#this au is so stupid but hellion needs his husband

[gerrystamour]

@stobinesque / @amusingdisplacement requested "You need to wake up because I can't do this without you." for Vinny/Keziah

So, once again, me and Read have created OCs, we put them in a mafia!au, bon appetit

Vinny, Tig, & Winters: Mine

Keziah & Yoyo: Read's

This takes place before THIS FICLET that I posted the other day.

Tagging the scromies: @scarcrossdlvrs @patchworkgargoyle @sidekick-hero @vecnuthy @steddieas-shegoes @theheadlessphilosopher @wormdebut @sentient-trash @starryeyedjanai

Aaaaand tagging the honourary scromies: @hellion-child @lovemesomeartsstuff (since both of you seem to like all the OC posting too)

Kez stood at the end of the hospital bed, staring down at zir husband with a numbness ze hadn’t felt in years. Since the brothel, before Vincenzo got zir out of there.

It had been hours since Vincenzo got out of surgery, and he was still not awake. The doctors were certain he would pull through, and Kez couldn’t stop zirself before they snarled, “He better.”

Vincenzo had to wake up so ze could yell at him, grab him by the throat and send him to hell zirself for that stupid fucking move he pulled back there. He had to wake up because too much was riding on him succeeding for him to fucking die.

“Ms. D’Amore.”

Kez blinked and released zir hold on the footboard of the bed, shaking out zir hands as ze turned to face the owner of the voice behind zir. Ze was getting distracted, not even hearing someone coming into the room, and that was dangerous. This hospital wasn’t on enemy turf, but it wasn’t on Vincenzo’s either; ze had to be alert.

Luckily, it was only Tig, one of Vincenzo’s boys, his most trusted bodyguard and enforcer.

“You were saying something?” Kez asked after a few long moments, and Tig’s face changed. It was a sympathetic expression, and Kez had the very uncharitable urge to smack him for it.

“There was a situation earlier, down at Yoyo’s club. Carver’s people showed up and had to be dealt with,” Tig repeated, and Kez’s hackles raised. Fucking vultures, already circling. Or maybe the more accurate comparison would be sharks, scenting blood in the water.

“How serious was it?” ze asked, turning zir gaze back to Vincenzo on the bed.

“They were put down. Expeditiously,” Tig replied, and Kez nodded.

“How many civilian witnesses?” ze asked next, dreading this answer most. Civilian witnesses usually meant the cops would come sniffing around and would need to be bribed. Ze hated dealing with cops.

“None,” Tig replied, and when Kez shot a look over zir shoulder, he raised his hands defensively. “It happened in Yoyo’s office. Winters was with her, they just needed help with clean-up.”

Kez took a deep breath through zir nose and let it out slowly, nodding once. “Go to the club. Both of us being seen here will only make them bolder.”

Tig didn’t move. “I shouldn’t leave you here alone,” he eventually said, and anger rose hot and bitter in Kez’s throat.

“You will do as you’re fucking ordered, Faulkner,” Kez bit out, wringing zir hands around the foot board of the bed again.

“Boss wouldn’t like—”

“If Vincenzo wanted me to give a shit about what he would’ve liked, he wouldn’t have gotten himself shot,” Kez all but snarled, whirling on Tig and crowding him against the door. “Now, let’s try this again, shall we? Go. To the club. Now.”

Tig stared down at zir, expression closed off and tense before he nodded once. “On it, Boss.”

With that, he slipped out the door and left Kez in the room alone with zir husband.

Returning to the bed, ze stood at the side of it and stared down at Vincenzo. He looked wrong, almost small against the stark sheets, his hair an uncharacteristic mess and the hospital gown the wrong shade of blue for his complexion. He was alive, but barely, and it was terrifying staring down that possibility.

“You hear that, Vincenzo? They’re already coming for everything you built,” Kez bit out, low and quiet as the veil of numbness briefly parted, just long enough to feel the ache of zir heart shattering, and tears sprung to zir eyes.

“I love you.” “I wish you didn’t.”

It was the last thing they said to each other before Vincenzo lost consciousness, succumbing to the blood-loss. How could that man be choking on his own blood and still manage to tell Kez he loved zir? It was insane, something out of the terrible romantic dramas Vincenzo pretended he didn’t watch. And yet he did it, and Kez didn’t respond in kind, and now he might never wake back up.

“You need to wake up, Vincenzo,” Kez continued, trying to keep zir voice even as ze slipped zir hand into Vincenzo’s. “It’s all going to fall apart.”

That wasn’t true, necessarily. Or more, that wasn’t the real reason behind that grasping, clawing thing inside zir. Kez didn’t give a shit about the Organization, the Family.

Ze cared about Vincenzo. Ze cared about them, and the thought of them becoming just Kez made it feel like ze was being skinned alive.

Before ze could stop zirself, Kez crawled up onto the bed and curled around Vincenzo, pressing a wobbly kiss to his shoulder.

“You need to wake up because I can’t do this without you, Vin,” Kez whispered against his shoulder, finally letting a few tears escape as ze tangled their fingers together in zir lap. “I need you, Vin. Please, wake up.”

#gerry writes #oc.fic #vinkez

[mercurybomber]

hot topic lizard

#design mostly inspired by underfell sans (hence the gold tooth) #this au is so stupid but hellion needs his husband #hellion forced me to draw this at gunpoint #LAfell #my art #my ocs #neo

[drwcn]

For the man-eating mer! Yanli au, are there any ChengQing Wen Merbabies running around? Does Jin Ling and possible siblings share their mom's eating habits? Will Wen Yuan still be part of the Addams-esque family? Enquiring minds have an inquiry.

LOL, hi friend.

So only men of the Jiang family - despite being carriers themselves - can pass on their mer-gene, which means only Jiang Cheng's daughters will be mermaids, while Jiang Yanli's children won't.

But how can that be? It's not magic, my friends. If you wanna know how, I put a genetics explanation undercut. :P Sorry I geeked out a little.

Chengqing is in almost every au of mine LOL.

Just imagine Jiang Cheng building a pond/pool outside of his new daughter's bedchamber. Its bottom is paved with cobblestone with lotuses surrounding it on the outside as a fence. The water is connected to the river, so it's always fresh. His father said a-jie didn't need to be put into the water until her first birthday. Prior to that she was breastfed and doing well. Jiang Fengmian did not tell Yu Ziyuan of their clan's secret until they had a daughter together, and it certainly gave her no time to get used to the idea. Yu Ziyuan was pretty restrictive of how much time Jiang Yanli spent as a merfolk, but Jiang Cheng has no such qualms.

Literally on their daughter's first birthday Wen Qing walks in with some baked treats to see Jiang Cheng tossing their baby butt naked into the pond like a dead fish.

To say she nearly strangles him would be an understatement. "Look - look - Wen Qing - look -"

Her precious cherub is no longer a cherub - she is a hellion. No baby merfolk is able to control their appearance in open water (they're not affected by well water, or baths, or rain). Jiang Yanli's true form is actually terrifying, but as she grew she was able to control her upper body to look beautiful and more human when she was in water - how else would you entice stupid sailors? Once she fully emerges from the river/lake/ocean, she returns back to human form. But as a baby, merfolks essentially look 12 different shades of ghastly.

Jiang Cheng spends hours lying on his belly out on the deck splashing with his hands while their baby swims around, "Come to diedie, come to diedie- ow! she bit me!"

Wen Qing, "serves you right." Also: jfc I seriously need to start having some sons.

[ WWX: Or, you know, you can stop having sex with your husband. WQ: I'll stop if you stop. ]

She does not. Wen Qing has 5 daughters, much to Jiang Cheng's absolute delight.

Wen Qing, "We're not gonna have enough people to feed your offsprings!"

Jiang Cheng, standing over the now expanded pool, holding a plate of fresh liver that once belonged to a greedy merchant from Lanling, dangling one piece in his hand while his five daughters chomp at the surface like piranhas for their mid afternoon post-nap snack. "....hmm... I'll think of something."

Then Wen Qing thinks hell maybe it's better she doesn't have any boys, so this fuckery can end with her....

She gives birth to a bouncing baby boy the very next year.

Jiang Cheng decides that he's done enough good in the world and elects to go to Qishan and gets himself an ancient chinese version of a vasectomy.

Their daughters all grow into astonishing beauties, much to the misfortune of seamen and seawomen everywhere.

Fuck.

The genetics

1) mer gene: People have 23 pairs of chromosomes, which means for each gene we have (for the most part), you have two copies of that gene, called two alleles. In a given population, there could be many many alleles that encode for one thing, that's why people look different and have different appearances, personality and health status. The X and Y chromosome, called the sex chromosomes, are a little different than the other 22 pairs. The location where the mer gene is encoded is on the X chromosome. For most of the population, this is a null allele. As in, it doesn't encode anything, or it encodes something that is non-functional. Therefore, people are people and not mermaids. Only the Jiang mer gene, found on the X chromosomes of people with Jiang blood, form an active protein with subsequent physiological impact. You could call it a gain-of-function mutation for those us in the field ;). The mer gene is a X-link dominant gene, meaning it only requires one working allele on an X chromosome to be expressed.

Females are XX. This is why Jiang Yanli is a merfolk. She inherited 1 gain-of-function mer gene from her father Jiang Fengmian (who is a carrier), and one null mer gene from her mother Yu Ziyuan (who is human). Because the Jiang mer gene is dominant, JYL only needs one copy to be a full merfolk.

2) mer transposon gene: So now your question must be, hold on, hold on a second. If the active mer gene is found the Jiang X chromosome, then how can Jiang Cheng be a carrier? He inherited the Y chromosome from his dad, and normal X chromosome from his mom. If Jiang Cheng has more daughters, he would donate his X chromosome, which is normal (since it came from Yu Ziyuan). So how can his daughters be mermaids?

Well, the Y chromosome, which is a shrivelled up little chromosome, is a little peculiar in the Jiangs. It has a special transposon sequence. Transposons are....kind of like DNA viruses. It has a sequence of genes that encode a transposition gene and a structural gene. The transposition gene first gets transcribed by DNA transcription factors into a mRNA, which then gets translated into a protein. This protein then comes back from the cytoplasm into the nucleus to its DNA origin site to cut out the structural gene and then implants it into another location in the DNA. I know. It's wild. This actually happens in real life, I'm not making this shit up. The structural gene in this case is a gain-of-function mer gene.

For the mer transposon, it specifically translocates from the Y chromosome to the X chromosome in an in-frame fashion (as in it won't fuck up the reading of the rest of the DNA on the X chromosome). This way now Jiang Cheng's normal X chromosome which he inherited from his mother, has a working mer gene.

So... why isn't Jiang Cheng a merfolk? Well because -

3) anti-mer gene: The Jiang Y chromosome not only carries a mer transposon gene, it also carries an anti-mer gene, which suppresses the expression of the mer-gene, even though the poor transposon gene did all the work to transpose it lol. So even though Jiang boys has a X chromosome that carries a working mer gene, they do not express it themselves. Only when they have daughters, when they pass on that X chromosome, does that gene get turned on in the presence of no inhibition by anti-mer.

This is essentially how the SRY gene, which determines male sex, works in humans. Without the SRY gene on the Y chromosome, the default sex is female.

But this doesn't answer, why can't Jiang Yanli's daughters become merfolks? Well -

4) Epigenetics: paternal vs maternal imprinting. Now here's where things get really interesting. The mer gene is a Jiang Clan secret, if all their daughters who married out of the clan also made mer babies, then the cat would be out of the bag in no time. The reason why only Jiang sons can pass on the gene is that some genes are "maternal" and some genes are "paternal". DNA expression is not simply dictated by what's encoded in the DNA - the T G C A sequence - but also regulated by the proteins that are attached to it, aka the epigenetics. Even though most genes are in pairs (remember, 2 alleles?), some times you only want to express 1 copy of it. Some genes, we only express the copy that we inherit from our mother, and some genes we only express the copy we inherit from our father. When a gene is imprinted either through methylation or acetylation or both, that gene is silenced - aka those DNA transcription factors we talked about earlier can no longer get to it to make mRNAs.

For example: DIRAS3 is a paternally expressed and maternally imprinted gene located on chromosome 1 in humans. This means ALL of us express the DIRAS3 we inherited from our fathers. And if one day I have a child (I'm female), even if I pass on the DIRAS3 that I inherited from my father through chromosome 1, in my child that gene will become imprinted and silenced, because I am the female parent, and my copy of that gene in my offspring will always be silent.

That's how the mer gene works. It is a paternally expressed, maternally imprinted gene. The gene is active in Jiang Yanli because she got it from her dad. If she were to have children, they would have gotten that gene from their mum, and that gene would be "imprinted" aka silenced and they would a normal human.

#cql #the untamed #chengqing

[loubabykitten]

UPDATED: KID FICS

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#larry #larry stylinson #larry fic #fic rec #larry au #larry kids au #dad harry #dad louis #larry smut #larry fluff #larry anfst #harry styles fanfiction #louis tomlinson fanfiction