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mewhenimanangel · 9 months

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everywhere ʚɞ miles morales

pairing: 42!miles morales x reader

synopsis: miles finally asks to take you out.

wc: 2.3k

warnings!: swearing, kissing, making out, google translate spanish

prev ʚɞ

it'd been a week since miles invited you over and thanks to him, you got your grade up. the week had been full of flirting, whispering and laughing during class, texting all the time, him and his friend joined your table at lunch, and him finding any excuse to touch you.

in physics he kept his knee touched against yours, he would "drop" a pencil or whatever so he could hold your thigh using it to support himself while reaching for it. when he sat behind you in math, you would feel him touching your curls or your shoulder every now and then. when you would pass a paper back to him his fingers always reached out far enough to touch yours.

it was thursday afternoon on the walk home from school, safiya didn't come to school that day so it was just you and miles. "no because why did she say that like is that bitch really insane" you laughed. "shit is crazy for real" miles agreed, grabbing an arizona. you were currently in lenny's bodega heating up a beef patty - the last one how ironic, debriefing with miles about your day at school. "no fighting bout it this time?" lenny chuckled, ringing you guys up. "nah, he willingly agreed to share this time" you giggled.

you continued walking, both of you munching on your respective halves. you said something that made the both of you laugh and miles just stared at your smile, he wants that image stained in his brain. "alright, what. stressing me out with the staring" you joked, feeling a little awkward. "nothing" he laughed off before continuing. "will you let me take you out?" he asked you. all of a sudden you were nervous and looking around with a doofy grin on your face. "okayy. where?" you threw your trash in a nearby bin.

"it'd be a surprise. actually not really a surprise but on saturday, would you come?" he asked. "yeah i'll go on a date with you" you smiled. he pressed his lips together to hide the big smile that was growing on his face. he laughed out "okay alright, cool. i'll let you know the time" "okayy bye" you kissed him on the cheek and went up your block.

ʚɞ

it was friday night and you were rummaging through your closet for an outfit to wear. you groaned out a sigh and grabbed your phone opening miles' contact.

you pressed face time and waited for him to pick up. "yeah?" his prowler distorted voice answered. you looked at your phone to see him on what looks like to be a roof, prowler gear on. "oh shit sorry, didn't know you were doing your prowler stuff." you said, about to hang up. "nah it's fine, m'not busy right now" he told you, prowler voice turning off. "need something?" he asked you. "miles where are we goingg" you whined. "its a surprise, you can't handle surprises?" he chuckled. "i don't know how to dress for surprises. i don't know what to wear" you sighed. "you look good in everything, don't over think it."

"yeah well i wanna look good for you" you rolled your eyes. he scoffed "you literally always look so good, chiquita relax." suddenly there was a loud bang in the distance and he shot his head over his shoulder. "you'll figure it out. aight i gotta go" he said, prowler voice back on. he quickly hung up and you sighed, going to the kitchen to make a chicken wrap for dinner. this was a 3 am you problem.

ʚɞ

you got in the shower to shave, exfoliate, and scrub your body. getting out of the shower, you put on a face mask letting it set before you came back to do your skincare routine. you sat in your mirror to put product through your curls, deciding to let them down past your shoulders.

you finished your makeup and got dressed in the outfit you'd picked after a few hours of searching. you decided on a short strapless black dress and a gold chain belt that hung around your hips and chunky loafer heels. you decorated yourself with two layers of gold jewelry and your mom's earrings she'd given you.

you admired your look in the mirror before leaving to go in the living room. your dad looked over at you and furrowed his eyebrows "where you going all dressed up?" he asked, pausing his show. "i literally told you i was going out tonight" you scoffed, grabbing your purse. "with who?" he asked you. "miles.." you answered in a small voice. "that damn boy again?! y/n you're not-" daddy please, you literally already said yes. plus he's downstairs already. please please pleaseee" you begged, leaning over the chair in his face.

"ughh alright fine! but that location stays on all night and when i call, you answer. aight?" he bargained. "yayyy thank you daddy" you gave him a quick peck on the cheek before running to grab your purse and jacket. "okay i gotta go byeee" you ran out the door, and down the building stairs. you were about to open the door but miles was on the other side about to do the same thing. "oh hey. was gonna come and ask if you were still coming" he joked. "sorry, stuff with my dad" you smiled.

he took the time to really take you in. the way your curls perfectly framed your face, the way your gloss made your lips shine, the way your necklaces graced your collarbones, the way your dress hugged against your waist. "wow. you look amazing..you look like elegant and shit" he chuckled, feeling a little nervous. "here, they're for you" he smiled, handing you a bouquet of red roses. he reached out to hold your hand, leading you down the street. "ahh thank you" you didn't know what to say, compliments made you awkward.

"you look reall good too by the way" you checked him out. he wore a pair of grey pants with a black short sleeve top and jordans, black jacket over it. "tried my best to look as nice. i don't be dressing like that"he shrugged. "well you look very nice anyway" you squeezed his face.

"can you tell me where we're going now?" you asked him going down the metro stairs. "rockefeller" he answered with a smile. "to do what?" you furrowed your eyebrows. "skating" he answered leading you to a seat. "aw i haven't done that in so long. i used to go with my mom" you told him. "i know, safiya told me." he rubbed a thumb over your knuckles and only now did you realize neither of you had let go.

"you're such a sweetheart, i never would've guessed" you said. "what do you mean?" "i don't know. like i would've never thought we'd be going on a date. or that you would be so thoughtful" you shrugged. "i'm full of surprises, chiquita" he said with a smug look on his face. "yeah whatever" you giggled, resting your head on his shoulder.

you were still hand in hand walking to the entrance to purchase your tickets. “okay well now i feel overdressed” you sulked, taking off your heels. “nah you look good. don’t be afraid to show everybody else up” he got in his knee in front of you and helped you put your feet into the skates. thank goodness you wore socks. he looked up at you and the action felt so intimate while he gently placed your right foot in the skate.

soon after he put his skates on and put your bag and shoes in a locker. he took your hand again and helped you walk out on the rink. you were immediately losing your balance, throwing an arm around his shoulder to hold you steady. “aight i swear safiya told me you used to do this all the time.” he laughed. “only sometimes! and i never actually learned” you giggled.

unlike your clumsy and struggling to find balance movements, miles was smooth and moving with ease, hand on your waist to keep you up right. “how do you know how to skate” you asked him. “unlike you, i actually tried to learn” he joked.

for the majority of the time you stayed close the walls using them to move without making a fool of yourself. miles slowed down to match your pace, practically showing off how easy it came to him.

“alright come on” suddenly he was in front of you and grabbing your hands to pull you out in the middle. “alright wait wait wait wait” you frantically put your hands on his arms. “aye you need to learn chica. hold my hands and watch my feet” he told you. you followed his instructions as he pulled you along, yet yours remained unmoving.

he laughed “you know you gotta move yours too right. just copy how i’m moving mines but in the other direction”

he was in control but you followed his movements and eventually got the hang of it, enough to even move on your own. “atta girl, it ain’t even that hard” he smiled at you and you geeked at his praise. he grabbed your hand again and turned your body in a little twirl. which wound up with you falling into his chest nearly sending him to the ground. “aight so we not that far yet” he laughed. he looked at you before pressing a kiss on your lips.

you continued skating until your time slot was up and you got your things and left. “hungry?” he asked you. you nodded your head and responded with a small mhm before he led you down the street to a cozy restaurant.

you sat down and he ordered a plate of appetizers for you both. you talked the whole time throughout the meal, laughing your ass off. he excused himself for a moment and you kept your eyes on him watching as he found your waiter and told him something.

he came back after a minute and sat down and you guys got back to talking. after a few minutes your waiter came back with two plates, one with a raspberry brownie with fudge and one with strawberry caramel cheesecake - your favorite. he put the plates down and sent a wink to miles before walking away.

you looked down at the plate and it had the words ‘will you let me be your boyfriend?’ written in caramel drizzling. you gushed and bit your lip to hide the huge grin that spread across your face “ohh my god i thought you were literally never gonna ask” you giggled. “is that a yes?” “yes, it’s a yes” you smiled. he leaned over to the table to kiss you, hand placed on your cheek.

you finished your desserts and miles paid the bill before you left the restaurant. you practically couldn’t stay off each other on the walk to the subway station, you arms were wrapped around his and when you complained that your feet were hurting he leaned down so you could climb on his back.

you sat down on the train and he rest a hand on your thigh while you laid your head on his shoulder. “still got one more thing to show you. you down?” he asked. “yeah, for whatever”

you got off and he led you back to his graffiti site. “now how i’m supposed to climb that fence in these heels” you twisted your mouth to the side. he chuckled. “i’ll go over first throw them over the wall and i’ll hold them till you get over duh”

you followed his instructions and hopped the fence before leading you down. there was a wall, once blank now decorated with your face, detailed and big across the wall. you looked so beautiful through his eyes. he moved up next to you and took your hand in his. “ughh you are so..” you didn’t finish your sentence you just put your hands up to his face and brought your lips to his in a heartfelt kiss.

he wrapped his arm around your waist to pull you in closer. his other hand moved to push your curl out of your face and at the back of your neck to deepen the kiss. his hand slid down to your ass making your lips part slightly and his tongue slid in your mouth. the blaring sound of your ringtone made you jump and you sighed seeing it was your dad calling. “hey baby, you on your way home yet? it’s getting late, think you’d better come inside” he told you.

“okay i’ll see you” you answered, hanging up the phone. “it’s my dad, he wants me home” you sighed. “alright let’s go” he said.

you hopped the fence again making your way out of the station. “your feet still hurt?” he asked you. “a little bit” you answered. “well then hop on madame” he joked, leaning down so you could get back on his back.

you talked the whole way home, literally talking his ear off as your chin rest by his shoulder. “sorry if i’m talking too much” you said. “no it’s okay i like listening to you.” you smiled and buried your face in his shoulder, hiding the giddy expression on your face.

he got to your apartment building and gently put you back on the ground. “i’m really glad you asked to be my boyfriend.” you told him. “i’m really glad to be your boyfriend” he smiled. you held his face and pressed your lips against his before pulling away. “goodnight miles” you said. “good night, hermosa” he said back, easing away as you walked in your house.

taglist ౨ৎ

@prettypink-princesss @itsnotino @r3d0n33 @iluvprowlermiles @jmsanchoo @stevenknightmarc @melllinaa @444morales @noetophat @bigdikzaddy

#NIA WRITES ࿐#across the spiderverse #miles morales x reader #earth 42 miles morales x reader #earth 42 miles x reader #miles morales #earth 42 miles x black reader #spider man: across the spider verse #prowler miles #earth 42 prowler #earth 42 miles fluff #black reader

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impostorsshow · 4 months

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Hello Tumblr city I have nightly doodles

This time it was just finishing up old doodles since I only gave myself 2 hours, and uh. I also had a Garfield x Tom sketch but I decided not to finish that one also if you want to hear about my DSAF au that goes with the image click the read more below

Close up of the image along with the ref I used i wouldnt recommend clicking on any of my images for higher quality since my coloring is very unpolished

Anyway this au is pretty simple but I highly enjoy it so I'm going to rant about it past my bedtime - essentially, I looked at how the good ending is a pretty sad ending, and while it's great when the canon/best endings in games aren't the best outcome, I wanted to fix it /j. Specifically I wanted a good ending for Davenport, fuck the children fuck everything else let's take the morals of the Dave endings in the games and fucking run with them.

So i uh haven't replayed the game in a long while forgive me for mistaking a few details but it follows the ending where you salvage davetrap, and Jack doesn't go past the second layer of the flip side and never meets Dee, but instead of Henry possessing Jack or whatever the fuck happened there, Jack starts to work on a solution. I should mention this is a world where Jack never gets a new phone guy but listens to all of Henry's tapes - but Jack gathers the fact that daveyrap is unhappy because hes not a complete soul, and devises a plan. That plan is just to work with both Dave's, making sure davetrap doesn't cause his business to go under due to child murder but he can't completely stop him and working with flipside Dave to both figure out how to make a robot vessel that looks like Dave and could reasonably pass as looking like a human since it wouldn't need anything for programming or ai or movement that possession would be capable of, and to convince flipside Dave to try and be a complete soul again.

Because from what I've gathered, the whole soul thing means thag when the "child" or in Dave's case the part that doesn't want to deal with murder part of the soul goes away to the flip side, the soul is torn apart since there's still something with a mind in the animatronics, it's just left without the reason part of itself. If we incorporate remnant lore which I'm not going to go very far in it further exemplifies the point that Dave repossessing himself over and over tore his soul apart while normal dead kids just leave the remnant behind but whatever whatever Jack decides that if the two halves of the soul exist in one body again they can merge back together and become one soul capable of the full range of emotions, including happiness.

Also my jacks a bit fucked up in the head because this jack went to Vegas twice and killed the real Fredbear so he's on a slippery slope of almost becoming a Henry Miller pulling this shit and asking Dave to continue repossessing himself, but instead risking losing his soul entirely by asking him to possess something that doesn't have any connection to his dead body. And it works when the "it looks exactly like Dave but he can't go in the rain and doesn't smell like a rotting corpse anymore and also doesnt have nearly as many scars" robot vessel is built and the two try possessing the body. And then Dave helps Jack make a robot body for himself and is built in like 1/3rd of the time since Dave knows how animatronics work and not smelling is a pretty nice feature, except Jack doesn't actually *have* a soul so for all intents and purposes I have no clue how to fix that so the jack body is just sitting in the closet of jacks house useless but it's there.

And like then there's actual lore but I need to go to sleep since I have school tomorrow but Dave and Jack decide to keep running Freddy fazbenders considering Jack doesn't have a problem with murder, and the two soul halves in davetrap argue enough that the murder keeps to enough where Freddy fazbenders just seems like a hotspot rather than it actually needing to be a place in need of getting shut down for an investigation. That and Jack blackmailed the phone guy I forgot his name into helping them cover shit up in exchange for getting a hell of alot of freedom [for a phone guy it's a lot of freedom at least, Fredbears isn't a stranger to murder coverups even if it goes against his morals.] Also the nice part of Dave is only really staying with davetrap because he cares so much about jack because I do support Davesport but I try to keep it at a level of implication so it can be passed off as platonic if someone wants it to be

#dsaf #davesport #oc art #talk talks #original post #i love vira so much #shes so damn hard to draw because of her color scheme but i love her #also this is one of the. very few up to date refs i have of her #i dont draw vira very much and shes gone through alot of design changes very quickly because she didnt look correct without the long shirt #and the cape just spices up the design and i might give her multiple sets of capes so she can have more variety #art

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xhellodollyx · 1 year

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I posted 89 times in 2022

43 posts created (48%)

46 posts reblogged (52%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@twyz

@chuckysource

@lexyscross

@marril96

@userethereal

I tagged 88 of my posts in 2022

Only 1% of my posts had no tags

#chucky - 69 posts

#chucky tv series - 38 posts

#chucky spoilers - 21 posts

#tiffany ray - 15 posts

#chucky tv series spoilers - 14 posts

#glen ray - 13 posts

#fanart - 12 posts

#glenda ray - 11 posts

#chiffany - 10 posts

#tiffany valentine - 10 posts

Longest Tag: 138 characters

#i do find it funny though that chiffany still seems to be going strong on the official chucky accounts like an outside canon sort of thing

My Top Posts in 2022:

IM LOSING MY MIND OVER THIS IMAGE

88 notes - Posted September 29, 2022

Also seeing the Glen doll again and hearing the Seed of Chucky theme playing in the background it really felt like a true sequel to Seed that i never thought we'd get to see again in the franchise 😭

99 notes - Posted November 3, 2022

Okay Im surprised that Don didn't make the twins campy and actually added emotional layers to them both, with Glenda talking about what having their dad be absent did to them and Glen also talking about the hole in their heart. Don actually emphasized the fact that the reason the twins dont feel whole and are so close, almost unnaturally so, because they shared one body for so long, two souls in one body, that it makes sense that even all those years later they would feel like two halves and not fully whole. Im SHOCKED don didnt make that into a joke and actually made it something people could sympathize with.

And adding layers to Glenda as well and not making them a caricature killer like their parents have turned out to be. Which again, makes me think that the fact Glenda was WORKING with Kyle and not just Glen, it makes me think they're gonna separate Chucky and Nica. Im wondering, and this is just a theory, a wild, wacky theory, BUT—

If Kyle survived and is alive, maybe Andy did too, and hell, maybe the Chucky head, the original Chucky, is in on this plan as well, because he realized he fucked up by making all these other versions of himself? Maybe thats why both the twins were clearly working with Kyle and possibly by some extension (if he's alive) Andy — maybe in exchange for the og!Chucky in some degree. Because right now they all have bigger problems than just the main Chucky, like a WAY bigger problem. And besides, maybe the twins just want their dad back— not one of the clones running around, but their actual Dad

136 notes - Posted October 27, 2022

See the full post

187 notes - Posted September 27, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Glen: "Mom's a murderer?"

Glenda: "Mom's a lesbian?"

GLENDA OH MY GOD

189 notes - Posted September 14, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

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

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jonathankatwhatever · 1 year

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It’s 17 Feb 2023, and I had no recollection of what I wrote only a few hours ago until I glanced it over. There’s a locality of threading in that, a Thingyness, which I really love as notation because it perfectly describes the 1-0Segmentation of Things. I’ve been trying to say this and it came to a head this morning with a debate over whether sex is good or bad, arising out of a story of a young woman fighting off a man who tried to rape her in her apartment gym. My mind flashed on old attitudes, like you’d see in old comics, movies, and TV, and which MadMen exploited, to the line ‘might as well enjoy it’, as if sex is enjoyable and the only thing preventing women from fucking all the time is fear of gaining a reputation which would diminish their ability to gain the necessary mates, whether husband or lover or friend. I use husband without gender; we’ve describing a female role in a relationship, meaning the wife role to this extent. It’s a lot of fun to keep segmenting, but each segmenting is a step, and remember counting: a single step generates an entire complex Thing.

Maybe we can get that out! Exciting. I deeply connect this process to sexual excitement. That’s part of the Halving process, because what I’m seeing is the hinge in that 2gs f&b, the spine of that book, is what connects the first page to the last, in whatever ordering. That power set of the infinite countable is uncountable because it connects to and expresses the Dimensional Enclosure reducing to whatever is countable through the process of Dimensional Reduction. That last means you can generate a computer that makes something and it won’t halt, and that something is tangible, perhaps a hologram that repeats or never turns off or which runs through some series of steps, like it’s a square and it can be seen in this position and this position and this one if you squint a bit more and these if you squint even more, but in a way that at some point you realize this is the same program running over and over and it will not halt. In other words, though that was a fun sentence, Dimensional Reduction takes the rendering from the most abstract to actual existing, you can stick your hand on it stuff. Like getting a shock takes the dimensions inherent in providing electricity to that spot, with all the history of that spot which relates to why it is that spot, and why then you are there, etc., etc. Massive abstract structures. That’s why ‘choice’ is not really my favorite word for a potential solution to a fit with higher dimensions as they reduce to your ‘choice’. And it’s why most choice is forced. I think there is more in that.

Forced choice relies on Conformal Reality transititioning into Tractable Reality, so that at any given ‘level’, the potential solutions are limited, and I’m seeing that is why these reduce to 1 against 1. I see how we relatively size over the Counter Between us, and that gives Between the full power of DR bringing us to this moment of confrontation, good or bad. It’s easier to think in terms of tObjects here. So David & Goliath, though mythical, is rendered into stories and art and belief and forms of practice, meaning how people internalize that, so that’s an iObject manifesting through tObjects, unifying those into a set. That also happens to be a solution to the DR at the level above, which is looking for iObjects, which Recombines iObjects until they fit what comes up from below. So what we manifest does in fact give us the God we make in our own image.

To get into that gets us closer to the idea I see lurking, which is that we can’t actually become anything other than our selves in our enclosures. That is, I can’t share a body with you though we can press 2 bodies together to enhance and reflect the abstract bonds. So everything is a projection against the wall of your own Dimensional Enclosure. You can see how we become fixated on ‘boundaries’ in that phrasing. At the group level, what we project against the wall of our group Dimensional Enclosure reflects how we internalize externality. This is the intellectual counter to deconstructionism’s rewarding of clever negative arguments, that it reflects the same perspective imposition of any prior dominant form. I don’t understand why this happened because these arguments clearly violate Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem: this form of argument establishes a dominant which claims to be true, which claims the same rightness as past dominants. It’s an obviously repeating pattern, and Marx talked about it in terms of synthesis and itwas all over the 19thC, particularly when you include religious awakening, abolitionism, temperance, native rights, etc.

In gs terms, we’ve long noted that people seek to balance Things. And that becomes a fixation on balancing now, in material terms. That is what translates into mass shootings: the amount of anger and hatred within seeks to express to its balance point where it is spent. That models in gs as Injection: the Thing of a person is Injected with hatred, whether against an identifiable tObject expression of that or against the self. Note how this process is the same as with David & Goliath: an identifiable tObject might be hatred of blacks or Jews, meaning the abstract structure which has built and maintained hatred places a construct in your own head about these others, and that projects, and for some that pressure must be released. That can happen in groups. That can happen across societies.

I see it in the US now. We’ve been shooting down objects in the sky. One appears to have been a Chinese spy balloon that, per the NYT, may have been used over Guam and that area, but which got away. The other 3 appear to be hobbyist weather balloons. We’re spending millions of dollars to shoot down stuff because we have an undefined fear that the other side is doing something bad to us. Talk about trigger happy. We’re becoming a military with a nation attached. I point to this fear and then our completely cavalier attitudes toward provoking nuclear war with Russia. Aggressively trying to wipe out other systems. Aggressively trying to control other systems. And yet it is happening. It’s like people aren’t afraid of nuclear weapons any more, like they’re CGI.

That’s what I so deeply appreciate in your art. Those concepts. There is so much in ‘dressing for revenge’, the way you enact it. You are an amazing construction. Anyway, enough lazy musing. Need more of a focused musing.

So, much of the urge to balance things now, that failure of forgiveness, that failure of confession, is that it manifests a lack of belief in eventual balancing, but also and more directly on point is that it enables yet another negative expression, meaning another substitution of dominance, one which says ‘by whatever means necessary’, because that manifests the ‘solution’ which gets you to the desired End when you simplify that End to whatever End is actually there when you use ‘whatever means’. This is what catches people every time. It’s not a hidden trap; it’s just ignored. If you use ‘whatever means’, then your End is not what you perceived it to be. That almost immediately became Hillel to me because he expressed the inherent conflicts: you have to be for yourself, and yet you have to be for others, and you have no excuses. That last is that non-decision is a decision which means you can’t be for yourself and can’t be for others as you could be. Hillel applied segmentation logic. It’s even Triangular: if not now, when can apply to getting a good seat for a show or finding a stray or any situation, because those are all Counters over which you enact yourself in the moment and over time. We can actually model all those ideas.

To get to the underlying layer of why this occurs, we’ve been trying to formalize that it results from the increasing awareness in humanity. That as we become more aware, our destructive urges come out. That would mean the iObjects tethered to basics like predation, meaning eating, and prey, meaning eaten. Procreation and survival of self.

I need a break.

——

If I’m not mistaken, we showed how uncountability works, that it’s Recombinance in Dimensional Reduction.

The division of selves over here is so pronounced now that I’m being gently reminded by left that it’s not that ‘I’ as right am stupid but that I’m in his space doing his job, which I’m not as good at doing, and that I should try to focus on this job, which is what I’m good at. That’s pretty much how I see this working in general.

BTW, I just had the most amazing experience in which you made me promise to wait for you, meaning you as a tObject you and thus those specific dimensions, which I did, and then it became clear that would be identity verification, please not IV, inherent in the return which balances the gs processes to the same ‘singularity’, which is not a physical space but the pole which hinges. I need more visual on that. Is it 4 like IV? That would be a hoot. It actually is: count Triangular from one End to a 2nd to the 3rd as 2 steps, from each of those Ends sharing a common 3rd is total of 4. Maps as a V with an I orthogonal, like grid lines in xK with the V connecting xK counts. Not sure what to make of that, but I see gestural working as spelling out processes in blocks, in stacks. If I can render this ….

If we have grid squares at scales, then gestural draws locations of End to End Pathways within projective layers and in blocks, meaning in depth. So both kind of projective block. I jus saw a different gestural G, one that is a C on top, but on the bottom hits the midpoint below then the midpoint of the start vertical. So all that lowers the End on that axis over that Pathway. Which also means G is one segment away from O in gestural. And these connect the other vertical axis of the D to that same midpoint, so the idea is that the missing Segment is the inversion of that other vertical axis. That’s why DOG works so well with GOD. Like Egyptian wall panels, the letters are didactic by embodying the idea of the other completing the one of you. It gets funny. Like BANANA in gestural would have the B orthogonal. The fertility image pops out.

Locality of threading. Tractable Reality. In layers, so we can worry about carbon emissions and not care about life making it through the winter without food because we obsessively clean up nature. The Segmentation model works perfectly here, and it explains why we can’t comprehend what to do in each situation, and why we can make the wrong decisions. It really is amazing to watch this happen with actual thoughts, seeing them identify attractors, seeing them sort by type. The better you can define your search, the better the result. But that requires knowing what you’re searching for, which requires digging deeper into the dimensions of that, which means you are inverting that image outward.

As I was making the bed, I heard a perfectly reasonable speech about what to say. It made complete sense. Never could hear things like that before.

So when you invert outward, you are identifying the specific solution to your search. That just sounds silly. I mean, take something like Fermat’s Last Theorem. By looking inward, I would say ‘we have grid squares and grid squares are where reality happens because they aren’t just regular squares, but are D4Spaces in which D3 tObjects, meaning physical reality, exists, as that constructs Conformal and Tractable Reality. Tractable Reality defines the ‘choice’ set which reduces the problem of infinite choice. I wouldn’t say this is axiomatic; it’s a consequence of grid squares in Dimensional Reduction that Pathways adhere to Conformal Reality, and that Conformal Reality localizes to become Tractable. Note that Tractable does not mean physical scale: the quest for world domination is a large physical scale localization of the Tractable sort. Note also that Tractable explicity means Pathways become limited, or appear to become limited by the layers of process required to enact them (in 1-0Segmentation), not that there is a clear answer which is correct, nor that there is a solution which is entirely ‘fair’ beyond some form of alternation.

I need a break.

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cornbread-but-art · 2 years

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the planning page in my sketchbook for my alina comic contest entry! most of it is just me sketching the characters to try to get a feel for their face shapes since i had never really done anything with them before. plus jamie's completely new for this comic and this page has a more full-body drawing of xim than was ever in the comic. a lot of the faces are actually traced over this page 'cause i can't do faces digitally, lol (the full-bodies were mostly just to get the clothes designs).

[ID: image 1: top half of the aforementioned planning page. in the top left are the tiny thumbnail sketches for each of the three story pages. only the vaguest of details can be made out. next to that are sketches of jessica's face from a side profile, a three-quarters, and a front facing angle. she is looking down at no-one in particular, smiling vaguely nervously. below the thumbnails are alina's face drawn at the same angles, looking up, smiling hopefully.

below that, are sketches of jamie's face at the same angles again. the faces have been labeled by character name so far, but jamie's is simply labeled 'instructor' as this was drawn before a name was chosen. she is mostly just staring of into space. the face sketches are split across the two images.

next to that are some anatomically inconsistent doodles of alina and jessica, also split between the two images, with a note that they are 'not to scale' between them. alina is doing an almost ballet pose, her right hand and left leg in the air and her right leg on her tiptoes, and her eyes closed. she has relatively short hair, not even reaching her neck, curling up slightly at the ends, and is wearing a leotard tucked into a tutu, with some leggings and and ballet shoes, and has a bracelet on her left wrist. jessica is standing, holding out a hand to no-one, her eyes also closed. she has similar hair to alina's, and is wearing a simple, long-sleeved dress going down to her knees, dark knee-high socks, and dress shoes.

image 2: the bottom half of the planning page. on top of the latter halves of the previously mentioned items split between the pages, it contains a full-body doodle of jamie, kneeling with her head tilted downward, her eyes closed, and her hands up by her chest. she has a fairly shaggy undercut, with the hair not undercut starting wavy before quickly becoming more curly, going down to about her shoulders. she wears a simple, long-sleeved dress going down to her knees, like jessica, with a a ribbon-y belt-like thing at around her stomach, some ripped jeans, and boots. end ID]

#glitchtale #cornbread's sketch book #planning page #jessica grey #alina grey-rutrow

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erin-bo-berin · 4 years

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My Heroine

MASTERLIST

This fic was inspired by the song My Heroine by The Maine which you can listen to here, if you’d like. The song I’ve come to realize sounds like it can have multiple interpretations, but I was inspired to use the whole “reader is Spencer’s drug of choice” plot. Not gonna lie it was rough writing about his prison trauma cause I consider it to be one of his biggest traumas, but I kinda wanted this to be a journey from his avoidance of it to his eventual acceptance, all while sex is his “heroin” or the reader is the “heroine” in his story. Anyway, I hope you all enjoy. Happy reading!

Spencer Reid/Reader

Rating: M (smut)

Word Count: 4,460

I’m feeling pretty dirty baby

Forgive my sins

I get the feeling you can save me honey,

My heroine

The silver gleam from the sharp blade caught his eye as it hit the light. In any other circumstances, the sharpness of it might actually be considered beautiful.

This was anything but beautiful.

This was horrifying.

The metal was so closely pressed to skin that even a small flinch could draw blood.

“Never ever mess with a man’s stash on the inside. When you do,” the man paused for a second—a millisecond—before the knife sliced across the skin, ripping the hostage’s throat open.

He struggled against the person holding him, his momentary shock and need to help his friend making him fight the grip of the big man, even more.

“People get hurt,” the first guy said, backing away.

The second man let go of him, his friend falling to the floor, choking on his own blood. While they made their departure from the laundry room, he ran to his injured friend’s side, grabbing a towel to hold against the wound.

“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” he repeated, kneeling over the only friendly face he’d known in the last weeks.

If he repeated it enough, he’d be okay. He had to be.

“Guard!” he yelled.

His hands cradled his friend’s face as he lay gasping and wheezing, the fear in his eyes matching his own.

In all the years, throughout all the things he saw that most normal people didn’t, he’d never been as terrified as he was right now. His heart raced from the fear and he was breathing heavy as he screamed as loud as he could.

“HELP! HELLLLP!”

Spencer shot up in bed, breathing hard.

His face was sweaty, his entire body was sweaty, in fact. His t-shirt clung to his skin.

He kicked off the covers, sitting on the side of his bed, running his hands through his hair. He tried in vain to calm his pounding heart and slow his breathing.

The nightmares hadn’t stopped. If anything, they’d gotten worse.

A rare burst of anger caused him to shove the object that was sitting on his nightstand, off of it with extreme force.

He glared at the journal on the floor where it had landed haphazardly. He didn’t want to write in it like his therapist suggested. It didn’t help him then and it wasn’t going to help him now.

He rubbed his eyes, trying desperately to erase all the images that constantly played behind his eyes, regardless if he was asleep or awake.

It was the middle of the night, but he knew what he needed. He grabbed his phone off the charger and sent a quick text.

I need a distraction.

The recipient would understand, he knew. It was only 1 am and they were known to be a night owl anyway.

He grabbed a pair of pants to change into and pulled them on in place of his pajama pants. All he had to grab were his car keys and his phone and he was out the door.

It’d only been six months since Spencer had been released from prison in which he spent three long, grueling months in.

He had been framed.

That was the first thing he remembered thinking, even under the influence of heroin and cocaine, in which the unsub had drugged him with. He had been sitting in a prison cell in Mexico, but deep down he knew he hadn’t done anything, even if his mind was scrambled and tried desperately to convince himself otherwise.

Fucking Cat Adams. If she hadn’t been such a psychopath, he might’ve admired her intelligence and skills to pull off something so elaborate, but alas, she was.

Her and her female partner Lindsey Vaughn had been watching him, waiting to strike. All because Spencer had arrested Cat and outsmarted her. It’s where she belonged after all. She’d been a

hit woman, operating in the shadows of the dark web that even experts in the area couldn’t even fathom.

She, along with four other assassins had been working for years before any law enforcement even knew of their existence. Spencer and the rest of his fellow Behavioral Analysis team had been the only ones to get close enough to them. Close enough in fact, to take them all down, every last one.

Cat Adams though, had been the hardest one. She was one to play mind games and she hated to lose. Which she had against him; he’d outsmarted her and she was the one who’d landed in a prison cell.

Of course, being the kind of person she was, she wasn’t going to take that lying down. So, she returned the favor.

He had been determined to help his mother—Diana Reid—who’d been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia all his life, but now had been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. He was smart, he was sure he could help her, fix her maybe.

There’d been a plethora of drug trials, medicine combinations, diet changes, but nothing helped. So without his teammates—who happened to be the closest friends he had—knowledge, he had been crossing the Mexico border numerous times to get medicine for his mother, one that was definitely not FDA approved.

It was one of these trips that Lindsey—and technically Cat too—had struck.

She’d dosed him with a spray of scopolamine, pumped him full of cocaine and heroin and murdered the woman he’d been meeting to get the vials of medicine from.

It was bad, really bad. He was the prime suspect in the murder and that is how he ended up in Millburn Correctional Facility pending trial for three months.

Thankfully, the BAU had worked their asses off to clear his name, but in the time spent in prison he had experienced some pretty awful things.

If that hadn’t been bad enough, Cat had orchestrated another evil plan. Lindsey had managed to kidnap his mother.

Less than 12 hours after being released from jail, he was back in another one to face Cat again and play her games.

She had been executed for her crimes and the additional charges she faced for framing him and kidnapping his mother. He wasn’t the least bit remorseful; if anything, he was glad he’d never have to deal with her again. He dealt with her in his mind enough as is.

Spencer didn’t deal with emotions very well, so it was no surprise to himself that he didn’t stop to process his trauma.

Instead, he found other outlets.

He’d known Y/N for several years but had done an awful job of keeping in touch as the years passed. He’d recently reconnected with her before his arrest and then he’d pulled away again.

He felt bad for never telling her until after the fact, but he’d been embarrassed enough.

She was a good friend, one who had said she would do anything to help him if and when he needed it.

That’s how the arrangement began. It’d happened once, by accident, but it had helped him forget everything when he needed it the most.

Which is why at 1 a.m. he was headed over to her house, just to forget everything for a while.

Your hips, my hands, you swing and you dance

Yeah, I’m feeling pretty lonely baby

Just let me in

The door to her apartment opened to reveal her barefoot and in a long, oversized t-shirt.

“Hey,” she greeted him.

He didn’t waste time with the greetings, he kicked the door closed with his foot and grabbed her face, kissing her.

Within minutes he had her pressed up against her door, hands roaming under her shirt as he kissed her hungrily.

He wanted to forget.

Needed to forget.

She moaned into the kiss. Lucky for him, she got horny easily. She was always ready to go at it whenever. Maybe it had something to do with him, although he didn’t know. He never really took the time to dwell on it.

His fingers stroked her bare stomach as his tongue moved against hers. Her hands clutched the bottom of his shirt, pulling away long enough to help him yank it over his head. Her shirt followed suit.

For a while, they stayed there, top halves pressed against one another as their lips moved together in a complicated, yet simple dance.

They made out for a while, while Spencer forced his brain to empty and focus on her. It finally worked as he felt his crotch tighten, his need for her now more than just something to get him through the night.

She led him back to her bedroom and within minutes was kneeling in front of him, pulling his cock out of his pants.

“You gonna be a good little girl and suck my cock?” he mumbled, looking down at her with lidded eyes.

Normally, he would never fathom talking like this. But something had changed within him in the last six months. He was rougher around the edges, he quite literally didn’t give a fuck anymore. Which proved to be true since he quite literally had a fuck buddy—something the old Spencer wouldn’t even consider.

He cared about her, but like him, she didn’t want anything serious, so he never felt too bad taking advantage of her this way. Weren’t they both using each other anyway?

“Your wish is my command,” she purred, making his cock throb even more.

The moment her mouth touched him, his eyes closed in pure bliss, the feeling chasing the nightmares away.

His hand threaded in her hair, guiding her head as her tongue glided and mouth hollowed out, sucking him like her favorite popsicle. She was amazing at this, he definitely had to give her that.

“Y/N, fuck,” he groaned, his hips bucking up towards her mouth.

Her tongue was his gateway to an anxiety free mind—at least for the time being.

He pushed her away after a few minutes. He wasn’t going to last if she kept that up much longer.

With surprising agility, he’d had her from her knees to bent over the end of the bed in seconds.

Their sessions were far from romantic love making—the type of intimacy he knew she deserved—but more animalistic and frenzied.

He knew he was selfish and instead of letting her have what she deserved from a man, he held tight to her like she was his lifeline.

In a way, she had become his lifeline. Things got worse the longer he tried to stay away from her. That’s why he always returned.

Her moans and the slap of their bodies were the only sounds heard in the room as he thrust deep into her. Even as fucked up as he was, he had to be an idiot to not admit that sex with her was incredible. She was incredible.

“Spencer, oh my god, fuck.”

Her words came out in a strangled moan as he’d switched up the movements of his hips. Instead of the fast and harsh thrusts, they turned into slow and deeper ones. He may only be her fuck buddy, but he was still gonna be damn sure she got her pleasure out of it too.

His fingers dug into her hips as he tried to erase the images of his earlier nightmare with every thrust. Usually, it worked. Tonight though, he was struggling.

Instead of disappearing, the memories kept flashing through his head like a silent movie on repeat.

The helplessness everyone felt in that prison.

The fear he felt.

The images of a group of white men who pointed a knife in his face his first full night in prison.

Two, sneering and sadistically joyful faces hovering over him as they beat him to a pulp, smothering his face with a rag.

His desperate decision in doing something so awful that it hurt more men than he intended it to.

The constant paranoia.

The fear he had become a monster.

Every single moment inside he’d spent that he had to make choices he’d never fathomed he’d have to—only to survive.

Delgado.

“Switch it up,” he muttered, pulling out of her, turning her around.

His jaw was tense, his body was rigid. All he wanted was one orgasm to erase his nightmare.

Her eyes narrowed, sensing his tension but knowing better than to comment on it.

“Let me take care of you,” she whispered.

She pushed him towards the head of the bed, ordering him to sit against it. He did as he was told, focusing all of his attention on her again.

When she climbed into his lap to straddle him, his breathing had become ragged and he was glad that the stirrings of his arousal were coming back—his sexual attraction to her luring him back in again.

She sank down on him and he exhaled sharply, groaning lowly. The feeling of her tight around him was always like drinking water after being utterly parched.

“You like that?” she purred, her hands resting against his chest, “You like when I take care of you?”

“Very much so,” he growled.

He thread his hand into the back of her hair, pulling her face towards his. He kissed her roughly, his lower half meeting the speed she’d set since she was now the one in charge. Her pelvis grinded against his, giving her even more pleasure, he was sure.

As much as he did this for his benefit, he also had a small sense of pride in knowing he could make her moan and writhe like he did. His hands cupped her breasts, massaging them and she threw her head back with a loud moan.

He could practically fall apart at that sight alone, but he managed to resist.

His lips attached to her throat, sucking harshly, sure to leave a mark. Their moves were frantic as she gripped the headboard and he bucked relentlessly into her.

They both spiraled into ecstasy, not that far apart from one another.

Sweaty and out of breath, she moved off of him, gathering her clothes and tossing his own to him.

“Want something to eat before you go?”

She asked it so nonchalantly it was as if he hadn’t just spent about half an hour buried to the hilt in her.

“No, thanks though.”

He wasn’t one to stay long after the deed, even though a part of him felt like an ass for it. Y/N didn’t deserve that. But if it ever bothered her, she never let on.

She nodded, watching him as he finished pulling his shirt over his head.

“I’m around, if you need me.”

Spencer gave a nod and headed to the door, grabbing his car keys on his way out.

You’re my heroine, but you’re suicide

If I let you in you’ll crawl inside

You save my skin

But you can’t wait to sink in

My heroine

In a way, Y/N had become his drug.

Whenever things got too hard, he went to her. But lately, it was like every time he fucked her, it only left him needing more.

His PTSD was getting worse, the sex was only distracting him for so long, but he was stubborn. He wasn’t going to give her up anytime soon.

The PTSD was also affecting his work and he knew it.

It’d been six months since his release from prison, but he’d only been reinstated for three months. He worked his ass off to get his position back and he wasn’t about to let his emotions get the best of him.

He was currently trying to focus on the geo profile in front of him, but his vision kept blurring. He rubbed his eye, trying hard to block out everything else but this case.

He was becoming increasingly irritable as well.

It had only been a week since his last visit to Y/N, but he was craving her and her distractions so much. His nightmares hadn’t ceased, he was hardly sleeping and his teammates weren’t oblivious.

They knew he was having a hard time readjusting.

Spencer doubted they knew just how bad it really was though.

The map blurred in front of his eyes again, the sight being replaced with moving pictures, his memories being played before his eyes.

Like the time he was so desperate to survive, he poisoned drugs that he was supposed to move, instead of getting involved with the situation.

He ended up causing several men to get incredibly sick—his guilt over that still haunted him at night.

Prison was an incredibly dangerous place and he had been too good of a person to survive as long as he had.

For a while he’d had two friends; Delgado and Shaw.

One was murdered in front of him.

The other turned out to be using him. Shaw ran the entire prison population. He called the shots and people listened to him. But Spencer wanted no part of that.

Making an enemy of Shaw had been deadly. In fact, it came close to being deadly. Spencer could’ve easily lost his life behind bars.

It had been months since he had been locked up, but the sense of helplessness he felt still haunted him to this day. It smothered him like the sweltering heat on a hot, summer day.

He rubbed his palms into his eyes. He felt like he couldn’t breathe while at the same time his heart rate accelerated. His sense of fight or flight was being triggered and he couldn’t stop the sense of dread that was engulfing his senses.

“Spence, you okay?”

“Yeah, I just need some fresh air,” he answered, brushing past a worried JJ.

The moment he exited the crowded police station and the cool air hit his face, he felt fractionally better, but the anxiety still gripped him.

He gripped his tie, yanking at it and loosening it, so he could breathe. The feel of it around his neck had been making him feel like he was suffocating more so than he already had been.

His therapist had told him panic attacks were normal with PTSD, but he hadn’t had them much. This was an exception apparently.

He leaned against the brick of the building and tried to focus on his breathing to bring his heart rate down. After all he’d endured, he wasn’t about to let a damn panic attack take him down.

His eyes were closed as he tried to calm down, so he didn’t hear Luke approaching.

“Reid.”

He opened his eyes, seeing his teammate Luke Alvez, standing next to him.

He wondered how he currently looked through Luke’s eyes. A mess, probably.

Luke didn’t beat around the bush, either.

“Your PTSD has gotten worse, hasn’t it?” he asked, gently.

Spencer shrugged.

“Spencer, if you need to take some time—”

“I don’t need to take time off because I’m fine,” he snapped.

Luke flinched as if Spencer had physically hit him. If anything, he knew that his outburst was just further proof at how not okay he was.

“I need to get back to work,” he mumbled, moving around Luke to head back inside.

He wasn’t sure of anything much lately, but one thing he knew for sure was when they got back from the current case, he was heading straight to Y/N’s apartment.

I feel a little withdrawal baby,

Come pick me up

Took a hit from your level

Now I just can’t get enough

Your taste, my touch

A little bit of love and a whole lot of lust

He was back at her door, knocking.

She opened the door, dressed in another oversized t-shirt—due to the late hour of night—and greeted him with a wordless nod. Somehow, he thought she knew that he was having a bad time today.

He looked like shit, that he knew. His hair was a mess of tangled curls, his eyes were bloodshot and deep, dark bags shined brightly under his face, darker than his normal appearance. His cheekbones were more prominent lately as well since he wasn’t eating much, nor was he sleeping well either.

“How do you want me?” she asked.

Her tone was dull and to the point and threw him off guard for a moment. She’d never made it about her, ever. But now, looking at her, he could see her unhappiness. Whether he caused it or not, he was unsure.

This arrangement of theirs had been only to help him forget. Too quickly, it had become like an addiction for him. She was like his drug. He needed her to forget. But maybe, at the same time, she was tired of trying to help him when he couldn’t even help himself.

He promised himself that this would be the last time. Once more and he’d let her go. He’d let her be free of him. She’d be happier anyways.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said.

He tried to be gentle as he pulled her towards him. As he kissed her, he felt her body melt into his. Maybe he had been imagining her mood earlier.

He tried to focus on getting hard, not on all the horrors that constantly swirled in his mind.

His lips moved swiftly with hers in a kiss that was anything but romantic or gentle. It was lust driven and filled with his own desperate need to be distracted.

She knew exactly what to do to get him in the mood, that’s for sure.

Her teeth tugged at his lower lip gently, her tongue almost the complete opposite of their current actions. It was gentle and hesitant as it met his before continuing its dance with his own.

He pulled her closer, his hand tangled in her hair as he kissed her more roughly, pushing her against the arm of her couch.

In the blink of an eye, he had her turned around and bent over the arm, his hand gliding over the silk material of her underwear. He felt a small swell of pride hearing her moan as he touched her. It also went a long way in helping his own arousal which was now throbbing in his pants.

He was already unbuttoning his pants as he kissed her neck, his hips pressing into hers. The more he got into it, the more he actually felt that he wanted this—that he wanted her.

With one smooth movement, he had her underwear pulled down to her thighs and he entered her with a groan.

But he couldn’t focus.

Somehow, without him realizing it, the memories had slipped through a crack in his mind.

Instead of being there with Y/N, he was back in that cell.

The countless hours sitting in a cell, trying to remember something he never did.

The desperation, the helplessness in that place.

Familiar faces he dealt with sped across his mind.

Malcolm, Shaw, Delgado, Wilkins. Frazier, Duerson, the two men who gave him a beating meant for Delgado.

The fear he felt in those final days when he had no one to trust, when he had to stab himself in the leg to get into solitary confinement, just to stay alive.

The horrible memories were flashing in his head at the speed of lightning.

“Ow! Spencer, you’re hurting me.”

Spencer snapped back to the present, realizing his fingers were creating bruises on Y/N’s hips from his too tight grip.

“This isn’t working,” he said in way of an apology, pulling out of her.

He was already going soft anyway, the previous arousal now completely gone and replaced by his racing thoughts and memories.

“It’s fine,” she muttered, pulling down her t-shirt and pulling up her underwear.

He had just zipped up his suit pants—he’d come straight from the jet—when she spoke again.

“Actually, no. It’s not okay.”

Spencer blinked in surprise at her harsh tone. He didn’t think he’d ever heard her raise her voice.

“I’m sick of this Spencer! I know we started this a while ago for...reasons,” she flapped her hand in midair as if demonstrating all the unsaid things between them.

“But I can’t do it anymore. I care about you Spencer. Honestly right now I don’t know if it’s as more than a friend or just as a friend but that’s another can of worms to open another time. You can’t keep doing this! You can’t keep coming to me and fucking me to try and rid your demons. You’ve been through a hell of a lot and you didn’t deserve any of it, but I’m not going to stand her and watch my friend destroy himself because he refuses to get the help he so desperately needs.”

Spencer stood, frozen in place, mouth agape. It was then he saw tears shining in her eyes.

“We have a lot to sort out between us, eventually, but you need to help yourself first,” she whispered, as if feeling defeated by her previous outburst.

He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what he could say.

“I know facing everything, processing it all is a scary feeling, Spencer. Even if you tried reaching out to a friend to talk through it, that would be a big step. I just...I just want you to get better.”

A single tear slid down her cheek and he did the worst possible thing to do.

He fled her apartment like the coward he was.

•

He didn’t go home.

Instead, he walked around the city as the daylight receded and the sun slipped behind the horizon, saying goodnight to the world until the next day.

He spent a lot of time thinking.

He ended up dashing into a busy diner he came across as the night sky opened up and rain began falling in sheets.

He sat in his booth, absentmindedly sipping on the cup of coffee he’d ordered and watched the rain fall in the darkness outside.

In an ironic way, the weather outside was similar to the turmoil he felt inside.

Just like the completely blackened sky outside, he felt just as dark and empty. The storm was similar to the storm of emotions, memories, traumas he continually tried to squash, all in the wrong ways.

He knew ignoring his problems wouldn’t make them go away; he also knew using sex as a distraction was the worst possible thing to do as well, yet he’d continued to do it and he’d hurt more than just himself in the process.

He’d hurt his friends, who’d only wanted to help, but pushed them away. He’d hurt Y/N, who didn’t deserve to be treated like a plaything, yet he kept coming back, making things worse.

By the time he’d finished his coffee, he decided what he wanted to do. What he knew he needed to do.

I’m feeling pretty lonely baby,

So just let me in

Just let me in

He’d ran through the pouring rain. He didn’t even bother to try to take any transportation. The rain felt like it was washing him clean from the horrors of the last year.

He was back at her door, but this time, for a different reason.

He was soaking wet and felt a lot like a dog with his tail between his legs, but he refused to chicken out once again. So, he knocked.

She answered, this time in actual pajamas rather than the attire she was in hours before.

Maybe it was the expression he wore or something she saw in his face because she didn’t immediately slam the door in his face—something he knew he deserved. She stood patiently, almost questioningly, waiting for him to speak first.

He took a deep breath before speaking the words he should’ve uttered months ago.

“I’m ready to talk. I’m ready to get the help I need.”

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kyeungsoo · 4 years

Text

a head full of dreams.

× pairings: byun baekhyn + reader

× genres/warnings: soulmate au—where when you dream of your soulmate, you can see the world/their day through their eyes, college au, barista au!!, fluff, it’s not chanyeol’s fault he’s tall and handsome ://

× notes: yes, i like soulmate aus. no i do not believe in real life predetermined soulmates. yes we exist <3

Baekhyun isn’t actively looking for his soulmate, but he’s not not looking, either.

He knows that it’s completely normal to not have found his soulmate by his current age. That many, many students and professors alike on campus were still soulmate-less. He knows he shouldn’t care that much about finding you—that he’ll meet his soulmate when the time is right and the stars align and all that good shit. But coping with that is so much easier said than done. Especially since he’s quite literally been dreaming of you since he was ten.

Not to mention that the majority of his friends have already found their soulmates, too. He’s happy for them, of course. It’s nothing short of incredible to see just how perfect their partners are for them, how seamlessly they fit into their lives. Hand-picked; their exact other halves.

He remembers when Kyungsoo first started dreaming of his soulmate. Kyungsoo had just turned eight, and called his best friend (with his parents’ permission, of course, like the good-mannered boy he was) in a frenzy, voice frazzled and loud—extremely uncharacteristic of himself. And Baekhyun listened to every detail; not just that first night, but every time Kyungsoo indulged him for the next six years.

Kyungsoo’s one of the lucky ones, Baekhyun thinks. To have had his first dream that young, to have found his soulmate in middle school, to have known them for the majority of his life. Baekhyun’s a little jealous, sure, but he knows Kyungsoo deserves it. If anyone deserves to have that kind of luck, it’s definitely Kyungsoo.

So, overall, he’s happy for Soo; and for all his friends who have already found their soulmates. But, it does get a little tiring, disheartening at times—sometimes, even leaves a bitter taste in his mouth—to know that he hasn’t found his person yet.

He’s gotten really good at dreaming, though. Which shouldn’t be all that surprising, since he’s only had the last decade to practice, but, still Baekhyun prides himself on a bit. It’s nice to know that he can see you—or, rather, see as you—when he wants to.

The science of soulmate dreaming isn’t exact.

Generally, what’s seen is a sort of playback of your soulmate’s day. Somewhat of a fragmented, first person movie going on in your head. There are a few caveats, though. There’s usually no revelation of your soulmate’s face, and no indication of their voice—of anybody’s voices really. And it’s worth noting that the dreams are replays of their memories of how their day went; and a single person’s memory isn’t exact to begin with.

Which is usually why it’s not a full play-by-play of their day from wake to rest. Usually they’re scenes strung together. Nobody knows exactly how the images are picked, or what they mean for you or your soulmate. Some psychologists theorize that you see the parts of your soulmate’s day that were most memorable to them; others think it might be the happiest moments; others, the darkest. But everyone has different experiences, different ratios of the kind of scenes they see and the emotions they provoke; so there’s really no way to calculate it.

People usually start dreaming when they reach middle school. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. Those who have their first dream younger than that age, like Kyungsoo; and those who don’t start dreaming until well after they’ve graduated college.

Regardless of when you have your first dream, there’s still no guarantee that you’ll have them every night after that. Like everything else about it, there’s no magic number, no statistic to it, no predictable pattern; no way to know for sure when the dreams will happen.

But, it is known that a few people can focus their minds on their soulmates. Almost command their subconscious to dream of their partners by their own will.

The dreams still aren’t exact—you can’t go as far as to perfect your soulmate’s memory—but it does allow some kind of control, and comfort even. If you’re observant, you can learn a lot about your soulmate through dreams. Their hobbies, what they like to eat, who they live with, where they live. More importantly, how they see the world. And the little things add up over time.

Some people, if they’re really, really lucky, can even even see their soulmates current point of view; quite literally see the world as it is through their eyes. It’s rare—less than a percent or so report the ability. Baekhyun is a part of that less than one percent.

So, yeah, he’s gotten really good at dreaming of you. It’s not easy—seeing your current point of view—and he can’t even do it every time that he tries; but, if he focuses hard enough, clears his mind enough, it’s possible. Sometimes, he wonders if you can, too. He hopes that you can. It makes him feel that much more connected to you.

Exhausted from morning classes and last round of midterms, Baekhyun’s hoping today is one of those days where he gets to see things the way you do. It’s always nice to get a little reminder that you’re out there—that you see the world as a little brighter than he does on days where he’s feeling down.

So, Baekhyun drags himself through his apartment, barely mustering up the energy to greet Kyungsoo as he passes by him in the living room, before plopping down on his bed. It’s only midday so, if he can’t close his eyes to see you right now, hopefully he can if he takes a nap.

Baekhyun shuts his eyes and takes a deep breath. Gently, he brings palms to massage against his closed eyelids. He steadies his breathing, clears his mind of anything but you, and hopes—prays—for the best.

Everything is black for a bit, but then, there you are. Well—not you, exactly, but your life. First, the picture is fuzzy, but Baekhyun makes out that you must be at work. He sees your hands maneuvering around espresso machines, pouring milk into ceramic mugs, sprinkling cinnamon on top of latte art.

Then, strangely enough, he sees Chanyeol.

Baekhyu bolts upwards, eyes wide and eyebrows drawn together in confusion. He shakes his head repeatedly, even knocks his hand against ear for good measure, before laying back down and shutting his eyelids again.

But, no, Chanyeol is still there.

Confused, he opens his eyes again, slowing trying to piece things together. But when it clicks, it clicks. Hard.

Frantic, Baekhyun jumps off the bed and immediately scrambles through his jacket pockets in search of his phone, scrolling wildly to find Chanyeol’s contact. The phone rings all too slowly, and Baekhyun all but screeches incoherently when his friend finally picks up.

“Do you have actual words to say me, or are you just going to screech like a hyena?” Chanyeol questions, cautiously holding the receiver away from his ear on the other end of the line.

But Baekhyun is too off the walls, too excited to register the sarcasm in his words. “My soulmate! Chanyeol, she was your barista! You—was she—you have to tell me how she was and where she works and—”

“No way, that’s great, Baek!” Chanyeol chirps, “Do you want me to get her number for you? I’m pretty sure—”

“No!” Baekhyun shouts, almost falling over his backpack in the process. Kyungsoo is eyeing him judgmentally as he stumbles through the apartment like a drunken elephant, but Baekhyun can’t find it in himself to care right now.

“No?”

“No! Absolutely not,” Baekhyun confirms, “You and your big mouth and all your height and pretty face do not speak a single word to her! Just tell me where you are, I’m already on my way.”

Chanyeol huffs and pouts, but takes the flattery anyway. He hurriedly gives Baekhyun his location, and waits in a corner of the cafe for his friend to arrive. It takes all of eleven minutes for Baekhyun to come stumbling through the glass doors of the coffee shop, a feat which surprises both himself and Chanyeol, considering he lives a good twenty to twenty five minutes away.

Baekhyun’s breathing heavily and looking around frantically. He realizes he probably looks like a madman, or at the very least an extremely disheveled and sleep-deprived undergrad. He can’t exactly blame the soulmate situation for that last one.

Chanyeol’s waving excitedly at him, and Baekhyun bumbles through the crowded store to his table, his eyes glancing back behind the counter with every step he makes.

“Which one is she?” Baekhyun questions, eyes still fluttering back to the counter. There had to be at least eight baristas back there making drinks he can’t pronounce or afford. And one of them is his soulmate, holy shit.

“Do we not greet people anymore?” Chanyeol scoffs, “Hello to you, too.”

But Baekhyun doesn’t have time for the formalities. He gives Chanyeol a glare that shocks the younger into submission, and reluctantly, but not after some more much needed teasing, he points you out to Baekhyun.

And Baekhyun smiles. You’re perfect. You were perfect before, when he had no idea what you looked like, but, still—you’re perfect now, still. Even with your uniform hat on with a stupid pun about coffee written across the front, even with your head bent forward to focus on perfecting the latte art you’re doing, even as you fumble a bit and spill some milk. You’re perfect and Baekhyun’s been waiting his entire life to meet you.

So, he pushes his chair back, stands up straight, smoothes out his hoodie and starts to march towards the counter. He’s almost there, almost, then it hits him: Baekhyun’s been waiting his entire life to meet you. You’re his person—the perfect person for him. What the fuck is he supposed to say to you?

He freezes, body heavy with the sudden realization that speaking to you could literally change his entire life. He blocks a few snooty patrons’ paths, before he’s knocked out of his own trance, and makes a prompt, sharp turn before scurrying back to where Chanyeol is seated.

Wide eyed, and confused, Chanyeol all but wails when Baekhyun takes a seat. “Bro, what are you doing, she’s that way—” he points unnecessarily, “—not over here!”

Baekhyun’s shoulders slump. “I… what am I gonna say to her? I have no idea—what if I fuck it up and she hates me forever.”

“What do you mean you don’t know what to say?” If possible, Chanyeol’s eyes grow bigger, “You don’t have to know anything! You’re meant for each other!”

Baekhyun straightens himself upwards in his seat, Chanyeol’s words giving him a sense of purpose. He’s right! You’re his soulmate, you two are meant for each other! He can do this.

He’s standing up again, ready to do it—really do it this time, but he takes one look over to counter and sits himself right back down.

Okay, sure you’re supposedly made for each other, but what if you don’t even believe in soulmates? What if you don’t want one—what if you don’t want him! There’s a million questions and doubts running through his head right now.

Honestly, Baekhyun has never considered any of the previous questions, or any of the hundred continuously popping up into his mind. All this time he’d just assumed that things would go smoothly, assumed a picture perfect happy ending for the two of you, but maybe, really it was just for him. What is he going to do if you don’t want the same things?

Or what if you don’t want to be romantic soulmates at all? There are definitely cases of people who’ve met and know their soulmates, but have no kind of romantic attachment to them. Completely platonic—best friends and soulmates. Baekhyun remembers that Yixing is like that—met his soulmate during a study abroad trip sophomore year. An older guy, tall too; they have no sort of romantic feelings for each other, but they’re still a perfect match.

Come to think of it, Baekhyun could consider a few of his own friends to be his platonic soulmates, too. Sure, they’re not the people Baekhyun lives through in his dreams, but Kyungsoo, Junmyeon, Chanyeol—they’re all his soulmates in that respect. They’re his best friends, he loves them to death.

So, when he reasons about it, it honestly doesn’t sound too bad. Girlfriend, or not, Baekhyun just knows that simply having in you in his life as some kind of partner would be better than nothing. Maybe the universe has it cut out that the two of you are platonic soulmates. That’s fine, Baekhyun would still absolutely love to have you in his life.

He voices his concerns and newfound thoughts to Chanyeol, who listens with crinkled eyebrows and over dramatized expressions. Baekhyun thinks he’s going to offer him some advice, or at the very least some encouragement, but instead Chanyeol reaches over the table to flick him on the forehead.

“Ouch—what was that for! I didn’t even—”

“It was for being a chicken,” Chanyeol declares, hands retreating back to a folded position in front of his chest.

“I’m not a chicken!” Baekhyun cries, “I’m just thinking things through! Junmyeon tells me all the time I never do that, so I’m finally taking his advice.”

“You’re over thinking things.”

“There’s no such thing as being too careful.”

“Yes there is.”

“I think Junmyeon would disagree,” Baekhyun huffs, “You know what—let me call him and find out.”

Baekhyun clumsily fishes his phone out of his back pocket, but it’s snatched out of his hands before he can even unlock it. Chanyeol all but slams it down on the table in front of him, paying the pout on his friend’s face no mind.

“You can keep wondering and wondering and come up with a billion scenarios, but you won’t know anything unless you go talk to her.”

Baekhyun knows that Chanyeol is right—a sentence rarely ever formed—but it doesn’t make the entire situation any less nerve-wracking.

As much as he thinks Baekhyun is avoiding the inevitable, Chanyeol feels a sense of pity for his friend. Chanyeol was lucky enough to have known his soulmate from his childhood, so he never really had to meet them. He can’t imagine that it’s easy to introduce yourself to your forever person for the first time. Still, he knows Baekhyun isn’t dreading meeting you, but rather making sure he lives up to everything you’ve been dreaming about.

“Okay, how about you try running it by me,” Chanyeol suggests, “Just… tell me what’d you wanna say to her and you can practice, yeah?”

The idea doesn’t sound terrible to Baekhyun, so he tries. They both do, spending nearly thirty minutes just getting his simple greeting and introduction down, then (embarrassingly) another hour coming up with a list of things to say on the off chance that he got past “Hello, I’m Baekhyun and I’ve been dreaming about you since I was 10.”

Chanyeol thinks it’s all very dumb—quite a statement coming from him of all people—for several reasons. Namely, because Baekhyun has the memory of a small rodent and he’s damn sure that he’ll forget all his so called talking points the second he opens his big mouth. Also because Baekhyun is the chattiest person he knows. The fact that he thinks he needs to write down and memorize a list of potential things to say really just goes to show that he’s completely lost it.

“—Does that sound dumb? I don’t know if she already knows that I like to swim, but what if she’s deathly afraid of water, and I completely turn her away by telling her that? I probably shouldn’t mention it then, right?”

Yeah, he’s completely lost it.

Even Baekhyun knows that he’s losing his mind. It’s been almost two hours, and he feels like he can’t form a coherent thought. Like every possible scenario could end in a flaming hot dumpster fire of a mess.

“Do you think I should call Soo?” Baekhyun questions, but his words are so frantic and strung together, Chanyeol can barely make them out, “I think I should. He always knows what to say. Give me my phone, I’m gonna—”

But he doesn’t get the chance to, he doesn’t even to reach for his phone at all, because actions halted by a small tapping on his shoulder.

And then looks up and there’s you, with your hands retreated behind your back, and your ugly uniform cap shading over your eyes, looking down at him with the smallest, hopeful grin on your face. And if Baekhyun thought he couldn’t speak before, then it’s nothing compared to right now.

Luckily, he doesn’t have to, because you do for him.

“Hi, um… I know this might sound weird, but I took a nap during my break just now and I keep seeing this guy—” you pull your right hand from behind your back to gingerly point towards Chanyeol, “—In front of me, so I, uh, I’m pretty sure you’re my soulmate.”

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rocorambles · 3 years

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As promised, have some Alpha Bokuto x Omega Kuroo omegaverse headcannons since it’s all my brain can think of this week~ (In reality, this ended up just being a short fic that’s broken up in a headcannon format LOL)

Warnings: NSFW, Dub-Con

- It’s so obvious to everyone around him that Bokuto is an Alpha through and through, his charismatic and bright presence loudly making itself known no matter where he goes or who he’s with, his strength and domineering personality leaving everyone in awe and instinctively wanting to follow him to the ends of the earth.

- Everyone assumes Bokuto will end up with a cute and adorable omega. It just makes sense and it seems like it’s just a matter of time as omega after omega throws themselves at him. He dates some here and there and he can admit that their sweet scents and dainty builds incite some interest in the Alpha inside of him. But none of them fully capture his attention and he shrugs his shoulders after every breakup, focusing on the sport he loves most.

- His family ask if he gets lonely without a mate, but he’s always confused by the question. How could he be lonely when he has his MSBY teammates, Akaashi, all his old Fukurodani teammates, and most importantly, Kuroo? And he can’t help the radiant smile that spreads across his face at the thought of that hideous cackling laughter and messy bedhead.

- Bokuto’s never really thought too much about mates, bonds, or alphas, betas, and omegas, never bothered to classify the people around him unless they decide to reveal what they are to him of their own choice. And to this day, he doesn’t actually know exactly what Kuroo is. Alpha? Maybe Beta considering how he never seems to have a scent around him? But it doesn’t matter. Kuroo is Kuroo. Kuroo is smart, mischievous, caring, pretty...

- Pretty??? Bokuto freezes, wondering where that thought had come from and he tries to push it down in the back of his head, but when Kuroo comes over for their weekly movie night, it’s all he can think of. Golden eyes roam over the long and lean body purchased on the couch beside him, trailing over endless legs, scanning slender wrists that reach over for a handful of popcorn, lingering on a vulnerable arched neck and Adam’s apple that swallows.

- It’s hot. Why does it feel so hot in here? Why does something feel like it’s stirring and building uncomfortably inside of him? Bokuto doesn’t realize the overwhelming possessive and hungry scent he’s releasing as he gazes at the man beside him, but he’s wrenched back to reality by a high pitched whine that has every primal instinct honing instantly on the source. And suddenly the whole world comes to a halt as hazel and gold clash, as Bokuto finally comes to a stunning realization as he truly sees and smells Kuroo for the very first time.

- Omega. Omega. Omega. The Alpha inside of him is roaring in a way he’s never felt it react before and he can feel every muscle inside of him tense, ready to pounce, can feel how his mouth salivates, fangs urging him to bite and mark. Kuroo’s an omega. His omega. His. His. His.

- And that’s when Kuroo makes a fatal mistake, fear and confusion hindering his common senses, omega instincts he’s tried so hard to ignore going haywire in the presence of such a prime Alpha going into rut. He runs, staggering and stumbling away, fighting the way everything inside of him is pleading and begging him to bare his neck, to let Bokuto claim him like he’s always secretly wanted. But this isn’t how he wants it. Not when both of them are both driven by animal-like instincts.

- The Alpha inside of Bokuto howls in excitement, practically salivating as he watches the gorgeous creature sloppily try to escape, leaving a trail of his intoxicating scent in his wake. And then the chase is on. Bokuto sighs in disappointment, wishing they were in a bigger space, wishing he didn’t have to end this so soon. But Kuroo is getting close to the exit and the professional athlete growls at the thought of anyone other than him getting a whiff of the Omega, easily lunging and catching the lankier man in his arms, throwing Kuroo over his shoulder like he’s a sack of potatoes and not a full-grown man.

- The Omega pounds his fists on the broad back he has access to, but he yelps when a hand comes up and roughly pinches his ass, automatically whimpering in submission when Bokuto growls at him to calm down and behave, his Alpha voice breaking through the naturally warm timber of his voice, adding an edge that orders for obedience and that has slick leaking down Kuroo’s thighs.

- It’s a tangle of limbs and torn clothes once the two make contact with the bed and Bokuto doesn’t think he can ever get enough of Kuroo’s desperate moans, the hazy lust-filled look in normally sharp eyes, the addicting entangled mix of their scents entwining together so perfectly. It’s like Kuroo’s body was made for his and a feral grin spreads across his face at how sensitive the other is, how easily he melts and succumbs to even Bokuto’s slightest touch.

- He takes his time exploring every inch of the writhing Omega, calloused fingertips roaming across toned muscles, teeth biting patterns into the blank canvas, lips greedily wrapping around perky buds. And he smiles as nails dig into his skin, back arching in a beautiful angle, a lewd wail escaping past kiss swollen lips as Kuroo’s hips frantically buck up and down, begging for more stimulation.

- Bokuto’s heart soars as he sees Kuroo in a state he’s never even dreamed of seeing before. His strong, naughty panther reduced to a needy kitten because of him, only for him. His lips come crashing down on a panting, drooling mouth and he swallows the moans as he coats his fingers in the pool of slick forming between Kuroo’s thighs, easily sliding and stretching the warm tight hole.

- He sees the flicker of hesitation and uncertainty hidden deep behind the throes of pleasure and he wills himself to slow down, to take his time, cooing gentle loving words of reassurance to the man beneath him, coaxing him to relax, to let his Alpha take care of him. And he smiles when the body underneath him fully relaxes, when Kuroo’s wiry arms wrap around his neck and timidly bring him down for a kiss, letting the feline-like man take the lead as he continues adding more fingers to the puckered hole, twisting and probing, groaning in satisfaction when Kuroo pulls away with a broken cry, eyes blown wide in arousal as he finds that spot inside of the Omega that has him begging for more.

- Neither of them remember many details after that as they succumb to their inner natures. All Bokuto can remember is the image he’s seared in his mind of how gorgeous Kuroo looked on all fours, presenting so beautifully and obediently for him, the feeling of bottoming inside of drenched tight walls, the broken cries as Kuroo screamed Alpha, Alpha, Alpha as Bokuto ruthlessly thrust in and out of him. All Kuroo can remember is the feeling of being almost impossibly stretched open and stuffed full of cock and cum, how right it felt to have Bokuto on top and inside of him, how perfect it felt to call him Alpha, to be called his Omega.

- And all both of them can think about as Bokuto gently cradles the exhausted raven-haired man, both their hands protectively cradling his cum-filled stomach, their lower halves still connected by the knot buried inside of the Omega, is how perfect it feels to be with the other.

Bonus Epilogue:

Bokuto smiles as Kuroo shyly hides the bottom half of his face underneath the rumpled bed sheets as the sunlight filters into the room, both of them completely back to their senses and exhausted after a week of non-stop action.

“You- you didn’t mark me.”

He hates how sad and insecure Kuroo’s scent is, how soft and shaky the words come out, how watery tears build up in tear ducts. But he doesn’t let Kuroo hide, doesn’t let him turn his back on him, doesn’t let him wriggle out of his grasp, only holding him tighter to him in response, releasing a calming, soothing scent that has him settling back besides him, peering up at him in confusion.

“Of course I didn’t mark you. I want that to be something we talk about, something that happens after I officially court you. And you looked so scared-”

“I wasn’t scared!”

And how can Bokuto not love the feisty kitten glaring indignantly at him, only to go stock still, an adorable rosy embarrassed flush gracing his cheeks as he stares wide eyed at Bokuto.

“C-court me??? You want to court me?! You want to be my mate?”

A warm excited scent floods the room and Bokuto deeply breathes it in, chuckling as long legs and arms are suddenly wrapping tightly around him, as messy black hair tickles his face when Kuroo tucks his head under his chin.

“You’re so cute.”

“I’m not cute!”

And both of them laugh as they grapple and wrestle each other on top of rumpled bed sheets.

#haikyuu smut #bokuto x kuroo #tw: dubcon

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sailorspazz · 3 years

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10 Dance Vol. 6 Special Edition overview

Volume 6 of the 10 Dance manga was released in Japan on March 18th, 2021. As with volumes 4 and 5, there are both regular and special editions available. In this post, I will provide an overview of the release, including observations on changes that were made to the chapters compared to how they were printed in the magazine, plus summaries and select scans of content from the special edition booklet.

It is often the case that when chapters come out in the manga magazines, they aren't always fully polished, and since I became highly familiar with this run of chapters from the summaries I made, several things immediately jumped out at me as I went through the book. First of all, though chapter 29 was split into two parts and released in subsequent months in the magazine, these two halves were combined into one chapter, with no indication they had ever been separate. I assume that they were always intended to be one chapter, but since the full chapter was not completed before the deadline (and it was a month when 10 Dance was being given the cover image, so not possible to delay its release), it was simply split over two months instead.

For visual changes, the most common alteration was scenes that originally had little or no screentone having it added in:

There were also some instances of either slight panel redraws, or complete replacements with new panels. None of these were from particularly important scenes, so it could just be Inouesatoh or someone on her team didn't like the look of the original panels and wanted to change them. The following example has a bit of both, with Suzuki in the upper left corner being replaced, and his eyes being redrawn in the lower panel:

Personally, the most amusing addition I noticed was when Max was thinking about throwing a party. Originally, we didn't see what he was envisioning, but in the volume, an addition has been made in the background: the New Year's piece Inouesatoh drew with sexy men dressed as cows, except now they're bunnies!

As for dialogue, it appeared to be almost the same in both versions throughout. Some minor exceptions include a spot I found where the dialogue was put in a different order, swapping Sugiki’s lines between this panel and his first line on the following page (in addition to another altered panel example):

As well as in this shot of Suzuki describing how they tug at the thread that connects them through their dance. Whereas before it put the word “dance” next to the part about tugging on the thread to specify what was meant by that, it was deleted in the volume. And while it was originally described as “affirming that we’re connected”, this was also tweaked a bit to be, “affirming our connection”.

There were a couple instances of character names being different from when they appeared earlier in the story. In this volume, two characters who were last mentioned back in volume 2 (Lucas Calvo, one of the champions at the table in Blackpool, and Deeks, who Ernie said hated Sugiki because he "stole" his girlfriend), either from typos or intentional changes, weren't the same as before. Lucas' last name was written with a 'g' sound (ガルボ) instead of a 'c' (カルボ), and this change carried over to the volume. On the other hand, Deeks' (ディクス) name got transposed as Disc (ディスク) in the magazine, but was fixed in the volume.

There was a typo that unfortunately made it through to the volume (but could perhaps be fixed in future printings). In chapter 34, when Norman is testing Suzuki's skills, he flashes back to Sugiki taking the national title from him several years earlier. The text in this scene, written in English, incorrectly states that Suzuki won the championship, rather than Sugiki.

The volume also includes the usual additions that are not present in the magazine, such as the under the cover flap comic, and Inouesatoh’s notes about each chapter.

The cover flap comic (which looks very much like a sketch, compared to previous ones that have had more complete art), features the Shinyas during a practice session earlier on in the series in December, where Suzuki complains that Sugiki’s Latin just isn’t sexy. Sugiki suggests that he can practice being sexy by wiggling his butt around to write a message in the air. Suzuki worries that if he starts writing out “love” or something, he’ll have to run away and escape. Sugiki gets started, and Suzuki calls out each letter that he can make out from his elegant butt bouncing. After figuring out he’s written “M-E-R-R-Y”, Suzuki guesses that he’s writing “Merry Christmas”. Sugiki gets mad that he said it aloud before he finished writing his message, and says he’s going to leave. Suzuki says, “Wait, I love you,” as narrative text says that this somehow turned into a love story in one panel.

And here are some tidbits I found interesting/amusing from the chapter notes:

She thinks readers who are fans of pecs will like Saichi.

She’s not sure if readers will love Max or hate him, but she personally likes him (sorry Sensei, I kinda hate him lol)

As of chapter 32, a portion of the art is now done digitally.

The epic “last dance” scene from 33 was something that she had planned since the beginning of the series, and it ended up being 8 times the cost for a typical chapter.

Special edition booklet:

The special edition comes with a 48 page hardcover booklet that includes a variety of different extras, divided into 8 sections called “heats”.

Heat 1 is a newly drawn, 12 page parody manga. Back in September 2020, Inouesatoh put out a request on Twitter for fans to send in their suggestions for an erotic side story. Putting the characters in a high school setting was the most requested scenario, so she chose this idea as the basis for the story. The title is “And All That Jazz” (the premise makes this somewhat confusing to summarize, so keep in mind that I’ll mostly be describing their actions based on the soul rather than the body, but will use quotation marks if it’s about other characters and who they think they’re addressing. It’ll all make sense, I promise...I think :P)

(The title page actually depicts the ending of the story, so I’ll come back to it later). It starts with Suzuki narrating his introduction, saying that he’s a transfer student to the Standard Academy. He really doesn’t get along with a guy named Sugiki, but for some reason, the two have now switched bodies with each other. Sugiki opens his shirt and inspects his new physique in front of other students, as Suzuki yells out asking what the hell he’s doing to his body. They look at themselves wearing each other’s expressions, Sugiki seeming surprised his mouth can gape open like that, and Suzuki wondering what happened to his body’s facial expression muscles. The bell rings and Sugiki heads off to class, as Suzuki is baffled that he can act so calm about this.

Sugiki perfectly reads a passage aloud in English class, something everyone (including the teacher, who looks like Norman) find unusual coming from “Suzuki”, as they wonder where his usual hearts are. Suzuki makes the decision to enjoy living as Sugiki for a bit, and is shown getting flirty with several girls. He notes that the more serious personality in his regular body is also strangely popular, though with a very different crowd.

A student named Alberko (Alberto in a girl’s uniform) shows up and says that “Sugiki” was supposed to have lunch with her(?) today. Suzuki says that he thought Alberko was going out with Dorou (a masculine alteration to Dolores’ name). Ernie and Suzuki watch as his harem falls apart with Alberko running amok. Ernie comments that both “Sugiki” and that transfer student have been acting weird all week, and he asks if something happened. Suzuki internally reflects back to one week earlier, when he was relaxing in bed in the infirmary. Sugiki comes in and accuses him of skipping class, and Suzuki tells him to mind his own business. He thought this would turn into one of their usual fights, but he can’t believe that actually happened instead...

After school, Sugiki asks Suzuki if they can go home together today. As they’re walking, Suzuki asks if Sugiki realizes what it was that made them switch places, and Sugiki says he does. Suzuki says that in that case, they know how they need to fix it, and they should go over to his house. Sugiki asks for clarification of whose house exactly he means by that.

As they start to get undressed, Suzuki says that he always thought his mom and sisters were annoying, but after a week apart he really misses them. Sugiki promises that he’ll make sure he can see them soon. Suzuki claims that he’ll be the one making Sugiki come, and Sugiki asks how he can talk like that when he was the one who looked like he was about to cry when Sugiki first touched him in the infirmary.

Sugiki peeks into Suzuki’s pants and wonders if he won’t get hard unless he touches him. Suzuki thinks it’d be weirder if he could get hard while looking at his own face, and wonders if Sugiki has AI in his crotch or something (Sugiki contends that it’s not his body). They fool around with each other until they finish, and Suzuki wonders why they didn’t change back yet. Sugiki suggests that maybe it needs to be just like the last time to count as a complete set, when they went at it until they fell off the bed, so both agree that they need to go for one more round. This then ties back to the title page, where they’ve finally managed to get back into their old bodies, but have now sprouted cat ears and tails.

Heat 2 of the booklet is 8 pages long, and contains short comics and illustrations that were not previously included in the volume releases. The comics include “How to 10 Dance”, a one-page comic with the Shinyas demonstrating the tango. Their privates end up touching, and Sugiki seems highly amused, gleefully asking Suzuki how it feels. Suzuki says that he was the one who got all bent out of shape over that back in volume 1, and tells him to lay off the sadist mode since they’re not dancing Latin right now. The second comic is “2nd Step”, and shows a glimpse of how the Shinyas were with each other after Suzuki gave the go-ahead for kissing. In fact, Sugiki ends up kissing him so much that Suzuki’s lips get sore and swollen. Sugiki then tries to kiss his neck as an alternative, but Suzuki’s not having it. The third comic depicts Suzuki’s first time in a public bath, where he realizes that Japanese people aren’t fully shaved everywhere like he is. Some of the old guys talk to him and slap their balls with their towels, and Suzuki, seeming a bit confused, gives his own balls a slap, too. After the comics are a selection of illustrations that were never used in the volumes, including this one from a Real 10 Dance event in 2018:

Heat 3 is 18 pages, and contains a variety of colored versions of both chapter covers and scenes from the manga, a couple of which I’ll share below:

Heat 4 includes 3 pages of insight from the professional dancers who consult for the manga, in which they explain the moves shown in specific panels.

Heat 5 is a single page look at Inouesatoh’s work space.

Heat 6 is 3 pages worth of advertisements that have been used to promote the series, including things like ads that were posted in subway stations:

Heat 7 is a single page look at the storyboard for chapter 1 of the manga.

Heat 8 is a single page showing the covers for foreign editions of the manga (Taiwanese, Korean, North American, and French).

Finally, there’s one last page with a thank you message from Inouesatoh, including an absolutely precious illustration of the Shinyas in happier times.

And that’s that! This really is an incredible release, and I’d definitely recommend picking up the special edition if you can. CD Japan offers direct international shipping, and I’ve also seen that Kinokuniya lists it as “available to order” currently (though they don’t appear to have stock on hand, so might take longer).

#10 dance #10dance

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9worldstales · 3 years

Text

Loki & Thor in “Thor & Loki – Double Trouble” n° 2

I really, really, really wanted to read this one from when it was announced so here are my two cents on the new number.

BEWARE FOR SPOILERS?

So, “Double trouble” continues on the same line on which it’s started. It’s fun and cute and it’s based on having a funny situation after another, in total contrast with “Thor” of this month.

Anyway, where were we?

We’ve left Thor and Loki having to deal with Mildred, the sister of the Midgard serpent, which is really not happy at having been summoned.

The story starts… showing us two panels. In one we can see Thor’s eyes, in the other Loki’s.

Although they’re physically different, the fact they’re shown in the same way, remarks a similarity. It’ll be something recurring in this episode.

Thor is conveniently saying it’s all Loki’s fault.

Now... I won’t deny Loki has a HUGE share of the blame, but Thor knew they shouldn’t take the lur, knew it could be dangerous, and that giving it to his brother was a bad idea and yet did it anyway over a dare. He was a willing accomplice and, while he couldn’t figure out the full extent of what this would have caused, he could have avoided the whole thing by saying ‘no, I’m not retrieving the lur’. He didn’t, afraid he would look a coward so yes, he’s also to blame.

Loki, who’s still being held there by Thor, points out whoever is the fault (and he remarks he’s not conceding anything), this doesn’t matter as they’re both doomed.

He seems relatively calm and rational (really, Loki, shouldn’t you worry a little?) and I really wonder why he wanted to play that lur so badly, he recognized Mildred so maybe he knew what playing it would cause, beyond causing mischief.

I mean, to use a way to say from my country which is particularly fitting here, was the play worth the candle?

Mildred attacks, parting them and sending them both flying.

Thor says he guess it’s up to the more HEROIC brother to make short work of this mess as he tried to use his hammer against Mildred.

Indeed, the siblings have a poor relation, as this is also a jab implying Loki is ‘less heroic’ (coward), as well as a demonstration of Thor’s big ego. Loki doesn’t seem offended though as he pats dust away from his clothes and smiles as he agrees and look at his brother.

There’s to wonder why Thor kept him there if he thought he could solve it on his own, did he want to show off?

Mjolnir hits Mildred. Thor seems proud of this but Loki is much faster to understand this only angered her more.

As the siblings hurriedly and not so heroically run away (in an hilarious way... I mean, look at them!), chased by a furious Mildred, Thor tells Loki to be the one to think of something.

Loki’s plan… is to have a bouquet of roses magically appear and then to try to swoon Mildred over.

Honestly it’s hilarious (he even has a shine effect around) and, considering the cover, one might even think it would work (it doesn’t as Mildred uses her tongue to toss him away) but it’s not really particularly clever or make special use of magic, which should be Loki’s two strongest points.

Still it’s interesting how he tries to deal with her pacifically, not fighting but trying to ‘make friends’.

Anyway, as Loki flies away, Thor comments he’s not her type.

Mildred heads for the market, devastating it. It’s probably a good thing this is meant to be a funny thing or there would be a massacre. Instead the market place seems to be empty.

Thor points out they need a new, new plan to which Loki retorts it’s Thor’s turn.

I like the visual of the panel, with Mildred’s body cutting the 4 panels in halves and Loki and Thor alternating between panels, Loki on a side and Thor in the other, well balancing the symmetry of the scene.

Thor spots the lur and makes a run for it, telling Loki to distract Mildred. Loki points out that was what he was trying to do previously but it didn’t work.

So… I take if this was what he was trying to do when he attempted to seduce her, Thor didn’t realize and he didn’t take the hint.

It’s also clear Loki doesn’t look pleased with this plan, yet he still does what his brother says and, after catching Mildred’s attention, since Thor has previously suggested he was rejected because he wasn’t her type, he turns himself in a snake… maybe thinking she might like him more in this form.

She doesn’t.

As Thor grabs the ‘dreaded object of his brother’s schemes’ (which actually belonged to Odin and Thor totally contributed in handing it to Loki) Loki, in his snake form, escapes from Mildred, urging him to act.

Thor explains he believes if a note summoned her, another note might send her back so he bets on him guessing it. I’ll say it would have been better ask Loki first if he had an idea which one it could be as it’s Loki who’s the magician but whatever, Thor has the good luck of being the heroic main character.

Loki, still in snake form, comments it’s a solid plan… (it’s not really, it’s more a risky bet in Loki’s style) and then we see him draped on his brother’s shoulders, which is kind of cute, as he wonders if it did work, wearing the same expression as his brother.

Call me weird but I find adourable Loki crawled on Thor’s shoulders in snake form and Thor isn’t even fazed by it, as if this was perfectly normal for him.

Anyway turns out Thor has summoned an even bigger snake, which Loki recognizes as Mildred’s mom.

Mildred is dragged home by her mother and while Thor and Loki comment on how she’s going to be grounded, a voice calls them, saying their names in 2 different fonts. It’s Odin who wants to know what’s going on.

In the most (im)mature manner the siblings blame each other in a mirroring way, each refusing to act as an adult and take his share of the blame.

Odin though, is distraught over the loss of his favourite ice cream stall (who cares about the rest of the market and possibly of the city being in ruin?) and, as the siblings get another image in which their position mirror each other...

...he condemns them to clean up duty.

Thor is pissed but, as he carries a huge load of ruins, comments maybe this will curb Loki’s craving for mischief. Obviously not, as Loki, who’s carrying just a rock, immediately starts suggesting something. Thor cuts him, insisting he doesn’t want to hear it.

Loki is disappointed, he doesn’t get what Thor’s problem is.

Thor, covering his ears, insists Loki does this to him every! Time!

Loki still doesn’t get the problem, saying he’s just trying to keep the days lively with intriguing solutions to their problems and asks him if he wouldn’t like the cleanup done faster… so Thor can go chase his adouring fans.

Really, I do wonder if Loki does all this not so much for the mischief but because this is the only way he knows to have Thor paying him attention. He really doesn’t seem to get what he’s doing that’s so bad… but he seems to get that Thor would prefer to be elsewhere than with him.

Anyway Loki’s ‘brilliant’ plan is to use his cunning and genius and… some sort of crystal ball he has snatched from Odin’s vault while Thor was escaping from the guards because sacred objects can be useful and it’s better to be prepared. When Thor asks what the ball does Loki claims he’s glad Thor asked… but it turns out he has no idea what it does and discovers it just by testing the ball.

I take back my previous speculation about Loki having better chances than Thor to know which note to play with the lur. It seems Loki’s way to deal with magical objects it’s not to read instructions but to test try it on the nearby object. Really Thor, why would you trust ANYTHING in your brother’s hands?

Well, credits when it’s due, Thor tells him to put it back and, after finding back his hammer that he has somehow left behind, that it will be a bad idea.

I’m not really sure why we had this scene with Thor searching for his hammer. Is it a clue Thor isn’t the ordered type? Is it going to be relevant later on because, let’s say, Thor picked up the wrong hammer or something like that? Or it’s just to fill space? No idea.

Anyway as Loki asks him if he wants to resume clean up duty, Thor gives up.

Loki tells him to then shut up and let the smart brother do some cool magic.

Now… hum… I’m not really sure it’s smart to use some magical artifact Loki doesn’t really know how it works but whatever, we know this is just the prelude for another disaster.

Again they reinforce the previous dynamics, where Thor defined himself the heroic brother, Loki calls himself the smart brother… and even if Thor knows it’s a bad idea, ultimately he plays along because he doesn’t want to do the clean up.

Anyway the panel with Loki holding the ball is quite awesome, there’s the focus on the shining ball, Loki on the front in a powerful position and Thor behind, which causes him to seem conveniently of the same idea as his brother, which, symbolically, proves how they’re actually the same. Loki partially standing in front of him connects their figures, reinforcing the idea they’re on the same page.

In a way this episode showed them more similar than they seem to think to be, remember also how they previously blamed each other in an almost mirroring manner?

Or how Thor totally risked everything randomly playing the lur even if he had no idea if it would make matters better or worse?

I don’t know if there’s a goal in this comic beyond being funny, but I wonder if it could be they could understand they’re more similar than they think.

Whatever, Loki is clearly very happy to do his cool magic to the point he doesn’t even notice some sort of hole is opening up below them. Thor does and manages to warn his brother about it just in time for Loki to begin to say he is sure it’s noth—before they fall through it, losing hold of the hammer and the ball..

Thor blames Loki for this (forgetting he has allowed him to play in hope he wouldn’t have to clean up things) while Loki insists he maintains no responsibility.

Again though the image plays on how they’re similar. Both let go of their objects and both are in almost exactly the same pose, although Thor is upside down compared to Loki.

The comic ends here.

I’ve to say this volume was very well balanced in term of portraying both the siblings, with the visual depicting them often in the same position or in a mirroring one, but also with them making mistakes similar to their counterpart, or adopting their same behaviour.

So, as I said before, I don’t know if this comic has a point beyond the cute and funny tales but maybe it’s trying to set up the brothers so that they’ll realize they’re more similar than different?

We’ll see, maybe the meaning is just to make us smile, and in these times of pandemic this too is an important goal.

Anyway I love how cute and funny it is, I love the characters’ expressions and the dynamic of her art, the costant bitching of the siblings and... everything really.

Really, maybe it’s just a weird AU universe story but it’s lovely, you must read it.

As for me I just can’t wait to see the next episode!

#thor and loki double trouble #thor odinson #loki #thor #loki laufeyson #9 worlds comic study

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trashassassin · 4 years

Text

Two Halves of a Whole | 2: Side Effects (Vergil x Reader)

The first hints of plot have emerged! If you expect it to stay like this throughout, then I have some bad news for you because I ended up getting a bunch of really sappy ideas and I have no self-control.

This began its life as a kinktober drabble with the prompt “Wet Dreams”, to risk spoiling the incredibly clever twist that I’m sure no one will see coming. I’ve had this idea in my head for several years now and it’s seen the light of day at last.

Alternate title: you really need to lay off the nyquil cause it’s trying to lead you to make bad decisions

Word Count: 1610

Warnings: Strong Language, Sexually Explicit Content, Dumb Premise

This was how you had spent most of your nights for the past couple days, laying in your bed staring at the ceiling, desperately willing sleep to come, and resigned yourself to the fact that you would likely spend the rest of them this way for quite some time.

You had known that this was a bad idea from the start. Something deep inside of you had been screaming this bit of knowledge at you since the very beginning, and yet you chose to ignore it. But even in your wildest imaginings, you never could have envisioned it going quite as poorly as this.

You turned to one side and wrapped your arms around your pillow, hugging it tightly to your chest. Your bed felt so cold and empty now.

What had come over you? What had happened to the version of yourself that was perfectly content being alone? You squeezed your eyes shut and silently begged this part of you to come back as the empty hollow burned in your chest.

Fuck it.

You finally relented and made a grab for the bottle of sleeping pills on your nightstand. You hated taking them, seeing as they always affected your dreams and left you in an uncomfortable haze upon waking, but you decided that these temporary side effects would be better than getting no sleep at all.

You took two, knowing full well that one would not be enough, and tried to make yourself as comfortable as possible until they finally took effect.

You were awakened by a knock at your door. At first, in your half asleep state, you thought it was your bedroom door, but as you became more aware, you realized that the sound was coming from deeper inside your apartment.

You shook your head a few times to clear in a futile attempt to clear the fog from it, then rose from your bed, put on one of your big sweaters to cover yourself, and headed out to investigate.

The knock came again and for some reason, you felt compelled to call out, “I’ll be right there,” even though you had no idea at all who could possibly be knocking at your door in the middle of the night.

Someone with shady intentions, no doubt.

Still, in the back of your mind, you couldn’t escape the thought that it may be someone in need of help. If that were the case, it wouldn’t sit right with you to ignore them.

You approached your front door and opened it just a crack.

“Do you have a moment to talk?”

As your mind finally caught up to your senses, your heart sank.

“What the hell are you doing here, Vergil?” you asked, the tone of your voice a healthy mix of groggy and pissed off. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”

“That makes two of us.” The honest sentiment slipped out before you had a chance to stop it and your face grew hot as the realization sank in. “Make it fast, alright?”

You motioned for him to come inside, then shut the door behind him a little harder than you’d meant to. Your motor functions were not yet back under your control.

“Sit down if you want,” you continued. “Do you want some tea, or something?”

“No, thank you,” he said.

The tone of his voice suggested that he was feeling just as awkward as you were and that set your mind at ease a bit.

He took a seat in one of your dining room chairs and you stood across from him, feeling compelled to pull the hem of your sweater a bit further over your legs. You were quite underdressed compared to him and this made you all the more self-conscious.

"I'm here to say that I'm sorry," he said. "I would like to try again."

You snorted.

"Try again?" you repeated. "You think I can just look at what happened and be like, 'whoops, let's do that over'? This isn't some petty disagreement we had. I know you're not that stupid."

“I recognize that,” he said, the look on his face suggesting that he’d taken offense at what you’d said. “I would like to try and make it up to you, if you’ll let me.”

“And how do you plan to do that?” you asked.

He rose from his seat and walked toward you, coming to a stop only when his body was mere inches from yours.

“Let me show you,” he whispered. “Let me show you that things can go back the way they were.”

“That’s impossible and you know that.”

“Is it?”

He took your right hand in his and brought it up toward your chest.

“Give me a chance,” he said.

He spoke more slowly this time, emphasizing every word.

There it was again, the voice in your head screaming at you to release his hand, to push him away and make him leave.

But it was quickly silenced by the realization at just how much you'd missed his touch. Even the small amount of contact that you currently had sent a tingle across your skin.

"Okay," you said.

Your voice had softened now and he seemed pleased by this.

"Come," he said. "Let's go upstairs."

You were incredibly disappointed with yourself for actually following along with his plan, but in that moment, you felt that you had no choice. You needed this. You were ready to deal with the regrets that would surface in the morning.

He started up the stairs and you followed after him, but only made it about half way up before he turned around and grabbed your wrist, pulling your body tight to his.

"Do you have any idea how badly I've needed you?" he growled.

"No more than I've needed you, I can promise you that."

Another brutally honest admission came tumbling out of your mouth, but you had no time to ruminate on it as he pressed his lips to yours, catching you entirely off guard.

There was an intensity to his kiss that had never been present before. Could this mean that he'd really missed you as much as he said he did? A part of you was sure he was lying, but to what end, you weren't sure.

He pulled away for just a second, then took your lower lip between his teeth, which drew a sharp gasp from you.

He lingered there for a second before nipping along your jaw and licking up the length of your neck, which he bit as well.

Your legs suddenly threatened to give out beneath you and you gripped tightly onto his shoulders to prevent yourself from falling.

As his lips found yours again, the two of you stumbled up the stairs, hands roaming all over each other's bodies until you finally reached the top.

He gripped your wrists again, then pushed you back through your open bedroom door and stuck his hands under your sweater.

One of them slipped beneath the thin tank top you had underneath it and the voice began to protest once again.

Stop! This is wrong!

But your heart was pounding loudly in your ears, your mind focused solely on the searing heat of his touch.

You fumbled around blindly for a bit before you managed to locate the button on his pants, which you unclasped to allow your hand inside.

You wrapped it around his erection, which was already straining hard at his underwear, and rubbed it with a feverish intensity that you realized you were no longer in control of.

"See?" he purred. "Just like old times."

He gripped your hip with one hand, then shoved the other beneath the band of your panties and began to draw circles over your clit.

"You're already so wet for me," he said.

You wanted to protest, to come up with some kind of snarky comeback, but all that you could manage was a soft moan as he slipped his fingers inside you.

"I'm gonna make you cum."

You awoke with a gasp, your heart still pounding in your head as it had been moments earlier, your entire body drenched in sweat beneath your comforter, which was now entirely too warm.

You cast it aside and assessed your surroundings. Had any of that actually happened?

No, it hadn't, you realized, as your eyes fell on the sweater you'd been wearing, which was still exactly where you'd left it the night before.

It disgusted you how disappointed this made you.

Your heart rate took a few moments to finally slow back to its resting pace, and once it had, you decided it would be a good idea to get yourself a glass of water.

Had you been panting in your sleep? You must have been, because your mouth was incredibly dry.

You glanced at the clock as you passed by on your way to the kitchen and it alerted you to the fact that it was only six AM. This was earlier than you'd been wanting to wake up, but there was no way you would ever manage to get back to sleep being as worked up as you were.

As you made your way down the stairs, the sight of them drew the images from the dream back into the forefront of your mind, the memory of them bringing attention to the painful ache between your legs.

What would it take to make you forget him? Whatever it was, you were going to figure it out, preferably before he’d managed to drive you completely out of your mind.

#writing #fanfiction #vergil x reader #dmc #dmc 5 #reader insert #vergil #gonna mess around with the tags again #smut #lemon #WHY DID THEY REMOVE THE PARAGRAPH BREAK FROM THE RICH TEXT EDITOR #angy #i had to edit this so many times cause swapping between them kept messing it up

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barryjeanblues · 4 years

Text

taako meets death (again)

(also posted to my ao3)

taako has met two raven queens in his life before now.

well, close enough, at least. most - though not all - of the worlds the starblaster had traveled to had gods, and surprisingly enough, those gods were usually - though not always - strikingly similar to their homeworlds gods. (this was useful, because one of the crews number relied very heavily on a certain nature god for his magic. luckily, the nature or life god of each world always seemed to have a soft spot for little old merle, even if they werent merles traditional cloven-hoofed pan.)

twice, taako had met the death god - someone equivalent to faeruns raven queen.

this had led to taakos understandable trepidation upon kravitz finally putting his foot down and insisting taako meet his mother boss.

the first time taako had met a raven queen, she had been… overwhelming. the light of creation had fallen into a forest dedicated to her and her followers, and the head acolyte refused to give the wandering crew the light unless they first received permission from the queen.

the crew had agreed, with no other option, bracing themselves to firmly explain the direness of the situation. surely a goddess would be intelligent enough to understand.

that raven queen had burst into a forest cleaning in an explosion of black feathers, half illusion, half steel, so that when lup brushed the smoky feathers from her eyes they blurred and dissipated, but when magnus tried the same thing he yelped and brought his hand back bleeding.

that raven queens laughter had been eerie and echoing, almost but not quite mocking, almost but not quite infectious, almost but not quite joyous. the crew had stood firm and offered their argument, and the queen had given them tests and tokens and bargains and tricky promises with too many clauses and loopholes and at the end of it all the ipres numbers had been halved and the rest were weary and worn as they caught the light of creation and fled with only minutes to spare, the faelike laughter of death following them terribly even through the overwhelming cacophony of the hungers assault.

that laughter had trailed after them longer, if only in their heads. taako would be making stir fry, planning outfits, swapping merles shampoo for hair-loss potions, when hed have to sit down suddenly and breathe through the musical trills of the raven queens cruel pleasure. it had seemed to bounce in his head the way a rubber ball might, ricocheting off thoughts and feelings until it rolled under a couch to be forgotten about, till some slight movement sent it rolling and bouncing about once more.

davenport had died in an illusion, thinking he was saving his crew. poor merle had been choked by his own plants, betrayal writ across hos face. barrys skin had grown sickly purple with poison - ten to one odds arent very good odds. taako doesnt forget easily. he decides the goddess of death can go fuck herself.

the second raven queen taako had met much later in their journey, and taako had met her alone.

lup and barry had become liches a few cycles back. it was something taako had still been coming to terms with.

taako loves lup. this is an immutable fact of any and every universe. taako loves lup and lup loves taako and not death or memory or space can separate them, not for long. but seeing your sister die, and then… go beyond death, to twist herself and latch on to a chance that she may never return except in madness and spite - thats a hard thing to grasp, even when she succeeds. taako had still found himself shivering when his sister forgot she had a body again and grabbed a hot pan off the stove, crying out in pain. taako still woke sweating from nightmares in which his sister and his friend flew apart and reformed as cackling red robed horrors of insanity and cruelty, too far for him to reach.

until that cycle, though, barry and lups choice had only been an asset.

but some raven queens do not take kindly to anything they see as a perversion of their domain.

barely a week into that cycle, taako had awoken from the guilty non-elven pleasure of a nap only to find himself in some cold, hard court, fashioned seemingly of steel and silver and concrete, onyx lining the floor and the only color coming from sparse sapphires sparkled throughout the long echoing hall.

at the end of it - and taako had known his eyes must have played tricks on him, because at first the being at the end of the hall seemed, while large, not much larger than a giant, but when hed called a nervous greeting his voice had echoed so awfully he knew the hall stretched much farther than hed thought and the goddess at the end of it must have been unimaginably huge.

her eyes had glinted a flinty sapphire in her carven steel face when she ordered him to defend the existence of his sister and his sisters lover.

taako had tried. he truly, truly had. but while taako is a being of preservation and caution, full of intelligence and cleverness, he is not one of cold hard logic. perhaps lucretia could have convinced this raven queen, the only of their number who had ever been able to grasp true hard reason… but taako doubts it. he had doubted it then and he doubts it even more these days.

the point is, taako, for all his love for his family and his brilliant wit and devotion (probably, in fact, because of it) taakos arguments couldnt convince that raven queen. she saw past his genuine belief that lup and barry had made a good decision, and into his fears for her, and the goddess of death had based her own argument on those. she won. taako never had a chance.

he, lup, and barry had woken up in the next cycle, newly resurrected. taako never stops feeling guilty about it.

so. yes.

taako is more than a little nervous about meeting the goddess his boyfriend serves so devotedly. but, and youd be hard pressed to convince him to admit it, taako would do anything for kravitz. and despite it all he does actually want to see what the deal is with his sister and his best friends boss, and his patron gods… friend? lover? girlfriend? taako isnt quite sure what fate and death are to each other, but its definitely something.

kravitz lays a warm hand on taakos shoulder, but taako squares them up. he can do this, for fucks sake - hes died a shitton of times, he can meet death.

the doors open and taakos breath - the only breath in this realm of the dead - catches in his throat.

taako is a die hard istus fan, and shell always be his goddess. but if taako wasnt a taken elf, hed follow the raven queen, he realizes with a startle.

shes beautiful, yes. shes gorgeous, and taakos always been weak for beauty, but hers isnt the cold hard beauty of gemstones and gold, thinks his nimble fingers snatch up and hoard in his endless pockets. the raven queen is beautiful in a way that taako cant describe as anything other than simple.

he cant pin down any features. she has a kind face, gentle hands, bright eyes, but taako can tell she is a goddess because despite staying still the image of her flicks and shifts in his head. at once she seems to have every kind face hes ever seen, even if he doesnt recognize anyone. her hands reach out to comfort him - no more than comfort - but she stands without moving in front of taako and kravitz. her eyes glitter and sparkle and crinkle up with cheerful laughter, except taako isnt entirely sure she has eyes at all, or maybe she has too many.

he thinks… he thinks maybe she has wings, or maybe theyre arms, or maybe theyre black fabric, draped around and behind and below and above her, shifting with the last breaths of every mortal in the universe. its darkness but its not scary, taako realizes, its solacing, healing, the way that he feels when dusk passes to night and the sky is huge and warm and the brush of lups hand against his as she says goodbye for the night is a relief and a love.

hello, taako, death says. its lovely to meet you.

she means it, taako knows. he can tell, somehow. shes just happy to meet him. nothing more, nothing less.

'oh,' taako says aloud, and kravitz laughs his quiet sweet dorky laugh, and the raven queen laughs too, and its just that. its just a laugh, and its a nice one.

'oh indeed,' kravitz says. 'taako, did you really think id serve a monster or a cruel master?'

'well,' taako replies hesitantly, 'honestly, homie, i kind of thought you were, and id, like, have to start some quest to slay death itself and rescue you.'

the anthropomorphic personification of death laughs again, a note of delight in her tender voice. i like him, my kravitz, she says, good job.

kravitz does the dead-reaper equivalent of blushing. taako grins a little because its very cute.

'death is different here,' taako hums. 'its… it wasnt like this anywhere else i went. it was cold, or cruel, or empty. i dunno why its different in your world.'

'then i guess we're the lucky ones, huh?' kravitz asks. taako leans up against him and murmurs an agreement. 'its why i love my job so much, why it means so much to me. its not that im some hardass, i just…'

'yea, cha'boy gets it now,' assures taako. 'still.' he looks at the ever-shifting, ever-stable face of death again. 'you better treat my boy kravitz and my lady istus well, capiche? or we will have issues.'

its a deal, taako, the raven queen says, smiling.

when taako opens his eyes, hes in his home in the material plane, and kravitz is next to him, and theyre both smiling.

#this is unedited and also i wrote it at 4am #taako #kravitz #taakitz #the raven queen #taz balance #the adventure zone balance #fanfiction #death tw #trigger warning for death because it is a fic about the goddess of death #and also taako mentions some times that they died before story and song (so they dont count)#m text #fic #text #ask to tag #o shit yea and its lowkey lowkey inspired by gaimans death because i like the idea of a nice death

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crusherthedoctor · 4 years

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Sonic Villains: Sweet or Shite? - Part 15: DR. EGGMAN

There are some villains I like. And there are some villains I don’t like. But why do I feel about them the way I do? That’s where this comes in.

This is a mini-series of mine, in which I go into slightly more detail about my thoughts on the villains in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, and why I think they either work well, or fall flat (or somewhere in-between). I’ll be giving my stance on their designs, their personalities, and what they had to show for themselves in the game(s) they featured in. Keep in mind that these are just my own personal thoughts. Whether you agree or disagree, feel free to share your own thoughts and opinions! I don’t bite. :>

Anyhow, for today’s installment, it’s finally time for him. The bad doctor himself. Gather round ladies and gentleman, for the spotlight is on the arch-villain that shines above them all... Dr. Eggman.

The Gist: It's the dawn of the 90's. A little company called SEGA had an ephiphany. They wanted to make a video game juggernaut that could rival the quality and iconic appeal of the then-unmatched Super Mario Bros, and their current star, Alex Kidd, just wasn't doing it in the way that they hoped. They promptly set about starting anew, as a worldwide phenomenon wasn't going to make itself.

So a gentleman named Naoto Ohshima created a selection of design concepts for this brand new mascot. One of these concepts was President Roosevelt in his pajamas.

Seen here with his catgirl body pillow.

The response to this character was “This is good, but we think kids would prefer kicking the shit out of him”, and so he was given an antagonistic role instead. In the meantime, after juggling the rest of their ideas, they eventually settled on a rabbit hedgehog named Sonic for their main protagonist, knowing his Mickey Mouse-like aesthetic would help endear him to the audience, and the franchise as a whole would have an easier time gaining a DeviantART fanbase later on down the line.

Initially, the character of today's review was but a mere lackey among many, seemingly little more than one of numerous minions working for Sonic's originally intended main villain, the Nonspecific Goblin. He was also dressed as a bee for some reason.

Which is the least weirdest thing in this image.

At some point however, they all got together and decided that actually, the guy with the moustache was the only one worth shit, and so he was upgraded to the role of main villain himself. With a spiffy new attire of red and black, he was given the bold title of Dr. Eggman, because with a shape like that, what else are you gonna call him?

“Funny you should say that”, laughed SEGA of America, as they rebelled like an angsty teen and named him Dr. Ivo Robotnik instead. While this name does make equal sense for the character, as he is indeed a hard worker who also happens to like robots, the reason for this name's existence seems to have been mainly because they thought Eggman was too out there of a name for an egg-like man. Whatever the case, this would confuse a lot of fans for years, and remains a point of divisiveness to this day... Unless you're like me and your first game in the series was Advance 2, in which the manual clears it up right away, and you accept the idea of a character having two names and immediately carry on with your life.

He would have aimed it perfectly if it weren't for the Sonic Heroes Parrot distracting him.

And that was that, really. It didn't take long for them to come up with his characterization, which was that of a cackling fiend with an ego to end all egos. This guy was the Narcissist Alpha, more king than actual kings, no strings attached. Other villains would build statues of themselves, but only Robotnik would deface Ancient Egyptian monuments to improve them with his face. Other villains would think “Nah, refacing all four in Rushmore would look silly”, but only the Eggman, the Eggmyth, the Egglegend, would go “Well fuck you, I'm doing it anyway.” Then he'd do it anyway, and proceed to address to the entire world that he did in fact do it anyway.

It also didn't take long for them to develop his primary schtick. With the dynamic of Sonic VS Eggman, you had a classic rivalry between nature and technology. Interestingly enough however, this turned out to be executed more tactfully than your typical Amish-abiding examples in similar media. Never was technology itself regarded as a corruptive influence that you should never utilise no matter what. Rather, it was only as good or as evil as the person using it, with it just so happening that the villain loved machinery only slightly less than he loved himself, and it was countered by Sonic’s best friend being a techno wiz in his own right anyway. Anyhow, with his machinery, the doctor would make a name for himself among video game baddies by confronting his enemy as the boss of nearly every zone in each game, rather than hide away until the endgame.

And all without a driver's licence.

In his soon-to-be-30 years of activity, he has largely remained the same since his inception. Other characters have been introduced, other villains have came and went, but Eggman has remained THE villain of the franchise, and he's remained a vital part of the Sonic the Hedgehog universe... with a slight redesign along the way.

The only ad I don't want to skip.

The Design: Eggman's design may be more simplistic than the likes of Bowser and Ganondorf, and he may not look as openly threatening at first glance, but it's still a very iconic look no matter what look it is. His original appearance was devised so that kids could have an easy time drawing him, which only makes me feel worse about not being able to do it as a grown adult without it looking like a Sexy Legs Kirby.

Still, it's a classic for a reason. With his to-the-point colour scheme, contrasting heavily with Sonic's blue, and his capelet collar resembling walrus tusks, it was an instant winner and made everyone goo goo for g'joob.

The Emeralds he’s juggling are a metaphor for the divided fan community.

And when it was time to give the cast an update for Sonic's first real 3D adventure (or at least the first one that didn't get axed for being a magic eye seizure), Eggman got a respectable change of his own. He was taller, his getup was militaristic, and his body was more legitimately egg-shaped rather than basketball-shaped. He also gained a pair of goggles that he never uses, except in scenes where he puts them on and then never uses them.

“How do my chicken legs not collapse under the might of my gluttonous mass? Find out in an unrelated tie-in novel that you have to pay additional money for.”

There was also that one redesign from 2006, but...

Be it Classic or Modern, I've always loved his design. Before he even says a word or does anything, you know from his appearance that he's a bit of a clownish sort. But he also has a subtle creepy vibe going on, with the way his glasses often obscure his eyes, and how this only makes the pearly-white, unnecessarily wide grin on his face that much more empty and unsettling. This little bit of eeriness hiding among his cartoonish physique reflects the full extent of his character pretty accurately, as we’ll delve into soon enough.

If nothing else, it's more effective than him having no eyes at all.

GRRRRRRRR FUCK YOU BUNNIES THAT I CAN'T SEE

The Personality: If you've seen my villain reviews, then you'll have gathered that Sonic's rogues aren't known for having much in the way of personality. There are exceptions, but they are indeed the exceptions. More often than not though, whether it's an alien conquerer, an ancient monster, or Dan Green the Recolour, they can be summed up thusly: They're evil, they want to destroy the world, and the heroes stop them because they're evil and want to destroy the world. If they're feeling particularly daring, they might go for a second colour.

Luckily, as if to counter all these cardboard drawings, the central adversary of the franchise makes up for these voids of personality by actually having one. And what a personality it is.

The writers of SatAM looked at this and thought “No, this won't do, there's no character to work with here.”

He really is brimming with comedic charm. Every moment that he's present...

Every moment that he shows off...

Every moment that he basks in his own glory...

Every moment that he unveils a new wicked scheme...

Every moment that he puts his enemies to the test...

Every moment that he challenges the world...

Every moment that he laughs at the world...

Every moment that he lives, nay, every moment that he breathes...

Yes, the man has plenty of humor, and it's part of what makes him so enjoyable and memorable. However, if you think being a clown is all there is to him, then prepare to have your expectations subverted initial assumptions taken in a unexpected direction, because although he puts the goof in goofy, he ALSO puts the “oh...?” in “oh shit”.

For you see, Eggman is by all means the epitome of Laughably Evil, but do not, under any circumstance, take him at face value and write him off as a joke. He is anything but.

For starters, he can swing a planet.

There is a rule of thumb that I personally go by with Eggman’s characterization, one that I believe is an immediate make or break factor in regards to whether or not you understand what makes this villain work. Eggman - when you put all his secondary traits aside - is made up of two prominent halves. There’s the egocentric meme machine that bounces up and down like a kid with his N64 and laughs like Santa... and there’s the monster buried within that remains completely and utterly unrepentant for everything he’s responsible for. This is very important. Despite the character’s simplicity at his core, many writers have failed to grasp this, official writers included, and I for the life of me cannot understand why this is such a recurring problem. Eggman is funny, AND Eggman is evil. Both are equal. When you take away one or the other, you may have a funny character, or you may have an evil character, but you don’t have Eggman. Simple as.

Armchair intellectuals may argue that Eggman’s deeds aren’t that evil, since he tends to be merely callous rather than actively trying to hurt or kill people. Those people are probably the types on TV Tropes who weigh a villain’s evilness and effectiveness purely through the surface-level scale of their goals rather than what they actually do to achieve them. While it is true that Eggman tends to be more apathetic about the aftermath of his actions, that doesn’t - and shouldn’t - negate how dangerous he is. It shouldn’t negate what he’s capable of. It shouldn’t negate how far he’s willing to go. And it shouldn’t negate the consequences and casualties that can and do result from his many schemes.

Seriously, think about this for a second. If you confronted Eggman about his current plan to... I dunno, make a water park in Africa or some shit, and you informed him that there has been unexpected mass suffering as a result of this, how do you think he would truly feel about that? What do you think he would actually say to that?

Spoiler: No fucks.

If anything, that he “merely” doesn’t care either way as long as he gets what he wants is more uniquely horrific and deplorable than if he were a generic baddie who committed his evulz specifically for evulz’s own sake and nothing more. At least you’re inadvertently acknowledging that other people’s lives have value when you act one-dimensionally gleeful over ending them, but when your immediate response to the side-effect of a million potential deaths and environmental disasters is “Oh well, fuck ‘em, Eggmanland time baybeeee”, that’s a new level of cruelty.

Besides, even in the Genesis era, he was carpet bombing Angel Island...

“Good thing I have this shield. Sucks to be this forest!”

And he’s only gotten worse since then, indulging in such acts as going full suicide bomber with a missile, after his initial plot to destroy and rebuild Station Square through the means of Chaos and the Egg Carrier didn’t work out...

But don’t worry, he kept it lighthearted by making it look like a penis.

Making one of Sonic’s friends go insane with power against their will, forcing the Blue Blur to put them down personally...

It’s ironic, cause he’s metal. Or do I have to awkwardly explain the joke two more times before I’m a proper YouTuber?

Capturing thousands of innocent aliens, and forcefully converting them into mindless beasts...

I’m pretty sure I saw Alfred Molina conduct this experiment one time.

He even removed the heroes’ collective IQs so that he could shoehorn a cliffhanger on an already terrible game.

Thanks, cunt.

And honestly? When it comes to Sonic and chums at least, Eggman does let out a more openly sadistic side now and then. Need I mention that time when the doctor forced Sonic and two random buddies to make their way through a trap-infested island of his own creation? Not for the sake of nabbing Chaos Emeralds or anything of the sort mind you, he just wanted the blue motor mouth to suffer.

Images you can hear.

To make matters even worse, as befitting of his manchild tendencies, he’s ridiculously petty. How petty? Petty enough to abduct a little girl’s mother for no other reason than because Cheese completely trivialized his forces the girl was friends with Sonic and helped participate in the latest kicking of his own ass.

He only picked Vanilla because there was no Strawberry.

But at least his captives can admire the sheer variety that their captor has to offer. One of the greatest things about the doctor's style is that anything goes. With all due respect to Bowser, he tends to stick with his fiery castles (although he has been branching out recently), and plenty of other villains in gaming tend to be similarly stuck in their ways when it comes to tastes. Eggman, on the other hand, will create all sorts of fortresses and reside anywhere on the planet and beyond. It can be in the sky, in space, somewhere hot, somewhere cold, under the sea, in a circus... and every now and then, he might combine some of them together and thensome. So long as it's even vaguely mechanical in some way, his ground rules have already been ticked off.

Hang on a minute...

You know what else Eggman is? Relentless.

Persistence is a quality that most villains by their very nature share, lest they cease to be an effective antagonist. But once again, Rrrrrrrobotnik maxes out more than any other, and will often go to insane lengths to keep the current plan going, or if not that, then to spite Sonic.

Exhibit A: Sonic 3 & Knuckles, in which the grand finale consists of the madman throwing a gravity-shifting contraption your way, busting out a Kaiju-sized robo, escaping with the Master Emerald after his defeat, continuing to escape even after the Death Egg has been thoroughly destroyed, getting chased through the asteroid fields in space by Super Sonic, and only finally going down when the escape craft and the piloted mech controlling the escape craft are down. And all of this came after a grand adventure where, among other things, he destroyed an entire level just to kill you.

There are immortal omnipotents that put up less of a challenge.

“Looks like it’s time for Plan... *checks paper*... F.”

His relentlessness also reveals another side of the doctor that is simultaneously admirable and terrifying: He bows to no one. No one. Doesn’t matter who it is. Doesn’t matter how powerful they are. Doesn’t matter how much the odds are stacked against him. If another villain were to demand that he cower before them, the scientist would laugh and show through physical demonstration that this is not the way the egg rolls. Unless he’s absolutely unable to do so, he will give it his all every time, and even if he can’t, he’ll use his crafty mind to find some other way to get around the issue. You can beat him in battle, you can foil his plans, but you absolutely cannot break his resolve.

“Dad said it’s my turn to play with the Ruby. I know this, because I’m your dad.”

What about his relationship with those who actually serve him? Specifically, his own robots? Well for the most part, he treats them like absolute crap, what with verbally abusing them at every corner and being all too willing to go full Vader on them the moment they mess up. He IS capable of expressing fondness and giving praise to his more successful creations, like with Metal Sonic and Gamma, but even then, it’s a roundabout way of praising himself, since he’s the one who made them what they are. So basically, you’re only valuable to him if you make him look good.

Gaming in the Clinton Years in a nutshell.

And as for Sonic? Yeah, like with any legendary and long-lasting hero/villain dynamic, it’s obvious that Eggman has some degree of begrudging respect for his opponent. But if you think this respect would dissuade him from actually going through with his ambitions of rulership...

As the hedgehog’s apparent demise in Sonic Adventure 2 proves, as well as his defeat at the hands of Infinite and the subsequent six months of brutal conquest in Sonic Forces, Eggman is dead serious about his goals. If you think he’d get bored after conquering the world, he would simply expand his resources and have a crack at conquering the rest of the universe. When he says he hates that hedgehog, I’m inclined to believe that he means it, and although he may enjoy his “games” with Sonic to an extent, I also can’t see him wanting to remain stuck on square one forever.

If this were Sonic X, he’d just grieve.

By the way, the scene above? Undeniable proof that for all the doctor’s boasting, he’s not actually lying or exaggerating when he prides himself on his brilliance. Because when you get past his goofy exterior, when you look beyond the occasional, relatively minor mistake (*glares at IDW*), you’ll see that... yes. He IS brilliant. And not just in the science department either, although his countless robots and strongholds over the years are no doubt a testament to his credentials there. While he may prefer to go in big and bold, he can also be shrewd with his strategies when he wants to be.

Sonic’s aforementioned near-death experience, for example, was the result of Eggman turning the heroes’ own cunning plan on its head by being one step ahead of them. And in Sonic Unleashed, he lured his enemy into a trap, culminating with him cancelling out Super Sonic.

“...and pay the price for your Werehog gameplay...”

And after all those years of struggling, he finally got a giant monster under his complete control. “But he had help!”, you say? Yeah, from himself.

Did Flynn sleep through all this...?

Much like his inner nature as an evil bastard, Eggman's effectiveness is likewise commonly underestimated by writers. Yes, he occasionally makes mistakes. Yes, he occasionally overlooks details. Yes, he occasionally lacks foresight. But he is NOT stupid. A hero is only as good as their villain after all, and if Eggman is portrayed as a bumbling fool, then how can Sonic be a truly great hero? Eggman is humorous, sinister, and when the chips are down, competent.

...Did I mention that he's also a master Olympian?

The Execution: There's no surprises here. You knew from the moment you saw this review that my stance wasn't going to be anything less than 100% fanboy adoration. In that respect, this section almost feels redundant, because there's only so many ways I can say “Dr. Eggman is the fucking shit and I'm eternally grateful to Mr. Ohshima for bringing this absolute masterpiece into our world” without it getting repetitive. So to cap this review off, I'm going to very briefly compare his portrayals in other media, and explain why they tend to not be as good as the original SEGA Eggman.

“Cause they’re not balanced, right?” you ask. “Cause they veer too far in a particular direction? You're so predictable,” you add. To that I say:

1. Yeah, basically.

2. ...S-Shut up...

3. While the conclusion may be obvious, it's nonetheless important because as I mentioned previously, despite how straightforward this villain is, writers seem absolutely intent on not getting the point. There are loads of villains out there who share Eggman's talent of mixing hilarity and evil together with a bow of competence on top. Two of those villains are among the most famous supervillains of all time, in fact. You might have heard of them.

Joker can do it just fine. Green Goblin can do it just fine. And plenty of others can do it just fine. So why is it such an issue with Eggman? What is it about a round body and a long moustache that gets people to think “No, this guy is absolutely incapable of being comedic and threatening at the same time, no question, end of.” Is it because he’s a more cartoony franchise? Well, that can't be the case, because even Mario has a couple of beloved examples. Fawful, anyone? How about Dimentio? Cackletta? King Boo? K. Rool? Hell, you could even count Bowser himself depending on the portrayal.

Anyway, the point is, writers tend to miss the mark for one reason or another. With Sonic X for example, he wasn't too bad in the beginning, but as the show went on, he became exactly the toothless non-villain that many people misjudge him as. We all know that scene where he berates Black Narcissus for harming their captives (not for pragmatic reasons mind you, he genuinely took issue with the act on moral grounds, even though his own hands weren’t exactly clean either), but even before that point, he was doing such things as healing an injured Sonic without an ulterior motive, not taking any opportunity whatsoever to start conquering Sonic's world because he was pining for Sonic's attention, and being the Jiminy Cricket to Chris Thorndyke's Pinocchio. Why they thought the goddamn villain should be the moral conscience of this show remains an unanswered question, but at least it no longer influences how he's portrayed in the games.

Then you have the IDW comic, which is a similar tale of starting off decent and then careening wildly into the abyss, but for different reasons. Initially, he was built up to be in-line with his competent, foresight-packed self from Forces, with his inevitable return being met with dread, and a delightfully devilish scheme to match when he finally did so. But somewhere along the way, Ian Flynn thought that Eggman coming back from his amnesiac period and returning stronger than ever with a new minion and a deadly virus wasn't enough to up the stakes... so they decided to “up the stakes” by turning both the doctor and his new minion into massive imbeciles so as to justify their plot getting hijacked by the Deadly Six, a move so predictable yet infuriating that it got even me to turn against the Six. And the reason the Six got invited in-universe is because Starline decided he didn’t like being unique and devolved into Snively 2.0 behind Eggman’s back. All this from the alleged “best writer” for the series...

Yeah, same.

And then you have the Boom version, which shares basically the same issues as Sonic X but in a more mundane fashion. It's easier to dismiss because it's a comedy-centric show and his redesign makes it easier to separate him from mainline Eggman, and I'll gladly admit that he does have a lot of genuinely funny lines that redeem him a little bit. But yeah, too much of not being a true villain for my tastes.

Now this isn't to say that there haven't been portrayals in other media that are up there with the original. The versions that I consider better off than the ones above include...

- The OVA Eggman is pretty faithful all things considered, aside from his romantic feelings for Sara, which feels slightly off since the idea of Eggman loving anyone other than himself is incredibly unrealistic at best. But it doesn't actually soften or undermine his deviousness, so I'm willing to let it slide for an alternate take. Especially since he gave us the best Metal Sonic out there.

- AoStH is far from a perfect show, but there's a reason why even its detractors tend to treat its version of Robotnik like a national treasure. Admittedly most of that is because of the legendary Long John Baldry and the endless memes associated with this incarnation, but despite hailing from a comedy-focused show like Boom Eggman, this Robotnik still had a lot of legitimately dangerous moments, more than you'd think.

- And of course, Jim Carrey's Robotnik in the Sonic movie is just... *chef's kiss*

So obvious aesop though it may be, but you see what the more effective portrayals have in common, I assume?

Granted, this also isn't to say that SEGA Eggman himself has had a perfect track record. The decade's worth of upstagings and backstabbings by other villains should be enough of a counterpoint to that claim, and I've also made it clear now and then that I take issue with certain games regarding what they do with the doc, no matter how revered they may be by other fans. Sonic Adventure 2, for instance. I praised the fake emerald scene, and I do sincerely believe that he has a number of other badass moments in that game, but because Shadow was playing him like a fool the whole time, I can't help but have a bitter taste in my mouth when I look at the bigger picture.

So close to greatness, yet so far...

So in that case, which game do I think has Eggman's best showing overall? That's not in any way an easy question, but lack of dialogue aside, I'm gonna go with Sonic 3 & Knuckles again, as the classic journey through the sights of Angel Island plays out in a way that highlights just how determined, ruthless, and underhanded he is with carrying out his mission to revive the Death Egg by any means necessary. Other games do win out in other areas - SA1 for how bastardly he is, Forces for how cunning he is, Colours for his hilarious announcements, CD for using the scenery to show the effects of his actions, Mania for not letting the other villain walk all over him - but for the purest essence of the doctor at his cartoony yet competent best, I'd say S3&K is a reasonable bet.

And when it comes to all his many traits, which one do I find the most special one of all? Well again, far from easy to answer, but I think the coolest aspect about him is also one of the most overlooked. Robotnik, despite whatever superhuman qualities he may occasionally unveil, is for all intents and purposes a regular guy with a big brain. This might make him appear unimpressive when compared to your average Final Fantasy villain and the like, but if anything, it paints him in a more flattering light than expected, because he doesn't even need to be on their level to still be on the radar. It's easy to be a big bad threat when you're an ancient demon or an almighty god-like being, and you only have to wave a hand to cause armageddon. But when you're just Some Guy™ going up against superpowered opponents, meaning you have to earn your threat level the hard way, and you prove to be a challenge every step of the way regardless, because you're just THAT much of a genius... that's fucking awesome, no other way to put it.

And you know what else is awesome? You may not like Eggman, and you don’t have to like him, but like it or not, he is directly and indirectly responsible for a vast majority of the coolest and most loved moments and aspects of this franchise.

The opening to Unleashed? Eggman set up the scene.

Shadow running around and continuing to be part of the franchise? Eggman released him.

Blaze getting involved with Sonic’s world and continuing to be part of the franchise? Eggman’s half-responsible for that.

Metal Sonic? Eggman made him.

Egg Dragoon? Eggman.

Big Arm? Eggman.

Monkey Dude? Eggman.

That text is missing a blue checkmark.

This review is probably longer than the echidna family tree in Archie at this point, so I better finish it off. If it wasn't obvious from all the paragraphs I've belted out in this post, I'm very passionate about Eggman and the way he’s portrayed. Ever since I got into the Sonic franchise in 2003, I immediately took a liking to the doctor, and to this day, he remains not only my favourite Sonic villain, my favourite Sonic character, but also my favourite character period. Some may find it a weird or lame choice compared to other, “better” characters, but that's the way it is, and I ain't about to change it. I am very unlikely to ever stop enjoying the hell out of this villain, and even if he got irreversibly ruined in some way, I'd still continue to love what he was before that point.

Because yeah, he's not the deepest character ever, but... who cares? Is it not enough that we find something that appeals to us? When I got into Sonic, I was introduced to fantastic games, a likable cast, high quality soundtracks, beautiful worlds, numerous friends on this very site, and of course, the lovely treasure that is my partner. I may not have been with this franchise during the 90's, but it's given me just as much fun, nostalgia, and happiness as those who were. Despite the flawed titles, despite the fandom conundrums, I still love this series.

And I still love this absolute prick.

Crusher Gives Dr. Eggman a: TWO Thumbs Up!

#Sonic Villains: Sweet or Shite?#Opinion #Sonic the Hedgehog #Dr. Ivo Robotnik

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arllenn · 3 years

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METANOIA chapter 2

There’s only cannon typical violence in this chapter and it’s only described briefly so I think this should be ok for y’all. > AO3

Opening my eyes I was greeted by snow once again. Only this time there was much more than when I had last been awake. Hills of the fluffy white powder framed the landscape creating an eerily stunning image. I was facing downwards the snow taking up most of my vision with only a sliver of the sky making its way towards me and questioned just where I was. For a second I wondered why I was alone. Did the person from before go to get help? Did they get tired of watching me bleed out and leave, or was it all a hallucination?

It stopped snowing, the sun bleakly shining through the clouds, a ray of light burned into my eye sockets, having escaped through a small hole in the weather. I thought to raise my arm up for some type of relief before rembering that it most likely wasn’t possible. Both of my arms having been so damaged in the car accident. It was a wonder, I could no longer feel any pain only overwhelming numbness and the texture of the snow underneath my body. Again odd, how was I able to feel the snow so vividly through my clothes. I attempted to look down towards where my body should be but my eyes stuck firmly in place the effort only bringing rise to an uncomfortable grating feeling. I attempted to call out for help, my jaws feeling uncomfortable like I was grinding the top and lower together just to forcibly pull them apart seconds later, but the only noises that came out of my mouth were breathy huffs who lost their sound in the wind. Closing my mouth a resounding ‘clink’ came from it. It sounded a bit like glass and I assumed that it was just my teeth hitting one another, that wasn’t right it’s never sounded like that, however it also reminded me of the noises that the gems made when running in Houseki no Kuni. I loved that show back when I was younger, and still watched it for the nostalgia. It’s unfortunate that as it’s looking it be now I’ll never get to finish the manga or see season 2.

inwardly I sighed. Here I was who knows where with serious injuries that I could no longer feel with no idea how long it will be until my body gives out and I’m reminiscing about anime that I like. I’m ridiculous. I had to move, get out of here, do something! Clumsily I raised my arm towards where the window frame of the car should be. The feeling of my skin, or was it bone, grinding against itself was uncomfortable and a slight bit painful. I definitely should be worried that something as serious as my bones touching and grinding together is only a slightly painful but now wasn’t the time. I fumbled for where the window frame would be, it shouldn’t be this high up, it’s never been this high up, my arm felt like it was going to drop, until it felt lighter all of a sudden and something hard dropped down hitting my back before crushing something else.

I panicked. My arm just broke into two, it just broke, broken into halves like nothing! It didn’t even feel painful! I have to be dreaming, or having something like a full body hallucination right before death, because there’s no way in hell my arm just broke in half and I’m fine, hell I couldn’t even feel the blood gushing out that should’ve accompanied it! I tried to use my other hand to push me up so that I could find some way to help myself, rising on a single shaking arm that felt like it too could snap in any moment I noticed something. My arm, no not just my arm, the long hair that fell off my head too, was all a milky white with splotches of iridescent blue gemstone. I breathed out not believing what I was seeing when my other arm gave out leaving me lying completely on my side, face to face with a huge flat rock, or was it a mountain and the rest of what I presumed to be my body which also held the same bewitching shine as my arm and hair.

I don’t believe it, no I can’t believe it. My body had somehow turned into some type of wacky gemstone statue and there was no sign of the car that had killed me, nor the road that I had been flung off of. However just like before the teal shards were there. Only this time they took the remote shape of a person. Maybe it had been a statue? If so then was I still on the scene of the car crash, or did they get moved to where ever I had been moved as well? There were too many questions and not enough answers. So I decided to think my way through the situation I currently found myself in.

I had presumably died, or been severely injured. And transfered to somewhere unknown along with the statue from before. My body was made out of some type of stone, a gemstone most likely, and I am unable to speak or look around without risking snapping the remainder of my limbs off. Is this some kind of prank? Ridiculous I know but my only other theory was that this was my brains last parade before it shut down and I died. Or maybe I was in a coma, do people dream in their comas? It’s good to sort everything out even though I don’t have enough information to fully understand or even attempt to grasp the situation.

Pursing my lips, or just making the attempt to, I wasn’t sure of anything other than the feeling of my rough jaws pushing against each other, I looked at the statue infront of me. I studied the shape of what could possibly be a face, small and round with large eye sockets that were empty (did they get knocked out before I was here?) a nose that fit its face perfectly, small and button shaped. With hair that flew down in jagged layers looking a bit like leaves on trees at just the start of fall. It’s a bit funny I had just been thinking of Houseki no Kuni and now here I was staring at what could very well be a life sized Phosphophyllite, if only a bit younger than what they were shown to be in the begging of the story. Huh? A life sized Phos, a humongous rock that has bits of gemstones peaking out of its craggy surface, and a barren landscape with no signs of humanity. Not to mention the fact that I’ve literally become a gemstone as well! There’s no way it could be right?

‘Wait...’

’Don’t tell me...’

‘there’s no way in hell..’

Hah yeah right, the day I’m isekai’d is the day pigs fly and the moon explodes. Actually didn’t NASA find a crack in the moon? Off topic but the point still stands I’m jumping to conclusions way too far out of my league. There’s no way isekai is real, I’ll probably wake up in a hos-

THWACK

As if just taking off one of my legs wasn’t enough the arrow that was accompanied by an all too familiar sound track came and cracked through my denial, a second punishment for daring to doubt the universe I suppose.

Bad, bad, bad, this was bad, no more like horrible! I can’t move, my limbs being too splintery and uncontrollable to even attempt to run away, I lost half of an arm and my leg up to mid thigh, theres no way I’m moving myself. So unless by some miracle Phos lookalike, the real Phos, not just some lookalike, suddenly tripled in hardness and was able to move I’m done for. Isn’t this cheap? Dying before my life even begins! I’m not even a main character! There’s no plot armor to save me! Maybe Phos but not me! Is that why I don’t remeber a anyone that looks like this? Because they were so irrelevant that they were never mentioned or eluded to?

Desperatly trying to escape with only an arm on the brink of collapse and a leg that doesn’t want to even pretend to cooperate really makes your blood pressure skyrocket. Can I even say that anymore, it’s not like I have blood! My panic was accompanied by the sound of bows being drawn and the sound of arrows piercing through the air.

In a split second my torso was separated in two and my other arm shattered into bits along with the majority of my shoulder. Looking over to Phosphophyllite who had been shattered completely everywhere except for their head and legs carved a sense of desperation into me. There was nowhere for me to go and even if there was there was no way for me to get there. Resigning myself to a second death I stopped struggling and just laid there. Truly a blessing I was turned away from the lunarians so that I didn’t have to see the arrows and spears being flung at me. The strings were pulled back and...

Nothing but a spray of snow came. It threw me over forcing me to look at the lunarians and whatever had caused the snow to be so greatly disturbed. Slightly off to the left in my vision but at the center of my mind stood ANTARCTICITE? If the lunarians hadn’t convinced me of my situation then this certainly did. The arrows and spears all stuck into the snow having been slammed off course. They glanced back at Phos and I before readying themselves to go on offense. They took a running start and soared through the sky straight towards the lunarians. The anime could never compare to seeing it right infront of your eyes. The way they used their legs to make complicated twists and turns avoiding every attack while delivering one of their own was breath taking. They had cleared out the front of the float. There were only a few archers left on the float (ship? I forget the cannonical name for it) that was quickly disappearing the final blow haveing been delivered to the center just a few seconds ago. Fighting in what was essentially mid air they breezed through dodging arrows and pointed their sword at their final enemy. They twisted out of the way of the arrow being shot and plunged their blade straight through the lunarians neck. Of course knowing my luck, because I clearly being crushed by a car and almost being taken to the moon could never be enough, the arrow that Antarcticite had just dodged came flying at me. I felt it pierce through my nose and shatter my face. The last thing I saw was antarcticite running towards us as my world faded back into that inky black.

The next time I woke up was to a body that didn’t feel like hell when I moved it and eyes that roamed to where I told them to. The animation in Houseki no Kuni, I was IN Houseki no Kuni I’m a gemstone that lives and exists here, did the actual architecture of the school no justice what so ever. I remember hearing rumors on the internet that Ichikawa studied architecture before writing the manga and the fruits of her labor really showed through in person. The high ceiling met the archways perfectly and truly reminded me of the drawings and pictures one would see if an elegant civilization from back at humanities beginning. The wooden cot I was laying on didn’t seem worn out in the slightest despite the age of the gems and how often they had to be repaired.

i was yanked out of my thoughts by the voice I had heard during so many watch throughs, raising my eyes from the swirls in the wood that my fingers were tracing I looked up at Sensei.

“Hecatolite also that is your name. A hardness of six. You were born on the twentieth day of winter along side Phosphophyllite.”

I bit down on my bottom lip, while I was no expert of any kind on gemstones I had never even once heard of the name Hecatolite. Was it named after the goddess Hecate? In that case I don’t think the pale white and glimmering blue fit the name at all. Considering that Hecate was a goddess of the night.

As if he could read my thoughts Sensei, Adamant, whatever, told me something that I couldn’t help but laugh bitterly at.

“Hecatolite also had the common name of moon stone long ago.”

I a human soul who should have realisticly been reborn into this world as a lunarian was a gem named after the moon, the place where I belonged. Honestly this kind of ironic situation is something I’d expect from a novel, not real life. Sensei was still looking at me and I just wanted to be alone with my thoughts for now so I nodded as best I could with my awkwardly stiff yet also too loose neck. Apparently satisfied he turned to Phos and began working on them.

I’ve really never thought of the idea of being isekai’d before. Sure most stories about the premace were fun to read but there’s no way on earth I ever would’ve thought that I of all people could ever be isekai’d but here I am, sitting in the gemstones infirmary that I’ve seen in every way possible watching Sensei, or adamant which should I call him , carve Phosphophyllite’s face, having just been told that I’m Moonstone Hecatolite or whatever and have a hardness of 6. My life would in no way be hard like Phos’ or Cinnabar’s due to my hardness, the only thing I could ever even imagine that would cause trouble is my name, but then again I could just go by Hecatolite and keep the moonstone part to myself. It’s not like Antarcticite knows, or maybe they do and I’m just assuming, they were rather close to Sensei before they died, Sensei doesn’t seem like the type to blab information like that and I’m not sure that Phos is awake right now.

‘Really’ I thought as I brought my knees up to my chest slowly hugging them tightly so that the wouldn’t fall that any point. Today, could this even be counted as just a day had been too much all at once. I had essentially flung myself off of the road, died after being crushed with some random stranger holding my hand. Upon arrival into this messed up world I had encountered lunarians earlier today and been saved by Antarcticite after almost being taken to the moon. This is, unbelievable, ridiculous, I just can’t seem to comprehend what the hell is happening right now! Even in the lore of Houseki no Kuni it was outright stated that humans souls became the lunarians and that the gems were their bones, my very existence went against the firmly set laws of this world! It made no sense when I first realized and it makes no sense now, in all honesty I’m sure that it will never make sense. But, here I am sitting watching Sensei, Adament, whatever, whoever, carving Phos like it was nothing.

To be fair to him it was probably nothing considering the fact that Phos is the youngest in a long line of gems, but it’s still unbelievable. To me a person who had been living in modern society and didn’t believe that magic or reincarnation was a thing possible being here right now just wasn’t something I could wrap my mind around currently. I put my head down into my knees and thought of my family, my life up until the crash and everything that I had ever done. I tightened my hold on my knees in an attempt to focus on something else. Gems didn’t cry instead when they had extreme emotions they cracked. I didn’t want to break my newly formed body already. Despite my best efforts a crack still formed. Luckily I wasn’t a soft gemstone and it was something minor that could be chalked up to me falling. I moved my hand up over to my shoulder to cover the shallow but midsized crack. My regrets, my wants and the moments I was proud of all came to the forefront of my mind.

I’m not sure what the measures of time are here but to me it felt like quite a few hours, however it was hard to accurately perceive time as I currently was and I had no intention of finding out how long it actually had been, seeing as to the fact that I wasn’t even sure that I could talk, or that the languages that I had knowledge of would translate or be understood. And even if they were only Sensei would be able to understand and that would likely bring up questions as to why I knew a dead language. So I kept quiet as I was led by Sensei alongside Phos to where I guessed our rooms were. It did make me wonder if gems were born understanding the language and unable to speak it or if this was a cheat granted to me by the universe as compensation for ending my life.

We were placed in rooms next to each other. The designs were simple and minimalistic. A single window a bed that was shoved into a crook in the wall that had a wooden frame, it really just looked like a stone box with a pile of sheets on it but I digress. Young Phosphophyllite was rather cute, it was a shame they’d go feral and lose their mind one day. I plopped down onto the bed only keeping on the button on shirt that came with the winter uniforms on. I know usually from what Sensei said that gems sleep with either everything off or with a uniform that they requested from red beryl but considering that it was winter and they were sleeping I would have to make do with this until they woke up. The idea of sleeping without anything on at all was just a bit too much for me as I currently am.

i looked out the window towards the moon that was high in the sky and allowed myself to play with the strands of my hair, funnily enough the weight was comfortable and from the way my hair fell it seemed like it was styled the same way as it was in my past life. Of course mirrors weren’t a thing currently, so it was just an assumption. Pulling the sheets up I resolved to not think for the rest of the night. Reliving my life for who knows how long was definitely draining.

A few minutes after I had laid down I heard shuffling around the doorway. Looking up I realized that Phos, who looked two steps from falling over was standing in the door way looking at me. I sat up and beckoned them over by waving my hand towards myself. For a second I got scared that they wouldn’t understand, after all they don’t know how to speak and i have no idea if this means something different to them, but cute innocent Phos stumbled over to my bed on legs that would make a newborn fawn jealous. It looked they they were going to fall midway so I sprung up tangled in my sheets to steady them. Luckily the sheets formed a barrier in between us that stopped me from cracking them but it was still nerve wracking. That matter aside I wasn’t sure why Phos was here or what I could do for them currently.

With their behavior matching their angelic face Phos didn’t leave me to silently wonder for too long before they pointed at the bed. Though vague I think I understand? Did they need help getting into their bed because of their hardness? I nodded and picked them up ready to take them to their room, however once I reached the door frame they reached out and pointed towards the bed again...

’I’m an idiot...’

Sighing I went back into my room and placed Phos down on my bed and put on the shorts that came along with the winter uniform. I didn’t want to risk grinding them into dust like I was Achema so I took precautions. I left the room to go and grab Phos’ sheets. I wrapped them up in mine as if they were a cat getting medication or a shot and used their sheets to put over the both of us. There was no way I was going to break Phos on my first day alive, or ever considering the story. A small smile played on their face and they fell asleep soon after.

Sighing I decided that sense it was like this I should just sleep for now. There was no point in staying up and thinking when the situation was like this. Though I am nervous about crushing Phos in my sleep I really don’t want to wake them up right now.

The sky was empty and without stars, a stark contrast to the night sky I was used to. The moon was the only source of light and all I could think about was the earth that I was used to before all of this.

That night I gained a few more cracks over my shoulders.

#houseki no kuni #houseki no kuni au #author is tired #author is too dumb to reread #so many spelling errors #its crazy really #metanoia au #antarcticite #phosphophyllite #adament #sensei

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the-goddess-of-mischief-writing · 4 years

Text

Two halves become one whole {8}

Chapter summary; You’re hours away from the party. A sleepless night and tear stained cheeks stops you from being physically, neither emotionally, ready to go there. But somehow a certain billionaire, a sister and a brother makes you pay it a visit.

Pairing: Bucky x reader

Rating: Mature

CHAPTER NO/ONESHOT: Chapter 8/9

Word count; 4.565

Warnings; hinting angst, caring Steve (the main warning for this whole series)

Author; @the-goddess-of-mischief-writing

A/N: I can’t get enough of a caring Steve or the tension between Bucky and reader, so you’ll continue to get both. Putting the translation for the Russian word here.

идиот= idiot

SERIES MASTERLIST

“Are you serious?” Steve barked at Bucky as soon as he couldn’t see you anymore. The blonde's eyes were wide, the disappointment in them evident.

“Are you asking me that? I could ask you the same thing about choosing her”, he snapped back, one arm shooting out to violently point the way you’d gone. He was angry, fuming at both you and Steve. However, somewhere inside himself, something urged him to calm down.

“Yes, I’m asking you that! And your question isn't valid because you damn well already know the answer", Steve answered, taking a step closer to the brunette as he continued. "I chose her because she’s the only one who could help you. Not only because she's the sole one in the team knowing how to handle a situation like this. But also as she has endured similar things as you", he saw how Steve's chest heaved while his eyes burned into him. It was a long time ago he had looked this upset. All because of you.

The look in his friend's eyes hurled him back into the memory he wanted to erase from his mind, but never could. He had come here in hopes of finding Steve, to talk about something concerning you. However, he hadn't only found his friend as he hoped, but you as well.

He had stopped on the threshold of the room the moment Steve had pulled you in for a hug. The way you had welcomed his embrace by burying your face in his chest, made a pang shoot through his own. He recognised the familiar thought he believed he buried resurfacing. Were you a couple? He would've mulled over the question he got proved opposite many times already if it wasn't for your movement.

It was small, almost unnoticeable, but still, he had seen it. Your body trembled. He remembers how his heart had tugged at the scene and understood that something must've worried you enough for Steve to try and soothe you. He was about to walk forward to comfort you as well, like you'd done so many times to him, but was halted when he heard a conversation between the two of you begin.

“What did I say, Rogers”.

“I’m sorry”, Bucky had seen Steve look down on the crown of your head, before looking up and blinking a few times. He knew his friends just blinked away a few tears. “You're not going to tell him I guess”, the statement had intrigued him, but further so did the scene beyond the two of you. It had been a simple flicker of his gaze that made him notice. By the station you had chosen in the shooting range, he saw a gun on the table. Looking over your shoulder, he curiously observed the dolls. However, the moment his eyes landed on the scene, his eyebrows flew up. There was a neat hole in the bullseye part of the target.

“Honestly, never. Never if he doesn't ask directly about. It wouldn't do anything good for him, neither me", it was your answer to Steve's question that pulled his attention back to you. Your words had made his mind reel and the first question that had surfaced was, did you speak about him?

Though Bucky had tried brushing past the question, it was one move from his blonde friend that had made him realise you did. Steve had glanced on the weapon behind you, then to the targets and after that, his embrace had tightened.

“Then it’s good I ask perhaps”, he hadn't been able to stop the words from leaving him. The moments afterwards, he had witnessed you jump away from Steve.

“I-I...”, he wanted to believe he was wrong, but the look on both you and Steve's faces screamed the opposite. Despite this, Bucky had felt the need to give you a final chance to prove him wrong.

It was that decision that had carried him forwards, towards the open weapons department on the wall. He hadn't looked at you, though now in the aftermath he perhaps should've. Maybe it would've stopped him from picking the two guns most familiar to him. Stopped him from walking to the shooting range. Stopped him from ordering you to shoot. But he had felt the need to know.

And had gotten to know. As soon as Steve tried stepping in to defend you, but you had taken the guns from him regardless, he knew. It was too familiar. The way his friend had tried to argue for you as he had done for Bucky many times as well. How you had handled the weapons, with a learned profession.

The realisation hit him even before you began to shoot and had made him take a few steps back. He almost hadn't noticed he leaned against the wall, while metal fingers scraped against it.

The image was fresh on his frontal lobe, the way you had focused when squatting down to stabilise the rifle. He still sensed the strangeness he had felt when seeing you use a weapon so differently than him. But it hadn't mattered, because you had moved as one with the gun.

The only remembrance Bucky had of a small hope was when you had picked up the pistol. Your grip shuffled out of unfamiliarity, making your first shot come much later than earlier. But in the end, it didn't matter. Bullseye. Bullseye. Bullseye.

Before he even had registered he moved, he felt his fingers clench into a fist, one which in return slammed into the wall. Despite his then newfound anger, he had noticed your shooting halted in a jerk as you spun towards him. As soon as your gaze met his, he saw your eyes widen and fingers reflexively flick on the safety, before you dropped the gun. It landed with a dull thud from the small distance it had fallen.

“What are you?” He felt the word ring in his head as venomously now when he thought back at them, as they'd done when he said them aloud. “Assassin? Hitman?…”, he had seen the quick flex of your jaw, along the tip of your head and your quiver in your lip before you bit down on them. “So hitman it is”.

“This is why I didn’t tell, it isn’t relevant”, he hadn’t expected your outburst, but now when thinking back on the event, he should've.

“Ain’t relevant?” The wince he had seen your body, most possibly, unconsciously make at the volume from his voice had made Steve snap out from his bystander role.

“Buck, she’s a former one. There’s a reason she is on the team, she hasn’t done it for many years”, he had heard Steves voice, filled with what he now afterwards could distinguish as hope, probably hope for him to calm down. But at the time he hadn't been able to do that. The betrayal he felt, both whether your sentiment had been out of care, pity or an order. And because you had withheld the fact of your true nature.

“So your help was that also fake?!”

“I didn’t lie about my degree thank you very much!” The way you had defended yourself, perhaps rightfully so, had made him ready to snarl a response at you. However, his words had died on his tongue when he heard the soft words leaving you on your exhale. “I cared Bucky, I still do…”, there was an explosion in his chest by the way you said it, he still could feel the traces if.

It had felt like pure happiness spreading through him, but instead of lingering in that feeling, he had closed it off. He had stubbornly wanted to believe what you said, but doubt and anger made him reluctant. It was in the shadow of those feeling his next words formed.

“How much can you truly care, you’re a paid murderer”, he meant them, but at the same time, he hadn't. His conflicting feelings made him unsure how to react when he had witnessed something break in you. But from fury, he didn’t want to take it back even if his conscience yelled him to do it. Something he wished he now had listened to.

“We are the same kind. We both are murderers. The only difference is that I got paid and you didn’t”, your voice was high pitched and even though tears had formed you raised your head higher, not letting them fall. “I-I didn’t want to do it in the beginning, for fuck sake!” He remembers how you'd glance at Steve and that was the moment he understood his friend somehow convinced you to do this, to help him.

“I only did it because Steve saved me, no matter what I did. So I only found it fair I would repay him with saving you”, Steve had saved you, he didn’t know how but his friend was the cause of you standing before him. It was in that second the blonde man had stepped before you, shielding you almost entirely from him.

“You shouldn’t have done it”, the words tasted bitter even now when thinking back on them. But truth to be told, his sentence wouldn't have ended there. He had wanted to say, you shouldn’t have made him trust you, fall for you, only to show him this, but his voice had died.

“Sometimes the only one able to understand is the one that suffered the same fucking thing, James Barnes”, your use of his full name, something you had never uttered before, somehow carved the deepest wound in his chest.

“Didn’t you say you trusted me?” Steve hauled him back from his memory by his question. In the absence of his mind, Bucky noticed his friend had come closer than before.

Looking at the blonde, he knew he asked the question to make him think about the first time he had met you. Already then he had felt calm with you, despite back then he had been wary of why. He also remembers that he had said he trusted Steve but...

“I never said I trusted her”, it was more that he spoke the end of his thoughts aloud, rather than actually meaning them. However, it seemed the blonde man didn't notice this.

“Jesus!” Steve cursed, throwing his hands up in the air. “Step down from your high horse and see past your anger, without her you wouldn’t be able to have gotten this good”, he tried reasoning and Bucky knew he was right, but the only reason he behaved as he did was because he knew. He knew he wasn’t only angry on Steve and you, but on himself as well. For how he acted, for how he hurt you. Because of this tug of war of feelings, he said one thing, and continuously meant another.

“I have every right to be upset, she lied”, he believed it, he genuinely did. But with the disappointing look that Steve gave him, Bucky wished it wasn't the case.

“She did it for you...”, Steve halted himself by taking a deep breath while rubbing a hand over his face. “Don’t you see it? She’s done all of this for you. To a beginning, she may have done it because I asked for it. But, believe me, for once if any time now, that she wouldn’t have continued if she didn’t care for you”, Steve looked at him and for the first time, Bucky didn’t have anything to say. His anger still boiled, but he didn’t know if he had a good enough reason for it anymore, so he turned and walked out.

You’d looked forward to the party tonight, now you didn’t. Last night you had cried yourself dry, the memory of Bucky's confrontation on repeat throughout the whole night. You guessed, however, that your exhaustion of the event eventually had knocked you out. Albeit given a few hours of sleep, it felt like you hadn't rested at all when waking up in the morning. Your body felt heavy, mind occupied along with tears always present in your eyes.

It was purely because of your state, both physical and mental, you didn't dare exit your room. You wondered if your teammates missed your presence, although as the donation gala was tonight, you guessed they only thought you prepared for that.

Remembering the cause of your problem, you glared at the grey bag shielding the dress. It fault like it taunted you, where it was draped over your couch, and you debated on whether you should throw it out of the window or not.

“Y/N I thought I should…”, you were snapped out of your thoughts by Tony's voice and in shock, you looked at the billionaire who now stood in the opening of your door. His voice had died down, like his steps, as soon as he noticed you. His brows pulled together as he saw you sit on your bed, seconds away from crying. “Hey, what is it?” His voice had gone soft, much less boisterous than when he entered.

It was as if refraining from making a remark and preferably showing his gentler side, something that didn't often happen, made you break. You looked away from him to try and hide your tears, but it seemed he already had seen them. You heard him come closer, but not until he crouched down in front of you could you see him.

“Sweetheart, what happened?” He took your hands in his, while his brown eyes tried finding what was wrong by studying your features. You felt muted to his stare, thus as soon as his question was asked, a picture of Bucky resurfaced. It was from the moment he realised what you had kept form him. Seeing the sheer look of anger and loathing painting his features in the memory, made whatever answer you would've given come out as a sob.

Quickly you saw how your vision got blurry and how droplets started to fall down your cheeks. Bothered by your reaction in front of the billionaire, you began to furiously wipe your tears away. It was not until Tony, similar to what Steve had done many times, swept you in for a hug you stopped. You had never received more than a friendly side-hug from him, so for a moment, you were taken aback by his unusual action.

“Tell me what happened”, at the same time he urged you to speak, he pressed you closer to him. It was the little shift that made you came back to your senses and wrapped your arms around him. “Is this why we haven’t seen your beautiful face around?” You couldn’t help the small, but in Tony’s eyes, miserable smile that spread on your lips.

“It’s Bucky…”, your voice let you down as another sob bubbled up in your throat, but you saw the lightbulb go off over his head when he figured it out.

Tony's brows furrowed when he really saw the distress you were in and what had caused it. He didn’t know you like Steve, the two of you practically seen as siblings by the team, but he knew the essential things. By the looks of it, something had gone wrong yesterday. There weren't many things that could elicit this reaction from you, which instantly made him realise what it implied. Bucky must've gotten to know what everyone else already did.

“So, that’s why mister spangle left in a fury yesterday", although Tony's chuckle was light and you knew he tried to make you feel better, the mention of Steve didn’t help. You hadn’t met him, or rather, he hadn’t come to visit you afterwards. You didn’t know what to believe, but something must’ve happened between the two soldiers after your and Bucky's confrontation. And if trusting the billionaire's words, neither had that ended well.

“I know it ain’t easy sweetheart, but trust me we’ll solve this”, Tony reassured you. “Especially if Barnes wants to stay”, a laugh escaped you, but it was more out of fear. You wanted him to stay, whatever he felt towards you at the moment, you couldn’t deny how you felt for Bucky. “I wanted to ask you about tonight, go over things a final time, but it seems I chose the worst time for it”, Tony murmured and you broke away from his embrace. You wiped away your final tears and took a deep breath before looking at him.

“It’s fine, I’m able to talk about it”, you tried saying confidently, a smile on your face.

“Ah, a beautiful smile at last”, Tony joked which made you chuckle.

“Don’t say that I don’t want Pepper after me”.

“And there’s the Y/N I know”, he cheerfully pointed out, which you only shook your head to.

What occupied your time for the next thirty minutes was exactly that, a final walkthrough of the evening. You discussed the events before the donations. The usual time for paparazzi to grab their pictures, but also for people to mingle around. It was not until later on in the evening, Tony would announce the surprise, the donations. He told you he had received confirmation that the representatives from the chosen organisations would attain. Much like everybody else, the associates were unknowing of the true intentions of the party. Therefore, the donations would come as a complete surprise. After the main event, the evening would simply proceed as it liked, which you from experience knew meant quite a few interviews for Tony.

“I don’t think there’s much more to go through by this point. If you don’t want me to hang around for longer?”

“It’s okay Tony, I think I’ll be able to handle myself until the party starts”, you smiled towards him, thankful he’d been here with you.

“Well then, just in case you forget I’ll send Nat here to get fixed with you”, he stood up before his expression changed into one of recognition. “I don’t even think I would be able to stop her when she gets to know”.

“You don’t need to tell her”, you very well knew how she could get when things like this happened.

“You know as good as me that I won’t be able to hide it from her”, you simply chuckled to what he said before bidding him goodbye.

As promised, or expected, a few hours before the party started, a knock came on your door. With a little lighter tone to your steps, you headed to the door to open it for Nat. However, you hadn't even been able to open it fully before a flurry of red hair stalked into your room.

“What doesn’t that идиот understand?" You hadn’t thought about the rather hard-knocking moments earlier, although the intensity of the word you didn’t miss. Despite not knowing any Russian, you knew she cursed him, having similar sounding words thrown your way during training.

“Hi to you too”, you said to her while closing the door. It seemed she didn't bother to greet you back, as you started walking over to where she stood,

“I’m glad we bought this dress, will at least make his sorry ass feel a bit remorseful”, you huffed out a chuckled to what she said, but not without a shake of your head.

“Don’t blame him, you would feel the same”.

“I blame him fully”, she began, before turning around. It was then, when meeting her gaze, you noticed her irritation. “I stand by what I said before this happened, regardless of how much you believe it, you were the defining piece in getting the man back. But he didn’t deserve it, by the looks of it”, she huffed the last thing out.

“Oh Nat...”, you hugged her, not knowing if her words actually helped, but you felt touched by them.

“Come on now, we’ll get you fixed up and try to enjoy tonight, it’s about you no matter what Stark does in your favour”, she held you on arm-lengths distance, a smile adorning her lips while she said it.

“I’m happy he’s taking the spotlight, he does it better than me”, you chuckled.

“That’s just what you believe”, the redhead answered while packing up your dress, placing it on a hanger.

Despite the stubborn arguing about who should get fixed first, you had won in the end. And by winning, you meant taking Nat by surprise and pushing her down in the chair to start with. From the moment she had been forced to admit defeat, things had fallen into a much calmer moment. You curled her hair while she busied herself by doing her makeup. Though you didn't complain, because she was the better one out of the two of you surrounding that, you questioned how the hell she could do it whilst you made her hair. 'Some can do it from the beginning' her answer had been, to which you threatened her to be quiet by saying you accidentally would burn her with the curling iron.

When you and Nat finally switched places, you felt untroubled as your heavy chest had become lighter. You would almost call it therapeutic, the way she combed your hair and put makeup on your face. However, when she said 'if you begin to cry now, the makeup will be ruined' you burst out laughing, the feeling of it being therapeutic gone. However, in the end, things had gone swiftly.

“Simple but elegant”, she stated, as she tapped your shoulder for you to examine your looks. As you opened your eyes, you immediately remember why you enjoyed Tony's parties.

“Right as you are”, you agreed.

“Go on and put on the dress now, then this”, she handed you the glossed lipstick she had grabbed from the table before shooing you away to fetch your dress and change. You chuckled at her, though a last pointed look from where she stood in her own fixed up glory, made you hurry into the bathroom.

While inside, you took your time to admire the work Nat had done with your hair and face. You would certainly not have been able to do such handiwork yourself, even if you had some skill. It was while carefully slipping into your dress, scared of destroying the garment with your makeup, you heard Nat’s voice from outside.

“She ain’t ready mister”, something ignited in your chest and you hurried to sip up the dress. Although, the moment you stepped into the main room, you knew it had been a hopeless thought that Bucky would've been the one standing at your door. Despite that, you couldn’t deny the slight disappointment when you saw blonde hair instead of brown.

“I’m ready, so speak for yourself”, you hid your feelings behind the remark when walking further into the room. It was when hearing your voice Nat turned to look at you, closely followed by Steve. A smirk pulled on the spy's lips, but it wasn’t her reaction which attracted your attention.

“Would you look at that”, his praise had been followed up by a whistle.

“Stop that, you’re gonna make a girl blush”, you waved your hand at the soldier who looked you up and down.

“Looking like that I have every right to”, a bashful smile followed and you could indeed feel your body heat up by Steves comment, as you came to stand with your teammates.

“Oh shush”, you lightly hit his arm, though as you began to draw your hand back, you were startled by Steve grasping it. Quizzically you peered up at him.

“I wanted to talk to you, before heading down”, he said. It was the slight narrow between his brows, the almost excusing tone before he even began, that made you understand what it was about. It was about Bucky.

“I leave you two to it then. See you there”, Nat understood the hint and walked out the door.

Although the door was kept open, both you and Steve stood inside your room. You looked at him, Tony had indeed gotten a good tailor for him. And Bucky. He’d chosen to wear a darker grey suit, white undershirt, a pair of shoes a shade slightly darker than the set itself. After doing this once over, you looked up at his face, the sad look more visible since Nat left you.

“You look good Steve, you’ll get some nice photos with the press”, you smiled, but he didn’t return it.

“Y/N don’t try and hide it”, he said and you felt your own smile drop, as well as your head. A sigh left you when you turned around, about to fetch your heels standing on the coffee table. Nonetheless, a gentle grip on your hand made you turn.

“I’m just going to get my heels if you don’t want me to go barefoot”, a smile twitched in the corner of his mouth and he let you go. While you turned around, he looked after you.

“Do you know he didn’t mean everything he said?” Steve noticed you gripped the heels tightly while sitting down on the couch.

“It sounded like he did”, you huffed sharply. Nevertheless your heated replay, Steve noticed your fingers trembled when you fastened the heels and how you chewed on your lip.

“The way you bite away your lipstick says otherwise”, he pointed it out and earned a look from you. However, the heat in it quickly faded.

“Steve, I don’t know if I’m able to do this”, you had thought back to why you were nervous from the beginning, the donation. That, together with Bucky knowing your past, seemed to crush you. You saw how Steve moved in the corner of your eye and looked up to watch him. It wasn't until he squatted down before you, his pants only letting him do so until a point where it looked mildly uncomfortable, your gaze stopped wandering and instead met his.

“I know you will, you’ve done it before”, he saw a protest was about to come, so he swiftly continued. “There’s a reason I’m here. First I’m sorry I haven’t come here to see you, I’ve been busy trying to get the fool to admit”, he sighed shaking his head before continuing “I wanted you to know that he understands he has done wrong, his stubborn ass just doesn’t want to confess it yet. He argues he has a reason to be angry…”

“And he does”, you cut him off, while glancing away momentarily. With a few blinks, a measure to avoid crying, you looked back to Steve, noticing he waited for your eyes to find his again before continuing.

“But at the same time, he knows he has no right to be. How you treated him is something he can’t see past, no matter how blind he is”, you laughed softly and at the sound, Steves sweet smile came forth. “So go and enjoy the night which happens because of you”, he urged softly and you shook your head, a smile adorning your face despite it.

“Sure, but I’ll do it merely so your pants don’t break, they weren’t made for squatting”.

“If that makes you come, then fine”, he laughed at your comment and raised himself from his position. Standing up, he offered you his arm and you couldn't but help but smile appreciatively at him.

Forever taglist: @flowerchild1216 @haven-in-writing @krystallynx @lancsnerd @thejamesoldier

Series taglist: @buckysforeverprincess

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