8:34 PM
in hindsight, there’s no other person you can blame for your current heartbreak but yourself.
if only…
if only you were honest, maybe things would have gone differently.
if only you were honest to yourself and to the people around you, maybe you wouldn’t have to sit through this dinner with a forced smile while you watch suna rintarou hold hands with a girl who isn’t you.
DENY
you’ve always liked suna rintarou. your sister knew it, your friends outside of volleyball club knew it. hell, you reckon that even your parents knew it.
yet you always deny, deny, deny. especially to your close friends and neighbors, atsumu and osamu. you’ve known the twins since you were all children and have seen how they fell in love with volleyball; they even managed to recruit you as a manager for their volleyball team once you all entered inarizaki high.
it goes to say, you ended up becoming friends with the then new-to-town suna rintarou. the twins always made it a point to tease you to him but you were the maser of denial.
sometimes, you think you’re even able to deny to yourself that you like suna as more than just a friend.
that is, until hani nakamura entered the picture.
she was a grade younger, known for her intellect and beauty. even boys from other schools wait for her outside of inarizaki’s gates in the hopes of getting to know her. you’ve managed to befriend her when you both got seats in the student council during your sophomore year.
she’s a sweet person. president of her class, eldest daughter in the family, and a part of the youth council at church. it’s a running joke in the student council how she must have more than 24 hours in a day to be able to manage everything she’s involved in.
you genuinely liked her nice personality and almost everyone will agree that finding something to dislike about hani nakamura is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
“do you like someone, y/n-senpai?” she asked you one afternoon as you’re both leaving the student council room. she wasn’t in a hurry like usual days, the thursday afternoon free for her while you were running late for the volleyball club’s practice.
“that’s random!” you replied as you avoided her gaze.
“neither of the twins?” she curiously asked.
you made fake vomiting sounds. “ew, no, they’re like my brothers.”
“sorry,” she immediately said before sighing. “i’m just curious, that’s all. i mean, you being the manager of a group of athletic boys… how is it? how haven’t you developed a crush on any of them?”
the curiosity in her voice made you giggle a little. “who said i haven’t developed a crush on any of them?”
at that, hani’s face lit up. “really? who?”
and before you could think any further, you said, “you’re free this afternoon, right? why don’t you come to the gym with me?”
8:40 PM
“so,” atsumu begins with a sly smile, his face already reddening from the alcohol he’s been consuming even before the food was served. “when did it all start?”
the couple in question exchange a look and you can’t help but notice how the other people at the table coo over the action.
“she made the move first.” “he made the move first.”
suna and hani laugh after realizing what they said at the same time, earning teasing remarks from the table.
“fucking shit, suna rintarou!” atsumu suddenly yells. “stop looking like that at nakamura. you look so goddamn whipped.”
suna only rolls his eyes as he brings their intertwined hands to his lips and kisses the back of hani’s hand. “if you’re envious, just close your eyes, atsumu.”
another round of laughter.
“but seriously,” aran steers the conversation back on track. “how did it all begin?”
hani dons that sweet smile of her. “it’s all thanks to one person.”
and then you feel eyes on you as suna finishes the girl’s sentence. “yeah, thanks for bringing her to our practice that afternoon, y/n.”
LIE
“it’s number 10, right?” hani said as you both walked home after the practice ended.
you nearly tripped on your steps as you gave her a shocked look. “w-what?”
“the one you have a crush on.”
was it that obvious? you wanted to ask her but instead said, “the one i had a crush on. that was soooo last year.”
“oh. why did you stop liking him?”
you shook your head. “just because.”
“because?”
a shrug. “i don’t think it’s wise for the volleyball club manager to date one of the members. what if we fight? it can ruin the team’s dynamics.”
8:45 PM
“you know what surprises me more than the fact that you’re dating nakamura?” ginjima says as he reaches for another stick of barbecue. “it’s the fact that as it turns out, you’re interested in dating, after all.”
a murmur of agreement from the other team members. suna suppresses a roll of his eyes. “did i ever give off the energy that i’m not interested in dating?”
“yes,” one of the freshmen answers a little too quickly, making everyone laugh with the exception of you. sure, other times you would have let out a few giggles as well but a bad feeling was stirring in your stomach, having a guess on which direction the conversation is heading.
“ah, i can’t actually blame you. i mean, we mostly see each other in the gym and court where there are no potential love interests to be seen.”
you feel osamu shoot a quick glance at your direction as you try your best to stop the frown from forming on your face.
as if the night couldn’t get even worse.
not only did suna announce he’s dating one of your friends, but he also confirmed the thing you’ve been trying not to think of all this time: for the past two years as friends, you often wondered why suna never dated anyone and never acted on the small hints and opportunities you’ve been dropping ever since you realized you liked him as more than just a friend. you concluded that maybe, romance is the least of his priorities.
but his answer just now, and the fact that he’s proudly holding hands with hani in front of the team, splashes the ice cold truth on you: it’s not that he wasn’t interested in dating; it’s just that he wasn’t interested in dating you.
suddenly, you feel like leaving dinner. your mind scrambles to find an excuse to leave but all you can think of is: suna is holding hani’s hand. suna who acts as if he cares about nothing is holding hands with a girl in front of the whole volleyball team. suna is dating hani. suna’s heart belongs to a girl who isn’t you.
and it’s suffocating. you want to at least go to the rest room but you’re glued to your seat, as if the heavy feeling in your chest has planted you on the spot with no chance of moving.
instead, more thoughts flood your mind: what if you had been honest with yourself earlier? what if you never denied to the twins that you like suna? would they have made a way for suna to see you in a different light? what if you were honest instead to hani and didn’t tell her that you no longer liked suna? would she have had second thoughts about dating him? what if you had tried to be as perfect as–
“y/n,” osamu’s voice breaks you out of your thoughts. you look to your right and see him standing next to your seat. “you look unwell. do you want me to drive you home?”
8:59 PM
“i won’t ask anything but you can cry now. i’ll just drive and let you be.”
you close your eyes and let the tears fall. silent, at first, until choked up sobs escape your lips and your body is shaking and you try not to curl in onto yourself but your chest physically hurts that you mindlessly lift your knees to your chest and cry and cry and cry and cry because you know you’ll never be able to call suna rintarou “yours” despite your heart only belonging to him.
part two
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#18.1 Rak
Rak let out a huff and sat down next to Agni. Agni peeked over at Rak, who was looking far ahead, as if his past were replaying right before him.
TW: Self harm and suicide…in a way? (Sorry if it gets too dark. I put the TLDR on the tags)
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"I met him back when I was young, about a hundred years ago," Rak started.
Agni was taken aback at how long the gap between their time travel was. He wondered how much his Rak had changed.
"It was getting cold, which meant it was hunting season. I got bored and picked a fight with the toughest and biggest prey I could find."
Agni hummed when Rak paused for a moment too long, "Let me guess. You underestimated it and you lost?"
"The river was slippery!" Rak crossed his arms defensively. "And I didn't lose!"
"Sure," Agni rolled his eyes, one corner of his lips upturned. "How come?"
"I didn't lose, but I didn’t win either." Rak looked away, probably in embarrassment. "Another spear pierced its head before mine. That's when I met him."
From the way Rak's expression turned fiery, Agni had a suspicion that that exact moment had affected Rak more than what he spilled out. It didn't surprise him however, since he knew Rak’s ego.
"He was around for a while, acting like he cared about me." Rak huffed again, more fondly this time, eyes closed and arms still crossed. "He taught me a few fancy tricks with rocks and how to hunt better. He talked a lot about turtle this and turtle that. There were so many, I don't remember. But Black and Blue turtles were the ones he talked about the most, saying something like 'no one else will be more worthy prey than them.'"
Agni felt his chest tighten. To think that their Rak had acknowledged them and even bragged about it…it filled him with a sense of pride and longing.
"I didn't believe him then, since turtles are boring and no way they could do what he said they could." Rak paused and untangled his arms, eyes focusing and turning predatory, "But when he said that these turtles were unlike what we had there, I have been wanting to meet those turtles he told me about and hunt them."
Rak's story was intriguing. But even if it flattered him, Agni was more curious about his Rak's whereabouts. "What happened to him then? Wasn't he…badly injured?"
Rak frowned and went silent. But when he found his voice, it lacked its previous vigor. "He was. It looked fresh and so impossible to walk with, but he did. I asked if it was painful, but he said he didn’t feel a thing."
Third-degree burn. Agni thought to himself. But there was no way it spread evenly. Some areas must've been painful.
"He definitely lied," Rak voiced Agni's thought. "He was just acting to look tough."
The edge of Agni's lips twitched in an attempt to suppress his smile. That's him alright. And of course Rak could figure his own self easily.
"One day he challenged me in an all out duel," Rak's gaze turned dark. "His wounds had weakened him over the months, and it was obvious who would be the winner."
Agni frowned at the implication.
Wordlessly, Rak called out his arms inventory which held a familiar looking spear that shouldn't have been in his possession at this point in time. Agni would recognize that design anywhere, "...Mad shocker."
"He said he wanted to test me, and he gave me this." Rak glared at the spear as if it was responsible for his misfortune. "And later told me that I should be proud, for only a true hunter was allowed to defeat him."
Agni felt his throat going dry, and gulped. "He died, didn't he?"
Rak's eyes sharpened. Whether it was in regret or anger, Agni couldn't tell. "I killed him."
Agni didn't know what to feel about that. On one hand, he could empathize with how much pain Rak must've felt from the injury, especially with the lack of proper treatment that could cure or even just lessen the pain. But on the other hand, it meant that his Rak was truly gone, in such a way, and he still couldn't wrap his head around it.
Rak put his pipe back to invisible mode, like looking at it had brought him so much grief. "I've never used that spear since."
The silence stretched, with only the loud noises coming from the training ground to fill it. Agni wasn't sure how to reply to that without being overly friendly nor physical, and he definitely wouldn't do that to Rak, who only met him today.
Sitting beside Rak like this reminded him of their chat before the workshop battle, on the balcony. It was when Rak truly let him see his buried feelings, his desire to climb the tower together with him and Grace. And with that, the grief finally started to dawn on him. The scar on his face felt itchy and his hand was already clawing at his mask before he registered the motion. He sighed and put his hand back on his knee, pushing the tangled feeling to the back of his mind to be dealt with later. And since the silence had stretched out for too long, he asked; "What was he to you?"
"A rival," Rak looked thoughtful before adding, "and family."
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cora’s bad time hell simulation steps or how to play “sprite station for girl” “harvest moon ds cute” the wrong way
(all ways are wrong this game is Accursed)
ok so here’s what my disorganized “guide” to myself for harvest moon ds for girl (aka indecipherable notes i wrote to myself as i played and revised as i tested various things and restarted due to mistakes) looks like. at some point when i become a real gamer i will write a legible guide meant for eyes to look at but uhhh this is how i play this accursed game personally
i’m not sure if anything i wrote will make any sense since i wrote it as notes to myself so probably definitely use fogu and fc2 jonason wiki (may not work but some pages should be archived) instead
ALSO if you’ve never played or barely played the game it won’t make sense at all! hmds was my first harvest moon so i am used to various horrors!
my play style is probably not fun in general HOWEVER if you are a grinding hell goblin like me then it’s GREAT!!!! if not you may still find it amusing that the game gives you permission to play like this
(it’s a great background task game while doing like productive stuff but otherwise playing this way would probably be unbearable)
(image limit)
anyway after that the days go a lot faster, you’ll get the island on summer 1, so on spring 30 i put all my money into million G tickets and sell 200 of em, do the 5x money thing, and save the rest. so when thomas comes the next day to sell you the 900 million G island you can just sell 180 tickets and do the 5x money thing again with like ~600 million G tickets left over. it takes up inventory but you’ll get the shelf in a few days. basically you just need to remember to order from the TV shopping every saturday and place orders with gotz and gray whenever they finish stuff.
random tips
after unlocking the fuckass hot spring sprites (the ones that require you to spend a total of 700 1 hour sessions in the hot springs) i usually grind grazing points— if you put your animals outside for 5 hours you get a “Love Point”, but if you interact with them after they earn that LP then the timer switches over and you can get another LP after 5 more hours. if you wear the time ring the whole time it’s 2.5 hours. i’m not very good at explaining this but basically if you’re super efficient you can get way more animal LP than you realistically should, which is great because the touch glove petting minigame is Bad!!!!
i usually wait on getting the rest of the purple sprites (the ones that require you to hire the purple team and ask for healing) until i’m totally done with the indigo team, cuz i wanna get HG’s purple heart event asap, but you can switch the order if you want
by summer y1 you’ll basically have a feel for everything. aside from Skye, Leia, HG and WP everyone can be married early-mid autumn if you want
if you want to Gay (in the japanese version only) keira is the quickest to marry. leia is the quickest to max affection but it’s impossible to get leia year 1 because the bottle you need to fish up can only be caught in spring. you have to wait until at least year 5 for WP and iirc year 6 for HG.
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Hm ok not sure how to write this post but it's a fun thing and I've been wanting to gush about it for weeks. Uhhh
Achievement Unlocked: Finally found something that's pushed me closer to agnostic than atheist??
Basically, I was seeing an obnoxious, totally inexplicable amount of hawks and corvids in my area irl, especially whenever I was stressed. So I asked all my witchy friends about it (one was straight up born into a coven, it's fuckin sick 🤩) and they sent me some stuff those animals symbolize.
And then I asked about what deities/entities they're associated with. They sent me a short list, so I started looking into each one to see if I felt a strong pull to any of them. One of them was Apollo, the Greek God of [A Lot of Cool Shit]. Right away, I clicked with him. The god of truth, prophecy, healing, the arts. It's all stuff that matters a lot to me. I especially found it fascinating he's said to be a protector of the young, and I, a psych major, want to be a therapist of some sort (read: healer) specifically for teenagers. He's also Known for being incredibly bisexual, and even though I'm pan, my sexuality is still a huge part of me. And a lot of other things about him clicked with me too, both big things like my career goal and my identity, and small insignificant things like the fact that he's a Sun God and I'm a Fire Sign. There were way too many coincidences and connections I was making to myself while reading about him to just think nothing of it. Most damning of all, hawks and corvids are said to be his messengers. If that wasn't a "Hello Isa I've been trying to contact you about your car's extended warranty" moment, I don't know what is. So I said fuck it, I'm gonna give working with him the way my witchy friends work with their deities/entities a try.
It's been like three weeks now? And I haven't done much but I'm really happy about the concept of it all. I see hawks and crows a lot still, especially when I'm stressed or upset (One morning I was getting roadrage omw to school and I shit you not, I watched a hawk land on a street lamp and there was a crow sitting on the very next one. I couldn't help but laugh). I got myself a necklace with a crow on it because I don't really have a space to do formal practice type stuff. And last night I had my wife do a tarot reading for me, and the gist of it was "you have a budding relationship, it's a good thing and it'll help you, nurture it with all the creative freedom you like and be chill about it." Which is basically what I've already been doing.
But my favorite part of this wild ass development is that I realized while reading up on Apollo that my whole life I've thought of or spoke about something and then it either happened or something related to it would suddenly show up in my life right after. I don't believe in ✨️manifesting✨️ and holy shit I'm not calling myself psychic whatsoever, but this weird coincidence thing has been happening to me as long as I can remember and I've been noticing it even more after looking up Apollo, both irl and in my dreams. I think Apollo's dodgeball being my favorite Tumblr meme before this all happened to me is making a comedic amount of sense now.
I'm still pretty skeptical of most religious practices because I just. Am one of those people, I guess. And I had Catholicism shoved down my throat by my dad as a kid, AND I'm queer, so I have a Bad relationship with the concept of religion as it is. But this feels right, and it's fascinating to me, and the idea that these weird happenstances in my life could be a figure that represents several things that make up my core values and my identity trying to get my attention feels really touching. It feels like something wanted my attention so badly, and I've been happier since I gave it a chance.
TLDR: After consulting my witchy friends about some weird shit that keeps happening to me irl, I did some light research and figured out I feel a strong connection to the god Apollo. He represents a lot of things that matter to me and the concept has made me a lot happier recently. And I'm pretty sure he's given me minor dodgeball privileges. I'm finally invested in some form of religious practice, and best of all its one I kinda get to just make my own because it's not an organized one.
So if yall need a dodgeball thrown at something, maybe I got you. 👈🏻👀👈🏻
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