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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months

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Why Millennials aren’t leaving Tiktok

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW NIGHT (Mar 22) in TORONTO, then SUNDAY (Mar 24) with LAURA POITRAS in NYC, then Anaheim, and more!

The news that Gen Z users have abandoned Tiktok in such numbers that the median Tiktoker is a Millennial (or someone even older) prompted commentators to dunk on Tiktok as uncool by dint of having lost its youthful sheen:

https://www.garbageday.email/p/tiktok-millennials-turns

But "why are Gen Z kids leaving Tiktok?" is the wrong question. The right question is, why aren't Millennials leaving Tiktok? After all, we are living through the enshittocene, the great enshittening, in which every platform gets monotonically, irreversibly worse over time, and Tiktok is no exception:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

To understand why older users are stuck to Tiktok, we need to start with why younger users relentlessly seek out new platforms. To some extent, it's just down to youth's appetite for novelty, but that's only part of the story. To really understand why people come to – and leave – platforms, you have to understand switching costs.

"Switching costs" is the economists' term for everything you have to give up when you change products or services. Switching from Ios to Android probably means giving up a bunch of your apps and purchased media. Switching from an airline where you're a high-status frequent flier to another carrier means giving up on free checked bags and early boarding.

In an open market, rivals have lots of ways to lower these switching costs (it's an open secret that you can call an airline and say, "Hi, I'm a 33rd Order Mason on American Airlines, will you make me a Triple Platinum Diamond Sky-Baron if I switch to Delta?"). Of course, big incumbents hate this, and do everything they can to increase their switching costs, finding ways to impose high switching costs that punish disloyal consumers who have the temerity to go elsewhere.

With social media, lock-in comes for free, thanks to the "collective action problem." Getting people to agree on a given course of action is hard, and as you add more people to the picture, the problem gets harder. It's hard enough to get half a dozen people in your group-chat to agree on where to go for dinner or what board-game to play. But once you're reliant on a social media service to stay in touch with friends, relatives around the world, customers, communities (say, rare disease support groups), and coordination (like organizing your kid's little league car-pool), the problem becomes nearly insoluble. Maybe you can convince your overseas relatives to switch to a Signal group, but can you do the same for your small business's customers, or your old high-school pals?

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/

Taken together, switching costs and collective action problems make platforms "sticky," and sticky platforms inevitably enshittify.

Platforms, after all, generate value. They connect end-users with each other (say, little league parents) and they connect end-users to business customers (you and your small business's customers). That value needs to be parceled out among end users, business customers, and the platform's shareholders. A platform can make life better for business customers at its end users' expense by increasing the number of ads (hello, Youtube!), and it can make life better for its shareholders at its business customers' expense by decreasing the share of ad revenue given to publishers or performers (oh, hello again, Youtube!).

From a platform's perspective, the ideal state is one in which end users and business customers get no value from the platform, because it's all being captured by the platform's shareholders. But if Youtube interrupted every 30 seconds of video for ten minutes of ads and paid the video creators nothing, both users and creators would ditch the platform – and advertisers would follow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dab8sKg8Ko8

So platforms seek an equilibrium: "what is the least value we apportion to end-users and business customers without triggering their departure?" Maybe that means giving more value to end-users (for example, keeping Uber fares low by suppressing wages), or to business-customers (crowding more ads into your social media feed).

Every business – including brick-and-mortar, non-digitized ones – wants to find some kind of equilibrium between the value going to its suppliers, its customers and its owners, but digital businesses have an advantage here: digital systems are flexible in ways that analog, hard-goods businesses are not. Digital businesses can alter pricing, payouts and other dynamics from moment to moment – second to second – and make a different offer to every supplier and customer. They have a bunch of knobs, and they can twiddle them at will:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Well, not quite at will. Businesses face constraints on their twiddling. If they get too greedy, users or business customers might weigh the cost of staying against the switching costs and decide it's not worth it. But the more expensive – the more painful – a platform can make leaving, the more pain they can inflict on the people who stay.

In other words, there's two ways to keep a customer or supplier's business: you can make a better service so they won't want to leave, or you can make leaving the service so painful that they stay even if you mistreat them.

There's three ways a digital company can make things worse for their customers and users without losing their business.

First, they can eliminate competition (think of Mark Zuckerberg buying Instagram to recapture the users who'd fled Facebook to escape his poor management):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Second, they can capture their regulators and avoid punishment for trampling their suppliers' or users' legal rights (think of how Amazon has raised the price of everything we buy, both on- and off Amazon, through its "most favored nation" deals):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

Third, they can use IP law to prevent competitors from modifying their services to claw back some of that value (think of how Apple used legal threats to block an Android version of Imessage, blocking Apple customers from having private conversations that included non-Apple customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Companies can't just use this tricks at will, of course. Antitrust laws can block companies from making anticompetitve acquisitions or mergers. Regulators can punish companies for cheating their customers, workers and users. Technologists can come up with clever ways of modding or reconfiguring existing services with "interoperable" add-ons that let users bargain for better treatment by refusing to accept worse:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Day in, day out, the decision-makers at tech companies test these constraints, twisting the knobs that shift value away from users to shareholders. Their bosses and boards motivate them with "KPIs" that dangle the promise of huge bonuses and promotions for any manager who successfully enshittifies part of the company's products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Decades of pro-corporate, pro-monopoly policy has loosened those knobs. 40 years of lax antitrust meant that companies had a lot of leeway to buy or merge with rivals – that's changing today, but it's tough sledding:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

As sectors grew more concentrated, they found it easier to capture their regulators, so that they no longer fear punishment for price-gouging, spying, or wage-theft, so applying the same amount of torque to the "break the law" knob cranks it a lot further:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Once you've captured your regulators, you can aim them at your competitors. A monopoly-friendly policy environment has transformed IP law into a bully's charter, allowing powerful companies to strangle would-be competitors who dare to offer their customers tools to shield themselves from enshittification, like scrapers, ad-blockers and alternative clients. Big companies can crank the enshittification knob all the way over and know that smaller rivals knobs won't turn at all:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

At one point, bosses faced one more constraint on knob-twiddling: their workforce. Many tech workers genuinely cared about their users' welfare, something bosses encouraged as a sneaky trick to get techies to put in long hours without exercising their leverage by quitting rather than destroying their lives to meet arbitrary deadlines. These workers would fearlessly slap their bosses' hands when they reached for the enshittification knob, threatening to quit rather than allowing the products they'd given so much for to be enshittified. Today, after hundreds of thousands of tech layoffs, tech workers are far less like to challenge their bosses' right to twiddle, and far more likely to get fired if they try:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

All this means that tech bosses don't have to change their approach at all, and yet, their services will grow steadily worse. The boss who twiddles the enshittification knob in exactly the same way as he did a year or a decade ago will find it turning much further, because his customers are locked into his platform, his regulators won't protect them, the same regulators will stop his competitors' attempts at countertwiddling, and his workers fear losing their jobs too much to speak up for their users.

That's the contagion that produced the enshittocene: the forces that constrained companies (competition, regulation, self-help and labor – all melted away, allowing every company's MBA-poisoned knob-twiddling leaders to shamelessly caress their knobs with every hour that God sends:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

Which is why people want to leave platforms. When a platform loses its users, those users have weighed the switching costs against the pain of staying and decided that it's better to bear those costs than to stay.

So why have Tiktok's younger users found the costs too high to bear, and why have their elders remained stuck to the platform?

For that, we have to look at the unique characteristics of young people – characteristics that transcend the lazy cliche that kids are easily bored, fickle novelty-seekers who hop from one service to another with unquenchable restlessness.

Whether or not kids are novelty-seekers, they are, fundamentally, a disfavored minority. They want to do things that the platforms don't want them to do – like converse without being overheard by authority figures, including their parents and their schools (also: cops and future employers, though kids may not be thinking about them as much).

In other words, kids pay intrinsically lower switching costs than adults, because a platform will always do less for them than it will for grownups. This is a characteristic kids share with other supposedly technophilic, novelty-seeking "early adopters," from sex-workers to terrorists, from sexual minorities to trolls, from political dissidents to fascists. For those groups, the cost of mastering a new technology and assembling a community around it is always more likely to be worth bearing than it would be for people who are well-served by existing tools:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/21/early-adopters/#sex-tech

Pornographers didn't jump on home video because of its superiority as a medium for capturing flesh-tones. Home video was a good porn medium because it was easier to discreetly get into the hands of porn consumers, who could, in turn, discreetly view it. The audience for porn in the privacy of your living room is larger than the audience for porn that you can only watch if you're willing to be seen marching into a dirty movie theater.

Every new technology is popularized by a mix of disfavored groups and neophiles, who normalize and refine it – and yes, infuse it with their countercultural coolth – until it becomes easy enough to use to become mainstream. As more normies drift into the new system, the switching costs associated with leaving the old system declines. It gets easier and easier to find the people and services you want in the new realm, and harder and harder to find them in the old one.

This is why tech platforms have historically experienced sudden collapse: the platform that gets more valuable and harder to leave as it accumulates users gets less valuable and easier to leave as users depart:

https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/12/05/what-if-failure-is-the-plan.html

If you're a Gen Z kid on Tiktok, you experience the same enshittification as your Millennial elders. But you also experience an additional cost to staying: as late-arriving adult authority figures become more fluent in the platform, they are more able to observe your use of it, and punish you for conduct that you used to get away with.

And if you're a Millennial who isn't leaving Tiktok, it's not just that you experience the same enshittification as those departing Gen Z kids – you also face higher switching costs if you go. The older you get, the more complex your social connections grow. A Gen Z kid in middle school doesn't have to worry about losing touch with their high-school buddies if they switch platforms (they haven't gone to high school yet – and they see their middle school friends in person all the time, giving them a side-channel to share information about who's leaving Tiktok and where they're headed to next). Middle-schoolers don't have to worry about coordinating little league car-pools or losing access to a rare disease support group.

In other words: younger people leave old platforms earlier because they have more to gain by leaving; and older people leave old platforms later because they have more to lose by leaving.

This is why Facebook is filled with Boomers. Yes, their kids bolted for the exits to avoid having their parents (or grandparents) wading into their sexual, social and professional lives. But the reason the Boomers were late joining younger users' Facebook exodus – or the reason they never joined it – is that they stand to lose more by going. Facebook deliberately cultivated this dynamic, for example, by creating a photo hosting service designed to entice users into uploading their family photos while disguising how hard it would be to take those photos with them if they left:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

The irony here is that tech has intrinsically low switching costs. All other things being equal, a new platform can always build a bridge to ease the passage of users from the old one. There's no (technical) reason that moving to Mastodon, or Bluesky, or any other platform should mean cutting ties with the people who stayed behind.

A combination of voluntary interoperability (where old platforms offer APIs to allow new services to connect with them), mandatory interop (where governments force tech companies to offer APIs) and adversarial interop (where new companies hack together their own API with reverse-engineering, scraping, bots, and other guerrilla tactics) would hypothetically allow users to hop between networks as easily as you change phone carriers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go

Tech platforms tend to offer APIs when they're getting started (to ease the inward passage of new users) then shut them down after they attain dominance (locking the door behind those users). The EU is tinkering with mandatory APIs through the Digital Markets Act (though bafflingly, they're starting with encrypted messaging rather than social media). Restoring adversarial interoperability will require extensive legal reform, which is getting started through Right to Repair laws:

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/03/13/oregon-passes-right-to-repair-law-apple-lobbied-to-kill/

The people who are stranded on social media platforms shouldn't be mistaken for uncool, aging technophobes. They're not stubborn, they're stranded. Like the elders who can't afford to leave a dying town after the factory shuts down and the young people move away, these people are locked in. They need help evacuating – a place to go and a path to get there.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/21/involuntary-die-hards/#evacuate-the-platformsr

#pluralistic

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redux-iterum · 1 month

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Charred Legacy: Prologue

(AO3 counterpart here.)

The thing Russetfur hated about the Aulmir was how overwhelming it was.

She was grateful for its bounty, of course, and the blessed kindness of the occasional human bringing out fresh scraps, but it all came with an undercurrent of noise—buzzing worse than an angered wasp’s nest, clicks and clacks and incoherent shouts, all clashing into each other to create a uniquely irritating cacophony that grated on Russetfur’s sensitive ears. That was to say nothing of the scents, crammed into each other’s trails and knotting together so thickly there was no chance of picking out a specific smell; and that still ignored the lights, those awful miniature suns of cars and houses and streets that created shadows in useless places and lit up what could be perfect paths to sneak around on. And forget the deluge of humans, and dogs, and loners, and…

It was all just so much.

But, she reflected as she crouched with her nose just behind the edge of a flat rooftop, tolerable or not, she had her title as deputy for a reason, and it certainly wasn’t for whining about scouting missions in the Aulmir. This was her first outing since coming back to the position after having her kits forced her to take a break and let her father replace her, and she wasn’t about to disappoint him or Blackstar with a bad attitude and an early departure because she wasn��t comfortable.

Then again, by the prickling hair along the backs of two of her followers and the slitted pupils of the third, perhaps she could find some comradery in a complaint.

Focus. She returned her attention to the grey, flat ground beneath their low roof, currently host to a small cluster of loners that had just turned into the alleyway and were approaching a broad-shouldered and broad-bellied tom, mostly white with some black scattered on his back and head, reclined on a box. The loners still spoke to each other, just loud enough for a ShadowClanner’s broad ears to pick up.

“It’s just from so far away, y’know?” a tabby said, his good eye darting back and forth while the other pointed lazily down. “Rumors swell up real fast the further they get from their old source. And it could be fake.”

“Kemerain* don’t make things up for fun,” the tortoiseshell he was speaking to said curtly. “I trust their word more than I trust some of my neighbors.”

A blue-grey cat just behind the tortoiseshell shook their head. “You’re crazy. Any moron that flits about having games with foxes and crows isn’t a reliable source.”

They’d come within a body-length of the big tom at this point, and conversation stopped so that the tortoiseshell could crouch; less like a bow of respect and more like an animal bunching up its body, afraid to be hit.

The tom grunted and hauled himself up into a sitting position. His voice was rough and deep. “They’re right this time. We’ve seen them.”

The tabby jolted in place. “No fooling?”

“No fooling,” said the tom. Somehow, the words were much more dangerous coming out of his mouth. “Ain’t close, but they’re around.”

The tortoiseshell’s torn ears perked up about as well as they could. “What’s that mean for us, then? What’s our move?”

“Our move,” the tom said slowly, “is nothing. We stay put, let them do their thing. They ain’t our problem.” His green eyes narrowed just a fraction. “Yet.”

“Don’t like that ‘yet’,” the tabby mumbled. “Don’t like it.”

The blue cat came up to his shoulder and nudged him a little harder than they had to. “Easy. They’ve got plenty of things to keep them busy out there. We can just sit back and wait.” They looked to the big tom. “That’s about our plan of action, yeah?”

The tom nodded once.

Above the group, now chattering to each other in surprise and intrigue, Russetfur’s ears were pinned back against her head. She flicked her tail and carefully crawled backwards, her Clanmates following suit. Once they were a good nine steps away from the edge of the roof, she turned to them.

“What do they speak of?” Fernshade, a brown tabby, whispered. “We ought to listen more…”

“We will.” Russetfur gave her a reassuring blink. “I want you and Volewhisker to check the other side of this roof. See if there are more loners who can tell us more as we listen in.” At her and Volewhisker’s nods, she now turned to the largest by far of the patrol, a big grey tom. “Bouldernose, do they speak sense to you?”

The former loner drew in a breath, shut his eyes, and opened them again on the exhale, the pupils still slits. “Frankly, ma’am, I don’t know what they’re talking about, but that big one… I know him, and he’s got keen whiskers for things all the way on the far side of town. If he’s saying this…” His mouth twitched sideways. “…whatever it is, is true, I believe him. He’s not a liar.”

Russetfur hummed and gave a firm nod to her patrol. “We continue to eavesdrop, then. Bouldernose, with me.”

Volewhisker and Fernshade immediately turned and trotted off for different sides of the building. Russetfur gestured for Bouldernose to follow her, and together they resumed their position above the alleyway, where conversation was still going on, though quieter.

“I can tell you this,” Bouldernose muttered to his deputy. “Whatever’s got their attention, it is not a good thing.”

Russetfur said nothing, but her tail’s bristling fur agreed with him.

---

Far across the land, in the hollow atop the moorland, Rookstar sat with his eyes shut, forcibly keeping them from screwing up tightly.

Ryenose and Rushtail were in the center of camp, huddled over remains that had brought nausea to even the experienced leader’s set-in-stone gut. The apprentices whispered together in a disturbed hush, clustered into one side of camp, occasionally being gently reminded to keep their voices down when one spoke too loudly. The hollow was unsettled and uneasily quiet otherwise; a few murmurs of apology to the family and well-wishes to the tattered corpse’s departed soul dotted the night, and that was it.

Uneven pawsteps alerted Rookstar to open his eyes, taking care to look directly at his limping deputy as he approached.

“Think the foxes will take him?” The black tom sat down beside Rookstar, looking squat and stout compared to his overstretched and bony leader. “Body’s rather in a poor state.”

Holding his breath for a moment, Rookstar turned his gaze to the mess in the center of camp. He managed to push past the wave of ill in his gut and responded calmly. “They will. Meat is meat.”

Deadfoot grunted.

Rookstar took the opportunity to look away and back to Deadfoot. “Getting it to the carrefour will be rough.”

Deadfoot grunted again.

Things fell silent for some time. Even the apprentices had quieted down, now leaning against each other and, like Rookstar, turning their attention anywhere but the body.

The old molly currently staring down at her son’s remains finally turned her head up and looked to Rookstar and Deadfoot. Croaking a bit with emotion, she asked, “Can we take him now? I don’t…” She shook her head ever-so-slightly. “I don’t want to see this anymore. Him.”

Her living kit, Rushtail, gently placed his broad paw on hers. “Stay here. We’ll handle it.”

Steeling his stomach, Rookstar stood up and nodded once. Ryenose’s eyes went to her living son, her dead son, and her leader before she shut them and rose to her feet, backing a few steps away. Rushtail twisted around to touch his nose to her forehead when she stopped.

“I’ll help.” Thrushwing, a grey-brown molly, approached the remains. “That fine, sir?”

“Fine and well,” Rookstar said. He and Deadfoot joined the younger warriors. Deadfoot and Rushtail maneuvered to take the front half, while the broader Thrushwing hoisted up the back and Rookstar stood beside her, ready to catch their end by the tail if it started to fall.

Ryenose said nothing as they left, but when Rookstar glanced back, her faded eyes were wet and dim.

They were out of sight of camp before one of the patrol spoke, and it was Thrushwing who broke the silence.

“Tell you what,” she said. “That scent on him makes sense. Explains the missing prey.”

“And the shreds where food’s buried.” Rushtail tilted his head. “How many d’you think there are?”

Rookstar didn’t respond. His ears, usually facing backwards, were now perked, and his eyes were narrowed as he considered this.

“Blended scents and mud mixed in,” Deadfoot said, as the patrol went at a slow pace to let him keep up. “Could be one, could be nine.”

“However many, with respect,” Thrushwing said, “we ought to tell the other Clans.”

Rookstar looked back at her, his voice low. “Next Gathering is soon. We will.”

Thrushwing hummed shortly.

Silence fell over the patrol. They continued on their way, the hedge-line of the Barn steadily approaching. Rookstar could practically hear everyone’s minds storming as they thought over the events of the early evening – the discovery, the grisly return to camp, the mourning.

The implications.

Rookstar’s stomach was taut with the effort to acknowledge their grim load without being ill. Even in all his years of experience, this was a bit beyond him. And to think that it could happen again, to anyone, not just WindClan…

They all had to know. The Gathering was a few nights away.

Hopefully it could wait that long.

*"Kemerain": Plural for “kemera”, meaning “a neutral colony of cats”. Can mean a stationary or traveling group.

#warrior cats #redux iterum #iterum #prologue #chapter #book three #arc one #charred legacy

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slashingdisneypasta · 2 months

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This idea/question popped into my head last night and I think it might intrigued you too. Or at least it'll be fun to think about.

So we know that in the Slasher AU, Rena is dead and Ryan and Kingston are still running their L.V mafia. But what if they were a bunch of slashers? Whether they replace the weasels as the Slasher Villains or they are Las Vegas' group of killers? How much different do you think they and their relationships would be (not just with each other but other people, like Maya and Kingstons parents)? What kind of irl slashers would you compare them to?

If they are slashers alongside the weasels... Ohhh boy Shiny, Poppy, and Lottie are in for a shit show when they get on the road, I imagine.

SLASHER AU SLASHER AU SLASHER AU-

Okay so I saw this and had to get up, fill a hot water bottle and get comfy so I could respond. I'm ready now, here we go.

Slasher!Rena is Freddy down to a T. She's an orphan, she's a Huge Tease, she's terrifyingly cunning, and she'd absolutely come back for her daughter just to use her when she needs her. So Rena's basically herself, but with a taste for bloodshed. As opposed to King and Ryan, Rena probably always had a little bloodlust in her, from childhood; I can see her being bullied when she was little (she was a lanky, awkward thing who looked just like her brother- they called her a boy, boyish, masculine. Said she would never be pretty; that kinda thing. As well as 'poor' and 'orphan'. She and Ry still get adopted by King's parents in this au but that doesn't change the fact they aren't her real mum and dad, and children are cruel) and hating everyone around her (Except Ryan and King). She started hating guys, particularly, even more after she hit puberty and SUDDENLY!! everyone liked her.

As she grew up she became more and more the character we know- addicted to drama. Except its even worse, because... well, she's not satisfied with a little sex. Yes, thats great, but she starts to think that if she can kill... and then go to the funeral, too,... t h a t would be perfect. And of course, she targets kids she grew up with and their families. (And at this point, she's the most popular woman in the little australian farm town. She knows everyone, she's friends with everyone- So she has access, to everyone.)

After they move to Vegas, america's capital of bad mistakes, Rena really hits her perfect stride. Everyone there is her puppet.

(And *cough* I have this thought where, after Poppy/Shiny/and Lottie come to Vegas and meet the Roo's, and Lottie naively thinks she's finally found a parent who wants her (Rena's spinning it like Smartass took her and hid her from her mother- which we both know is nothing but lies), Rena digs into her daughter. She finds out everything that happened, convincing Lottie with gentle motherly touches and warm openness to tell her all her secrets. Then, for fun, Rena sells Lottie out to Greasy)

Slasher!Kingston is Chucky for sure XD Oh! And also Foxy and Stu!! Kingston still seems to think pretty clearly (Unlike, say, Otis or Baby. Or Tiffany. Or Billy.), he k n o w s the difference between right and wrong, he can explain ethics, but he just doesn't care ('wrong's the fun one'). Kingston basically started developing a bloodlust after Rena started killing. He was always pretty popular in school (AFL star) and in town; he was never bullied, but he's always up for trying something new! King's a bit of a thrill seeker (He drove before he had a licence way over the speed limit, he drank before it was legal, he smoked, he did drugs, he was up for really any dangerous stunt, etc), so when he stumbles upon his girlfriend with blood on her pretty face and his old football coach laying still on the ground, he's basically like... 'oh is this what we're doing now?? Well- shit- I'm down! Whadawe do with this??' *gesturing to the body of the man who kindly taught him football all through highschool* Who's next??'

And its not personal for him at all like it is with Rena, he'll kill anyone. Doesn't matter. He has very little in the way of empathy.

King just jumps on board immediately- following Rena's lead but quickly ~flourishing~ on his own. And, being a thrill seeker, he almost blows their cover so so many times! Rena gets so annoyed 😅 She has tied him to a chair with military grade knots through the night before on multiple occasions because they need to lay low now goddamnit!

As for his parents... he would absolutely kill them, no guilt no shame. He doesn't want to, he's not gonna go out of his way to do it (They're his mum and dad! He loves them, in his way), but if they found out about his extracurriculars and they started creating problems then he will shoot them in the heads.

Slasher!Ryan, true to his character, was never a really cruel person (Just complicit)... until Maya** was killed. So, I'd liken him to... maybe... Needy? From Jennifer's Body? After Jennifer and Chip were killed, she lost a l l semblance of being the 'good guy'. She went basically monotone, and just... pissed. And thats definitely Ryan (In the original universe too, but its definitely more violent in this one). Ryan definitely also has a mindless, wrathful Michael Myers thing about him.

He wants to destroy whoever did it, whoever took Maya away. But once its done... he still doesn't feel better. Ryan will never feel better. He's lost something very important inside him, he doesn't care anymore, and it will not ever go back to the way it was. He's like a mindless soldier for King and Rena to use as they will. (To their credit- they do try not to treat him that way though. Thats their brother, who's been with them no matter what since the start, and... they love him. He's their soft spot!! But sometimes they have to use him.)

Ryan goes into dissociative states where he will hurt anyone near him, and King has to hold him back (Which is a struggle- Ryan's stronger then any of them) while Rena forces a pill down his throat; covering his mouth until it goes down and he goes to sleep.

** Maya did not know about Kings and Rena's killings when she was alive. Ryan kept it from her, and though King made some odd jokes sometimes around her, and she might have had some suspicions... she never outright found out.

#i hope all that makes sense!! 😅

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squid-ink-symphony · 4 months

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ok time to talk about my fav agent ships bcuz i am v normal (also i am a multishipper so i like a lot of stuff)

First off: 4 x 8!!!! my beloveds!!! and they were roommates! i see this sort of a mirror of pearlina in a way since 4 would show 8 around and 4 is also a chaos gremlin(but more competent than pearl in a lot of ways). and 8 rlly looks up to marina i think(pearl too ofc) and i like the idea of marina teasing her like "wow u also have a short squid gf?". also just like.. their dynamic is so everything to me. both of them are so gender like 4 is a boy who is kind of a girl. and 8 is a girl who is kind of a boy. do you see my vision? they are made for each other. and i can see them being like pearlina but in a new era since 8 doesnt have to worry about telling 4 shes an octoling. so both of them can get to know each other and share their cultures in a way that pearl and marina couldnt up until post octo expansion. just like THE PARALLELS OK???? and i dont just like them cuz i also like pearlina. i like them for their own unique dynamic. they just fit together so well. i think they compliment each others strengths and weaknesses while also not being so different that they cant get along.

next: 3 x neo 3. i thought 4 x 8 was underrated... but this??? ig its just cuz 3 has more popular ships and neo 3 is so new. i know a lot of ppl view them more as a mentor situation w neo 3 being much younger. but in my mind i just cannot picture the agents hanging out w 3, 8, and 4 all being late teens/early 20s and then just..... 16 yo neo 3.. it does work sometimes if u view them as like a younger sibling or just the younger one of the group. or even just like.. there. i can see them as an apprenitce of sorts to 3. and thats cool and all but since im not that young and i project on my agents when i play as them in my mind neo 3 is in the 17-19 range. but i see them as 18 specifically. so 18 yo neo 3 and 21 yo 3. and in my mind 3 is kinda silly(have u seen them in splat1?) but trying to be professional and takes a look at neo 3 w all their terrible looking ripped up clothes and questionable hygiene and scavenger swag and goes "how could i not be attracted to that?". and 3 tries not to show it cuz like.. this is their new recruit??? and yet 3 finds themselves going easy on neo 3 andbeing rlly sweet. and callie or marie catches on and probably teases them about it in private. and callie tries to play matchmaker or see if neo 3 likes 3. and on the other end..... neo 3 is probably distracted when they first meet 3. but when they are taking a break at the camp hanging out w lil buddy they finally notice 3. and neo 3 finally takes a look at them. and its like?? not love at first sight like it was w 3. but neo 3 likes them. no offense to agents 1 and 2, but neo 3 immediately lowkey distrusted them since they looked too "pristine" if that makes any sense? so neo 3 sees 3 and is like!!! !!!!! this is my new bestie!!!! and starts becoming attached to 3. and so neo 3 comes to bother 3 at their seat and talk to them and 3 gets so flustered but doesnt show it and only 1 and 2 can tell. and they continue to poke fun at 3. and lowkey try to hint to neo 3. but neo 3 is a brick wall when it comes to sublety. but then eventually they realize they like 3. so they gather a bunch of cool rocks and shiny things off the floor and walk up to 3 and go "here take this and also please be my partner" and 3 is so in love. and they flirt constantly and both of them hate taking showers and have to be reminded to . and also little buddy is their new child (jokingly. i see lil buddy as neo 3s younger sibling) i can see neo 3 coming up to 3 and flirting w them and 3 flirting back and them getting distracted and aro marie coming in to jokingy make fun of them and tell them to get back to work. and when the rest of the agents meet neo 3 they would jokingly get mad that neo 3 gets special treatment from 3.

anyway.... also 3 x 4 x 8 x neo 3..... it is a top tier poly ship. all of them. i think 3, 4, and 8 would get to know each other and date after octo expansion takes place. and then when 3 has to deal w splat 3s story mode they meet neo 3 and fall in love and they meet back up w 4 and 8 and is like yooo..... uhh... what if i just.... expanded the polycule? and the other 2 were like ur literally so swagless (but we love u) how did u do that? and then 3 brings out neo 3 and the other are just like.... oh god theres another one. anyway i think they would get along w neo 3 too and maybe end up dating them as well

ALS MY MOST OBSCURE SHIP YET 4 x neo 3. this one is so good, like both of them are chaotic and goofy. yet 4 is a nerd and neo 3 is probably a war criminal. so like.. opposite sides of the insanity spectrum. they would hang out and neo 3 would ask how bombs are made and 4 would explain it thinking its just curiousity and then look over to see neo 3 contrusting a bomb out of everything around them. and its not like neo 3 is dumb. they are also smart just like.. not in a geeky book smarts way like 4 probably is. more like ... idk how to describe it but different? anyway their dynamic would be SO good. you just have to trust me on this.

#splatoon #splatoon 3 #agent 4 #splatoon agents #agent 3 #neo agent 3 #agent 8 #agent 32 #agent 12 #agent 288 #agent 96

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secretgamergirl · 9 months

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"No it's cool, it was reclaimed."

So the other day, just kinda trying to follow a conversation some people were having on Discord, I saw the topic of Nazi symbols rear its... quite literally ugly head, as people were trying to have a civil little chat with someone who really wanted to see people posting that one Nazi frog. Short answer is no, that's still not OK, there is never going to be a time when that is OK, and the fact that you're even testing the waters is about as big of a red flag as they come, but let's take a moment to articulate why.

As anyone who's been following me for any length of time should know, along with anyone who's just been dealing with violent threats and intimidation from Nazis over the past decade give or take, there's this frog, see. Really, a couple variations on it. Nazis just absolutely love using this frog as profile images, making it into response macros in chats and spamming it, putting it into little forum signatures, putting it on lapel pins, just generally displaying it like it's their corporate sponsor or something. How this came to be the symbol or choice for this I'll eventually circle back around to, but first let's talk about why they do this, and why it's important to take action when you see it.

All nazis start out as people, just like you or me, except they're just sort of bad at being a person. Some combination of not developing proper social skills or morality, failing at everything they try, and failing to recognize how crap like how the "hero" always "gets the girl" in movies doesn't reflect how reality actually works leaves them all bitter and self-pitying and receptive to Nazi recruitment, and from there they slowly get indoctrinated until there's nothing left of them but a hollowed out husk of a human being who will focus on trying to ruin or end the lives of any normal functional human being they have pitched at them as "the enemy." Which tends to be anyone sufficiently marginalized by society that attacking them won't result in the sort of general outrage from onlookers that they have to worry about getting their teeth kicked in in response.

Because they're miserable losers trying to make themselves feel big by targeting only the most defenseless people they can find, they always need the psychological security of knowing people around them have their backs. Ideally other nazis, but you know, in a pinch, it's also good to know about people who are maybe sympathetic to them, or at least see them as harmless, or are conflict averse enough to not intervene if they get rowdier, or hate some of the same people they hate, etc. And of course if they just stood up and shouted, "Hey everybody! I'm a Nazi! How do you all feel about that!?" then unless they happened to be in a super pro-nazi room, the likely and correct response would quiet likely be that Nazi being absolutely mobbed by decent people and faced with justified violence until such point as there was no longer a Nazi in the room.

So, symbols it is! Want to see if people around you are on your side without calling too much attention to yourself? Have some symbols you can flash in a crowd that probably won't mean anything to anyone but the people in your in group. Want to know if a place you're gonna hang around in is onto what an evil piece of garbage you and people like you are? There's more recognized symbols for that. Want to know if they're happy to have you around? There's universally well-known ones for that.

Now obviously it's not like Nazis keep some sort of formal hierarchical list of all their symbols in some sort of central repository. It's all a lot more ad hoc, with new ones getting introduced and tested out and all that, and it's also not like all Nazis talk to each other so some of these can be pretty local, or just for a single event even. Like if a bunch of Nazis are planning to crash a pride parade in Wyoming one year maybe when they're trying to organize that someone goes "hey everyone wear a white polo shirt and a set of mirror shades so we recognize each other" and yeah, on that particular day, at that particular event, polo shirts and mirror shades are Nazi symbols. They probably aren't going to continue being seen as such past that event, unless maybe someone records them beating some queer people to death and shouting the 14 words or something and inspiring other Nazis planning other crap to copy that look, but you know, after seeing that go down you probably wouldn't want to walk around Wyoming with a white polo and mirror shades the next day. Oh and of course if their whole big plan boils down to all of three people dressed up the same way lost in a crowd and not finding each other, or running into someone who caught wind of their planning and beaten down, yeah that looks really not gonna take off as the new Nazi fashion.

The real point I'm making here though is it's not like there's some sort of Nazi brand manager really sweating over the creation of new Nazi symbols and distributing them and getting everyone properly kitted out with them. It's organic, it's shifting, and if a particular symbol gets more and more recognized by other Nazis on a more global scale, or gets recognized more and more by normal people as a Nazi symbol, usage of that one is going to just natural shift to the sort of contexts where they're comfortable being a lot more open with it. Which in turn means if the average person recognizes something as a Nazi symbol, it's a particularly bad one and seeing it displayed is a sign of imminent danger.

All that having been said, let's get back to that ugly Nazi frog. That one is a SUPER well-recognized Nazi symbol today. Like if a Nazi wants to have absolutely no subtlety at all, they're probably still going to just straight up fly the Nazi flag or wear a red armband with a swastika on it, but IMMEDIATELY below that on the latter we have the damn frog. At this point seeing that thing might be a bigger indicator that a Nazi has shown up to throw down than seeing someone fly the Confederate flag, and that one's literally a red flag symbolizing a readiness to go to war on the side of white supremacy.

Personally speaking, as someone Nazis have been pretty vocal for some time about wanting to see dead, and not even just in a broad categorical sense, I see any of the above, I am in immediate fight or flight mode, and I am going to take whatever steps feel prudent for my life and safety. What those are going to be depend on context, but one way or another I'm not going to share space with someone so clearly broadcasting their desire to see me dead, and we are not going to have a discussion about my stance. If you are present, you should have my back here, if you are responsible for the venue someone is flashing this hate symbol in, you have a moral obligation to remove the offending Nazi. Like I know in general we have a societal problem where most people in charge of moderation duties were taught completely wrong, but hopefully the "Nazi bar story" has been circulating around well enough for people to finally be on the same page about this.

Returning to this conversation I walked in on the other day, someone I'm forced by the facts of this anecdote to assume was a Nazi shows up in this server that I suppose I'd give a C- on moderation when it comes to this (the Nazis who eventually show up do eventually all get the boot, but the people doing the booting tend to be frustratingly slow in strapping the boot on) just sort of out of the blue and passionately objecting to people's objections at seeing that frog. Safe to assume I got here late and missed a deployment and deletion of said. But the main argument this person was going with was that the Nazi frog "had been totally reclaimed" and trying to compare it to "the OK symbol."

So... OK, let's knock out the sidetrack first I guess. Nazis, especially ones with a 4chan background, are absolutely OBSESSED with doing these "false flag operations," where they try to frame one group of people by pretending to be them and get some other group of people to mindlessly attack them. To be fair they had one absolutely massive success with this, getting Nazi crap back into general public view by pretending to be angry about something involving video games a decade ago (again, unless you're REAL new here, we've covered this plenty), but almost always failing to get things off the ground, or only catching enough attention to generate maybe an article or two about their sad little stunt. One of these a couple years back was an effort to convince people that the "OK" symbol (you know, where you touch your thumb and pointer finger and splay the rest out) was a "secret nazi symbol" and... really the whole thing was so poorly thought out it's hard to even follow the logic. I assume the goal was to get people who kept tabs on Nazi activities to start violently attacking anyone who used this long-established gesture that things are going well, thinking it was always and exclusively some secret signifier of hate, or something? In practice I don't think most people have any awareness this was a thing, and the people who do were just the Nazis absolutely failing to make it happen, and people like me monitoring hate groups watching a bunch of prominent Nazis make asses of themselves trying to make an alternative to a thumbs up look sinister on cameras for like maybe a week. There's no "symbol being reclaimed" here there's just a poorly thought out prank failing to get off the ground.

This of course does not compare in any way to the frog, which again, legitimately is at this point a broadly recognized Nazi symbol with no other meaning attached to it, displayed explicitly to intimidate targets and establish whether Nazis are welcome in a space. So the notion that it has been "reclaimed" is absolutely ludicrous, but also I have to take a moment to ponder what that would even mean.

Like, the first thing that comes to my mind when we talk about "reclaiming" is the word "queer." There was a period in, what, the 1970s? where if you heard the word "queer" it was almost certainly being shouted by a bigot in the same way you'd hear someone now deploying a certain three letter slur starting with an F... which honestly had taken over the role as go-to slur by the start of the '80s, and really nobody was particularly saying "queer" with any real regularity besides bigots too old and out of touch to even stay current on their hate speech by the time we got to the big ol' social movement from the people who'd had it shouted at them to do a whole international series of demonstrations with people marching through the streets of major cities shouting "We're here! We're queer! Get used to it!" in a way that I'm pretty sure is so thoroughly burned into our collective memory that I really shouldn't need to explain this to anyone.

And of course since then it's grown into this big ol' catch-all umbrella term, because every other term we have for queer people is weirdly specific and plenty of things aren't otherwise covered, and this is a pretty natural outgrowth for a term that originally just meant kinda meant "atypical" and was tossed around for a century or so to refer to anyone who wasn't both cis and straight before the terms "cis" and "straight" had really caught on, and not always in a negative light. So yeah we took this term that was frankly super handy to have as a neutral discriptor for a broad group of people dealing with bigotry and reclaimed it from people specifically using it in an explicitly hateful context.

So the two things that would have to happen to "reclaim" the Nazi frog would be it no longer being so strongly associated with hate and violence, which, yeah, that has not happened, and no effort is being made to make that happen, and then the people who it was weaponized against would start using it again as their own symbol before Nazis corrupted it.

But, you know, for THAT to be popular, it would have to have originally been a symbol used by the people being targeted with it. So, broadly and in no particular order, queer people, particularly trans people, Jews, people with disabilities, women, particularly those not actively onboard with being Nazi brood mares with no rights of any sort, anyone who isn't white, and anyone else who understands that Nazis are evil, dangerous, and must be eradicated. And uh... that's kinda just most people? Not really a single particular group with a need to rally behind a symbol, nor is there any subgroup within that that has ever, in any way, used the Nazi frog to represent anything.

Where did that frog even come from before it became a Nazi symbol anyway? Well, for a good bit it was one of the symbols people used to indicate that they were a 4chan poster, but... OK we already covered the Nazi bar thing. 4chan is absolutely "a Nazi bar." It's openly welcomed Nazis forever, more or less since it was founded, they use the aforementioned three letter F-slur like a piece of punctuation. I've shared some pretty strong thoughts on the site and its relationship to Nazis before, and there's a pretty strong case to argue that the mascot of a well-known Nazi hangout is kind of already a Nazi symbol by default.

So OK, where did the Nazi frog come from before THAT? Well, some webcomic. So far as I know, said webcomic doesn't have a damn thing to do with any of the various marginalized people Nazis hate either. Just kind of a stoner/slacker thing. And I am of course fuzzy on the details because it's deeply obscure. If it was something anyone had otherwise heard of, it wouldn't have ever ended up as this weird obscure thing for people to paste in places to indicate that they're "from 4chan" because that was otherwise the only place anyone beyond the creator of said comic or however many fans it may have or have had would ever recognize it.

So... the people being targeted with the hate here can't "reclaim" the symbol because it was never ours. The creator of the comic and it's fans could potentially reclaim it if they were the ones being attacked with it, but they're not, and the creator quite sensibly killed off the character featured to end any associate between himself and this clear hate symbol, so, if that's your background it's extra disrespectul to flash that symbol. Random 4chan posters REALLY can't reclaim it because I mean, they're literally the people who initially made this into a symbol of anti-queer/pro-nazi sentiment. There remains, to this day, absolutely no reason for anyone to post that thing anywhere than to try and proclaim it as a Nazi-friendly space, and as such everyone's reaction to seeing it in absolutely any context should be swift and brutal. Same for the other symbols mentioned here.

Hell, you could honestly actually make a better argument for the damn swastika. I mean, nobody would ever buy it, nor should they, but at least it actually did exist in an actual positive context a century ago unlike the rest of this crap.

#Nazis #Nazi symbols #pepe the frog

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half-man-half-lime · 1 year

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Fic I'm not gonna write: Wednesday edition

So this is the barest structure of an idea with some loose spitballing of what I'd like to see in a version of the show Wednesday that was maybe catered a bit more to my tastes. I don't know how much I like some of the ideas, but I thought I'd share some of them anyway. Sorry, this turned out very rambly and incoherent.

The core of what Wednesday didn't do for me was 2 things: it's a CW show, and, uh, the dialogue seemed dumb some of the time I guess.

I think I would have liked to see a campy comedy about Wednesday Addams attending a private school for actual weirdos, not just a bunch of cool teens doing love triangles or whatever. Not trying to hate here (apologies if I'm failing that attempt), but that stuff isn't my thing. Also no toxic family dynamics within the Addams Family! That is like the easiest fish in a barrel the writers could have ever shot and somehow they missed!

The foundation of the show or fic I'd make is that it has to be silly first. Think Homestuck: take a bunch of very wacky stuff and let it spiral out into something genuine and dramatic. Populate the school with campy movie monsters and monster-adjacent weirdos, then show what it's actually like for those people to live like that, and let drama ensue from serious lived experiences you never expected to take seriously.

If there's a grand conspiracy or mystery or big bad, it should fall in line with that idea. Absolutely ridiculous, but in a way that all of the high tension and melodrama extend out of. Something that ties into the tangled mess of spooky magic and relationships in the school, or something tied to fundamental structures that everything grows out from (like a central magic system, the origin of the school, whatever). I like the second one better, but the first is more fitting for an Addams Family series.

Some of the more shaky and specific ideas that I'm less attached to:

Base the houses or cliques on the Four Horrors theory. Separate your campy movie monsters into your Gothic Horror types (where Wednesday gets sorted), your Nuclear Horror monsters (I'm not sure where you find Kaiju small enough to fit in the school, color me stumped), your Lovecraftian kids (I'm thinking Night Vale inspired, maybe a core cast member who's like the floppy awkward fish people version of the Deep Ones as portrayed in the Innsmouth Comics), and the Slasher Students.

You could shove the Our Monsters Are Different tropes up its own ass? I don't know that this is a dead horse worth beating, but you could do that, if you humanize the characters at the end of it. I imagine that Wednesday gets introduced to the different kids as she's walked through her new school, the person showing her around says something to the tune of "I think you'll find the vampires here a little different from what you've seen in the movies." They gesture to a broody teen who's clearly an unapologetic Edward Cullen parody, in a joke that seems 12 years out of date. Then another vampire boy in a cheap Dracula costume with a cartoon Transylvania accent comes up and fist bumps him. A later episode sees these two boys try to force Wednesday into a love triangle, basically wingmanning each other. Wednesday isn't having it, but she gets entangled in their complex personal issues- not sure about the Dracula kid's deal, but we learn the Edward kid is pretty fucked up- he never mentally aged past 17 over the last several decades, he's caught in a mentality and role he's incapable of changing or breaking out of (like the Winter Court Fae in Pale), and there's a perception-altering field that everyone else treat him like a normal teenager. Wednesday somehow cottons on to the existential nightmare he's living in and helps him to actually grow up a little. Maybe in her very blunt and confrontational way, or with a strange and chaotic prank. These boys aren't in Wednesday's friend group, and don't function as anything but side characters most of the time, but when it comes time for things to go bad in the finale, kids who got spotlighted in episodes like these show up to support Wednesday with the Power of Friendship.

Actually, reading that, I think part of the issue is that Wednesday really functions best when she's in an antagonistic relationship with someone. I feel torn between thinking the series should put her against a preppy authority figure a la Addams Family Values, and forcing her into a situation where everyone's so much like her there's no authority to rally against. Probably the latter inside the school, and the former in the local town of meanies. Sort of like what the Netflix show does, but you know, less CW-ish.

IDK how to allude to this without spoiling it by implication, sorry: one of the Big Bads is played by the same cast member as the actual show. They get to be dramatic and chew the scenery and face off against Wednesday in a more intense way, and are better tailored to be a good foil for her character. I liked the idea in the show, even if the twist was a bit obvious after a while.

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bisluthq · 3 months

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I generally just infodump about Taylor Swift in my submission, but I actually need some advice (or literally just to vent).

So, about a month ago I moved from Grade 10 (high school) to Grade 11 (college) and obviously it's been an adjustment period, but I'm starting to get used to things.

The problem is, like a week after I expressed to my best friend that I'd felt like our friend group (including her) were sort of just tolerating my presence, she texted me this LONG text basically saying that she's been trying to find the right way to say things, and that she really cares about me, doesn't want to hurt my feelings, how I haven't done anything wrong, but she's going through some shit and is really struggling mentally at the moment, and basically needs some space, and feels like she can't be there for me in the way I deserve.

I cried when I saw it, but I understood (and still do understand) where she was coming from, and was very supportive of what she'd said in my follow up messages. But since then, every time I've seen her at school she's been with out other friend, even though she said she'd expressed this to other people.

Me, her, and the other friend all share a maths class, and they've stopped sitting with me. The first time it happened, she texted me that night and was like, "fuck were you here today? I'm so sorry."

And to be quite honest, I'm upset, but I sort of feel like I shouldn't be. She's done everything "right", and done her best to make it clear I haven't done anything, but it still feels a little targeted, especially since when I told her about feeling ignored she was like, "I really think for your sake you need to get out more/talk to more people" but even that was phrased as nicely as possible.

It's all just a mind-fuck, and I don't what to do. I've just been hanging out with some other people I'm a little less close to and it’s been great, but she's my best friend and I hate not talking to her, even if I get why.

I think transition periods (middle to secondary; secondary to college; college to uni; uni to workplaces) often come with these sorts of complicated friend situations and it absolutely does suck. I think you’re justified in feeling a bit ticked off and it is - imho - a little bit personal (which is okay). By the sound of it, she wants to craft a bit of a new identity and strike outside her established comfort zone and you’d prefer to stay close and keep the status quo. That’s an impasse. I’d recommend trying to make some new friends and getting out your comfort zone too. You and her might reconnect in time, or maybe you’re growing in separate directions. That’s definitely sad but it’s a part of life. I’d focus on making new friends at college and your extramurals/part-time job. Be proactive. The people you like from college but aren’t close to - why not invite them to do something together? You aren’t close now but you might become close and it’s a chance to spread your wings and make new friends (which seems to be what she wants to do too). Neither of you are at fault - this is a really hard but normal thing to go through.

I had a similar situation actually partway into uni so not even during a life transition but basically a friend told me a similar thing. It was right after my ex and I broke up and I was sorta leaning on being very sociable and she and I had been friends since school and anyway I kept asking her if she wants to hang out and eventually she said to me that she feels we’re growing apart and should take some space from each other. Her and I actually went on to do the same postgrad course and we’ve hung out again but we’ve never been THAT close and yes it hurt a lot (her message was ruder than your friend’s btw) but eh she was probably right like we were growing in different directions and the close friendship was running its natural course. Didn’t make it hurt less but I wish her well and I’m glad I did manage to make a bunch of new friends at uni - many of whom are lifelong friends - which I probably wouldn’t have done if she hadn’t sorta given me that push and carried on focusing on like her and our other school friend and mutual friends with my ex.

allow yourself to hurt and mourn a bit but also go out and be sociable and make new friends imo!

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youtubegreys · 2 years

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A tale in the desert guide

#A TALE IN THE DESERT GUIDE HOW TO#

#A TALE IN THE DESERT GUIDE FREE#

Merek always struck me as the older, calmer member of the pair.

#A TALE IN THE DESERT GUIDE HOW TO#

That’s serious -serious- trust.) I learned how to find marble from them – though if you asked me at gunpoint now, I can’t remember how to save my life. (Spouses in ATITD can literally log on as each other’s characters. I remember we mined a decent amount of marble together as well. I still have some old screenshots of the pair dowsing for metals and me in the vicinity possibly doing the same thing? We were talking in chat, so I was probably learning how to do it from them? This is absolute bliss as an explorer motivated by discovery. It’s years ago now, but I seem to recall that I mostly provided cheerful conversational counterpoint, and the two veterans essentially took newbie me under their wing and taught me little interesting secrets that you couldn’t find on the standard wiki. The only thing I can do when trust is extended like that is accept the honor in the spirit that it is given, and not abuse it.

#A TALE IN THE DESERT GUIDE FREE#

My possessions are mine, until I decide to stop playing, at which point, whoever wants them is free to declare open season and nab them for their own use. Every time I play ATITD, I have one personal guild that is only me and my alt. Significant levels of trust are involved with guild invites and guild ranks. Or even if you intended stuff to be shared, maybe you didn’t intend for one person to take ALL the resources overnight and use it all for personal profit. This in A Tale in the Desert, an MMO where if your ownership permissions are set carelessly, anyone can pretty much come along and loot you out of any and all possessions that you set to be shareable. (I was Isaiah, and my alt spouse was Juliana.) Imagine my surprise when one day, out of the blue, I got a guild invite to, pretty much, their personal guild. I did my usual solo self-sufficiency hermit thing, just being civil to all and sundry. Turns out that a pair of veteran players also had similar ideas and we ended up in the neighborhood near each other. I’d moved up to middle Egypt to have a change from my previous Tale 3 attempt down south Egypt near the Zfree guild. My second go at A Tale in the Desert was on Tale 4’s Bastet shard. Tehm (aka tehmoosh) and merek (aka Verix) were a very well known ATITD pairing since the early Tales. Sadly, one would rather not see familiar names pop up in this context: Something about just seeing the same names over and over again, and having the time and space to have civil conversations without getting interrupted by aggressive virtual wildlife and so on. It’s a very social, tight-knit, neighborly sort of community (including neighbors of the sort who hate each other.)īut now and then, neighbors become friends. I haven’t played the game for years, but I had a nice MMO time with it when I played. I end up joining a bunch of groups because people want me to listen in, and I join a few other groups of interest where I lurk and every once in a very rare blue moon, scroll through pages and pages of text chat of other peoples’ conversations weeks ago.)Ī Tale in the Desert’s Discord chat is one of the latter. Or I have no idea how to use it to its fullest potential, and very little impetus to do more with it. While mulling over his memory, wondering if the faint melancholy of the past few days was worth a post of some kind, what do I see while reviewing the immense Discord detritus I’d accumulated with the Dragon’s End metas and Aetherblade CM release? Touched enough lives that you can hang out with his virtual doppelganger and bring back his ten rats. No, what really got me was the commenter at the bottom of that post. Lifestyles were healthier in the old days. They made it into their 90s, which is likely far longer than I might achieve. Perspective, indeed.īoth elderly relatives have now already passed on, by the way. The old post took my mind off that rather neatly. A game that wasn’t supposed to be a traditional MMO ever. I’d been doomscrolling the GW2 reddit recently for far too obsessive a time for the last week or so, and getting somewhat unsettled by the seeming brigade of hardcore challenge-seekers clamoring for more rewards for their preferred game type – including exclusive mount skins and high profit rewards – so that they could resume their place on the traditional MMO pedestal of prestige. Going down the rabbit hole of my blog posts, probably the only one with the gumption to do so, I came across an old post that brought back serious memories. The plan is still in effect, but not today. It seems like I was a lot more excitable and passionate then, for one thing. Perhaps find the equivalent comparisons to the Flame and Frost story instances and Molten Facility / Molten Furnace instances and do a compare and contrast? The plan was to re-read some of my ancient posts way back in 2012 and early 2013 to remember how I felt about GW2’s Living Story World back then.

#A tale in the desert guide

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erenisms · 3 years

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chapter 10

WHAT WE CAN BE : in which eren deals with his crush on you like an elementary school kid.

eren likes you. a lot. but he treats your existence like it's god's punishment to humanity. and you, not having any idea why he loathes your presence so much, decided to not give a single fuck about him.

pairing: eren jaeger x f!reader, +slight!reiner x reader

genre: college au, e2l, fluff, crack

CH. 10: the dumb.

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Eren sees you from afar before he can even come close to the street you’re on. After a full year of staring at you, as weird as that sounds, he easily recognizes your head. He squints his green eyes and watches you stand there like a kindergarten kid with her juice box, waiting to be picked up by her parents. Or in your case: Jean, Connie and Sasha.

Wait.

“Where are her friends?”

Even though more than half of your interactions were awkward and eccentric, at least for him because you seem to not mind anything, Eren felt jovial. That was until you told him that you know how he hates you.

“That's not—”

“Orders to-go for Eren!”

“Shit.” He stands up quickly, gathering the paper bags but not forgetting to check its contents despite being in a dilemma.

You got your attention stolen by the chime of the bell by the door and your face lit up when you saw your friends along with Eren's enter the cafe. You raise your hand in a small wave to get their attention.

Sasha jumps straight into your arms and nuzzles her cheek on yours.

“[Naaaame]!” She cries, squeezing the air out of lungs. “I thought something happened to you!”

“You saw each other less than half an hour ago.” Connie states the obvious.

“Get off, Sasha.” Jean becomes the voice of reason as he faces you. “Did something happen to you? Do I have to sock Jaeger in the face?”

Or not.

“You saw each other less than half an hour ago.” The golden-eyed boys says again with more emphasis.

“Hi, Armin, Mikasa.” You nod at the two others as your friends, mostly Jean and Sasha, fuss over you.

“Hey, [Name].” Armin greets you first and Mikasa gives you a small hi. “We met Jean, Connie and Sasha on our way here so we all just walked together. You and Eren already got our snacks?”

You nod, and Sasha cheers on your side.

“Where's he?” The black-haired pretty girl asks.

“There.” You point to his direction.

Everyone except you stare in confusion at the tall male's constipated face.

Connie asks dumbly, “Why does Eren looks like he’s seen a ghost?”

Armin and Mikasa share a look.

ღ

The seven of you are already inside the rented studio that looks way too professional for a bunch of sophomores who don't know what they're doing. Workshop tables, comfy chairs, and an air-conditioner are too much along with the nice walls and bright ambiance, but none of you complain at this steal of a place.

Your group split intro three: Jean being with Armin at the right corner, Mikasa— not having Annie as her partner because something came up, is stuck in the middle table guiding Connie and Sasha who's partners are also not with them while you and Eren sit on a table beside the window just in front of the blonde and the ash-blonde.

You blink. Eren blinks back.

“So…?”

You only tilt your head at your partner.

“How do we do this?” He asks, scratching his nape mindlessly.

“How do you want to do it?” You throw the question back at him. “Let's do whatever will make it easier for you.”

“I’m not an idiot.” The brunette scoffs, covering up the fact that he's flattered that you thought of him.

But that's not it.

“I am though.”

Eren double takes what you just said. “Come again?”

“Stupid.” You state shamelessly. “I’m not good at these things.”

“Studying? Don't you have high grades?” Eren prays to whoever's up there that you won't question how he knows that.

“I do. But this is not studying, just glorified existential crisis.”

“Pft—”

Eren snorts, finding your remark a little funny. Just a little. He covers it with a cough.

“Whatever.” He gets back on track. “Philosophy is about perspective and shit, right? So, uh, what do you think of this—” He gestures with his hands. “—whatever this project is?”

“I don't think.”

“You don't think what?” Eren coerces, confused as to why you paused mid sentence.

With a straight face, you clarify. “I just don't think at all.”

Now, Eren knows he’s not the dumbest person in the world but he didn’t expect out of all people that you would be more of an airhead than him. And it baffles him that you’re so self-aware of it.

“Are... are you actually stupid?” He asks incredulously. “You messing with me or something?”

“No.”

“Why? How?”

You shrug, looking back on your laptop. “I’m not going to explain my personality to you.”

Eren rubs his face and composes himself.

“Well, how are we going to start then, idiot?” He sighs. “Isn't this about discovering the self or something?”

You side-eye him. “Wouldn't be a lot of discovery if I'd just tell you.”

Eren's heart skips a beat.

Holy shit.

“...” A pen cap comes flying to Eren's nose. “Ow, what the fuck!”

The brunette glares at the direction of where it came from, expecting to be either Kirstein wanting to piss him off or from Connie and Sasha messing around. Instead, he locks eyes with Mikasa who's staring at him intensely.

“Sorry, you were out of focus.” She explains, but her eyes are telling her brother something else.

Redemption.

Eren gulps before turning back to you bashfully. “Uh, yeah. I guess you're right.”

He could hear Armin and Jean chuckling on their own table and Eren is willing to bet his life that those two are laughing at him. He throws them a flustered glare before focusing back on you.

“Then, we– we should get to know each other?” Eren asks uncertainly and you gave him a nod of affirmation. He relaxes at that. “It would help a little if we tell each other at least something though, anything.”

He is totally not using this as an excuse. “Sooo, are you always like... that?”

You look at him weirdly because of the word he used but you answer his question anyway. “I think so. People think I’m quiet because I have lots of thoughts but I’m just spacing out.”

“Huh.” Green eyes widen in enlightenment. “That... that actually explains a lot.”

“About what—?” You raise a brow but Eren immediately dismisses you off.

“Nothing. Forget about it.” He raps.

“What about you?” You inquire, tapping a pen on your notepad, pretending to be a therapist in your head. “Have you always been easily angered?”

“I'm not easily—!” He starts to defend but you quickly call him out.

“You're getting mad right now, Eren.”

Said male huffs, cheeks reddening at being caught but mostly because you said his name. “I'm not easily angered. ...Just a little intense.”

“Understatement of the year!” Jean shouts from their corner, slamming his hands on the table as Armin ushers him to sit back down.

“Shut your fucking mouth!” Eren mimicks the same action as your best friend.

“Yeah, right.” You mumble, finding your partner just like what he said he was: intense. You look up to him. “Sit down, please.”

“I—” Eren gapes in surprise.

He throws a glare at Jean when he saw the male smirk at him. Nonetheless, he follows your request with a scoff and crosses his arms like a little kid.

Mikasa's and Armin's eyes twinkled.

“Anyway, back to thinking.” You refresh, wanting to actually achieve something for today. “I don't think a lot about things. I kind of go by instincts.”

“Hm? You’re simple-minded then?”

“Very.” You answer blankly but your proud nod makes Eren want to fall off his seat. “Do you think a lot?”

About you? “More than you know.” He shrugs. “They're all senseless though.”

“Great, I guess we can start on that.” You note, and voice out your thought shamelessly, “I’m surprised though, aren’t you stupid?”

“What the fuck did you just say—”

“Annie calls you a himbo.” You state nonchalanty.

Eren's jaw drops. He now knows you're friends with his best friend's girlfriend but he doesn't know that she talks to you about him. Eren doesn't know what to feel regarding that. And among everyone else to talk shit about him to you, he expects it to be Jean, not Leonhart.

“She calls me what? Don't listen to her, she's a bad influence. Tell Annie to fuck off—”

“Hey!” Armin retorts from their table.

Eren doesn’t fall back and turns his attention to his best friend. “Tell your girlfriend to fuck off!”

ღ

ah yes, more stupidity, highkey wanna punch them so baaad :( but an overthinker and one who doesnt think at all, theyre so cute lol

taglist: closed — @lamiapony @sofijaeger @hvneyluvr @kjd55 @reddesert-cal @tumerixs @songbirdgardensworld @freedomlsaburden @itsannayalll @jelliou @lagrimasdeglitter @erens-eyebrows @chewymoustachio @ayyisasra @kalesugar @diestheticu @ravensleepyeyes @y2klove @mikasavqx @mockingjaytributes @littlemochi @mariaerdgzn @philfont @fwess @tzobio @teenageangeldiaries @backstagepaige @renjunvibes @shunkaza @je-suis-argent-miel @lavender-moon13 @regina-com @the-princess-button @kaitlyn2907 @blrqt @xaibs @roseabelle21 @rory-cakes @bubs-world @rieka-archives @pennylanewrites @usernamehere91 + if your un is in purple, i cant tag you

- love, zari

#zari.wwcb #eren jaeger x reader #eren yeager x reader #eren x reader #eren x you #attack on titan x reader #aot x reader #aot x you #aot imagines #snk imagines #snk x reader #attack on titan smau #aot smau #smau #x reader

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haadeswrites · 3 years

Text

Elysium

god this fic took forever i’m so sorry!! but hey, first fic on the new blog! <33 also y’all should really thank @iwaasfairy who listened to me complain about this fic for a solid month, she’s the reason it got finished

Cult leader Oikawa Tooru x female reader

tw: indoctrination, extremely dubious consent, blood, yandere themes, religious themes, minor character death, implied abuse & drug use, mild smut, nsfw

The island itself is breathtaking

Pristine beaches with gleaming white sand, vast swathes of lush, green rainforest and waterfalls that cascade into shimmering pools of crystal clear water. Untouched, undisturbed; a paradise. At least, that’s how Ryuji had described it.

Paradise, but only in the sense that a gingerbread cottage in the middle of the woods is paradise to a lost and hungry child.

He hadn’t been wrong. Bare feet sink into soft, white sand as you climb from the boat - the warmth just toeing the line between pleasant and burning. Gentle waves ebb and flow behind you, and there’s a light breeze that kisses your skin, the taste of seasalt carrying in the wind. Home, it seems to sing.

A laugh sounds somewhere in the distance, yet the only other figure on the beach is a man walking steadily towards you. He smiles when he sees you’ve noticed him; friendly, non-threatening. It’s a far cry from the swarming welcoming committee you’d been dreading, and you wonder if that’s somehow intentional as well.

As the boat pushes back out to sea he comes to a stop before you, “I’m Makki,” he says, pushing the fringe of his hair back and giving you a not-so-subtle once over. Whatever he sees must meet approval, because his grin only widens, “Welcome to the Commune.”

Ryuji wasn’t wrong; the island is a beautiful, deadly thing.

—

You’d never heard of the Commune before the phone call.

And maybe that shouldn’t be so surprising. You’ll be the first to admit you’re hardly an expert, but from what you do know, groups like the Commune – cults – don’t spring up out of thin air and start broadcasting their mistreatment and systematic abuse.

They’re not the kind of people that have sweet old ladies clutching their pearls and mothers shepherding their children away – at least, not in the beginning. Not entirely. They’re not out to recruit extremists to further their cause, they choose to prey on the vulnerable, the lost and the disillusioned. Those easily manipulated. You suspect that’s why when you google the Commune, all you find is a website for what essentially looks like a long term luxury wellness retreat.

‘The Commune is about healing and harmony, about returning to nature, supporting one another to forge a brighter, more holistic future together… a self-sufficient community living apart from technology and other evils of modern society.’

You fight the urge to roll your eyes as you scroll through. There’s a whisper of philosophical teachings woven throughout, a page dedicated to their founder, Oikawa Tooru – smiling handsomely in every single picture, because what would a burgeoning cult be without a charismatic leader – but there’s not enough.

So here you are, on an island hundreds of miles away from home living amongst strangers; because Ryuji wouldn’t have sounded so terrified if this was just some alternate, free-loving bunch of hippies.

And even with all that he’d told you, everything you thought you’d be prepared for, the Commune is like nothing you could’ve imagined.

Makki introduces you to Asuka, a woman only a few years older than yourself, dark haired and stunningly beautiful, and winks as he tells her to take you under her wing. She smiles brightly, eyes twinkling, and pulls you into a heartfelt hug – as if you’ve known each other your whole lives.

“We’re so glad you’re here!” she beams.

You’d like to hate her.

It feels like you're supposed to, sometimes; when she gets that dreamy look in her eyes and starts talking about Oikawa and the Commune and how lucky everyone here on the island is. Yet there’s something about her – the genuine warmth she emanates maybe, or the kindness in her eyes – that makes it difficult for you not to like her.

“You should come to the gathering tomorrow,” she hums idly one afternoon, maybe a week or so after your arrival. The two of you are sitting on the edge of the pier, legs dangling down into the water, tangled fishing nets to be repaired strewn between you.

“I always go,” you reply.

She laughs, fixing you with a knowing look, “And sit right at the very back, all but running off the moment we finish?”

And your traitorous heart skips a beat.

“It’s okay to take things slowly,” she says. “We understand that being a part of the Commune is a big change from the life you knew, and that not everybody is able to see what we see and embrace those changes.”

Asuka sets down the knot she’s working through and reaches for your hand, a gentle smile on her face, “But you shouldn’t be afraid. You’re meant to be here, I can feel it. You just need to stop fighting against it; surrender yourself to us, to the island, and everything’ll make sense, I promise.”

It’s dangerous territory. One wrong word could set off alarm bells, yet you can’t help pressing just a little.

“Do you ever miss it, then? Life outside the Commune?”

Your family. Friends. The life you left behind before you came here to be brainwashed like all of the others.

“Why would I?” she answers without missing a beat, and it’s hard to ignore the bitter flicker of disappointment you feel at her answer. “The island provides for us, we don’t have to spend our days selling off tiny pieces of ourselves just to make ends meet. It’s paradise here, and we have Oikawa to thank for that. Why would I ever want to go back?”

Silence falls between you as you struggle to think of something to say to salvage the situation. Yet Asuka isn’t even looking at you, instead staring out at the water with a strangely pensive expression.

“Did you know I was married once?” The words seemingly out of the blue, you can only shake your head. For a moment, she doesn’t reply, watching as the waves rise and crash offshore. And then;

“I was young, eighteen or so, fresh out of high school and he was a small town cop.” Her eyes flicker to yours, and your heart clenches at the sadness and pain echoing there. “I thought he was a good man, once upon a time.”

A chord strikes deep, your chest tightening involuntarily at her words. It’s not the same, of course it’s not the same, and yet…

No. You stop the errant thought in its tracks. Groups like the Commune prey on the vulnerable, you know this. People like Ryuji, like Asuka, like–

Her fingers squeeze around yours, pulling you back to the present. “Come to the gathering tomorrow. Listen to Oikawa, it’ll help.”

—

She doesn’t give you a choice in the matter – dragging you by the hand to sit right at the front of the gathered crowd that very night.

Oikawa’s handsomer up close; tall and dark haired with pretty eyes and long, sweeping lashes that frame delicate cheekbones, it’s not hard for you to see how a man like him has amassed such an impassioned following.

Once he starts actually speaking, however, you realise that his good looks and charming smile are just the tip of the iceberg. Oikawa’s utterly captivating as he preaches about the cycle of life and death and the paradise that awaits his faithful. Passionate and engaging, he speaks like he truly believes every word of the lies he’s spreading.

And Asuka, her friends, the others gathered, they eat up every word like it’s gospel truth, resounding cheers and thunderous applause deafening around you. In the midst of the rapturous din, Oikawa’s eyes flit to yours.

Slowly, he smiles – a dazzling grin that makes your stomach flip – and everything; Asuka, the noise, the others swarming around you, it all fades away.

For one electrifying heartbeat, you’re frozen in place. Just you and Oikawa, trapped in the pull of each other’s gaze.

—

You can’t forget the reason you came.

But it’s… difficult, in a way you struggle to understand. You only have one purpose for being here, one goal; find Ryuji and bring him home.

And yet, some days it’s like there’s a fog in your mind, and you have to focus to remember why you’re here at all. You catch yourself laughing with Asuka and her friends, the days passing by in a blur of endless, easy distractions.

It barely feels like work when you’re sitting under the shade of the trees, eating the fruits you’ve picked by hand – ripe and sweet, unlike anything you’ve ever tasted – diving off waterfalls into the crystalline water and meandering down the shore collecting seashells. Even when you are working, mending clothes or cooking with the others, it fills you with a sense of contentment you can’t quite explain.

Like you’re a part of something bigger. Like you’re doing something that matters.

Ryuji becomes a distant thought. A whisper in the back of your head, a niggling in your gut, easily brushed aside and ignored until there’s a moment of quiet. In the dead of night, the balmy summer night’s breeze kissing your bare skin, you lie awake, lost in memories of the last time you’d seen him.

Fists angrily pounding at your door, the yelling that gave way to sobs and the hoarse, desperate pleas that followed. Ryuji’s face; pupils blown wide and eyes rimmed in red, darting restlessly around as he held you too tight and begged–

Rolling over in bed, you gaze out your window at the star flecked sky, the shadows of the forest that lie at your doorstep, and wonder what it is that scares you more; that you’ve lost track of the days you’ve been here, and saving Ryuji is starting to feel like an afterthought, or that you could so easily forget all of it, find a place here in the Commune and be happy.

‘The island, it–it fucks with your head.’

Ryuji’d told you that, and you’d brushed it off as paranoia. You need to find him. Find him and get the hell outta dodge.

You can deal with the fallout later.

—

Kiyoshi.

He’d mentioned the name a few times amidst his rambling – a friend of his on the island. You’re annoyed with yourself for not thinking of it sooner, however much like Ryuji himself, trying to focus and remember the name is like wading through thick mud.

Once you do, though, finding him amongst the hundred and fifty or so inhabitants is the easy part.

There’s no strict division between genders within the Commune, however Kyoshi, despite his somewhat lean stature, is among the builders of the island and his path doesn’t often cross with yours.

From Asuka you find out that he’s been a part of the Commune for years now, before even she joined, and that he mostly sticks to himself, though you’ve seen him chatting quietly to a few of the other men, a perpetually angry looking blonde in particular.

It’s the last part that piques her interest, “Why’re you so curious, anyway?” she asks, her face lighting up as a sudden thought occurs. “Do you want me to introduce you two? To be honest, I didn’t think he’d be your type, if you’re interested, though…”

Cheeks aflame, you’re quick to shut her down. “No, no, nothing like that. I’ve just… seen him around and we’ve never really spoken, I guess.”

A lame excuse, though mercifully she lets the subject drop without too much prodding.

Therein, of course, lies the problem. Walking up to Kyoshi and casually trying to drop Ryuji into the conversation without raising red flags is risky, but what other options do you have? You’ve already spent too much time on this island.

Although, maybe Asuka has the right idea.

While you hadn’t been lying when you said you weren’t interested in Kyoshi in that way, nobody else knew that. Who would really look twice at the shy newbie striking up a conversation with the quiet, easygoing man? He wasn’t unattractive per se, and from the brief interactions you’d seen of him, he seemed kind enough.

You have enough patience (barely) to wait for dusk the following night. There’s a celebration, something about the full moon and a blessing on the island and the Commune– you hadn’t really been paying attention when Oikawa had spoken about it. Still, it’s too good an opportunity to pass up. With the fire pits crackling, and the dancing and music and the sweet honey wine flowing freely, nobody will be paying too much attention to what you’ll be doing. Hopefully, the alcohol will also serve to lower Kiyoshi’s guard, and perhaps if you’re really, really lucky, loosen his tongue as well.

Of course, you’re not banking on him telling you exactly where Ryu is or what happened to him– and that’s assuming he actually knows – but at this point you’ll take anything over the nothing you currently have. A tiny slip up, that’s all you’re asking for.

As the sun descends beyond the horizon, you play your role well, laughing and chatting amongst friends, sipping carefully at the cup of wine in your hand as you wait for an opening. And perhaps it’s your nerves working against you, but you find that it’s not just Kiyoshi your attention is drawn to.

Up on the shore, away from the rabble, Oikawa lounges back with a cup of the same honeyed wine you’re pretending to drink. For the most part he seems deep in conversation with Iwaizumi, his right hand, but every once in a while he glances up, letting his gaze roam over the crowd of his followers.

Every inch a king and his general.

And it would seem benevolent, if not for the strange smile he wears – the one that widens when his eyes catch yours.

Swallowing tightly, you force yourself not to dwell on it, to ignore the odd sensation curling in your gut and the way your skin prickles under his attention. Now is not the time to lose focus.

Pushing all thoughts of Oikawa aside, you subtly scan the beach once more, only to find that Kiyoshi’s moved, sitting now on a piece of old driftwood near the bonfire. Alone for the first time tonight.

Your legs are moving before the thought even fully registers.

“Do you mind if I sit?” you ask, gesturing to the empty space on the log beside him.

Kiyoshi smiles, the laugh lines at corners of his eyes crinkling pleasantly, and shakes his head, “Not at all.”

“Thanks.”

Taking another sip of your wine, you will your shoulders to relax, your racing pulse to slow. This has to seem natural, and so you force yourself to hold your tongue, let your head loll back and breathe deep, soaking it all in. You can hear the others in the distance, the music and the dancing, the happy laughter and shouts that beckon – you want to go join them. Even your blood seems to hum, a call of something other pulsing through your veins.

But you pay it no mind. There are more important things to worry about tonight.

Indeed, steel blue eyes have been appraising you curiously for a while now. “This is your first Lunar blessing, isn’t it?” Kiyoshi asks after a moment.

You nod, humming in agreement. Less than a month; you’ve been here less than a month. Is that a good thing?

“Are you enjoying yourself?”

A harmless enough question, and again you nod your head. “Yeah, it’s…” you pause, searching for words that won’t sound hollow. “It’s paradise. I feel like I need to pinch myself just to make sure it’s real.”

He smiles gently. “But?” he probes.

Grimly, you wonder whether Kiyoshi’s usually this perceptive, or if you’re just a really terrible actor. In a way, you suppose it really doesn’t make a difference; you’ve come too far to turn back now – at least not without raising suspicion.

So you lie with a truth, and pray that it works.

“I had a friend I was supposed to meet here,” you confess quietly, gazing not at him but the crackling flames of the bonfire, the burning embers carried off into the night. “He was the one who said I should come, but now I’m here and he’s not and every time I catch myself enjoying this–”

“You feel guilty,” he surmises, cutting you off. “Because he’s not here to enjoy it with you.”

Wordlessly, you nod – and maybe it isn’t so much of an act when your eyes begin to glisten, your smile wavering.

Kiyoshi’s silent for a moment, and you take another sip of the honey wine to hide your nerves. “You shouldn’t, you know,” he says eventually. “Feel guilty, I mean. You belong here, with the Commune. You’re happy here. Paradise… isn’t for everybody.”

He doesn’t say it to be cruel, more like he’s simply stating a fact, and somehow that makes it all the more unnerving. And it’s nothing you haven’t listened to Oikawa preach about time and time again. The Commune is for the devoted, the faithful – the lucky few – and you’ve never thought too hard about what he’d meant by that.

The Commune’s small, maybe a hundred and fifty or so people on the island. There’d been no initiation, no test of faith or trial period you’d had to pass when you arrived – at least, none that you’d been aware of. You simply stepped off the boat and they’d welcomed you with open arms.

An uneasy sensation settles into your gut, goosebumps prickling at your skin despite the heat of the midsummer night.

That… doesn’t make sense. It can’t. Absolute control’s too important in groups like this, they couldn’t just let anyone–

Kiyoshi speaks again, his calm voice pulling you from your thoughts. “What was his name?”

You blink at him slowly – stupidly. “Sorry?”

“Your friend,” he clarifies. “What was his name?”

“Oh, um- Ryuji.”

Kiyoshi’s brow furrows in thought for a moment, but he merely shakes his head, “Doesn’t ring a bell, but like I said, not everyone who arrives stays with us for long.”

He looks you right in the eye as he says it.

You don’t understand the cold, foreboding that seeps through your veins, because he’s lying. He has to be.

Ryuji was here. They were friends, Ryu’d told you that–

Why did you think this stupid plan would work anyway? That he’d tell you anything, much less the truth when this whole fucked up island is full of liars and those too indoctrinated to know the difference?

“You alright?” he asks when abruptly, you shoot to your feet beside him.

And it takes every ounce of willpower you have left to force an easy smile to your lips, raising your cup just a fraction, “Yeah, just gonna go get a refill. Thanks for the talk, Kiyoshi.”

Whether he notices that your wine’s barely touched or not, you don’t care – not as you turn on your heel without another word and head back up the beach.

Your head is pounding, your body trembling – you don’t hear the call of your name until a hand reaches out and grasps at your wrist, spinning you around.

Asuka greets you with a wide grin, Makki and a tall, broad shouldered man you think is called Mattsun standing either side of her – the former’s arm slung casually over her shoulder. “There you are! I’ve been looking for you,” she says. “Come on, we’re gonna go swimming, it’s so pretty out there!”

You glance out towards the ocean. Moonlight bathes the inky blue water, light shimmering off the rippling tide; some of the others are already out there, splashing amongst the waves.

“Clothing optional, of course,” Makki laughs, and Asuka tugs on your wrist once more.

“C’mon, it’ll be fun!”

But you shake your head, slowly pulling your hand from her grip, “I’m not feeling great, I think I’m gonna head back.”

Asuka frowns, concern marring her pretty features. “Are you okay? Do you need us to call Mizo–”

“No,” you say, cutting her off. Healer Mizoguchi is the last person you need to see right now. “I just– I just need to go lie down for a bit. You guys go have fun – enjoy the blessing, I’ll be fine.”

Makki and Asuka share a fleeting look, but it’s Mattsun who interjects before either one of them can speak, “I’ll walk you back, then.”

Your stomach churns. It doesn’t sound like a suggestion.

And the smart thing to do would be to accept his help; the walk from the beach to your villa isn’t far, and while you’re not as familiar with Mattsun as you are with Makki or Asuka, it’s not like he’s going to hurt you or anything, but–

“Really– you don’t need to, it’s fine,” you smile weakly, shuffling back as he reaches to offer you his arm. “Go swim, I’ll see you guys in the morning.”

Mattsun shrugs easily enough, falling back into line with the other two – yet there’s something in the way he grins and holds your gaze for a beat longer. A glimmer of amusement, as if there’s some joke you're not a part of. “I’ll hold you to it, sweetheart.”

The heat that floods your cheeks clashes uncomfortably with the cloying heaviness in your stomach, but somehow you manage to stutter out one last goodbye before turning back to scamper off in the direction of your room.

–But not to lie down.

There’s not a cloud in the sky, and the full moon’s bright. No need for a torch, not unless you decide to venture into the heart of the forest.

You’ve been a fool. Kiyoshi, Asuka, Makki, Mattsun; you can’t trust any of them to help you, even unwittingly. Ryuji’s here on the island – somewhere – and every second that slips away, every second that you allow yourself to forget puts him in further danger.

And so you cling to your discomfort, ground yourself in it. The prickling sensation at the back of your neck, the tightness in your chest as you slip past your villa, keeping low and quiet – they’re a reminder that there is something insidious here on the island, that you have to get out.

You and Ryuji.

He’s here. Away from the others, kept under lock and key as punishment, or maybe being forced to undergo whatever kind of glorified brainwashing they’ve got going on, but here. You need to be smart about this, because while you don’t intend to stop until you find him, tonight will be your best shot – while everyone’s distracted down on the beach.

For the first time in a long time, it feels like you have a clear head.

Creeping through the underbrush, you steer clear of the well trod pathways that lead towards habitation. You’ve been there, and to the docks, and the river.

If they’re still keeping him here (and they are, you refuse to entertain the possibility that it could be otherwise) then it’s not somewhere out in the open. A bird cries out in the distance shattering the calm of the night, and you flinch – but it only serves as another reminder that your time tonight is limited; you cannot afford to delay. You wrack your brain, trying to dredge up memories of the last few weeks, surely you must have seen something–

“Lost?”

The single word, spoken in a deep, gruff voice has your blood running cold.

Slowly, you turn.

Iwa stands behind you in the thicket, his face utterly impassive. Briefly, you contemplate whether it’s worth trying to bluff your way out of this, but Iwa’s eyes narrow, flashing in the dim light and you think better of it.

A sigh escapes you, your shoulders deflating. “Where is he– Ryuji?” you ask; a whisper rather than a demand.

Iwa’s expression gives nothing away. Did he know, or have you handed him the smoking gun of a crime that’d fallen through the cracks? Does it even matter anymore? You’re just–

You’re tired.

Exhausted. In the space of a few moments all of that shining determination and resolve; it fled, leaving a gaping hole in its wake. This has to end, you can’t keep fighting against them forever. You can’t keep drowning in this guilt, feeling torn every second that you spend here on this stupid island. You just want to find Ryuji and go home.

… Right?

A tense beat passes as Iwa appraises you, and then; “Come with me.”

The hand he places on your shoulder doesn’t give you much choice. His grip isn’t what you’d describe as gentle, yet he’s careful enough to make sure you don’t trip or stumble as he marches you north.

In the thick of the forest away from the beach, it’s eerily quiet. Every twig that snaps underfoot, every ragged breath you draw; it feels too loud. Out of place amongst the stillness of the midsummer night.

And isn’t it ironic, that for the first time since you set foot in this paradise, you feel like you’re trespassing?

A bead of sweat trickles down from your temple and your mind unwittingly drifts back to Mattsun and Makki. Are they still swimming with Asuka? Probably, you reason. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how long it’s been since you left them on the beach, but surely no more than an hour.

And strangely, like water drawn from the depths of a well, an image comes to mind; the four of you standing in the waves, you perched atop Mattsun’s shoulders, screaming and giggling in delight as Asuka tries to knock you down again, two sets of eyes watching from the shore…

You should have stayed on the beach.

“Can I ask you something?”

“You can ask,” he replies drily – humouring you, you suppose.

Your lips quirk upwards for the briefest of moments. “What happens on the Lunar blessing? Asuka, the others– no one told me what it was.”

Iwaizumi doesn’t answer you immediately, but you feel his fingers reflexively tighten on your shoulder. Likely it wasn’t the question he was expecting; surely there were others that you could have asked – but you don’t really want the answers to those.

If you’re being led like a lamb to proverbial slaughter, what good would it do you to know it?

And yet as the seconds pass and no answer seems forthcoming from your captor, you resign yourself to the fact that your curiosity will remain unsated. You don’t even know what prompted you to ask in the first place; knowing Oikawa it’s probably some grand, meaningless spectacle. Pretty, hollow words spoken only to–

A heavy sigh draws you from your thoughts, and you falter in your step, almost tripping over your own feet in the process. Iwa’s quick to right you, urging you forward with a less than gentle nudge. “Walk straight,” he grunts, yet it lacks any true heat. Anticipation flutters through your veins, and he mutters a soft curse behind you. “Fine. It… it’s an exchange.”

An exchange? What the hell was that supposed to mean? Your eyebrows draw together, mouth opening to press the matter, but Iwa beats you to the punch.

“You’ll find out for yourself soon enough, now shut up.”

You have no response to that, so you do.

—

The two of you walk in silence for what feels like hours. Eventually, the terrain becomes steeper, the worn path you’re treading twisting and winding, and you realise you must be close to the mountains at the heart of the island.

As your breath comes in heavy pants, your legs beginning to ache, you can’t help but be lost in the beauty of it all.

The flora’s different here, unlike any you’ve seen before. Flowers bursting from the bark of towering trees, blooms of vibrant hues; reds and purples and soft, baby pinks. Even the vines at your feet curl amongst pretty white buds that gleam invitingly under the moonlight. Your jaw falls open as you gaze around in wonderment.

You forget why you’re walking, where it is that you’re heading. Iwa’s grip relaxes as a quiet gasp escapes you, and he doesn’t stop you when you stray from the path to take a closer look. You can’t resist reaching out to touch the silken petals, leaning in to smell their perfume. Soft and light and sweet, your eyes flutter shut, a smile creeping across your visage.

It reminds you of home. Not your actual home – the rundown, tiny shoebox apartment you gave up before you came here – but something deeper.

Home, like the long summer days spent playing in your parents’ backyard. Home, like afternoons curled up by the window, watching the rain come down in sheets outside.

Home, like the comfort of arms wrapped around you; two hearts beating in sync.

“C’mon,” Iwa interrupts after a minute or so, his voice a touch less gruff. “We’re almost there.”

Dazed, you find yourself nodding, allowing him to guide you back to the path. This time, he doesn’t grab you by the shoulder, seemingly content enough to walk by your side.

True to his word, it’s only another few minutes before you see it; a wooden villa, four times the size of your own and far, far grander, set amongst a clearing of trees on the mountainside. Confused, your eyes flicker from the villa to Iwa and back again. Gossamer curtains billow lightly in the breeze, a warm, inviting glow spilling from the open windows. Surely this cannot be where he meant to lead you… and yet he merely stands at your side, arms folded across his broad chest, watching you expectantly.

“You gonna make me carry you up there?” he asks, not unkindly.

Swallowing tightly, you shake your head.

Another glance, and you catch a shadow lingering by the window. Your heart skips a beat, apprehension curling in your gut as you begin to walk, every step feels less steady than the last. You’re almost glad when Iwa takes you by the arm; if only so that you have something to focus on other than the growing tightness in your chest. The villa, with its pretty flowers and airy, elegant grandeur is far from the isolated cell you’d been afraid of, yet the uncertainty of what you’re walking into eats at you all the same.

Is this where they’ve been keeping Ryu, or has he brought you here for another reason?

Nothing, however, can prepare you for what you find inside. Warm light emanates from lanterns that bathe the room, and your eyes widen as you stare around you.

Strange, gold carvings inlaid with mother of pearl decorate the thick, woodens support beams, a pot of incense burns on a table overflowing with fresh fruit. There’s a jug of the same honeyed wine you’d drank earlier in the night and two cups set on an ornate stand nearby – just within arms reach of one of the chaise lounges.

Iwa affords you little time to gape, drawing you further in. Silken tapestries hang from the walls – you’re pulled along too quickly to truly take note, but the brief glimpses you get hint at a story; a divine being cast from his home, lost and wandering.

It tugs at something buried within you, and uncomfortable, you tear your eyes away.

The two of you reach a closed door at the end of the hall, and Iwa pulls you to a stop, knocking once.

“Come,” a familiar voice calls.

You stiffen, though perhaps you should have foreseen this outcome. Who else would Iwa bring you to but to him? Distantly, you register his grip relaxing, the sound of the door sweeping open and his voice at your ear.

“Go on.”

And it’s funny, you think, how two halves of yourself can be so at odds with each other. Because while your stomach twists itself into knots, goosebumps prickling at your skin, your legs stumble forward of their own accord.

Two steps forward, and your breath catches in your throat.

It’s a bedroom, that much you can deduce from the decor, but that’s not what captures your attention. Nor is it Oikawa, leaning against the bureau with a genial smile – at least not at first.

No. In place of a back wall, there’s open space, not so much as a panel of glass obstructing the view before you. And what a view it is; from this height you can see the sprawling forest below, the coastline dotted with bonfires and the moonlit ocean shimmering beyond. Where the floorboards end, there are steps, you realise as you unwittingly inch closer, leading to a cascading spring – likely fed from the waterfall you can hear rushing nearby.

How easy it would be to brush aside your worries, you think, to shed your clothes, slip into the cool, calm water and lose yourself entirely. Even amongst all you’ve seen and experienced on the island so far, this is incomparable.

“Stunning, isn’t it?” Oikawa murmurs, coming up behind you.

His voice startles you, yet when you turn, you find him not gazing out at the scenery but rather at you, that same strange, knowing smile curling at his lips.

“Some days, I admit, it’s hard to tear myself away,” he continues, unbothered by your stunned silence. “But even I can’t neglect my duties for too long.”

You swallow, tongue darting out to wet your lips. Confusion twists through you at the conversational tone, surely he hasn’t brought you here just to chat about the impressive views, yet there’s no hint of disapproval on his face, no indication that he’s anything less than pleased with you.

It’s unnerving to say the least, but you’ll play along with his game if that’s what Oikawa wants.

“Beautiful,” you say, though the words feel woefully inadequate even as you speak them.

He hums in agreement, something akin to pride flickers in his eyes at your assessment, “A labour of love, I suppose. But… everything you see here, everything I’ve built, it comes with a price. You understand that, don’t you?”

“I-I’m sorry?” you stutter.

“Paradise,” he elaborates, his smile widening. “There’s no give without take. Those people down there,” he nods down at the beach, the tiny, ant-like figures still milling about, “the lost, the beaten, the abused – I gave them what they so desperately sought; a sanctuary. A life without struggle, without suffering.” He pauses for a moment, reaching forward to take your hand. You almost flinch, almost skitter across the room to put as much distance between you as you can, but you don’t–

His palm is warm as it envelops yours, a pleasant heat that seems to spread through your veins, easing your tense muscles. There’s nothing to fear from him, you’re safe with Oikawa.

“Aren’t you happy here?”

Yes.

“What about the price?” you ask instead, though it takes more concentration than it should to force the words out.

Oikawa’s thumb sweeps along the back of your hand. “I never said it was your price to pay,” he soothes.

There’s something wrong with that sentence, but another sharp knock at the door draws your attention before you can think too hard about it. You turn out of instinct, barely aware of the way his hand tightens fractionally around your own.

A single finger at your jaw coaxes your attention back to him. “If you built a paradise, wouldn’t you give whatever necessary to ensure it flourished?”

Oikawa stares at you expectantly, deep brown eyes searching your face as he waits for an answer. Agreement would be the logical choice – the one he seems to want from you – but even as your lips part, the only sound that escapes is a breathless, confused noise.

When you were a kid, maybe six or seven, your parents took you to the beach one day and you waded too far out into the water. The waves were bigger than you expected; all it took was one mistimed jump and you were dragged under.

It wasn’t for long, probably only seconds, and ultimately you were fine – but you remember those few seconds so vividly. The feeling of helplessly tumbling through the water, fighting to break the surface but not knowing which way was up. Your lungs crying out for oxygen, the disorientation and dizziness, the panic.

It feels like that now – like the floor’s dropped out from beneath you and you’re just hurtling through empty air, desperately trying to slow yourself down with nothing to grab onto.

None of this makes any sense. Your emotions are shot to pieces, too many parts of yourself being pulled in different directions and you’re not sure which ones you can trust anymore. How can you be? Oikawa’s still holding your hand, smiling at you, and you just want everything to stop for a second so you can right yourself and breathe–

The door opens.

Iwaizumi appears in your field of vision, dragging a bound, hooded figure behind him. And because this is all some big, cosmic joke, you get your wish. Both of them, actually.

Time slows.

Even with a burlap sack pulled over his head, you recognise the man Iwa shoves to the floor and sneers at.

Hundreds of miles, weeks of uselessly traipsing around this fucking island, and finally–

Finally, you’ve found Ryu.

There should be relief. Fear, considering his current state, yes, but Ryuji’s here and he’s alive and as the hood is ripped off his head Oikawa squeezes your hand and the only thing you feel is… anger.

Not a heated flash that surges through your blood. It’s slow and seething, insipid. You look at him, locked in place as empty, pleading eyes meet yours and all you can think is that all of this – everything – is his fault.

“Asuka told you why she came to me, didn’t she?” Oikawa asks.

Your brow furrows, why–why is he asking you that now, how did he even–

He slips closer behind you, letting your hand go in favour of your shoulder, his spare dragging lightly along the bare skin of your arm. “She was lost, in so much pain. The physical wounds, they heal after a while,” his voice is right in your ear, a low murmur that sends a shiver rippling down your spine.

It isn’t an unpleasant feeling.

“But the scars inside, well… sometimes those fester.”

Gagged and bound, kneeling at your feet, Ryu doesn’t even try to make a sound.

He’s thinner than you remember. Face gaunt and bruised; there’s a half healed, mottled yellow one painted across the left side of his jaw, one eye purple and swollen. You glance at Iwa, standing stoically behind him, muscular arms folded across his chest. His work, you wonder, or others as well? You notice the tear tracks running down his face, catching the light of the lanterns, but it’s as if you’re seeing it all through a thick pane of glass. None of it reaches you, there’s nothing but that simmering, ugly feeling in your gut.

Oikawa hums, “I told you that Paradise wasn’t for everyone. It’s a haven, yes, but there are those who simply… don’t belong.”

His body’s so warm, pressed up against yours. Fingertips graze along your side, and this time you don’t bother biting back that tiny, breathless moan. Iwa briefly smirks at it, but there’s no embarrassment. Why should there be? Your eyes flit back to Ryu, bowed on the wooden floor.

Another memory resurfaces; A sharp crack and a ringing in your ears, Ryuji, eyes bloodshot and glazed, falling to his knees, clutching frantically at the leg of your pants as endless apologies spill from his lips.

It wasn’t him. It was never him.

“He hurt you,” Oikawa purrs. “He kept hurting you, I saw it.”

The words wash over you like waves breaking on the shore, but you find yourself nodding anyway. It was the truth, wasn’t it? A thousand tiny hurts, piled up on one another until you finally broke.

And you’d still come when he’d called.

Listened to him when he’d begged you not to hang up the phone.

“Iwa.”

The brunet moves towards a grand chest of drawers pushed up against the western wall. An ornate dagger sits atop, strange and beautiful; the blade isn’t steel or any metal you’ve seen before, but some kind of black stone, the handle intricately carved ivory. You hadn’t even noticed it before, Oikawa’s room filled to the brim with odd trinkets and treasures, but now that you have, it’s hard to tear your eyes away.

Iwa takes it and carries it over towards the two of you, holding it with the utmost care.

“Obsidian,” Oikawa informs you as he accepts the blade from his friend, bringing it in front of you both to show it off. “Pretty, isn’t it?” And while you can’t see his face, you can hear the smile in his tone.

He isn’t wrong though.

Ever so carefully you reach out, the soft pads of your fingertips running along the obsidian surface, surprisingly cool to the touch. The razor sharp edges – wavy and asymmetrical, leading to a tapered point – you’re careful to avoid, almost positive you’d draw blood with the slightest touch.

“Take it,” he urges, his breath ghosting over the shell of your ear.

Obediently, you turn your hand over, your fingers wrapping around the hilt when he presses it against your palm. And as long fingers curl around yours, you idly wonder how old the dagger is – there’s not so much as a scratch on it, yet there’s something about the weapon in your hand that feels ancient. It thrums under your combined touch.

Oikawa jerks his chin at Iwa, and with a short nod and one last, lingering glance cast your way, the latter exits once again.

Leaving you and Oikawa alone with Ryuji.

“It’s almost time,” he remarks – though time for what, you’re not entirely sure. His lips press against your hair, his arm dropping from your shoulder to your waist, drawing you flush against him. “I know why you came to me, the lies that led you here.”

Both of you turn your attention back to Ryuji at that, the bound man now shaking with the force of his muffled sobs, snot dripping from his nose. That bitter resentment rears its ugly head again, soothed only by Oikawa’s pacifying hum, his thumb now rubbing slow circles at your side. “Shh, I’m not angry – none of that matters now. You’ve found a home here, no? You want to stay on the island with me.”

You swallow, nodding your head rapidly. The thought of having to leave now, of being forced out after everything you’ve seen and felt and experienced here, you– you can’t fathom it. You don’t want to.

Ryuji’d wrought so much damage, but even before he’d swept through your life… had you ever been happy? Were you ever truly accepted – or loved, for that matter?

You can’t go back to that life. You won’t; he’ll have to drag you kicking and screaming from the shore. The Commune is your home, this is where you belong. Here, with Oikawa.

“Good girl,” he croons, another kiss pressed to the crown of your head. You beam at the praise and Ryuji crumples a little further. “Death begets life, you understand now, don’t you?”

You glance at the obsidian dagger in your hand and then at Ryu, beaten and bruised, bowed in forced supplication before you, and nod.

His fingers tighten around yours, “Then do it.”

Leaning forward, you reach for Ryu, fingers lightly trailing down his ruined cheek, curling at his chin to coax his head upwards. He squeezes his eyes shut, pain and regret etched over every inch of his face, but he doesn’t fight you.

Baring his throat to your dagger, Ryuji’s pleas take the shape of your name.

Muffled, thanks to the gag, but unmistakable. And for one single moment, you falter.

This… this is wrong; for all his faults, and god knows there were plenty, Ryu didn’t des–

A wave of calm washes over you, allaying your fears, your doubts. Your breath leaves you in a heavy gust, taking with it the tension in your shoulders, and Oikawa’s voice, smooth and honeyed, reaches your ears once more, “Nothing comes without a price, doesn’t he deserve to be the one to pay it?”

With your hand still tucked inside of his, your arm moves with a will of its own; slashing with inhuman grace.

The dagger cuts deep, Ryuji’s eyes snapping open in shock as a spray of warm blood hits you both. He chokes – a horrid, wet, gurgling sound – wide, pleading eyes frantically shifting between you and Oikawa. Every beat of his failing heart sends fresh blood spurting from the gaping wound. It drenches his front, splatters across your dress, your face, crimson pooling at the wooden floorboards at his knees. His mouth falls open and shut, trying and failing to form coherent sounds and you just stand there and watch, the dagger hanging limply at your side.

It doesn’t take long; seconds at the most.

Ryuji’s slumps to the floor, his body finally growing still as the light fades from his eyes. There’s a beat of absolute silence, and then–

Oikawa shudders behind you, a strangled, drawn out moan leaving his lips. You try to turn, but his arms lock around you, every muscle tensing, his back arching. The dagger in your hand grows hot, burning the soft skin of your palm, but with his fingers still tightly entwined with yours you can only whimper and endure it.

With a hoarse, guttural roar, a pulse of pure energy surges through the room like a shockwave. Every cell in your body lights up, electrified, buzzing; a dizzying euphoria unlike any you’ve felt before coursing through your blood.

Across the island, voices cry out in delight, a symphony of life. The trees tremble and shake, invigorated and renewed, fresh buds bursting from the forest floor, blooming under the light of the full moon.

The harvests flourish, even the river swells in response to the call.

Death begets life, just as he promised.

And with every inch of your body alight and singing with pleasure, you can barely think much less protest (and why would you want to?) as Oikawa roughly yanks you around, hungry lips crashing against your own as his fingers pull and tear at your bloodstained dress. He wastes no time with foreplay, and you suspect only begrudgingly takes a moment to hoist you up against him and carry you to his bed.

There’s nothing gentle about the way he hauls your hips to his, sheathing his cock inside of your warm, tight cunt with one savage thrust, but you don’t care.

Not as you cling to him, fingernails raking along his shoulders as he presses your thighs further apart so he can fuck you deeper. It’s hard and rough and brutal, yet you moan for him all the same, his name a prayer swallowed up by feverish, claiming kisses.

Tonight, bathed in blood and the soft glow of moonlight, you offer your god everything.

—

“Look, look!”

A small hand tugs at your skirt, and you glance down to find a little girl with pretty, dark curls holding up a crown of woven flowers.

“Do you like it?” she asks.

Carefully, you take it from her, bringing it closer to examine. She watches you intently as you study it, lifting it this way and that to appraise her work, humming thoughtfully for good measure. “I think it’s beautiful work,” you tell her after a long enough pause, and you can’t help but smile at the way she lights up, preening under your praise. “Why don’t you go show your mama? I’m sure she’ll be very impressed.”

The girl nods rapidly, thanking you before skipping off in the direction of her parents. The sun’s hanging low in the sky, the fires already being readied for the night ahead. You’re not unaware of the watchful gaze that carefully monitors your every move, and the moves of anyone who ventures too close by. Soon enough, you’ll return home to the heart of the island – anticipation fluttering in your belly at the thought of what awaits you – but for now, you let your feet sink further into the sand, closing your eyes as you bask in the lingering warmth of the setting sun.

At least until the sound of your name being called draws you back to the present. Yet it’s not Iwaizumi approaching, but rather Makki, two strangers trailing along behind him.

“Thought I’d find you here,” he grins, throwing a casual arm over your shoulders. “This is Kaneo,” he gestures to the man, “and his wife Manaka. They arrived this morning, I’ve been showing ‘em round.”

You turn to the couple, smiling sweetly as you extend a hand, “Welcome to the Commune.”

#yandere haikyuu #yandere oikawa x reader #yandere oikawa tooru #yandere oikawa #yandere oikawa tooru x reader #cult au #tw: religious themes #tw: dubcon #tw: blood #tw: minor character death #tw: abuse #hades.dark #oikawa x reader #oikawa tooru x reader

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katsukikiss · 3 years

Text

I WANT YOU TO WANT ME

CHARACTERS AGED UP // PRO HERO IZUKU x F!READER // MINORS DNI 18+

WARNINGS: NSFW 18+, smut, oral (f receiving), fluff, semi-established relationship?

AN: Im a little late for Izuku’s birthday :( but this is for @rat-zuki The Deku Agenda Escapes No one event! and thanks @morelikebaku-no for helping me come up with a title >.<

WC: 2.2k

Masterlist

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“Hey y/n! You look different, you have something planned for today?” Izuku beamed at you, looking slightly confused. He approached you as you headed towards the elevator in his massive agency building. You were both heading up to the top floor, where his office resided. You two had been ‘talking’ for the last two months now, since you started working for him, and were casually going on dates or hanging at each others places. Nothing physical had transpired between you two yet; he made you incredibly nervous even though he was so warm and welcoming, so there was no way you were going to make the first move. However, you two had spoken almost everyday since Iida had suggested you for the job, and you practically knew everything about each other at this point. The romantic attraction you two had towards one another was undoubtedly strong, but because he never made any moves on you, you feared that he didn’t like you enough to do so.

“Oh thanks, I was just trying something new, do you like it?” you sheepishly asked, your face filling with heat. You dressed a bit differently than usual, a feeble attempt at being more ‘alluring’. You thought maybe if he saw you in the clothes everyone else was wearing he might find you more attractive. You were always told you had the goods and should flaunt them; you were far too embarrassed and insecure to actually do so, but you were getting a bit frustrated at your lack of physical contact between you and Izuku. Momo took you shopping the other day for some new clothes and makeup and convinced you to ‘just give it a try, see it it helps’. You dawned a tight sage button up and a short form fitting pencil skirt, and heels an inch taller than you were used to. Safe to say, it was a big change to your long loose skirts and fluffy blouses you normally wore.

“Its nice, different but nice. I think I have a meeting in ten minutes, I hate to ask but could you go pick up some coffee?” he asked you, a hand scratching the back of his neck while the other held the elevator door open. You usually attended these meetings, taking notes and giving input, but he never asked you to leave right before one.

You quickly nodded, “Oh yeah sure! Text me the orders I guess?”

“I will, thanks so much!” he said, removing his arm from the door allowing it to close. His reaction to your outfit was okay? He didn’t seem to particularly like or dislike it, but sending you out the minute you arrived to work, and before a meeting, seemed really odd to you, especially since he usually made other people do coffee runs so you two could spend more time together. You turned around on your heel to leave and saw the large group of pro heros entering through the two giant glass doors.

“Oh hey guys! Deku sent me to go get some coffee for you all, since you’re here mind if I just write down your orders now?” you asked, gently curtsying in their presence.

“Hey y/n long time no see!” Red Riot called out to you, hopping forward and pass the group to get closer to you.

“Hey Kirishima! I think I know what you want already” you laughed. He was a close friend of yours in highschool so it was only natural you’d know his favorite coffee. He smiled back at you, his eyes downward, looking at your chest for a bit too long than you were comfortable with. You shuffled back a bit, looking at the rest of the men whose eyes were also glued to your body. You never had a problem talking to them during meetings or outside of work but you felt incredibly flustered now.

“Uhm just tell me what the rest of you want okay?” you mumbled, trying to get the hell out of there. They all nodded, each taking a turn to approach you, coming too close to your face to give you their orders. Once you had them all written down on your phone you waved to them and they each had wide smiles and waved back.

“You’ll be back before the meeting ends right?” Dynamight snapped at you. Although you knew of him in high school and saw him at the office occasionally, he never spoke a word to you until today. You nodded quickly, and turned to leave. You weren’t oblivious, this outfit was working wonders, you just hoped it was working on the one you care about.

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“Here you are boys!” you cheered, placing each of their drinks down in front of them. As you went around the long table to hand out the coffee, Izuku's eyes weren’t on you but on every one of his friends instead. He looked calm but something was hiding underneath that soft face of his. Some of the men ignored you as you handed them their coffee, mumbling ‘thanks’ under their breath. Others, including Bakugo and Kirishima, still looked at you like they did in the lobby, with starving eyes, regardless of the way Izuku was looking at them. You smiled gently at each of them before taking a seat next to Izuku so that the meeting could resume.

When you sat you felt your chair being yanked. You held on to the sides of the chair as Izuku brought you closer to him, a low dragging sound emitting into the room. He looked down at you with a kind smile before addressing the group again. Your heart raced, something was different about him today, was it your outfit? Did it work?! You started to get excited, your legs dancing a bit in your seat. He placed a hand on your right thigh without looking at you as he continued with the discussion. You tried to focus and take notes but the warmth of his hand on you made you so nervous and happy; Of course you two have hugged, snuggled and shared a few kisses here and there but something about this moment felt intimate.

The meeting ended and the men began standing to head out. You were standing and about to move from your chair when you felt his hand pulling on your arm lightly.

“Could you stay for a minute? I just want to talk to you about something” Izuku remarked.

“Oh yeah of course” you responded, taking a seat once more. The men all waved to you and Deku before you were left alone. You reorganized the papers in front of you and into a folder.

“Why the change?” he asked, taking you by surprise. You looked around the dark meeting room and down at your body, before looking back up at your boss.

“I- um I thought you’d like it?” you stammered. He looked like he was thinking, looking forward at nothing with a concerned expression on his face.

“Well I do, but I like when you’re you much better” he affirmed, his eyes aimed downwards. Frustration and defeat came over you; he didn’t like the new outfit, not really, and you weren’t sure what else to do but be honest with him. You thought for a moment it worked but you must have been wrong.

“You never look at me the way all those other men did today, you don’t touch me like you want me, is there something wrong with me?” you implored, practically yelling at him, tears welling in your eyes. His face looked upset when he finally turned to face you. He raised a hand to touch your cheek and swirled his thumb over.

“Y/n, no theres nothing wrong with you at all. I didn’t know you felt that way. Honestly I just didn’t want to rush you. Your are so incredibly beautiful and amazing and theres nothing I want more then to touch you in the way that you want, I just wanted to be respectful about it” he assured you, his hand never leaving your face. You sniffled back your tears and your eyes looked at him longingly. He looked anxious, searching your face for some sort of inclination as to how you felt. Relief flooded over you when you heard his response and you leaned forward into his chest. He placed his hand on top of your head.

“Im sorry I freaked out on you like that Izuku, I was just overthinking it, I can assure you I’m ready to move forward with our relationship. And I didn’t like this outfit much anyway…” you paused for a second and looked up from his chest “what was the deal with the chair though?” you asked. He looked every so slightly annoyed, but he still had a smile when he spoke to you.

“Some of the other heroes were making comments in here after you took their orders, and its safe to say I was a little frustrated and shocked with their behavior, thats all” he admitted. You couldn’t begin to imagine what pervy locker talk they were having about you, and its no wonder he reacted that way.

“Oh wow I-“ he scooped you up and into his arms, causing you to lose your train of thought. He gently squeezed at your thighs before slowly placing you down on the meeting table. Your legs parted instinctually as he slithered in between them.

“Im ready Izuku, trust me” you whispered. He leaned forward and into your neck, placing hot wet kisses down your exposed flesh. He pulled away and looked down at you, cupping your face in his calloused hands.

“Alright baby, then let me do something nice for you” he breathed out. You nodded quickly, your deep breaths making your chest rise to new elevations before falling slowly. He bent his knees, landing on them and placing his face between your legs. He looked up at you quickly before using his hands to pull your skirt up. You helped him and allowed it to bunch up at your waist. You watched as Izuku slowly licked his fingers, maintaining eye contact with you the entire time before dipping them painfully slow into your needy hole. You gasped at the feeling of his two large fingers entering, he began slowly pumping them in and out of you. He kept looking at your wet cunt, admiring it before delving in with his tongue. You let out the quietest whimper you could manage, so as to not be heard by the rest of the staff and people in the office. His tongue danced to rhythms you’ve never experienced before. He lapped up and down your folds, even removing his fingers so that his tongue could get a chance to fuck you too. Your little gasps and moans grew louder but he kept telling you “louder, its okay”. Your legs started to tremble, involuntarily closing slowly on his head. He loved the feeling of your thighs pressed flush against him.

“Fuck Izuku ah I love you” you moaned out, without thinking as you ran your fingers through his green locks. Your mind was in a state of euphoria, lost in the overwhelming sensation of his finger and tongue working wonders on you. You grasped a wad of his hair tightly as you came undone for him, your sweet release splashing out of your cunt and onto his fingers and mouth. He lapped up your juices, reveling in the way you tasted before licking his lips and wiping his face with the back of his hand. He stood up and you immediately pulled him in for a passionate kiss with shaky arms. Your tongues intertwined, before he pulled away, bringing his fingers to your mouth. You sucked on them slowly while looking him in the eyes. He looked dumbfounded as he watched your lips wrap around his and felt your cute mouth sucking on him.

“We can keep going Izuku, I want to” you practically begged, your face almost pouting after he removed his fingers from your mouth. He backed up from between your legs and pushed them closed much to your dismay. He placed his hands on your legs and bent down to your level and looked at you before speaking.

“We have plenty of time baby, plus I have an interview in about” he checked his watch “six minutes” he smiled at you. You hopped off the table, pulling your skirt back to its correct place. He straightened out your shirt and patted your shoulders. His hands moved down to your waist and he pulled you forward, your lips finding each other perfectly. You shared one last kiss before making your way towards the door.

“You can dress however you want y/n, whatever makes you happy will make me happy” he said, pausing with his hands gripping the doorknob.

“I appreciate that Izuku” you paused, a clever idea crossing your mind, “but wait till’ you see what I’ve got planned for tomorrow” you winked at him. His face turned a deep shade of red, as did your own at your fleeting sense of confidence. He shook his head and took a deep breath.

“I cant wait” he murmured before opening the door.

#mha fanfiction #mha smut #izuku smut #izuku x reader #izuku x y/n #deku smut #deku x y/n #bakugou x reader #bakugou katsuki #kirishima eijirou #my hero academia #my hero academia smut #my hero fanfic #the deku agenda escapes no one collab #bnha smut #bnha x reader #midoriya izuku

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recurring-polynya · 3 years

Note

Do I mind if I ask how you approach writing longer fic? I've always struggled to write anything more than maybe two chapters long and I'm curious if you have a particular method to how you approach such stories.

Thank you so much for this ask! I absolutely love it when people ask me for writing advice because it makes me feel like a Smart Person Who Knows Things.

Before we start, here is one grain of salt to take all of this with: I have a naturally long-form brain. It is very hard for me to write something less than 1k. Short fiction is great, and there is nothing wrong with sticking to short things if that's what your brain likes to do.

So. You have decided to write a story. This is going to focus on "stories". Some people write fic that's more freeform or whatever, I am not going to cover that. What I mean by a story is this:

It starts

Some stuff happens

It ends

It is highly probable that your story contains a change of state, which could be that a villain is defeated, or a goal is reached, but it could also be that character falls in love with another, or someone learns to like broccoli.

I like to start out by completing the sentence, "This is a story where _______". This is basically like coming up with a summary for an ao3 post, except that it doesn't need to be catchy. Lots of different kinds of things could go in that blank! It could literally be what happens: This is a story where Ichigo goes back in time and punches young Aizen in the nose. It could be about what you want to explore: This is a story where Hitsugaya gets a better understanding of his zanpakutou. It could be about the vibe you want to achieve: This is an AU where everyone is in a punk rock band and has cool hair and outfits. The idea of this is to clearly define what you, the author, is interested in writing. Make sure it feels right! Maybe you pick the first one, but when you say it out loud, you say, "You know, I really just want Ichigo to go back in time so he can horse around with young Renji and Rukia and punching Aizen in the nose is just an excuse for that." That may sound dumb, but it's fine, actually! Most people don't read stories strictly for the plot, they read stories for the implications of those plots! Will my favorite two characters kiss? Will there be funny interactions between these two groups of characters? Will there be sick fights? Stories are excuses to have scenes. Sometimes, you will have a story where the interesting sequence of events is the draw, but the point is to know what you're about.

Once you feel happy with your "mission statement", you need to decide the bounds of your story: where it starts and where it ends. It may be easier to start with the end. In some cases, it may be obvious from your mission statement: everyone gets home, a villain is defeated, Kenpachi realizes the meaning of friendship. On the other hand, let's look at that punk rock AU. You've picked a vibe, but you don't really have a natural story arc. It has to have a destination, though, otherwise, it's not really a story, it's a recipe for 3 chapters of an abandoned fanfic. So brainstorm a little: Maybe they get a record deal? Maybe they win a Battle of the Bands? Maybe Byakuya accepts that the band is actually good and tells Rukia he is proud of her. Do not settle for a plot just because it works. Pick something that makes you excited! You're the one who is gonna have to write it!

I said that we needed to pick a beginning point, too, but I'm actually going to skip that for now. The next thing I do is think of all the Big Scenes I want to write, the ones you are hype to write, the ones that pop in your head as you think about the premise. Make a bullet list. They don't need to be in order. The descriptions don't need to be super detailed, but write down anything about it that is important to you. If there's a mood or a snippet of dialogue or a joke you want to make, go ahead and jot that down so you don't forget it later. What you're doing now is putting broad blotches of color on a canvas, filling in space and leaving the detail for later.

Once you are pretty happy with what you have down, try to arrange it in chronological order. Put your end at the end (if it wasn't one of your big scenes, add it now). The next task is figuring out how to traverse your scenes. You've already picked out where you want to spend the majority of your energy. The rest, I regret to tell you, is your slog writing. Now, it often happens that you will find joy in some of these scenes and your best writing may occur there, but that's serendipity. These are the scenes that you are gonna have to make yourself sit down and write, so you honestly want to limit them to just the ones you need.

So how do we do this? Look at the first thing on the list. Can you start there? If so, congrats, that's your beginning. If you can't, what needs to happen to get to there? Where can you start so that you can get to your first fun scene as soon as possible? There. That’s it. You’ve picked your beginning, good job! Now, go through the rest of your list, and add in things that must happen, even if you don’t particularly look forward to writing them. The characters need to travel from geographic point A to point B. Shuuhei needs to say something that Izuru hears and misinterprets. The Central 46 makes a new law. If you have a good idea of how these things happen, go ahead and write them down, but it’s okay if you don’t know yet. Fill in all the blanks so that if you think of each bullet list as a scene, you could read it as a story, start to end. Once you get writing, you might add more scenes, or move things around or whatever, but you should have a thing that functions as a story.

If you struggle with this, an alternative is a story with a very strong structure that is going to guide you though what you have to write.Here are two examples from my own stories Hold On, Hold On (which is only one chapter, but the principle is the same) is structured around the 5 stages of grief. Not Broken, Just Bent takes place over roughly a week, and I just decided what happened every day of the week. See You on the Other Side takes place in the middle of a bunch of canon events, which worked at mile markers.

Congratulations. You’ve just made a rough outline!

Special note for avoiding burnout!: I am a slogger. I will drag myself through the broken glass of an interminable plot to get to a single thirsty scene. That's why, at this stage, I try to look at the ratio of what I want to write to what I must write. It's gonna vary for everyone, but this is a hobby, and if looking at this proto-outline makes you feel deeply tired, maybe this isn't a good story to be devoting your time to! Can you carve it down? Can you chuck two scenes you really want to write and get rid of 80% of the slog? Or maybe you can't! In that case, just write that thirsty scene as a standalone drabble! Or just go work on something else! Maybe in the future, this one will come back to you and you’ll have a fresh idea or a renewed enthusiasm for it.

Another thing I sometimes like to do at this point is to write out some notes about my characters and their motivations and moods. Character A is homesick. Character B is so determined to defeat the enemy that they are having a hard time being sympathetic to Character A. Character C cares for both A and B and is trying to support them both. This is sort of background info that you want to keep in your head as you are writing. Depending on the type of story you are writing, this might actually be the main plot, or it might be happening subtly, but adding to the emotional impact of the story. It’s very easy for me to write these sorts of emotional arcs, but if you struggle with that, you may wish to go ahead and made a more detailed outline for that, too.

Now, it’s time to start writing! I am great at beginnings-- it is very often the case for me that the opening scene was one of my Big Tentpole Scenes. (Before you hate me too much, I make up for this by being double horrible at endings; just let me have this) Usually, I will start at the beginning and write linearly for as long as I can until I get stuck. Then, I will look forward on my outline and do the next chronological scene that I feel like writing. In general, if I sit down to write and there is something I have an urge to write, that trumps everything else. Inspiration is a precious commodity, and you should embrace it when it hits! You can slog any day. I will occasionally hold off writing a scene that I really want to, because I am saving it, like a prize for myself for getting that far. This is a very personal process of figuring out what motivates your brain and then giving your brain what it needs to be its most productive.

Eventually, you will run out of things you are excited to write, but the good news is, you’ve got a bunch of story now! Odds are that what’s left is going to be a lot of those connective tissue scenes, and you’re just going to have to do them, except that now, because you’re connecting two concrete points instead of two abstract points, it will be a lot easier. You can continue running jokes you’ve started. Maybe you invented a cafe in an earlier scene where your characters hang out and you can have them return there. Try to think of ways to make these scenes more fun, both for yourself to write and for your reader to read.

Around this time, I like to start refining that rough strokes outline into what I will call an “as-built” outline. (This is an engineering term where you update your plans or models for something to reflect any changes that had to be made along the way). This is a great activity to do at times when you feel like you have writers block. I write down every scene I have written as a 2-3 word blurb, in order. I break the scenes into what I think makes logical chapters, and I will do a word count on those prospective chapters and write it down. As you do this, you will realize that maybe you can move a scene from here to there, which will make it 1000% easier to write. Things may be happening too much, or you’ve got the characters eating three times in the same chapter. If you have subplots and dangling threads, this is where you make sure they get closure. I know this sounds very headache-y, but you are so far along in the story at this point that it’s really not-- it’s a way to look at the problems you have left. Use some sort of formatting (I like to bold things I haven’t done and sometimes I put them in red) and it gives you a very visual to-do list.

You specifically mentioned multi-chapter fanfics and I admit that I don’t tend to think in chapters, I tend to think of the story as a whole and just break it up where it feels natural. The as-built outlining I described is very helpful in making sure that my chapters feel balanced. They don’t necessarily need to be the same length, but I like them to have the same amount of stuff in them. One chapter may basically contain one long scene, and other may contain many short ones. I don’t tend to, but you can certainly have a fanfic that varies between short and long chapters, that can actually be an interesting effect. But like I said, I always like to know what I am doing, and so having it mapped out, you can say “welp, this is what I’ve done, how do I feel about that?”

Polynya, you may be saying at this point, do you write the whole fanfic before you post any of it? and I regret to inform you, the answer is yes. A lot of people write as they go, and I have made one attempt at this and I didn’t like it. I don’t like locking myself in, I just need to be able write out of order and go back and change things. Here is the story of a little in love: someone gave me an AU prompt and I got mildly obsessed with it, and wrote 5 snapshots drabbles in that universe, ending with a slight cliffhanger ending. I probably should have stopped there, but I decided to keep going. I wrote out an outline of 5 acts where the first act was detailed to the degree of each chapter being specified. The chapters here were much smaller than I usually make chapters: 1-2k. I wrote act i and ii and it was actually great, and then I hit act iii which required a lot of set up for misunderstandings and a mini romance arc. I couldn’t wing it, but nor could I figure it all out with outlining. I write dialogue in almost sort of an improv “Yes, and...?” style, so until I do it, I don’t know what’s going to happen. So, what I did was treat the second half of act iii as a complete story in the process I describe above, wrote the entire rest of it, and then posted it. One might notice that the chapter lengths grew to 3-5k each. I have two more acts to go, and I haven’t decided how I am going to do them yet, but I suspect I will treat each of them as their own mini-stories.

(I will admit that in Heart is a Muscle, I tend toward chapters that are about 10k long, and this is honestly too long, someone should smack me. If you like punchy chapters, 1-2k is good. I think 3-6k is probably an ideal chapter length. Is this how long the chapters are in my latest fanfic? Absolutely not.)

Okay, so there’s one more step, which is quality control. I am habitual re-reader-- I read my fanfics-in-progress over and over and over while I am working on them. I understand that not everyone does this, but I am usually the primary audience for my own writing, and this is the actual fun part for me. Nevertheless, you should re-read your work at least once, to make sure it hangs together.

This is purely optional, but I recommend it: get a writing friend (if you don’t like re-reading your work, I recommend this even more strongly). If you can get a full-service beta reader, that’s great, but if you can’t find someone, or if receiving that level of critique stresses you out, it’s perfectly valid to just find a friend who will read your stuff and a) shower you with compliments, b) reassure you about parts you aren’t sure about (or suggest ways to help) and c) point out any huge problems you missed. When I am writing a long fanfic, it is a huge motivational factor for me to be able to send my beta chapters as I finish them. If you are already an established writer, and you have people who consistently comment on your fic, they might be overjoyed to get a sneak peak at your work.

And that’s it! That’s the way I do it, anyway! Some people are able to sit down and write a very detailed outline and the write it start-to-finish. Good for them, I say! I have tried this and it doesn’t work great for me. I will admit that some of my fics (especially my early ones) I just sat down and banged out whole-cloth like an insane person and they are generally better than the ones I actually plan out, but that’s not a reproducible process.

As one final mechanical note, I usually write in Google Docs, which I can access on multiple devices (I used to write a lot on my phone), has convenient sharing functionality, and I use the ao3 html formatting script add-in. I generally have two documents for a single story-- one is the outline, and any other notes I want to have handy. I’ll usually put a trashcan space at the bottom for scenes that got cut but I don’t want to lose. The other is the fanfic itself.

I hope this is helpful! Please feel free to follow up with other questions and good luck with your writing!

#writing advice #longform writing

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fruitoftheweek · 3 years

Text

Little Cherry Book:

Chapter 1: Who is She?

Chapter 2 Here/ Chapter 3 Here

I guess this is a Switch!Spencer (mainly Sub! Spencer)X reader fan fiction this is my first fan fiction I’ve written since middle school so bare with me and feel free to message me constructive criticism. This will probs be multiple chapters but I just couldn’t get this idea off of my mind so here we go! And yes this season 1/2 Spencer because he is just the cutest!

Pairing: Spencer Reid X reader

Plot: Doctor Spencer Reid has heard of little black books, but that pales in comparison to what he has just found in the BAU’s elevator. A sweetly scented notebook filled with salacious journal entries illustrating the writer's sexual fantasies. He doesn’t know what it is about this book but all he can think of is finding its owner.

TLDR: Spencer finds your kinky notebook and uses super sleuth skills to find you.

Series TW: 18+, smut, degradation, piercing, choking, knife play, mommy/daddy kinks, spanking, exhibitionism, Will update as time goes on

Chapter TW: Cumming in pants, Hinting at sex, exhibitionism, no panties, Language, General 18+, Hinting at future kinks

Word Count: 2,439 (gah damn)

𝒯𝒪 𝒲𝐻𝒪𝑀 𝐼𝒯 𝒞𝒪𝒩𝒞𝐸𝑅𝒩𝒮:

𝒟𝑜 𝓃𝑜𝓉 𝓇𝑒𝒶𝒹, 𝓃𝑜𝓉 𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝓂𝓎 𝓈𝒶𝓀𝑒, 𝒷𝓊𝓉 𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝓎𝑜𝓊𝓇𝓈. 𝐼 𝓌𝒾𝓁𝓁 𝓃𝑜𝓉 𝒷𝑒 𝓌𝓇𝒾𝓉𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓂𝓎 𝓃𝒶𝓂𝑒 𝒾𝓃 𝒸𝒶𝓈𝑒 𝒾𝓉 𝒸𝑜𝓂𝑒𝓈 𝒾𝓃𝓉𝑜 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓌𝓇𝑜𝓃𝑔 𝒽𝒶𝓃𝒹𝓈. 𝐼𝒻 𝒾𝓉 𝒸𝑜𝓂𝑒𝓈 𝒾𝓃𝓉𝑜 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓇𝒾𝑔𝒽𝓉 𝒽𝒶𝓃𝒹𝓈, 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝒸𝒶𝓃 𝒻𝒾𝓃𝒹 𝓂𝑒. 𝐼𝒻 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝒸𝑜𝓃𝓉𝒾𝓃𝓊𝑒, 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝓈𝒽𝒶𝓁𝓁 𝒷𝑒 𝒸𝓊𝓇𝓈𝑒𝒹, 𝒷𝑜𝓉𝒽 𝒾𝓃 𝒶 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒸𝒽𝓎 𝓌𝒶𝓎 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝓂𝑒𝓃𝓉𝒶𝓁𝓁𝓎. 𝒴𝑜𝓊 𝒽𝒶𝓋𝑒 𝒷𝑒𝑒𝓃 𝓌𝒶𝓇𝓃𝑒𝒹.

As Spencer read these sentences, he paused. Not for the warning of so-called curses, there was no scientific evidence for such things and Spencer knew magic was just science with a trick of the eye, but for the vehement warning making him feel intruding on whoever had left their journal in the elevator.

It had caught his eye as he stepped into the elevator on his way out of the office. As someone who had lost plenty of books in his days roaming the halls of the BAU, he knew how frustrating it was to not know what happened at the end. As he picked it up, he noticed the cover. It was old, bound in aged cherry red leather, yet too small to be more than a pocketbook. He had found your message while searching for a name to return the book to, and simply reading the first page already felt prying.

Alas, one sentence enticed him “If it comes into the right hands, You can find me.” Where his hands the right ones to come into? The probability of that could be found easily by calculating how many people got on and off of this specific elevator that day, no, in the past hour, with the hustle and bustle of people leaving for the day. Spencer could and he would calculate it he wasn’t so distracted by the message and his voracity to solve this mystery.

Tentatively, he flipped the page, finding a handwritten table of contents. This book had obviously been very important to the reader if they had taken the time to write in page numbers, detailed headings, and chapters. The table was nearly full of chapter titles in scrawled cursive lettering. His eyes stopped on the first chapter title. “Male Needs” with shakey lettering. He could tell by your handwriting that you grew more confident in your journaling as the chapters progressed, the hesitations in your strokes growing few and far between.

As he flipped the page once more he had reached the next floor and a large group of people bustled into the elevator. Spencer shied away from them, not just because he had an aversion to contact with strangers and their germs, but because of the sentences, he had read underneath that first chapter “I do not need a man, a man needs me. Yet, when I am with a man, I have needs. Needs that most men can’t fulfill. I need a man that eats pussy like it’s the only way to quench his thirst-“ and with that Spencer slammed the book shut, earning some confused looks from the others on the elevator. He should have heeded the warning because now all he could think about was the fact that this was your nervous entry and as your confidence grew, it was bound to escalate from there. He wasn’t sure if it was his flustered mind or the heat growing deep from inside him that made him feel dirty; not because it scandalized him, but because these were someone’s fantasies and he had intruded in their secrets and soiled them with his mind.

Ding! He had reached the ground floor and that was when he decided to leave it alone. He couldn’t bring it to the lost and found as it would be more likely to end up in the wrong hands there and your secrets would be for someone else to find, not that he even knew who you were.

On his drive home, he tried to think of anything else besides the book. His lunch, Garcia’s new item she added to her collection, how to get back at Derek for putting salt in the sugar container, but his mind kept wandering. It didn’t help that the notebook sat tauntingly on top of his satchel as if saying “Open me, you know you want to. You want to know who I am. You can find me.” There was no way that it had been there for that long as the janitor was on duty today and he had been on the elevator two hours ago on his way to clean the top floor. Since Spencer had left a little later than most people that meant there were multiple elevators full of people who would have noticed. He knew it wasn’t so but part of him felt as if you had left it there specifically for him to find. Like it was made for him. He quickly shook off the thought and went back to who it could be. He wanted to return it without reading any more. You clearly would miss it but he couldn’t imagine you wanted others to know about what lay in those folded corners of your book and your mind.

As he walked up the steps of his complex, he clutched onto the notebook with all of his strength, he feared that he would look down and it would have disappeared, he wanted to keep your deepest secrets safe as if they were his own. He was only able to relinquish his grip when he shut and locked the door to his apartment. He set it on the table as he got prepared for the night. By now he had limited his pool to 54 women who were regularly in and out of the elevator at that time of day which was a cut down in comparison to the 860 roughly women in that building on any given day. But that number still wasn’t small enough. He had to minimize the sample size even further. That was the only reason he reopened to the table of contents, right? Not because of his own morbid curiosity and definitely not because of the heat burning in his stomach.

He looked down at the page numbers, still too nervous to look at the titles, and saw that each entry was a page long consisting of 23 entries and one with a title but no page numbers. Not chapters as he previously thought but entries giving lascivious details into what he had not yet mustered up the courage to read. He was still unable to look at the titles in fear of what he might find. If graphic depictions of female oral sex were displayed under “Male Needs”, what possibly could lie ahead.

For now, he studied the handwriting. Cursive, not often used by many younger women, was often associated with antiquities and traditional values but he noticed something off. There was a very specific curl to certain numbers. Every even number had a specific extra curl or flourish to it and the zeros had a line through it like a “do not enter” sign. This went directly against the hypothesis that you were an older woman that the cursive provided; as many older women who wrote in cursive stuck to the rules even when it came to numbers. She wasn’t old enough to even be Hotch’s age but she appreciated the charm of the past. 'Who is this girl?' Spencer wondered. He was able to narrow it down to about half of his previous lot, excluding the women on his team. He had seen them write enough to know their handwriting inside and out. And while Garcia’s had similar flourishes to yours, she never crossed her zeros.

Spencer knew that he would have to read at least the chapter titles to grasp a better understanding of your handwriting and who you could possibly and as his eyes scanned the page, for the first time in a while he was actually reading slowly; putting all of his focus into each word and what order they were in. Unfortunately, his focus was his downfall. His face became so hot that he felt as if you could see steam coming off of it.

Table of contents:

Male Needs

Praise

Degradation

Mommy

Daddy

Work

Exhibition

Choking

Collars

Breeding

And that was all he could take. Ha couldn’t look at the thirteen and a half more entries, even this much knocked the wind out of him. He didn’t have much experience with women and certainly not enough to understand what all of those words necessarily entailed but he knew that whatever it was keeping his internal fire roaring with heat.

While he hated snooping, he knew he would need more information. He chose the chapter that sounded the most mundane out of all of them, "Work." ‘What was more normal than work.’ he thought, but he was so sorely mistaken.

"Work:

"Before I move on to exhibitionism, I have to talk about work. Yes, I would love to have sex at work where I and my partner are one step away from getting caught, I haven’t done that yet. I want to tell you what I have done. Almost every day I go to work wondering if the others can tell that I’m not wearing underwear.”

His heat spread from his face down until it pooled in his loins and his cock became hard imagining this mystery girl walking the halls of the BAU with a breeze in her skirt, nearly exposing the secret that lied beneath. Had he sat next to you when you were partaking in this activity? What would he have done if your skirt bunched up your thigh as you sat, exposing the tan lines where your underwear should be. Would he be able to see you in your tight work pants with no pantie lines and be the only one who truly knows your secret?

“I kinda want to be caught someday by Him. I wonder what he would do. Would he tell me off for being unprofessional? Would he take me to that storage closet 3 doors past Garcia’s office, just far enough away that he could teach me a lesson for being naughty at work?”

He felt so dirty, inserting himself into the fantasies of a girl which he did not even know that he almost glanced across the use of Him, capital H.i.m. He wanted to indulge in his imagination that in some way or another that the “Him” in question was in fact the man reading this with trembling hands and an impossibly hard cock. He couldn’t stop himself from imagining situations in the storage closet that he regularly used as a reading nook when he needed time away from the others.

He rested his head on the pages of the book, hoping somehow that his dirty thoughts would be transplanted from his head and back into the pages so that he could stop thinking about you. His efforts were thwarted as this action meant that he could spoil himself in your scent that enveloped the book. As if you had wrapped it in the deepest most vulnerable part of you to hide it away from others. You smelled of bergamot, patchouli, and musk but deeper than that, you smelled like sweet, tart berries and honeysuckle in summer. There was something else that he couldn’t put his finger on at first but it was intoxicating all of his senses. It was saccharine, heat, and sex all combined in one. When it clicked, it no longer felt as if his head was pressed against a book but as if his he sat kneeling on the ground with his cheek resting in your inner thigh, your hot sex waiting for his indulgence, “like it's the only way to quench his thirst” echoed in his brain. The scent was your natural pheromones beckoning him closer with the promise of a treat.

And that was it. That was what sent him over the edge. The purest embodiment of your scent had him cumming, hot in his pants.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You sat down at the edge of your bed after a long day at work; shucking off your work clothes to get as comfy as you could in your PJs as a way to unwind from the day. You went to grab your lip balm from your bag and noticed that the front pocket of your bag had been left open. You instantly panicked, searching everywhere for your little red book. The one that kept the key to your deepest secrets and darkest fantasies. You tore your bag apart, knowing that you had it at the end of your workday because you took it out of your desk drawer and tucked it back into its home in your bag. You cursed your carelessness for not double-checking that you zipped your bag before leaving. With your forgetfulness, you knew it would happen one day but you didn't realize it would be this soon.

There was an odd mix in your heart and your stomach. Part of you felt your heart drop through your ass thinking that it had ended up in the wrong hands, part of you had butterflies thinking about someone knowing the deepest parts of you, intimately in your own words. You had the assurance that your name was nowhere to be seen in the book but you also knew that you worked with people who analyzed people's dark desires for a living. While none of your fantasies involved murder, they were like precious gems that you kept locked away in your heart. You couldn't dare imagine what would happen if it came into His hands. While you were the youngest at the BAU, only by a few months and you weren't even part of the group because you were still tentative, you couldn't put your dirty thoughts into the innocent head of the pretty boy genius. It was almost more worrisome than if SSA Hotchner or Gideon found it and you were fired. The idea of tainting someone so pure...

You had to literally shake your head to clear your thoughts. Imagining His face tinged red in innocence reading through your lewd writing had your head in a tizzy. Imagining Doctor Spencer Reid sifting through the pages with lightning-fast fingers, stroking down the pages of smut as you had imagined him stroking down your thighs so many times before. You decided to bury your head in your pillow, hoping that would calm your mind enough to slip into slumber.

Unfortunately for you both, your efforts would be fruitless and you would both go to sleep unknowingly thinking of each other.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chapter 2 Here/ Chapter 3 here

And that's Chapter one. Hope y'all like it. LMK in my messages and all that <3 have a great week!

#Spencer Reid smut #Spencer Reid imagine #Spencer Reid x reader #spencer reid blurb #spencer reid fluff #spencer reid angst #criminal minds smut #criminal minds imagine #criminal minds fanfiction #criminal minds #sub spencer #spencer reid fanfic #spencer reid #sub!spencer #mommy kink

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goddesswritings · 3 years

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“Can I slap her for you?” - Corpse Husband | Part Two

Title: “Can I slap her for you?” – Part Two

Pairing: Corpse Husband x Reader

Summary: Being stuck living with the queen of YouTube drama and partying during the pandemic has seriously worn down your patience. Meeting Pokimane has changed your life for the better, making Among Us a pivotal part of your life.

Word Count: 5.2k

Unedited for now. I was eager to post. I will edit it later.

Corpse Masterlist

********

<< PART ONE

After you left the apartment, you sat in the parking lot of some random store, trying to decide what to do now. Sighing, you opened your phone and went to Instagram. Corpse was probably wondering if it went okay.

Corpse: She left the stream, thank you!

Corpse: What exactly did you do?

Corpse: She’s sending Sean angry DM’s now.

Corpse: Hey, are you okay?

Y/n: Hey sorry, I had to pack. I’m fine, happy to help get her out of the stream. I switched off the power to her office.

Honestly, you wished you could have stood up against her more often than you did. She was four years younger, so you should have been able to have the say in things. But no, Olivia was a control freak and a spoiled brat too. She would no doubt tell your parents you started a fight with her, and she felt unsafe.

Corpse: Wow, you’re badass. Packing for what?

Y/n: Um, she may have kicked me out of the apartment, and I may have left without a fight because I’m tired of her shit. 🤷‍♀️

Corpse: Do you have a place to stay?

Of course you didn’t and you really should have thought about that before just leaving the way you did.

Y/n: Not really but I will find somewhere.

Well you hoped you could. There weren’t many people who were keen in taking in a friend during a pandemic.

Corpse: Poki’s going to call you.

At that message, your phone started to wring and sure enough, it was Poki.

“Hello?” You asked hesitantly.

“So someone let it slip that your sister kicked you out?” Poki said calmly.

“Is that someone, Corpse?”

“Yes, he said it out of shock but I’m glad he did. Knowing you, you would have kept it a secret from me.” She was right. You hated inconveniencing your friends.

“Damn you, Corpse.” You muttered making her laugh. “Yeah so I ruined Olivia’s stream and she started screaming at me before kicking me out. I didn’t fight it because I am tired of her.”

“Understandable. Well do you need somewhere to stay?”

“Yes but I will find some place.”

“Nope, you’re staying with me. Come over now or I am coming out to drag you back to my place.” Her protectiveness made you smile.

“Sure, I’ll be there in a few.” You hung up.

Y/n: Thank you for looking out for my stubborn ass, Corpse. I would have never told her.

Corpse: Stubborn is one word to describe you. Cute is another.

That comment made your face heat up from the sheer adorableness of it. Corpse seriously just called you cute.

Y/n: Can I say you have a genuinely nice hand. It’s marvelous.

Corpse: Hey, don’t make fun of my hand. It takes all the heat for me. That hand is very anxious every time I post him.

Y/n: Awe I bet. Give him hugs from me. Also tell him I’m a big fan!

The easy flow of conversation between the two of you was nice. You got along extremely well and talking outside of the game was nice, since you could focus on what you really wanted to say to him.

Corpse: He’s flattered!

This was great and took your mind off Olivia and the fact she just kicked you to the curb with nowhere to go. But Poki was there for you. You appreciated her more than she knew.

You pulled up in front of her apartment building, parking the car, you got out and grabbed your stuff. Typing in the code Poki had given you a while ago, you were let into the building. Entering the elevator, you made your way to her apartment.

Barely knocking, the door flew open to reveal Poki. She looked mad but also worried. She pulled you into the apartment and hugged you tightly.

“Can I slap her for you?” She asked calmly.

This made you giggle. “I mean I would like to slap her as well.”

“We should make a plan. Hey, the group is still on, come say hi.” She started to lead you to her office.

“Are they still streaming?” You didn’t want to reveal your face to the world, not like this.

“Oh no. We ended our streams when Olivia started talking about you. She completely wasn’t respecting your privacy and we weren’t about to let her spill it to our viewers.” That was so sweet of them to do.

You had left your bags in the other room while you followed her. An idle conversation was going on when you entered.

“Hey guys, I’m back.” Poki took a seat in front of the computer, she pulled up a second chair. “I have someone special here.”

Sitting down, you saw her nod for you to say something. “Hey, did you miss me?”

They went wild.

“Y/n! Oh we missed you!”

“Don’t leave us again.”

“I’m sorry I invited your sister to stream.”

“Hey Y/n.”

The mix of voices was overwhelming in a good way. Sykkuno, Rae, Sean, and Corpse pretty much spoke over each other which made you laugh.

“One at a time, guys. You can’t overload her.” Leslie told them.

“Sorry Y/n. We just really missed having you here. You’ve become one of our favorite friends to play with.” Sykkuno said sounding as sweet as ever. That man was just the best.

“Yes, I can say we agree.” Rae added.

It was nice to hear they missed you. It really helped to lift your mood as well.

“Did your sister really kick you out?” Toast asked

“Yes she did. But it’s not surprising at this point. She’s probably been gunning to kick me out as soon as she could.” Sad truth

“Well she’s the worst player ever. She can’t keep a secret at all. I really should have never agreed to get her into the group.” Sean said sounding sad.

“Hey Sean, please don’t worry about it. She’s always weaseling her way into things. It’s completely not your fault.” One of the things she loved to do was incessantly DM other youtubers for collabs or for free stuff. She really had no morals.

“Well thank you, Y/n. You’re literally the sweetest.” Sean said earning a bunch of ‘I Agrees’ from everyone else. That really was helping make the night better.

“Who’s up for some more Among Us to relax after that shitshow?” Lud asked making everyone laugh hard. It was agreed the group would do it. Luckily, you had your laptop and joined the call and game and stayed in Poki’s living room to play. Honestly, it was so good for you.

At the end if gaming, you said goodbye to the group. Then Poki showed you to the extra room that used to be her roommates before she moved out last month.

“Hey, are you looking for a roommate?” You asked as you put the bags on the bed.

Poki sent you a smile. “I am. Are you interested?”

This was good. “Yes, I mean I still have to find another job since my main is still furloughing me until this pandemic gets better but I have some money saved up.”

“Hey, please don’t sweat it. Besides, I know a friend who’s in need of an editor, I may have mentioned your name and she really wants to talk to you about it. Is that okay?”

“Wow, that’s perfect. Thank you, Poki. You’re such a great friend.” It felt good to have someone there for you.

She pulled you into a hug. “Always. I am so glad I met you. You’re one of my best friends.”

This was an honor. “Don’t make me cry.”

“I can’t promise anything. Anyway, I will leave you to rest. It’s been a long night. Tomorrow I will give you my friends details.”

“Sounds good, night Poki.”

“Goodnight, Y/n.” She waved goodbye and closed the door behind herself.

Smiling, you sat on the bed. It was such a good thing that she was here got you. But also Corpse was the catalyst that got you to actually tell Poki was what happening. He was sweet and it seemed he was looking out for you.

After changing into comfy pj’s, you brushed your teeth before climbing into the freshly made bed. Opening Instagram, you saw that Corpse has messaged you.

Corpse: I don’t like being too forward but hey here we go. Can I please have your number so we can talk more easily?

A smile made its way to your face. For a tough man, he surely had a sweet way of getting to you

Y/n: Yes you can. xxx-xxx-xxxx.

The nerves jumped when you sent that message. Less than a minute later, you received a text from an unknown number.

xxx-xxx-xxxx

Hey Y/n, it’s Corpse. Would you mind if I called you so we could talk for a little?

You liked this idea truthfully. It only helped to show how genuine Corpse was being.

Y/n

Not at all. Please go ahead and call me.

Your phone rang, displaying Corpse’s name.

“Hello?” You answered the phone while pushing away the anxiety.

A soft deep laugh filled your ear. “Hey sweet girl. How are you feeling?”

His words made you want to sigh in the most lovesick way. That never happened these days.

“I’m good. Poki had an extra room I could crash in and well I might just be her new roommate.”

“I love that. She’s so much better than your sister I assume.”

“She is. Here I won’t have to deal with the incessant pandemic partying Olivia likes to do.” That selfish bitch.

“Shit, is she stupid? She does know she’s risking a lot of lives, right?” You loved that Corpse had the logic you craved.

“So she is stupid, and her response was always that it’s not her problem and that the vulnerable people should stay home.”

“She sounds like the typical beauty youtuber these days.”

“Yes, she is. She has no morals.”

“Well that’s not good. I guess that’s why her name keeps popping up all over social media. She really needs to be careful, before she becomes the next Tana.” He was right but you personally thought she was past that point already.

“It’s too late. She’s already passed the point of return with all of this.”

“Yikes. It’s good you got out of there when you did.” A soft but deep laugh was heard through the phone. The sound made you giggle. Hearing such a tough guy laugh the way Corpse laughs, made you feel giddy. “So about what I said earlier, I meant it.”

“Huh, what are you talking about?” You truly were a little lost by this.

Corpse laughed again. “When I called you cute earlier. I meant it.”

Heat filled your face and a small smile made its way to your lips. “Thank you, Corpse. That’s really sweet of you. I don’t like to show many people who I am because they will immediately connect me to Olivia, and I don’t want that.”

“I get that. I don’t show my face for fear they won’t like me when I do. All my fans have built up this expectation of what they want me to look like and now I just don’t want to let them down. Plus it’s nice being able to stay anonymous if I go into public, but of course people will hear my voice and know. Shit, it’s hard.”

“Awe, I’m sorry. I saw what the attention has done to some people, but I think not everyone goes into that headspace. Also, I think you should stay faceless if it makes you feel better. There is no rule that says you ever have to show your face. People who push you to do it have no boundaries.”

Corpse was quiet for a while and you thought you had offended him. “I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing, Corpse.” You squeaked.

“No, you said the right thing. I was just thinking. You’re right. A lot of people have been on me to reveal my face, but I never intend to. I want to be able to live my life without being swarmed by fans, or god forbid, them judging me by my appearance.”

“Which is really fucked. When I first appeared in my sister video, the comments were awful. They couldn’t understand how she was related to me, but I never thought I looked bad. But I guess they expected Olivia to be surrounded by people in her genre. It was so hard to see those comments.” Thinking back to it, Olivia had even added to it. Telling you that you should have tried to look more like her for the video. You should have worn something more colorful and put-on way more make up then you liked. But you hated that. That wasn’t you.

“I can’t imagine the things they said. Is that why you deactivated your twitter?” How did he know about that?

“Oh, yeah. How did you know about it?”

“I remembered seeing a story about it on YouTube last year. They didn’t show your face, so of course I didn’t know it was you. But I figured it out when Olivia joined the game tonight and she blabbered on about being your sister. I’m sorry you received that hate. No one deserves that ever.” His voice was calming you now.

“Thank you. Olivia seemed to add to it, as well. Fuck, she’s just the worst person.” Family definitely had the ability to be shitty. “Meeting Poki last year really was the best thing. But also joining this Among Us group has been so good for me. Thank you for accepting me.”

“Of course. You’re a natural in the game but you also fit very well with the group.” Corpse really hoped you believed him because this was true. The group had a whole conversation about it when Olivia finally left

“I’m flattered. The Corpse Husband is telling me I fit in with him and his streamer friends. Wake me up, I must be dreaming.” You knew his words were genuine because it was just easy to tell.

“You better believe it, baby, because it’s true.”

You stopped short when you heard him call you baby. Of course Corpse had used that word before but right now it felt more intimate.

Letting out a yawn you realized it was nearing 4 am. “I appreciate it.” You mumbled, feeling the events from the day seep in.

“You’re tired, aren’t you?” His deep voice was lulling you closer to sleep.

“No.” Another yawn broke through.

“You can’t lie to me, Y/n. Get some sleep and we will talk tomorrow.”

The words made you smile. “That sounds good, Corpsie. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, sweet girl.” Despite wanting to stay on the phone, you hung up. Sleep was quickly coming in to claim you. You can happily say you fell asleep with a huge smile on your face.

Waking up was easier than it had been in a long time. Normally you woke up to Olivia screaming at you or someone else. So it was nice to wake up to silence. It allowed you to relax and wake up properly.

Your phone buzzed from beside you. A text from Corpse is what you first saw, so you opened it.

Corpse

Good morning, sweet girl. I hope the night treated you well.

Sweet and to the point. His messages made you think he had a thing for you. Well you hoped he did but he also could just be treating you the way he treats friends.

Y/n

Yes, I slept well and for once I wasn’t awoken by my obnoxious sister.

It would he good not to live with her.

Corpse

I bet. Hey I hate to be the one to show you this, but your sister posted this on her instagram.

He then sent a link to the post. It made your blood boil.

::::

There was a picture of her, she was holding up a ripped picture of you. A huge frown was on her face.

oliviaxoxo It’s a shame when family starts to treat you like you weren’t the one to give them money when they needed it. This is my sister and she’s a bitch. For the last few years, she’s been the one editing my videos. Well I found out she was trying to sabotage me, so I had to fire her and kick her out. What a shame it is when family stabs you in the back. 🙃🙃

1,454,787 people like this

oliviafan23 Is this true? Damn, f*ck fake people.

queenolivia Sueeee herrrrr!

lovinliv Family ain’t shit. Spill her info so we can drag her.

sykkuwu Whoa, why are you spreading lies about your own family?

queenolivia Why would you defend someone like that?

valkyrea You’re such a sad human for doing this. Stop lying.

pokimanelol Let’s see, none of this is true. Your sister has done so much for you and you’ve never appreciated it. Get some help for this.

corpse_husband This is sick. No wonder your name is always blasted everywhere. Do your sister a favor and stop talking about her.

oliviaxoxo I don’t know why you’re defending my stupid sister, but that totally makes you not hot to me anymore. Ugh.

valkyrea Uh, that’s what you got from this. Wow, you’re not worth this.

corpse_husband What can you expect? The covid must have gone to her brain. |

corpseandlivfan Whyyyyyyy Corpse, why would you stand up for her. Do you not realize how horrible Y/n is? Please tell me this is a joke!?!?

corpse_husband Well, she’s a good friend of mine and I won’t let people make up lies. So it’s not a joke.

::::::::

You were mad that she’d even say this shit publicly, but you should have known she would. She was nothing without her group of misguided followers.

Y/n

Can’t say I’m not surprised. This is so on brand for her. Thank you for sticking up for me. It means a lot.

Corpse

I would do it any day. She shouldn’t be able to get away with doing that to you.

Sadly, growing up, she did get away with doing the absolute worst shit and you always received the brunt of it.

Y/n

With any luck, she draws negative attention.

You clicked the link to view it again but instead were lead to a page that said the content was unavailable.

Y/n

I believe she just deleted the post.

Corpse

Oh, she did. That’s awesome.

It was. Olivia was never one to swallow her pride and admit any wrongdoings. That means she would never delete a problematic post, but she finally did

Y/n

I didn’t really read any other comments besides you and your friends and the top comments. I can’t imagine what her fans are really saying.

Olivia was completely okay with letting her fans attack people. It was seriously a huge mess. She fell into the category of YouTuber with the worst most entitled attitude.

Corpse

It’s good you didn’t read them, because they were horrible. I can’t believe she would let her fans do that.

Y/n

She’s done a lot of shady stuff. This is even before she blew up on YouTube. There is a lot of issues between us.

There was a lot that could be said about your relationship with Olivia and none of them were good. Forever it seemed, you had tried to make it work and hoped your sister would grow up and change but it never happened.

Corpse

I think she’s a vile human. From what I have seen and her complete lack of human decency, I just can’t help but feel she’s just not a good person and she never will be.

He was right. She would never change.

Y/n

You’re right. Hey, I have to go thank Poki for letting me stay but I also need to go back to that apartment to get the rest of my stuff. Can I call you when I get back?

Corpse

Yes, of course. Good luck heading over there.

Talking to him was pretty natural feeling. It was clear now that you were getting a massive crush on him. You had a crush on a man who’s face you’ve never seen. You couldn’t help it though, his personality just meshed so well with yours. He’d made you feel safe and wanted.

After getting dressed, you found Poki in the kitchen making breakfast. She sent you a sweet smile when you entered the room.

“Thank you for standing up for me against my sister on Instagram.” You were truly honored this group of friends liked you enough to do something like this.

“You’re welcome. I couldn’t just let her say that and get away with it. She’s done a lot to you, that you don’t deserve. Corpse messaged all of us the minute he found it and we all jumped into action. Sean and Felix were getting ready to comment when she deleted it.” She explained as she set a plate in front of you.

“I’m so honored. Thank you!”

“Of course, you’re one of us now and we will never let her get away with this stuff anymore.”

You could just cry with how loved they were making you feel. This is what had been missing in your life. Friends who genuinely cared about you and wanted to protect you from the nasty stuff Olivia was capable of doing.

“Would you come with me to the apartment to get the rest of my stuff?” You asked once the two of you finished eating.

Poki nodded. “Of course I will. You shouldn’t have to go alone.”

An hour later, you exited the elevator on the floor where you once resided. Your sister wasn’t home, which would be good but there was a chance she could return while you were packing. But you would deal with that when it came down to it. The two of you quickly got to work, packing your life up into the boxes you’d brought with you. Luckily, you weren’t one to collect a ton of stuff. You mainly just had to make sure your clothes and makeup were packed up.

You and Poki would fill boxes and pile them by there door, then you would take them down to the car when you acquired a good amount. In the end, you figured you would fill maybe 10 boxes which is actually not too many considering you’ve lived in that apartment for five years.

Poki had left to go take two more boxes to the car while you finished up packing up your last few items. The front door closed, and you assumed it was Poki, but it wasn’t.

“Oh look who’s here? My lovely sister.” Olivia’s voice was flat and emotionless.

You rolled your eyes and turned to find her standing in the doorway, glaring at you. “Hello, Olivia. I’m just packing my stuff and then I’m leaving.”

“Who said you were allowed to come back here?” She grumbled, eyeing the boxes.

“Well, this is my stuff and I have every right to come pick it up.”

“If it’s in my apartment, it clearly belongs to me.” She snarled.

You snapped. “Cut it out, Olivia. This was my apartment too, until you kicked me out last night. You can’t just claim my stuff as your because you’re salty about me having friends.” She was a spoiled brat, and you were done letting her get away with it.

“I’m not the salty one. Everyone can see it’s you.” God she was so annoying. You taped up the last box and turned to her. She held her phone in her hand. “Everyone say hi to my sister. You know, the one I posted about earlier before someone reported my post.”

“Are you live?” You asked, keeping your face expressionless. Olivia would do this.

“I bet some of you remember the few videos I did with her. Well of course that was before she turned against me and decided she was going to try and ruin me. Say hi, Y/n.” A sick smile played on her face.

“I never consented to being in your live, Olivia. Please stop.” You tried to keep your voice calm so that she wouldn’t have any way to make you look like the bad person. But regardless, she was already doing it.

Olivia cackled. “Well I think I’m free to do as I please in my apartment.” You could only imagine what her fans were saying. “You’re right, Andrea, she is an idiot, and I should have her arrested.” She spoke aloud making your blood boil.

“You’re so immature, Olivia.” You grumbled before grabbing the last couple boxes and moving towards the door. Olivia decided to swat the boxes out of your hand, and they fell tumbling to the ground. “What the hell, Olivia. I could have fragile stuff in there.” You growled at her.

Olivia was just laughing. “This is funny. What else should I do, guys?” She asked as she panned the phone around the room.

Her immaturity was giving you a headache. Poki walked in and saw Olivia.

“Oh hey guys, look who’s here. Pokimane.” She panned the camera to Poki who frowned. Olivia just laughed and started talking shit until she was cut off by the stream just ending. “What the hell.”

You gathered the last few boxes, and Poki came to help while Olivia attempted to start another live.

“What the fuck, it won’t let me go live.” She growled while stomping her foot like a child.

“That’s what happens when an influx of people report your live.” Poki spoke as you both had gathered the boxes.

Olivia was frowning. “What did you do, Y/n.” She wanted to pounce at her, but Y/n and Poki were already at the door.

“Y/n did nothing, but I got word of your little livestream and contacted some friends for help. It will be at least 24 hours before you can have another live. But with the amount of people who reported you, well you may be banned for a while.” With that, you and Poki left Olivia standing there is absolute shock.

You and Poki put the last boxes in the car. “Thank you, Poki. How did you get so many people to report it?”

“Well it was actually Corpse. He texted me and informed me that she was doing a live and bothering you. He had his fans go report it, but apparently Sykkuno and Rae also sent their fans. I was going to send mine, but they had it handled. So this was all Corpse.” She explained.

Hearing this made you feel so soft for Corpse. “Awe wow. That’s so sweet of him.”

The two of you entered the car. “Y/n, can I tell you something without you telling him I told you?”

You looked over at her. “Yes, sure.” Your heart rate kind of picked up.

“Well the other day, Corpse admitted he has feelings for you, but he wasn’t completely sure if you felt the same way for him. But I mean I can clearly see you do. Your whole face just lit up when I mentioned him. So do you?”

Heat filled your face and you suddenly felt shy. “I do, yes. Which is ridiculous because I just met the guy, and I don’t even know what he looks like. But gosh, I like him so much. When I talk to him, I feel happy. He’s been so good to me through this crap with Olivia.” You admitted, knowing she already knew.

Poki smiled and squealed in complete happiness. “You two are just the most adorable people! It’s not ridiculous. We pretty much knew from the first time you joined us, that Corpse was into you. But oh my god, you’re into him. You need to tell him!!!!”

You agreed, Corpse deserved to know. “I do. But how? It’s been a really long time since I’ve told someone I liked them. Shit, I feel like I’m in high school again!”

This made Poki giggle. “Calm down, Y/n. I have a plan. Let’s get back to the apartment and we will talk about this. Rae also wants to be involved in this.”

Back at her apartment, you had jumped onto a call with Rae and the three of you talked about what your plan was for you to tell Corpse what you felt for him. Rae and Poki decided to organize an Among Us game strictly for fun and no one would stream, they would also use Proximity chat.

“So we will get him to follow you around until one of us is imposter, then we will lock you into wherever you end up. Do it then” Rae explained sounding so excited.

“Okay, that can work. Let’s do this!” You were nervous but also excited to finally do something good for yourself.

You and Poki set up for the gane and Corpse sent you a text.

Corpse

Are you joining the game tonight?

Seeing a text from him, made you feel giddy.

Y/n

Yep I am. So I will see you in game?

Corpse

Yes you will, angel.

Cue the insane butterflies.

The lobby loaded and it was you, Corpse, Poki, Rae, Sykkuno, Karl, Tina, Sean, Toast, and Leslie. All streamers you had grown to like a lot in the time you have been playing with them.

“Y/n, I am so happy you’re playing with us!” Tina gushed as her little character ran around yours.

“I’m happy to be here.” You really were.

“You’re sister is a piece of work, Y/n.” Sykkuno said.

You giggled. “Don’t I know it.”

“What did she do this time?” Sean asked.

“Decided to film a live when we went to get Y/n’s stuff from the apartment.” Poki explained.

“Oh, that’s gross.” Karl commented.

“I have to thank Corpse for helping.” You stated to the group.

“Yeah Corpse was quick to text us.” Sykkuno added.

“You’re welcome, Y/n. I wasn’t going to let her get away with what she was doing. Truth is, I got a bunch of fan DMs that were telling me what Olivia was doing. So a lot of my fans were already reporting it, but the tweet helped.” Corpse’s deep voice soothed you.

“I appreciate it so much. She was just being an immature brat as always.”

The group laughed before deciding to start the game. Poki and Rae agreed to text you when either of them were imposter. Now it was a matter of getting Corpse to follow you.

The group was on the Polus map, which seemed to be a favorite for everyone.

Rae

We should lock them in weapons.

Rae had texted you and Poki through the group text.

Poki

That’s the best place for them.

Y/n

Okay but I still have to get him to follow me.

Rae

He will. Just wait, I have a plan.

You trusted Rae and Poki to help you. Now it was time to admit it all to Corpse and hope he genuinely liked you back.

Y/n

Let’s do this!

PART THREE >>

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goblinshork · 3 years

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Ok so what abaut Bodyguard and Agony whith a a naga prince that just hates the royal life and dreams of just having a simple life living in a cottage and selling homemade jewelry, so Reader his childhood best friend, personal bodyguard and person who he feel in love whith decides to make his dream come true (bonus if the prince has a sister so the kingdown whont stay whiout a ruler and she helps Reader whith the plan, bonus+ if the prince is kinda huge and scary to other people but he is just a chill dude that likes to make rings and necklaces)

Short scenario please! (Also sorry if its too long, feel free to just ignore this if you whant)

Not too long at all and I think it's an extremely charming idea! Thank you for sharing; big gruff, undercover sweeties are one of the most Choice(tm) archetypes.

This also got super long, but the vibes were singing to me.

Features: Slight angst, happy ending, kissing

Bodyguard + Agony (Monster Ask Meme)

Hands, Touching Hands (m!Naga x gn!Reader) [3.7k]

“Don’t lie, how many names do you remember?”

Alok yawned, curved fangs peaking out from almost-lips.

“None, thankfully,” he said, scratching at his curls, cut short enough that they barely formed.

“Impressive.”

“Oh—no, you won’t distract me. You agree with me don’t you?”

The book Alok had toyed the entire briefing slammed shut, the many bracelets at his wrist clinking for emphasis when you did not answer.

Watching him unfurl his tense length of tail, broad shoulders rising far above you as he 'stood', there was little to say but, "It’s not my place."

"Then it’s not mine, either."

He slunk toward the door and you picked up the book--the monstrous thing--with your arms rather than your hands before following him.

"Just give it time," you said in a reassurance that was too shallow to drown his mood.

Every move forward looked painful as he slithered forward like a child first learning to move against stone rather than soft grass. Unlike when he was a child, he was stilted by frustration rather than inexperience.

The conversation was left dropped, burning like the weight of the tome in your arms. If you were alone, you'd tell him to carry it. But servants, nobles, and royals passed frequently, all low bows and murmurs, moving on a touch quicker than polite.

When you first arrived to the kingdom, a slave dressed sweetly and presented as a gift, you'd marveled at how anyone could find the royal family intimidating when removed from their wealth and status.

Baby yellow skin and soft pink dapples painted everyone of them. Alok, himself, was more pink than yellow, and it reminded you of those delicate, painted dolls you'd press your face against glass to get a closer look at before being shooed away by the shop-keep.

You supposed little had changed since then, except now you were simply stared at, expected to keep your fingers off the pretty pink glass always, always in front of you.

The hallway Alok stopped moving forward in was empty, private; his. Without a word, you tossed the horrible book toward his crossed arms and swept the windows, floors, and ceiling for anything strange. His fumbling for the book, fingers audibly skimming against pages, made you smile.

"It's clear," you nodded. "Workshop, right?"

Alok deflated a bit, too caught between the mention of his workshop and pretending to have perfectly caught the book to keep his anger stoked.

"You're asking now," he said flat, looking from the book to you.

Putting up your hands in mock defeat, you turned, alert enough.

"I'm not angry at you.” The slits that served for his pupils, deep red and small in their focus on the gem he was cutting, turned to you when you said nothing in response.

“Sorry, I--” was dazzled by your eyes? Was enamored by how passionate you are for perfecting that sparkling little gem? “I know.”

“I just wanted to say it.”

You stretched from your place beside the door, perched on one of the few chairs at your disposal in the entire castle, “Thank you.”

“Don’t be patronizing,” Alok grumbled, pausing in his work. “I know...I know very well you must be tired of this, even if you won’t say it.”

The window was suddenly so interesting, your throat burning as you swallowed down the feeling kindling there.

“This is my home,” you said after hearing the scales of his tail shift closer. “There’s nothing to be tired of.”

Slowly, his hand rose to hover over yours, where it lay on your lap, “But you should be. I’d give you anything you needed. They couldn’t stop me.”

Everything you wanted to say was tucked in the patch of air that separated his touch from yours.

Any person, bought and raised to be singularly loyal would hesitate at the offer of freedom, wouldn’t they?

They’d want to grab his hand, wouldn’t they?

You could only guess as a love for a prince was not something to be said aloud unless you were allowed.

And you, a slave turned body guard, were not.

Standing, you scattered the almost-moment with a shake of your head, “I don’t care about freedom half as much as you think I do.”

His hand fell limp to his side, the slits that served as his nose flaring wide, as you continued.

“I’m your bodyguard and I’ll be your children’s bodyguard and I’ll be the same to whoever you choose from that book,” you finished, thoroughly shooing yourself away, wanting so much to run out the door.

Alok said your name quietly, but you remained silent.

And everything was still until it wasn’t.

In one smooth motion propelled by his sheer size, Alok stretched to the book and hurled it out the open window.

“No, you won’t. I’ll be their prince,” he said low, body suddenly too large for the room. “But I won’t be their king.”

You did run, then.

Perhaps the only place off-limits for a would-be king allergic to potential suitors was his sister’s drawing room.

Adur payed you no attention as she demanded entertainment from the brightly colored darlings and dark patterned beauties of the upper echelon.

“Did you know, I simply adore the pattern of your bangles lately,” she cooed, pointing to a decorated tail. “So perfectly in style.”

She continued on, picking this and that to sigh over, as you stood against the corner that provided the best view of the room, next to the door.

You recognized each piece she fawned over as being similar to something Alok had on display or nearly-done in his workshop. Ah, to know a magician’s tricks.

Melting into a squat, you let their voices wash over you. No heart could hurt for long listening to women enjoy court gossip as much as this bunch did...from a distance.

When you, Alok, and Adur were younger, the rules seemed less stone and more like blades of grass, flexible and beneath you. Adur set you in front of her always revolving group of friends and tried to fit tail bangles around your thighs and waist. Alok insisted you sit side-by-side while studying geography, arithmetic, and etiquette. You lay between them on sunny afternoons, napping, legs touching tails.

But everything golden goes grey eventually.

“Well, do tell me. Did he throw it in the fire?”

You turned from the window, swapping red, setting sun for sharp, red eyes, “Out of the window.”

The room was empty but for you and her now. Adur pacing around, tail making quick work of circling the room as she read from her collection of letters.

“Still the amount of melodrama I expected so,” she shrugged, raising shoulders toward her pleased mouth as a silent finish to her sentence. “I, on the other hand, did pick.”

You rose, legs tingling from the sudden change. “Who?”

“Prince Talsa,” she said after cutting open a letter with her claw, “I’ve already decided on a short engagement and a respectable wedding down south. Perhaps closer to his kingdom than ours.”

“Talsa? Not rare one who everyone’s after?”

Adur looked at you as though you should know better before deigning to explain, “Prince Talsa is rather plain looking for a naga, yes, but that’s just the point.”

“Go on,” you said, wanting so much to be distracted.

“Think about it,” Adur scoffed. “Rare, beautiful babies create wonder amongst people, but children who look as though they could be born anywhere....don’t you see the appeal?”

She leaned against the window, long black hair obscuring her pink and yellow face, “They would be royalty that even the most common of folk could feel familiar to--feel endeared to. Even someone as devoid of charm or pretense as Alok could gain some favor. From their birth, I’ll have them attend every little festival and celebration. Their bond with the people will be unshakable.”

“You’ll make the best queen,” you said, unthinking to the implication.

“Has something happened to Alok?”

“No, you ju--”

Adur turned to you, delicate face empty, “It doesn’t matter what we know. He’s the eldest and alive and destroying a book won’t change that.”

Your hands shook as you laced them together, risking at least your life, by asking:

“What if we could change it?”

Everything in the little room lacked splendor, save the jewelry that her brother displayed to no one but himself, built only to separate Alok from his mentor. A failed attempt to elevate a man too gargantuan to grow further.

Even the flooring was rough on the tail, not smooth stone but brick for retaining heat. Only care for function within these four walls.

Adur noted her brother’s tail was bare as she swept over the lacking room, only his leather work belt draped over the apex where tail met torso. Every bit of jewelry he wore crowded his wrists and fingers, noisy as he worked on some large bangle unfamiliar to her.

He looked haggard, frown too ugly and deep to be a mere product of concentration. Grey tickled the roots of his bangs, pronounced enough to shine in the lamplight. Alok was getting too old to be a prince with only time for his hobby.

“Sometimes I think it would be kinder to simply put you out of your misery,” Adur said, closing the door behind her.

Alok’s back tensed, but he did not pause his work, “I’m surprised you said it out loud, but don’t say it like a joke.”

“Don’t be so serious,” Adur sighed, “of course it was a joke.”

“Where is--”

“Your human delight? Running errands for me.”

Alok did turn then, face flickering through emotions too fast to name, “They’re just as much your dear friend as mine, you little viper.”

“Forgive my callousness, but I find you respond to little else,” Adur said, picking at the sheer fabric of her top so it draped correctly against her arm again. “And perhaps they are my friend. But they are not just yours.”

“I won’t be king...even if they weren’t here.”

Adur laughed in a sizzling tone, forked tongue dancing with humor, “Oh? And I suppose your little fantasies of running away involve you doing so alone?”

Only the flames licking back and forth in the small forge answered her.

“You’re too old to be deluding yourself like this,” she went on, dropping a bottle and a sheer robe on Alok’s work desk. “It’s time to make choices once and for all, brother.”

“I’m not--”

“I’m not asking you to rule. You’d be pathetic at it, yes, I know. If not for our dear human friend, you’d have flunked every tutor save for your precious jewelry maker.”

Alok curled back over his tail, fingers picking at the fabric of the robe his sister had dropped. “Then what are you asking?”

Hand on the doorknob, Adur smiled, “if you had your way and left to live like a common man with your human, would you really never come back?”

“Never.”

Adur opened the door. “Good.”

The drider--Woodnet? Woodne? Wodner?--stayed near the the door as you did, but unlike you his sleek, black legs rested on a few thin lines of webbing where wall met ceiling.

Slowly, Alok raised his face to address the bodyguard, entirely unused to being the short one. Worse still was the struggle to match sights with the correct pair of the drider’s many blinking eyes. If you were here, you’d have nudged him to follow your lead already.

If you were here...this wouldn’t be happening in the first place. Just another wishful thought to swallow down as Alok struggled to stay polite in the face of his father’s prime bodyguard.

“Outside the room is fine,” Alok said in a clipped tone, turning as he did to avoid dealing with anymore niceties.

“Forgive me for questioning, Prince Alok,” the drider said, voice drifting down like floating silk. “But bathing is when you are most vulnerable. I can not help but object to the risk.”

The drider polished each word, in no hurry to finish his sentence and Alok’s eyes rolled once--twice--thrice by the time there was silence. If only this were any guard other than his father’s favorite.

“I understand,” Alok said. “But, the windows are trapped and you will be guarding the only entrance.”

The sound of burdened legs skittering down stone, followed by the opening and closing of the lone, stone door was his answer.

Driders were generally no longer friends of Alok’s kingdom. Wodnel....no, Wodni perhaps, was a relic of a time long gone, when his father was just proving himself a leader of a nation. That Wodnir--that was it, Wodnir--was so protective of Alok, having sparsely been involved with him and having been enslaved through ruthless, warmongering means made Alok’s shoulders bunch, the muscles between protruding over scales.

Is that how it was between you and he? Did you feign fondness and care or was it true? Was it true but maligned of him to hope for it due to how you came to be near him? Because of he was?

Alok disrobed and slunk into the hot water, hoping to drown his pithy doubts that crowded so large in his mind.

Flakes of shed rose to the top the longer he soaked, proof of a difficult shed. There was sure to be more bits to come as he scrubbed himself with the, apparently, ‘to die for’ body scrub his sister had left last week.

You were usually the one to soothe his bubbling stress in a life of constant politics and decorum, but the bits of dead skin were proof enough that Alok truly was getting too old for delusions. You’d only been away for a week and a spare number of days and here he was, so tense that not even a hot bath could unfurl him.

Ugh.

Politics and decorum. How would he survive tonight without you? Adur was announcing her engagement tonight, in tandem with the nobles emerging from their collective sheds at the tail end of the Harvest Festival.

Alok scrubbed himself raw, hoping to emerge a new man who could weather life half as well as everyone around him. But the harder he lathed himself in soap, the clearer the truth rang.

If only he could have you.

You had relieved Wodnier of his duties, thanking him with a bow, and standing stiff beside the door for precious minutes, waiting for his delicate range of hearing to wane.

As an apprentice, you had met Wodnier often enough to know he wished you well as much as any spider did a fly.

Hammering against your chest, you feared the vibration of your heart was loud enough for him to hear. And there was always a chance the door shutting at the end of the curved hallway was a trap; that Wodnier still stood in Alok’s quarters and was not making his way back to the King.

But you didn’t have time to be safe, only quick.

Jittered by adrenaline, you sprinted to Alok’s room---toe first, heel last--and back, holding your breath once you made it back to the door of the bath.

Sweat pooled against your forehead, but nothing sprang toward you sans the faint sounds of Alok bathing.

You slipped past the door, the pack in your hands bulky enough that the door opened wider than you’d wanted, the hinge creaking.

“Alok?”

The figure behind the curtain froze before calling back your name.

“We don’t have much time, Alok,” you pressed in a sure voice, but your legs wobbled as you neared the curtain. “I’m....I’m running away and I’m taking you with me.”

“What?”

Coming past the curtain, your chest could barely contain your quick breathing. His hair was devoid of any gray, blacker than pitch as it fell just above his ear holes and forehead. Muddy brown and maroon scales were sleek and wet, droplets rolling down his body, even near his---

You looked back up quickly, away from where his belt always covered. “I mean, I want us to run away and we need to go now.”

Having followed your wandering gaze toward the apex of his stomach and tail, Alok frantically looked toward his arms, the muddy water, “What in the fuck is this?”

“Adur is helping us,” is all you said and it was all Alok seemed to need as he picked up the bottle the dye had been in, nodding. “She said it’ll only last until your next shed but, by then, hopefully....”

“She wants to be queen very much,” he murmured.

You tore open the pack, reminding yourself that time was short, and held them out. “Yes. So, we need to go.”

“You have no idea--,” Alok started, before interrupting himself. “I need something from the workshop.”

“We don’t have time.”

He shook his head as he took what you offered, dressing himself in plain leather and thick, scratchy wool. “It will be quick.”

You opened your mouth--- “Please.” --but couldn’t keep firm in the face of his pleading.

“Okay.”

Alok threw a few rings, bangles, and tools into the bag.

“Only enough to sell and get started again,” he assured.

But as you turned to leave the room, his hand was on your arm, pulling you back.

“We--”

“I love you,” he breathed, holding two thick, ornate bangles in his free hand. Both were decorated, from the side you could see, with marigolds, jewels gleaming in the center of their petals. You recognized each one.

One was the size to fit a large tail while the other...

“Alok.”

“I want us to leave belonging to one another.”

Your shaking hands dropped the large bag and his slid to hold both yours in his large one. “If we leave together, we’ll live together too won’t we?”

Even your head shook now, from side to side, hoping to discern the moment as waking or dreaming. “Alok. Of course, because...Of course we will.”

“Oh, please say it,” he said, tugging you nearer still.

He repeated your name and like a spell, you found your words, “We’ll live together because I love you, too.”

His thin mouth, soft and bloodless, fell to yours from his full height, his body curling over you as he pressed against your lips again.

“Let me put it on you,” he whispered, mouth moving against yours as you clung to him.

“Hurry and then we can....Just the bangles and then we must go before it’s too late.”

Careful of his claws, he lifted you to sit on his work table before slipping his own bangle over the small tip of his tail and up further, until it stuck in place under his belt.

There was no time to remove your pants, to mold the bangle against your bare thigh as was intended, but Alok’s thick hands skimming around the metal the entire way up burned as though he were doing just that.

You slid off the table, when the bangle was snug, to melt against him for one brief moment of loving calm, your face rubbing against his neck.

You didn’t have time for more.

After disentangling from his tight hold, you threw the bag at him, near tears as he scrambled to catch it. “I know it’s selfish, but I’m so glad you’re going to be mine instead of a king.”

And then you ran, hand in hand.

“Hey! Heeeeey,” one of the children yelled as the whole group of five ran toward you, kicking up dust on the dirt-packed road. “My momma said that snake man eats kids who don’t do chores!”

“My papa said he can’t help with the festival because he’s growing more arms!”

“That’s dumb, Brittany. My papa is smarter and he said the same thing as Corey’s momma. He’s a kid eater!”

The group shrieked in delighted horror as they squabbled on the specifics of what was really, truly going on in their village.

You hiked the basket in your arms higher after several attempts to respond, loudly telling them to pay attention or you’d leave.

As though pulled forward by strings, they straightened as still as a child could, a few even holding their hands over their mouths to keep silent.

“All of your parents are right,” you nodded, “Every two months he must curb his huge appetite and force back his new, child-grabbing arms so he doesn’t hurt the very naughty children of this village.”

They all clamored to stress their innocence in a cacophony of babbling that soon grew into questions.

“Is that why you live with him? ‘Cause you protect the village?”

“And him,” you said.

“At the same time?!”

“Of course, it’s my job. Now go back toward the smithy before you find out just how many arms he has.”

Lunging forward in jest was enough to urge the children away, all of them teasing the other that they would be last to get there and a snake man’s lunch.

“You’re horrible,” Alok groaned, scales pale pink and yellow from a successful shed. “Soon, they’ll be grown-ups, running us off.”

Hefting the basket onto the dining table, you laughed, “they adore you in secret.”

The cottages here were baked of mud, hay, and a few supportive beams of wood and yours was no different. There was no splendor in the room-less house, but it was truly yours and his. And that was luxury enough.

“They had enough this time?”

You shook the canteen of dye, moving to stand next to him on the low hammock that served as bed, “And the next shipment of birch will contain enough to last us three months or more.”

Alok smoothed his claw down your face, his own expression wistful, “I feel too content to explain.”

You pressed your nose against the pink of his jaw, letting him raise you to straddle him.

“Then show me.”

#monster x reader #monster x human #monster fucking #monster romance #exophillia #terato #monster boyfriend #naga x reader #naga boyfriend #naga x human #fluffy.foam #new.shork #goblin.writes #conch.answered #alienfromagalaxy #I love adur and it is a shame how much of her had to be cut to make this not a mess #exophilia

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