and head with how he was doing it earlier.

"Did you give them a bath after bringing them in? Even wrapped up on this it's far too cold outside. How long's it been exactly?"

"Uh, only a couple hours, sun was already down. And no, of course I didn't, how do we even do that? You can't just put him in a shower."

"Well, no duh. You need a little plastic bathtub, eh- honestly even just the sink will do, as long as it's shallow enough to hold them up."

"How do you even know this stuff."

Akane joins them, getting close while paying attention only to what they're talking about. Unfortunately, it's Aoi who's talking.

"Mom and dad had me help dry Akane after her first baby bath–" "Aoi..." Her hand goes instinctively to pinch his arm but it stops halfway, then it stays there as she closes her eyes and inhales deeply defeated by the fact she can't shut him up this easily without risking him losing his balance.

"She was soo tiny. I don't know about being this small, but I think she was heavier."

"Aoi. Aoi. Please, shut your mouth. And I'm pretty sure you just couldn't hold as much weight back then."

"Hm. Maybe." He shrugs. Then completely takes the subject over a one hundred and eighty degree turn. "Do you think this violates probation by the way?"

It's Junpei who answers.

"That's... A fair question."

He didn't think of the legal implications of bringing a baby off the streets to his house which just so happens to be the same place his criminal mastermind girlfriend lives. In fact, he was much more hopeful she'd be all altruistic about it and how it's the right thing to do instead of getting hung up on it being an impractical solution or that he's just fooling himself wanting to skip right to raising a kid together or whatever.

"We are not on 'probation', and we're not adopting a whole human child because of an impulse *you* had, Junpei. Our technically legal position is only yet another reason we should–"

Aoi interrupts her before she can get on a roll ranting again.

"Can you guys argue at the grocery store? This thing is gonna get hungry sooner rather than later and we can't exactly feed them with instant ramen."

"I have other things on the kitchen, I'll let you know!"

"Yeah, well, but I don't figure you treat yourself to baby formula on the weekends, now do you? And a can of energetic won't do it either, jackass. Now, get moving!"

im really abt to have the most hellish weekend of my existence

yumyumyum

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Oh nooooo srpg studio is on steam it looks really good oh no oh no please I already am so distracted

omg I need your thoughts on the terminally o line author culture bc ngl it makes my eye TWITCH, there are authors I deliberately avoid even tho I've heard their stuff is good bc they're like that 🙈

HHHHH oh good lord, okay, from how I see it, there are two angles on this, both aggravating and sad: the official decree one and the spontaneous ecosystem one.

The officious one is that the nature of publishing nowadays demands an author have an online presence. You need Twitter/X. You need to let every potential reader know your book is coming out. You need engagement through reviews and pre-orders incentives (if you buy now you’ll get a special keychain!!) and word of mouth assurances from your peers that yes your book is as cool as you say it is. You need a newsletter with links (more buying! more voting on lists that are simply popularity contests!) and promises you’re still working on the next thing, don’t forget about me in the morass of everyone else doing the same thing. You need an Instagram and TikTok now to post pretty pictures and videos because one or two authors made it big off this kind of promotion and now everyone thinks it’s the ticket to the bestseller list (sadly, it seems to be working). You need an OnlyFans (a joke but I do recall a twt spat that was a joke/not joke about how rupi kaur will always be more beautiful than her critics and people who took issue with the conflation of beauty with talent). At the end of all this, you’re basically an influencer, a content creator creating content for the content you should be focusing on creating, the finished novel. And the novel itself seems to be disappearing behind the masks used to promote it (fanfic-style tropes, moodboards, playlists, memes) until I now no longer trust the book that I’ll pick up to have any resemblance to the enticements that brought me here. I’ve seen an author or two complain about the stress all this self-promotion generates, but it’s become such an entrenched part of the industry, I think people just accept it. And thus spend too much time online hoping that if they tweet just a little more, produce just one more reel, maybe that’ll be the difference between a sale and no sale.

The other side of this, distinct but obviously connected, is the ecosystem created by this panic of being perpetually visible coupled with the fact that so many of the new authors came of age during the rise of internet fandom culture. That opinionated community mindset that blurs the line between anonymity and friendship is the lens they bring to their own work. I mean, it makes sense I suppose—if you love yelling about characters and words, why wouldn’t you do that once you start to produce your own? This really came home to me hearing about that reviewbombgate “scandal” and how people involved were in reylo circles and that was used to provide receipts. You’re interacting with your readers and peers about your intimate work but they are also all strangers. They will not always give you the benefit of the doubt, and now—as opposed to the past when maybe the worst that could happen was a handful of bad reviews in newspapers—you will either be tagged in hate reviews, sub-tweeted, explicitly called out, demanded to atone for your sins. It’s no longer the morality of consumption but the morality of production. Of course, the easy answer is just log-off, touch some grass. But that can work only when you and everyone else are separated by anonymous accounts or when you have no platform to maintain. As an author trying to make your livelihood from this, suddenly it’s do or die. We’re in a strange moment of authorship bringing the Internet’s echo-chamber and claustrophobic into the real world (this is a lie: publishing now is no longer the real world. But it looks like it) and thus you can kind of no longer escape things.

Will the average reader who isn’t aware of all these machinations care about reviewbombgate? Would a reader browsing at Target think about the controversies around Lightlark? Very likely not. But the impression I’m getting more and more is that the average reader isn’t the one buying all the books. Or shall we say—a bestseller’s status relies on bookstore stock. Bookstore stock is only huge when they know a book will be a good investment. They’ll only know a book is a good investment if it and its author has street cred based on booktokkers, bookstagram, bloggers and reviewers (have you noticed how many books out these last maybe 1-3 years have these kinds of accounts thanked in the acknowledgments? Yeah), and THESE are also chronically online people who will Know. And decide the cast of fate.

Honestly, @batrachised, I see why you avoid these kinds of writers, though I wonder how long it’ll be before the disease becomes epidemic.