#this was supposed to be part of a much bigger piece but the rendering did nOT want to turn out the way I wanted it to 😅 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

chibimyumi · 4 years

Photo

Lizzie’s Campania Dinner Dress REDESIGNED

After having redesigned the Notorious Robin Dress of O!Ciel (click here), I thought I’d try my hands on another well-known dress; Lizzie’s dress on the Campania!

As explained in the post linked above, Yana seemed to not have an inkling of historical fashion knowledge at the beginning of the series. As the series became bigger however, she employed a Victorian Era expert and the results are clear.

In this post I will examine to what extent Lizzie’s dinner dress is accurate and break this costume down from the top, and propose how to “correct” these while trying to keep as much of the original design as untouched as possible.

I. Dinner Dress

Hair

Just like I said in the Robin Dress™ REDESIGN post, needless to say, 19th century people would not have worn twin tails. Wearing the hair down was considered ungroomed for women in the 19th century, but young, unmarried girls were allowed to spare a few hairpins.

Unlike O!Ciel who would always try to strive for a more mature look, Lizzie would aim for the opposite.

In the late Victorian era it was normal to have bangs, but it was proper to have it cut well above the eyebrows. So Lizzie’s bangs only need to be trimmed a bit to be period accurate.

The long dangling fringe of Lizzie’s is a tribute to her mother, but alas, that one does need to go... I do not dare fully risk the WRATH of Frances the Formidable however, so in honour to her, I have kept that bang as much as possible. The sides of the bangs were allowed to be longer in order to frame the face better, but the point remains that the face should not be covered.

(I know, I know, two symmetrical half-arsed fringes would have been better, but I promised to try change as little as possible...)

Victorians hardly ever cut their hair, because the longer the hair, the more feminine and desirable a girl/woman was deemed to be. The aesthetic of hair in 1880s was more in the vertical direction instead of horizontal. Hence Lizzie would probably have worn her curls a bit smaller, therewith using up less hair into the width.

The period wherein people strongly favoured a horizontal aesthetic was approximately 200 to 70 years outdated. If we had to justify what type of hair Lizzie’s hairdo was supposed to be historically, I could only say it is probably the 1670s early baroque hairdo. (I mean... that portrait IS fairly similar to Lizzie’s hair, is it not?)

The hair ornament Lizzie wears is not entirely impossible, just very unlikely for the 1880s. I have kept the weird rosette that she wears, and used them to pin up both sides of her hair. I could not find any visual sources of people wearing rosettes in their hair instead of their chest after earning some type of prize, but since there were no regulations regarding how a ribbon must be tied into a bow, the rosettes can stay.

Neckline and Bodice

The design of the original bodice also requires a bit of work. Just like with the Robin Dress, the main problem lies with the silhouette.

In the height of the Victorian Era, the main endeavour was waist reducing, hence the chest area would be accentuated and “streamlined” towards the shoulder, while the seams would detract from the waist optically.

Instead of the straight design of the chest panel, I replaced it with a fan-shaped front piece, of which the lines would achieve this ‘streamline’ effect.

The halterneck-like neckline as in the original design would have been quite unlikely as it would have made the neck stand out, and make the much thinner neck compete with the desired small waist. The rule of thumb for what aesthetic bodices should have was generally open wide top, closed small bottom (V shaped, not O). Usually when there is a halterneck-line, something else that would redirect the eyes towards the larger shoulder-chest area would adorn the bodice too for compensation.

Thus, instead of the rounded halterneck-line, I replaced it with a straight square neckline. Though square-necks were not very popular in Lizzie’s time, they were not unheard of. Miraculously I happened to stumble upon this illustration from 1889 (exactly Kuro’s present day setting), and herein we can see both the short lantern sleeves and the square neckline.

Decoration wise there is nothing inconsistent with 1889 fashion, but as Lizzie is the daughter to an influential Marquis and the dress is supposed to be a dinner dress, it should be a tad gaudier. The elaborateness of Lizzie’s original dress was more alike that of a daytime walking dress. I did not deviate too much from the original manga’s design, I simply added some gold details that were not there yet.

(The anime’s dress had been simplified for animation’s sake, so my redesign is based on the manga’s slightly more elaborate triple panel decoration.)

This choker ribbon necklace is the same as for the Robin Dress. Like I said before, these were worn by people in the 1880s, but they were not standard for fancy night time events. However, as it is technically not historically ‘inaccurate’, it can stay.

Waistline

Just like the Robin Dress, Lizzie’s waistline is the most historically inaccurate part that renders the entire design a period amalgamation.

First of all, I gave the waistline a pointed end and swagged the inner skirt up towards the hips for a dramatic V-shape. The bow-sash worn around the waist was something that was in fashion during the 1780s and 1790s, and was part of the ‘Chemise de la Reine’ look that was named for and popularized by Marie Antoinette.

Fashion trends do always come back every now and then, so a ribbon bow is not necessarily taboo. But the height at which the bow sits on the original dress would guide the waistline towards the hips, which would have gone against the small-waist aesthetics of 1880s, which would have been taboo.

Hence, I removed the sash entirely, and shoved the bow itself to the back (more on this below.)

Skirt

Again, the same problem Yana had with the Robin Dress; the bell-shaped silhouette that would be at least 30 years outdated by 1889, so I simply reduced its volume.

The split panel front however, was common in the 1880s, as such it remains untouched.

The dress code for formal events would require a floor-length hem for dresses, but a dinner party such as the one on the Campania would be semi-formal, and Lizzie who strives for a very youthful look would have been able to get away with a shorter hem. Hence, the skirt length also remains unchanged.

Bustle

“Does this dress make my butt look small?” would have been the question women asked. Late Victorian fashion just LOVED a huge behind, and the bustle was the absolute star of any feminine outfit.

The design of the ornaments on the original dress is actually spot on, except that it would simply lie flat over the skirt, rather than help the skirt get a large bulge.

So for the redesign, I have decided to use the golden bow that sat at the front to draw the attention towards the maximised behind. Underneath I used the original triple row tails, and flanked this decoration with large pleats to produce a dramatic back. For completion’s sake, I have added golden embroideries to the pleats so that the large golden bow will not just sit there as a random piece of ornament.

Shoes

I could find relatively few sources on late 1880s shoe fashion, so my caveat here.

Lizzie’s d’Orsay type of shoes were not standard in the 19th century England, but they were definitely not impossible. 1880s d’Orsay pumps were a bit more closed around the lateral arch, but the technique to make completely open d’Orsays was already available in the 1600s, and wildly popular after the 1830s. As I could not find any sources on when they stopped being popular, I think Lizzie’s shoes would probably have been acceptable.

What I do propose to change is the point of the toe. Only very, very young girls (up to age 4 ish) would wear a rounded nose. Slightly older children and adults would wear pointed toes instead.

The only other thing I propose to change is only a “problem” if I were to be perfectly pedantic and nitpicky; namely the arch of the shoe. Arches of the shoe until the 1910s were mostly straight, and did not have the same arch as our natural feet have. So in order to create the perfect 1889 shoe silhouette, I straightened Lizzie’s shoes too.

Y’all still with me? Good. Now comes the trickiest part, THE UNDERWEAR, a.k.a. Lizzie’s Battle Suit.

II. Battle Suit

Lizzie’s dinner dress was actually fairly historically accurate, earning a personal Chibimyumi rating of 6.6/10 in total (as opposed to Robin Dress’ miserable total rating of 4.1/10). Her Battle Suit however, scores less well, reaching only a 5.4/10.

Chemise

Victorian undergarments were nothing like our contemporary ones. If you have no breasts then it is easy, but if you do... well, a bra is bad enough, right?

Well.... In the Victorian times women wore layers on top of layers, of which the first was the chemise. Contrary to popular belief, people did not wear corsets directly on their skin. Corsets were very hard to wash, thus the chemise served to both protect the corset from getting dirty, as well as absorb the sweat.

Yana did do pretty good research as attested by her not having fallen for this popular misconception. Lizzie does indeed wear a type of chemise underneath her corset, though I would say that the sleeves are too elaborate for the dress she has chosen to wear on top.

Such elaborate sleeves were worn to be combined with smaller sleeves so that the lace can protrude from underneath, giving the entire outfit a little icing on top (like the lace at the chest). Lizzie’s dinner dress has lantern sleeves that would not reveal any of the chemise’s sleeves.

Chemises were washed quite regularly, but lace is a very expensive and delicate material. Hence, in order to minimise wear-and-tear, people would probably have avoided wearing ultra fancy chemises if it cannot be seen anyway. But who knows. Lizzie is a rich kid, she probably has enough lacy chemises at her disposal. Still, just to be perfectly historically accurate, I gave her chemise simpler sleeves.

Corset

Unlike the chemise, corsets were not regularly washed, and thus elaborate lace was very desired.

The large ruffles on the chest of Yana’s design however, are probably a tad too elaborate, and judging from the thickness, they could easily disrupt the smoothness of the outerwear.

1880s corsets were generally not very decorated as their function was valued over anything else. This corset I found dating from 1887 is the most elaborate authentic one I could find, and it indeed strongly resembles the one Lizzie wears. However, as even this one does not have lace protruding as much as Lizzie’s, I have toned the corset down too for the redesign.

In the 1880s, both corsets with and without front closure were worn. However, the pieces as elaborately decorated in the front would not have front closures. Hence I removed the hook and eye closure in the redesign.

The thing that is the least accurate about Lizzie’s corset is the boning structure. What produced a well-shaped waist was not how tight you lace the corset, but the structure of the boning. An unlaced corset of that time would have looked much ‘curvier’ than any tight-laced straight-boned corset.

By the late 1880s, boning techniques were so advanced that they were very soft and flexible, and yet also provided the firmness necessary for the desired look. The straight paneled type of boning drawn by Yana was outdated and strongly advised against.

Finally, the mini-skirt at the bottom of the corset is cute, but I have yet to find one like that in the 1880s. I don’t think that tiny piece of fabric would disrupt the desirable silhouette, but there will be PLENTY layers on top, so I removed it just to be sure.

Skirt

The skirt - or rather, everything that happened UNDER the skirt is a stack of complexities.

The most bottom layer would have been the underwear with trouser-legs, layer 1. Layer 2 is the protruding hem of the chemise, that may either have been long or short. But the chemise and the underwear are the only things that were worn UNDER the corset, hence the frilly-frilly skirt we see Lizzie fight in should have been the chemise, and not the underskirt.

The chemise was never something as wide as the one drawn by Yana, and could therefore not achieve that flare effect. I know it is absolutely gorgeous, and from an artistic point of view I myself would not have done otherwise. But as I am doing historical fashion research and redesign, I shall compromise myself and settle with a narrow skirt. The skirt would probably have been so narrow Lizzie would have trouble fighting. So it would not have surprised me if she decided to make a large split in it, or rolled it up and tucked it under her corset.

The frilly underskirt we see Lizzie wear should be layer 4 rather than 2. If we study Lizzie’s dress, we can see that the frilly part is a separate piece of clothing, unlike what the anime-art suggests.

Underneath this layer, there would have been a bustle (layer 3) that was strapped around the waist, over the corset. Like I explained before, bustles were essential to any Victorian dress. They came in many shapes and sizes, but I have settled with the simplest one.

Should we wish to keep the frilly skirt, then we need to keep in mind that Lizzie would have worn FOUR layers, which would hardly have made it any easier for her to navigate through the water than before. So why bother remove the dress and expose herself at all then? Hence, all layers from layer 2 on will sink with the Campania.

From our 21st century point of view, the Battle Suit looks quite cute, and we would probably just wear it like that. But if we consider down to what layer a real 1889 girl would have to have stripped, and how many somewhat embarrassing contraptions had to be removed first before reaching some level of mobility, we can probably understand how embarrassing it truly must have been.

Well, I had tons of fun doing this research, and I learned a great lot about what corsets really were (and not the inhumane torture devices they are claimed to be). I hope you all also had fun reading this too. (*´▽｀*)ノ

【Related post: Ciel’s notorious Robin Dress™ REDESIGNED】

【Related post: Redesign: O!Ciel and Sebastian in different eras】

MASTERPOST My Art

MASTERPOST Furukawa Era Kuromyu

MASTERPOST Gender in Kuroshitsuji

MASTERPOST Analyses & Info

#Kuroshitsuji #Black Butler #Redesign #design #Campania #Campania Arc #Luxury liner arc #Lizzy #Lizzie #Elizabeth Midford #historic accuracy #Historic fashion accuracy #Historic fashion #fashion

2K notes · View notes

bubblegumbeech · 3 years

Text

Stumbling in your Sleep

Phic Phight prompt fill for @the-only-wife

It was the ticking sound that woke him.

Danny yawned, blinking sleep out of his eyes and stretching out his sore muscles. Looking around only served to confuse him though. He wasn’t in his room anymore, and he wasn’t downstairs either (which sometimes happened with his body’s penchant to fall through not only his bed, but the floor). He was in a large, heavily shadowed room that was on the edge of familiar, and it was taking him a moment to place it in his sleep fogged mind.

“It’s not healthy to fixate on what could have been,” came a deep, familiar voice from behind him.

Startled, Danny spun around to see Clockwork floating a few feet away. He was in his eldest form, long knitted beard and all, and was gazing past Danny towards something further in the room.

Following that gaze, Danny saw what exactly Clockwork had been talking about and flinched, flying quickly away from it and over towards the Ancient.

It was a Thermos, horridly familiar and just- sitting there on a pillow as if for display.

“How did I get here?” Danny asked, putting Clockwork between himself and that thing .

Clockwork hummed, stroking his beard a moment before slowly answering, “I suppose, the likely answer is that you were having a nightmare.” He lowered a hand to Danny’s shoulder and led him out of the room and back into a more familiar part of the clock tower. “Let’s get you some tea before I send you home, it might calm your nerves.”

Danny followed, eager for distance, before asking, “the likely answer? Does that mean you don’t know?”

“Despite what you and certain others seem to think, I am neither omniscient nor a mind reader, I cannot see into your dreams,” Clockwork said and Danny chuckled softly. “Besides, Nocturn would likely be unappreciative if I was interfering in his domain.”

“You know Nocturn?” Danny asked stopping and tugging lightly on Clockwork’s cloak so that he’d stop as well.

He did, lifting one of his eyebrows and answering with a dry tone, “of course I do, I know everyone.”

Because of course he did. It wasn’t like he didn’t just tell Danny that he wasn’t omniscient, that was clearly a different skill set to someone as determined to be mysterious as Clockwork. Danny found himself wondering if the intrigue surrounding the older ghost was not mostly of his own creation, an attempt at seeming aloof and beyond comprehension while simultaneously laughing behind everyone else’s backs.

A wash of amusement filtered through the ambient ectoplasm of Clockwork’s lair and Danny scowled up at him, “I thought you weren’t a mind reader?”

Clockwork tried to hide his smile, unsuccessfully, and nodded, “I do not need to be, to hear the accusations you make towards me,” he guided Danny to the main room of the tower where the screens were kept along with the relatively recent addition of a couch and coffee table. There was warm tea, purple and slightly glowing, already waiting for them.

“So I’m right then? You are just messing with us all the time?” Danny grabbed his own cup, dubious, Clockwork wouldn’t poison him right? He would know whether a half ghost could drink something if anyone did.

If Danny was expecting an answer, he’d be dissapointed, but when a ghost spent enough time with the mysterious Ancient it became increasingly clear that straight answers were not something they would get in large supply. So instead he rolled his eyes and took a sip of his tea, Clockwork could be as obnoxious as he wanted after saving Danny’s family like he did.

The least Danny could do in return, was accept his eccentricities.

“Do you remember your dream?” Clockwork asked and Danny shook his head. There were bits and pieces, sure. Certain emotions and feelings that flashed to the surface when he closed his eyes or tried to think about it. He’d never been good at trying to recall something once he was awake, and despite Jazz once offering to buy him a dream journal to ‘help him decode his inner turmoils’ he’d never felt the need to try and change that.

He sighed into his tea, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bother you. I know you’re busy.” There was no way he was going to get a decent amount of sleep now, especially since he’d have to fly all the way home first and he didn’t even know how late it already was.

Clockwork’s lips twitched slightly upwards, “Daniel you’ve never once cared before how busy I am when you’ve come to visit,” Danny flinched, well he wasn’t wrong , “and besides, I quite enjoy your company. It’s no trouble at all.”

“Ah,” Danny didn’t know how to react to that, he was pretty sure he was nothing but trouble, especially with a certain future of his locked up in that other part of the clock tower they’d been in, “thanks?”

His host sighed, taking the time to sip his own eerily glowing tea. The silence stretched, but not uncomfortably and Danny found himself starting to drift towards sleep again, the struggle to try and keep his eyes pried open quickly becoming a losing one.

That was probably his cue to leave, as nice as it was to just sit here and not worry about things like classes and ghost attacks, he was probably already pushing it close to the first bell at school. He stood up and Clockwork’s eyes followed, “I have to head out, thanks for the tea Clockwork. I’ll try to be more considerate the next time I drop by.”

There was a small pinch between Clockwork’s brows, something he wasn’t saying or that Danny wasn’t hearing. “I’d rather you didn’t,” he assured and Danny let out a chuckle. He’d probably respond with something equally sarcastic, if not quite as dry, if he wasn’t so tired.

Clockwork seemed to be of the same mind, “Daniel, when was the last time you slept through the night?” He asked it as a question, as if he didn’t already know. Then again, maybe Danny was giving himself too much credit, it was entirely possible Clockwork didn’t waste his incredible power watching to see if Danny bothered to sleep at night.

“Yesterday,” Danny lied, a yawn built behind his jaw as if to discredit him but Danny held it back stubbornly. It didn’t seem to work though, as Clockwork’s lips tightened. He looked over at his screens, eyes flicking quickly over each one while his fingers tapped a steady rhythm against his staff. That, combined with the gentle ticking of clocks and general comforting atmosphere of the other ghost’s lair was making it more and more difficult for Danny to keep his eyes open.

He flinched awake fully as a hand shook his shoulder, shit, did he fall asleep standing up?

“Daniel,” Clockwork’s hand was still on his shoulder, practically holding him up at this point, “you can always sleep here.”

Danny shook his head, “I don’t have time-”

“Daniel,” Clockwork interrupted, his expression flat.

Oh right.

“I don’t want to…” he tried, “It’s just, you already help me all the time, you’ve fixed so many of my stupid mistakes and-” and Danny was tired of being a burden. He was tired in general, but ancients was he tired of that specifically.

He was tired of seeing his friends lose sleep to help him as back up, he was tired of constantly having to go behind his parents backs and lie to their faces he was tired of watching as Jazz’s once perfect grades started slipping just enough because of all the time she spent helping Danny with his and he was especially tired of knowing that he wasn’t worth the effort in the first place.

Not if he could turn into that .

But Clockwork didn’t let go of his shoulder, in fact, he pulled him closer into a hug, a real, full hug like the ones he used to get from his parents before they started wearing their weapons and he was scared to get near them. “I’d rather you slept here than wandered around the realms half asleep. Who knows where you’d end up,” he said, speaking gently into Danny’s hair.

“You would,” Danny said before losing the battle against another yawn and relaxing fully into Clockwork’s arms. “You know everything. Can I really sleep here?”

“Of course,” Clockwork released him, leaving one hand on Danny’s back to guide him to a staircase he hadn’t ever noticed before. Just how big was this clock tower anyways?

The room Clockwork took him to was a little bigger than the one he had at home and nothing like what Danny had expected. Most of the tower was colored with dark purples and muted greens, with the occasional brush of silver or brass from the multitude of gears and cogs that littered the floors and walls. This room however, was full of dark blues and greys, a swirling galaxy floating above a single full sized bed that Danny easily sunk into when Clockwork led him to it.

He blinked up at the stars, they were perfectly accurate to the night sky above Amity Park if it didn’t have the light pollution and had to stop himself from counting every constellation rendered there in perfect detail or he’d fall asleep just like that without even bothering to thank Clockwork for offering to stop time for him.

“You made me a room.” It should have been obvious, of course, but Danny hadn’t fully processed what the room and it’s decorations meant until he’d said it out loud and Clockwork didn’t even try to deny it.

Clockwork fazed the blankets through Danny in order to pull them over him properly, tucking him in. Danny was almost tempted to ask for a bedtime story, just to see how he’d react. “Yes, I made you a room.”

Danny frowned, he didn’t understand, “why?”

“I suppose it’s a bit of an excuse to have you visit more often,” Clockwork said, ruffling his hair before sitting at the foot of the bed, “and an offer for you to get some proper sleep before you sleepwalk into someone else’s lair and I have to fight for custody.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Danny mumbled into the pillow, his eyes drifting shut.

The last thing he heard before he drifted off was a soft chuckle and a gentle reassurance that he needn’t worry about anything like that just yet. Maybe, if someone like Clockwork could see the absolute worst of Danny, the monster he could become, and still care enough to make him a room and be sure he slept, then maybe Danny couldn’t be as terrible a burden as he thought. Surely Clockwork, who could see all the futures stretched out below him like a parade, wouldn’t waste his efforts if he didn’t think Danny was worth the time.

He dreamed of stars and ticking clocks and didn’t worry for once about how soon he’d have to wake up.

#Danny phantom #Clockwork #lost time #Phic Phight #phic phight 21 #a nice short one to make up for the last one #short and sweet #bee’s writing

161 notes · View notes

memeadonna · 3 years

Text

Mind Over Monster

I wrote this for a friend, so if you're reading this: Hi RJ!

You and the Bakusquad (plus Shinsou and Jirou, because it is a crime to exclude them) survived the zombie apocalypse, and now roam around hunting down the remaining monsters and rescuing survivors. But you feel like everyone except you has a place in your little group. When someone in your group makes a potentially fatal mistake, you set out to prove yourself. But the question remains: did you ever even need to in the first place?

You kept your eyes closed as you listened, searching in the murmurs around you for something unquiet and unorganized. That was how you would know if there was danger. The mist had long since retreated, but the wind carried it to places where it would rest and collect and re-emerge, using the dead to do its bidding. “Anything?” you jumped and opened your eyes to see one of your companions balancing precariously on the roof of your car.

Kaminari Denki never stopped smiling, no matter what. And considering he was the only reason that you were able to drive this electric car anywhere at all, he was one of your team’s most valuable members. You… also didn’t need to know that he was eye-fucking you right now, but it wasn’t like he could help it. There’s only so much you can turn off in the human mind, and despite your best efforts you usually ended up reading too much into things. It was nice to know that all of your companions thought you were attractive, at least.

This had all started with an accident. An unknown person had been born with some sort of zombification quirk that turned people into mindless zombies forced to do the user’s bidding if they inhaled a mist the user secreted. That person had been killed in a violent car accident that had sent them over the edge of a bridge and plummeting to the dark, angry waters below. As they bled out, their quirk had somehow activated. Maybe it was their way of saying that they did not want to die. Mist had billowed up around them, and within a few hours everybody in that prefecture had been infected by the quirk. The infection had spread across the country and then the world within a few weeks, and now, a year later, this was all that remained. The creatures had never been meant to exist this long, so eventually they began to mutate as well. They gained the ability to infect other creatures through bites, or even absorb body parts and (in the cases of the rare bigger monsters) whole people.

You and your companions had been training to become heroes, but when society had collapsed your goals had changed to survival. Now you travelled around acting like vigilantes, tracking down reported cases of those creatures and protecting civilians. Your class had split off into three groups (as had your grade’s class B), and everybody in your squadron had a purpose.

Bakugou Katsuki was obviously your firepower. He was also your self-appointed leader, and was great at barking orders. Kirishima Eijirou was your muscle – the creatures couldn’t infect him with whatever virus they had (or absorb him, though many had tried), and usually he and Bakugou did most of the heavy lifting when it came to the fighting. Ashido Mina and Sero Hanta were both masters at setting traps or helping with evacuation efforts, and they were also both charismatic and cheerful and kept your group in high spirits. Shinsou Hitoshi could almost always control the monsters to some degree, and even if he couldn’t, he was also adept with his capture weapon and could easily change gears mid-battle. Kiyoka Jirou could detect the monsters moving from miles away, and the speakers on her hero costume were both useful in battle and in evacuation efforts.

Jirou and Shinsou both basically rendered you redundant. Your quirk was a mind reading/telepathy quirk that allowed you to locate monsters (they couldn’t suppress their subconscious thoughts, so it was easier to read their minds), but the more of them there were the more useless you became. You already tended to get lost in your thoughts, but with all of these thoughts swirling around you…

“Hey!” Denki snapped his fingers in front of your face. “Are you okay? Any monsters nearby?”

“Sorry,” you smiled up at him. “No, I don’t hear anything. Should be safe to stop here and recharge.” You hopped off the roof and went to go help pitch your tents.

While you loved the electric vehicle you had looted, it could only go so far with one charge, and it took a lot out of Denki to keep it working, especially considering he couldn’t just charge out of outlets anymore. That meant the group had to stop and make camp in the middle of the day and let him charge up the car. Despite being electric, it wasn’t exactly the most efficient car in the world.

At least it had lots of storage space. That meant you had lots of useful weapons and supplies for killing the zombies. That was no easy task.

The largest beast you had encountered so far had been around eight feet tall and had taken over the corpses of about six people and several dozen animals. These beasts weren’t usually able to use the quirks of the people they had absorbed, but some creatures were anomalies. The one you were hunting now was supposed to be one of those anomalies, and had apparently retained a teleportation quirk, making it tricky to catch. You supposed you could be a little more useful in this case.

“Hey! Stop standing there being useless and start a fire!” Bakugou dumped some of the wood Kirishima had just chopped into your arms, and you struggled to hold all of its weight. He laughed at you as you dropped a piece of the firewood and caught it with your foot. Mina came to your rescue and told Bakugou off with a laugh as you hopped off towards the fire pit. Even he thought you were useless. Especially he. Him. Whatever.

Shinsou used his capture weapon to lift the wood back into your arms, and you smiled at him. He understood you in a way nobody else did, and maybe it was because you both had mind-related quirks, but you found camaraderie in the fact that people tended to be driven away from you or mistrust you. Who would want to be friends with someone that could tell exactly what they were thinking, or with one verbal response could make them do literally anything?

“You okay?” he asked.

You nodded as you knelt by the makeshift fire pit and started to stack the wood. “I’m fine, Shinsou,” you replied. “Just a bit of teasing.”

He walked over to the trunk and returned with a box of kindling. He balled up some of the paper and lit it when you were done. You couldn’t even do this small task without help. How useless did they really think you were?

You stood and looked around for somewhere else to help. Mina, Sero, and Kirishima had already set up the tent, Denki was charging the car, and Bakugou was digging around for something in the trunk. Shinsou walked over to go help him, and as you were about to check if Jirou needed anything you were grabbed from behind and lifted off the ground.

“Gotcha!” Kirishima purred into your ear, pretending to bite into your shoulder as he tickled you. You cried out in involuntary laughter, and kicked and flailed in his arms.

“Hey, put me down!” you tugged at the hands around your waist, and he finally listened to you, only for him to turn you around and pull you into a bone-crushing hug.

He pulled away and tilted your face up by the chin. “No more sad face, okay?” he asked softly. “Cheer up.”

Before you could respond, Bakugou started yelling again. “What useless fucker packed up the supplies?” He shouted, and if you weren’t used to that shout you would have probably flinched at the rough tone in his voice.

“Me and Mina!” Denki looked up from his charging duties. “Why?”

“You forgot our fucking food,” Bakugou growled. “Both crates full of food are missing! Seriously? Even people as inept as Y/n and Sero remember to bring the fucking food when it’s their turn to pack up!”

“Calm down Bakugou!” Sero stepped forward. “Is there any way you just missed it?”

Bakugou’s words washed over you like glass in your heart. You had heard them before – he was always calling you a dumbass, or a burden, and while he was that way with everybody, and they just shrugged it off, you just… never could. Bakugou had one of the most guarded minds you had ever seen, and regularly called you a Voyeur if he caught you staring at him for too long. You hadn’t purposefully read his thoughts very much, but his brain seemed to be full of those harsh words and nicknames. It would have been easier if you knew he didn’t mean them.

While your group argued (Jirou, Mina, and Denki were all screaming at Bakugou while Kirishima and Sero tried to break it up, and Shinsou watched with a tired expression), you snuck around to the back of the truck to retrieve a few weapons. You grabbed a small handgun (Yaomomo made you lots of supplies every time she saw you), and a few rounds of ammo. You also grabbed a metal baseball bat for good measure (better safe than sorry), and one of Bakugou’s mini grenades just out of spite. When you returned to camp with dinner in hand, you were planning on detonating it just to scare the bejesus out of him. You wondered if they would still be arguing when you got back.

Maybe they wouldn’t even notice you leaving?

Nobody stopped you as you set off across the field towards the woods. Nobody even spared you a second thought as their restless minds grew more and more distant. You relaxed as you realized you were alone, and hummed quietly to yourself as you crept through the woods looking for dinner.

The birds were singing, and the trees rustled softly in the wind as you wandered farther and farther away from camp. The small stream you crossed was probably where Jirou had collected water earlier, and just for the hell of it you decided to climb up the waterfall. It probably wasn’t the smartest move, but it was about a thirty-foot climb and it looked like fun. Once you were at the top, you followed the river upstream and searched for any thirsty wildlife.

Being the useless party member was boring. No matter what your companions did, you never seemed to be able to see the value in your own contributions. You were able to broadcast messages across large groups of people all at once, which made you invaluable both in evacuation efforts, and when planning strategies. Your range was somewhat limited unless you really pushed your quirk (if you were scared enough the words and pictures could travel up to five kilometers), but the ability to detect thoughts had less limits. Some people (like Bakugou) naturally suppressed thoughts, while others (like Kaminari) did not. It was easy to tell when the monsters were nearby because they could not repress their thoughts whatsoever. Even less than Kaminari. Everything blurred together in one big, overwhelming jumbled mess, and if there were a lot of them you were easily overwhelmed.

People you could deal with. You had grown up in a big city and gone to school in large classes, you knew what people were like. You could be in crowds with hundreds of voices and be unbothered, purely because it was all background noise. It wasn’t meant to be heard.

Sometimes, the monsters knew you could hear them. Sometimes they wanted you to hear.

You were dragged out of your train of thought as you caught sight of dinner. Drinking at the river was a boar, a yearling probably weighing about 45lbs. It hadn’t noticed you yet, and as you aimed your gun for it, careful not to make a noise, it didn’t stir.

A shot through the eye was all it took, and the animal dropped dead. You grinned to yourself as you approached it, and carefully picked it up and slung it over your shoulder. You couldn’t wait to see the look on Bakugou’s face when he realized just how useful you really were. You carried the boar back downstream, humming one of Jirou’s punk songs to yourself.

“Blood,” was the first thought that filled your head, and it made you halt in your tracks. It was so sudden, and so strong that it had startled you. You looked back the way you came and noticed that about two hundred yards away a figure crouched over where you had killed the boar, and as it uncurled its body vertebrae by vertebrae you felt terror grip your heart.

You were alone. Nobody was going to come save you. You were out of range.

The creature had a massive rack of antlers on its head – it had clearly been feeding off of the local wildlife to make it big and strong. Big and strong it was – towering at probably twelve feet tall with a lanky and deceptively fast body. Its mind was full of violent thoughts, and you heard each and every one. As you noticed it, it also noticed you. You heard its thoughts as they ricocheted around a brain that should not have had the capability to think, and as the word “Need!” filled your mind, it lunged for you.

You screamed in terror, and your quirk activated without your permission, sending the horrifying image of this thing leaping and bounding through the air towards you out in all directions. The image of itself halted it in its tracks, but it quickly shook the feeling off. You dropped your boar and aimed your handgun. The rounds did nothing, and the creature picked up speed again, unhinging its jaw and letting out a shriek so loud your ears rang. You fired into its open mouth, once more discharging an image of its maw. That also gave the creature pause, and as your handgun clicked out of ammunition, you reached for your bat and your grenade. Its eyes were so cold as it watched you change your stance, and you swallowed hard as you noticed tiny hands protruding from its chest. Those hands had once belonged to a child, and that made you angry.

Noticing the pattern, you started to send it random pictures and see what it reacted to. It seemed to recognize itself, so you started sending it pictures of its parts – deer, boar, birds, and eventually people. It kept coming at you, but it seemed almost dazed as it avoided your bat. You grinned to yourself as you assaulted it with more images and increasingly complex thoughts, not caring how you swung your bat. You landed a blow and it shrieked in pain. You then assaulted it again, sending it emotions and increasingly complex feelings. You recited math equations, explained how to start a fire, and told it about yourself in the blink of an eye, still swinging your bat. It connected with the skull-like head and broke the bone apart.

It felt anger now, you could sense it, and it wanted you dead. You kept bashing, overwhelming it psychologically. Then, all at once, you backed off. It shrieked at you as it retreated too, which gave you just enough time to chuck your grenade into its open mouth. You hit the deck as the grenade detonated, and the creature’s throat exploded outwards. As it fell to its knees, folding its long legs under itself, you stood once more. You then raised your bat high and dealt the killing blow to its head, scattering brains everywhere. You kept bashing for another thirty seconds for good measure, until all of the thoughts were gone, and the forest was once again quiet. You panted hard in the silence, and as you once more heard thoughts you gave the creature’s head another few bashes, even though you knew it couldn’t possibly have been the source.

By the time you registered the explosions behind you Bakugou was already sprinting towards you, yelling incoherently. Before you could get a word in, he was blasting the creature’s dead body with all he had. He then turned to you and pulled you into a bone-crushing hug, one so tight that your back popped.

“Bakugou?” you asked in alarm, and he just held you tighter.

“Don’t fucking wander away, dumbass!” he pulled away to growl into your face, eyebrows knit. “We thought we’d lost you.”

The thoughts dancing around his head made you almost shiver. “Thank god they’re safe,” and a thousand variations of that hit you all at once, along with feelings of guilt and fear and pride as he took the time to appreciate the beast you had killed.

Sero was next to arrive, having scaled the waterfall in record time. He swung through the trees towards you, clumsy and graceless. His head was also filled with panic and then joy and then wonder as Bakugou let you go and Sero had his hug.

Jirou and Kirishima clamoured over the waterfall, Mina and Kaminari (who for once, wasn’t smiling) hot on their heels. You were pulled into several more group hugs, and as Shinsou approached even he wrapped you in his arms.

“Why the fuck did you go off on your own?” Bakugou yelled.

“We needed food,” you replied. “So, I hunted a boar, which we can’t eat anymore because this thing showed up.” you gave its carcass a kick. You then walked over to the boar cadaver, which was covered in goo and chunks of brain, and based its head in. You did not want this thing coming back in a new form. Either thing.

“Don’t wander off like that!” Kirishima stressed. “You could have gotten killed! If Bakugou hadn’t been here to kill that thing for you-”

“I killed it,” you cut him off, resting the bat over your shoulder and trying not to sound smug. “Apparently it’s not invulnerable to my quirk. I figured out how to use it. Guess I’m not so useless after all, even if I did ruin dinner. Sorry guys.”

Bakugou’s eyebrows twitched. “Who the fuck said you were useless?” he demanded.

“You did,” you replied. “Earlier today.”

“I told you to stop being useless. There’s a difference,” he grabbed you by the shoulders. “Listen to me. You are not useless. You don’t have to run off on your own and nearly fucking get killed to prove that, and I’m sorry if I ever made you think that’s what we wanted from you.”

Holy shit. Did Bakugou just apologize? To you? Were you dreaming?

He pulled you into another hug. “Don’t run off again, okay, dumbass?” he asked softly.

“Okay,” you smiled softly. “I can promise that.”

“Good,” he growled. “And we found the food crates. Turns out that Shitty Hair over here-” Bakugou punched Kirishima in the shoulder, “-put them away in the tent.”

Kaminari sobbed loudly, interrupting the moment. “Denki, don’t cry!” you were hugging him in an instant, and he clung tightly to you like you would just disappear if he didn’t anchor you. “I’m here, and I’m safe. I promise.”

“It’s not that!” he wailed. “We could have had bacon!”

151 notes · View notes

avaritia-apotheosis · 3 years

Text

Phantom Children [DP x Batman Crossover] Ch. 1

Disclaimer: It's been a while since I watched DP and the only Batman/DC stuff I've interacted with are B:TAS, the JL cartoons, and what I got from fandom osmosis so don't expect any sort of canon compliance.

In Which: the author takes advantage of the passage of time in Nanda Parbat being wonky and Danny doesn't give up, per se, but is sort of resigned to being stuck with the League of Assassins until further notice.

AO3 | Prologue | [ 1 ] | 2 |

CW for descriptions of non-consensual drug use (if there's anything you guys would like me to tag, please tell me)

-----

WHEN SOMETHING WENT WRONG WITH DANNY’S LIFE, it was usually because of one or two things: Ghosts or Vlad. And considering their truce and how even Vlad wouldn’t go this far (at least, Danny hoped), Danny was kidnapped because of ghosts. Or his association with ghosts.

Though how an organization of ninja-assassins got wind of his ‘unique’ circumstance was beyond him. The shackles they slapped on his wrists were more a formality than anything after the second time he tried to escape them with intangibility. The only reason they managed to get him contained the entire trip from Amity Park to wherever the fuck Nanda Parbat lay was because of the cocktail of drugs they pumped into his system spiked with blood blossoms.

Danny had to give it to them. The League of Assassins might not have any anti-ecto weaponry, but they did their homework.

He barely remembered the trip. He catches flashes—blurry figures and words he couldn’t comprehend. A warm hand holding his, a thumb rubbing smooth circles on the back of his palm and calloused fingers running through his hair.

When he awoke, it was in a room bigger than his bedroom. His ankle was shackled to a bedpost, and the only door leading out was locked. There was a separate room for the bathroom off to the side and a shelf stacked with books decorating the otherwise bare walls, but other than that there wasn’t much else. Not even windows.

Intangibility, he learned, wasn’t an option. The blood blossoms in his bloodstream were still in circulation, rendering his transformation useless. If his nose was right, his captors were pumping blood blossoms from the vents. The sickly sweet of the flower was faint in the cool air, but the slight red haze that persisted in the room was unmistakable.

He tried, regardless. The rings barely made it half-way before his knees buckled and he started retching all over the floor. At least his stomach was empty.

-------

Danny doesn’t know how long he’s been in Nanda Parbat. Time moved differently here. Faster, he thought. He doesn’t really understand how or why, though sometimes he wondered what Clockwork thought of all of this.

(There are times, in the darkness and solitude of his cell, when Danny would call for Clockwork to rescue him. Quietly, so quietly, it was barely even a whisper. But Clockwork would hear it—Danny was sure he would. Clockwork helped him out before, so this time shouldn’t be all that different. But at the end of the night, nothingness would answer him. And Danny had to learn over and over again that even the Ghost of Time had his own rules to follow.)

It had taken a few days and Talia nearly biting the head off of the League’s physician for them to realize that blood blossoms would be an awful way to contain him. Effective at immobilizing him, yes, but the flowers left him about as helpless as Superman in a kryptonite cave.

“It all works out in the end,” Talia would say. “The blossoms were never going to become a long-term solution; you might end up developing an immunity to them given enough exposure.”

Though knowing now what Talia’s ‘long-term plan’ was for making sure Danny didn’t slip through the walls of the headquarters and fly across the ocean, Danny would rather take his chances with the blood blossoms.

Danny might not have been as smart as Vlad, but he was tricky and creative when he needed to be. He knows he’s powerful. And sure, he might forget some of his own abilities every now and then, but that doesn’t mean he can’t use them. In the time he’s been stuck in the Leage’s lair (and coherent), Danny had thought of a dozen escape plans, each one with a high chance of success. If he made an attempt, he could guarantee the League wouldn’t notice until he was a quarter-way across the globe.

Escaping wasn’t the problem. That would be the easy part.

His core burned at the thought of it. And it hurt—as if his entire being was dunked in a vat of dry ice and left to freeze. He hated how he was here and everything that he was protecting was far. Away.

Danny wanted to go home. Wanted to read comic books in his bed, play Doom with Tucker and Sam, sleep in class and make fun of the Box Ghost. He wants to eat his mom’s food, even if there’s a fifty-fifty chance that it would come alive and try to eat him instead. He wants to listen to Jazz try to psychoanalyze his problems. Wants to go fishing with his dad and eat his famous chocolate fudge. Wants to fly above the skies of Amity Park and touch what little he can of the universe before he’s called down again.

Amity Park is his haunt. His Home. The soft hum of the Ghost Portal in the basement a lullaby he’s listened to for so long that sleeping without it was next to impossible. Every fiber of his being craved to go back because how is he supposed to protect Amity if he isn’t there?

But to go back meant sacrificing everyone.

Danny doesn’t risk it.

(The—the last time was an accident. If Danny isn’t—if he isn’t careful, this time it may be an assassination. He refused to have his family’s death on his hands again.)

He has faith in Sam, Tucker, and Jazz to hold down the fort until he could find a way to escape. They’re smart. Smarter than him. They’ll work something out and—in a worst-case scenario, they’ll find a way to shut down the Ghost Portal to stop the ghosts from coming through.

Logic meant nothing to his ghost core, though. The next best thing to do was to drown out his worries with the League’s rigorous education.

Hand-to-hand and weapons combat. Geography. History. Dozens of foreign languages. Poisons and herbology and basic first-aid. His days are packed with new things to learn and to repeat until it’s drilled into his skull so deep he could recite the information in his sleep. (Hyosycamus niger, aka Henbane. Every part is highly toxic and can cause dizziness, stupor, insanity, and eventual death. It’s medicinal uses range from--)

The League demanded perfection. The Demon’s Head demanded even more than that.

Talia oversaw his education. Sometimes, there would be another, older, man by her side, observing his regimen with cold calculation. Whenever that man arrived, Danny’s instructors were always stricter.

His teachers made little effort to interact with him outside of their set schedule, and during his lessons they only ever answer pertinent questions. He supposed there would be other students of the League in Nanda Parbat, but he’s seen neither hide nor hair of them. His rooms (a bedroom + bathroom combo that led out into a large indoor space for training) are separate from everything else.

Danny slept alone, ate alone, and trained alone. And for a boy who has had his two best friends stuck to his side like glue for as long as he could remember, it’s a terribly lonely experience.

His shadow guards don’t count. They might as well be another piece of furniture. Another stone in the wall.

-------

Talia was the only one that broke his new mundane routine, as much as she was the cause of it. She was his only source of companionship in this hell hole; the only one who would really speak to him. And yeah, he knew why that was. Jazz had rambled on enough about Stockholm syndrome to know that this ‘arrangement’ was Talia’s attempts at forging a bond between them. But godit’s just so hard to be stuck inside your own mind all day when. It made him think too much. Worry. (Whatifwhatifwhatifwhatif).

And then—

And then.

Danny had asked Talia a multitude of questions, but only two did she ever answer. Both asked when he was still trying to flush the drug cocktail and the blood blossoms from his system.

The first was when he asked, “Why am I here?” She answered that it was because Ra’s al Ghul, her father, wanted him. He had knowledge the Demon’s Head wanted; powers that Ra’s could only ever dream of. The man was curious—though Talia assured him over and over again that Danny wouldn’t be vivisected and studied for science.

The second answer came right after when Danny asked her “How could you be so sure?”

Talia smiled. Lacquered fingers coming up to brush away the dark strands that fell over his face. Her hands traced the curve of his jaw, cupping his cheeks to raise his eyes to hers. “Because you are my son,” she said, voice honey sweet.

He jerked from her hold.

Burned by it.

“You’re lying,” he spat. “I’m already someone else’s son. Try again.”

Talia let her hands drop to her sides. “You are my son.” She took a step closer towards him. Steady. Firm. “That is why you are here.”

“I don’t believe you.”

A pitying smile. “Be that as it may, you cannot change the truth.” She approached him, slowly backing him against the wall before she reached out to tilt his chin upwards. Some traitorous part of Danny’s mind catalogued her features. Made connections that shouldn’t exist. “I have carried you in my womb, Daniel. You were a part of me for so very long and I loved you more with each passing day. You are of my body and of my blood—not matter how much you may deny it.”

“No.” He pushed her hands away and raked his hands over his hair. “You’re lying.” She must be. They don’t look alike. Not at all. Everyone always said he was his dad’s—Jack Fenton’s—exact copy. Black haired and blue eyed and sharp-jawed. Awkward but well-meaning and with a heart of gold, his mother said. It was once of the facts of life; Danny took after his dad, and Jazz took after their mom. Simple as that.

(There is a memory resurfacing from his early childhood that Danny is desperately trying to repress again. Memories of kids teasing him on the playground, innocently cruel in the way only children can be as they tried to convince him he was adopted. That his skin looked nothing like his parents’. Dusky where his parents and sister were fair. He went home crying to his parents that same day, and they soothed away his worries with hushed words and a well-timed distraction.)

He asked no more questions after that. Talia was lying to him for some reason, and no answer she could give would be trustworthy anyways. What little of him he could see in her was only a figment of his own imagination. His mind playing cruel tricks.

Then his hopes were dashed aside when Talia showed him a picture of his father a day later.

The man in the photo looked like him. Black haired and eyes the same shade of too-bright blue. There were differences, of course. The man in the photograph was fairer, unlike Danny. He was taller and broader where Danny was lean and lanky. But despite this and all the other minute differences, this man who was supposed to be Danny’s biological father looked like him.

The same slant of the brow. The same shape of the eyes. The way the man held himself with this sense of gravitas and power that Danny couldn’t yet do in his awkward teenage years but had seen before. In a monster another man.

Danny’s future self was terrifying in its inhumanity, but it didn’t take that much of an imagination to know that he looked almost exactly like the man in the picture.

#danny phantom #batman #danny phantom x batman crossover #cw; drug use #phantom children.txt

44 notes · View notes

rouiyan · 3 years

Text

𝘈𝘕𝘋 𝘞𝘏𝘌𝘕 𝘐 𝘍𝘈𝘓𝘓 [ 𝘭.𝘫𝘯 ]

⧏ the fourth volume of rouiyan’s debut series, till death do us part ⧐

synopsis: and when i fall, will you be there to catch me by the waist?

✧ prince!lee jeno x crown princess!reader ✧ royalty au

✧ genres : angst, fluff ✧ word count : 7.4k ✧ disclaimers : disclaimers — violence in the form of attempted assassination/murder, bloody/gory scenes, mentions and allusions to character death, malintent

✧ author’s note — this is the one where i romanticize everything.

read volume three here: dearly departed.

prince donghyuck is running. he's sprinting almost, and his strapped bow and quiver hits his back with each of his coming strides. his hands are furious in breaking away the tall grasses that surround him on all sides with a blunt blade. cutting through them with swift flicks of his wrist. the dirt beneath his feet crunch and the blades of grass he's cut sway to the ground with slow and deliberate motions, avoiding the drag of gravity like paper in the wind. donghyuck is aware that he's leaving an obvious trail but there isn't time to spare if he doesn't want to meet death at his destination. he wished he'd been smart enough to take a horse, though he knows he would have had to abandon it as he drew close.

the skies are clear today, rare for the winter that has made itself evident in the past few weeks. there are no clouds to stir up a storm, and no threat of rain to muddle his sight. donghyuck pulls a compass from beneath his armored chest. his feet are still moving fast though his arms are now pulled in to read the display on the device. the grass that's no longer pushed back springs up and brushes the skin of his forehead, the skin under the cut of his hair, obtrusively. the needle points south albeit a tad east. he continues forth. the sun is just about setting, flakes of purple beginning to bleed into the blue and donghyuck swears he can hear the ocean. he swears it's near.

he breaks out into an open expanse, sudden in the way the grass stops short, but he sees soon enough that it stops short at the curb of a trodden dirt path. his hand against the ground, he feels the soil fine in between his fingers, sifting almost as finely as sand does. donghyuck's face tinges with the slightest annoyance in the realization that thin soil meant that tracks were covered up all the more easily, something that'd indeed be in his favor, if only there were tracks left to follow in the first place. the compass resurfaces again, the fine chain on which it hangs sloshing in the wind in conjunction with his hurried movements. lee donghyuck bites the bullet and recedes back into the mass of grassland, this time hurrying along the edge of the road whilst ducking once again in the cover of the reeds.

the sun is fast in waning and it's as if the prince is chasing it. he is on the descent of the hill himself when he begins to hear it clearly, the sounds of waves crashing against rocks, sputtering along the shore. he wishes he had time to go down and relish in the feeling of the water lapping between his toes, the salt and sand it carries shrugging off his dead skin. the sight he's first met with is the thatching of the roof, worn down and sodden through days of heavy rainfall. it sits like a weight upon the rest of the structure that soon forms in his line of vision. a decrepit shack, almost, or a sizable shack. the shiplack that holds the siding in place is doing the exact opposite, lifting off of its holds and fraying downwards into the ground, carrying pieces of the inner insulation of the walls with it. the shutters are absent in barricading the gaping holes the windows have abated to, the awning of the porch creases earthwards, blocking most of the front door. the visage reads, 'seaside home succumbs to the inexorable confines of loneliness and lack of care.' there is no other way to describe the forces that keep the assembly upright except the willfulness of a wicked hand.

donghyuck pauses and crouches to the roots of the turf. he peers between the strands to see a guard, no, two placed just before the widest cavity in the side of the house, the only way in he supposes. his fingers are quick to pluck the end of an arrow, to slot it in its place, to draw and arm back, an eye squinting. he's quick to duck under the cover of the grass once again when the arrow pierces the left of a guards' eye. he's quick to avoid ruffling the grass that would otherwise be giving away the whereabouts of his presence away to the other, frantic, guard. prince donghyuck is crouched at the foot of a tree when he draws another arrow, slots it, draws back, releases. he knows that death meets wherever the point of his arrows land, he's accustomed to it, he feels pride in knowing that one shot is all he needs to become the greater version of him, to decide who lives and who doesn't. one shot is all he needs to play god. at least, that is what you had told him on a lonely day of his fifth summer, the first summer he had spent at the northern palace but definitely not the last.

"and you'll keep staring from afar, will you? you in the creepers," you turned your head in exact to where he'd been crouching, "as if i wouldn't know." young donghyuck removed himself effectively from the brush, dusting off bracts from his trousers in effort to present himself with a little more ease. sheepily, he treaded across to a few yards behind where you were stood, stance rigid and facial muscles pulled taut when staring into the bullseye. you plucked an arrow, turned it over in your hands, fingers running along the ridges to inspect. prince donghyuck knew that you were the same age as him, he'd been taught of the four, of which he was one, who were birthed in the same year, in each of the kingdoms. he knew this, yet with the aura you're giving off, he couldn't help but think that you've been around for much longer. the arrow split the previous arrow in a clean half. both lodged into the red-marked center, fifty or so meters away and barely visible to the eye at such distance.

prince donghyuck stumbled to take a bow from the stand beside you. he placed an arrow clumsily between his fingers, strangely he felt the need to prove himself though he does just the opposite by fumbling. the arrow launched after his third try, but rather than taking on a straight course, it gave a feeble arc and lodged itself into the soil before him. the prince was a sight of vexation at this point, "my instructor said- he said…"

you crossed your arms over your chest, bow tucked neatly in between. "oh, i bet he said a whole bunch."

you taught him all you know and he learned with a newfound respect, though he was unwilling to admit to himself. you had him practice on a bird first, a bigger target than the red dot, so tiny that frustrations would surely be easy to come if he'd started there. donghyuck gave you an apprehensive glance behind his shoulders but you nudged him along with a nod of your head. it's the first time he hasn't missed. he never misses a shot after that. "is- is it dead?" donghyuck didn't dare peer over, afraid of what he might see.

"of course it is."

the five-year old boy was rendered a stuttering mess at this point, "d- did i just commit a felony?" shrugging, you plucked a stone from the shore of the creek, tossing it light across the water, "hunting is legal, if that's what you're asking."

"but i just killed a- a living thing!" he exclaims as if you hadn't said what you had said moments before. sighing, the next thing that comes from you left the boy in confoundment and annoyance at how curt you were, like an grown up he thought. "well, there are times where we are left with no choice but to comply with the blurred lines of right and wrong. there are times where we are left with no choice but to play god.”

his snappy attitude is all too quick to arise, no clue as to even what you were referring to and only in the knowledge that he disliked talking to you. "you're only five, just like me. what do you know?"

"i know a great deal," you turned abruptly to face the boy. you stepped in slow, paced motions, eyes strong and unwavering. he gulps as you spoke though unsure of why. "i know because i look for all my answers from what's put before me, not from my instructors."

prince donghyuck bites down on his lip, he wasn't nearly done with you yet, "so you're saying that you've learned all you know? then when will you learn that you don't have to act all high and mighty when you're already crown princess."

"i don't act. i am not an entertainer." he could not count the amount of times you've rendered him unable to process his thoughts. donghyuck can only retort back, "then what are you?"

"i am crown princess y/n, just as you've said it."

it's years later when he realizes why the earth seems to quiver beneath you, it's years later when he understands that it's because unlike the earth, soil that is bound by the pull of gravity, you've never allowed yourself to be limited to what something, someone, anything else subjects you to. you are a subject to no one, and that is why you will be queen one day.

he thinks this even as the second of the guards drop dead. he thinks this because he has never had less of a reason to carry out a task, yet he finds himself doing so with attentiveness to detail. donghyuck by no means could categorize you as manipulative, nor persuasive. he simply understands the way you work, the things you desire, the people you need by your side. even he, as much as he disagrees with the likes of prince jeno, he knows that only he can be your king.

the dust settles thick as he crosses through the threshold, one leg after another. he doesn't need to breathe to know that the air could suffocate if he didn't have his arm sleeve pressed into his nose. the inside of the cottage, the wreck that it is, seemed to be intact, for the most part. donghyuck even thinks that if you were to run a thick duster across the tapestries, the carpet, the counters, the armoire, most everything, that the place could live up to the coziness of just about a decade ago, minus the blatant hole in the wall and the condition of the walls itself.

donghyuck does his best, he's sure, but the halls twist in ways meant to confuse and he ends up at the same stairwell all too many times to count. he finds it soon enough, just as the sun regresses into night. the one stairwell that led down in the midst of all the ups. the absence of light is the only noticeable thing by sight, the moon isn’t nearly upon the horizon, but he uses all that he knows to make out the shine of the door at the foot of the steps.

skipping the last few steps, he rams into it with all his body weight. the brass, weakened through weather and age, cripples beneath him revealing the darker of night.

the first thing donghyuck does is cough, there is no way around that. his arm is back by his nose but this time his mouth also clamps tight onto the roughened fabric of his sleeve. he has a short blade in hand, his least favorite weapon of choice but a sword would have been too inefficient and a single arrow too thin. besides the heavy air that hangs, the room is also dead silent. four paces in and his foot hits a solid, a clang, a metal. he drags it along in the same direction, clang, clang, clang. bars. metal bars. a cage, an imprisonment of sorts.

the last bar he's hit escapes him, it swings open. the door, he supposes though he wonders why it hadn't been locked, why the door to the very basement hadn't been locked, why the whole vicinity was put under the supervision of two, poorly trained guards. donghyuck understands when his eyes do their part in adjusting to the dimness of the room and he sees the prince, slumped and unconscious, out cold.

perhaps, death really was waiting for him at his destination.

time is running thin as donghyuck dismisses his urge to check for a pulse, he figures he'd have to bring the body back anyways, alive or dead, and furthermore he has a deadline. long gone is the dagger, tucked away on the side of his left thigh, replaced with a metal arrow that clangs itself with each time it strikes the wall adjacent to it. to prince donghyuck, picking a lock with a sharpened point of an arrow is second nature; he's done it as many times as little boy scouts practice their square knots and soprano's run through their warmups. but even then, he hates the feeling of picking a lock that binds two wrists, he hates the feeling of how the wrists fall when they are no longer bound, and he hates the feeling of the chains as they clatter and clump at his feet. more than that, the dead weight of a man on his shoulders, void of all vicarious pretenses, is the worst among all feelings.

the sun carries with it shadows as it sets. it draws them like a coachman and his horses, a dog on its leash, a flock of baby geese and their mother. the shadow of the cottage, in particular, is seven feet from where it was when donghyuck entered. he doubts he'll have much time to get back into town on foot, running wouldn't work well with his already depleted stamina and the hunk of a man on his shoulders. he plays it safe with a jog and his compass in hand, the shine of the needle becoming harder to decipher in the fast-coming shadows that drown out his sight.

the first break he takes under a tree a little ways down from the cottage, shoving the weight of jeno under the cover of a few tendrils of vines. he almost wants to kick his figure in annoyance but under the guise that he was trying to wake him. prince jeno is very poor company when he's knocked out, or dead, he supposes now is as good of a time as any to check. fingers against his wrist, he feels the faintest of a pulse and is relieved in the most concealed way, though there is no one around for him to be concealing from. donghyuck thinks, with sureness, that if he were to let the boy wilt in his arms, to deliver him dead when he might as well have been alive, he himself would be dead in your eyes. he shakes his head and brings his flask to the lips of the older, slightly older.

the first few drops of water do nothing except sit in his dry mouth but the rest is gurgled, choked, swallowed. the prince, and soon to be king, lunges at donghyuck with his eyes still shut closed. he has his fingers tight around the eastern prince's neck when he finally regains the will to peel open his lids. the sun is long gone at this point and the moon has still yet to appear over the horizon. jeno is startled when he realizes that the ground his knees are rubbing against isn't dusted concrete but thick soil and stones. he draws back at that though his arms wind back as well, as if to drive into his unknown captor's cheek, to knock him out. donghyuck is a whirlwind of coughs as he barely registers the fist that's approaching fast, he's glad he still has it in him to roll to the side and croak out an, "it's me."

two princes are panting under the span of a tree, the roots that jut out slashing the backs of one of them and the twigs that litter the ground cutting into the kneecaps of the other. their breaths alternate, loud sighs and sharp inhales, as they regain their bearings enough to acknowledge each other. two princes sit side by side under the span of a tree, glancing at each other, or what they believe to be each other, in the shroud of darkness that envelops them. they wait for the moon.

jeno finds himself reaching for the flask that lays discarded a few feet away. he chugs and donghyuck eyes him in disgust, feeling how his own throat is clenching up with the same thirst. jeno must sense this because he holds it out for him when he's had his fill, "how much time has passed?" donghyuck throws back the rest of the water. they are bound to come across a freshwater stream on the long way back, he's sure and he swallows, "a week in approximation."

a week, he's sure a lot of things could've happened in the week he was gone. possibly, you'd know of his absence. surely, you know of the death of your father. no doubt were you in mourning and he was halfway across the region and in no state to comfort you. his brows furrow, "anything notable that's happened?"

there are many things donghyuck could say in response. he hasn't left your side since the day after your father's body was found, the day he'd arrived at the palace, ready to comfort. he'd never have expected you to lash out in rage with no one to blame. he'd been there when the maid had delivered news of the anonymous tip that'd made your knees go weak in an instant. a hell of a week it had been, indeed. he prefaces with the general. "the coronation has been moved up, three days from now you will be crowned king."

jeno nods in understanding. it's all his parents have ever wanted from him, to marry off into golden blood, to become golden blood, for their immediate family to bathe in golden blood. he sighs knowing that he feels it's fine if it's with you, that your presence in his life simply mocks that of his parents. but he needs answers, the yearning to see you is set alight in the pits of his stomach. "and how is she holding up?"

disgruntled, prince donghyuck answers curt and vague, the exact opposite of what jeno needs to soothe his worries, "she's holding up just fine." neither of them are in high spirits when they set off into the night. they suffice with the silence and when they come across the expected stream, donghyuck fills the flask, they bathe. the moon is kind that night, outshining all nights before and illuminating the compass needle, the guide into the outskirts of the southern kingdom.

the sun is on the rise when the two princes are met with the sight of buildings in the distance, small shacks, roofs thatched but unkempt and messy unlike that of the seaside cottage for royalty. the people bustling about are donned in the plainest of clothing and donghyuck is sure that his combat gear and jeno's days old and crinkle suit would draw unwanted attention from the commoners, after all, he's almost sure that they wouldn't recognize the faces of two royalty if they were dressed down, not here in the southern kingdom where the prospects of royalty are told like a fairy tale.

like how any disguise is gained, donghyuck sneaks through the bushels of the nearest house and snatches two pairs of trousers, two plain cotton tops, and a tweed satchel, leaving four golden coins under the back awning. they change before the sun arrives to clear the air of fog and mist and they bustle and weave within the crowd with ease when the sun peeks over diagonal, mid-morning.

they don't make it far on foot, there is still a ways to go before they can safely make it past jeno's homeland without being noticed. the farther they delve into the heart of the kingdom, the closer they mingle with the nobles, the higher-ranking families, those who would recognize them almost immediately.

a first of many close calls come when they are at the back end of a manor, a huge estate, spanning about half the palace itself. whoever the owner was, the individual jeno was rambling on about, wouldn't suffer the loss of two horses. that is, if they could be stolen in the first place. the stables were a mile into the plot of land from the back and though donghyuck could be so efficient in simply shooting dead all the guards that lined the outer premises, he really did not wish to cause a ruckus, not when he's sure the officials of the southern kingdom are aware of the escape of their second prince. and if jeno is correct in labeling this very estate as the abode of the capital governor, he wouldn't be keen in taking chances where it could hurt most.

night falls for a second time and, under the cover of darkness, jeno slashes the calves of two of the guards, a stroke that could easily be mistaken to be of a running and wild badger if timed correctly. he ducks between the electrical cords of the fencing, donghyuck just behind him, as he gets on all fours to survey the grounds. the guards that are left mill around the stables, the only structure that'll provide them light during their break. they are jolly and big-bellied when they laugh and jeno finds it all too easy to slip past the commotion to the back of the stables where the gates open onto the track. donghyuck moves with practiced stealth to the opposite end, foot looping on the edge of a table where kegs of beer are stood tall. he steadies himself, centering his movements around his breaths and not his impulses. retrieving his compass, he doesn't stop to crack it open this time, angling the sleek alloy cover in such a way that it glints in accordance with the glass of the window, left side of the stables that's illuminated inside out.

they count to three. the kegs meet the earth and while some roll, others simply spill. donghyuck leaves a mess in his wake. he'd like to stay back, admire his work, the looks of shock on their faces and the realization that'll come when they check the stables a little later. he gets this feeling each time he completes a mission, and very rarely is a prince allowed to do so. prince donghyuck loves the rush, the adrenaline, the anticipation and the satisfaction of completion. he knows that jeno feels the same. although as much as he would love to linger in the shadows to bathe in his victory, he knows that if he doesn't remove himself from the scene he will have a great deal more things to be worrying about. perhaps, his head on a stick.

with the horses accompanied by night, an ever-so-welcome friend, they are able to make haste. their course deviating the slightest to avoid the boundaries of the royal palace. jeno is familiar with the towns that lay just a little beyond and just a little before the middle glade. his familiarity means he knows where to book a rest for the night, where to get the needed replenishments for themselves and the horses and where to stock up for the coming day that will be spent entirely in the middle glade. his familiarity is helpful, but deemed futile when they arrive to see that each stall, selling food or goods, has a banner hung on the overhead. the prince's face is printed on each one, a lost prince, help needed! captioning each notice.

the pitstop, originally jotted to span a whole of two hours becomes a series of laborious tasks that involve intricate planning of thievery, indirect thievery as they make sure to leave, in their ructions, the rest of their gold coins, distributed evenly. they enter the middle glades with relieved and wearied hearts and sacks upon sacks of provisions.

the middle glade is the right place for any wearied heart. the grass is knee-length here, and it stays that way for a day's trip worth of land. the edges are crowded by a thick forest of trees with trunks too wide to hug and roots so big that traversing the land on foot is treacherous enough. but just beyond the thickets of trees and boughs that hang low is the glade itself. the four kingdoms were built to accommodate the livelihood of the grasses, wildflowers, gentle ponds that stretched only a few feet deep. the glade is a sight for sore eyes, and a marvel for all traveling through. it's where the four kingdoms diverge, and also where they meet.

rays of sun are harsh on their backs, it's been a little over an hour and though the looming threat of the southern kingdom has been left in the dust, the road ahead proves bleak, grasses the run along the horizon and, seemingly, endlessly beyond. jeno thinks of what he'll say when he sees you. he thinks of the smile that's sure to grace your features and he thinks of your warm embrace. jeno is patient when he thinks of you.

"she's been troubled."

jeno looks over in surprise at the sound of his companions voice, he notes the lilt and remains silent for him to go on.

"the princess and i, as i'm sure you know, we've been well-acquainted for a long time now." donghyuck steals a glance of his own and finds that jeno's sights are held to the front but his brows are drawn in consideration, deliberation. "and i've always known her the best, loved her the best, been the best for her. we've both been, for each other i mean. we both also knew that there would be a day where the same would be said for someone besides the other. i don't mean harm when i say that i didn't think it'd be this soon, not for her."

"why not for her, distinctly?"

prince donghyuck gives a moment to think of an answer that he knows all too well from being by your side for the good majority of his life, "because she's not one to talk. she prefers to listen." nudging his point along, jeno makes it known, "she talks to me."

"that's how i know you're the one for her." jeno smiles to himself. he lets himself relish in the feeling of your love, even indirectly. his lips stay turned upwards, even when he wills them back down. he can't help but feel a little silly so he disguises his countenance with another question, "did she ask this of you? to come for me?" a question that he already knows the answer to.

"of course," a playful grin spreads with ease across donghyuck's face. he supposes that the taut strings between them have loosened up ever so slightly, either that or the dreariness of traveling for days on end with only each other's company have done the trick, "i'd have never gone out of my way for you." jeno's expression is gruff but his tone is light when he quips back in agreement, "neither would i."

"i'll have you know though, she's beyond excited about the wedding preparations. the coronation as well but i can sense that she's more apprehensive to take the throne so early on. it's a relief to know that you'll be by her side when the time comes."

"as i should be."

"you know, i've heard some rumors about you, just picked them up here and there. and while i have made sure of your sincerity by means of this," he gesticulates, "this trip of ours, i would like to confirm that you're not...after her for the throne, are you?"

"not i, but i wouldn't put it past you to see it as so. much of my family sees her for only her blood," he doesn't bother to palliate the resentment in his expression as he spits out the last half. the other in the conversation is thrown into thought, once again. the moments he gives himself to respond are filled with the sounds of horse hooves fast on the crimpling grass.

"the death of her father, were you aware that it was dawning upon us?" donghyuck airs prudently, "in the assumption that it was of your lineage's doing."

jeno replies dismissively, not in the context that he is avoiding the inquiry, but more so that he found the case scenario obvious, "i was not aware, no. it had certainly been staged so that i could not have been there to prevent it, unfortunately." his eyes slide from the grassy hills ahead to his friend beside him, he lets new information fall from his lips in the face of someone he has come to trust, "i'm also apprehensive about her taking the throne so young, and not because of her duties. i have an inkling that she might be stolen before her throne is."

"another scheme of your parents, the king and queen? or is that past my bounds to be asking?"

the dismissive tone laces his voice again, but only for a few cumulative seconds, "not at all, there are many times a day where even i find it hard to identify as one of them." a turning point is reached where he gazes grows stern and the dismissiveness is replaced with an air of officiality, "but yes, i believe it to be one of their schemes to place a crown atop my head."

donghyuck considers jeno's words with heavy thought and a heavily-ladened question, "would you take it if it was offered?" he takes his answer with an equally heavy understanding.

"at the cost of her, i would give it up in a heartbeat."

you've lost count of the nights you've spent staring at the same ceiling you were faced with now. even turning onto your sides you know that you'll be met with all too familiar scenes. your mind, instead of relenting to the rest it needs, replays the same track over and over of prince jeno asking for you not to stay up too late, ironic in the sense that that's simultaneously exactly what you've succumbed to. you miss the way his locks bunch in between your fingers, something you haven't quite grasped the reasonings behind your liking of. it's just hair, but it being his hair supposedly makes all the difference. would it be foolish for you to be thinking of his hair when he might as well be taking his last breaths in the same second? there wouldn't be a way to know, the wall that you've encountered each time you venture down the glum alleyways of 'what if.'

"acceptance disempowers fear, darkness, shame." (my co--star day at a glance 1119).

you wallow in acceptance because the fear, the darkness, the shame stands too tall against your thin spears of hope. they've dwindled with each day that you've spent circulating between those three emotions in a hopeless and never-ending circle of self-induced torture. somewhere in between your fourth and fifth hour of intermittent lapses between sleep and wakeful exhaustion, the inner door of your chamber is burst open and you swear under your breath. murder is in the night.

or rather, it's your lady-in-waiting, her eyes bugged out and a coat haphazardly thrown over her nightgown. "your highness!" that's when you see the smile on her face, that's when a similar one begins to light your own. "the guards down in the valley, they say they've seen them!"

legs kicking up the blankets that hold you down, you scramble out of bed, even slipping on a coat is deemed too much a time-consuming task when the raptures that have enveloped you for the past weeks are now coming to a close. your fingers barely catch onto the door frame just as you skid out, peering back in to get another word for your maid, "them, them as in two. both lively and well?"

"i've been told of two men, both on horseback."

a grin splits your cheeks wide as your bare feet clap down hard on the frigid marble flooring. it echoes unlike the sound of your nightgown flitting between your form with each step, the whistling of wind curling your insides with warmth and joy. your heart sings like a village girl, whose love has just returned safe from the battling seas. perhaps you were a juliet, in the pretense that 'star-crossed' meant that you and him were written in the stars, not torn apart by them. your lungs welcome the morning air as you inhale as much as you can, replenishing the depths of your spirit, invigorating you down to each cell that you were built of.

the guard at the foot of the steps implores you not to go any further, the crisp winds that sift through the orchard would be far too dangerous with how little you are wearing. he sends for your lady-in-waiting, who had just arrived behind you, panting with all her might, to head back in to retrieve a coat or two for you. you tell her to take her time.

you're on your knees weeping when they come into view, the sight is unsuitable for the weak-hearted. head in your hands, you're making frantic motions to swipe away the furious tears that trace down your cheeks when the soiled dust from a sudden break of hooves lifts into the air before you. prince jeno dismounts as if it were his life's duty, his strides are long, as they have always been, and when he takes you in his arms, collecting your listless limbs and wearied bones in place, you find home within his embrace.

at the crack of dawn, on the bottom steps of the northern palace, a man clad in plain white and a woman in a silk nightgown rejoice in the name of love. his fingers never let the goosebumps on your skin stay for as long as he smoothes them over, you are absent of the wintry weather on your bare skin. at the crack of dawn, on the bottom steps of the northern palace, the up and coming king and queen of the northern kingdom rejoice in the names of each other, alive and so, so full of life.

you're looking up in curiosity at him as he crosses the room to the side of the bed, opposite of yours. jeno has a book in his hand, and rather than looking at you, his sights are on the pages, a finger skimming along with his eyes. he's by your side when he looks up, satisfied, "i brought something to read to you, love."

your eyes sparkle in the moonlight that slips undisturbed through your open balcony doors, "and what might it be?"

"you'll know when you hear, i assure you." he extends an arm and your back is pressed against his chest without a question, his arms encircling your frame, both hands converging to hold the book in front of the two of you. he spoke the truth when he said you'd recognize it. a smile makes its way to your face before you can even take notice. and when you do indeed notice, you mouth the words along with his voice.

“i will love you if i never see you again, and i will love you if i see you every tuesday. i will love you as the starfish loves a coral reef and as kudzu loves trees, even if the oceans turn to sawdust and the trees fall in the forest without anyone around to hear them. i will love you as the pesto loves the fettuccini and as the horseradish loves the miyagi, and the pepperoni loves the pizza. i will love you as the manatee loves the head of lettuce and as the dark spot loves the leopard, as the leech loves the ankle of a wader and as a corpse loves the beak of the vulture. i will love you as the doctor loves his sickest patient and a lake loves its thirstiest swimmer. i will love you as the beard loves the chin, and the crumbs love the beard, and the damp napkin loves the crumbs, and the precious document loves the dampness of the napkin, and the squinting eye of the reader loves the smudged document, and the tears of sadness love the squinting eye as it misreads what is written.

i will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat, and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms. i will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp…i will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and all the secrets have gone gasping into the world. i will love you until all the codes and hearts have been broken and until every anagram and egg has been unscrambled. i will love you until every fire is extinguished and rebuilt from the handsomest and most susceptible of woods. i will love you until the bird hates a nest and the worm hates an apple. i will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close…i will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, i will love you until your face is fogged by distant memory. i will love you no matter where you go and who you see, i will love you if you don’t marry me. i will love you if you marry someone else–and i will love you if you never marry at all, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all. that is how i will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.”

(Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters)

the book is discarded, but unforgotten, to the side when the curtains are pulled back. the moon is at its height. renjun has a lot of work to do.

the scene is as expected, the princess, inseparable from her prince is on the bed and clasped on all sides by his form. he regrets that he did not have the guts to ask for the murder of them both. his orders strictly called for the death of one, a much more tedious task when a possible witness, such as the prince, could hold a hefty punishment over his head if he were to be caught. renjun knows that isn't likely to begin with.

his first mistake is waking the prince. perhaps going in for a knife to the heart was the most efficient but the least accessible, seeing as the man clung to you like no other. renjun doesn't bother hiding though he knows his face covering and hood aren't enough to cover his unmistakable stature. the prince charges at him once he's gained a sense of his surroundings. renjun dodges his sleepful fit easily and uses this opportunity to strike at you. a quick blow to the side should do enough damage for his job to be considered completed.

his second mistake is misconstruing the sheer amount of power the prince possesses. in truth, the prince does not know himself, especially if that power is being drawn by the prospects regarding your safety and wellbeing. renjun is pulled back with veined arms that encase as if to wrestle him into surrender. he's experienced enough to worm his way out and to position himself opposite of the bed where you're now beginning to stir from all the commotion, the prince standing in front of him, shaking his head in disgruntledness as he tries to fight off the waves of post-awakening exhaustion and strain.

renjun knows a lot of things. he knows much about caged animals, he knows even more about greedy men, specifically greedy and powerful men, he knows of hierarchies and classes and exactly how to get what he wants from them, but in this moment, he knows nothing more than the fact that prince jeno will duck. and that he will regret.

when one is young and naive and still in the belief that their blanket will shield them from the monsters in the dark, they simply disregard that it will not. the flimsy, flimsy blanket, made of nothing more than woven, and likely processed, fabrics will do nothing against the demons that await, under your bed, in your shadows, from your ceiling. you are not young, nor are you naive, and it's in your understanding that these demons, they are a breed of sorts, fallen angels. perhaps, you will never understand. and in their line of work, they have never halted at the sight of a blanket. you toss it aside and you charge even as your prospects of living dim as the dagger parts the air, the air that scampers away and leaves an open trail for the dagger to the dead center of your abdomen, the very spot your father had been punctured with.

there is a part of renjun that wishes he missed.

the man in the moon frowns as the beams that foam and froth and bubble behind him are poured down from the heavens onto the west wing of the palace solely, the west-facing windows, a specific west-facing, wrought iron traced door that gives into the expanse of your room, your bed. it illuminates you, it bares its shine upon you, unabashedly, unashamedly. and it is also the sole reason jeno can see, with such clarity, the shank that slits your silk nightgown with ease, that embeds itself within your now-withering body, that in turn, makes his blood run cold.

renjun is long gone when jeno begins his cry for help. there are guards just outside but it would take a miracle for a medic to arrive before you bleed out your internal organs completely. the white of your sheets is stained with your blood, the strands of your hair are strung together with the stickiness of the substance, jeno's hands, the beds of his fingernails are deluged in the blood that spurts from where he is desperately trying to press down on. the hole in your front gushes with each breath you take and jeno could only wish that he could breathe for you, in your stead.

prince jeno cries, in the most literal and figurative senses, for help, for someone to wipe away his tears and to tell him that you're alright. to shake him awake as he dissolves further into the abyss of his fears. to kneel by his bedside and tell him that it was all a nightmare, that you're fine, really, that you've just gone to get a cup of earl grey with honey, that when you come back, there will be no dagger struck between your intestines and no red staining your nightgown. lee jeno cries because as time drags, and the guards that scramble about, fruitlessly counting on a distant and frankly unprepared medic, you are in his arms taking your last breaths.

"acceptance disempowers fear, darkness, shame."

and so he accepts.

volume five, the final installment: heaven belongs to you will be updated whenever the author sees fit.

✧ end note — i hope this piece brought back some cherished memories of 'a series of unfortunate events,' personally, such a great memory of my childhood, reading-wise. i say this a lot but, this has got to be one of my most favorite things i've ever written. i think i did quite well with this. it makes me happy. i hope it made you happy, i love you, have a nice day.

#nct fics #nct jeno #lee jeno #jeno fluff #jeno angst #jeno fics #jeno x reader #lee jeno fics #lee jeno angst #nct scenarios #rouiyan fics #rouiyan writes

80 notes · View notes

chibiwritesstuff · 4 years

Note

May I have scenarios for Vil, Rook, and Epel where they received a flower bouquet from fem!Mc because she thought the flower reminding her of them? Thank you! I am happy to see a new twst writing blog!

Uwaahhh, I spent hours deciding what flowers to give them and have written and deleted multiple versions of this but I finally settled on what. Oh, my francais is highly deplorable so do forgive my mistakes as google translate is my scribe on Rook’s part. The flower meanings I picked are based on what Wikipedia gave me since hanakotoba has pretty limited flowers in them. I hope you like it!

Pairings: Vil Schoenheit x Reader, Rook Hunt x Reader, Epel Felmier x Reader.

Now, let’s enter this twisted wonderland~

Black Tulips - Power, Strength, Supreme elegance

Applause filled the theatre as the performance ended. The cast bowed one last time before heading towards the backstage, in which you followed suit. Gently cradling the freshly picked flowers in your arms, you head straight to his dressing room.

“Vil, may I come in?” You knocked softly as to not irritate him.

“Come in, sweet potato.” You can hear shuffling from which you presume him getting changed.

Twisting the knob, you found yourself observing his meticulous makeup removal ritual. No matter how many times you’ve set your gaze upon his face, it never fails on capturing your heart and render you speechless. His sharp eyes focused at you as a haughty smile graced his lips. He stood up and graciously approached you, hands raised to caress your cheek.

“The queen got your tongue?” The teasing yet gentle voice brought warmth to your cheeks as you fumble to form words.

“Y-you look enchanting out there.” You manage to say as you pushed the bouquet towards him. “For you. Sorry about how sloppily bundled they are. The packaging part is not my forte.”

He brought the said flowers close to his nose and sniffed its aroma. “Aren't these the black tulips you were growing in Ramshackle?”

“Ah well, I’m not sure if this world has a different meaning for it but in my world, it means power, strength, and supreme elegance.” You took a deep breath before looking straight at his eyes lovingly. “They remind me of you. You have the power and strength to face everything to achieve your goals and you do it with elegance. No matter how hard, you challenge it head-on and emerge victoriously through your hard work and resolve.”

A mirthful chuckle escaped his lips before placing a soft kiss to yours, returning the rosy tint to your cheeks. Placing the bouquet to the nearby vanity, he snaked his arms around you and pulled you close to his chest. Upon contact, you felt his heartbeat hammering loudly much to your surprise.

“Thank you, my dear (y/n).” He whispered as he lovingly placed a kiss on your head. “For being there every step of my life. For accepting my flaws and all. I want to be able to bring joy to you as you have to me.”

“Oh my silly, beautiful queen,” You wrapped your arms around his waist and giggled happily. “My greatest joy is seeing you smile because of me.”

Magnolia – Love of nature

“Ah, Reine des Fleurs!” You hear Rook call you with your assigned unique nickname. “Even at night, these flowers receive your bountiful love. Beaute!”

A small laugh escaped your lips as his speech filled the silence in your small garden at the back of Ramshackle dorm. “As always, I can only understand a few words of what you say. How did you even know that I’m out here?”

“Oh, but a hunter naturally keep their gaze upon to their prey lest they escape.” His hands, making grand gestures to emphasize his point. “To lose sight of you is but a tragedy I’ll face for the rest of my ephemeral life!”

You stood up and approached one of your magnolia trees and plucked some of its blooms to make a small bouquet. A couple of grass blades you quickly wove into a sturdy makeshift rope and secure the said piece. You turned around and gasped lightly when you came face to face with your lover, personal space ignored.

“Please stop doing that. I thought my heart is going to leave my body with how much you surprise me.” You took deep breaths as he chuckled at your reaction as you handed him the bouquet you’ve created. “For you, my whimsical hunter. Receive my…uh…blessings? Gift? Whatever… for your continuous bouts of love to me.”

“A bouquet of magnolias crafted on the spot just for me! Magnifique!” He grinned widely as he accepted your piece and lovingly took a whiff of it. “To be given a wondrous gift by my beloved Reine des Fleurs. This is truly a blissful night!”

“Must you really exaggerate that? I just gave you a bouquet that I thought sounds like you.” Warmth rose to your cheeks at his flowery language towards your actions. “In my world, magnolias mean love of nature and that pretty much sums you up if I say so myself. Hope you like them.”

“I can fill a garden with beautiful florae and you still will be the most beautiful of flowers blooming under the deep azure sky.” He went on, hugging the said bouquet before pulling you into his arms as well. “Therefore, allow me to shower you with my everlasting love to you as well, my queen of flowers!”

Snapdragon - Graciousness, strength; deception

You’re peacefully caring for your garden as you wait for Epel to arrive for your apple picking date. As you snipped, pruned, and watered your flowers, an idea popped into your head as you saw your snapdragons now in full bloom. You’ve always wanted to show your appreciation for him and what you love about him so you proceeded to make a bouquet.

“(y/n)! Are you ready to go apple picking?” Epel called out as you hear his footsteps getting closer.

“I’ll be there in a minute!” You placed your finished work in one of the nearby baskets before facing him. “Sorry I took too long.”

“That basket looks heavy, let me carry that for you.” He grinned as he successfully lifted the said basket. “Actually, give me that empty one too. I can handle it.”

“Epel, I know you’re strong but do let me at least carry this empty one. I don’t want to offset your balance.” You chuckled and lead the way towards the apple orchards.

“I can do it, I swear.” He pouted as you two continued walking. “I managed to lift an additional kilogram compared to yesterday’s weight!”

“Wow, that’s amazing, Epel!”

And you mean it. Yesterday he looked like he was struggling lifting said weight but to think he even managed to add another kilo is really impressive. A blush spread into his cheeks as he shyly laughed at your sudden praise. You two arrived at the orchard and began picking apples as planned. He went on and talked about the magishift practice today, his lectures from Vil, and Rook being creepy as always. After filling the entire basket with your harvest, you two set the picnic items and you decided this is the right time to give him the bouquet.

“Epel, I want you to have this.” You handed him the bouquet of snapdragons that were hidden in your basket.

“Flowers? They’re lovely but why?” He curiously poked and turned it around.

“Snapdragons mean graciousness, strength, and deception. It reminds me of you.” He gaped at you with the mention of deception in which you chuckled at. “No worries, I’m not implying that I feel like you’re deceiving me but rather it's your physical appearance.”

“Hey! What’s that supposed to mean?!” He glared as he struggled to keep his dialect at bay. “I would like you to know that I –”

“Let me finish.” You flicked his forehead and smiled at him once more. “I find you gracious in everything you do and yes that includes you shoveling manure. I see strength in you not just through physical means but mentally as well as you continuously do your best in abiding Vil’s strict regimen.”

“Thanks. That’s really nice to hear.” He sighed as he dropped the bouquet to his lap and began making an apple carving. “But I really don’t get the deception part.”

“Deception is because even though you look delicate and effeminate you are more than capable of performing a german suplex on someone!” You cackled at you pictured him suplexing someone taller than him. “I bet you can do it on someone bigger than you too!”

“(y/n)…” He smiled as he handed you an apple carving of a rose. “Sorry its rather cliché but I made you an apple rose? Rose apple?”

You accepted the carving and placed a kiss on his cheek. “Its lovely, Epel. Should we start eating now before Vil sees how much junk food we have in it?”

“Heck yeah!”

“By the way, does Vil even know you’re with me?” You asked mid-chew your sandwich.

“Nope! Highly doubt he’ll allow it with how I disobeyed him earlier.” He grinned at his little rebellion against his dorm leader. “No worries, I will find as many excuses I can just to spend as much time as I can with you.”

#vil schoenheit #epel felmier #rook hunt #twst vil #twst rook #twst epel #vil x reader #rook x reader #epel x reader #vil schoenheit x reader #rook hunt x reader #epel felmier x reader #twisted wonderland vil #twisted wonderland rook #twisted wonderland epel #twisted wonderland x reader #twst x reader #requests are open #chibi needs to stop over researching this stuff

120 notes · View notes

jooniyah · 4 years

Text

Silver Blades

Pairing: Jeon Jungkook x Fem Reader ; Yandere Royalty!au

Genre: Angst, Mature

Warnings: Hard Yandere behavior, emotional abuse, dubcon bordering on non-con, violence, degradation and physical abuse, manipulation, profanity, smattering of smut, blood, swords and murder.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction and I do not condone any of the actions of the characters in this fiction. This is to be treated as pure fantasy, and should not be misconstrued to be demeaning the idols in any way. If any of the above warnings cause you discomfort, kindly refrain from reading.

This is an incredibly mean yandere, please proceed only if you are not triggered by the warnings. I repeat, please be sure to read all the warnings carefully. Author’s note: I have coined a couple of words to better suit my fiction, please be assured that they are not typographical errors. I am sorry in advance for the ending, and for breaking your heart! Okay, read and get your hearts broken!

Picture credit: YimeiZhu

“Don’t you dare sulk,” your aunt grumbled, adjusting your corset.

“It is the King’s orders and the law of the land. Keep your face pleasant.”

You couldn’t see properly, all those tears blurring your vision. You searched your aunt’s face for any trace of compassion, but there was nothing kind in the eyes that stared back at you.

“You know I have my own children to take care of,” she continued, pulling at the lace, crushing your chest tighter.

You squeezed your eyes shut in pain as the laces bit into your skin. Why were you the Cimarin when there were plenty of other girls in the kingdom? How was it that life always seemed to hand you the worst of luck?

“Wipe that look from your face,” your aunt chided, bustling around to fetch your Tochir, or gifts, meant to be taken with you to the Prince.

The ladies from the village had all gathered in your aunt’s house, bringing sprigs of honeysuckle, carnation, and heather as part of your Tochir. As was customary, they draped your corseted body in yards and yards of silk, sprinkling each layer with a perfume that was made of distilled azaleas.

The smell overpowered you, making you feel giddy and suffocated. Your hair was elaborately braided, complete with tiny flowers set in the twists of your braids.

You looked at yourself in the rusted mirror. You were the prettiest you had ever been. Why then was your heart threatening to burst anytime out of your corseted chest? How convenient for your aunt that the King had chosen you. An orphan. Raised unwillingly under the roof of your mother’s sister.

Your aunt had a way of reminding you often that you were nothing more than a burden to her. How relieved she’d be right now, that her daughters had been spared. It was you that the King had asked for. You, the Cimarin of the Prince. You laughed bitterly at your reflection.

“Born under the unluckiest of stars,” you spat at yourself miserably.

The ladies had fashioned the flower sprigs into a small bouquet for you to carry. It was time to leave. Your aunt was telling you how to behave with the Prince, but your numb mind couldn’t process a word. She pressed a jade medallion, also a part of your Tochir, into your palm, the stone feeling as cold as your frightened heart.

“…. fortunate that I wasn’t asked to provide any dowry,” your aunt was rambling on, her face lighting up, not believing her luck at getting rid of an unwanted encumbrance that had threatened to encroach her daughters’ dowry money.

Your parents hadn’t foreseen dying at thirty-odd years of their lives and had left you penniless when you became an orphan at the tender age of seven. The Royal carriage arrived, drawn by two luxuriously black steeds.

The footman opened the dainty doors, waiting for you to board. Clutching your Tochir, you looked back one last time, heart sinking when you realized that every other woman apart from your aunt had a sympathetic look on her face. With a strangled sob, you turned and climbed into the carriage.

*****

The long ride to the Palace allowed you to bemoan your destiny, tears flowing ceaselessly with each sob that raked your body. The sweat in your palms seeped through your gloves and dampened the stems in the bouquet you held onto for dear life. The smell of heather and azaleas adulterated by the odor of sweat emanating from your gloves seemed to curl around you like wisps of smoke.

Whatever did you do to deserve this? Would your parents have defied the King’s orders had they been alive?

“Why didn’t you take me with you, mama?” were the only words echoing desperately in your head.

You could see the towers of the castle looming in the distance. The Donjon grew bigger in your field of vision as the horses sped with thudding hooves towards the castle. A fresh wave of fear stirred in the pit of your stomach as you sensed the carriage slowing to a halt.

You were frozen in your seat when the liveried footman opened the door and held an arm out to you. A small group of Royal maids had gathered around the carriage. A matronly woman reached in and pulled your arm harshly, with an air of annoyance, as if she were bored with welcoming distraught Cimarins all her life.

When you alighted awkwardly, with the woman’s hand still gripping you tightly, the rest of the maids sprinkled rose water on you, another rite. But the air, to you, was nothing but a smothering fire, finally consuming your wings, burning them to ashes forever.

***** The great halls you were led along were adorned with tasteful decorations, every ornate item polished to perfection, every piece of delicate china gleaming vibrantly. There was not a speck of dust on the glass panes, not a spot on the crisp curtains. So different from the grime-covered attic you were used to sleeping in.

The orderliness scared you, the enormity of the fact that you were going to live in the Palace hitting you hard. Your throat went dry when you were finally led to a chamber, furnished minimally with only a cupboard and a divan.

“You won’t be using this room much,” said the maid who had led you to the room. “You will only use this room to retire in case of illness or menstruation.”

The gravity of her words struck you like cold daggers. Suddenly the room felt like a safe haven you dared not to leave. You hadn’t opened your mouth ever since you arrived, gawking at the intimidating surroundings. The maid looked at you closely, and you thought you sensed a flicker of pity in her eyes.

“The Prince will be ready for you in an hour.” She stopped and stared at you. “Stop looking so forlorn and wear a smile when you meet the Prince. You are here to be with the Prince, whether you like it or not.”

And with that, she turned and left.

***** You had nothing to do except wait to be summoned to the Prince’s chambers. Seated on the divan, you looked down at the silk robes you were wearing. All perfumed up and wrapped elaborately, only to be torn at the hands of the Royal stranger.

The jade medallion was supposed to be the symbol of good luck you brought to the Prince. Where then was the symbol for the bad luck he brought to you? The cold green stone glinted at you as you kept turning it in your palms.

Out of nowhere, a maid materialized and said, ��The Prince will see you now.”

You shot up to your feet, blood rushing to your head. Was it time already? Your legs felt like lead as you followed the maid along the long corridors. She stopped before a door and motioned for you to go in.

“You will wait here.”

Without any more instructions, she closed the door behind her. This was a large room, furnished with only a magnificent bed, strewn with rose petals. You had been there only a few minutes when a side door opened.

In walked a young man, dressed in the richest of robes, his eyes never looking once in your direction. He stood and surveyed the bed, his jet-black hair spilling over his eyebrows. His mauve robes contrasted sharply with his fair skin, the light from the windows enhancing the color of his robes and casting a glow on his chiseled face. With a snap of his head, he turned and gazed directly into your eyes.

You stared back spellbound; how could a mortal man be this handsome?

He advanced towards you without a word, eyes locked onto yours. His face had a boyish charm that mesmerized you and rendered you speechless. He stopped directly in front of you, one arm catching hold of your robes.

Losing no time, he pulled the fabric hard, causing you to turn on your heels over and over as he unwound the silk hastily. Irritation clouded his features as the silk kept spilling out without ceasing.

“How many damned layers are there?” he muttered and dug his fingers into the fabric between your breasts and ripped it.

He said nothing as he tore at the silk, finally reaching the corset. Like an angry child tearing at the wrappers of a gift, he butchered the lace, reducing it to shreds. Finally, with a dark joy, he yanked off the corset, drinking up the sight of your body, with his arms suspended in the air, holding the mangled corset.

You instinctively raised your arms to cover your chest, when he gripped you hard.

“Do not dare do anything you aren’t told to.”

His coal-black eyes roamed maniacally all over your body, a frightening grin curling up his lips.

“It is my birthday, and you are the Cimarin my father chose to gift me. He did well.”

His arms curled around your waist as he pulled you snug against his clothed chest.

“Obey me and you will be rewarded,” he sniffed your hair, sighing at the feeling of having his own Cimarin at last.

He was not a boy anymore, he had turned eighteen, and here was a woman picked exclusively to please him. He closed his eyes as he felt the heat of your body against him. He had grown tired of his own hands, he now had another set of hands to caress him. He had never seen a naked woman so close before, he had grown hard as soon as he had set eyes on your rotund breasts.

When he opened his eyes, you were still rigid in his arms. He didn’t enjoy the stricken look on your face.

“Disrobe me,” he ordered, letting go of you.

With shaking hands, you got to work on removing his clothing. He stood still, looking at you as you peeled the robes off his body, revealing broad shoulders and an incredibly taut chest.

You had been indoors most of your life, never having seen a topless man. Your virginity had been the first to satisfy the criteria for a Royal Cimarin. Your hands stopped at his underclothes, unsure of what to do next.

“I don’t recall telling you to stop,” ground out the Prince, impatience contorting his features.

Closing your eyes, you swiftly undid the buttons and pulled the fabric down, your head remaining bent, not daring to look.

“Do not keep me waiting,” he thundered, pushing your shoulders down to kneel before him.

“Please me,” he ordered, closing his eyes, waiting to feel your lips on him.

A whole minute later, he threw his eyes open, rage evident in his burning orbs, only to see you cowering, with no clue on how you were supposed to please him.

Thoroughly peeved, he grabbed your head into position, with a curt “Open your mouth.”

Catching a fistful of your hair, he pushed himself inside your mouth, hissing at the warmth. He threw his head back and groaned, all the while snapping his hips into your face. You tried your best to avoid gagging, holding back the tears threatening to spill out. He became more excited, pinching your nose closed, willing you to take more of him. He forced himself deeper, causing your nose to touch the tufts of hair at his base.

His excitement caused him to climax sooner than he had wished to, and he came in your mouth, causing you to cringe. You hoped he hadn’t noticed, and closed your eyes, waiting for him to remove himself. With a shuddering sigh, he released your mouth and cupped your face tightly, making you wince.

“Never do that again. I’ll let it pass since I’m feeling benevolent today,” he said, eyes boring into you.

You gulped and nodded. There was something in his eyes that screamed danger and you’d rather not be on the receiving end of it. He was astonishingly strong for an eighteen-year-old. The veins in his arms were prominent, bulging with each movement. He could probably snap your neck in no time if he ever felt like it.

“What are you looking at?” he asked, and when he received no answer, he clucked his tongue.

“ Swallow it. Always swallow unless I tell you otherwise.”

You swallowed immediately, and he smiled his arrogant grin again. God, he was enjoying this so much. He wanted to do everything he had ever imagined, try every possible fancy and have his way with you. This, an obedient woman just to satisfy his whims, felt too good to be true.

You were naïve enough to think it was over for the day. Just as you thought he would leave you alone to mend your broken dignity, he bent and picked you up in one fluid motion.

Throwing you on the bed, he leaped over you with the swift agility of a panther stalking its prey. His skin glowed in all its naked glory, muscles flexing as he hovered over you. There was a carnal hunger in his eyes, so palpable that the air felt charged with his want.

Without warning, he sunk his sharp teeth into your breast, making you arch in pain. He didn’t seem to care, as he tried to bite deeper and fit as much of the flesh in his mouth. He closed his eyes, one hand kneading the other breast as he inhaled the soft feminine scent emanating from the swell of your bosom.

As someone whose calloused hands had held only the hard hilts of bloodied swords for so long, he found it hard to comprehend the pliancy of your supple mounds. Wanting to give the same attention to both breasts, he switched sides, gnawing on the other breast with equal vigor. He was growing hard once more, and when he felt ready again, you had two crescents of bite marks on both sides of your chest.

Spreading your legs, he inspected your core, snapping his head to look accusingly at you, stating, “You are not wet for me.”

Though he would never say it out loud, it was a humiliating slap to his ego that his own Cimarin was not wet for him. You didn’t feel privileged that the Prince of the land was providing you his ministrations? Fine. Your arousal didn’t matter to him anyway. You were there for his pleasure, and not the other way around.

His chest twisted in anger, hating you for being apparently unperturbed by him. With a harsh shove, he entered you, hissing at the warmth of your tight walls. The shocked gasp and look of terror on your face appeased him and spurred him to pound into you harder.

“I wasn’t … I wasn’t ready…” you whimpered, choking on your sobs.

Wisps of dark hair fell over his eyes, brushing his eyelashes as he panted out, “Your Highness.” He shrunk his eyes at you, snarling, “You are to address me properly, you ungrateful peasant.”

The words stung you, bringing tears to your eyes.

“It hurts, your Highness,” you mumbled slowly.

“Do I look like I care? You will get used to it,” was his reply.

Something about your teary eyes aroused him, heightening his pleasure. Serves you right for being thankless, he thought. You lay beneath him, watching him tear into you, his exacting hands gripping your hips agonizingly hard. The lack of lubrication made your insides burn. You could do nothing but grit your teeth and bear it.

Your fear had tightened your walls and had made you feel even better for him. His sinful groans chilled you to the bones, heating your cheeks and causing your core to throb. He thrust harder and harder, deep growls rumbling in his chest as your core pulsed around him. His forehead and torso glistened with sweat when he finally reached his high, releasing himself inside you with a feral groan. A huge smirk broke out on his face, and he pulled out of you.

God, you felt a thousand times better than his hands ever did. What a fine day to turn eighteen! He was still blissed out when you scurried to make room for him on the bed. His eyes softened a bit before disgust clouded them.

“You have the audacity to think you can share a bed with the Prince?” he scoffed, rolling off the bed.

The man really knew how to slice you with his words.

“Dress me up,” he commanded, standing upright.

Cheeks burning with shame and embarrassment, you clothed him again. As soon as your fingers finished tying his sash, he abruptly turned on his heel and exited the room without a word, leaving you quivering, naked and humiliated.

***** The days at the Palace were all the same. You had two maids whose job was to dress you up in the best silks of the land for the Prince. You were supposed to be ready to present yourself to the Prince at a moment’s notice.

All-day long, you had nothing to do except wait for him to come back from his princely duties and throw himself at you. He never cared if you liked it or not. He ravaged you whenever he pleased, and deserted you as soon as he got dressed. It was as if you were just a mannequin for him to play with.

But wasn’t it exactly what a Cimarin’s role was? Every Prince had a Cimarin to practice his husbandly duties with, so he could please his bride better. But everyone knew that the real reason was to curb unwanted displays of the Royal heir’s promiscuity with all the maidens of the Kingdom.

The King usually chose a virgin damsel and appointed her as the Prince’s Cimarin. The title probably served to mask the bluntness of other words one would use to refer to such a companion.

You had been granted access to saunter in the Royal gardens, but you had quickly learned that you were looked upon with contempt by the maids. To them, you were nothing but another maid of the Royal household, albeit a titled one. Your title did nothing to hide the fact that you were as disposable as they were.

There were bitter stares directed at you whenever you ventured out of the Prince’s lair. It was even more difficult when you retired five days a month to your little room. No one cared to ask if you wanted anything to soothe the pain, no one brought you a morsel to eat.

Once you hadn’t eaten during the entirety of your exile, only to be greeted back by the Prince sarcastically with “Those bones look good on you.”

***** A whole year rolled by, filled with the Prince’s harsh claiming of your body. His habits of biting and pouncing on you had advanced to whipping and choking. He vented all his anger on you, punishing you for things you hadn’t the least to do with. He simply didn’t care if you were in pain because of him. You were his to destroy.

One day, he returned with a stormy temper, his foot sprained, all thanks to his horse, which had thrown him off the saddle. He shouted for you, his face all stony and seething with anger.

When you rushed to his side, he thrust his foot in your face, saying “Bandage it.”

You ran out to the Royal doctor in your quest for bandages.

As he waited impatiently, it occurred to him that he had come straight to you instead of summoning the doctor to his private chambers. What had brought him to you? Were you, the insignificant peasant, growing on him?

When you returned, he searched your face for anything other than the usual revulsion and fear he had grown accustomed to. He noticed how your fingers trembled, evidently scared to make a mistake and get whipped for it. No, you didn’t even like him, he was sure of that. But why was it that he wanted you to think of him all the time, even if it were out of fear and hatred?

Your face was aligned with his foot, bandaging the sprained ankle as he rested his foot on your bent knee.

“Kiss my foot,” he said, intently staring at you.

You were taken aback by the strange command and blinked in confusion.

“I said, kiss my foot,” he drawled lazily, “Which part of it is unclear to you?”

Not wanting to get punished, you swallowed your pride and pecked the bridge of his foot. T

he Prince leaned back, satisfied. He decided it would be best to remind himself of your station with orders like these. You were not a Princess, surely you didn’t deserve to be treated like one.

When you placed his foot down gingerly, he barked out, “Fetch me the cavalry officer.”

He was always this blunt, leaving you to figure out who or what he wanted, leaving ample room for error, and consequently, painful punishments.

When you ran out to the stables, you found the groom and asked for the cavalry officer on duty during the Prince’s accident. The groom sent you in search of an officer named Jimin.

As you skidded to a halt in front of the said officer, you were stunned into silence. In front of you was a man looking like he had descended straight from the Heavens.

His soft blond hair caught the sunlight and shone, and his grey eyes gleamed like jewels. He was dressed impeccably, the crisp riding uniform tailored to fit his lithe body perfectly, clinging to his toned frame.

Only when he cleared his throat discreetly did you snap out of your trance.

“Yes, miss?” he asked, and you marveled at his mellifluous voice.

“The Prince… He wants you,” you managed to blurt out.

Your cheeks felt hot, your whole body felt like it was on fire. The gallant officer nodded politely, thanking you for the message. He fell into step alongside you, silently walking towards the lair, as you secretly called it.

As you walked with him by your side, you couldn’t stop the buzzing in your ears. Did he know you were the Cimarin? Did he look down upon you like the rest of the Royal servants did? Did he always dress this well?

As you led him to the room, you had the sinking feeling that the officer probably knew what happened inside whenever the Prince frequented this part of his suite. You couldn’t bear to look at him when you presented him to the Prince and curtseyed out of the way.

You could hear Prince Jeon’s deep sonorous voice shouting at the officer for not taking enough care about the steeds, but you found your ears struggling to filter and catch just the cavalryman’s soft measured replies.

After the meeting ended, the blond man saluted his Prince and left the room, gliding out to the hall you were standing in. As he crossed you, his eyes flitted to yours, crinkling into beautiful crescents as he flashed you a gorgeous smile. You blushed furiously, unable to stop yourself from smiling back, the exchange feeling so natural and effortless.

You were still in a happy mood when you went back in, it was so obvious that the Prince raised his eyebrows at you.

“So happy that I’ve sprained my ankle, are you? Do not fret, I shall put my other body parts to good use while my foot recovers.”

The rest of the afternoon, as the Prince pounded into you, the only face you could think of was that of the blond young officer.

*****

One month and sixteen days. It had been that long until you had the chance of seeing the smart cavalry officer again. T

his time too, you were bringing him a message from the Prince. He was probably oblivious to the way his charms were making you mushy, or he might probably think nothing about a creature as lowly as a Cimarin.

Either way, he never lingered near you a moment too long, taking all your breath with him as he marched away. As you stared at his retreating figure, a part of you fantasized about being an average country girl he would meet at inns, someone with an inkling of dignity he could proudly talk to.

With a sigh, you turned back to the lair, it was getting late and God knew what punishment the Prince was brewing for you now. When you reached the room, however, Prince Jeon was nowhere to be seen.

Just as you decided it was a lucky day for you, the Prince’s voice drifted from a nearby room. It was treason to overhear, and you hurried to the windows to shut the voice out when the subject of his talk froze you in place.

“….. that I want another Cimarin,” he was saying.

“What happened to the one you have now? Is she not good enough?” a deeper voice much like the Prince’s asked.

Was it the King? You waited with a beating heart for the Prince to speak again.

“She is satisfactory, your Majesty. But I still wish to have another one.”

The King remained silent for a moment. “Do you want me to get rid of the present one then?”

Your breath caught in your throat. Whatever did ‘get rid of’ mean?

There was a long pause and the Prince replied, “No, your Majesty. She serves me well enough. I was wondering if I could have another Cimarin, in addition to this one. It is not uncommon to have a couple of Cimarins, I believe?”

You closed the window, having heard enough. They were discussing you as if you were a slave, a toy they disposed of after playing with. Your head throbbed, and you had to calm yourself down before the Prince caught you red-faced and became suspicious.

*****

When the Prince returned, he was quite put out. He had wanted to see if he felt the same way he felt about you with any other Cimarin. But the King had not given his word, rather choosing to say he would think about it.

True, having a harem of Cimarins would defeat the purpose of having just one woman to take care of his needs until he got married. But how else would he find out if the feelings were just boyish lust?

He was annoyed at you for putting him in this position. Had you made him a weak man who only thought with his crotch? How was it that the more he tried to distance himself from you, the more he found himself going back to you?

You were seeping through the folds of his brain like poison. But the irony was that he wanted it. He wanted to be poisoned by you. Your eyes, your sweet-smelling hair, the way you bit your lips and scrunched your face when he entered you, it all made him go crazy.

He lay down on the bed and beckoned to you. The rule was to either kneel on the bed or remain standing but to never lie down with him as an equal. Except, of course, he told you explicitly to do so.

Today, however, he wanted your mouth on him, erasing away all those annoying thoughts that buzzed in his head. He caught your hair in his hand, guiding your mouth to his hard member. His moans filled the room as you got to work on him.

Catching hold of your head, he thrust his hips off the bed and hit your throat deep, enjoying the way your throat muscles constricted around him. He couldn’t help forcing his hands on the back of your head to take him deeper, causing you to make those gagging noises that made him go wild.

He looked down at the dark hair that bobbed in his crotch and a thought flickered in his mind. You were so fragile that he could just end your life with a snap of his fingers. What if he choked you to death, stuffed full of him?

His hands left your hair and circled the pulse points on your neck. He could feel your pulse throbbing against his fingertips. Just one hard press and he could break you, break all the insanity you were putting him through.

Right at the moment he started to tighten his hold around your neck, there was a knock on the door. He let go of you, waiting for you to stuff his member back into his underclothes, and dress him up again.

*****

When you opened the door, there was officer Jimin, along with a person who looked more decorated, he was probably a higher authority of the cavalry. They had rolls of parchment in their hands, which they requested the Prince to sign. You went back in as the Prince made his way to the door to reach for the parchment.

Embarrassment crept up your spine, you wished you could melt away instead of letting Jimin see you in the lair, hair disheveled and mouth crusted with come.

But luck had its way, and the bottle of ink into which Prince Jeon dipped his quill slipped and shattered to pieces on the floor, splashing ink all over his feet.

The irate Prince turned back and bellowed, “Hey, you! Come clean this mess.”

You scrambled to wipe the ink, feeling as insignificant as the dust on the floor. The Prince saw an opportunity to humiliate you further and thrust his ink-smeared foot towards you.

Ears burning, you blotted up the ink as well as you could with the end of your robes. You knew he would have a fit if you used the rag to wipe his precious feet. When you were done, he proceeded to nudge his foot into the crook of your hips.

“Pick all the glass.”

You wished the ground would swallow you. Here you were on all fours, picking glass pieces at the feet of three men, one being the man you had never wanted to witness your mortification. As you hurried, the minute shards pierced your palms, drawing blood.

When you bit your lips and raised your head, you saw two soft grey eyes looking at you with concern. The indignity was too much to bear, and you gathered all the shards and fled into the room. The grey eyes followed you, unaware that a pair of cold black eyes were staring at them with dark malice.

***** When the two men turned to leave, the Prince waved one hand at Jimin saying, “Jimin will stay behind.” You instinctively stiffened on hearing it.

Seeing Jimin look at you with such softness had kindled a fire in the Prince’s chest. He had to establish who you belonged to.

“You! You ruined my feet on the pretext of cleaning them. Let me hear you whip yourself ten times,” he yelled from the door.

You hung your head, catching sight of Jimin’s horrified face when you reached for the whip.

As the whip cracked through the air, hitting you and bringing broken gasps of pain, the Prince enjoyed the growing look of dismay on his subordinate’s face.

“Is she counting right?” he asked Jimin lazily. The officer stood motionless, unable to respond. When he was finally excused after the sounds of the whip ceased, he turned and marched away, wiping the tears in his eyes.

Back in the lair, the only words directed to you after Jimin had left were, “Don’t you dare graze me with those shards. I don’t want your blood on me either.”

As much as it had irked him to make you whip yourself, he justified it to himself that it was to keep Jimin from looking at you that way again. He was sure the man knew what you had been really punished for. He would make up for the pain by going easy on you that night. But he had to change his mind because when he reached to touch you, he was annoyed by the way you flinched. Well, if you wouldn’t behave, you quite deserved the whip. That was one load off his chest, sympathy didn’t really suit him.

***** The next day, you were alone in the lair, an official duty had required Prince Jeon to ride far away, on a trip spanning three days. You were considering retiring to your little room when there was a hesitant knock on the door.

You didn’t recognize this knock. It wasn’t the maids, they ignored you when the Prince was away. It couldn’t be the Prince either, he had left early, he was accustomed to throwing the door open without knocking anyway.

You opened the door slowly, catching sight of a breathless Jimin in the foyer. He stood there panting, unsure of himself. Finally, he pulled himself together.

“Miss? I was wondering if I could have a word with you?”

You nodded your head, and he hastily added, “Not here.”

He looked around to see if anyone was watching. “Could you meet me by the rose bushes?”

There was an urgency in his voice and you replied in the affirmative. He left as abruptly as he had come, not turning back once.

You made sure you were dressed as inconspicuously as possible, and threw a cloak on, before slipping out of the room unnoticed. The rose bushes were in a dark spot of the Royal gardens, and it was secluded enough to provide privacy.

When you reached the bushes, Jimin was already waiting for you, his hands in the pockets of his breeches.

“Miss, I can’t express how sorry I am, it was all my fault yesterday that you had to harm yourself,” he started, his words tumbling out in a rapid torrent.

He extended his palm towards you with a soft “If I may..”

When you gave him your hands, he examined the little cut wounds on your palms.

“I am truly sorry for the suffering I caused you,” he repeated, his eyes now glistening as he took in the welts on your forearm.

Instinctively you pulled the frills on the sleeves to hide them. He didn’t need to see them and feel more guilty. But he had already seen them, his heart bleeding on seeing you trying to put on a brave face for him.

“Please do not worry, officer. I am fine. I really am.”

“Please, call me Jimin. I have to tell you something else, miss” he said.

“Please call me Y/N. No one here even knows my name,” you mumbled.

You wanted to hear your name roll off his tongue, you wanted to hear your name pronounced in his mellow voice.

“Y/N,” he repeated, looking deep into your eyes, “I came to tell you as soon as I heard it. The Prince has requested another Cimarin and the King was just discussing with the minister on whether he should get rid of you.”

This was something you already knew, except for the fact that the King wouldn’t let the Prince have two Cimarins.

“I came to tell you I will do everything in my power to help you if you want to escape,” he continued.

Your eyes widened. So did he care about you, the lowly Cimarin? There was heavy silence before you spoke.

“But wouldn’t that be treason, Jimin?” you asked in a low voice.

He looked torn between his Royal obligation and his need to help you.

“I am prepared to face anything if it ensures your safety,” he replied.

Your heart swelled on seeing his earnest face.

“I think the Prince would not relinquish his hold of me that easily. There is still time. But I thank you sincerely for offering your help.”

He shifted on his feet hesitantly, almost like he wasn’t sure if he should say what he was about to say next. “Can I meet you again? Would you mind coming with me to a certain place tomorrow?”

Your heart fluttered wildly in your chest, and you replied: “I’d love to.”

A relieved smile blossomed on his face, and he gently raised your hand to his lips, placing a chaste kiss on your knuckles. Little did he know of the storm the feeling of his lips was causing inside you.

He waited for you to leave first, promising to call on you the next day. Suddenly after so many days of darkness, it felt like the sun was beginning to rise in your life.

*****

The next day, Jimin was there at your doorstep again, true to his promise.

“I hope you ride?” he asked as he extended his arm to you.

“I’m afraid I don’t,” you replied shyly.

He grinned and patted your arm, saying, “Not to worry, Y/N.”

He smuggled you out of the Royal grounds, taking you to the stables. There was a gorgeous steed swishing its tail, tied to a tree. You pulled the hood of your cloak to hide your face, eyes scanning the surroundings to make sure no one saw you.

Jimin mounted the horse with a graceful jump and held his hand out to you. His strong arms pulled you up in a side-saddle position, to make up for the lack of your riding habit. He galloped off into the woods, holding you in place between his arms, the wind tearing at your hair.

It felt wonderful, as if you were on wings, riding to oblivion, far far away from the horrors of the lair. Behind you, Jimin’s warm chest felt like a wall of safety, resting on your back and spreading tendrils of happiness all over you.

On reaching the heart of the woods, he helped you dismount, and led his horse to water, tying it up securely. When he returned, he was smiling broadly, with no trace of condescendence in his eyes, very unlike the Prince’s.

He led you to the banks of a small rivulet flowing through the woods, laying his robe down for you to sit on. He sat down beside you, saying, “Hold my hand.”

He composed himself for a moment and said: “There is something about you that keeps drawing me to you.”

Blood rose to your cheeks, painting them red as you bent down, trying your best to hide your shy smile. He reached out to lift your chin and found you blushing furiously. He wanted to be sure you liked him too before he made a fool of himself.

“Y/N,” he murmured, searching your eyes. “Do you feel the same way about me?”

This felt too good to be true. Was this a dream? You couldn’t believe your ears.

“Jimin, is this out of pity? Everyone else despises me at the Palace,” you breathed.

He scoffed and shook his head.

“Do you think I care about what they think? And no, this is not out of pity. I offered to help you, yes, but this is something that I’ve been meaning to ask you for quite some time.”

He looked ahead at the water, lost in thought.

“I like you,” you said softly.

At that, his head turned to you, blonde hair dancing over his eyes.

“Did you just say what I thought I heard you say?”

You said nothing, choosing to smile wide instead. He clasped your hand tightly, joy evident on his features.

“But don’t you find me repulsive? I am just the Prince’s…”

He placed a finger on your lips before you could say anymore. “Don’t beat yourself up thinking like that. You did not choose to do it. You were forced to obey a Royal order.”

He squeezed your hand reassuringly, adding, “I would never find you repulsive. It is a promise upon my honor.”

Tears welled in your eyes, as a huge burden was lifted off your shoulders. He genuinely liked you, he didn’t think you were easy prey, nor did he look down on you. Maybe your future wasn’t bleak after all. You nestled closer to him and wrapped his free hand around your shoulder.

Fondness flooded his face as he ruffled your hair. God, he was going to take such good care of you. He had been unable to sleep the whole night on that wretched day, his ears ringing with the cracks of the whip. He shuddered and pulled you closer. He wouldn’t mind if he had to die to protect you from that monster of a Prince.

The whole afternoon passed with comfortable ease, both of you talking and getting to know each other better. It was the first time in months that you breathed freely, laughing at Jimin’s little jokes and marveling at the way his eyes regarded you.

On the ride back to the Palace, he held the reins in one hand, the other arm wrapped around your waist, holding you as if you were a precious treasure to him. That night was the first in months that you slept without any worry about the future. You had a person who loved you with all his heart, Cimarin or not.

*****

The three days Prince Jeon had been away were the ones you treasured the most. They were filled with happiness and laughs, delicate holding of hands and deep talk. The more you talked, the more you fell for Jimin.

You remembered how he had attempted to kiss you; he had been remarkably nervous for a cavalryman who was used to fighting battles. He had cupped your face in his hands, tilting his head to align his lips with yours. Just as his breath had ghosted your lips, you had pulled away. You still remembered the shocked look on his face.

He had begun to stammer his apologies before you had cut him short saying, “I want to kiss you as your woman, and your woman only. Not as the Cimarin.”

You giggled when you recalled how relieved he looked on hearing that. True, he had tried to get a kiss from you at least five times after that, proclaiming that he did not care about sentiments like those. But you had slipped from his arms every time, teasing him, saying it would all be worth the wait.

As you lay on the bed with your eyes closed, a cold voice shook you out of your pleasant reverie.

“What the devil are you grinning about?”

You jumped to your feet in horror, the Prince had returned already. He looked at you with narrowed eyes, which were heavy with fatigue. Without waiting for your reply, he pulled you towards him, collapsing on the bed with his arms wrapped snugly around your waist. He fell asleep within seconds, arms hugging you tight. As you lay there in his embrace, you couldn’t help wishing it were Jimin holding you, not the Prince. You smiled again, even thinking about him made bliss course through your veins.

What were you going to do to hold on to his hand? He was the only bright light in your tunnel of darkness. You looked down at the head resting on your bosom. God forbid the Prince ever found out about Jimin.

***** Weeks later, a rumor wafted through the Royal household, multiplying as it passed each ear and left each mouth. Someone had claimed that they had seen a Palace horse in the woods, carrying a rider and a cloaked woman.

It made your face go pale when your maids talked about it while they were dressing you up for the day. Your heart beat faster, not able to control the fear that threatened to make your lips tremble.

Fortunately, your maids didn’t notice, too busy gossiping away. But the Prince did. He cast one look at your face and raised his eyebrows.

“Don’t tell me it is time for you to retire to your room for the month already. I might have you whipped for making me come this far for nothing.”

You shook your head, not trusting your voice.

“What else is it then?” he huffed.

You weren’t sure if he knew it yet. Palace horses weren’t for romantic trysts, and you knew it would cause serious trouble if the rumor was reported to him.

“It is nothing your Highness,” you replied, crossing your fingers, “I just have a headache.”

To your surprise, he placed his thumbs on your temples, pressing them lightly. His face was impassive, but his touch was unusually gentle.

“Stop squirming,” he said, holding his thumbs in place, keeping your back pressed against his chest. “Better?” he asked, pulling your jaw to face him.

“Y-Yes…” you stammered.

This was unusual and somehow scary. Prince Jeon was actually in deep thought. He had been told of the Palace horse incident that morning, but he hadn’t a clue on who the miscreants were. He decided to call the cavalry officers and investigate, but he didn’t want to send you out into the sun with your headache.

“Get one of the maids, and tell them I summoned officers Shin Ho and Park Jimin,” he murmured to you.

You obediently left and returned when you had sent a maid on the errand. The Prince was pacing the room, his mind preoccupied with the events that had happened the previous night.

His father had sent for him, telling him there was a prospective bride for him from the Kingdom of Huwan. He had provided a portrait of the Princess Leila of Huwan, beautifully rendered in pastels by the Royal artist. Instead of being thrilled, the Prince found himself staring at the portrait in dismay.

The Princess did look captivatingly beautiful, but he felt nothing, she didn’t stir his heart. He had listened to his father talk about all the political ties the union would bring and all the wealth that would reach the Royal coffers.

“This is a wonderful proposal, and I want you to consider this carefully,” the King had told him.

Prince Jeon had been caught off-guard. He hadn’t expected to get married at nineteen, but when it came to issues of Royal unions, it was the King’s word that ultimately prevailed. This was a dilemma and according to him, you were the root cause of it. You had messed with his mind and ruined him. But he couldn’t think of a way to salvage the situation.

Just as all these thoughts were running through his mind, you returned and stood by the bed as was the custom. Damn you. Why hadn’t you been born a Princess? He hated you for placing him in such a knot. He stood observing your lowered head, those eyelashes dusting your cheeks, making you look the picture of innocence. His attention was broken by the sound of footsteps on the foyer, followed by a brisk knock.

You ran to open the door, moving back to the farthest corner of the room after the Prince reached the doorstep.

“Shin Ho,” the Prince began, “It has come to my ears that someone from the Palace had taken a woman to the woods on a Palace steed during my absence. It appears that they were engaged in a liaison, such was the report that reached me.”

As the Prince addressed officer Shin Ho, unadulterated shock registered on Jimin’s face, and he caught sight of you standing behind the Prince, hands covering your mouth to muffle your gasp.

“This kind of behavior is inexcusable; I want you to inquire into this. I want to know which bastard had the nerve to take one of my horses for a dalliance with some woman.”

You found yourself struggling to breathe. An innocent stroll in the woods had been warped into an ugly liaison by wagging tongues. What would happen if someone in the stables remembered that Jimin had taken a horse on the specific day and let it slip to officer Shin Ho? You were shaking in apprehension when Jimin caught your eye and shook his head subtly.

‘Don’t give yourself away,’ his eyes seemed to tell you.

Prince Jeon discussed with the officers for some more time, telling them how the issue was to be handled. When the officers finally took their leave, you were rooted to the spot, not hearing when the Prince called you twice.

“Have you gone deaf?” he hollered, shaking you by the shoulders. “What has gotten into you?”

He was half-distracted by the Princess Leila issue that your shaky limbs and guilt-ridden face didn’t quite register on his usually sharp mind. He wanted to forget everything for some time and get lost inside you. He let go of your shoulders.

“On your knees, take me in your mouth.”

When you dropped down to your knees and obediently started working your mouth on his member, he wondered if he could order Princess Leila to do all the things he made you do to him. He closed his eyes to recall her face from the portrait, but to his surprise, he couldn’t even remember how she looked like. Your face kept flashing, replacing hers on the portrait in his subconscious eye. You had become a threat to his sanity.

***** Exactly one fortnight later, the King summoned Prince Jeon again, asking him for his decision. It was just rhetorical, both of them knew, because the King had already made up his mind and had sent a pigeon to the King of Huwan.

The news somehow broke out and spread through the Palace like wildfire. When your maids arrived the next day, one of them gave you a haughty look before saying, “I am so eager to see how you would perform your duties as the chambermaid, O mighty Cimarin.”

Her mouth stretched into a sneer when you looked at her with bewildered eyes.

“Whatever do you mean?”

She clucked her tongue, whispering: “We are going to have a proper Princess in this household, someone worthy of the Prince’s attention. I can’t wait to see her kick you out of the Palace. Because, my dear, you are nothing but scum.”

“And what do you think you are?” a deep voice boomed behind you, as Prince Jeon stood with his nose flaring.

The maid immediately straightened, muttering incoherent syllables of explanation as the Prince ambled forward, laying a hand on your shoulder.

He leaned in towards her, making her uncomfortable, and looked straight at her eyes hissing, “You are not to step foot inside the Royal grounds. I will have you beheaded if I see you again.” You saw the woman’s countenance turn ashen.

“Your Highness, was she telling the truth?” you asked slowly, after the terrified woman fled the room.

“What was she telling you?” he asked, looking at your reflection in the mirror of the vanity table.

“That you will be having a bride…” your voice trailed off.

His hand left your shoulder as if it had been scalded. So you had come to know about it? He misread the look on your face, assuming you were mocking him. You thought he was too drunk with a Cimarin to marry a Princess? Well, he would prove you wrong.

“Yes, I am.”

He straightened to stand at his full height, as you rose quickly to your feet. He couldn’t decipher the reaction on your face. Were you as annoyed about it as he was? He wanted to make you hurt as much as he was hurting inside.

“Well?” he asked, “What is with that look?”

He cocked his head to the side, saying, “You didn’t expect me to….”

He threw his head back in mirth. “You thought I would marry you?”

He laughed loudly, seeing your face twist in humiliation.

“You are nothing but a concubine” he sneered. “I would never marry a woman like you.”

He saw the way your lips trembled, shame evident on your face. It made him feel better, he did not want to suffer alone, he had to make you suffer with him. When he left your room an hour later, leaving your body ravaged and bitten, he was sure he had broken you, as much as you had broken him.

*****

As the months reduced to weeks, and the weeks flew by in haste, the Prince’s behavior towards you became more and more hysterical. He taunted and jibed at you without the slightest provocation.

He was nervous, unsure of how he would handle his new bride. He released all of his nervous anxiety on you, belittling you and hurting your mind as well as your body.

At long last, the day of the wedding grew nearer, and the King and Queen of Huwan arrived at the capital. The Palace was decorated with the finest of the Kingdom’s artworks. All-day long, the maids polished the silver and china till they sparkled and shone. The whole Palace was buzzing with feverish excitement, caught up in the whirlwind of the Royal wedding.

The Prince, however, didn’t stop visiting you. If anything, he visited more often than he had ever done. He never spoke anything about his impending wedding, choosing to talk about your worthlessness instead. You felt like all the insults he hurled at you were sinking in, threatening to make you believe you were nothing more than a slave destined to die at his feet.

You hadn’t seen Jimin since the day the Prince sent him out to inquire about the misuse of the Palace horse. The only solace you had in these dark times was the memories of those three carefree magical days in the woods.

It was the eve of the wedding, and all the servants of the Royal household had been instructed to gather in the threshold of the Royal Hall to welcome the new bride. You stood at the very back of the line of servants, craning your neck to see what the new Princess looked like.

A few minutes later, a magnificent carriage drew up to the steps, and out stepped the most beautiful woman you had ever seen. Her clothes were made of the loveliest satin, and everything about her features screamed perfection. She had elaborate jet-black curls arranged in ringlets, framing her face and setting off her pale skin perfectly.

The Prince reached out to her, kissing her knuckles and requesting her arm, to which she happily obliged. She glided up the steps, accepting the welcome of the servants with a gentle bow of her head. The Prince was searching for you along the rows and smirked haughtily when he caught your eyes. As they sailed into the specially decorated ballroom, you couldn’t help thinking they looked perfect for each other.

You knew the Prince would always be on the best of his behavior with his bride. Because after all, Royal wives were for soft lovemaking and breeding heirs, while Cimarins were for satisfying animalistic desires.

******

The Royal wedding took place with eminent people from far and wide in attendance.

The Prince had looked his smartest, in a crisp white wedding suit, with gold piping along the shoulders and Royal decorations adorning the breast of his suit. The Princess had glowed in a dreamy white gown, tailored to show off her slender body beautifully.

As the guests retired to the ballroom for toasts, a hand pulled you to a relatively abandoned area of the Palace.

“Y/N,” Jimin whispered, “I almost went mad without seeing you for months.”

His face looked deeply troubled, and he continued, “Come away with me, I shall take you to the farthest land from here, and we shall live as man and wife.”

Your mouth fell open, the prospect of running away numbing you into silence.

When you finally regained control over your voice, you asked, “How can we go away without getting caught? The Royal guards are everywhere. How would we cross the borders of the Kingdom?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Leave all of it to me, I only seek your consent. I shall take care of everything.”

He pressed your hands in his, earnest eyes looking determined.

“I shall come with you,” you said, squeezing his hands and nodding your head urgently.

His whole face lit up with elation, all the worry washing away.

“I will come back and take you when I have everything ready,” he promised and left you after kissing your hands.

When you walked back to your lair, there was a ball of fear crushing your chest, making it difficult to breathe.

*****

As you lay on the bed tossing and turning, worrying about Jimin and how you were supposed to escape the Royal guards, there was a heavy rain pouring outside. Everyone had rejoiced that it was a good omen on a wedding night, but to you, the thunder rumbling outside only served to make the night eerier.

Sleep refused to touch your eyelids, and the wind howling outside your window made your worry grow even more pronounced.

Suddenly, the door was thrown open with a crash, and a flash of lightning illuminated the profile of the Prince, standing framed by the doorway. He walked in unsteadily, holding a bottle in his hand, swaying slightly.

The man had been thoroughly intoxicated, the front of his white dressing gown soaked with alcohol. It clung to his body, the white fabric sheer with all the alcohol, showing off his chest with every flash of lightning. He chuckled in a drunken stupor, pulling the sheets and clawing at your legs. You were terrified. This was his wedding night, and what was he doing here, hovering over your legs?

He took another swig from the bottle and threw it away, the glass shattering to pieces as he wiped his mouth with his forearm. There was an ominous smirk on his face now, and he pushed your legs apart as wide as he could.

He would never tell a soul what had really happened in his bedroom a couple hours before. He had watched his bride undress sensually, and had noted how much effort she put into making it appeal to him. He had caressed her breasts, running his fingers over her body. He had peeled all the layers of fabric from her body expecting to grow hard. But he had felt nothing.

Nothing was stirring in his breeches, and to his horror, he had found he was flaccid, his body showing no response to her nakedness. The Royal women were not educated on matters of the bedroom, so she was blissfully unaware of his problem. His cheeks had started burning, he could not allow himself to be humiliated like that.

He had to imagine your scrunched up face and work on his member to get it hard. When he had entered her and started rocking his hips, he had found the lovemaking too slow for him to enjoy. He had always been a man of feral passion with you, and the irritating slowness had made him go crazy. But he had known better than to be harsh with his bride, he would always have to be careful to never let that side of him slip. When he had finally done the deed, he had escaped as soon as she had drifted off to sleep. The mortification had made him go in search of alcohol, and finally, in search of you.

As he pushed into you, he let out a long drawn out moan, almost demonic in nature. He started thrusting like a mad man, trying to prove to himself that he had not lost his masculinity and that he was indeed a man of vigor. You caught sight of his eyes, blown wide, as he rammed into you with all his might.

The lightning made his eyes look predatory, and his snarling teeth made it more frightening. His sounds echoed throughout the room, the bed creaking in harmony with his loud grunts. Finally, when he climaxed, he threw his head back in euphoria. He bit his lip as he emptied himself inside you, deciding he would never let go of you. You were always going to be his Cimarin.

*****

You woke with a start when a fresh peal of thunder sounded outside, to find the Prince draped over you, his tousled hair tickling your chin. You gently nudged him awake.

“Your Highness, it is almost dawn.”

He mumbled sleepily, looking at you in confusion before realization hit him.

“Quick, dress me up,” he commanded urgently.

It would never do for the Prince to be caught sleeping away from his wife on the first dawn of his married life. He bolted through the door as quickly as he could, not looking back at you once. The shattered glass was lying everywhere, and you got to work cleaning it, wondering if this was going to happen every night until you escaped.

***** It was exactly a week later that officer Shin Ho requested an audience with Prince Jeon. He brought a young stable boy with him and had a quick meeting with the Prince. When he left, the Prince was fuming and trembling with anger. He marched straight to the lair, throwing the door open with unusual force. The bed was empty, and you were gone.

“Hold on a little tighter, lamb. I don’t want you to fall,” Jimin said, riding as fast as he could.

He was tearing through the wind, whip cracking in the air as he urged his horse to go faster. The hooves were thudding as loudly as your heart was. This time around, you were seated behind him, clasping his waist in your arms, chest draped on his back. You held on tighter and closed your eyes, praying to every powerful force in the world to deliver you safely from the clutches of the Prince.

You were sure the Prince would have found you were missing by now, and there was a definite possibility that the best riders of the Kingdom had been dispatched to alert the guards at the borders.

You rode on for what seemed like hours until you had to stop to let the horse drink water.

“You feeling alright, love?” Jimin asked, catching stray strands of hair and tucking them behind your ears.

You nodded, collapsing into his chest in a tight hug.

“You will be alright,” he said, kissing the top of your head, patting your back reassuringly.

“Let me ask you something, you once said that you liked me. But, fair maiden, do you love me?”

His eyes twinkled as you peeled yourself from him to look at him indignantly.

“I would not have come this far if I hadn’t loved and trusted you,” you said and hit his chest with balled fists.

He chuckled merrily, catching hold of your small fists with a fond look lighting up his features.

“Let us go then, my love, we shall go far away from all this din and love each other to our heart’s content.”

******

When you resumed riding, it was past midday, you could tell from the short shadows cast on the ground. You had ridden on for a few more hours when you reached a forest.

“We need to cross this if we are to avoid going into the village,” Jimin said, cajoling the horse to trot past the prickly bushes that were overgrown on both sides.

They scratched and jabbed, but you made no complaint, it was nothing compared to what the Prince had done to you ever so often.

Suddenly, your ears caught a sound, which felt like it came from right ahead of you. You strained your ears, patting Jimin slowly to let him know that you had heard something.

“Jimin, I think…” you were saying, when an arrow shot right through the trees, hitting Jimin straight at his chest, causing him to gasp and topple from the horse. Frightened by the sudden movement, the horse reared and bucked, throwing you off before fleeing into the dense forest.

“Jimin! Jimin!’ you cried, kneeling and tapping his face.

Only then did you see the arrow still sticking out from his chest, drawing blood that pooled around him, staining the forest floor. You started wailing, calling his name out like a prayer, trying to keep him conscious.

“Y/N,” he breathed out, coughing, blood spurting from his mouth.

“No no no Jimin, stay with me, don’t leave me” you sobbed, tears flowing and landing on his face.

“Y/N, ” he said again, blood pouring from the sides of his mouth in a steady stream now. His eyes were losing their luster, and his breathing was becoming rugged. He struggled to keep his eyes open and parted his lips to form a whisper.

“Kiss me.”

You bent down urgently to place your lips on his, crashing your mouth on his in desperation. But you were met with no yield, his lips did not move to kiss you back. When you pulled away in confusion to look at him, his eyes had stilled, and a lone tear trickled out of the corner of his eyes.

Your wails filled the air, each powerful sob racking your body as you screamed out, wringing your heart in anguish. There was nothing more for you to do, the only light in your life had been snuffed out. It hurt you like someone had punched a hole in your chest, and pulled your heart through your ribs.

As you kneeled there, your clothes bloodied and Jimin’s head on your lap, the thunder of hooves growing nearer sent vibrations coursing through the ground.

A pair of riding boots dismounted from the horse with a thud, and you heard a disgustingly familiar sing-song voice saying, “Well well, if it isn’t the Kingdom’s whore.”

Your tear-filled eyes made out the blurred figure of the body you knew only too well.

“I could cut you to pieces for betraying me like this, whore!” he said, drawing his sword out and placing it on your shoulder, the blade pressing into the side of your neck.

“But what is the thrill in that?” he pulled his sword back, the blade cutting the skin of your neck and drawing blood.

You remained kneeling on the ground, eyes blank, not moving or uttering anything.

He bent down and bunched your hair in his fist, pulling you up with a harsh tug.

“You will return to the Palace with me, and serve my wife. You will be the chambermaid, and I shall strip you of your honor, I shall enjoy doing so.”

His hold on your hair tightened, and he pulled your face closer, placing a volley of stinging slaps on your cheeks until his hands smarted.

“Lying, scheming ungrateful whore,” he spat out, throwing you over his horse.

You were lying uncomfortably across the horse, head and legs on either side of the animal. From your position, you saw Jimin’s body lying on the ground, face upturned towards the sky, your eyes never leaving his body as the horse trotted farther and farther away from the scene until he became a dot and disappeared from your line of sight.

****** Your hand clutched the small hunting knife you had extracted from Jimin’s robes. Life was no longer worth living, there was no Jimin anymore to love you and protect you. You would rather get beheaded than go live with this monster again, you would not endure his violence any longer. There was no reason to endure him, as you now had no purpose in life. You decided it would be better to be hanged than serve Prince Jeon again.

Clasping the knife tightly, you raised yourself from your awkward position and turned, seeing the surprise on the Prince’s face turn into horror when you sliced the knife through the air, plunging it into his heart with all your might. Both of you fell on the ground, rolling in the dust.

The knife was embedded deeply in his chest and only a part of the hilt jutted out. You screamed like a madwoman, rushing to your feet and climbing over him, swinging your legs on either side of him. You pulled with all your strength, and retrieved the knife, stabbing him again with as much force you could muster. The Prince’s mouth opened and closed several times, straining to clear the blood that was choking his breath.

You didn’t stop screaming as you reached out to clasp your hands around his neck, pressing hard and never letting go. The screams leaving your body turned into powerful sobs, your hands only left his neck when his pulse had stopped throbbing.

His eyes had bulged wide in his fight for air. You let go and rolled off of him, the catharsis hitting you like a wall of bricks. The monster had finally been killed.

***** It was a glorious morning, you could hear the sweet chirping of birds drifting through the air.

You were at peace, all feelings wiped from your mind as you were led through the dark corridors.

The chains on your hands and feet were clanking with each step. The long corridor opened into an arena, where hundreds of people had gathered.

When you were led to the guillotine on the podium, the chains were loosened and your hands were cuffed.

You looked at the sky, which was a beautiful rosy pink. It reminded you of Jimin. You smiled. He always brought a smile on your face.

“Off with her head,” the King bellowed.

You raised your face to the sky one last time.

“I’m coming Jimin, I shall come to you and kiss you, my love,” you whispered, closing your eyes.

#yandere bts #yandere kpop #yandere #yandere jungkook #jk fanfic #yandere jungkook x reader #bts yandere #bts fanfic #bangtan #bangtan fanfic #jeongguk #jeon jungkook #bts jungkook

981 notes · View notes

ichika27 · 3 years

Text

TWEWY 12

Grande Finale already!

I felt the same nervousness and excitement I felt when I watched the first episode while watching the last one. I’m excited, half knowing what I’d see but not knowing what else to expect.

Can’t believe we finally got to this point. I took so many screenshots... I had to limit myself cause they’re not all gonna fit in one tumblr post.

Also I don’t have to give a spoiler warning anymore. Length warning though cause this is super long!(longer than the usual posts I made for this series at least).

Kitaniji transforms into a three-headed monster and unlike in the game, he doesn’t capture any of Neku’s partners nor use Josh’s power to do so. I’m not sure what explanation there is as to how he got more than one noise form but I guess he’s the Conductor so maybe it’s part of his powers here.

Shiki and Beat awaken in the middle of Neku’s fight and help out. The trio then forms some kind of three-way pact (four if Rhyme actually counted although now completely sure?) and continue battling Kitaniji. The fight scene was pretty cool especially Beat’s attack with the chains. It just sucks the fight ended too fast. I guess all of TWEWY anime’s boss fights end kinda fast even though they’re uh, boss fights.

Final attack beam like in the game! It was too fast and I couldn’t get a good shot of the white version this transforms into (which looks like the one in the game). They have an explanation later as to why it looks different at first but they’ll talk about it later.

It’s sad Joshua isn’t part of this. This is supposed to be the four-way fusion attack. (;-;)

They defeat Kitaniji who disappears, sad that he was unable to protect Shibuya. Joshua never showed up in this boss battle so Kitaniji never got to talk to Joshua for the last time. In the game he at least dies happy in a way - he lost but he gave it his all and his Composer praised his efforts. He was also able to tell Neku that the rest is up to him now. Here in the anime, he just... he lost and felt bad. I wish they had Josh show up here but they had other ideas.

A new door opens and Neku braced himself as he knows the fight isn’t over cause there’s still one last guy on top.

They find themselves in this room/hallway (is this supposed to be the Trail of the Judged?) filled with CAT murals. This somewhat confirms the “CAT = Composer” theory and Neku has now accepted it, calling out Mr. Hanekoma to show himself.

And yeah, the last episode’s title is the show’s title as well “It’s a Wonderful World”.

Someone else showed up instead. Joshua finally makes his reappearance!

Boy, have I been waiting for you! I wish you were with them in the final battle earlier so you guys could be a team (and you could be one of Neku’s partners) one last time.

Neku is surprised but happy to see Joshua again. He thanks Joshua for saving him before and is glad that he’s okay.

In the game, this never happened cause Josh appears in the middle of a fight. Things were too hectic and when the battle with Kitaniji finally ended, he and Josh talked about their own game and so after Kitaniji disappears, what’s left is questioning what was happening. Since Josh didn’t show up earlier, they were able to reunite in a more peaceful way and Neku had no suspicion until Joshua himself brought it up.

And I guess that’s why I was so nervous when I watched this. It’s a bit too peaceful. I know what’s gonna happen next but not exactly how they’d adapt it.

Joshua finally explains the truth to Neku and his friends.

This felt more... awful to watch. Like we had both Joshua and Kitaniji giving bits and pieces of the truth in the game via their conversation so there’s two people to focus on. Here it’s just Joshua. But in a way, I guess this works cause there’s no one else there to soften the blow and Joshua could make the revelation hurt more if he wishes so. It also kinda feels worse cause you see Neku happy to see Joshua earlier before the reveal happens. Kinda heartbreaking.

“I’m the Composer of Shibuya.”

He finally says it clearly to a confused and surprised Neku.

We get a flashback of Joshua and Kitaniji talking about Shibuya’s impending destruction, why it must happen, and Kitaniji making a deal to try and save it. He has a month to change things for the better and if it works out, he wins. If not, Joshua continues the destruction plan.

Joshua’s Composer form is more vague here. It’s human shaped but you don’t see his face and the outline glows like this so you don’t properly see the shape. I think this is better cause there’s no way you can tell who the Composer is like this and he looks less human.

Beat gets angry at the revelation and tries to attack Joshua which he couldn’t do because of Joshua’s powers. I wasn’t able to get a screenshot of this but Josh is twirling his hair after this while Beat struggles to try and punch him. He’s cute and I know this is kind of inappropriate to say in this situation given he legitimately made someone mad and he deserves that punch to his pretty face.

Joshua uses his powers to freeze the others (and later renders them unconscious to keep them quiet). Neku is worried about his friends and is mad.

Joshua tells him he won’t hurt Neku’s friends. He then explains about how he found his proxy. Which is Neku much to his horror at what this meant.

I just had to get this with the subtitles on. I replayed the scene several times to hear if there was no error. Joshua says “Daiji na Neku-kun no tomodachi...” and I google translated it. It says “daiji” means “important”. So yeah, he definitely called Neku “important” to him. It’s surprising although this wouldn’t be out of place in the original game since they had more moments to just talk on there.

Yeah, I know I focused on this a little but I’m a nekujosh/joshneku shipper so forgive me for latching onto this.

Neku slowly sees the bigger picture as Joshua continues to explain himself. As a reward for getting this far, Joshua returns Neku’s memories.

He really had to get that close while saying Neku’s name, didn’t he?

Neku’s death flashback. The scene plays almost similar to the game right down to the censored guns (is this a creative decision to make it faithful to the game or are they really just not allowed to draw actual guns?). I was gonna make a joke about how Joshua stopped Minamimoto’s bullets using an AT field but the shot was different and the bullets just looked like they froze midair and not stopped by some kinda force field like in the game.

Neku ends up getting shot by Joshua complete with bleeding unlike in the game. I just have to wonder if I was the one who got it wrong cause in the game, Joshua looks like he’s aiming for Neku’s head and here, Neku gets shot on the chest. Did they change it cause a headshot would be too much or has it always been a shot to the chest?

Neku angrily walks over to Josh and grabs him by the collar. Joshua stops Neku with his powers as he continues to explain about what happened regarding the death scene and Minamimoto. Joshua then materializes two guns out of thin air and places one on Neku’s hand as he tells him the rules of their final duel: just shoot and if Neku wins, he could save his friends and he becomes Composer and do what he wants. What stood out with how he said it is that he didn’t exactly go “If you don’t beat me, Shibuya is destroyed.” and instead went “If you win, these are what you get to be Composer and whatever else you’d like! Sounds good, right?”. As if saying killing him has a lot of perks.

It feels weird seeing Josh physically placing the gun on Neku’s hand cause in the game, the gun was by Neku’s feet and Neku had to pick it up on his own accord. Anyways, I like the effect they used to materialize the gun cause it’s the same effect for the names of the routes when they show them on screen. Like graffiti or something.

At this point Neku’s crying. The shot didn’t feel as dramatic as in the game in my personal opinion. Neku is tearing up here but he looks tired and was about to sob in the game. Joshua meanwhile, counts down from ten.

Before Joshua’s count hits three, Neku hears a somewhat distorted voice (which we know is just Mr. H) saying “Trust your Partner”. This reminded Neku how he got to where he is: by trusting his partners. (I have something to say about this later)

In a very shocking turn of events, instead of just lowering the gun and letting himself be shot like in the game, Neku drops his gun and with a hand outstretched tells Joshua “I’ll trust you”. Oh my god... they really did it. I love this change not gonna lie. I think they might have added this cause they didn’t adapt Neku’s ending monologue where he does say he trusts Joshua. It’s less dramatic than the game though since Neku doesn’t say anything while Joshua is counting down. In the game, he was crying and saying how he thought Joshua was his friend and how all of this really hurt him. Guess we take what we can get and they gave us this.

Joshua smiles as he shoots but as Neku falls, the smile on Joshua’s face disappears.

Mr. H didn’t show up at the end here either so Neku didn’t get to see him.

Neku wakes up in the middle of Scramble Crossing like usual but he bumps into people and so he realizes that he’s alive now. He doesn’t scream after the very stressful crap he went to like in the game. Might not be entirely the same but Joshua still left him lying down in the middle of the street. Nice.

We then see a short timelapse from above Shibuya which is probably supposed to show a week has passed. Neku’s monologue wasn’t added in and no ending music as well. I’m disappointed “A Lullaby for You” wasn’t used. Here I was hoping for a miracle.

By the way, Shooter, Yammer, and I think Makoto all passed him by the scramble. They really didn’t get much screentime but at least they made cameos.

Neku finally meets up with the Bito siblings like at the game’s epilogue! The shot they did was almost the same as with the game, too. They have dialogue here instead of just stills with Neku showing how happy he was to see his friends alive again, too. I’m happy the anime version showed him smiling more at the end cause he needed that after everything. It’s nice to see him smile.

RG! Shiki is here! With the same shot as in the game! They really aren’t gonna show us her face, huh? Also, all of the shots with Shiki on them has her back towards us. Like there are scenes where Neku and the rest are looking forward and she’s in front of them with her back turned on us. Why? They could’ve used the lighting on her glasses to obscure her eyes, too. So her bangs are a secret as well then?

They show Eri later, too enjoying a concert, by the way. I was hoping to see a reunion between her and Shiki as well and them finally talking after the stuff from before. Oh well.

Neku takes off his headphones and he and Shiki do a proper introduction with each other with Shiki being herself this time. (Is Shiki the same height as Neku? It looks like that from this angle.)

Anyways, this was a nice way to adapt Neku taking off his headphones since they can’t do it like in the game.

They adapted the secret ending but expanded it to add stuff from the secret reports to explain other lore stuff which would’ve been missed by the anime-only watchers since those are part of bonus game contents. Mr. Hanekoma and Joshua talk about the events of the long game and Joshua says he knew it was Mr. H whose responsible for Minamimoto.

They also talk about the Red Skull Pins and how Mr. H made it for Kitaniji. Mr. H says the pins imprints Kitaniji’s will on people and that he himself (Mr. H) doesn’t need that cause he could do so with all the graffiti he left all over town.

Which brings me to earlier in the duel: Neku hears a voice, clearly (to us) is Mr. Hanekoma’s and it’s in a place filled to the brim with CAT graffiti. Did he imprint the words “Trust your partner” to Neku?

Meanwhile, Beat wonders how they were able to pull off the final attack. Neku says it was probably the pin Hanekoma gave them (the keypin looking thing). I guess they needed an explanation for the last attack but they didn’t have the fusion pin so they used this keypin instead. It’s why the attack looked different in the beginning when the attack was powering up.

There’s apparently a new CAT graffiti at Udagawa and of course, CAT-fanboy Neku has to see it. On the way, they meet Sota and Nao who are now alive! I’m so happy!! Joshua brought them back, too! I always felt bad about what happened to them in the game. I’m glad they got a happy ending in the anime.

Def March, 777′s band, are back as well and look... they got their winged mic back! It makes me wonder if they found it later on or if Joshua gave that to them back the same time when he brought them back lol. I’m just really happy for all of them.

Joshua’s wings!! This is, unfortunately, the best shot I could get since they never really zoom in on this. In the game he is in his Composer form in the secret ending and turns into a ball of light when he leaves. Here, we see his wings. It’s smaller than the one he has in KH:DDD. At least we canonically see it here.

I can now use the term “Joshua Maji Tenshi” and be accurate!

Mr. H points out that Joshua looks lonely and is in denial and Josh just leaves. Mr. H also shows his wings and leaves afterwards, too. I didn’t take a pic of it since we see it in the game’s secret ending anyways. His wings also seem smaller than in the game.

Final shot of the new CAT graffiti. I was so close to crying the entire ending and this nearly tipped me over but it didn’t. If “A Lullaby for You” was playing, I’d have probably bawled my eyes out. This graffiti is beautiful. I want a sticker of it.

Also, I just noticed but CAT’s old graffiti at Udagawa had mostly darker colors. This new one is brighter and is more colorful.

First of all, I wanted to thank tumblr for not giving me an error for posting more than 15 images like I usually did. I was bracing myself for the error pop up and was gonna make a part 2 instead but there was some kind of miracle and I got more than 20 pictures on here.

I have a lot of melodramatic things to say about the anime but I’ll save it all for later. For now, I’ll say something else. I’m sad they didn’t adapt Neku’s monologue. Those words from Neku still hits me in the feels to this day. Him saying that the entire ordeal really affected him in more ways than one and it wasn’t all good even though he’s happy about changing and what he learned from the experience. His line about how he can’t forgive Joshua but trusts him was cut along with it and it would’ve been nice to have to know what he thought of Joshua.

The thing I missed the most was the “I have friends now. We’re meeting each other for the first time in a week. See you there?” lines. It shows how happy Neku is that he now has people to call his friends which is super heartwarming and the line implies that he counts Joshua as one of those friends, too (which is properly confirmed in KH: DDD which I’d probably make a post about later if I get the motivation to do so). That would’ve also made the last scene with Josh hit harder. In the game, knowing Josh wanted to be with them and is sad he couldn’t already makes me sad but also knowing Neku is waiting for him makes it much worse (and I still feel pain thinking about it even after all these years).

Maybe we’d see them get reunited in NTWEWY. Hopefully. I really do hope so.

The anime isn’t perfect but it did what it could with the limited amount of time it had. The show would’ve been better if they had more episodes but we don’t know why it ended up with just 12 so we can’t really say anything else. They did it and it wasn’t as bad as I was fearing in a way. Would I recommend it? I’d probably rec the game first, to be honest. I was only okay with watching cause I have played the game and could fill in the missing stuff but the anime-only fans couldn’t and the thought that they won’t be able to fully appreciate the entire story of twewy is kinda sad. It was a nice watch though and I’d miss waiting for it every week.

I wonder if they’d make “A New Day” OVA since the anime is supposed to help the ones who haven’t/couldn’t play the first game but would go play NTWEWY and that scenario has story stuff that’s connected to the sequel.

Anyways, thanks for reading this far if you did! I’ll be watching gameplays of NTWEWY when it comes out in full (since I don’t have the money nor the console for it).

#Subarashiki Kono Sekai #the world ends with you #twewy #subaseka #sana_post #joshneku #nekujosh

15 notes · View notes

alaraxia · 4 years

Text

Process Breakdown: Starfall

Since I got some positive responses to my question on process stuff I’m gonna do a behind the scenes breakdown for my most recent piece to help people see the process I use and how I problem solve. I didn’t plan to do this initially so I won’t have a ton of process shots but I did save a handful. There’s a few scattered hyperlinks to other pieces I reference too. Just a warning this is mostly train of thought so it’s super verbose.

So base sketches were mostly focused around me defining the shape of the girl since she was the focal point and building the environment around her. Going in the things I knew I wanted were a girl precariously balanced on top of a massive capybara catching a falling star, while surrounded by smaller sleeping capybaras on rocks. I layered out a general forest scene surrounding it but didn’t really commit to much in the sketches. Messed with the angles of the large capybara a few times to make it feel less flat and more 3D in the space, used a lot of reference photos of capybaras and sorta simplified them to what I thought was cute/ what stood out to me as their defining features.

Skipping ahead a solid amount is midway through the initial lineart, with some areas just colored in to define them as separate. Initially this piece was supposed to be in a similar style as my “Stratosphere Dreaming” art, with a single uniform line thickness, bright colors, and no gradient shading at all, but I realized pretty soon after I finished the lineart and started coloring that I had done what I tend to do a lot and made it too complex to pull off successfully in that style so I had to pivot to using gradient shading and other non-cell style techniques (though you can see a lot of those methods still in the coloring of the girl). This caused an even bigger challenge as I was drawing on a large canvas with high DPI in Procreate which resulted in me having a cumulative 50 layers to work with at any given time (hell).

Now once I made that rendering style pivot is when the really hard part began, and why on top of my persistent arm injuries this took me about two months to finally finish.

1.) I had an extremely difficult time trying to figure out the color pallet for the piece. I had an idea of the values and general colors I wanted (you can see some pallets and random base color tests in the image above) but I just couldn’t get them to look right and I became extremely more aggravated as I kept trying new and different things. My biggest mental block was feeling like I was stuck trying to make the initial pallet idea work, but eventually I was able to bump it to a slightly adjacent pallet and it worked far better. Essentially a lot of angry experimenting and testing.

2.) I made the piece too complex for its own good when it came to the foliage and scene. After finding success with a very specific way to render foliage in one of my favorite pieces I started to use it as my standard, but that standard started to show cracks when I had foliage heavy scenes like in my Hollow Knight piece from last year. The rendering style became insanely too time consuming, and incredibly distracting when used in abundance, taking away from the focal point. I knew this but I still attempted to use the same style to render the foreground foliage MULTIPLE times in increasing states of frustration until I stepped back, evaluated it wasn’t working, and tested out a very similar style with the same effect but that I could throw together twice as fast without the aggressive distraction and minuscule details that were irrelevant in the scheme of the art. This frustration in the rendering not working was only exacerbated by the color pallet indecision making a lot of the attempts just look bad both color and style wise.

Due to the limited layers I had to finish rendering out the girl very early and merge her together to free up layer space, and couldn’t keep my lineart layers as separate as I would have liked to allow for quick line color swaps. She ended up being a key point in defining the rest of the color pallet of the piece. The dress shape was indeed inspired by the Lirika Matoshi strawberry dress, but with my own twist.

Once I got a more solid color pallet down the rest started to come a lot easier and I was able to begin filling stuff in and doing general color adjustments to make the backgrounds darker and give it more depth. I don’t have any more process shots beyond the initial color pallet exploration unfortunately, but the last hurdle I hit was at the very end once I was doing final touch ups. I found that with the only light source/ lighter color being the falling star that it washed out a lot of the rest of the pieces and made the details I spend so much time on feel unnoticed. I found though that adding the bright orange stardust specks into the trees, the girls hair, and falling from the star itself gave the last bit of color I think it needed without completely destroying the atmosphere. Originally (you may see it in some of the process shots) there were going to be jars with stars already in them illuminating the bottom of the piece, but after multiple trial and error iterations it just didn’t work out and ended up taking the focal point away from the girl and the star too much so I scrapped it.

Finally once I got everything done I made a copy of the entire art file to save as a backup, then with one of the copies merged all the layers together. Once all merged I made a copy of the fully merged layer, and went and adjusted the entire layer copy using a Gaussian Blur, reduced the opacity of the blurred layer to a super low percent, and put it on top of the original merged layer. This gave it that ethereal sort of feel that is difficult to notice unless you zoom in but really helps soften the piece and make it more dreamlike overall. Then I merged that blur layer down, and turned on about a 3% noise layer on it all to give it a bit of texture.

But that’s enough rambling from me, hope this helps give a bit of background to my process and decision making and it wasn’t just a wall of random musings.

My last piece of advice is if you’re looking to do art professionally, do commissions, or make a lot of pieces in a short period of time I would highly advise against directly copying techniques I use. Because while I’m always working to improve I do only do this as a hobby rn so I have the luxury of being able to invest a lot of time, energy, and details into higher complexity pieces that would take way too long in a professional environment. I can put a lot of time into making a single piece exactly as I want it since I’m not reliant on art as my sole income. As I improve I can make things faster, but it’s still an overall slow process and I just end up moving my quality standards up with any level of improvement anyway. Use stuff I do as inspiration but I cannot stress enough to learn as many shortcuts as possible (I’m still struggling with this myself).

If y’all have any questions about bits feel free to dm, if I do something like this again I’ll try to get better screenshots during the process n try to be less verbose.

#tutorial #behind the scenes #alaraxia process #process breakdown #starfall

52 notes · View notes

pandemilkbread · 3 years

Text

abashed ✩

eyes like sinking ships on waters

ᴛᴏᴅᴏʀᴏᴋɪ sʜᴏᴜᴛᴏ ✩ masterlist

sᴜᴍᴍᴀʀʏ: It was something that crept up so slowly it left Todoroki unaware, but he thought that was the best kind of love; one so natural you don't even notice.

[ᴏʀ ᴛʜᴇ ᴀ ᴛᴏ ᴢ’s ᴏғ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʀᴇʟᴀᴛɪᴏɴsʜɪᴘ ᴡɪᴛʜ sʜᴏᴜᴛᴏ ᴏᴠᴇʀ ᴛʜᴇ ʏᴇᴀʀs]

warnings: suggestive themes of smut, though only detailed at the last parts. read at your own discretion. not really smutty tho...

author’s note: i promised to upload this earlier, whoops, i apologize. hehe

ⓐ — ᴀʙᴀsʜᴇᴅ

ᴀʙᴀsʜᴇᴅ:

/əˈbaSHt/

adjective

embarrassed, disconcerted, or ashamed.

Warmth.

Warmth was the ray of light shining through the gray-like curtains at the peak of dawn, the heat amassed within the heavy blankets that covered skin, the hotness of pillows from where your touch lingered and left, with all the toss and turning in between; the very definition of warmth described the comfortable heat radiating from the arm wrapped around your stomach like a safeguard—

Cold.

Cold was the sweat dribbling down your forehead in sheer panic, the chilly breeze that encased your body as you quickly ripped the blankets off, the freezing temperature of the tiled floor immediately upon falling on your bare bottom soon after, cold and empty was your mind, connecting the images of what transpired the previous day— or night rather.

All you picked up were bits and pieces: bright lights, booming music, the smell of strong alcohol, a pop of a balloon… ‘Ah, yes.’ You thought, hesitantly. ‘The birthday party.’ Who knew an adult as yourself, who had the alcohol tolerance of a Viking from the late eighth century, could flat out collapse from drinking too much.

And God you wanted to throw up.

Besides wanting to spill out your guts onto the crystal clear floor—you cringed at the thought of whoever was supposed to clean the mess after, if you chose to do so anyway—there was a direr issue to address; which was… knowing where the hell you were, and who you were with.

You slightly inched yourself onto your knees and peered back at the comfortable blue sheets where he laid, fast asleep. Surprisingly, your fumbling did not wake the sleeping man. You assumed as much as you were knocked out from the liquor, he was in a similar state as well.

Sighing, you pulled yourself up only to be met with a painful ache on your upper thighs, forcing you to stumble on your backside. You hissed. ‘What in the world?’ Squinting at the dark splotches on your skin that darted from your lower thighs up until your upper stomach, a small part of you believed there were more sprinkled on your chest and neck. It forced one notion down your thick skull.

First, you were naked. The bareness of your skin provided neither protection from the cold breeze coming from the air conditioner, nor the heat radiating from your cheeks in embarrassment. The pain from earlier, and the bruises that enveloped your skin were two of the many testimonies of your late night endeavor.

You groaned. In truth, you weren’t the type of person to be hooking up with a stranger, no— scratch that, you were never the type of person to be having sex at all, and with a stranger nonetheless. Frankly, the only time you were close to doing the deed was with your boyfriend of a year and a half, whom you broke up with months ago, and it did not end well.

Let’s just say, he had a ‘technical difficulty’ with putting on a simple condom; leaving the touch starved you, furious as he suggested to do it otherwise without it. And the night was cut short. ‘A great night forever encased into my memories.’ You mused.

Back to the crisis at hand, your eyes shifted to the human unconscious on the bed, the sound of small breaths reached your ears. You prompted yourself onto your knees then leaned your upper body on the bed, a small blush dusted your cheeks as you glanced at the man.

‘Great.’ You breathed. Over 126 million people in Japan and you slept with the one person you’d rather not see again.

Your fingers gently swiped the strands of red hair covering his closed eyes. Breathtaking. Even while asleep he managed to send your heart into a frenzy, and brought shivers down your spine, and reignited the little speck of hope you had left, one you thought had blown out years ago, only to reemerge stronger than ever.

Oh, god, you hated hope.

You propped your chin on the palm of your hand. Sighing, you continued to play around with his hair. A part of you hoped the beautiful stranger, not-so unfamiliar anymore, woke from his slumber— a sort of wakeup call and signal for you to get going. Another, cruel part, wanted him to stay asleep, a somewhat impossible wish; and you wished, you really wished, this was a dream.

If it was one, please, please, please, you wanted to crawl back under the covers, just for a few minutes.

You pinched yourself.

Once, then twice, then thrice.

Maybe seventh times a charm?

You massaged your temples. If it were a dream, you would have awaken by now. Then, you were not in a dream, and this was real. And if it was real… you can afford to be a little selfish. So you sat up from your spot and leaned forward, brushing your lips against the top of his forehead.

“Good morning,” you whispered.

Loud enough to satisfy your wants, but as quiet as the passing breeze, rendering it nonexistent.

You could always shuffle back into the sheets, you know you wanted to; bask in the warmth of the bed, so soft and cozy; pretend reality did not exist, yes, in another life this apartment was your home; and the notion of walking in shame was all fiction, you were abashed.

You sighed, sounding more like a mix of a hiss and a groan.

It was time to go. There was no use dwelling on the what-ifs and the what-could-have-beens. Simply, you are an adult. Yet, the years of being humbled at college, forcibly awoken by the harsh realities of adulthood, and the gruesome jobs at the hospital— could not diminish your fairytale dreams and hopes, by now reverted back into one intense form.

Your high school crush on the one and only, Todoroki Shouto.

Something that had shrunk to the size of a pea, had somewhat grown into a bowling ball, all in the span of ten minutes and by all means, it would continue to grow bigger. You were sure of it. The plausible solution?

Running out while you still had your mind, heart, and spirit intact. Oh, yes. The very same went for your embarrassment and shame: behold, the little youngling had initiated her very first hook-up for all the world to see! ‘Technically anyone awake by seven’ you presumed by looking at the light from outside.

Grabbing your discarded clothes, you walked to a room, closer to a closet than an actual bathroom, and put them on. Now that you were fully dressed, the whole idea of sleeping with your high school crush was unbelievable.

A prank? You rolled your eyes. No one would go that far to prank someone as unimportant as you.

…Would they, though?

Your mind wandered back to the mix of silver and red asleep in the bedroom. Was he the type of person to sleep around with anyone he wanted?

He can, though. You thought. Then again. He did not seem like the type to do so.

You ruffled your hair in front of the mirror, sliding your fingers through your hair in an attempt to smooth out the tangles.

Is it possible? Perhaps you never slept with him in the first place? Maybe, your lower pain was the symptoms of a forthcoming period, or maybe the bruises on your skin were the scars of an epic battle fight sequence in the bar, or maybe the person sleeping on the bed was never Todoroki Shouto and you were delusional.

Putting it that way, the lame excuses sounded more ridiculous than reasonable.

The door opened with a click, and you winced at the sound, your fingers quickly twisted the knob to prevent any more unnecessary noise. Stepping out of the bathroom, you glanced at the person laying on the bed. For someone considered one of the nation’s top heroes, Todoroki slept pretty peacefully while a stranger used his room to her volition.

What if I was a villain, hm? You grumbled. One slit to the throat and you’d be a goner.

The exact moment you thought about assassinating (not that you would actually do it, you were a hospital resident for heaven’s sake!) the peppermint boy stirred in his spot, forcing you to freeze. The blankets shifted downwards to reveal the bare skin of his chest, littered with splotches of dark blue, and you gaped.

His neckline gleamed with love bites, his collar taking the brunt of all the kisses, and the chest area had a trail of kisses all the way down to his lower stomach, where the blanket laid comfortably— ‘did I do that?’ you breathed.

This close, you were this close to pulling all your hair out in frustration. Last night must have been the best night of your life and you couldn’t remember a thing! The whole thing was unfair!

You shook your head. No time to dwell, time to go! And go you must before the object of all your teenage fantasies woke up. Eyes scanned the room for the last item of your possessions, the shoes you wore.

You scoured under the gray sofa to the side of the bed, then softly shifted the blanket on the floor, it was not in the bathroom where you changed, the carpet showed no sign of the footwear, and you remembered really wearing shoes to the party. ‘So, where is it?’

After searching for what seemed like twenty minutes, you plopped down on your knees in front of the bed. ‘Maybe Todoroki knows where it is?’ A stupid suggestion, why would a sleeping man know the location of your shoes? He was not psychic; and if you did not know the place, how on Earth would he know?

But that did not stop you from asking either.

“Good morning, dear. Happen to know where my shoes are?” You joked.

It was barely a whisper, a joke for your ears only; a gag really to soothe yourself during moments of distress. He was not supposed to reply, you weren’t expecting a reaction either, so you slumped. If you could handle three back to back shifts at the hospital without a break, you can handle walking out of this damned apartment without shoes.

By the shine of the bright light outside, and knowing it was a Sunday morning, there should not be a lot people to gawk at your unruly appearance. If you were lucky enough to hail a taxi in three minutes, all before the early joggers on the street gushed about your lack of footwear, you would be safe from the impending embarrassment.

Maybe, you could take a pair of slippers from the apartment? The hero will never know, and if he did, what kind of rich hero would search far and wide for a woman who stole his flip-flops? It was just some slippers! ‘All right, do it!’ You dared.

Just as you were about to stand up, a warm arm reached for your neck— the base of his palm wrapped around the back of your head, compelling your chest to rest on top of the bed. Mismatched eyes of gray and turquoise stared back at you—your stomach jumped, and you gulped, God was it that hot in here?— rather groggily, the corner of his lips smirked.

“Have you tried the shoe rack outside?” Todoroki murmured.

One blink, two blinks, three blinks. You hissed in realization. ‘Of course! Who brings their shoes inside?’ You had to be the dumbest drunk to have ever lived, you weren’t drunk right now per se, but, the alcohol must have done something to your brain. It was strong enough to make you forget simple Japanese customs, you wanted to smack your skull.

Eyes peeping at the man, you diverted your gaze sheepishly, the intense stare he had made you bashful, slightly making your insides churn and almost making you a spluttering mess. You glanced back at Todoroki, and tilted your head.

“W-Were you awake this whole time? I-I thought I saw you move…” You admitted.

He loosened his grip on your neck and rested his palm on your shoulder. “You were not exactly quiet,” he then traced tiny circles on your collar. “Falling off the bed…must have hurt, are you all right?”

Your face swiftly turned three shades darker. ‘He was awake!’ The moment you woke up in shock and slammed your bare ass on the floor, he was awake! ‘Naturally! He’s a god damned hero!’ Obviously, who wouldn’t stir awake from the loud smacking sound, and your cry of pain?

You squinted at the smirk on the corner of his lips. ‘He’s teasing you!’ He was awake this whole time… then, he must have felt your lips on his forehead, and heard the ‘good morning’, and the fumbling for your shoes, and the swipe of your fingers, and you playing with his hair, and everything else!

How was it possible to be this abashed? Your cheeks felt as if they were on fire, oh fuck, it had to do with his stupid little smirk, his stupid intense gaze, his stupid hold on you as if you meant something to him like—like you meant the world to him.

Oh, how your stomach kneaded at the thought.

“I’m… fine.” You snatched his hand and placed it on the bed.

By the way he looked at you, you reasoned out he was waiting for something. Gratitude for the night before sounds way too conceited, he did not seem like a narcissist. An apology for taking too much of his time and space sounded too sad, your heart ached and hearing him jab it with regrets would hurt.

What else was there to remember? God, did you puke into his suit, or clothes, did he want you to pay for his dry cleaning? You cringed, goodbye self-esteem.

“…I’ve never done this thing before, you know?” You spoke. “Ah, I don’t really know what happens the morning after…” Blushing, you pinched your fingers, a nervous habit. “I’ve… I mean… I watch those shows and… I know someone has to walk out after and seeing this isn’t my room, I have to walk out. Yes. Me.”

His face contorted, confused. “Why do you have to walk out?”

The whole purpose of walking out was to signify the end of a session, like you would tell him that. Basically, the room was unfamiliar territory, therefore, not your apartment. Who else would walk out if not you?

“This,” you gestured the room, “is your apartment. Not mine. Why would you walk out of your own apartment?”

“Yes, I know.” Todoroki said, matter-of-factly. “But, why?”

“What do you mean ‘but, why?’ Why? Me… and you… we aren’t even a thing! We just happened to—“ You pointed. “You! This is all your fault! If you just pretended to sleep and continue doing it, we wouldn’t have this awkward exchange in the first place!”

“You asked where your shoes were.”

“I didn’t actually think you were going to reply!”

He pulled himself into a sitting position and stretched his arms. You heard the sound of a crack followed by a soft groan, and his feet perched on the ground, right in front of where you stood. The sleepy man placed his chin on his closed fist, while his elbow laid on the top of his now crossed legs.

Todoroki sighed. “You did not answer the question. Why do you want to leave?”

There were a hundred reasons to leave. He was a top hero, a celebrity in the eyes of his followers, an untouchable God by his multitude of fangirls. You believed it was impossible to stay with someone like him, your ego would not allow it.

A part of you was scared. If you stayed, the chances of talking about what happened increases. Staying meant realizing you really slept with him, and in a way reconfirmed your feelings that you might actually stand a chance. Maybe your feelings were worth it, maybe he would give you a chance, and maybe your impossible love was never impossible at all, maybe—

“It’s— It’s… not proper…” You conceded. “You’re… you! And I’m me! I barely even know you and in all honesty… I don’t really remember what happened last night. I’m sorry, it’s better if we pretend this never happened.”

He paused for a while before answering. “Why? Do you hate it that much? Do you want to talk about it?”

You clenched your hands. It was infuriating how easily his words planted fantasies into your head. The way he phrased the sentence drove an idea down your throat. ‘Did he want you to stay?’

“The thing is… I don’t remember. Do you?” You replied.

“Of course…” He took a quick glance at your face, almost looking for something, before staring back at the curtains. “Are you married?”

‘Married? Married!’ You gaped. You could not begin to comprehend why he asked such a question. Did he think you were running away because you had someone waiting at home for you? Or did he ask because he tied the knot with someone else? God�� did you sleep with a married man?

You don’t recall him being married. “No! I don’t have a ring on my finger…”

“Do you have a boyfriend?” He added.

Oh, you breathed. Was that the reason why? Was he asking all these things because he felt inclined to know whether the woman he slept with had someone waiting for her at home? He was minimizing the potential of a possible scandal. You sunk at the thought. “Ah, I did… But that was months ago.”

Do all hook ups have these morning questionnaire sessions? Or was this a top hero only session, to reduce the possibility of a hot and spicy front page article on the tabloid? Oh, maybe he felt guilty. You glimpsed at the man, his eyes closed in ponder.

You were never one to snitch, and something like this was a secret that would never leave your lips, until, well… you were six feet down under. You deflated yet again, presuming after his barrage of questions, he would send you out the front door.

“If it is not because you are married, not because you are taken, not because I did something wrong…” He began. “Then… stay.” His arms wrapped around your waist, while he leaned his forehead on your stomach.

Faint, you were going to faint. You heard it right, didn’t you? He said ‘stay’, not ‘leave and never come back,’ not ‘forget this, go,’ not ‘get away,’ he told you to stay. You died and went to heaven, didn’t you? Was it possible for someone like him to want you? Even if it was just for a moment, you wanted to succumb to the feeling of being loved.

Your face heated up, and your hands unconsciously reached for his head, dragging your fingers slowly between the locks of his hair. “…Are you this touchy with all the girls you sleep with?”

Right off the bat you tested the waters, almost grimacing at the implications. Why you formulated such a simple sentence into something with a double meaning, you never knew.

“No. Just you.”

Great. The issues with double ended questions. What did ‘just you’ mean? Did he sleep with a lot of women, and you were the only one he cuddled with so far? Did it mean something else? You had to pry further, not that it mattered whether he slept with other people.

“So… do you sleep with people this often or…?”

He scowled. “What makes you think I take anyone I see to bed?” Todoroki swiftly twisted you around, facing your back, and pulled your body to his lap. “…Only you.” He mumbled.

Ah, you instantly felt relieved. Though, the reassurance only managed to disorient you even further. What happened at the bar? What conversations happened during the hours of the party? What did you say to make him interested? Was he really interested? Maybe, by the way he was holding you right now, his body language proved he was.

Your stomach stirred at the close contact, pulse racing as he settled one hand on your thigh while the other swaddled your waist. “…Do you really not remember?”

You wanted to recall as well. “I don’t… sorry.”

He sighed in defeat. “All right.”

His breaths caressed the back of your neck, sending goosebumps all over your body. You shook your head and forced yourself to breathe, breathe in, and out, in and out, in and— were you being cuddled by the Todoroki Shouto on his fucking bed, why me? Out of all the women in this world, Japan rather, why would he be wrapping his warm arms around you— breathe out!

Everything was so confusing, so perplexing, so—a prank! ‘Ha ha ha, good job everyone!’ You mused. ‘Time to reveal yourselves, you assholes!’ Your list of ‘bastards who pissed you off for a living’ had hundreds of guys. The idiot from work, the bartender near your apartment, your next door neighbor who played rock music at 3 in the morning, stupid Monoma who fucked around at the hospital.

You sighed. One more time, one more phrase of reassurance. Just one more. And you’ll stop asking.

“Hey, hey… Todoroki?” You nudged him with your head, gently. You heard a soft ‘hm’ and continued. "Are you really Todoroki?”

He paused. “…Shouto.”

“I know who you are,” You hummed, a smile flickering your features. “I mean, is it really you? You’re like this… cool hero. A celebrity, really. And I’m just… sitting on your lap, in your room, in your apartment, wherever this place is.”

His grip tightened on your waist. “Who else would I be?”

“Monoma trying to fuck around and fuck up my feelings.”

“Ah, trust me, princess. I would not let that happen.” His so soft voice, sent shivers down your spine. “…Do you really not remember?”

Knock out! He called you ‘princess’, princess, princessprincessprincess. Such an endearing word for a stranger, oh but you love it so. You took a double take, the word was very familiar. Very familiar. It was difficult to pin point a certain time or place, but…

You pinched his ear. “Why do you keep asking? Was it that good that you can’t stop talking about…?”

“We talked about this right before I took you to bed and you—“

“You know what,” You spluttered. “Never mind! Don’t tell me. I’ll figure it out on my own.”

The tips of your own ears tinged red, you could feel the heat. Learning more of what happened last night made you squirm, …it will flow back eventually. You hoped. Learning about it from the man himself made you embarrassed, super embarrassed. Knowing he was the type to be nonchalant about everything, he might describe the whole night without any reservations.

Feeling braver, you wiggled yourself into a position that had your legs wrapped around his waist and your head rested on the crook of his neck. Cloud nine, you sighed. This is what cloud nine feels like.

You closed your eyes and listened to the beats of his heart, the rhythm pulling you quicker and quicker into the sensation of sleep. As long as the man himself told you to stay, you shall indeed stay, God, you wanted to stay.

Eyes moving under your lids, one memory emerged— and boy did it send your heart tumbling. You yelped in reaction, eyelids immediately snapping open.

“Hm?” Todoroki asked, certainly with a teasing tone. A fraction of smirk was displayed on his lips. He had sort of an inkling of what happened.

“Nothing, nothing.” You deflected, snuggling your head back into the crook of his shoulder, a way to hide your forthcoming blush.

Warmth was his breath on your neck, trailing kisses down your collarbone, as his teeth lightly nipped the base of your throat. Your head blanked at the pleasure, the heat, the excitement— and only he, calling your name pulled you out of your drunken stupor, though the words he muttered afterwards sent you into a crying mess.

“…I love you.”

#todoroki shouto #todoroki shouto x reader #bnha todoroki #todoroki x you #todoroki x y/n #shouto x reader #bnha fanfiction #bnha scenarios #bnha imagines #eyes like sinking ships on waters #todoroki shouto x you

30 notes · View notes