#there's no one way to art and there is a massive difference between this and harmful tracing
Note
Hey aren't you tracing from Rise screenshots? It does not really seem like a redraw since you didn't make it...
Tell that to the over 7 1/2 hours of work tracked on the most recent one anon. You're really gonna tell me I didn't make shit?
#drag replies#redraws is just easiest to say#but I've literally. never hidden that I do the lines over the screenshot#I blatantly post wips showing as such#they are for fun. I've been struggling w sketching recently. These are so i can get the joy out of lining & colouring#and I am FAR from the only person to use a screenshot as my base#there's no one way to art and there is a massive difference between this and harmful tracing#get off your high horse and yap elsewhere
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The massive list of SFW and NSFW Gale Dekarios headcanons
Gale of Waterdeep x Reader (Gn! for the most part)
A/N: the more I write Gale, the more in love with him I am. I started this before patch 5 and haven't been able to play it myself, so whoopsies if I just have to make another one of these. Lots of requests included in this one, to be expanded on later!
Gale is the most caring partner in the whole group. Followed by karlach and Wyll
He would much rather do everything for you than anything for him
This means he often over extends himself for you and you have to convince him to let you help him
Quality time and words of affirmation are his main love languages. All he wants is time alone with you, and he will do so much to make that happen
Gale actually sets up his tent to be as comfortable as possible because you don't have your own tent, and he doesn't mind at all if you sleep in his
eventually you basically just sleep in his tent exclusively, platonically at the moment. Sleeping on other sides or with a blanket between you
It isn't until you wake up from a particularly bad nightmare that your accidental touches aren't followed by apologies. Not quite embracing but not flinching away
He held you that night, wrapping his arms around you, his hands were big, soft, and comforting. He didn't speak until you did, who knows how long that was. All he said was "You're safe. It's ok."
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He truly believes he doesn’t deserve you and that weighs kind of heavy on him
That shows in his body movements, confidence, still hesitant to be close to you physically in an extremely subtle way
With more flirting, more talking, more late nights close together, but still apart, still a gap in your embrace
Gale is still in touch with his sexuality and sex, but sex is different than love making. And he knew, when he fully let you in, when he’s finally stable and his mind, body, and soul were ready, he’d make love to you
Your first time together was for the most part, pretty talked through. You set your boundaries and safe word pretty fast
He’d stop at some point, pull back and just admire you
Stop is used lightly because he’s definitely still inside you and just very slowly still pumping in and out of you
“You’re absolutely ravishing.”
And he’d give himself fully to you
Gods he’d be all over you after, so touchy, even if not sexual in nature, any tough felt electric
Gale holds your waist more than your hand, it feels more romantic, showing you off to the world as someone that chose him. It’s really sweet, the first time he does it, he hand trembled a bit, he thought he was smooth enough for you not to tell but you could definitely feel it
Don’t get me wrong, he is confident and cocky at times, everyone knows that. But with you somehow, he feels nervous that you deserve more than he could give
Part of your early relationship is making sure he knows he’s wanted and loved and more than anything you could have wished for
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Cuddling is always fun because it usually end up with fucking
If you’re the big spoon? He becomes such an angel and snuggles into your touch
If he’s big spoon he’s immediately turned on by everything, you being so close into him, your ass pressed against him, so many beautiful places for him to touch
Always ends in side fucking, just pulling your underwear down just enough to grind his cock on your bare ass
It’s also just convenient and easy if you’re getting busy while the others are sleeping in camp
But many days your time has you weak and just ready for rest, but you're both more horny than tired
that's when mutual masturbation becomes a daily routine, which never really leaves, even when you aren't as tired and have more privacy
he likes you call you his cherished work of art, seeing you spread for him is like a painting
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One night in baldurs gate, you stay up into the morning drinking and talking in a bar, they only kicked you out when they literally were an hour last close, keeping it open because you had bought so much
It was literally anything, just talking about everything and nothing at the same time. Past pets, stupid haircuts growing up, embarrassing failures
That was the night everyone else really realized how deeply in love you two were
Like sure there was romance but real true love, with sparks
They absolutely made fun of you when you finally stumbled to your camp and passed out all day crammed into the small one person beds
I like to believe Astarion drew a stick figure version of y’all’s sleeping position to make fun of you when you woke
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Once you’ve moved in with him he gets more and more turned on by you every day
You could be doing nothing and he’d grab your thigh and give you such a dirty look of lust
Not even three months in and ya'll have fucked on every surface possible, knocked over many books, and accidentally broke a vase and a bit in the shower
For the most part, your cozy days consist of him reading, and you beside him, feet resting on his lap
If you're a bard, of course he's going to ask you to practice and play around him and while you relax together, his favorite sounds all come from your sweet melodies
if you drink you definitely share a bottle of wine throughout the day
When Gale get's tipsy he just gets lovey and nerdy
telling you about a favorite bit of history or a spell, interrupting himself to compliment you "Gods you're beautiful, have I told you that today, dear?" and "And that's how the stars fell in love with- that top is stunning my love, mind if I take it off?"
cooking is fun yet very stressful unless he has a drink in hand
it's his kitchen and he's not used to company in it, so he often bumps into you or doesn't know where to say something is, so he just ends up getting it for you
I have a feeling this man is super into coffee and the roasts
like he's an absolute snob over it. A whole glass cupboard is dedicated to bags of coffee from where ever he travels
"Just too dark of a roast, it muddies the hazelnut flavor" (yes I believe he's a whole bean light roast lover)
Maybe you get a normal, non-speaking cat for yourself and just to have a bigger family in your home
I'd imagine a very reckless black or ginger cat who tara takes a VERY long time to love
but it's your and Gales cat. It's a thing you own together and love dearly
There's also a self of cards, board games, etc, for your date nights in
Gale legitimately is just as happy if you win than if he, if not more happy for you
He often takes a while to take his turn because he's distracted by you
super sweet but makes games feel much longer
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@shyminnie07 @makers-breath @claryvoyantfray @black-sapphic @fapqueen
(Consider supporting me on Ko-fi)
#x reader#fluff#smut#gale of waterdeep#baldurs gate 3#gale x reader#baldurs gate gale#gale dekarios#bg3 gale#gale x tav#gale of waterdeep x reader#gale of waterdeep bg3#gale of waterdeep x tav#gale of waterdeep smut#baldur's gate 3#baldur's gate iii#baldurs gate tav#baldurs gate x reader#baldurs gate headcanon#headcanonn#fanfiction
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Lucifer Morningstar Relationship Headcanons!
A/N: I haven't written for Lucifer before, but this man has my heart and soul so I am going to start! Also, feel free to DM or chat! I love talking and meeting new people, and I need more people to simp with over Lucifer.
Warnings: Minors do not interact, these headcanons include both SFW and NSFW
✶ Lucifer is deeply sentimental, never one to shy away from his feelings. When he is in love, it is all consuming and a driving force for him. He would do anything for those he loves.
✶ He is a gentle lover, a tender lover; a foil to Adam, if you will. When he is in love, he takes it slow, gently drowning you in his affections.
✶ A gift giver? Absolutely! Whether it be handcrafted pieces of art that he made himself or buying you stuff that reminded him of you, he revels in the idea of lavishing you with gifts.
✶ If we are to assume that you are with him after Lilith, expect some slow burn. Not only does Lucifer have to live with the consequences of his decision to bestow free will upon humanity, but the woman he (presumably) loved left him. The guilt he fee is massive, so please just be patient with him. Let him open up to you. Don't make him feel like a burden.
✶ Once he does start to fall in love with you, the first thing he will do is take off his wedding ring. He is a little hesitant, but the way you make him feel...it's refreshing and invigorating.
✶ After years of being too afraid to dream, you rekindled his passion. How could he not fall in love with that?
✶ He loves kissing you - forehead kisses, hand kisses, cheek kisses - he will kiss you until his lips turn violet and melt off.
✶ Although he doesn't acknowledge it often, he has a tendency to be a bit possessive. Not that he is controlling, but more so that he wants to show you off. He wants everyone in hell to know that he pulled the most beautiful and kind person to ever grace the universe.
✶ Some days when he has to go to meetings early in the morning (he is the King after all), he will always make sure to wake you up softly so you know when he is leaving...only to kiss you back to sleep.
✶ Going along with his love of craftsmanship, you become his muse. There will be several different versions of you as a duck, an apple, whatever comes to his mind really.
✶ Lucifer as a whole is a bit eccentric and peculiar, but charming nonetheless. There is a reason why he was able to seduce Lilith and Eve.
✶ If you two pursue a relationship further, you must be able to get along with Charlie. Charlie is Lucifer's pride and joy, and if you can't get along...well Lucifer would choose his baby over you.
✶ But that's alright because Charlie is very easy to get along with!
✶ He frequently uses pet names such as sweetie and sweetheart, as well as angel and apple pie.
✶ He always calls you the apple of his eye.
✶ NOW TO GET ON TO THE SPICY STUFF >:)
✶ Take one look at that man and tell me he ISN'T a service top. You can't! It's impossible (/j).
✶ Lucifer is desperate to prove himself, to prove his worth, even if he knows you love him. That's why he loves servicing you; he will spend hours pulling you further and further into pleasure.
✶ We all have seen episode eight, we know that he will spend hours between your thighs until you are an overstimulated mess. He gets off on the idea of you relying on the pleasure he gives you and no one else.
✶ It's a pride thing.
✶ His favorite position to have you in is missionary. He just loves to hold you close as he slowly enters you, being able to see how you writhe and become a moaning mess for him.
✶ He also loves to hold you close from behind and pound you (spoon fucking). That's mostly reserved for morning sex though.
✶ Again, he is a deeply sentimental and loving man so he prefers to make love to you than fuck you. But he definitely could fuck you if he wanted to.
✶ His wings have a tendency to poof out right as he is on the verge of coming. Sometimes he wraps them around you, sheltering you in a heavenly cloud.
✶ He has a daddy kink and a breeding kink. No, I will not take any arguments against this.
✶ He just desperately wants to claim you fully, and what better way to do that if not through breeding your pretty pussy.
✶ But really, this man is desperately in love with you. Please let him love you <3
#Lucifer#Lucifer x reader#Lucifer morningstar#Hazbin Hotel#Hazbin Hotel Lucifer#Romance#Fluff#Lucifer Morningstar x reader#Service top Lucifer#smut
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Tell Me to Stop: Part 2 (NSFW Kyojuro Rengoku x F!Ice Pillar)
A/N: oh man, it’s here. This took a lot out of me, so I hope that you all like it.
Part One can be found here: post-Mugen AU where Kyojuro lives; events take place post-Entertainment District.
Multiple POVs (Y/N, Shinobu, and Kyojuro). There are several flashbacks, which are in all italics and separated from the main text.
Massive TW: trauma/PTSD, anger, nightmares, descriptions of corpses, violence and violence between characters (shoving, grabbing/shaking). One character triggers another and it’s dubious whether it’s intentional or not.
CW: 16.7k words; explicit sexual content. Unprotected sex/oral (F!receiving), creampies, cursing, light scar worship, intimacy, angst.
For the song that inspired this, listen here.
Without further ado!
🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸
(Y/N’s POV)
Y/N began her rehabilitation training within one week of awakening from her coma.
For those seven days of rest, Y/N had fielded all sorts of visitors — the Master, escorted by his two daughters; the Love Pillar, who had wasted no time throwing her arms around Y/N’s shoulders and sobbing in relief; and three of the Mansion’s youngest girls, all of whom crawled up on her bed and cried while hugging her.
Uzui had sent her a note by crow telling her he would be by to see her as soon as his wives finished making her favorite treat — red bean mochi — and said they could compare battle wounds in celebration of their feat.
Y/N had neither seen nor heard as much of a whisper from the Flame Pillar.
The Ice Pillar resolved to distract herself from the glaring absence of the man who embodied fire, though every day that passed without word from him only seemed to make that absence more pronounced.
Y/N had thrown herself into her rehabilitation training, as supervised by Shinobu. Because she was a Hashira, her recovery was vastly different from that of lower-ranked slayers, and she worked with the Insect Pillar directly, rather than with the haughty Aoi and other younger Mansion girls.
That particular morning, the Love Pillar had joined them in an effort to recuperate Y/N’s loss of flexibility as the result of the nearly two months she’d spent sedentary. Y/N cherished the one-on-one time she had with the other two women Hashira; the three of them had formed a tight bond with one another since ascending as Pillars, united amidst the predominance of male demon slayers.
“Good! Now just bend this way-“ Mitsuri Kanroji kept a steady hand at the small of Y/N’s back as Y/N arched over backward, teeth grinding as her stiff spine resisted her movement.
“Almost there! Just touch your other hand to the floor and hold it!” The Love Hashira said encouragingly.
Y/N stretched her left arm over her head as hard as she could. Her fingers had just graced the wooden grain of the training room floor when her body seized, and her legs gave out from under her.
“Oh!” Mitsuri caught Y/N effortlessly before she could crumple to the floor, gently helping her to sit while blushing at the stream of colorful curses that poured from the Ice Pillar’s mouth.
“This damn wound,” Y/N moaned, her hand pressing against the angry red mark that curved from below her belly button to her right hip. “You would think it would have healed by now.”
Shinobu frowned as she crouched next to the Ice Pillar, fingers lightly prodding at the scar left behind by Upper Moon Six. “It has healed; if it hadn’t, it wouldn’t have scarred already.” Shinobu pursed her lips. “Though, I suppose it could just be a residual effect of the Upper Rank’s blood demon art – after all, it was no ordinary blade that he pierced you with, was it?”
Y/N shook her head, though she tried to suppress the memory of the demon’s cursed flesh blade ramming through her back and into her stomach. “The blade was his conduit for his blood demon art – but I think it was made from him.”
“How often does it hurt, Y/N?” Mitsuri asked, rubbing soothing circles on her friend’s upper back. Mitsuri was one of the few people Y/N knew who preferred to give physical comfort, and Y/N was grateful for it.
Y/N furrowed her brows in thought. “In a way, there’s always just this dull ache I feel, though it becomes sharper whenever I move a particular way.” Y/N pulled at the band of her uniform bottoms in discomfort. “And, it doesn’t help that these damn pants chafe and rub against it. I’ve even foregone the belt, and it still feels like they’re cutting into me.”
Mitsuri hummed in thought. “Have you considered one of the uniform skirts? They sit a little higher on the waist, so they’re less likely to aggravate it.”
Y/N scowled. “I would rather be stabbed by Upper Six again than request a skirt from that pervert tailor,” she said severely, “Sorry,” she added when she saw the Love Pillar flush with embarrassment.
“Lecherous Corps tailors aside, you may have a good point, Mitsuri.” Shinobu said, eyeing Y/N’s uniform pants in thought. “Y/N, do you mind if I brainstorm some designs for you? I can’t promise whatever I come up with will be suitable for public appearances or assignments, but I might be able to come up with something that will at least keep you comfortable while you heal and build back your strength.”
Y/N smiled as she stretched her legs out, bringing herself into a pose meant to flex her hips. “I’d be grateful for anything you could do, Shinobu.”
The Insect Pillar nodded. “Mitsuri, you know how to sew quite well, do you not? I’m afraid my proficiency with the needle is limited to sewing up wounds.”
The pinkette glowed with enthusiasm. “Yes! I have an entire room dedicated to sewing at my Estate – if you bring by your designs, I’m sure I could put something together!”
Shinobu smiled. “Then it’s settled. I’ll see what I can come up with tonight, and I’ll bring it by in the morning.”
Y/N’s heart swelled at the dedication her two friends showed towards her comfort and recovery. “Thank you both, from the bottom of my heart.”
Shinobu’s smile turned wicked. “Don’t thank us yet, Y/N. You have agility training next.”
Y/N groaned and pulled on her uniform top, buttoning it over her bindings. As a Hashira, agility training meant that she was to meet the Wind Pillar outside of Kocho’s estate where she would endure two hours of having to dodge his relentless attacks. Y/N got along just fine with Shinazugawa – he’d even welcomed her back, and gruffly complimented her work in the Entertainment District – but that did not mean he eased up in his ruthless training.
By the time the Wind Pillar had dismissed her with a satisfied nod, Y/N had all but limped back to her room, wondering whether she could even summon the strength to bathe after such an arduous day. She almost decided against it, but when her newest scar began to pulse and throb once more, she knew nothing else would soothe it better than the hot water in Kocho’s private hot spring.
Y/N greeted the bowing Kakushi who guarded the entrance to the northernmost wing of the Butterfly Mansion’s hospital as she passed by, and she hoped that Aoi had remembered to restock her room with fresh towels so she could go straight to her bath from her room.
She drew short at the sight of a familiar figure which stood outside of Kocho’s office, leaning against the wall of the small hallway.
“Rengoku!” Y/N was startled, taking a step back in surprise at the sight of the Flame Pillar.
“Y/L/N.” The man who reminded her of the sun nodded in greeting, but his familiar, sunny disposition was noticeably absent, his face impassive and his voice detached.
“I am happy to see you in good health.” Rengoku spoke with unnatural formality; he’d never used that cold, detached manner of speaking to her, not once since she’d caught him staring at her right before the commencement of Final Selection all those years ago.
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“Ice Pillar Y/L/N!” His sunny voice boomed, and Y/N groaned. She’d just gotten her migraine to calm down.
“Rengoku,” she nodded politely, as her comrade came to stand beside her, all smiles and warmth.
“It’s been a while, Y/L/N! I was beginning to forget what you look like when you roll your eyes at me.” He laughed, and Y/N scowled.
“Perhaps I’ll pay to have my photograph taken, Rengoku. That way, you can carry it with you wherever you go.”
Rengoku turned to her, an eyebrow raised in surprise at her willingness to engage with his banter so quickly. “If that’s the case, Y/N, I’d prefer to have one of you smiling. It would do well to keep me warm on those cold nights away from home.”
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“I heard you were called away on another mission— some train?” Y/N asked him as they strolled through the Master’s garden following their meeting.
“Yes, we’ve unfortunately lost a number of slayers. Perhaps it’s an upper rank!” The Flame Pillar responded jovially, but he stopped in front of Y/N when he saw her frown.
“What is it?” His voice was gentle, and Y/N shook her head, focusing her eyes on the blooming wisteria saplings that had been planted.
A warm finger curled under her chin and tilted her face up until her eyes clashed with pools of golden ore. “My dear Ice Pillar, are you worried for me?” He was smirking, and his thumb lightly caressed the underside of her jaw.
Y/N gingerly took his hand and removed it from her face, though she did not let it go right away. “You are the Flame Hashira, Rengoku. If anyone is capable of defeating an Upper Rank, it most certainly is you.”
Rengoku smiled broadly at her, his hand nearly grazing her own. “For someone whose prowess lies in ice breathing, Y/L/N, you sure know how to start fires.”
Under any other circumstance, she would have changed the subject, or not said anything at all. But Y/N couldn’t help her sudden desire to flirt back, just to see if she could knock him off his feet as he so often tried to do to her.
“Yours is the only one I’m interested in stoking, Rengoku.” She said sweetly.
She’d laughed at the Flame Pillar’s beet-red face for the rest of the day.
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“And I, you.” Y/N responded, her eyes still wide with surprise as she came to a stop before him, maintaining a cautious distance between them.
A pregnant pause followed, and Y/N made to speak once more, but she was cut off by another deep throb from the wound on her lower abdomen, her hand unconsciously flying to press against it as she swallowed the gasp that threatened to leave her.
“You’re in pain.” It wasn’t a question.
Y/N shrugged in a feeble attempt at nonchalance. “I suppose it’s to be expected for a while yet. At least until I recover.”
Rengoku said nothing, and the silence felt suffocating.
“Would you-“ Y/N hesitated, and inwardly she’d never felt more embarrassed, or more uncertain than she did then as she stood before the uncharacteristically stoic Flame Pillar. “Would you like to sit down?”
Rengoku’s face remained impassive, and he turned away from her, dismissively.
“I cannot. I came only to retrieve a salve from Kocho.” His voice was just as cold, just as unfamiliar as the rest of him had been.
“Rengoku, is everything all right?” She stretched out a hand to touch his shoulder but was alarmed at how quickly he flinched away from her as if her touch could burn him.
“Everything is fine, Y/L/N. I need to be on my way.” Rengoku’s voice was flat, monotone, and wholly foreign to her.
“I’m sorry for not thanking you sooner — for everything you did to help me that night.” Y/N blurted, and to her relief, Rengoku froze mid-step, though he did not turn towards her. “I owe you my life.”
She did not miss the way Rengoku’s fists clenched at his side. “You owe me nothing. I would have done the same for any other comrade.” He replied, voice tight. “I must get going now. Farewell, Y/L/N.
She was so stunned that she’d not bidden him farewell back. Rather, she’d stood helplessly in her doorway, even long after the edge of his haori had disappeared around the corner of the Butterfly Mansion’s hall.
He had not looked at her once.
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(Kyojuro’s POV)
Kyojuro’s fists remained clenched the entire journey back to his estate.
He felt disgusted with himself. He felt like a coward.
It had nearly knocked him to his knees to see Y/L/N up and standing and talking because for so long, he had feared he would never again see the way she crinkled her nose when she laughed, or how she tucked that one loose strand of hair behind her ear whenever she was concentrating — the one that never stayed put in her braid.
But he had not been able to meet her eyes; couldn’t bear to bring himself to try, because he had been terrified of what he would see.
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Every night for the last two months, he has dreamed of her.
They were not pretty dreams, not like those he had before when he’d wrap her in his arms and kiss her until she laughed, the two of them living in a monster-free world and at peace.
Now, he dreamt of vacant eyes-tinged blue, unseeing and unblinking and frozen, just like the rest of her. He dreams of iced skin and blood and poison pouring from her mouth and her nose until she chokes, her chest rising once with a final rattle before it falls still.
He dreams of Upper Three, smiling deviously as he aims his fist to deal his final blow, and Kyojuro wrenches his blade down, desperate to finally win.
Only, his blade decapitates Y/N, not the Upper Rank demon and he is helpless to watch her head bounce pathetically to the ground. His hands are covered in her blood, and instead of disintegrating, her body falls uselessly to the side. Human.
As quickly as he kills her, the dream changes. He is in a lively street, filled to the brim with street vendors and women and men offering their services. It is night but the lights of the shops and gambling dens and pleasure houses are so bright that it looks like daytime.
He recognizes her by the back of her haori, and his feet move towards her, relieved to see her amidst the hustle and bustle of the city. He reaches out to touch her shoulder, her name whispering on his lips. But she turns before he can make contact, and though she looks healthy, her eyes — her eyes are white and unseeing.
I don’t understand, she pleads with him, it doesn’t make sense.
Kyojuro looks around in alarm and they are no longer standing amongst eager entertainment seekers, but among flame and wreckage, the once-ornately decorated stalls now smashed to splinters as fire slowly consumes the skeletal remains of the entertainment district.
He turns back to her right as a blade pierces through her gut, lifting her from the ground before letting her drop.
His hands shake as he reaches for her, desperate to check her wounds, but when she looks up at him, he stumbles back.
She is all wrong. Her skin is mottled and rotting from her face, and her hair is gray and matted. In place of her eyes are black holes, empty and cold.
Why can’t I come with you? Why can’t I go home, Kyojuro?
Please take me home.
Every night for the last two months, he awoke screaming.
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Y/L/N was alive; he knew that. He knew that if he looked at her, he would not see a corpse; but terrifying visuals aside, Kyojuro had not been able to look at her because he knew what his nightmares were telling him.
He’d been responsible for her near death.
If the Kakushi had returned with a box rather than a Pillar, it would have been his fault.
The thought that Y/L/N — his Y/L/N -- had almost obtained her own headstone in the Master’s graveyard had rocked him to his very core, for that had almost become a reality. She had actually died – for the briefest moment – in his arms; and it had been his fault.
Why can't I go home, Kyojuro?
And though Y/N had awoken from her slumber, her corpse still haunted Kyojuro’s dreams.
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(Y/N’s POV)
Y/N was sprawled on her infirmary floor, preparing her limbs for another day of rigorous recuperation training at the hands of her fellow Hashira.
She stood to stretch her arms and lower back, wincing slightly at the pull of her scar. “Don’t you start,” she warned her body, willing total concentration breathing to dull the persistent ache that threatened to derail her entire day.
Y/N sensed movement near her doorway and knew, without looking, who watched her as she warmed up her aching muscles.
“Uzui retired. It’s time for you to do the same.”
Y/N who had been in mid-stretch, righted herself and blinked at the Flame Pillar. “Pardon?” Both the news of Uzui’s retirement and Rengoku’s words were a shock to her.
“Retire, Y/LN.” Rengoku repeated in that detached manner of his that she hardly recognized. “You helped take down an Upper Rank. You’ve done enough. Let someone else shoulder the burden, now.”
“I see no reason to retire, Rengoku.” Y/N retorted, voice hardening. “And unless and until the Master requests it or I perish, I see no reason to do so.”
Rengoku exhaled harshly through his nose. “You were injured — seriously so.”
“As were you, and yet you seem to have no intention of slowing down.” Y/N said, coolly.
Rengoku’s attention stayed fixed on the garden outside her window. “And I was only unconscious for three weeks. You were out for nearly two months, Y/L/N. That is unheard of and frankly, unacceptable for a Hashira.”
“What is your problem?” Y/N was growing more irritated the longer this inane conversation dragged on, and it wasn’t helping that Rengoku still refused to so much as look her direction, let alone meet her eyes. “Is this about what happened after you brought me here? Kocho told me everything — I’m not mad.”
Rengoku’s shoulders tensed. “It was necessary. Again, I would have done it for any one of my comrades.”
Y/N felt like she’d been slapped.
“You keep saying that, yet you won’t look at me— why?” Her confusion and hurt were beginning to melt into anger. “If I am just another comrade, then you should be able to meet my eyes.”
Rengoku said nothing.
“What Uzui did for me— that was what comrades do,” Y/N continued, her voice growing stronger as her blood grew hotter. “But you? You and I both know you were under no obligation to bring me back from the brink of death the way you did.”
“I’m not sure what you want me to say, Y/L/N,” Rengoku answered after a long moment.
Y/N took a step towards him. “I want to know why.”
“It was necessary.”
Y/N felt like throttling him.
How long had they danced around each other? How many times had they caught themselves staring at the other for a breath longer than normal, had allowed an otherwise friendly touch during a spar linger?
How could he have held her, half nude for hours, putting himself on the brink of death all for the sake of keeping her alive — and then tell her she was the same as any other comrade?
“What are we doing Rengoku -- is this to be our destiny?” Y/N demanded, exasperatedly, her voice hard. “We continue to pretend like we don’t care about one another until one of us dies?”
Rengoku remained silent, back still turned away from her.
“We’ve each had a near-death experience in a matter of months,” Y/N continued, throat working hard to keep her voice steady despite the telling burn of angry tears in her eyes. “By all accounts, one if not both of us should be dead.”
“And yet, somehow, you expect me to act as though the fact you carried me back here— that you put yourself on death’s door to keep my heart beating — doesn’t mean anything?”
It didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense for him to fight so hard for her, to make her believe that someone valued her life that much, only to cast her aside.
She hadn’t wanted to wake up, initially; she’d felt relief for the hair’s breadth she’d thought she’d finally met her end. He was the one who dragged her back, and now he wouldn’t even look at her.
It didn’t make sense.
Y/N’s fists shook beside her, and she felt the venomous words fly from her mouth before she could stop them.
“You should’ve let me die.”
No sooner had she let the poison drip from her mouth had she felt herself flying backward, back slamming against the nearest wall of her temporary room.
“Never,” Rengoku snarled at her, his arm pressing firmly against her shoulders to hold her in place against the wood. “Never say those words to me again.”
Y/N’s chest was heaving, and she trembled beneath him, her fury threatening to explode out of her.
“There is no place on this earth where you could be in peril and I would not find you,” he said quietly, his eyes a simmering, fiery orange. “Where I wouldn’t find a way to bring you back home.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Y/N said softly, breath still coming hard from her nose but no longer from her anger.
“Doesn’t it?” Rengoku was close, dangerously close.
Y/N wanted nothing more than to lean in, to close the distance that barely existed between Rengoku’s face and hers and finally be done with all the nonsense. But he had spent so much time avoiding her gaze until that moment, and Y/N felt more lost than ever, set adrift by the look of heat and longing that was mixed with the burning rage in his eyes.
Something tugged incessantly at her gut and it would not allow her to move from her place against her recovery room’s wall.
Instead, her arms came up to rest against Rengoku’s chest before gently, but firmly, pushing him away.
“No, it doesn’t.” She repeated. “And I am tired, Rengoku.”
The Flame Pillar allowed himself to be pushed away, but he looked at her with a small, cruel smile.
“Then you’re right; it doesn’t mean anything at all.”
She flinched against the ugly slap of his words. Y/N had expected him to hit back, but she hadn’t anticipated his venom to sting as much as it did.
She felt all of the fight within her gutter out, leaving her with nothing but a heavy weight in her chest that she wished she couldn’t feel.
“Y/L/N, I-“ the Flame Pillar almost sounded remorseful.
“Thank you, for your clarification, Lord Rengoku,” she said numbly, formally, parroting his earlier tone with her. “And thank you for your assistance that night. Please, next time — don’t trouble yourself.”
Rengoku hesitated for a moment, his hand twitching as though he wanted to reach for her. He swallowed hard, and turned away, shutting the door to Y/N’s infirmary.
The moment the door at clicked shut, Y/N exhaled harshly, stumbling back against her bed as she hugged her arms around herself, and she tried to keep herself from falling apart.
It shouldn’t have hurt this bad. They were both in the Demon Slayer Corps; they saved strangers all the time without it ever meaning anything other than good will and a desire to exterminate all demons.
So why did his insistence that she was no different hurt so badly?
Because she wasn’t a stranger.
Because, while she’d always known she wasn’t his, she’d still thought she’d been something.
As Y/N curled against her blanket, an unsettling numbness began to spread from her heart, quieting even the dull ache from the scar across her belly, Y/N realized that she’d meant nothing to the Flame Pillar all along.
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(Kyojuro’s POV)
He hated himself.
He utterly and truly despised himself.
He’d been hurt by her insistence that she did not know his feelings even though he was the one who’d opened the door, yet somehow, it still felt like a rejection.
So he’d hit back, only for her to visibly recoil at the sharp blow of his words.
He would not forgive himself, for as long as he lived, for the way the light in her eyes had winked out.
He did not know what bothered him more: the fact that she’d assumed that he regretted keeping her alive, or that she’d said “next time” he needn’t bother. As though she were counting on there being a next time.
He knew he should turn around; knew that he should barge back into her hospital room, drop to his knees, and beg her to forgive his cruelty.
He knew that he should explain to her why he found it so difficult to admit his feelings for her — that he had watched his father turn into a shell of a man and abandon his children in the wake of their mother’s death, leaving them to raise themselves. That he had vowed, as he’d watched his father drink his days away, that he would never be like him, would never abandon those who relied on him most.
He’d promised that he would never be a coward, even if, in all honesty, the idea that he, Kyojuro, could ever love someone that fiercely only to have them ripped from his grasp terrified him to no end.
As he forced his legs to carry him to back to his estate, Kyojuro wondered if perhaps, in his desperation not to turn into his father, he’d become the old man after all.
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(Shinobu’s POV)
Shinobu felt the Flame Pillar’s presence in her office before she saw him, though she was in no rush to give him his salve, especially not after what she’d overheard him spit at her friend.
“If you do not mind, I would like to send my crow to collect this from here on,” Rengoku said tightly, and Shinobu could sense his failing attempt to keep his fury in check.
“Very well then,” the Insect Pillar responded just as tersely, turning away from the papers and books on her desk to pull out the small tin containing the salve the Flame Pillar used to soothe the ache of the scar he now bore across his pectoral and shoulder. Rather than handing it to him, she tossed it through the air, the Flame Hashira catching it swiftly in his hand.
Rengoku nodded his thanks and turned to leave.
“I didn’t realize it was against Corps’ rules to care about our comrades,” Shinobu said icily, if not to signal to him that there had been spectators to his ugly outburst.
He couldn’t resist taking her bait. “Maybe it should be. It would be easier that way — for everyone.”
“Is that so?” Kocho sneered, no hint of familiarity or kindness in her features; nothing but that poisonous, deadly smile. “Well, if that was the case, then you would’ve preferred Uzui to leave Y/L/N for dead among the rubble in Yoshiwara, correct?
“You would rather us be searching to fill the newest Hashira vacancy, with her corpse barely cold in the ground-“
“Do not say another word, Kocho.” Rengoku warned, quietly.
But for Shinobu, anger was her vice, and so his warning only spurred her on.
“Tell me, Rengoku, if the new Pillar had been a woman, would you have held her the way you held Y/N?”
Shinobu’s smile was chilling as she relished the way the Flame Pillar began to tremble. “Or perhaps, would you finally confess to her, having learned your lesson from the missed opportunity with Y/N? Would you live out your days with her, while Y/N rotted below the earth, having never known someone loved her?”
“ENOUGH.” Rengoku roared, and for a moment, Shinobu thought the Flame Pillar might put his clenched fist through her wall. The silence that followed was tense and long as Rengoku struggled to calm his breathing.
“What do you want from me, Kocho?” Rengoku finally snapped, wheeling around to glower at the Insect Pillar, eyes half-crazed in his frustration.
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(Two months earlier)
Dawn was still far off, but the hall of her estate was a mess.
Shinobu knew that at any moment, another group of Kakushi would be coming through the hole Rengoku had left in her wall bearing the unconscious body of the Sound Pillar, and if they did so, they’d be stumbling upon the chaotic scene that had unfolded before.
Rengoku was still on the floor, legs on either side of Y/N, who was slumped against his chest and fully exposed from the waist up.
With some satisfaction, Shinobu noted that the dark purple bruising around Y/N’s chest was clearing, a sure sign that she had chosen the correct antidote for the Flame Hashira to slam into her heart.
But her hypothermia persisted.
Rengoku, on the other hand, was beginning to breathe rather loudly, no doubt as he continued to maintain his high fever for the sake of the unmoving woman braced between his thighs.
“Rengoku,” Shinobu crouched down next to the Flame Pillar, her hand coming to a rest on his shoulder, which burned beneath her palm. “Rengoku, we need to move.”
The man lifted his head up to meet her eyes, his own glassy and unfocused. Shinobu clamped down on the swear building on her tongue — he had fever fog.
Rengoku grunted at her before his head slumped back down, chin nearly touching his chest.
Shinobu tried again. “Rengoku, we are in the open hallway of the Butterfly Mansion. Others will be arriving soon. Y/N is completed exposed.”
That seemed to get his attention. Rengoku’s head lifted, his eyes narrowed slits, but nonetheless open. He grunted in some sort of acknowledgement and began to shift Y/N in his lap.
He turned the unconscious Ice Pillar so that her back rested against one arm that curled around her bare waist. His free arm slid to grip beneath her knees, shifting her into a bridal-style position to carry her.
Two of the Butterfly Mansion’s staff moved to help him stand, but Rengoku shrugged them off, surprising Shinobu as he managed to rise steadily to his feet, Y/N secured against his chest.
He looked at Shinobu expectantly and she began ushering him towards a secluded wing of the Manor, towards her private hall. Across from her personal office was a special infirmary room, walled off from the rest of the recovery ward.
Shinobu withdrew a ring of keys from her pocket and unlocked the heavy, wooden door.
“You two can stay in here until her body temperature returns to normal,” She said, as Rengoku made his way towards the recovery bed.
Shinobu watched as Rengoku, still wearing his zori and uniform pants, ever so gently lowered himself and Y/N down on the bed, repeating his earlier positioning of her between his thighs. He propped up one leg slightly to keep the Ice Pillar from slumping over, her back pressed to his bare chest. Rengoku leaned against the headboard so that Y/N’s head could rest against his clavicle, though it slumped instead towards her left shoulder.
Shinobu made to grab a blanket to throw over the two topless Hashira but stopped short as Rengoku made to move again.
He seemed to realize that Y/N, while also still in her torn uniform pants and zori, was still bare from the waist up, her body positioned towards the door. He frowned, his hand coming up to graze the side of her arm. He flinched slightly, no doubt at the persistent chill that lingered on her skin, and he moved both of his large hands down over the back of hers as they lay limply on either side of her thighs, intertwining their fingers.
Awestruck, Shinobu watched as Rengoku brought Y/N’s arms up to cross them over her chest, locking them in place by covering her arms with his own, as though wrapping her in a sweet embrace. Shinobu knew that he’d done so to avoid touching her bare breasts himself, or at least to do so as minimally as possible, while still providing her cover. And, due to the breadth of Rengoku’s muscled forearms, Y/N’s sensitive area was almost entirely obscured from view.
Rengoku had barely been clinging to consciousness himself, and once she was sufficiently hidden in his arms, his head dropped forward until his forehead came to a rest on Y/N’s shoulder, opposite of where she’d rolled her head.
To the unassuming eye, it would have appeared as though the pair of Hashira were simply engaged in an intimate moment, rather than one desperately trying to anchor the other to life.
Shinobu moved to place the blanket over the Pillars’ laps, before quietly exiting the private room.
“Seal this wing off entirely,” she murmured to Aoi, who had been waiting dutifully outside. “No one comes down here without my explicit permission.”
Aoi bowed to her before she ushered the other Kakushi out. Faintly, Shinobu heard the arriving shouts of the group bearing the Sound Pillar. She took a single deep breath, steeling herself once more, before moving to check on her incoming patient.
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Shinobu raised her chin, looking down her nose at him in disgust. “I’m waiting for the man who would have set the world ablaze to save Y/N to reappear.”
She cocked her head, narrowing her eyes at him. “I’m waiting for the man who used his own body as her lifeline, and who tried to smash open the infirmary door when he was delirious with fever because he thought that she had died while he was asleep.”
The Insect Pillar’s masked smile finally slipped from her face and her true rage towards the Flame Pillar shone through. “It is cruel to make her feel as though she’s done something wrong,” Shinobu’s arms folded across her chest. “And it is cruel to you both for you to pretend as though she does not mean anything to you. Haven’t you both been through enough? Are you not exhausted as well?”
A tortured look passed over Rengoku’s face. “It is better this way, Kocho. I do not want to be the cause of her pain, and I cannot survive going through what happened to her again.
“For all your talk about either of you dying, I’ve yet to hear you mention the equal alternative,” Shinobu sighed, gathering her papers and books. “The one where we win and you both live. What do you suppose happens then?”
Rengoku said nothing and so, Shinobu continued. “Suppose we emerge victorious – would you truly prefer for you and Y/N to go your separate ways – to never see one another again, or never acknowledge the bond the two of you share?”
“There is no guarantee that either of us survives, Kocho,” Rengoku said quietly, his eyes falling to his feet.
Shinobu smiled but it was no longer cruel or bitter; it was wistful. “And there is no guarantee that either of you die. That’s the fickle nature of humanity, is it not? The very reason we fight?”
The Insect Pillar gathered her papers and stacked them neatly on her shelf. “For the possibilities of it all.”
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The sun was high in the sky by the time Shinobu had a moment to check on the two unconscious pillars in the back room.
Uzui had required quite a bit of attention in order to stop the poison from becoming deadly, though the fact that her combination of the wisteria antidote with the amphetamine had been so effective on Y/N meant that Shinobu was able to administer the same to the Sound Pillar in half the time.
She was exhausted; the strain of the night’s events weighed heavily on her, but she had to check on Y/N’s temperature — if the Ice Pillar still had not recovered, she feared that hope was lost.
She pushed the door to the private infirmary room open and saw the two Hashira, still in the same position she’d left them in. Rengoku was deeply asleep, no doubt from the exhaustion wrought by his high fever.
Enclosed within his arms, Y/N remained unconscious but pink.
Shinobu felt the relief course through her, but she did not allow herself to relax until she reached out a hand to lightly pinch the Ice Pillar’s cheek.
It bloomed red beneath her fingers, and it was warm to the touch.
He’d done it. The Flame Pillar had staved off her hypothermia. Their only obstacle now lay in getting her to reawaken.
Shinobu laid her hand across Rengoku’s forehead, frowning at the scorching heat of his brow; his fever had worsened more than she’d anticipated, and he would need intervention soon. She turned to nod at the Kakushi who waited by the door to the recovery room, and the three of them moved to separate the Flame and Ice Pillars.
“Put him in one of the other single-recovery rooms. Tell Aoi to administer the fever medication I keep in my cabinet – it should dispel his fever within a few hours.” Shinobu ordered, as the Kakushi, with great effort, lifted the Flame Pillar from his position behind Y/N. Shinobu gently eased her friend down against the bed and pulled a blanket over her exposed torso. “I will also need a fresh hospital gown for Lady Y/L/N.”
The Kakushi nodded their assent and got to work, heaving the unconscious Flame Pillar towards the door when he awoke. At first, his eyes were dazed, and confused as they darted around him, but as he took in his surroundings, he began to struggle against the grip of the Kakushi.
“Please, Lord Rengoku, your fever is dangerously high! Allow us to help!” One of them cried, though his efforts to tug the Pillar away were futile. Shinobu supposed the only reason he had not yet succeeded in completely throwing them off was the fact that his fever had severely weakened him.
“Rengoku,” Shinobu said sternly, coming around from her position by Y/N to meet his eyes, though he only thrashed harder against the Kakushi as he began to mutter incoherently under his breath. “Rengoku, that’s enough. You’re safe. You’re in the Butterfly Mansion, and you have a high fever. Please, let the Kakushi do their job.”
But the Insect Pillar’s words fell on deaf ears as Rengoku began to hyperventilate, his muscles straining as he tried desperately to break free from the Kakushi’s hold. Shinobu was at a loss; her comrade did not merely look frantic – he looked terrified, desperate, and utterly beyond reproach or reason. His heart rate had spiked considerably, and his breath was jerky and uneven, as though he could not fully understand where he was or that he was amongst friends.
As she strained to make out what the Flame Pillar repeated, over and over, under his breath, Shinobu realized that his eyes were not unfocused at all; they were locked on the unconscious Ice Pillar in the bed behind her.
“I can still save her!” he roared.
It all made sense then.
Shinobu realized that he thought they were moving him not because he’d successfully thwarted her hypothermia, but because he had failed — and that she was now dead.
“Rengoku,” Shinobu said sharply, trying to force the irate and delirious Flame Pillar to meet her eyes. “Rengoku, Y/N is alive. Her body temperature has returned to normal. She is safe.”
But the Flame Pillar seemed not to hear her, as he only struggled harder against the Kakushi desperately trying to usher him out of Y/N’s room.
Rengoku was becoming more violent, even as the Kakushi finally managed to shove him through the doorway of Y/N’s room. Just before they’d managed to slam the door shut, Shinobu caught Aoi’s eye and nodded, the younger girl quickly disappeared into the Pillar’s office.
Shinobu watched in stunned silence as the Flame Pillar broke free from the Kakushi and began hurtling his body against the door, Y/N’s name falling from his lips in an anguished chant.
Rengoku was so delirious in his fevered panic that he did not notice Aoi slip behind him and plunge a syringe into his neck, depositing a thick stream of the clear liquid that Shinobu knew would have a near-instantaneous effect on his consciousness.
The Insect Pillar felt a strange sense of pity and remorse as she watched her friend slump to the floor outside of the infirmary room, a final cry out for the Ice Pillar falling from his lips before the sedative lulled him back to sleep.
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(Kyojuro’s POV – three days later)
He didn’t know why he’d returned to the Butterfly Mansion.
Kyojuro tried to convince himself that it was because he didn’t want to wait for his crow to return with Kocho’s salve, but he knew it was a pathetic excuse. He’d sworn to himself that he would leave Y/L/N alone after their last argument. He’d vowed that the door between them had been closed for good, and they would only ever be colleagues. Nothing more.
But he couldn’t stay away. Perhaps it was because he’d spent the last few days stewing over their last argument, and somewhere, amidst his endless supply of self-hatred, he’d also grown angry with the Ice Pillar.
Angry, because she had put herself in harm’s way when he’d specifically told her not to.
Angry because she’d nearly died, and she’d threatened to take the last vestiges of his sanity with her to the afterlife.
Angry that she insisted on remaining in the Demon Slayer Corps despite having given more than enough of herself to their cause; angry that she didn’t understand why he couldn’t yet do the same.
Angry because she didn’t seem to understand his feelings at all.
Perhaps in another life, they could have had each other. Had they both been born into a world without demons, then maybe they would have still found each other and maybe, just maybe, he would have been able to love her the way she deserved.
But for Kyojuro, their relationship would always be defined by a series of maybes, and nothing more.
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It would have been a lie for Kyojuro to say he’d not been struck dumb by her.
She was stretched out on the steps of Kocho’s engawa, legs dangling off the edge of the porch as she leaned back on her elbows, eyes closed dreamily as she kept her face tilted up towards the cooling night air.
Long, lean, bare legs, he realized, an uncomfortable heat creeping up his collar. He couldn’t help running his eyes up their length, fixating hard on the supple curves of her thighs.
Why were her legs bare?
She looked…so unguarded this way. Her haori was draped around her shoulders, one of its sleeves hanging loosely to the side and exposing her bare shoulder – how exposed was she, the idiot – and her hair was completely unbound, falling in a silken river to her waist.
It was a stark contrast to the braided crown she wore at the base of her neck. It hit him that, not counting the night she’d nearly died, he had not otherwise seen her with her hair down.
He liked it. A lot.
“I finally rid myself of one migraine only for another to appear,” Y/N’s lofty voice snapped him out of his reverence, as the Ice Pillar opened her eyes to glare at him.
“If you’ve come for Shinobu, she is not here. She’s on an errand and will not be back until early morning.” Y/N turned her attention away from him and back towards the garden, her voice stony.
At that moment, there were a million things Kyojuro could have said to the Ice Pillar.
How are you?
I missed the way you glare at me.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
Any of those options would have been far better than what came tumbling out of his mouth.
“I hadn’t realized you were indecent. My apologies.”
Y/N’s head snapped back to him, her eyes chips of ice. “Indecent?” She rose from her seat on the engawa and faced him fully, and Rengoku nearly groaned.
Indecent, indeed.
Y/N was showing more skin than Kanroji did on a regular day. As she stood, Rengoku saw that she was hardly wearing any clothing at all, save for the haori draped loosely around her frame.
The Ice Pillar wore no top but the bindings around her chest, leaving a sizeable swath of her midriff exposed to the summer air. Whatever she wore as bottoms could hardly be labeled as “pants,” given that their hem ended just short of the middle of her thigh, leaving the vast majority of her legs exposed to anyone who would happen to walk by.
The Flame Pillar felt as though he were overheating, and he tugged uselessly at the collar of his uniform shirt. As he looked over the scowling Ice Pillar, Rengoku found himself unable to remember why he had come to the Mansion at all.
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(Y/N’s POV)
(Earlier that day)
“Ta-da!” Mitsuri sang as she pulled the small bundle from behind her, a grin wide on her face. “A gift from Shinobu and myself!”
Y/N peered down quizzically at the small, folded bunch of cloth in the Love Pillar’s hands. “What is it?”
“A new take on the Corps’ uniform,” Shinobu replied crisply, sitting down on the tatami floor of her office. “I designed it myself, and Mitsuri sewed it.”
“But what is it?” Y/N pressed.
Mitsuri joined Shinobu on the floor. “Your new training pants. Altered, so that you have more flexibility and less irritation against your wound.”
Y/N held up the tiny scrap of fabric between her index finger and thumb. “Are you telling me these are pants?”
Mitsuri and Shinobu nodded, smiling.
Y/N looked incredulously at the two women. “But where are the pants?”
Mitsuri laughed. “Think of it as a cross between the uniform skirt and pants, but more modified.”
Shinobu nodded. “I used the same material that our uniform is made out of but designed it in a way to be more flexible – it will mold to your body rather than require you to use a belt to keep it up.” Y/N unfurled the cloth and gaped down at it. “They likely aren’t suitable for public, but around here and during your training, they should be perfectly adequate.”
“Perfectly adequate?” Y/N repeated, turning the garment over in her hands. “Shinobu, these are underclothes! Not pants!” The Ice Pillar could not stop herself from giggling. “My legs will be entirely exposed!”
“Try them on!” Mitsuri urged. “Shinobu and I estimated they would hit around mid-thigh, so you’ll still have some coverage.” Mitsuri looked down at her own skirt in consideration. “Slightly more so than I do.”
Y/N groaned but removed her uniform pants and slid into her friends’ gift. She was surprised at how comfortable they felt; they had a similar feel to the chest bindings most of the women in the Corps wore, in terms of fit. The black bottoms had no true waistband, but fit snuggly at the dip of her waist, before hugging her hips and thighs until the hem cut right above the middle of her thigh.
“How do they feel?” Shinobu asked as Y/N inspected the new garment.
Y/N turned from side to side, testing their flexibility. “Good. They don’t seem to rub against the scar at all.” Y/N smiled devilishly at her friends. “Even if they do leave little to the imagination.”
MItsuri giggled. “I hadn’t noticed Y/N, but you have – oh, what did Uzui call it?” She scrunched her eyebrows in thought. “Oh! An ‘easy and deliverable type of butt!’” The three girls laughed, carefree as Y/N wiggled her hips suggestively in front of her friends, her heart warm at the care and consideration they had put into their gift.
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Y/N mused that Mitsuri’s assessment of how she looked in the undershorts had been correct as Rengoku’s eyes raked over her as she stood tall before him, an unmistakable glint of hunger glowing in his amber pools.
Until they snagged on the thick, curved gash that extended from the band of her bottoms to just over her belly button.
In an instant, simmering fire of the Flame Pillar’s gaze had been snuffed out, something harder and colder taking over as he glared at where Upper Moon Six had buried his poisoned sickle within her.
Under any other circumstance, Y/N might have felt self-conscious at the mixture of frigid contempt that pulled on Rengoku’s face as he ran his eyes over her scar, but at that moment, it only made her blood boil.
“You should return to your room. You shouldn’t be out here exposed like this.” Rengoku said after a moment, his eyes moving away from her to stare over her shoulder, resolutely avoiding her gaze.
Y/N wondered briefly if it were possible to make someone combust with the fire of their stare. She was so tired and so angry at the way in which he demanded she stay at arm’s length yet felt utterly entitled to boss her around.
She decided then that she would not comply. Instead, Y/N took one step and then another, and again until she pushed past him, marching intently up the path she knew led away from the Butterfly Estate and to a secluded, grassy, hilled clifftop.
“Stop — Y/L/N” Rengoku growled, lunging after her, but Y/N, despite her injured state, was still faster than he, and she twisted out of his grasp before he could grab her and haul her back to the Mansion.
She probably looked insane, and maybe she was -- barely dressed, hair unbound, and striding towards that grassy hill up the winding path from Shinobu’s estate like she had any idea what she was doing.
The Flame Pillar followed.
—————————————————————--------
Apart from her close friendship with the Insect Pillar, there was another reason Y/N spent so much time in and around the Butterfly Mansion — its view.
Though she supposed this secret area she’d discovered couldn’t really be counted as part of Shinobu’s Estate — it was, after all, up a rather steep and twisting climb from the western-most point of her friend’s manor, and one could scarcely see the lights of the house once they ascended the small cliff.
Her thighs ached after nearly two months of disuse as she stormed up the steep incline, narrowly avoiding the sharp, twisting branches of the ancient trees that had concaved over the beaten path, forming a tunnel of gnarled wood that forced her to duck her head to navigate.
Y/N’s chest tightened as she neared the end of the path, the steady beat of the Flame Pillar’s footsteps trailing closely behind her.
When she finally emerged from the thicket of branches, she felt as though she could breathe again.
The path had given way to a cliff-top clearing. Soft, emerald grass covered the earthen floor, peppered with various wildflowers in vibrant hues of periwinkle, white, and pink. Towards the center was a thick, ancient oak tree, with a trunk as wide as a small hut, Its leaves ruffled lazily in the slight summer breeze. Fat hotaru floated idly above the grass while the crickets hummed.
The clearing extended to a point before dropping into a rocky cliff. Had it been a night of a new moon, Y/N would never risk coming out here for fear of stumbling too close to the cliff’s edge. But that night, the moon was full and its silver light was so bright that Y/N could see all the way to the opposite of the clearing, down to the summer irises swaying in the warm night air.
It was a pity that instead of feeling the warm serenity she normally had when she came out to her little hideaway, she felt nothing but boiling anger and a growing headache.
“You need to go back inside,” Rengoku said from behind her. Y/N ground her teeth, turning sharply on her heel to face him.
“Why do you care — I thought you only did that when I’m unconscious.” She bit back, and it felt good to see him be the one who flinched for once. “Or maybe it’s when you think I’m dying?”
She laughed, derisively. “You’ll have to forgive me, I’ve long since forgotten the rules of your game. You change them so often, you see.”
“Go back to the Butterfly Mansion, Y/L/N. You shouldn’t be out here. Not in your current state.” He said, voice as hard and unforgiving as stone.
“I’ve told you already that you are not in a position to order me around!” Y/N snapped, her words and her eyes chips of ice as she glared at him.
He was so infuriating — he had told her, in so many ways, that she meant nothing to him, and yet here he was, glowering at her as though her very existence incensed him.
“You’ve been nothing but unkind to me since I awoke, and you’ve given me no explanation!” She took a step towards him.
“Stop,” the Flame Pillar bit out, barely concealing the way he trembled with rage. “Do not take another step. Turn around and go back inside.”
If Y/N had looked pissed before, she looked downright furious now.
“Why did you come to see me while I was unconscious?” Y/N demanded, shaking. “You came every day, yet the second I wake up, you stop?”
His refusal to answer her, to even look at her, only made her seethe.
“You’re a coward, Rengoku.”
Rengoku’s teeth gnashed together, his fists balling tightly by his sides as he drew upon every ounce last shred of sanity, of restraint, left within him.
“Go. In. Side.” He ground out dangerously, his voice dropping into a growl on the last syllable.
But the Ice Pillar took another step towards him, her eyes blazing with a fire that could outburn his own.
“No.”
Rengoku’s jaw flexed. “Y/L/N-“
“I said no, Rengoku.” She was now within arm’s reach of the rigid Flame Pillar.
His eyes met hers, cold and hard, but she did not balk. She went in for the kill. “You have no say over my choices when my life is meaningless to you.”
Y/N watched the blow land, and land hard.
“Meaningless?” Rengoku looked at her and there was a new fire in his gaze, a hot, angry fire that threatened to burn the grassy overlook around them to cinders. “You believe I think your life is meaningless?”
This time, it was Rengoku who advanced towards her, bringing her within an arm’s length, and forcing her to tilt her head up to hold his raging stare.
“Do you have any idea — any at all — what it was like to see you, half dead in Uzui’s arms?” Rengoku’s voice dark, and harsh as he narrowed his eyes at her. “Or what it was like to have to carry you to Kocho, not knowing whether your heart would give out before I could get you there?”
Y/N refused to cower beneath the intensity of his gaze, her chin lifting defiantly. “Do I know what it was like?” She hissed; hackles raised.
“Thank you Rengoku, truly — thank you.” Y/N laughed, but it was devoid of any humor. “I am so glad that you’ve finally given me something to work with — so those are your rules, are they?” She was toe to toe with the Flame Hashira, glowering down at her.
“Well since we’re keeping score, Rengoku, do you know what it was like to see you broken and bleeding out on Kocho’s table after the incident on the train?”
“That’s not the same thing,” Rengoku shot back bitterly.
“How the fuck is it not-?”
“Because it wasn’t your mission to take!” Rengoku finally broke, his voice rising to a shout. He could not stop himself as his hands shot out and gripped Y/N’s shoulders, shaking her lightly in his torment.
“You have no idea how it felt to know that you had died — no matter how briefly — because you went on a mission in my place!”
“To know that — that you could still die because I had been too weak on that fucking train. Your death would have been my fault, Y/N!”
----------------------------------------------------
(Kyojuro’s POV)
And there it was: the truth that he had tried so hard to suppress, laid flat out in the open.
Everything that had happened to Y/N, the whole entire mess — had been entirely his fault.
His fault because he had been too weak to finish off Upper Moon Three, too weak to do anything but let the demon’s punch a hole through his chest like it was nothing.
Y/L/N and Uzui had saved themselves in the end; they’d completed their mission, defeating not just one, but two upper ranks. They hadn’t succumbed to their injuries until after they’d fulfilled their duties.
But him? He’d only been saved by the grace of the sun and the tireless efforts of the Kakushi.
He’d nearly lost his life and he had nothing to show for it. Rather than do anything to further the Corp’s ultimate goals, he’d only set them back, and nearly cost them something priceless in return — their Ice Pillar.
The woman he loved.
He had no right to love her, of course — not when his reprehensible weakness had forced her to be offered up to two upper moon demons on a silver platter.
She’d been there, the morning he awoke from his three-week-long coma. She’d been right by his bedside, a sob choking from her throat as she’d called for Kocho to come quick!
At first, he’d been confused, because he hadn’t understood why she was crying. He’d tried to reach for her, to wipe the tears spilling down her cheeks when the pain had slammed into him, causing him to seize, arm suspended in mid-air.
Never before had he not been in control of his body; it had sent him into a panic.
“No, Kyojuro, please don’t move!” Y/N had cried, calling him, for the first time, by his given name. a warm hand wrapping around the one he’d stretched out towards her, lowering it gently down to the bed. “Your injuries are too grave!”
He didn’t remember much after that, only what Kocho had filled him in on later — namely, that he’d begun to panic, his breathing flaring out of control as he’d tried to fight off Y/L/N, a Kakushi, and the Insect Pillar.
His recovery had been long and slow. His wounds from the Upper Three demon had resulted in significant muscle damage that had required weeks of intensive care and training in order to build it back up again.
Those long days spent at the Butterfly Mansion had given him time to stew; to rage against himself. He’d been frustrated, so unbelievably frustrated over his inability to swing his own sword for more than five minutes that he almost considered giving in and retiring.
And then Uzui arrived, and he’d mentioned an upcoming mission to the Entertainment District, that they had discussed prior to Kyojuro leaving for the damned train, and the Sound Pillar revealed that his intel suggested the possible presence of an Upper Rank.
Kyojuro had promised to accompany him, and then he’d woken up in Kocho’s hospital, and that mission had been taken off the table and given to her.
The panic he had felt had been indescribable; he had narrowly survived an encounter with an Upper Rank, but then he was forced to watch the woman he loved walk straight into the wolf's den, and he had been incapable of convincing her to stay behind.
While she had been gone, he had railed against and prayed to and cursed at the gods, begging them to bring her home, to let her come back to him alive and whole.
Instead, they’d sent her back as a near-corpse and had laughed at his pitiful attempts to save her.
And then, she had straddled that narrow divide between life and death for nearly two months, and he had been as helpless as a cat chasing a string — his desire forever in sight yet somehow always just beyond his reach.
After his brush with death, he’d made a commitment to himself not to think of his battle with the Upper Three demon, to not waste his skill and energy on the past, but rather focus his fury on ensuring that when they did meet again, he would emerge victorious. He’d certainly not given any thought to the demon’s slime-tongued words.
He’d been disgusted when the demon had propositioned turning him into its like — and outright offended that those creatures could ever compare to the beautiful transience of humanity.
But then he’d cradled Y/N, broken and dying in his arms, and for the first time, Kyojuro had understood the appeal of the Upper Three’s offer.
Because he would rather have lived in a world in which Y/N had been turned into his enemy than in one in which she did not exist at all.
The very thought had shaken him to his core; because it meant he was not fully dedicated to their cause. He had no right to call himself a Hashira; nor did he have any right to claim to love Y/L/N. Not when he’d so easily damn her out of his own selfishness. So he had run.
A coward, after all.
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(Y/N’s POV)
Y/N was panting, her fury rippling off her in near-tangible waves.
“So, this whole thing,” she seethed, her voice shaking. “Your whole fucking attitude — has been because you’ve had your head so far up your ass, that you thought my injuries were your fault?”
It was unbelievable. It was ridiculous. And yet it was so Rengoku that it made her ears ring, made her see red as she tried to keep herself from imploding.
Rengoku said nothing, but she could see the way his eyes shuttered closed, his walls flying back up as he remained intent on keeping her out. He turned and began walking back towards the path back to the Estates.
“I was right — you ARE a coward!” She shrieked after him.
He froze. She stood there, heaving, daring him to turn around, to face her.
“Do not call me a coward again,” he said quietly, his back still to her, but his shoulders tensed, his fists balling once more at his sides.
Y/N smiled ruefully. “Then exactly what would you call what you’re doing now?.” Her lip curled into a sneer. “Run away, Rengoku. It’s what you do best.”
A flash of orange and white clouded her vision as Rengoku turned on his heel and closed the distance between them before she could draw another breath.
Y/N did not have time to react before his hands gripped either side of her jaw as he slammed his mouth down against hers, furious and heated.
It was not gentle; it was an angry clash of lips and teeth, but it also stoked a fire so hot in Y/N’s belly that she did not care, and she fully gave herself over to the bruising press of his lips against hers. She gladly opened up to him so that his tongue could slide into her mouth as one of his hands snaked behind her head to press her harder to him, demanding that she let him take and take until he was sated.
As quickly as it had begun, it was over. They broke apart with a gasp, leaping back from one another as though burned. Their chests heaved as they stared at one another.
There was a line drawn in the sand between them. If either of them crossed it, there would be no going back.
He was a coward, but she wasn’t. And she’d grown tired of this tedious dance of theirs.
Yet it surprised her all the same that he reached for her at the same time she moved for him, the two of them colliding like magnets as their mouths clashed together once more.
Rengoku kissed her like he was drowning, and she was his lifeline.
Y/N threw her arms around his neck and tugged him down closer to her, determined to take from him as much as he wanted to take from her.
The pair of them stumbled back against the ancient oak tree that sat back from the grassy cliff, Y/N caged against its bark by the Flame Pillar.
His hands gripped fistfuls of her haori as though he couldn’t decide whether to pull her closer or tug her away. His lips devoured each breathy moan he pulled from her as one hand tangled in her hair and pulled, allowing him to deepen the kiss.
She ran her hands through the fiery strands of his hair, gripping and tugging it as he explored her mouth was his demanding tongue. Y/N, emboldened by the way his fingers dug into her haori, let her hands roam from his hair and to his neck, and then to the rocky planes of his broad chest before settling on his hips as she tugged him flush against her.
His control was slipping, and fast. “Y/L/N, I can’t- I won’t be able to hold back.” Rengoku moaned into her mouth, his hands scrunching the fabric of her haori, his fingers desperately seeking to hold her closer to him. “Tell me to stop, Y/L/N.”
Y/N’s hands only buried deeper into his hair, tugging him harder against her as she slid her tongue into his waiting mouth.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered against his mouth between breaks for oxygen. “Never stop, Rengoku.”
Y/N pulled back from him, just enough to unlatch his hands from where they were buried in the back of her haori, and moved them inside its folds, right on her bare waist.
The burning weight of his hands felt exquisite.
Rengoku shuddered as he felt the smooth, soft dips of Y/N’s waist, his fingers digging into her flesh as he sought to touch more of her, his hands running across every inch that was not covered by her bindings or those glorious undershorts.
Lips still moving furiously against hers, Rengoku bent slightly to run his hands down the silken expanse of her thighs, gripping under her knees before hoisting her up to carry her away from the tree and lay her down in the velvety grass below.
Y/N felt as though she were on fire. The ache between her legs was almost maddening, and she was desperate to have the Flame Pillar sheathe himself inside her, to make her forget even her own name.
If she could not have his love, she could at least have this.
Her hands dragged down Rengoku’s front, coming to a rest at his belt before she began fumbling with the clasp. Y/N had just managed to undo it when Rengoku’s hands — large, warm, and much stronger than her own, wrapped around her wrists, stilling her.
“Not yet, you impatient woman,” he smirked against her mouth. He moved one wrist to join the other in his left hand before bringing her arms up over her head, pinning her to the ground.
Y/N whimpered and rolled her hips against his, impatient and demanding, wanting desperately to feel some relief as her core clenched wildly around nothing.
Rengoku chuckled darkly, the rich timbre of his voice causing her blood to nearly boil with her want, as he made his way down her body with his lips.
He first came to her chest bindings, growling in impatience as he nipped at one breast over the tightly wound fabric.
His fingers brushed against her sternum as he ripped her bindings straight down the middle, Y/N shuddering as the warm summer night’s air caressed her sensitive skin, her nipples pebbling at the change in temperature.
She waited for him to lavish her soft mounds, but the Flame Pillar paused, eyes narrowed on the valley between her breasts, right on the pale, lilac mark where he’d plunged Shinobu’s antidote into her heart.
Y/N felt a lump form in her throat. He’d reacted poorly to the ribboned scar on her lower belly already, and now her once chance to finally have Rengoku in the way she’d so desperately longed to have him was about to be ruined.
But instead of pulling away from her in disgust, he leaned forward and pressed his lips softly against it the healed wound.
“I hadn’t realized I wounded you,” he murmured softly, reverently as he kissed it again. Y/N watched in bewilderment as he pressed his ear against her chest, letting his head rest there for a moment.
Listening to her heart hammer against her sternum.
“The sweetest music,” he whispered, pulling away to look at her not with lust but with unbounded tenderness.
Don’t look at me like that, she silently begged, don’t give me hope.
But as quickly as the moment had come, it passed and the esurient flame in Rengoku’s eyes flickered back to life. His lips continued down her abdomen, hot and needy until he reached the source of her near-fatal injury.
His mouth paused at the scar left by Upper Moon Six, the one he’d so callously glared at not even an hour before. This time, he ran his tongue along it, from the top to its base near her hipbone, pressing a fierce kiss against its end before continuing his descent.
“I will either have to thank my old Tsugoku the next time I see her,” Rengoku whispered darkly as he pulled at the soft waistband of Y/N’s undershorts with his teeth. “Or I shall have to burn her sewing room to cinders.” Rengoku’s fingers slid beneath the short hem of her bottoms, pulling them down inch by inch to expose her sensitive flesh.
Rengoku groaned when he saw Y/N was not wearing anything else beneath her scandalous bottoms. “Definitely burning.” His hands, so large and warm ran up the outer curve of her thighs, marveling at the silky smoothness of her skin. “Because you are far too tempting when wearing them.”
The Flame Pillar looked wild as he leaned forward, pressing his lips against the lower indent between Y/N’s hipbones as he kissed his way down to where she ached the most.
He ducked around the center of her desire in favor of sucking softly on her inner thigh. Y/N’s chest heaved as her hands flailed next to her, desperately seeking purchase, until the Flame Hashira caught them in his hands, his thumbs rubbing soothing circles on her palms as their fingers interlaced.
“Rengoku - just fuck me already,” Y/N groaned as the Flame Pillar’s face settled between her thighs, his hot breath against her bare cunt causing her legs to attempt to clench shut.
“Well now, that won’t do,” Rengoku tutted, his hands withdrawing from hers as he wound his arms underneath both of her thighs, spreading them as wide as he could to expose her core to his heady gaze.
Rengoku leaned forward and lightly traced up her damp slit with the tip of his tongue. His amber irises which had been locked on hers, rolled back into his head as he groaned at her taste.
“I’m going to take my time with you. I’ve been dreaming of this for a long time, Y/N.” He warned, hands tightening around her thighs as he pressed a light kiss against her slit, teasing her.
In the back of her mind, Y/N registered that he’d used her first name. But the graze of his lips against her most sensitive flesh had her crying out his name, high-pitched and breathy, and she watched helplessly as the sound made Rengoku’s eyes turn black.
In an instant, he was upon her, and he was ravenous.
His mouth latched to her center as though she was an oasis in the middle of a blazing desert, and he was a man dying of thirst.
The way Rengoku’s teeth grazed her sensitive nub made her abdomen clench, and she fought against his ironclad grip on her thighs as they spasmed, desperate to clench around his head.
Y/N moaned, head thrown back into the soft summer grass as she felt herself grow wetter and wetter beneath the Flame Pillar, her hands desperately tugging and pinching at her breasts in an effort to feel more pleasure.
Y/N felt as though she was hurtling towards a cliff that she could not stop herself from tumbling over as Rengoku increased the intensity of his ministrations against her needy cunt.
“You taste,” he ground out through harsh drags of his tongue up her drenched folds, “like fucking paradise.”
His mouth latched around her clit, giving it a sharp suck that had Y/N seeing stars. She barely had time to recover, to acknowledge that she was at her tipping point when Rengoku thrust his tongue into her core and began to fuck her.
Y/N came apart the moment she felt his tongue enter her, a rush of her juices spilling over his relentless maw, but he held her hips down and continued his feast. His teeth grazed her clit over and over while his tongue pumped steadily in and out of her, and Y/N was close to sobbing at the overstimulation.
The Flame Pillar kept his eyes locked on hers the entire time, the amber orbs glowing almost ominously in the indigo night.
“I- fuck.” Y/N breathed, grinding unrestrainedly against the blonde’s greedy mouth. “Rengoku!”
The Ice Pillar tried to sit up, tried to grab her comrade’s hair to tell him that she couldn’t take it anymore, that she needed him, but Rengoku was faster. Unfurling a steely arm from where it had been locked around her thigh to hold her open to him, he reached up her torso, his large hand splaying across her upper abdomen to restrain her.
“Sit down,” he growled between thrusts of his tongue into her aching cunt, nipping harshly at her inner thigh. “I am not finished.”
Y/N whimpered beneath the weight of his hand holding her down against the earth and the nearly painful ecstasy that Rengoku bestowed upon her between her legs.
Whether it was in praise for her obedience or a further act of torture, Rengoku then pressed his face flush against her core and rocked it harshly from side to side, his nose and the burgeoning stubble along his jaw scraping against her overstimulated and sensitive flesh.
Y/N slapped her hand against her mouth to stifle the howl that tore from her throat. Rengoku repeated the movement; it felt wonderful. It felt obscene. It made Y/N’s thighs contract around his head as her stomach dipped inward and a gush of her juices spilled out of her, more powerful than before, dampening the collar of the Flame Pillar’s haori.
For a breath, Y/N thought she would die of embarrassment until she felt Rengoku’s mouth vibrate against her from his groan of satisfaction. His tongue thrust once, twice more into her aching core before he withdrew completely, satisfaction tugging at the corners of his smirking lips.
But Rengoku looked nowhere near sated as he gazed down hungrily at her, wantonly spread out against the grass, the shredded pieces of her training attire strewn about, save for her haori.
“I will give you one last chance to end this now,” Rengoku whispered, kneeling above her but no longer touching her. “Tell me to stop, and I will. I will walk away, and no one will know.”
Though her body already ached from the intensity of Rengoku’s mouth upon her, she could not fathom stopping here, not when she’d barely begun to taste him herself. The thought of rolling aside to pull on the tattered remains of her clothing, to return to her estate and awake tomorrow as though he had not melted every icy reservation she’d held with his touch, was enough to make her want to cry.
Though her limbs felt boneless, she summoned all her strength to reach toward the Flame Hashira, to beckon him to return to her.
“I want you, Rengoku,” Y/N said, her voice a breathy whisper as tears clung to her eyelashes. “Please.”
Rengoku’s pupils exploded, his eyes darkening as he covered her nude body with his own. Y/N nearly sobbed in relief as his lips roughly caught hers, one hand coming up to cradle her face while the other snaked beneath her head, tilting it to the side so he could deepen his claim over her mouth.
Y/N’s hands rose, shakily, to pull at the buttons of his uniform top, desperate to feel his skin burn against hers.
“On one condition,” Rengoku said, moving his lips from hers to press against her ear, Y/N shivering. “You must call me by my name,”
“Rengoku?” Y/N questioned her mind too fogged by her own desire.
He nipped lightly under her jaw before pulling his face back from hers, smirking slightly at the way she whined when avoided her attempt to kiss him again.
“My true name.”
With clarity, Y/N realized what he desired. But he had teased her far too much already, and she yearned to return the favor.
So she looked up at him through her eyelashes, teeth sinking into her lower lip in such a way that made the Flame Hashira’s eyes darken.
“Please, please, Kyojuro,” she whispered, lancing a hand up his bicep. “Take me.”
The growl that clawed its way out of the heaving chest of the Flame Pillar made Y//N’s thighs clamp together. Rengoku — Kyojuro — pounced on her, and Y/N summoned all her residual strength to rip his uniform shirt open.
Kyojuro moaned into her neck as his shirt gave way and Y/N’s hands came to rest against his bare skin, her nails raking down his taut pectorals to the rigid planes of his chiseled abdomen.
Her lips began descending the path carved by her nails when she drew short at the dark, thick starburst-shaped scar that covered his shoulder and left pectoral. Kyojuro’s breath seized as she pressed her lips ever so softly against it, turning so she could look up at him from beneath her lashes.
Kyojuro was panting as she nuzzled against his scar, kissing it once more before gently gliding her hand over his heart and resting it there, letting herself savor the strong, sturdy beat from within his chest.
Just as he did before, she resumed her trail down his body, her lips coming to the edge of his pants when his hands wound themselves in her hair, every nerve in his body alight as she licked her way up the small happy trail that stopped just below his belly button.
As much as he wanted to feel her mouth around him, Kyojuro had been driven to the brink of insanity by Y/N’s touch, and his resolve was quickly dwindling.
“Y/N — my flame — I can’t wait,” Kyojuro said by way of apology, as he covered her hands with his own to still them on his belt. He slipped his hands down to grip her wrists, bringing them together in one hand and moving her arms up over her head, pinning them against the grasp. With his free hand, Kyojuro loosened his belt and his pants, and shimmied them down, kicking them off behind him. Y/N’s eyes widened at the sight of his proud length as it bounced against his belly button.
Y/N’s breath caught in her throat. She was no stranger to the male body, but this – she’d never had anyone compare to Kyojuro’s size or girth.
Kyojuro noticed her hesitation. “Is this – have you ever --?” Kyojuro breathed, hovering above her. It did not matter to him whether she had or had not, but he wanted to ensure that he did not hurt her.
Y/N shook her head. “No, it’s not my first time – but you are the first one to be so…well endowed.” Y/N flushed as Kyojuro laughed softly above her, and she felt his lips graze hers.
He pulled back slightly, reaching to grip the base of his aching cock tapping it against her soaked cunt in a warning and in permission.
Y/N seized beneath him at the spark of hot pleasure that was sent crackling up her spine as he rubbed his velvety head against the most sensitive part of her core. “Kyojuro,” she hissed through clenched teeth, rolling her hips impatiently towards him.
The mushroomed tip of his cock pushed into her entrance and Y/N felt herself go cross-eyed. It was heaven; pure, unadulterated, blissful heaven.
He was insistent on easing his thick length into her, but the throbbing between Y/N’s legs had grown nearly unbearable. He still wasn’t close enough, not nearly as much as she needed him to be.
Boldly, Y/N locked her ankles against Kyojuro’s backside, and with all her might, hauled him into her in a single stroke.
“Fuck!” he yelled, unable to restrain his volume as Y/N forced him to become fully seated within her. Her core was impossibly tight and so fucking warm and wet that it had been a true exercise of self-restraint not to spill himself inside her right then.
Y/N nearly screamed in pleasured relief at the way her body burned and stretched around Kyojuro’s considerable length, his base pressed flush against her sensitive clit as she began to grind furiously against him, desperate to relieve the friction that made her ache.
Kyojuro was still panting from the way Y/N had slammed him into her, nearly trembling with restraint as he willed himself not to finish before they’d truly begun.
Once certain that he would not climax like some green boy, he laughed quietly under his breath. The dark sound caused Y/N’s eyes to fly open, and her stomach flipped at the wicked glint in his eyes as he stared at her like a hunter stalking its prey.
Kyojuro leaned forward and took one of her breasts, harshly into his mouth, grazing his teeth over her nipple hard enough to make Y/N cry out in slight pain before he lapped at it soothingly with his tongue.
“You want me to fuck you, is that it?” He murmured between his ministrations, leaving fresh marks all over aching mounds.
Y/N could hardly make a sound as Kyojuro withdrew almost completely from her heat before slamming into her once, the Ice Pillar nearly choking on the breath that flew from her chest with his force.
Desperately — pathetically — Y/N nodded, whimpering.
“If that’s how you want it,” Kyojuro growled against her breast, giving her nipple one harsh nip with his teeth before pulling himself off her.
He sat on his knees, back straight as he began to pound relentlessly into her, his hands gripping her backside and holding her flush against his strong thighs. Y/N’s head remained thrown back against the earth, her fingers tearing at the soft grass beneath her.
Rengoku’s movements were just like those he wielded in battle — powerful; all-consuming; relentless; and unforgiving.
Y/N had never considered herself to be a particularly vocal person when engaged in carnal activities, but the way that Rengoku’s cock hammered into her spasming core over and over had reduced her to a moaning and whimpering mess. The only intelligible thing that fell from her lips was his name — Kyojuro.
“You look so fucking beautiful like this,” Kyojuro grunted out between forceful snaps of his hips against hers, the night air alive with the lewd squelching of Y/N’s dripping cunt as he pistoned into her.
Y/N looked to see the Flame Pillar’s eyes locked on her breasts as they bounced with the force of his thrusts. Between the moans and whimpers he pulled from her with every punishing thrust of his hips against hers, she lightly dragged her fingers from their place in the grass to her hipbone, and then up to trace teasingly around her peaked breast.
Kyojuro’s eyes followed every move, his thrusts hardening as she pinched her nipple and let out a breathy little scream, her walls pulsing around his aching length.
“Fuck,” Kyojuro grit, feeling himself twitch within her as he watched Y/N play with herself, spurring him to go faster, deeper within her.
He moved his hand under one of her knees and lifted her leg over his shoulder, allowing him to plunge deeper into her silken heat, and he teasingly drew his fingers up and down her outer thigh.
At that moment, as Kyojuro was poised against the silhouette of the moon, his amber eyes glowing as he watched where he appeared and disappeared inside her, the realization hit Y/N like a storm, and it knocked her entirely off her axis.
She was in love with Kyojuro.
Who else could make her feel so sacred and yet so angry? Who else had been capable of slipping past every wall she’d built within herself, capable of getting her to let her guard down before consuming her so furiously she had not realized she’d ever been in danger?
He was fire, she was ice. One of them had to give to the other. She’d just always thought it would be him giving into her.
Yet there, beneath the moonlight, her climax rising above her like a tidal wave, Y/N realized that she was powerless against the waves that rose to pull her under, to never again let her up for air.
Distantly, Y/N felt the Flame Pillar’s callused thumb find her clit and her climax slammed into her, and she succumbed to the endless sea called Kyojuro.
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As Y/N broke apart around him, Kyojuro swore he’d never seen anything as beautiful in his entire life.
She shattered over him with the prettiest scream he’d ever heard, and he could barely make out the drawn-out syllables of his name as her hips jerked up against his while her inner walls threatened to squeeze the life from him.
Y/N finally collapsed back against the ground, her body limp from the exhaustion of her pleasure. Kyojuro then moved in chase of his own release, his hips pressed solidly against hers as he rutted his cock deep within her.
“Fuck,” he groaned, his hands tightening around Y/N’s waist. The familiar electricity of impending release tingled at the base of Kyojuro’s spine, and his stomach began to clench as he began his ascent to his climax. “Y/N — I am going to finish soon,” his head was thrown back, and his groans were loud enough to alert anyone nearby of exactly what was transpiring between the two Hashira. “Please — tell me where--”
“Inside,” Y/N gasped, her legs tightening around Kyojuro’s hips in a feeble attempt to keep him within her, to ensure that he wouldn’t yet leave her. “Please, Kyojuro, stay.”
Kyojuro was a rational man, and he knew of one major reason not to allow his seed to spill inside Y/N’s heavenly body. But all those rationalities flew out the window at the sound of her wanton and needy whimpers and the way her heat fluttered around him and Kyojuro did not think he could pull out of her if he wanted to.
Kyojuro’s thrusts became more and more frenzied and bruising, with the Flame Hashira hardly dragging his twitching length out of her as he neared his own climax.
“Hold onto me,” he panted, falling forward so that his chest was pressed flush against Y/N’s, one arm going to wrap around her waist while the other snaked over to where her arm lay in the grass, gripping her wrist to pin it up over her head as his fingers interlocked tightly with hers.
Y/N hiked her legs higher up his waist, crossing them at her shins so that he was buried deep within her. Her free arm looped under the one he had braced above her head to wrap around his back, her fingers digging into the rippling muscle and scarred skin that littered his shoulders.
“Make me yours, Kyojuro,” she whispered against his neck, squeezing his hips with her thighs.
Y/N felt his entire body tense at her words and Kyojuro’s moans turned into shouts as he gave one final, deep thrust within her before he exploded. His hand tightened fiercely around hers with the force of his climax,
The pleasure that surged up his spine had been white hot as he pushed himself as deeply as he could possibly go within Y/N’s vice-like core. Kyojuro was not a novice to pleasure, but he had never finished as hard or as much as he did buried within her.
Kyojuro canted his hips, prolonging his release as he continued to empty himself into her, coming down from his earth-shattering high. Y/N mewled against his throat, her lips brushing against his sensitive pulse point as her legs spasmed. once more around his hips.
He finally stilled within her, arms shaking as he braced himself above her, to keep from crushing the exhausted woman beneath him.
He lowered his head down to her level. “Are you all right, my flame?” He panted, pressing a kiss between her brows before he rested his forehead heavily against hers.
She looked up at him from under her eyelashes and nodded shakily.
He no longer could keep himself from collapsing against Y/N, but as he fell forward, he gripped her and rolled, pulling her to his chest with his leaking cock still nestled deeply between her legs.
“I don’t want to push you away,” Kyojuro murmured softly after a moment, his chest finally easing as his breathing slowed.
Y/N made a show of looking down to where they were still joined, the Flame Pillar’s pearly seed slowly leaking out of her and onto the grass below them. “I think I’m about as close to you as physically possible, Rengoku.”
Kyojuro rolled his eyes and ground his hips slightly into her, causing Y/N to squeak against him.
“Quiet, woman, I’m trying to apologize to you.” He trailed his fingers up and down her spine as she nestled back against his chest, chin perched on his pectoral as she waited for him to continue.
“I was just so angry. After the incident on the train, when I woke up in Kocho’s hospital — I was furious. With myself.” Amber eyes met hers and softened to pools of melted honey. “It was never you I was angry with.”
Y/N held his gaze evenly, her voice firm. “But you took it out on me all the same.” It wasn’t an angry accusation — it was the truth; ugly and sharp. But it was real, and so was the tentative, knowing hope in her eyes.
“Yes,” Kyojuro breathed. “Yes, I did. And I am so sorry for it, Y/N.” His hand reached up to gently cup the side of her face, thumb smoothing over the soft expanse of her cheek. “May I ask for your forgiveness?”
Y/N leaned her head into his warm palm, and smiled, softly.
“You may ask, Kyojuro.”
He brushed his thumb along her lower lip. “Can you forgive me, Y/N?”
Y/N threw a leg out over his other hip, straddling him beneath her, though moving so fluidly that they remained connected at their base.
She rolled her hips against his, and he felt himself begin to harden within her once more. Kyojuro moaned softly, head falling back against the earth as he brought his hands up to steady her, fingers digging gently into her hips as she repeated the movement, again and again, until he’d fully stiffened within her.
“Yes Kyojuro,” she sighed, hands coming to brace themselves against his abdomen as she began to ride him. “I forgive you.”
Kyojuro groaned, his head thrown back as he began to gently grind up into her, goosebumps erupting over his flesh as she lightly raked her nails over his pectorals and the hard ridges of his abdomen.
He wanted so very badly to lose himself within his pleasure, to allow Y/N to consume him whole and never let him go again, but his atonement was not complete.
Because Y/N had given him every opportunity to confess to her before, and he had been careless with them; she would not open that door herself again.
So he would.
“And may I give you my heart, Y/N?” He asked, his hands gliding sensually up from her hips to brace themselves on either side of her sensitive waist, squeezing her firmly.
Her pace had stuttered slightly once his words registered, eyes widening as she looked down at him, and Kyojuro hated that he was the reason the shadow of doubt lingered in her eyes.
“Is it truly mine?” She breathed, resuming the intoxicating rise and fall and push and grind of her hips, breasts beginning to bounce as she picked up her pace.
Kyojuro’s mouth watered, but he restrained himself, holding her gaze. “It was only ever yours, Y/N.”
Y/N cried out then, her hips beginning to drop and roll into his with urgency. By the way her damp heat began to pulse and constrict around him, Kyojuro knew that she was barreling towards her release once more.
One hand left its searing position at her waist to drift down to where they were connected, his rough thumb toying with the sensitive nub that had her heavenly cunt squeezing him for dear life.
“My beautiful flame,” he moaned, “how lucky I am to have such a darling god be the keeper of my heart.”
Kyojuro rolled into her from below again, the hand still braced on her waist guiding himself to push deeper into her, as his thumb began to press harder into the apex of her thighs.
“Sweet tempest, please,” Kyojuro panted, the relentless squeeze of Y/N’s walls around his aching length beginning to drive him to the point of madness. “Please, may I have your love?”
Y/N’s moans were piercing as she half-sobbed above him, head thrown back into the night sky, the hoary glow of the moon making her look like a celestial deity given human form as she writhed above him.
“Yes!” Y/N cried, “Yes Kyojuro, you have always had my love!”
The moment the words fell from her lips, Kyojuro jolted upright, coming into a sitting position as Y/N’s legs instantly wrapped around him. He wound one arm around her waist to bounce her in his lap, the other moving to circle his fingers around her nub.
Kyojuro nuzzled her nose with his own, his lips mere centimeters from hers as he pressed his forehead against her and held her eyes. “Then come for me, Y/N,” he murmured, his breath tickling her lips as he nuzzled her again. “Come for me, my love.”
Y/N seized around him like a vice, her head falling back as she unleashed a euphoric cry.
The force of her climax had caused her to arch backward in Kyojuro’s lap, thrusting her breasts up and forward, and Kyojuro bent to suck one into his greedy mouth, his own release imminent. The warm sticky rush of her pleasure combined with the way her velvety, molten walls constricted around him had Kyojuro seeing stars as his seed shot into her, hot and fast, his strangled groan muffled only by the soft plush of Y/N’s breast as he filled her to her brim for the second time that night.
For a long moment, neither Pillar said anything as they came down from their mutual highs, Y/N’s head pressed against Kyojuro’s shoulder while the Flame Pillar kept his arms firmly around her waist, his fingers trailing up and down her spine.
“Y/N, are you all right?” He murmured into her ear, still buried deep within her heat.
Y/N nodded sleepily against his skin, savoring how full and complete she felt perched in his lap.
“I love you, Kyojuro.” She said so softly that the Flame Pillar thought his heart might break. Kyojuro pulled away slightly to bring his fingers beneath her chin where she lay against his shoulder. Gently, he tilted her face towards his and captured her lips with his own.
“My darling flame,” He murmured against her lips as they broke apart, his eyes sweeping over her face, committing every detail of her beauty to memory. “Thank you.”
Y/N gave him a lazy smile. “I cannot be your flame, Kyojuro,” she teased, “Not when I am made of ice.”
Kyojuro flipped her back beneath him and danced his lips teasingly across the bridge of her nose. “Don’t you know, my beautiful foil, that ice can burn just as well as flame?” He pressed a feather-light kiss against her lips. “And I have been consumed by your silvery fire since I first laid eyes on you at Final Selection.”
Y/N looked up at him in wonder, her hand coming to rest against his face as she adoringly caressed his cheek.
“I love you, Y/N. I am so sorry it took me until now to say it.”
-------------------------------------------------—
Epilogue
Y/N made back it into her room, sight unseen, just as dawn had crept over the horizon.
Feet bare, she padded softly over to her waiting bed, shrugging out of Kyojuro’s uniform shirt and falling into her blankets, not caring at the growing discomfort she felt as the Flame Pillar’s seed dried in her undershorts.
She just wanted to sleep.
Y/N and Kyojuro had come together twice more before the pair realized that morning was imminent, and they needed to return to their respective dwellings before anyone noticed they were gone.
Y/N had lamented that Kyojuro had shredded her chest bindings beyond salvation and had worried she’d be forced to sneak back into the Butterfly Mansion with nothing but her haori to cover her bare chest when Kyojuro slid his uniform shirt over her shoulders.
“No one will think twice if they see me bare,” he’d said by way of explanation, gaze dropping momentarily to appreciate the marks he had left dotted across her breasts before rising back to her face. “I would like to keep you hidden, however.”
Kyojuro then fastened each button one by one, beginning from the bottom as he kissed his way up Y/N’s torso until his lips found the sensitive spot beneath her jaw, which he’d nipped.
It had taken everything in her not to throw him down and have him for the fifth time.
Kyojuro had walked with her as far as the edge of the path back to Shinobu’s before parting her with a sweet kiss and a promise to return to her later in the morning. He had also mentioned, somewhat mischievously, that he would be inquiring into when Y/N could expect to be discharged from the Butterfly Mansion and return to her own Estate.
Her empty, person-free estate.
Y/N collapsed into her bed, ready to sleep for a precious few hours before her training would begin anew.
“So, do you mind sharing where you’ve been all night?” A dangerously sweet voice chirped from over by the door.
Y/N shot up out of her bed, stomach falling out of her ass, as she faced the smiling, enraged Insect Pillar seated primly atop her wooden stool opposite of her.
“I was quite worried, you know,” Shinobu tutted, the honey of her smile poisoned by the violence in her eyes.
Y/N had never been one to be at a loss for words, a quick comment, or a snappy retort always on hand when the situation called for it.
But to her horror, her mind had gone dreadfully blank, and her tongue was swollen stupid in her mouth.
Shinobu smiled like she knew, eyes slowly looking her over, and Y/N was left with the uncomfortable feeling that her friend could see every way she’d allowed Kyojuro to utterly defile her.
“Will you be in need of a contraceptive?” Shinobu asked lightly, and Y/N felt like she would drop dead right then and there.
“…Yes, please.” She managed to squeak, and the Insect Pillar turned to leave.
“I will bring it with your breakfast.” Her hand closed around the doorknob but stilled.
“And Y/N?”
The Ice Pillar whimpered as her friend turned to look back at her, all smiles and throbbing forehead veins.
“If you ever keep the younger girls awake from the sounds of your activities with the Flame Pillar again, I will poison you both.”
🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸
#demon slayer#kimetsu no yaiba#kyojuro rengoku#rengoku kyojuro#kimetsu rengoku#rengoku x reader#kny rengoku#rengoku smut#rengoku x y/n#kyojuro rengoku x reader#shinobu kocho#kny shinobu#kny fanfic#kny x reader#kny#kimestu no yaiba#rengoku#kanroji mitsuri#kny mitsuri#hashira#demon slayer fic#hashira smut#demon slayer smut#kny x you#demon slayer x reader#kny smut#rengoku kyojuro x reader#kyojuro x y/n
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Hands-On Learning (Rodimus Perspective)
Read 'Hands-On Learning' Here!
art by @archie-sunshine
Rodimus/Human Reader, NSFW, First Contact AU, AFAB Reader, GN Pronouns, G/T, Experimental Sex, Fingering, Oral (Receiving)
I was asked many a time for Roddy's perspective in 'Hands-On Learning', so here it is!
NSFW Below The Cut!
“You're real eager, aren't you? Taking off all your little coverings so fast.~”
If Perceptor, or Megatron, or, Primus forbid, Ultra Magnus knew he was doing this, it could easily be a one-way ticket to the brig. Or Rung’s office. Whichever was closer. The first time had been an accident, sure. A misunderstanding. Something that, if it were to get out to the other mechs aboard, Rodimus could easily brush off as a miscommunication between different species. A miscommunication that wouldn't end with him being questioned about particular fetishes or slapped with a warning about ‘interface misconduct.’
But this? Cupping your soft, unarmored body between his massive digits? Teasing and squeezing your plush organic mass while you wriggled in his grip? This is something he could actually get in trouble for. This was something dangerous.
And Rodimus loved ‘dangerous’.
Your soft skin yielded so easily beneath the press of his servos, each delicate touch bringing these tiny bumps rippling to the surface of your skin, microscopic hairs standing on end as he stroked you. Your thighs fell apart as he trailed a digit up the length of one, revealing your slick, uncovered valve.
“Cute.” Instead of following your invitation, he instead poked you in the side of your squishy thigh, chuckling as your muscle shifted beneath his digit. There was far more yield than metal mesh usually gave, warmth molding into the crevices of his joints when he squeezed you again. You let out a soft whimpering noise, grabbing for the seam of his wrist and directing him up, up, until one of his digits was pressed flush against your valve. Once it was there you crooned, hips jerking at the faint rumble of his engines coursing through his frame.
“Yes? You like that? Must feel good pressing up on all your soft spots, huh?” His optics flickered between your face and valve, torn between watching the subtle twitches of your expressions trying to hold back your pleasure, and the slick you were now drooling all over his knuckle.
“Yes…” You cooed, along with another string of babble he didn't yet understand. But you kept rocking your hips up against him, huffing and whining with each ex-vent. He gave the slightest roll of his digit, and even that sensation was enough to have you gasping in his servos.
“So cute.” He reaffirmed, letting his other servo stroke and fondle you while you got yourself off on his digit. With his thumb resting on your chassis he could feel the thud, thud, thud of your fuel pump hammering away, seeming to rev up faster and faster the closer you came to overload. Your little pedes scrabbled uselessly against the surface of the table, pushing your hips up harder, more desperately against his digit as you moaned. Rodimus could feel your valve clenching around nothing as your overload hit you, helm lolling back against his palm with a soft thunk.
“Careful.~” He teased, digit finally slowing to a stop as your moans began to pitch up into overstimulated whimpers. You blinked up at him with unfocused, glassy optics, slick and limp and looking utterly content in his servos.
“Rodimus…”
The heat pooling in his tanks and behind his modesty plate bellowed, a gush of steam venting through his parted dermas as his engine snarled.
“Slag… You’re so slaggin’ cute.” His digits slunk lower, prodding and massaging at the slick opening of your valve. Your soft skin gave way so easily, stretching far beyond what he could have possibly imagined until, with a wet pop and a sharp, staggering gasp from you, the tips of two of his digits were snug in your little valve.
“Rodimus!?” You yelped again, surrounded by a garble of unfamiliar language as you twitched and shivered in his servos. Your own little digits dug into the sensitive crevasses of his paneling, helm tossed back in ecstasy as he prodded further into your impossible warmth. Rodimus could swear that with each minute curve of his digits he could see the soft bulge of your tank from him prodding within, transfluid spilling out and dribbling down the curve of your aft and into his palm. Rodimus found himself transfixed by the milky substance, unable to tear his optics away from your valve as lubricant pooled beneath his glossa.
“Messy too… Don’t worry, sweetspark, I’ll clean you right up…”
The first lap of his glossa across your valve was electrifying. There was a heady, almost metallic tang to your transfluid, like the powder at the bottom of a box of rust sticks. And each time he teased your tiny node your hip struts would jump right off of his palm, practically humping his open intake. But the best of all had to be your noises. They were even more obvious now, hitched little in-vents and primal mewls as you writhed and gasped and shivered in his cupped servos. The urge to disengage the locks of his interface panels prickled at the back of his processor, drowned out and brushed aside by the mere euphoria of your organic taste. The cling and scrape of your tiny servos against his helm chevron was little more than a buzz in the back of his pleasure-fogged thoughts.
You sobbed out his name again, another spurt of organic fluid spilling from your valve and across his glossa as you clenched around his digits. He lapped at your sensitive node just a few more times before finally pulling away.
“That might have just made you more messy though. Hanging in there, bud? Good?”
Slippery with arousal and coolant and oral lubricant fluid, you lifted your servo weakly to offer him an exhausted thumbs up. Rodimus beamed, squishing your soft cheek beneath the prod of his digit tip.
“Ha! Good. Better get you cleaned up before you get all grimy though, huh? I wonder if you'd fit in one of Mags’s mugs…”
#transformers#transformers x reader#transformers imagines#rodimus#rodimus x reader#rodimus imagines#valveplug#sticky#transformers smut#maccadam#my writing
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Why is it that dc such as r@pe, sa, and incest is totally okay to write about and romanticize but y’all draw the line at racism, fat phobia, and homophobia *talking about the writings creators make, not personal beliefs*? Whats the difference between these things? All of them are hurtful and affect people in real life, so why is everybody on here choosing and picking one and not the other? Do writers on here think that they are not comparable or that one is okay to romanticize and the other is going way too far?
Im just genuinely curious as I have seen this topic be brought up again and again, which has made me realize this and Id like to see it from someone else's pov.
hi! there is a lot to answer and unpack here and i have every intention of doing so underneath the cut. forgive me if this gets long, but you’ve asked me 4 very massive questions that i think warrant detail, nuance, and thought. there is a lot i’d like to say here.
that being said, mind the content warnings and protect yourself.
cw: mentions of rape, incest, racism, homophobia, fat phobia, discourse in general
firstly, i am going to choose to give you the benefit of the doubt in assuming you are actually curious in hearing another side and you are not simply looking to stir a pot or pick a fight with beliefs you have no intention of changing or having an open discussion on. your accusatory tone in the first half indicates otherwise and kindly, i am not an idiot. but i want to earnestly talk to you about this and again, will think better of you than you perhaps have indicated you think of me.
secondly, you do not have to censor words like rape in my inbox. that sort of censorship has become wildly popular because of tik tok and other money-hungry social media that also desperately want to silence people. do you know why you have to censor words like that on tik tok? or words like genocide? suicide? racism? 1. so that they can make money and market and push their squeaky clean algorithms but 2. and perhaps worse, so they can silence victims. if social media platforms and capitalism and the systems of powers had it their way, you would never utter these words again—whether to call someone out for justice or to have an open discussion like this one. i encourage you greatly to think critically about this and how you choose to use censorship and why.
now, to your questions.
to preface, i am interpreting this ask as being anti-dark content in fiction as you state that ALL these subjects harm people in real life. or at least, you are being critical of all dark content in fiction and the way writers engage with them, effectively ‘picking and choosing’ which are deemed acceptable and which aren’t, when they are all hurtful. i apologize if that wasn’t your intention/what you believe, but regardless, i’ll endeavor to answer you.
i personally have drawn no lines about dark content nor spoken about any of these topics specifically really, which indicates to me you have a different narrative and/or are coming from more inflammatory arguments that are always circling fandom lately. in the post i most recently reblogged, i spoke mostly of violence. which, of course, all of those things can be. but i didn’t name one of those topics in particular.
regardless, i don’t believe in the censorship of any dark content in art, but rather advocate strongly for critical analysis on a case-by-case basis. in general, i encourage thinking critically about every aspect of the world around you.
i do not believe that rape, incest, and sa are okay to write about or create art about but racism, homophobia, and fat phobia are not. i believe all of those topics are ones that can, should, and will be explored in the safety of art. all to varying degrees of success, earnestness, impact, and intent. you’re right that these are real things, that can hurt people, and the fictional work about them can have impact on our society that is tangible but the actual art or fiction created is not real. and again, this is all to varying degrees on a case-by-case basis.
art and fiction also historically and massively do discuss these dark content topics and have actively swayed the public’s opinion on matters, whether for better or for worse. throwing away all dark content in art and fiction because it is ‘harmful’ is deeply, deeply dangerous and reductive. a lot of art that engages with dark content actually makes very succinct points about it—i think of vladimir nabokov’s lolita or octavia butler’s bloodchild or speak by laurie halse anderson.
this is where we must exorcise critical thinking. some pieces of work will handle dark content poorly—white saviors making art on racism. men making art about a woman’s experiences that (as you are so interested in) romanticize her pain. etc. etc. and some art will handle it’s dark content incredibly and be transformative, perhaps even revolutionary in how we talk, perceive, or acknowledge systems of oppression, violence, and dark content in this world. some dark content in fiction will have damaging beliefs and effects on society, some will not—we must also look at scope for this, at the writer perhaps, the historical moment, their audience etc.
(for example, there is a significant difference in a main stream male writer, writing of a woman’s experience with rape in a published book in a way that makes it sound romanticized, sold to thousands and thousands of general public vs. a woman using fanfic to explore rape, take control of it, or whatever in a fanfic for a small online community where there are warnings on it. indicating she is aware of its potential damage in a way her male counterpart is not…)
but i still believe in dark contents’ existence in art. of course there is differences between all of these topics you brought up, but i don’t think their differences matter in this answer. i believe in their right to be explored in art. i am talking broadly of media/art here, which i think is the more relevant conversation, but i think you are actually more interested in a much smaller scale of people. ie. fandom. ie. mostly marginalized people in small communities online writing and creating dark content.
people will choose and pick which ones they’d like to create art over and which ones they don’t, which ones they read and which ones they don’t. there’s no ‘hard line’ drawn anywhere. and i can’t control it and neither can you. perhaps you think violence is okay to be explored in fanfic, but racism isn’t. someone else will have different preferences. i do not believe in its censorship.
now, let’s move onto your interest in romanticization and what i think you are more pointing to, which is fandom. you are specifically referring to people in fandom who write about rape, incest, etc. and ‘romanticize’ it—ie. they write about it in a way that is a fantasy. it is perhaps supposed to be horny or sexy. so let’s talk about it.
i must remind you that these topics you’ve brought up (rape, incest, sa) being written are fiction and it is (most often) done by someone marginalized who has either experienced this or is in threat of experiencing this under a patriarchy. i assure you, they are aware of its harm. hence the copious warnings in fandom spaces.
if i can be candid, sometimes i think that people forget how systems of oppression work when discussing fandom and whether dark content being created should be allowed or not.
for example, i sometimes think people who are anti-dark content in fandom believe that a woman or afab person writing a fictional fanfic about rape or sexual violence then influences people to go out and rape people or that women actually like it. when the reality, in fandom spaces, is that rape and sexual violence happen frequently under the patriarchy and then these women in fandom write fictional fanfic in response to cope, explore, take control of, etc. etc.
to insinuate that women or afab people (which fandom mostly is) exploring dark content safely in fiction then causes their own oppression and harm or trauma is rather victim-blame-y to me. fandom exploring dark content does not cause these things to happen in our society….these actions (rape, incest, sa) happen in our society or systems of power and fandom reacts to them in their art by exploring it in dark content. do you understand what i’m trying to say?
it’s not a matter of what is ‘okay’ to romanticize and what isn’t. i do not think the romanticization that fandom does with dark content (ie. my kidnapper actually loves me! or this sexual act that i did not consent to…maybe feels good) is not actually romanticizing but coping because of the systems of power that i described above. and this can be coping with anything—shame of sexuality, shame of fantasies, trauma, fear, etc. etc.
as i said in my tags in that post i reblogged and as plato said, dark content in art is a safe place to explore what would otherwise be harmful and dangerous in real life. it is cathartic. potentially even, a purging.
and even if it isn’t all that—maybe it just is trashy fantasy. it is still playing pretend. it is still fiction and in fandom spaces, it is still most likely being created by a marginalized person. and again, even if it isn’t, we don’t get to censor it. we can be critical of it or wary or whatever, but to censor it, is a slippery, slippery slope. do deem some topics as “acceptable” and others as “unacceptable” is dangerous.
just like kids play pretend where they ‘fight’ or ‘kill’ or ‘kidnap’ or ‘shoot’ each other in games of cops and robbers or heroes and villains, they are safely exploring adventure, dark content, fantasy, tragedy, and higher emotions. adults can do the same in fiction and with adult topics like sex.
and at the end of the day, we don’t get to demand the credentials to do so either. we don’t get to censor them or control them and nor should we be allowed to. i cannot stress enough that i encourage you to be critical of censorship or the absolute disgust in dark content and at those (again—often marginalized people) who engage with it in fandom. i believe it is deeply puritanical, conservative, and dangerous.
you don’t have to like dark content or consume it at all and fandom makes it easy not to with all the warnings and tags, but you cannot control others or police them. nor should you want to.
and at the end of the day, i have some questions for you. you don’t have to respond to this, perhaps they’re just things to think about. what is the end goal here? what is the point in harassing, shaming, attacking, criticizing, or interrogating people in fandom spaces who create or support dark content? do you believe that if it is purged from fandom, it will be purged from our society? if you want it purged from society—shouldn’t you start there rather than in the inbox of marginalized writers in fandom? people in fandom did not create rape, incest, and sa nor do they in their exploration of fiction…they are merely reacting to a world that did create it.
i hope at no point i came off as rude to you, as was not my intention. i intended to stand up for myself and respectfully state my opinions and thoughts on this matter. i’m sorry it got long, but also i don’t believe in being brief on such complex matters. i am a writer who engages critically with the world around me and sometimes, things cannot be made into short, snappy answers. sometimes, we must unpack.
genuinely wishing you well.
#i cannot guarantee that i’ll have the time patience or energy to answer every ask like the one above in such detail#going forward#but i do support open discussions and i wanted to be kind to this anon#these are just my 2 cents on all of this#cw: rape#cw: incest#cw: racism#cw: fat phobia#cw: homophobia#discourse
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venus | choi seungcheol
SYNOPSIS. in which the love between you and the prince is forbidden.
PAIRING. prince!choi seungcheol x servant-commoner!reader (ft. servant-commoner!chan very briefly)
GENRE. fluff, angst with a hopeful ending?, forbidden love, royalty au, arranged marriage au (cheol is in an arranged marriage), established secret relationship
WARNINGS. cheol and reader both have a lil argument, terms of endearment (darling, love, sweetheart), kissing
WORD COUNT. 3.8k
note: fic is vaguely inspired by the bridge part of this song called "venus" by regina song 🫶💕 this is also my first time writing a royalty au, so i hope you enjoy! this also features the very iconic "you came" "you called" line 😭
The ballroom of Pledis Palace is charged with an air of enchantment. The time had just reached the peak of evening. Moonlight filters through the large, grand windows, bathing the open room in an ethereal glow. Along the sides of the ballroom are intricately carved golden marble columns, each one painted with a different tale of the kingdom's past.
In the middle of the ceiling sits a majestic chandelier hanging from a massive, golden chain. The piece is the crown jewel of the ballroom, one that easily draws visitors into all its glory and beauty, and it casts a radiant gleam that seemed to rain down like stardust upon the guests below.
The dance floor reflects the light from the chandelier, creating an illusion of stars twinkling at one's feet. You watch all the elegantly-dressed guests move with grace across the room. The women are all dressed with precise attention to detail, their gowns and jewelry like works of art on a canvas. Some wear dresses in shades of amethyst, emerald, and sapphire, embroidered with beautiful beadwork that glistens like constellations, while others prefer flowing gowns in delicate pastels, as if they've stepped out of a fairytale.
They all hold onto their partners𑁋lavish gentlemen dressed in sophistically tailored suits matching the colours of their ladies' gowns𑁋with utmost love and enjoyment, while you find yourself standing at the side, holding up a tray of drinks as a particular heaviness settles in your chest.
And as your eyes drift ever so slightly, you swear that regardless what direction you look in, he's always there at the end of it, like a light at the end of the tunnel. Yet the light this time was dim and lacked almost all the hope that used to be there when you looked at him.
Not only is the royal family of Pledis here, but also a second one. The Choi royal family of Pledis, and of course, the future in-laws.
Prince Choi Seungcheol is dancing with poise that appeared almost effortless, eyes locked in a tender gaze to his future betrothed, yet the smile to his face doesn't quite reach his eyes. It's the same kind of gaze during the times he would be with you, like in the secret corners of the royal garden that only the two of you knew, or in the times you both snuck out of the castle at the wee hours of the night to stargaze, or the intimate nights you spent with him in his quarters where you had to leave just before daybreak.
It's those times where the certain line between nobility and commoner could be momentarily blurred. It's those times where you both truly felt free in more ways than one.
As you continue to watch the dance and see the way he twirls his betrothed with ease, the world seems to blur, and it felt as if it was just you and Seungcheol in this grand ballroom. His eyes, so familiar yet so distant, meet yours in a fleeting moment. His face falls instantly.
The world and time may have pulled you apart, but in that stolen glance, you were brought back together. In your eyes, you saw the prince who had defied tradition and chosen to be with you without boundaries. In his eyes, he saw the commoner who had been his confidant and, more importantly, his secret love.
"Why are you just standing there? Go tend to your duties," the steward advises you annoyedly, snapping you out of your focus. With a start, you fix your posture, offering a quick nod of understanding to the stern-faced steward.
Hastily, you resume your duty, walking through the large crowd, presenting the tray of drinks and feeling their odd looks linger on you as you move past them. They're taunting you, not with words, but with their subtle, condescending glances. The weight in your chest only deepens with each step you take.
You reach the outskirts of the dance floor, casting another glance towards Seungcheol. His elegant moves and the seemingly affectionate way he held his betrothed gives a bittersweet feeling to your chest, and you can't help but briefly imagine yourself there with him instead𑁋being the one at the end of his smile, the end of his touch.
As the music swelled, the dance finally comes to an end. You watch as the prince gracefully leads his betrothed back to her seat, a warm smile on his face. You know he didn't have much of a choice. He had an obligation to the kingdom, to his family, and to the future over the love he had once whispered to you in the hidden corners of the royal gardens.
Your heart aches again, but you understand. You couldn't be a part of his world, no matter how much he cared for you.
You don't catch the way his eyes follow you once you dismiss yourself out of the ballroom, struggling to hold your tears back.
"Y/N, don't you think you overwatered this area right here?" Chan, a fellow gardener for the royal garden and closest friend, taps lightly on your shoulder, startling you out of your daze and nearly the watering can in your hands. You blink rapidly, bringing yourself back to the present.
All you manage is a weak smile, some embarrassment and guilt flooding your senses. "Sorry, I... I guess my mind was elsewhere."
He gives you a knowing look, gaze sympathetic yet encouraging. "It's okay. I know things haven't been the best recently." He gestures toward the grand castle behind you, its towers standing tall and proud. You know exactly what he's talking about, and it makes you let out a sigh, facing back towards the garden in front of you.
You've poured your heart into the royal garden for so long, finding comfort in its quiet beauty and the therapeutic rhythm of tending to its blooms from day to night.
As the sun dips below the horizon and the moon begins to rise, the garden transforms into a world of magic. The abundance of flowers surrounding you seem to glow vibrantly under the moonlight, and their scent becomes more rich in the cool night air. The air carries a gentle breeze, and the soft rustle of leaves soothes your troubled mind.
There was just something about simply being with nature𑁋in the royal garden and with the beauty that exists outside its walls𑁋that allows you to breathe more freely. Sometimes, you swear that even the flowers are capable of whispering words of their own, as if sharing stories with you alone, or stories that you used to listen to with one particular man.
Just as you're about to finish watering one last final section, you hear Chan's distant voice from afar.
"Y-Your Highness! What brings you here at this hour?"
You freeze in place, the almost-empty watering can slipping from your fingers as you turn around.
Prince Seungcheol stands at the edge of the garden, his gracious figure silhouetted against the moonlit scenery. He's dressed in his nighttime attire, a pair of simple yet elegant black trousers and a crisp white shirt that flows slightly in the cool breeze. His gaze flickers between you and Chan, a hint of curiosity in his expression, and the two of you both offer a respectful bow in his direction as he approaches.
"I just wanted some fresh air," Seungcheol answers sharply, locking his eyes with yours, and there's a small smile that graces his lips once he catches sight of you. "It's peaceful here in the garden, isn't it?"
You heart only flutters to his words, yet that arrow of sadness pierces through your chest. However, even below the auroral skies and with the intoxicating fragrance of flowers all around, your heart feels lighter than it has in a long time.
"Chan, you may excuse us for a moment." He gestures to the young boy, his voice carrying a warm, reassuring tone that you've longed to hear.
With a quick nod, Chan offers a polite bow, shooting you a glance before slipping his way back in the direction of the castle, leaving you alone with Seungcheol.
Seungcheol approaches you, the distance between you decreasing until you're standing just a breath away from each other. You both remain in a contemplative silence, neither of you wanting to break the fragile moment that has been rekindled after so long.
Finally, he speaks in a hushed tone. "You've been avoiding me."
Your gaze is quick to fall to the ground in guilt, unable to meet his eyes.
"You know I had to," You reply simply, voice barely more than a whisper. "We can't be together, Cheol. You should know this better than me. It was the only choice you had. Duty called, and you answered."
Seungcheol's face only contorts with a mix of anguish and frustration. "Duty? Duty won't keep me warm at night, Y/N. Duty won't make me feel alive. You are what my heart longs for. You should know this. This is all purely arranged, don't you remember?"
You let out an audible scoff, feeling your hands crumple into fists at your side. "You're being selfish right now. Think about the kingdom, your family, and the future you're meant to build. Don't you see why we can't... we can't be together? It's inevitable. We shouldn't..." Your find your voice drifting away, words getting caught in your throat.
He steps even closer, his frustration boiling over into desperation. "I am thinking about them. I think about them every day, but I... I can't stop thinking about you either. I can't stop loving you."
"This love won't feed the hungry, Seungcheol. This love won't protect our people. This love won't secure the kingdom's future. This love won't change the fact that I'm merely a commoner and you're a prince."
The moonlight accentuates the sadness in his eyes as your words sink in, and you find yourself unable to hold back the tears that have welled up. The two of you only stand there for a few long moments, simply gazing in each other's glassy eyes, feeling like the garden itself was holding in a breath of its own.
Then in a sudden moment of vulnerability, you step closer to him, resting your head against his chest, taking in his familiar warmth and the scent you've longed for as your tears stain his shirt. Seungcheol wraps you in his strong arms, pulling you closer, and you feel his heartbeat against your body, steady and comforting. It's a sound you've always loved listening to whenever you embraced each other.
"I've missed you, darling," he mutters quietly. "Don't you understand how much you mean to me?"
With his arms around you, you feel a warmth that fills the void in your heart. It's a sensation you've yearned for the past few torturous months.
"I-I've missed you too," You confess, voice trembling. "But... but we can't𑁋"
"Please," he pleads softly, tightening his hold around you. "Can't I just hold you?"
The tenderness his voice holds cuts you off, and you can't help the way your fingers instinctively knead at his shirt.
Seungcheol holds you tightly, as if he's afraid that letting go will make you vanish into thin air. In this fleeting moment, there's no kingdom to rule, no traditions to uphold𑁋just the two of you, reunited in an embrace that disregards the confines of your roles. It's as if the world beyond this secluded royal garden has ceased to exist, and for the first time in a long while, you feel truly alive.
"I love you," he murmurs, voice heavy with sorrow, his lips brushing against your hair. "I love you more than anything in this world."
Usually that particularly intimate exchange brings those flutters to your stomach and a giddy smile to your face, but instead, it only makes your heart throb. Though you know with every fibre in your body that it's true𑁋that you love each other. It's not a secret, nor a feeling to deny.
You find yourself pulling away slightly, angling your head up to be able to take a look at him. His gaze meets yours halfway, and the intensity in his dark pupils nearly takes your breath away. He searches your eyes for a moment, before drawing his lips near yours, his intent clear. For a heartbeat, you're tempted to give in𑁋to taste the sweetness of his kiss once more.
But then the weight of responsibility, the duty you've always known, everything, pulls you back.
"I-I can't," You whisper, the words escaping your lips shakily. "We can't, Seungcheol. It-It's not right."
Seungcheol's breath hitches as you pull away. His lips hover just inches from yours, yearning for a connection that seems increasingly unattainable.
"I know," he replies quietly, his voice barely more than a breath. He still doesn't want to let you go. "I understand. I'm sorry."
You bring a hand up to cup his cheek, caressing his skin softly. "The kingdom needs you. Your people need you. They need a strong, capable leader. They need their prince."
Seungcheol's jaw tightens. "And what about what I need? What about what my heart seeks?"
You only gaze longingly at him. The two of you know the answer to that. You don't have to say anything before he understands with a sigh. His expression softens with a mix of resignation and affection, and he takes your hand in his, bringing it to his lips to press a gentle kiss to your knuckles.
"Your Highness, your presence is requested back in the palace," Chan's voice calls out from behind, breaking the fragile moment between the two of you.
Seungcheol releases your hand defeatedly, his gaze lingering on you for a moment longer.
However, instead of backing away, he leans back in close to whisper into your ears, "Come meet me at the royal ballroom tomorrow at midnight," Then he pauses, contemplating, and adding on, "if you wish, of course."
Then his lips curl into a bittersweet smile before turning away to leave. The sound of his footsteps gradually fades as he walks away back towards the palace, leaving you standing amidst the fragrant blooms and under the rays of soft moonlight.
Come meet me at the royal ballroom... midnight... if you wish. Seungcheol's words have been echoing in your mind for the entirety of the day, sometimes even distracting you from the duties you are assigned to in the royal garden.
The more you thought over his invitation, the more it felt like an impossible temptation, knowing well of the risks and consequences it could bring.
The day passes in a blur, the sun making its daily journey across the sky, casting a warm and inviting glow over the palace and the royal garden. And when the late night finally takes over, and the clock strikes midnight, you find yourself cautiously walking down the large corridor of the palace, your feet instinctively bringing you in the direction of the royal ballroom. It's eerily quiet at this time, nothing but skeleton staff that still heightens your paranoid senses of getting caught.
Yet as you stop in front of the grand doors of the ballroom, your heart quickens its pace. You pause for a moment, taking a deep breath to steady yourself. Should you really be doing this? Was it entirely a good idea to be here?
But just the thought of simply him draws you in, your hand briefly gliding over the glistening doorknob.
With a determined sigh, you take the leap and push the heavy doors open. The ballroom lies before you, bathed in the silvery luminescence filtering through the grand windows. Your heart races as you step inside.
The ballroom is empty, deserted practically. All of the lights, including the large chandelier, were switched off, the only source coming from the outside world through the tall windows.
As you step further into the room, the sounds of your shoes echoing throughout, the sheer emptiness of the place becomes more apparent. You swear you even hear your own thoughts bouncing off the walls of the room. Doubts start to creep into your mind. What if he doesn't come? What if this was all a mistake?
However, just as you're about to give in to the feeling of hopelessness, you hear a soft sound from behind you. You turn to find Seungcheol entering the ballroom and closing the door shut. He's dressed in a simple black suit, and there's a twinge of vulnerability in his eyes that mirrors your own.
"You came," he says, and his voice is so soft that you can barely hear it over your racing heart.
You fully turn yourself to him, swallowing down a nervous lump in your throat.
"You called."
Seungcheol's eyes light up, and a faint smile crosses his lips as he steps closer to you. The moonlight bathes him in an celestial glow, accentuating his princely features. But in this moment, he's just the man you've been in love with for so long.
He extends his hand toward you, eyes locked onto yours, inviting you to share a dance with him.
"May I?" he asks gentlemanly, and it sends a rush of heat to your cheeks.
You hesitate for a brief moment, glancing down at his hand and back up to his face. "I... I don't know how..."
Seungcheol's smile remains warm and encouraging, his hand still extended toward you.
"It's okay," he says softly. "I'll teach you. Just follow my lead."
Tentatively, you place your hand in his. His grip is firm yet gentle as he guides you to the centre of the empty dance floor, a certain eager bounce in his step that you notice, and the stars painting the ground seem to come to life as you stand with him. Seungcheol places his hand on your waist, and the warmth of his palm against your skin sends shivers down your spine. You loop your arms around his neck, trying to steady your breathing as you prepare to follow his lead.
At first, your steps are awkward, but you try your best to mimic the elegance and grace that he naturally possesses. He's probably had personal training for this kind of thing, You think.
You chuckle at the small moments where your feet accidentally bump or you step on his toes, and Seungcheol's laughter mingles with yours. Nothing but a soft melody of an imagined song fills the silence as the two of you move together in the middle of the ballroom.
"You're doing great," he whispers, breath brushing against your ear as you sway together.
It's scarily easy to lose yourself in Seungcheol's eyes. They're the same eyes that once whispered secrets of love to you beneath the stars. Now they say a lot without saying anything.
You don't know how long you've been dancing, but it feels like an eternity and a fleeting moment all at once. The world outside the ballroom may be waiting, filled with your separate responsibilities and expectations, but in this moment, it's just you and him.
"Have I mentioned how beautiful you look tonight?" Seungcheol comments, even though you were only dressed in your servant uniform.
Your cheeks flush at his compliment, feeling a bit self-conscious under his gaze, and offer a shy smile. "I'm not as stunning as the ladies at the court, nor your betrothed."
Seungcheol gently tilts your chin upward, making sure you meet his eyes.
"Every time I look at you, I feel like I fall in love all over again." His thumb brushes lightly against your cheek. "Every time I watch you down tending to the garden through my quarters, I feel as if you're tending to my heart. I can simply say that you're the most beautiful person I've ever laid my eyes on, sweetheart."
His words make your heart swell out of your chest, his grip on your waist tightening imperceptibly, drawing you closer to him. The space between you vanishes, and you can feel the heat of his body seeping through the layers of fabric that separate you. Seungcheol could shower you with praises all day long, and you would never tire of hearing them. He has a way of making you feel special, cherished, and utterly adored.
"Cheol?" You call out, voice tinged with vulnerability.
He raises an eyebrow, still guiding you through the dance. "Yes, love?"
"Are we crazy for doing this?" You ask. It's meant to be rhetorical in a way, but the uncertainty in your voice lingers, and Seungcheol's expression becomes more serious.
He slows the movement between you two, his pensive eyes locked onto yours.
"Perhaps we are," he admits wholeheartedly. "but I'd rather be crazy with you than live a life without you."
His words quietly suspend in the air around you. The moments pass, but they feel eternal, as if time itself has momentarily paused to let the two of you be together. You're captured in his eyes, just like he is with yours. You see the emotions he's trying to convey: love, longing, and the knowledge that this moment is both a blessing and a curse.
And then without a word, you both lean in at the same time, lips meeting each other's in a kiss both softly and tenderly. It's a stolen moment; it's a secret scene that only the moon and stars witness.
His arms pull you closer, fingers dancing along your spine, as if he's trying to bridge any space that might exist between you. It's a kiss that tastes of bittersweet nostalgia𑁋something of what once was and what could never be. You savour the taste of him on your lips, knowing that once the morning light arrives, this moment may become nothing more than a distant memory.
As your lips break away, you both draw back slightly, foreheads touching, breathing heavily as you savour the precious seconds of closeness.
"You know that I'd give up everything for you," he whispers, breath warm against your skin.
You only smile, tracing your fingers gently over his lips. He leans into your touch.
"I know," You say softly. "And I would do the same for you."
"But just for tonight." He pushes back some strands of hair behind your ear. "Can we pretend that the world doesn't matter?"
You peer into his eyes, and for a moment, you see a reflection of your own pining. Your heart sinks, but it also rises. A smile drifts across your face, but it also carries a trace of sadness. Leaning in, you nearly press your lips against his once again, but then you take in a deep breath.
"Yes," is all you mutter. "I'm all yours."
That's all it takes for him to kiss you again, a bit more fervently and urgently that it nearly makes you stumble in surprise. But the second you pull back from each other, he's grabbing your hand in his, a bright smile to his face, before twirling you around and pulling you in close once more, your laughter echoing in the empty ballroom together. You share one more kiss, and then another, and another, whispers of hushed I love you's against each other’s lips as the night goes on like it will never end.
And it's with each minute that passes that only strengthens Seungcheol's determination𑁋that in some way, he will make sure you both will be together, whether that means escaping the constraints of your worlds, finding a way to keep your love alive in secret, or even sacrificing a part of himself.
With each kiss, he silently promises you that he will find a way. With each kiss, you silently promise to love and wait for him.
taglist (open) ʚɞ @enhazen @haowrld @ylliris-hanniehae @icyminghao @slytherinshua @jeonride @lockburn-castle @vrnism @weird-bookworm @mhlsymlysn @ryuwonieebae @yeonjuns-redhair @wonwooz1
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FREE PALESTINE MASTERPOST
Trying to keep this blog more art- and creativity-focused in general, so I'll be removing the Gaza-related reblogs that are about a month old. But I'll use this post as a permanent archive that will update periodically (some of this information will grow dated as the situation develops, but I think it's important to keep a record of just how fiercely opposed people were to Israel's actions from this moment forward). We should all continue to raise our voices about this, and refuse to support politicians who enable genocide. Remember, they work for us, not the other way around. Keep going.
October 2023
-Donation links
-Social media links
-US congress ceasefire script
-Decolonizepalestine.com (information, mythbusting)
-More donation links
-Ways to pressure politicians for a ceasefire
-HUGE resource list
-"Is there anything I can do to help Palestinians besides call my representatives and beg them to stop killing people?"
-"We are isolated now"
-Palestine and landback
-210 PAGES of dead people's names.
-Bail money for Palestine Action
-Article list
-US action items
-Boycott info
-Grand Central Station shut down by protestors
-Message to white American citizens
-UK ceasefire petition
-How YOU can help Palestine (regularly updated!)
-"Please try amidst all this fury and grief to still have faith in the common people." (+donation links)
-Reminder about protest etiquette and privacy
-Prints for Palestine
-"We have no communication with the outside world. They are using their military might to harm us. We have no power but the power of God, no one but God. Please, pray for us." (spoken over mosque speakers)
-DAILY donate button + more donation links
-"Doesn't Israel have a right to exist too?"
-Script for US Congress calls
-Queerness under apartheid
-Sudan is also at war
-Hundreds of thousands of protestors in London
-Half a million.
-Tips for folks with phone anxiety
-This comic got real
-European and Canadian ceasefire scripts
-"The people of Gaza see the protests. That is reason enough to come even if nothing else." WE HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN YOU. WE ARE HERE.
November 2023
-More genocides than just Palestine
-How to buy e-sims to circumvent Gaza's internet blackout
-"Occupying territories is illegal. Resistance to occupying forces is legal."
-MASSIVE resource list
-"For decades now the media has told us Muslim men are savages, terrorists, wife beaters and everything in between. I want you to challenge this trope the next time you see it in the media. Let these photos serve as a reminder."
-"Don't stop talking about the Palestinian genocide. IT'S WORKING."
-UN resignation letter
-Israel won't allow Irish or Brazilian citizens to leave Gaza
-"Palestine must never be forgotten. Promise me that." (from the documentary "Children of Shatila")
-Gifs of pro-Palestine rallies around the world
-Support Palestine's last kufiya factory
-Protestors flood the streets in Washington DC
-Explanation of why calling representatives is a numbers game
-FREE ebooks on the history of this conflict
-Petition to screen films by Palestinian directors
-Call to boycott Gal Godot's work
-Indigenous activists block weapons shipment to Israel
-If you're attending a protest, DON'T TELL YOUR GOVERNMENT SHIT. Y'know, friendly advice.
-Links to support Palestine Action and Palestine Legal. Get in the way.
-Parallels between Israel and the surveillance tactics used by NYC mayor Eric Adams
-Don't spiral into doomerism. Persevere.
-Want a different strategy to contact your representatives? Try faxing them!
-Florida rep Michelle Salzman calls for the death of all Palestinians
-"The phone doesn't stop" :)
-Indian trade unions call on the government to scrap deals with Israel
-An overview of Israel's human rights violations, and two major political groups that have exacerbated Zionism in the US
-Israeli man explains why he's protesting
-"Whoever stays until the end will tell the story. We did what we could. Remember us."
-US House of Representatives votes to send billions of dollars worth of weapons to Israel
-Canadian email campaign and petitions
-"Canada's First Nation standing with Palestine"
-"Freedom is infectious as it is just and no one is free until they ALL are."
-Israeli forces invade al-Shia hospital
-Leaked list of weapons the US has sent to Israel
-Only 32% of Americans believe the US should support Israel
-Cop City action demonstrates how to protest effectively
-Refugee grandmother "doesn't have to imagine a multicultural and integrated Palestine- she remembers it".
-Protestors block the Bay Bridge in San Francisco (plus bail fund)
-Israeli forces attack schools in northern Gaza. SCHOOLS.
-Journalist shares an update from an Indonesian hospital and pleads for others to spread it around as it "may be the last video we are able to send"
-Scottish Parliament votes overwhelmingly to demand a ceasefire
-Sobering texts from a friend providing humanitarian aid in Gaza. "They have been distributing guns to the civilian settlers and allowing them into the West Bank to terrorize people" "We have been given option to leave. None took it"
-"the absolute bare minimum in this situation is 1) a complete ceasefire and immediate humanitarian aid in Gaza, 2) complete halt of all military foreign aid to the Israeli government, 3) the Israeli government being prosecuted for its war crimes in the International Criminal Court, and 4) land back and reparations for the Palestinian people. free Palestine means free Palestine, not just temporarily stop carpet bombing Palestine."
-"It's important that you keep posting and speaking about the ongoing genocide. This 5 day agreement isn't the end of things."
-Boosting the incredible, FREE daily donate button again
-Protests at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
-"REMINDER THAT ANTISEMITES AREN'T WELCOME HERE AND WON'T BE TOLERATED"
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Little Art things I'm obsessed with pt 1
Portraits of absent figures:
David Hockney - A Bigger Splash, 1967
Hockney originally visited California in 1963 and was won over by the sunlight and laid-back lifestyle, especially the luxury and ubiquity of the swimming pool. He described it as his "promised land"
The splash is about freezing a moment in time, but it is also empty of human presence but implying a human.
The male figure is present in some of David's other works from this time period, especially his muse and then-partner Peter Schlesinger. These paintings are about a hedonistic gay lifestyle, and the swimmers, the divers, are often the subject of voyeurism and desire. But in this painting, we just missed the diver, which makes the object of desire more private and personal. Who was the painter looking at, lusting after, etc.
I like the contrast of the incredibly sharp and graphic suburban neighborhood, and the chaotic, organic splash. So again, if the divers represent this homosexual desire, we have this contrast of an orderly heterosexual world, and the queerness that joyfully disrupts it.
And then of course, with the absent figure, there is this massive sense of loss and loneliness. And so much of loneliness is about concealment, hiding in shame. This is a private space, but its also an exposed space, enhancing the loneliness. The figure is isolated, alone, invisible. Its a sadness that contrasts with the setting, the activity, and saturated lighting.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres - Untitled (billboard of an empty bed), 1991
These billboards were exhibited in the streets of Manhattan during the AIDS crisis. This piece was created the same year Felix Gonzalez-Torres's boyfriend Ross died. This portrait is a celebration of love and a memorization of loss and the emotions between intimacy and publicity. In the artist's own words:
“What I’m trying to say is that we cannot give the powers that be what they want, what they are expecting from us. Some homophobic senator is going to have a very hard time trying to explain to his constituency that my work is homoerotic or pornographic, but if I were to do a performance with HIV blood — that’s what he wants, that’s what the rags expect because they can sensationalize that, and that’s what’s disappointing. Some of the work I make is more effective because it’s more dangerous. We both make work that looks like something else but it’s not that. We’re infiltrating that look.“
The work intentionally uses the matching, identical depressions to imply a same-sex couple. The image itself is extremely intimate, but its being displayed in public spaces.
Felix Gonzales-Torres became known for his absent bodies.
And then, a little different, this painting by Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans (1837) commissioned by Frederick and and Coralie Frey, depicts the three Frey children, with the faint shadow of a figure. There was a legend that there was a fourth figure in this painting. In 2005 a private collector, Jeremy K Simien, purchased the painting and it underwent conservation.
The painting revealed Bélizaire, a fifteen year-old enslaved domestic owned by the children's father. The picture captures the complex relationship between the boy and the children, the family that was keeping him captive. For one thing, the way he is set back from the others. There is this sort of intimacy between them along side the psychological trauma of forced bondage.
Here is a great Tiktok about the painting, to quote "What I'm struck by is what a sensitive portrait this is of this young man who was living in an inhumane society where he, despite being a human being, was bought and sold."
A few years after this painting was created, the three Frey children died, and Bélizaire was the only one who survived into adulthood.
The painting stayed in the Frey family. At some point, likely in the late 19th or 20th century, Bélizaire was intentionally painted over. In 1972, the great-granddaughter of Coralie Frey donated the painting to a Louisiana museum, informing them that a figure was painted over. During the course of the painting's life at the museum, no effort was put into restoring the figure.
Jeremy Simien's, who bought and restored this painting, said on his instagram "Bélizaire, they know your name now. Tell the ancestors to let me sleep for a minute."
And shout out to the picture that make me want to write this, Hyde Park Flowers, London by Tumblr user @kimironside I won't re-post it so check out the link.
#art#art history#felix gonzalez torres#belizaire#david hockney#Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans#Jacques Amans#Jeremy K Simien#tw slavery#tw aids
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in 1 side we have Massive Angst of Talia and Bruce
on other side we have
Okay normal life Clone Talia, Himbo Danny and Damian.
Wait that is just Spy x family but Clone x Family.
No kidding. I can't say much for the angst between Talia and Bruce because I don't know their dynamic that well beyond that in one run they were supposedly in love with one another (and still are to some extent) but they're on such ideological opposites that it's never gonna work in the long term. And in another run Talia is just seducing Bruce (which iirc came about from post 9/11 hatred towards the middle east, and resulted in Talia's character being butchered by some asshole).
BUt on the other end we have Nasra, Danny, and Damian. Who I don't think ever really take on a traditional nuclear 'familial' dynamic since Danny and Damian agreed to both be brothers first and foremost - they're not seeking out a father-son relationship with each other, even with Danny occasionally being parental from time to time. And Nasra and Damian would still have an almost sibling-like rivalry towards each other as well (honestly I think it'd be very Tim and Damian-like), I think. That with a mix of "rivalry between little sibling and their older sibling's partner" too. Either way its def not mother-son like in the slightest, but still familial. Even if unorthodox
But either way they are still family with the additions of Sam and Tucker and Jazz! I like to imagine that Nasra and Damian both are actually pretty into art. Damian uses spray paints as his medium, however, and Nasra gets into charcoals and watercolors, and they compare different art mediums when they start tentatively getting along.
OH also unrelated but more on clone^2 but - danny in clone^2 like, killed like three guys when he was 17 because they attacked him and damian and nearly killed them both. Imagine being Bruce and finding that out
#dpxdc#dp x dc crossover#danny fenton is not the ghost king#dp x dc#dpxdc crossover#danny fenton is a clone#dp crossover#dpdc#dp dc crossover#clone^2#dpdc crossover#dpdc au#and nasra and damian having a tim-and-damian like relationship with one another is very funny to me because DW and Talia are still pretty#mother-son with their relationship.#and then Damian meets his clone (and DW is 16 years old around the time Nasra shows up) and little Dee and Nasra both turn to each other#the moment Danny's back is turned and are basically making death threats at one another. if it wouldnt get him in trouble Dee would've#sprayed spray paint into the eyes of Nasra - that's what he does with ghosts nowadays. It's very funny to him they get so mad.#also if i was a better artist i would draw these three together. I still might but it'd probably be like. just a general look of what their#vigilante uniforms would be. plus maybe even civies if I'm feeling up to it. With an older damian because he's got that skater boy aestheti#going for him and its my favorite thing about clone damian#danny: ive killed before#bruce and the fam: wh. what. you’ve what
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current bat games au lore
ok so here is part of what we have so far:
jason is no longer from district 2, he was originally a scrappy orphan from 12; he changed his name to "RED" after lazrus therapy and becoming a gladiator
Nightwing has a notorious reputation in the capitol as vain and bitchy. he constantly gets procedures done to look as young and beautiful as possible and will actively sabotage the new tributes' relationships with the capitol citizens. in reality, he is trying to protect the younger victors from being sexually exploited by putting himself on the front lines as the sex symbol
tim is the newest victor of the games. his mentor was barbara and they are both secretly working for the anti-capitol resistence.
damian is the political baby of a strategic union between talia and bruce to unite their clans without drawing suspicion from the government on why they're working closely. his parents are both big players in the capitol.
the al ghuls are the tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists of the capitol who believe the revolution is nigh. but instead of underground bunkers they prepare for the apocalypse by training their children in several warrior arts
bruce's alter ego is batman, political terrorist who is working behind the scenes to take down capitol corruption (good luck buddy)
the capitol has a capped maximum on how much wealthy citizens can donate as sponsorship because otherwise bruce wayne would sponsor all the kids in an effort for them to live
when jason was thrown into the arena, he had no living mentor and had to fend for himself. batman secretly helped him with tips and advice on how to survive
Nightwing tried to talk bruce out of sponsoring jason in the arena. it wasn't out of cruelty; he just thought it would be a better investment to sponsor a child who is more likely to live instead of a starving little boy from the weakest district bound to die. bruce sponsored jason anyway
bruce's parents were assassinated for the treasonous act of believing district citizens deserved human rights
jason's abundance of sponsorships made him a target in the arena. he got really messed up and had to go through a brutal, traumatic, and experimental rehabilitation called the lazarus project. he came out of it brain damaged and now most of his body consists of lab-grown flesh or robotic parts. (notice his fake eyes and how most of his body is covered up)
the hunger games are like the annual SuperBowl. for the rest of the year the capitol citizens enjoy entertainment like celebrity escorts (Nightwing) or gladiator games, which is basically the WWE but more deadly and no predetermined winner (RED)
gladiators all have a number that is worn by players and fans alike. most gladiators wear theirs on their armour but RED wears his as a corpse identification tag on his ear
tim purposefully makes himself seem boring and unlikable so that the capitol will allow him to go home rather than stay at the capitol like nightwing and RED.
tim is probably on like 10 different government watchlists
damian keeps nightwing around as a friend/babysitter, since he gave every other one he had a mental breakdown
damian keeps jason around as a personal weaponsmith/arms instructor (hired by talia)
talia and bruce have split custody of damian
nightwing and RED are top-celebs in their fields
bruce's name is brucellosis I'm sorry that's just the way it is
bruce stopped sponsoring for a while after jason's injury cause he blamed himself
hunger games sponsors are like gambling or horse race betting. if your sponsored victor lives you get more money back. but it is so costly with such high stakes that most people don't do it
nightwing volunteered for some random kid who he had no connection with because he has no self-preservation and is kinda self sacrificing like that
nightwing's mentor was starfire. he had a massive crush on her and she'd pat his head
RED has a tense relationship with bruce and Nightwing but also trusts them more than anyone else
there are more but they require more context and characters so hang tight. suggestions welcome! just dm me in my inbox
#nightwing#red hood#red robin#robin#batman#dick grayson#jason todd#tim drake#damian wayne#bruce wayne#brucellosis wayne#batfam#hunger games#hunger games au#asks#duckytree
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What do cogs eat in Toontown: Corporate Clash?
I'm doing research for a fic and have been scrounging the wiki for this information so I thought I'd compile my findings as a nice organised tumblr post in case anyone else needs access to this very specific part of the lore. There's actually a lot more than I thought there would be! If I've missed anything, feel free to add! The definitive list will be way at the bottom of the post if you just want the cold hard facts.
Section A - Foodstuffs that have a lot of evidence pointing towards their consumption by cogs.
Oil - Massive evidence for this in both Derrick Man and the CEO battle. Heals suits in Derrek Man, and seems to be their preferred food given its literally the only thing being served at the banquet? Maybe more of a beverage than a food? Still makes the list either way. Different varieties of oil are also mentioned, including carbonated/seltzer oil (from the Director's Cuts ARG andHigh Roller's trivia questions) and crude oil (discussed further below).
Cogfee (Coffee) - Cogfee is mentioned all the time. There's promotional art of Chip promoting cogfee, and his secretary also requests a new cogfee machine in the April Toons ARG. Cathal and Brian have also both delivered/refused to deliver cogfee to Allan, respectively. The Toxic Manager also gives the Insider a cup of Cogfee in the Director's cuts ARG, and there's probably even more examples of cogs drinking cogfee that I haven't included here. It's also worth a mention that Jennifer's favourite drink is a soyl mechiatto, which I would have assumed to be the cog equivalent of a machiatto with soya milk, but the fact that High Roller's trivia question on the subject makes a distinction between soyl mechiatto and cogfee mechiatto makes me doubt that the soyl one contains cogfee at all. Alas, I don't know enough about actual coffee to be able to tell you if you can even make a machiatto without coffee.
Cookies - Most of the evidence for this comes either directly or indirectly from Belle. Evidence for suits eating cookies comes from Belle's interview notes, the 1.3 blog post, the comic with Flint and Belle baking, and the C.O.O's 2023 dialogue. These also provide other things suits can eat in the form of cookie flavours: charcoal, ginger tar and crude morsels. I don't know if ginger tar is ginger flavoured tar or a variety of tar called "ginger tar", so that's up for interpretation. As far as I can tell, all three seem to function as a chocolate chip substitute, but could also possibly be replacing things like fruit or nuts in the cookies. The only non-Belle-related cookie evidence comes from the Director's Cuts ARG, where the Middleman gives the Insider a plate of crude oil cookies. I assume the crude oil used in these is a different thing than the crude morsels in the C.O.O's cookies, and I can't really identify what crude oil is supposed to be a subsitute for food-wise since it appears multiple times in different contexts.
Sandwiches and assorted ingredients - Cathal eats a sandwitch halfway through his battle, and you can't really get evidence more definitive than that. The wiki says it's specifically ham and cheese, and looking at his renders I can see that probably. In the 1.3 key art, he's got a different sandwich that looks like lettuce and tomato, so from Cathal alone, bread, ham, cheese, lettuce and tomato can be added to the list of things suits eat.
Ketchup - This is really a subsection of the last category given tomatoes have already been confirmed, but Count Erclaim steals 'Chup from Rocky on multiple occasions (notably the 'Halloween Hater comic') and Cathal also has two bottles of it in his office. There are also a concerningly high number of ketchup bottles inthe Mozzerella Styx freezer. So... Ketchup. Interestingly enough, the ad for Mozzerella Styx on High Roller's website lists 'Chup as a drink, so maybe its a suit beverage? Sure, why not.
Water - The existence of the water cooler attack implies that cogs can and do drink water, and it's also listed as an available drink three times on Mozzerella Styx's menu, as 'water', 'dihydrogen monoxide' and 'corporate water supply'. They also drink sparkling water/seltzer/carbonated water, whatever you want to call it, since Jennifer asks where she's supposed to keep her sparkling water after Spruce takes a bite out of her desk, and seltzer is one of the available options in the Mozzerella Styx drinks machine.
Cereal - Dave buys 500 boxes of cereal in the April Toons ARG. The picture identifies the cereal as 'Oil-o-Flakes', but the description says they're 'corn flakes', soooo... corn confirmed? Maybe?
Pizza - You'd think this one would be easy, given the fact that literally the only cog owned restaurant is a pizzeria, but the fact that Mozzerella Styx is a front kind of raises the question of whether they actually serve food there. Either way though, Count Erclaim orders a "none pizza with left beef" in one of his monologues, and even if his pizza is a meme it's still a pizza, and Erclaim is still a cog that's probbably going to eat it. Oh. Also beef then, I guess.
The sustenance page on the gopher version of cogs.ink gets a special mention because I forgot about it completely and then felt like I'd struck gold when I stumbled back upon it. Things mentioned on this page that aren't already on the list include:
Coal, petrol-marinated beet and diamond dust inside a sandwich called the 'Money Christo'.
Sides include crispy steel bits, extra crude oil and gas-infused triple-fried coal.
Coal again, Turpentine Ansoff Jelly and Oxalic Acid patties, all of which are considered breakfast (or, deskfast, as the page says) foods.
Carbon carbonara, made with only the finest eggs and crude oil (but what ingredient can be used in cookies and also in carbonara?).
Canned bread (WHY IS IT IN A CAN?) and kerosene dip.
Compressed fish
Strawberry Daigou, which is a dessert according to the description, and also contains the allergen 'red'. I didn't know suits could be allergic to anything until now.
SODIMM SOda
Section B - Things that I'm not certain on but I thought were still worth a mention.
Pie - Allan asks if the pies the toons are throwing at him "are imported blueberry", which implies that he's eaten both imported and non-imported blueberry pies before, to be able to tell the difference. Either that or he's been hit in the face so many times with both that he's now able to tell the difference, and he doesn't actually eat them. He can tell its blueberry though, which does suggest he's had those before and knows what they taste like. Given strawberries are already confirmed, its probably safe to say that cogs eat blueberries too.
Wood - Spruce, basically. He takes a bite out of Jennifer's table during his interview, says he's got at chomping trees in his personal statement and he's always got that log in his mouth. It's never really stated whether he actually eats the trees or just bites them, though. Also, eating trees feels very much like a Spruce thing, and not something any other suits would do. Like, they probably can eat wood, but would they want to?
Coins - Its mentioned in the cog building music backstage blog post that Dave ate 20,000 Cogbucks worth of quaters in the Cashbot mints. I'm confident this is a Dave exclusive thing and that no other cog would ever do this. I think.
Section C - Things that depend entirely on the validity of Mozzerella Styx as an actual cog restaurant.
Mozzerella Styx seems like it would be a veritable gold mine of information on cog food, but that actually depends on who Mozzerella Styx's target audience actually is. Mozzerella Styx's target audience is important because if they're trying to appear as a reputable toon resturaunt, then there's no gaurentee that cogs would even eat the things on their menu, as they would be toon foods rather than cog foods. The menu is weird though, since it definetly includes things that toons would never eat, like oil, which implies either that suits are intended to eat there or that whoever wrote the menu didn't know that toons can't drink oil. The menu does seem to be geared towards toons in some way, though, given the two 'toon drink here' options in the drinks section. Who are your target market, Mozzerella Styx??? And that's not even getting into if they even sell food there. The short with the two toons ordering a pizza implies that you can definetly order there, but the outcome of that short (the toons never getting any pizza) combined with the menu says 'pay upfront', 'product not gaurenteed' and 'no refunds' makes me incredibly doubtful that anyone has ever managed to successfully eat food from Mozzerella Styx (the fact that the toons are going here also suggests its a "toon" resturaunt. Or maybe they're just chill with going to a cog owned resturaunt? They definetly at least heard Styx over the phone). HOWEVER! The fact that the 1.4.0 patch notes say they're generating more money through pizza sales, combined with the (presumably paid for) ad on High Roller's website and the fact that they have actual pizza ingredients in the freezer makes me think that maybe they are actually running a resturaunt with real food on the side of all the money laundering? Perhaps? Either way, this big long ramble has acheived nothing, and I've got no idea if these foodstuffs are any more valid than I did at the start of it. Well then. If we're assuming that cogs do eat at Mozzerella Styx, for the sake of having more data, then everything on the menu can be added to the list. This includes:
Pineapple - The head huntin' hawaiian pizza, despite the pizza pictured under it not containing any pineapple, does make another appearance on a poster where pineapple is visible. There's no sauce, though. Why is there no sauce on this pizza. (Also, I'm going to remove pineapple from the 'Mozzerella Styx Clause', since Jennifer says in Buck's interview notes that he smells like pineapple, meaning she's eaten or at least smelled it before. Therefore, it's probably a valid suit food).
Nuts and bolts - The same poster with the hawaiian pizza also suggests you add [photo of nuts and bolts]. They aren't mentioned by name, but they sure are there!
New Year Cabbage
Salad - No idea what this salad contains, so I suppose every vegetable and other thing that could possibly be in a salad is up for debate. If you wanted to make it out of already confirmed salad stuff, it would probably be lettuce, tomato and beetroot.
Mushrooms - The picture of the aledgedly hawaiian pizza appears to have mushrooms on it, and mushroom pizza is also an option.
Broccoli - The alleged hawaiian pizza also has what I think is broccolli on it, and I really like broccoli so I'm adding it to the list.
Bread-sticks
Junior Executive Juice - I hope this is juice made for junior executives and not juice made out of junior executives
Ice cream cone - Not specified whether this is an ice cream cone as in 'its ice cream in a cone' or 'it's an ice cream cone with no ice cream'. I'll assume there's ice cream involved because it seems cruel to deprive these robots of ice cream.
Waffle cone
Traffic cone - I mean... it's on the menu?
Onions
Pine - Pine needles? Pine trees? Pineapples? We will never know
Jellybeans - I find it funny that these guys are just casually eating the toons' money. Maybe there's a difference between currency jellybeans and jellybeans for eating, but its still funny.
Soda Cold-a - The drink machine by the front counter actually provides a lot of new drinks that I'm specifically exempting from the 'Mozzerella Styx Clause' due to the fact that a) Toons definetly cannot drink half of this stuff and b) this drink machine for sure exists and probably does dispense all of these things. Available beverages not yet counted include antifreeze, diet oil, coolant, Cold-a and gas (which completes the C.O.G.S trifecta! Horray, suits can officially eat everything that C.O.G.S inc produces!)
Slushies - The slushie machine behind the counter appears to dispense slushy in flavours DRINK, Zap and BLUE. There are no cups present near this machine, only cones, which implies it could be a snow cone machine, but the ad on High Roller's website shows a cup with a straw labelled 'BLUE', so either they're drinking snow cone syrup or its a slushie machine.
Snow cones
Salt and pepper - There are salt and pepper shakers on all of the tables. Horray for seasonings! Why you would put those on a pizza I have no idea.
The List
Okay, I've probably missed something but here's my definitive list, colour coded, alphabetized and sorted for your convenience. Items in black are pretty much 100% confirmed, items in blue are speculative with not much evidence and items in green depend entirely on Mozzerella Styx's validity as a cog resturant.
Human safe foods:
Beef, Beetroot, Blueberries, Bread, Bread-sticks, Broccoli, Cabbage, Carbonara, Cereal, Cheese, Cookies, Corn, Eggs, Fish, Ginger(?), Ham, Ice cream, Jellybeans, Lettuce, Mushrooms, Onions, Pepper (the seasoning not the vegetable), Pie, Pineapple, Pizza, Salad, Salt, Sandwiches, Snow cones, Strawberries, Tomatoes (and derivitives ketchup and tomato sauce), Waffle cones.
Things humans should definetly not be eating:
Charcoal, Coal, Coins, Crispy steel bits, Crude morsels, Crude Oil, Diamond dust, Extra Crude Oil, Gas-infused triple-fried coal, Ginger tar, Kerosene, Nuts and bolts, Oxalic Acid Patties, Petrol, Pine, Traffic cones, Turpentine Ansoff Jelly, Wood.
Beverages:
Antifreeze, Carbonated oil, Cogfee, Cold-a, Coolant, Diet Oil, Gas, Juice, Ketchup(?), Oil, Slushies, SODIMM SOda, Soyl, Sparkling water/Seltzer, Water.
Unidentified:
red
All of these things can probably be broken down into their core ingredients, too, which would really expand the variety of foodstuffs on offer. Basically, cog food seems to be pretty similar to human food, just with a lot more metal and machine-stuff.
#yes im aware I spelt 'mozzerella' wrong#no im not going to fix it#ive spent far to long on this already#toontown corporate clash#ttcc#crocsyapping
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okay but like what if Leon is the famous one in the relationship. The whole RE universe is a movie or show and he’s popular. You’re out here devouring his fanfics. Then he found out….or u writing one —then what 🧍♀️
I weirdly see Leon as a mom vlogger. He’s one of those😭
(If you ever call Leon a mommy vlogger again it's curtain calls for anon. I will not rest until I find you)
(this is a joke pls don't come for me...)
I'm thinkiiiiing...
Actor! Leon x Assistant! Reader (Post Damnation era)
BUT YOU READING HIS FANFICTION!!!
He knew his fans read and wrote this stuff. Draw him, write about him. Character and him alike. The screenwriters literally wrote everyone's characters based off of who they actually were. So in a way his RE character is an extension of himself but everyone can still differentiate between the two. So he doesn't mind anyone doing this.
He's gotten fanmail with art, copies of fanfiction and even just fan accounts constantly interacting with his social media posts. But one particular account seems to interact with him a lot, R4Kennedy.
No idea who it is but whatever.
Eventually he starts getting a lot of offers from different companies for commercials, brand deals, appearances, ect. He starts getting a bit overwhelmed with things so he hands off some responsibilities to his lovely assistant, you. You get to do most of his social media stuff. But he still likes scrolling around, liking things, retweeting/reblogging stuff and making his own posts life update posts on occasion. But he'd notice the lack of interaction from that one account on posts he specifically didn't make. But the second he'd personally post something he gets responses from R4Kennedy.
Super weird...
He'd accidentally found out by having to use your laptop to check a few things because his computer was having issues. You two know each other well, you've worked for him for years now, practically live together. So you don't even think to close out your open tabs... Tabs to your social accounts...
Leon is too nosy curious for his own good so he ends up opening the tabs.
You're R4Kennedy... He starts looking through the fics you've liked, everything you've said about him, even the things you've written.
You're a good writer, he'll give you that. A lot more brave online versus your usual mousey demeanor on the clock. Maybe you were interested in him and we're just shy? The thought crosses his mind constantly.
But he keeps this information for himself for a while.
Eventually he uses it. A day you're looking particularly good. He's been attracted to you for a while but was scared of scaring you off with his abrasive nature.
But you're making a coffee for yourself in his kitchen and he ends up saying your account name. You tense up immediately and just look back at the massive grin on his face. He says nothing else before he walks out.
He knows. And now you know he knows. And he's definitely going to hold this over your head for a while...
#leon kennedy x reader#leon s kennedy x reader#leon kennedy x fem reader#leon s kennedy#🌿 ivy replies#🌿 ivy writes#resident evil x reader
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Hello, I am slowly figuring out how to use tumblr effectively. I thought I'd give an update on fics I've written in 2024, but keep forgetting to talk about here in a meaningful way.
As We Go Hand in Hand (explicit, gentlebeard, 7100 words) follows Ed as he processes the past few months while living on the island with Stede, massively in love but struggling with himself. I wrote it while feeling a lot of delayed grief around the (confirmed) s2 cancellation, and while it's sad at points it's also quite romantic I think. I really love this story.
Behind Closed Eyes All I See is You (explicit, gentlebeard, 5300 words) is a smutty PWP my dear friend @chaoticturtleturtle invited me to write with her. Stede lets Ed take the lead in a scene with some sensory deprivation, pwp, and aftercare.
like sugar to my heart (mature, gentlebeard, 4200 words) is a silly fic I wrote for my Animorphs OFMD AU co-writer as a birthday gift. Our blue four-legged four-eyed mouthless alien Stedeth gets foiled by a vending machine (based on the tumblr art of the giraffe centaur), and Ed consoles him.
like a bird (teen, gentlebeard, 3700 words) with @ghostalservice gives some backstory about Stedeth's life prior to the events of our 177k fic and features some very cute art of Mary and Stede's children (as Andalites, of course) by @theogem
Stede’s Cursed Red Suit as a Metaphor for Grief and Moving On (teen, stede + izzy, 1717 words) explores the squishy time of season 2, episode 5, and the dynamic between Stede and Izzy in season 2 overall. I am also obsessed with how Stede acts in the cursed suit. I find their s2 relationship really interesting so this is me looking a bit at that via a missing scene starting with Stede yelling OH FUCK OFF.
Calypso’s Dawn (explicit, gentlebeard, 1800 words) centers around how Ed made his boyfriend blush the morning after Calypso's birthday and how Ed feels about it. I love this fic. I've been trying to challenge myself to write more self-contained, shorter stories and this one turned out really well imo.
Life as a Series of Forward Rolls (teen, gentlebeard, 9900 words) features Stede running into his teenhood crush, the gold medalist in men's gymnastics from the 1996 Olympics. This fic also centers around a Barbie doll in Ed Teach's likeness, which @swashbuckling-sweethearts made an INCREDIBLE art of (embedded at the end of the story), inspired by my own 1996 Olympics Barbie. Silly and light modern AU!
Did you mean to do that? (teen, gentlebeard, 700 words) explores Stede's grief around Ed dying, even when he knows Ed is alive. I had no idea I would be so interested in writing missing scenes, but long conversations with friends have really ignited me in exploring these. (The length - I was trying to channel @brigdh, whose ability to write devastatingly brilliant drabbles inspires me, and I'm pleased with this one!)
Perfectly Ordinary Tuesday (mature, gentlebeard, 4900 words) with @ferventrabbit follows Stede and Ed deciding to get married on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday, and drag their inn guest Dave along for the ride. We split up writing the vows, and I balled my eyes out writing mine and then reading em's. This story is fluffy and fun, and it was a great way to start 2024. :)
What's next: I'm working on or noodling a lot of projects, solo and with different collaborators. Imminently, I've got a fic with @veeagainsttheday coming for AUpril on April 1st. Hoping to get something else out in April for @ofmdjanuaury's AUpril 2024 event, which I highly encourage folks to check out - it's for all sorts of creators!
@ghostalservice and I continue to think about our blue alien Stede and his human boyfriend Ed. Wanna Fly Away was such an important project to me while we were writing, and it's become even more special as folks find it. WFA now has art embedded in most of the 15 chapters, so if you haven't seen those check it out. More to come in that space.
Where was I going with this? Well, I suppose I want to say I'm still here. OFMD changed my life, and the OFMD fandom community is deeply important to me. I still hold out hope for a third season, or a follow-up that brings us more closure, but no matter what I'm still thinking about our pirates and will for a long time. If you read this far, thanks for being part of my community. <3
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The Beforus Ancestors
honestly, i didnt like how the drawings turned out. i searched for references for the ancestors but i didnt manage to draw them the way i wanted to. most of the designs are okay, though i still feel like some of them are missing something, like colors.
more info abt them ↓
The Treasure Huntress (aka. Beforan Aradia)
She was a very skilled adventurer and loved finding historic artifacts. She had a special taste for East Beforan art and culture. During her adventures, she met a violetblooded sea dweller who also had a fascination for history and dedicated his life to study and learn more about it. Together, they traveled along each other with the goal of learning more about the history of their planet, and eventually, they developed feelings for each other. However, the warmblooded girl was pale, while the coolblooded boy was red. The unspoken tension between each other lead to a fight, which ended in surprise on both sides over the admittance of feelings. Not wanting to disappoint each other, they agreed to just stay friends.
The Guardian (Beforan Tavros)
He he stood up for the rights of trolls in special needs, and by that, he was also heavily against culling (as in the Beforan meaning of culling), saying that nobody should be treated that way (as helpless and fragile, making them too dependant) and by doing that, they would be "hiding the truth of the world from the children" by basically being way too overprotective. He was a farm boy, living in the country sides with his moirail, who mainly took care of the stables. Their farm was open to public visits, and one day, a certain coolblooded visitor has caught his attention. He wished to re-encounter with the man someday. One day, he has suffered a very sudden mutation that made him sprout wings, with him finally being able to realize his dream of traveling the world to spread the word about the dangers of culling and the rights of trolls in special needs.
(please correct me if I got the wrong meaning of Beforan culling, as I will talk about it again)
Radiical Psygamer (Beforan Sollux)
He was, perhaps, the greatest programmer that Beforus has ever seen. With his magnificent skills, he was responsible for massively improving trolls’ technology and has contributed to the creation of a few robots and helped with the coding of various popular games. He was, however, a terrible teacher, given his introversion and general social awkwardness. He was a big figure in the world of console games and was the first to actively encourage girls to play games too.
The Unculled (Beforan Karkat)
Because of his rare candy red blood, no lusus wanted to raise him, leaving him there all alone. One day, he was found by a purpleblooded man who took him to his hive in hopes that someone would pick him. They waited, and waited, and waited… but no lusus came. Tired of waiting, the big troll decided to raise the grub himself. Because of his caretaker, the mutantblooded grew up to be loud, tough and intimidating, but had a big, friendly heart and cared for his loved ones a lot.
Sharpeye Furrline (Beforan Nepeta)
She was a very skilled huntress. According to herself, she only killed what she ate, and if she didn’t eat, killing them would be mean. She could hunt creatures from a very small size to ones that were the double of her own. One day, while hunting for her dinner, she has killed a creature that was going to become a Lusus of a small wriggler. Therefore, she has accidentally unlocked the rage of a coolblooded troll. Terrified, she knew she couldn’t fight back, so she ran as fast as she could, far away from that beach. No one knows what happened to her.
The Seamstress (Beforan Kanaya)
A rare jadeblood with a rare taste for fashion. She became known for her dresses with odd patterns, inspired by the landscapes around her. She also traveled in search of different sights and, consequently, more ideas for dresses. Her works have eventually caught the attention of the Empress, who offered her a job as her official seamstress.
The Attorney (Beforan Terezi)
She was a blind woman who did not allow her disability to hold her back. She fought back against Beforus’ culling policy and became a excellent lawyer. Dedicating herself to fight against crime and bring justice to maintain the order and peacefulness of her planet, she chased a mischievous pirate lady who seemed to cause trouble everywhere she passed. She was The Unculled’s matesprit.
Arachnid Cap8tain (Beforan Vriska)
A troublemaker who caused mischief together with her pirate crew. She considered The Attorney her rival, as she was the only one who insisted in chasing her and never gave up on her quest to capture the spider pirate. A completely platonic rivalry. She held a special interest for snooker and said that the Ball 8 was actually “her lucky ball”.
The Horseman (Beforan Equius)
A STRONG man who really liked horses. He lived in a farm with his moirail and was responsible for taking care of the stables. Because of his interest, they ended up having way too many horses, which resulted in them having to build a larger stable for all of them. He loved every single one of them and took great care of each one. He said he occasionally had dreams where he was half a man and half a horse (basically a centaur), which is the origin of his title.
The Clownish Caretaker (Beforan Gamzee)
He rescued lususless grubs and wrigglers with an absent lusus and took care of them temporarily, until a new lusus came to become their official guardian. Despite being tall, lanky and overall intimidating, he was a very sweet and cheerful man, and loved entertaining others. Just like others, he was also heavily against culling and said that “every motherfucker should know and be able to defend themselves.” One day, a lusus was coming to his hive to pick up a grub, but it was killed by Shapeye Furrline. The man never felt so much rage before. The pure platonic hate he held towards the woman was bigger than the amount of hate he thought he could feel. Despite that, and contrary to popular belief, he did not chase the lady and took him quite some time to calm down. He was responsible for raising The Unculled and made sure to treat him properly.
The Historian (Beforan Eridan)
A seadweller with a huge fascination for history, he dedicated his life to learn more about the mysteries of his world. He read diares and looked for accurate informations, instead of believing in telltale stories. He studied ancient walls and occasionally collected some artifacts, purely for research reasons, and that’s when he met The Treasure Huntress. They decided to travel together, and it did not take long for him to become flushed for her. Unfortunately, she did not return the feelings, instead being pale for him. They agreed to stay friends, but very deep inside, he was still a bit disappointed.
Her Glorious Imperialist (Beforan Feferi)
The ruler of Beforus. She was a very kind and sweet woman, undoubtedly one of the best rules Beforus has ever seen. She treated her people with fairness, yet despise that, she was pro-culling, saying that some should not face the dangers of the world. After offering a job for The Seamstress, she and the jadeblood grew close. Despite being the one in charge of the planet, she decided to take care of Arachnid Cap8tain herself, and being a seadweller, it wasn’t hard to find her. She still congratulated The Attorney for her efforts in chasing the troublemaker pirate.
#mareys dump#homestuck#hom3stuck#beta trolls#beforus#beforus ancestors#aradia megido#tavros nitram#sollux captor#karkat vantas#nepeta leijon#kanaya maryam#terezi pyrope#vriska serket#equius zahhak#gamzee makara#eridan ampora#feferi peixes
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will someone explain to me what the deal is with asoiaf lore? i'll see someone talking about something and it will come from martin responding to a fan letter from the 90s? and this is canon?? like who found and compilates all of the stuff he has said besides released books and interviews i guess. i've never been a fan of a series like this, is this common?
this has me genuinely in tears sorry 😭😭😭
okay serious now. i genuinely don't know if this is normal or expected in fantasy book series, at least i don't think it's that common in modern fantasy where the fashion has gone other ways from the expansive sword & sorcery type from the 20th century. i could not tell you if other fantasy authors are as involved as grrm is because i haven't been involved with any other fandom like this either (maybe lotr fans can say something different), but considering the years between publications (let this one be the last 🤞), the massive fanbase and fame of the source material, i think it's normal that his interviews, comments, and fanmail has been archived in the internet.
strictly speaking, everything outside asoiaf (books 1-5), fire and blood, and the dunk & egg books is not considered canon. BUT if the info comes from people like elio and linda like twoiaf book, or like the calendars, cookbooks, official art etc it's considered semi-canonical, just like anything grrm says /outside/ of the books. famous example, it's like when jk rowling said dumbledore was gay /after/ the books were done. it's semi canonical bc it comes from the author themselves, it doesn't affect the main body of work so it can be taken or discarded.
the thing is, martin has done A LOT of interviews and answered A LOT of fanmail and worked closely in answering doubts from the westeros dot org site for their rpg games set in westeros (girl, the dream) during the more than 30 years since the publication of agot. all this is considered semi canon and this archive is called "so spake martin" (SSM), which i think was started by elio & linda in the 90s and it's still collecting info. if you go to the awoiaf wiki, esp in the main series characters you'll see this citation (from tyrion's page):
most will be things like "martin has said tyrion has similarities to richard iii" (i mean duh) but other will be really neat like saying tyrion has been trained in arms, which while not something new (he does fight more or less ably during the blackwater battle) it's interesting to point out when it's a detail that may be lost in the series. it goes from character trivia to how casterly rock is different from the show. most fans take what he says seriously but i know there are people that only consider what's in the book and that's it, which is fine. in any case, most of these is used to enrich theories or character analysis, it's why you will see trivia from a fanmail from 1996 or whatever. i myself haven't read SSM completely one by one but i do like to peruse the wiki often, even if it's not complete.
i've seen a few blogs on here who also "collect" grrm's words like nobodysuspectsthebutterfly's "so spake martin" tag (mostly analysis but really interesting read if u don't want to go thru the westeros org page) or georgescitadel that has specific info about characters or themes in asoiaf.
#ask#Anonymous#im currently reading og fantasy like the fafhrd and grey mouser books and all that. not lotr......i could not get into it#so i cannot say if it's different in other fanbases#if anyone has other things to add abt the subject you are most than welcome#hope i answered some of anons doubts
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