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sweetestlamb · 3 years

Text

No Limits

Summary: Today's episode but minus the lies and with extra sexual tension but it gets resolved, somewhat.

Author's note: Today's episode called me a 🤡 too so in between writing my update for BMTL I wrote this drabble to ease my pain I love that the show keeps teasing us I really do it's delicious but I just wanted them to kiss sooooo badly today so here we go! I could keep going if people like 👀👀👀

P.s. Can an Italian tell me what exactly Vinny said to her in episode 3? Netflix says it was stupid idiot but that's stupida idiota and that doesn't sound like what he said to her in the clip. Help a writer out 🥺

She doesn't know if her father would be proud of her, or what she's been doing after turning away from Babel and reforming into a "good guy", it's borderline sanctimonious to consider herself a hero when she had spent most of the night torturing people. The ominous sound of toxic gas flooding the car still swooshes in her head, there was a moment when she'd truly considered going through with it.

Committing murder.

And he hadn't moved a single muscle to stop her, hadn't even uttered her name to pull her back in on the straight and narrow path to righteousness. In the end that had been enough to stop her, he trusted her enough to make the right decision. Every fiber of her being wanted to snuff out their lives the same way they had done to those innocent suffering families, but it was a line she couldn't return from. She should save it for a special occasion, they weren't worth tainting her soul. But there was someone else who was, Babo.

When the opportunity came, she wouldn't hesitate. Her father would have to look away because she wouldn't be stopping that time.

Before she realizes it they are outside her house, her late father's house and he's telling her good night. She'd ran out of excuses to keep sleeping at his apartment. Wanting to see him first thing when she woke up wasn't a reason she could say out loud to him, at least not sober. She was no longer scared of bumps in the night, being alone seemed more terrifying now.

"Drink with me." She whispers instead, falling back on a tried and true plan. They have become regular drinking buddies, using alcohol to cope and detach from the heinous things they see and do daily.

He looks over at her, wistful and searching before nodding solemnly. He unbuckles his belt and slides out of the car, though it is marginal she can see the hesitation in his movement and the night catches up with her. The blood is soaked into the pristine white of his collar, she recalls the hollow feeling in her chest when he didn't answer her calls and she was left with her torturous imagination. His possible death making desperate tears fall despite promising herself she wouldn't cry again.

She makes her way to the bathroom as soon as she enters the eerily quiet space, noticing the way Vincenzo peeks around the corner always on guard and she's thankful for his presence. With him, she's safe.

Pulling open her medicine cabinet she collects packets of gauze, a small bottle of antiseptic alcohol and a bandage, holding the small bundle in her arms before walking back to the living room. She finds him staring at the embarrassing photos of herself that her father had hung on the walls, she couldn't bring herself to take them down. There was so little of her father left.

"Don't let the hair fool you, I was still a heartbreaker back then. I had boys chasing after me." She lies with a smile and when he turns to look at her with those huge eyes she pauses mid step, his eyes survey her face in a distracting sweep before he smirks and walks away.

Maybe summer has come early, that would explain the sudden overwhelming heat that curls around her.

Shaking herself from her daze she calls out to him, "Hey! Come here before you bleed to death. I don't want the mafia coming after me."

The look on his face is his patent I'm going to refuse because I'm a pouty baby look and she intercepts it as she has become custom to doing, grabbing his hand and yanking him over to the kitchen table. For someone so intelligent he still hasn't learned that his refusals are futile around her.

"I'm fine. It's a shallow wound, it'll stop on its own." He argues and she wonders how many other times he has simply left a wound to fester and painfully heal on its own, was that his penance?

She shakes her head, "Why suffer when I can help you? Stop being so stubborn you're reminding me of a certain patient who you love scolding." He grows chillingly still at her words, and again a thought tingles in her mind that there's something she's missing but she presses it aside and pushes him down into the seat.

He doesn't put up a fight, going a little too easily.

"Open your shirt."

He stares at a point on the wall across the room, not responding to her command at all at first and then he looks up at her with dark eyes. She swallows deeply, raising a single brow.

When he continues to look at her without obeying her instructions she grows impatient, repeating herself, "Come on open your shirt I need to clean the wound."

Still he doesn't react and she carelessly tosses the supplies on the table, reaching out with steady fingers to unbutton his starched white shirt. He discarded the jacket earlier, so there are less layers obstructing her way. His face is unreadable as she grabs the smooth button and slips it through the hole, she gets two buttons undone before reaching the center of his chest and as if jolting back to life he suddenly grabs her hand halting her movement.

She stares at him in question, hands still on the button before he sighs at her, "I can do it myself." There's a tightness in his jaw that she can't explain and she has to stomp out the desire to run a finger across that sharp jawline.

"Okay. You do it."

Looking away she tries to give him some space but the sounds of him undressing capture her full attention and she feels her eyes shifting back captivated by the fluid motion of those dangerous hands. Knowing what they are capable of does nothing to douse the fire under her skin. Frustratedly he has a thin white shirt under the dress shirt and she can only faintly see his toned body through the material. She stares harder willing herself to develop x-ray vision, unfortunately those powers do no manifest.

"Surely I don't need to get shirtless right?" He inquires with a smug air and she glares at him, they've been playing this game for a while now. Longer than two adults should be as far as she's concerned.

In lieu of responding she picks up a fluffy cotton ball and saturates it in alcohol before dabbing at the blood on the nape of his neck, as she swipes higher he hisses at the sting and she remembers what her father would do for her when she was young and had scraped her knee. Leaning over his shoulder she puckers her lips and blows, cooling the burn.

She continues this until the cotton is soaked from the dried blood and alcohol and blowing one final time she draws back, this time she feels smugness simmering in her belly. His eyes are blown and pointedly looking away from her, she notices his tight knuckle grip on the seat of the chair as well.

"I'm all done." She announces moving away walking to the small garbage in the corner of the room. His breaths are loud in the quiet of the room, her heart echoes in tandem. Taking a deep breath she speaks without turning around, "You remember where the clothes are right? Get changed so we can drink."

She moves to the fridge to take out the platters of food they had purchased at the market earlier and the bottles of makgeolli, it was that kind of night.

He looks soft and harmless when he comes back out in a large knit sweater, without gel his hair flops across his smooth forehead and she's still not used to this sight, there's a level of domesticity that she's never had with another person. A man.

"I'll go change too." She whispers sidestepping around him, her hands brushing against his.

It's easy to get lost in their escape, slamming back gulp after gulp of the strong cloudy rice wine until her thoughts start to blur and she doesn't know what she's saying out loud and what's only privy to her brain.

When she hears herself monologuing her thoughts as she had ran into his arms in the underpass all she can do is scream internally, she can blame the alcohol but only for lowering her inhibitions really, it hadn't manifested the thoughts.

He looks stricken and oddly amused by her musings until she tells him to get up. That smile is wiped clean off his handsome face.

"I need to test it. Come on stand up." His reluctance is noted but unable to deny her once more he stands, a long suffering look on his face.

She tells him her plan, it sounds crazy even to her but for some reason he doesn't refuse or question her at all. Agreeing to all her stipulations and she's not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially not an Italian stallion.

Ten seconds.

That should be enough to hold her over tonight after he leaves her alone. If she can't lay beside him she needs a tiny piece of him.

Taking a running start she dashes across the small distance, slamming into his hard chest enjoying the juxtaposition of his solid body through the soft sweater. He smells amazing, even without his clothes that expensive cologne still lingers on his skin and she nuzzles into his shoulder. Curling her arm around his body she drags him tighter against her chest, her nipples pebbling with the close contact.

It's been longer than ten seconds and she knows she should stop.

But she really really doesn't want to.

Twisting onto his other side she prepares to let go, already regretting it but her sober thoughts are now pushing to the surface and she realizes what this looks like. Peering up at his face she expects to see that unreadable face again, he's annoyingly good at hiding his true emotions it makes her second this all the time.

Her insides churn when she sees the very face she expected. So she detaches and takes a step back prepared to dismiss this whole ordeal, the words denying her feelings for him already on her tongue when the biting sound of wood scraping against the floor fills the room. Jumping a little at the noise she glances over to the direction of the sound and sees his hands holding the chair in a punishing grip. He immediately releases the object at her glance but it's too late, she's already connected the pieces.

"You're holding back." She confidently states stepping back into the space she'd only just abandoned.

She doesn't ask why, that much is all too obvious.

I didn't want you to get hurt.

Being with him will put her in danger she's seen enough mafia movies to know that friends and love ones are always the first to be taken as leverage. So he'd decided all on his own that this, couldn't be and she was better off without him.

"Stupid idiot." She tries her best to repeat those explosive words with the same emphasis he's used when he had spat her in face not too long ago, watching with satisfaction as surprise shrouds his face as the Italian glides off her tongue. She'd been practicing for a while now, mostly curses words.

Fanculo, was still a favorite. What a fun way to say fuck.

She doesn't give him a chance to question her sudden switch in languages, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and pulling him closer, even more so than the hug they'd just shared.

"We're supposed to share everything, even passion." She boldly declares watching with fascination as he still tries to hold on to his semblance of control, the chair squeaks loudly under his hold and she lunges forward putting them both out of their misery.

It feels like coming home.

If your home was a sauna built on an active volcano.

Unlike their hug earlier this time there's no hesitation as soon as her lips touch his liquor moist ones he's already opening up and devouring her tongue. His immediate response makes her hungry for more, peeling his lips open with her teeth she sucks the remnants of the wine from his mouth, eagerly lapping and searching for more. He grunts at the rough treatment but doesn't back off, rather he sinks those capable hands into the depths of her hair caressing her scalp as he tugs at her head, tilting her to the right and moving instantly to the left slotting them even closer together.

The sound of their kissing is messy and loud, echoing in the still of the night.

She breaks apart with sloppy pop, gasping for air and his flushed red face greets her looking every bit as wrecked as she feels.

"Already regretting it?" He teases with an edge that's a bit too real and she yanks him forward, pressing him down into the chair and crawling onto his lap, legs straddling his thighs and their cores meeting through torturous layers. She's burning hot and moist where he's aching hard and rigid.

"Regretting waiting this long." She replies in a clear challenge waiting to see what he'll do.

"We shouldn't do this, partners is enough. You're already in enough danger as is, if they find out that we're..."

He trails off unable to finish the sentence but his clenched jaw speaks volumes. She chuckles coyly from her spot in his lap.

"What? What are we doing? What do you wish we were doing Mr. Vincenzo Cassano? Fucking? " She grinds down into his groin simultaneously and instantly he grips her hips, halting her movement with a bruising hold.

"You're playing with fire." He warns her, she can hear the metallic click of his ever present lighter at his words.

She should be scared of him, he was a world apart from what she was used to even when she'd been working with Babel, manipulation and bribery those things she could do without batting an eye but murder and torture? She'd had never done anything like this before, never. Not until this Italian Korean enigma had walked into her life and shaken it up like a margarita in a mixer. Was she making the right decision? She had no idea, right and wrong had become blurred a long time ago for her. All she knew was that the idea of not kissing him for another second made her want to pull her own hair out.

"I trust you not to burn me up. Too badly."

His eyes flash dangerously at her words and this time he's the one to initiate this kiss, cupping her head gently and dragging her into a sweeter embrace, a simmering heat now licking at her skin. She moans softly as he slips a wet tongue into her mouth, stroking at her back before pushing his hands up the back of her shirt, his hands are sweltering hot on her naked skin and she arches at the rough touch. They kiss languidly breaking apart only to come back together, each kiss wetter and more mind numbing than the last. With soft suckles to her bottom lip he pulls away, she stares at his soft smile as she chases after his retreating lips. Not ready to stop yet. She won't be ready for a long time.

He glowers at her and she waits impatiently for his next move, with strong arms he lowers her onto the table dishes clanging as he shoves them to the side laying her down like she's his last meal. She expels a loud breath allowing herself to be placed on the table, gasping as he stands looming over her.

"I'm the one in the mafia so why am I terrified of you?" He whispers too honestly, looking devastated as he stares at her helplessly all too ready to bolt.

"You don't want to get hurt."

He stares at her with liquid eyes emotions all but spilled across his face, with a whimper he closes the distance between them once more with her guiding hand on his back, this time they meet in the middle surrendering to the flames.

#vincenzo #vincenzo cassano #hong cha young #the tension is killing me #I wrote something without angst for them #it's a miracle

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has-gilgamesh-doneanythingwrong · 3 years

Note

In regards to the high school Au, Gil meeting a shy yet pretty girl that he likes. What would he do to win her heart?

Hello, anon! I'm glad you enjoyed the high school AU. This will be an interesting continuation...TIME TO GO IN GUNS BLAZING!!

btw i made the reader insert character gender neutral so then it feels more like a dating sims game. :3

note: this is going to be a bit ooc (crackfic maybe)

Student Gilgamesh Developing a Crush (High School Au)

- Bored, Gilgamesh sips his wine on the school roof as usual; gorging himself in a specially-reserved bento box. He liked it up above, where he could just rest, instead of dominating the school so fiercely.

- When he hears the sound of pattering footsteps traipsing across his sacred grounds, anger thunders down on his face. "To think that such a foolish mongrel would have the nerve to entrench themselves upon my resting area...How dare you-" The words freeze in his throat, as he catches sight of you.

- From your posture, to the expression on your face...Gilgamesh was ensnared within the thorns of captivation!

- "E-err...sorry about that." You bow politely, as wind billows through your beautiful strands of hair, eyes blossoming like the finest of flowers. "You see, I just like to sit here too sometimes." Albeit being rather nervous, you bravely spoke up for yourself, which he liked. "I mean, I can leave if you'd like but I like this place too-" His brusque red eyes catch you off guard, as you duck your head in agony; twiddling your fingers.

- He was so scary!! As you fluctuated between wanting to leave and wanting to stay (because its not as if Gilgamesh owns the school roof or anything), his hands suddenly grip yours- as he pulls you towards him with all the force of a bull.

- "How adorable...how utterly enthralling you are! I never expected to witness such a fine beauty upon these school grounds." Gilgamesh has already latched into his hardcore flirting mode, leaning in awkwardly close to your face. "Mongrel. Tell me your name. NOW."

- Eyes wide with shock, you reluctantly tell him your name, only for him to proclaim that you shall have his interest from now on. "Although you are a beauty, you are naught but a mongrel. If you catch my eye from now on as well, so be it!" He tries to play it cool, but is actually much more interested than he wants to let on. "Take this land for yourself. I have no need for it anymore."

-As he leaves- face beaming with joy- an ominous pit of worry pools in your stomach. You knew the rumors all to well- of how Gilgamesh was pretty tough work, relentless once interested; and the tales of all the people who he had left broken and rejected. 'I'd better pick a god and pray...'

- However, you are greatly surprised by how tame his approach is at first (let's just say that he can be quite a nuisance at times). Besides from randomly slotting the occasional gift atop your desk, and winking whenever you passed him by; Gilgamesh was pacing himself for once.

- Once you nervously asked your friends about this, they reassured you that he wasn't always quite so hardcore as he seemed. "He only pops off once he's fully invested! All the best," Your stomach churned slightly at the idea of that. The amount of expert knowledge they had on his movements were insane. Everybody treated him like a local celebrity!!

- However, all things drastically change once he crosses paths with you during Sports Ed. Bunking off yet another class deemed too banal to entertain him, he strolls through school grounds- only to catch sight of your legs trembling as you parry the horrible sports ed teacher's serves; tears dropping from your eyes- as other students watch blankly on, hoping to avoid eye contact with the situation altogether.

- Once the teacher picks his next unfortunate target, Gilgamesh is surprised to see you rush to the back; only to be taken aback by the next sight lying before him.

- Helping take care of students injured by your demonic excuse for a Sports Ed teacher, you mouth words of encouragement to them, despite clearly shaking with fear yourself. Despite being extremely shy and scared, it seemed as if you were trying desperately to support others, as well.

- "Hoh..." Now he was certainly interested. Slinking back to his private zone, Gilgamesh vows to conduct a little more research on a certain asshole Sports Ed teacher...

- Luck seems to strike the pan, for another huge encounter occurs once he bumps into you at the shoe lockers. The sun slowly sinks across the horizon; dappling the world around you in a bright orange light.

- "You've been evading me so skillfully lately, mongrel. Have my divine offerings been to your liking?" Leaning against your locker, he grins mischievously at you; red irises dancing with amusement.

- "T-the chocolates were nice...but I'm fine without any gifts. So you don't have to bring them anymore." Hugging your plastered hands to your chest, you lower your head. Now just wasn't the time, you were already drained for the day. "I have to go, sorry..."

- Now that was a surprise. Usually people would be dying for his attention, not evading him like this! However, this was exactly to Gilgamesh's liking oh my god. Leaning forwards, he's just about to attempt to set your heart aflutter with some cheesy adages until...

- The Sports Ed teacher bursts in, eyes brimming with rage. "Y/N!!! WHY ARE YOU LATE? All that talk about 'i want to protect my friends', and then you can't even come to club on time, huh? You freaking coward!" By this time, the teacher is gripping you by the arms, as scared tears drop from your eyes, expression frightened.

- Eyes narrowing with disgust, Gilgamesh stares at the events unfurling before him. His research had uncovered a great deal of trash on this teacher, who was infamous for training students way past their limits; bullying them severely for not fitting his ridiculous standards.

- Grabbing the teacher by the scruff of his neck, Gilgamesh forcefully pulls him away from your quivering figure. "How pathetic a troglodyte you are, to be treating your fellow mongrels with such disdain. " Gilgamesh all but hisses into the teacher's ears. "You leave me no choice but to punish you."

- "Punish me? Who the hell do you think you are, you bastard?! I'll suspend you for touching me!" The teacher slaps Gilgamesh's palm away, as you watch them with terror. Things were getting ugly, and fast.

- "I'm Gilgamesh. Remember the name, mongrel- especially once I've casted your meagre buttocks out of this estate." Unveiling his golden-plated phone, a horrifying gleam lights in his eyes as he reveals a huge list of the teacher's misdemeanors. "I know what pathetic things you've been up to...and about your abuse of power. Not that I'd usually care, mind you." However, the teacher had the gall to threaten you. Which basically meant that he was now dead meat?! he was gonna destroy him XD

- Worried, you step in before Gilgamesh can unleash one of his terrifying bribes upon the teacher. "W-wait, Gilgamesh!" As he turns to you-shocked that you'd address him by name, you smile. "I-I think we should have him legally fired instead...but that's just me..." That way, he'd never be able to become a teacher again.

- "Hoh, how kind-hearted of you. Well, I shall honor your rather pitiable request once." Gilgamesh shoos off the bewildered teacher, who looks confusedly between you both. "Fate has bestowed you with generous luck today; you pathetic excuse for a teacher. Depart the premises at once!"

- However, the teacher is extremely prideful; and lunges to attack Gilgamesh- flying so wildly off the mark that he legitimately crashes into the teacher's office nearby. Which alerts all of the teachers of the ensuing scuffle. Which then results in you having to bravely explain the situation...which ends up with the teacher being MIRACULOUSLY FIRED ON THE SPOT?!!!!

- It was as if this chain of events was perfectly orchestrated. As you look towards him with both a mixture of awe and fear, he heartily laughs. "Fuhahaha! Let's just say that Lady Luck favors me quite greatly." That was a lie. Gilgamesh knew much more than he was letting on.

- "Thank you." For the first time, you truly smiled at him; sunlight beaming down on your face. "For a scary tyrant, you can be really helpful sometimes." Those were not the words he was expecting to hear at all! Coughing awkwardly, Gilgamesh puts on a mask of nonchalance to avoid his burgeoning feelings. You weren't meant to say that!!!

- "Fuhn, I wasn't doing it to help you, nor the other pathetic mongrels that troglodyte was bullying. Don't get cocky, lowlife." And with that he was gone, as you waved goodbye.

romancing bit (?!!)

- Seeing as Gilgamesh is now very interested in you, he will most likely make sure to cross paths with you as often as possible; saying all sorts of cheesy and flirty things. He sits with you during break, loudly sipping wine by your side as other students look on with amazement. He also leaves letters and gifts by your desk everyday. The letters are eerily direct, proclaiming ominous things such as 'we shall wed...'

- Overall, he is overzealous and extremely headstrong in his approach, not giving you enough time to breathe. However if you tell him that you feel overwhelmed by his actions, he reconsiders them briefly...only to go over-the-top in different ways instead; hoping that you'll be pleased by his advances. I think Gilgamesh needs to learn more about self-restraint here.

- He'll probably want to take you to many places as well, and try and bowl you over with limited edition experiences; things that are beyond your wildest dreams. He's probably also going to get very serious as well by increasing the time he spends by your side considerably. Expect to see him everyday from now on, too!

- Is he the type to do a shoujo-manga style entrance to sweep you off your feet? Yes. He does helicopter landings every now and then, thrusting a bouquet at you. He also hires people to serenade you at times, much like something out of a romantic novel; and loves seeing your surprised reactions.

- He will get quite pushy at times, so it's recommended to alert him if you're not enjoying it. In his eyes, the two of you are as good as close contemporaries now.

- Exasperated, he finally decides to ask "Mongrel. What is it that you desire? Anything you shall wish for will be in your hands." He's absolutely convinced that he can do anything to win you over. However when you reply with a simple, "...I'd like some help with my studies!" as your adorable cheeks flush with determination, he sighs. There was no winning over you with conventional means. Yet, he is also spurred on by the challenge.

- "Although your response is a terribly common one, I'll oblige you." He certainly will. "With my expertise, you'll be acing all of your classes from now on!" When a color-coded, detailed guide on all of your subjects lands on your desk the next day, as Gilgamesh smiles smugly at you.

- As you flick through the pages, you see detailed notes on all the things you don't understand, and are quite shocked by the quality level of this. "T-this is amazing!" You gasp. "How did you do this?!"

- "I have my sources." He really did. "Mongrel. From now on, I shall stand by your side. Do not hesitate to call upon my assistance if need be." And with that, his word is final.

- I have a feeling that once he likes someone, he'll hold onto them quite tightly, and will do as much as he can to impress them; going out of his way to win their heart.

#gilgamesh #fate series #gilgablog #my writing #fgo #ok this is high school au so its a little tame a little crackfic and a little ooc XD its a light hearted story ^^#this is like an otome game now. it is isnt it.#asks #anon

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the-witty-pen-name · 3 years

Text

It Happened on Sakaar Pt. 1

Mando x F!Reader; Loki x F!Reader

Rating: M; 18+ Only

Warnings: swearing, mentions of drugs, alcohol, and exotic dancers, grieving, angst, slow burn

Word Count: 3.1k

Summary: The bounty hunter’s most recent puck sends him across the Galaxy to an unfamiliar and artificial planet named Sakaar- literally the galaxy’s trash can. Sakaar is a bizarre planet, but so is his most recent bounty. Din is chasing a man he only knows as The God of Mischief. The reader lives on Sakaar as a scrapper, a similar trade to that of a bounty hunter and has a tangled history with the man Mando is looking for. Will the unlikely duo team up to capture the mischievous Asgardian or will the reader fall victim to Loki’s promises?

A/N: I had planned on writing this in a few days but as per usual I put off coursework to write this fic! So here it is a couple of days early. I am also working on the next chapter of Deadbeat as well as Rest so look out for both of those within the next couple of days! I also am working on an adorable Obi-Wan x Reader request I received a few days ago that will be coming soon as well!

This is unedited and if I missed anything that I should include as a warning please let me know! Thank you y’all!

Tags and Requests are OPEN

He promised.

And you were foolish enough to believe him.

You were foolish to think you were different.

You were foolish to think you really got to know the real him.

You were foolish to think that everything he told you was real.

You were foolish to think that when he told you he loved you he meant it.

You were foolish to think he’d come back.

You, a warrior, a fighter, defender of the throne of Asgard, lied helpless on the ground, broken in pieces as you’re told by Odin that Loki was gone.

And he was dead.

You mourned him.

The ache never going away, day after day, that stupid statue just another thing to remind you that he was gone.

He wasn’t coming back.

Until he did.

And you realized how much of a fool you were.

And you realized everything you thought you knew was a lie.

So you left.

You left with the promise you made to yourself that you would never return to Asgard.

In your rage, you were blinded when you demanded Skurge open the bifrost and send you to the furthest planet from your homeland.

The thought crosses your mind that if it had been Heimdall, he wouldn’t have let you go, talked you into reason and asked you to stay.

If it had been Heimdall, Thor would’ve caught up to you in time instead of just missing you when you left.

You didn’t know where you were going and you didn’t care. Your only thought was to put as much distance from yourself and Asgard as possible. You landed in a gross pile of debris when you first arrived, and from there worked your way up to one of the favorites of the Grandmaster- you were dubbed Scrapper 451 and second in most captures to Scrapper 142. Time works odd in space, you’d been there for three years- completely developed a new life under your new alias.

You’d bring in life form after life form to the Grandmaster, always pleasing him by bringing him potential fighters.

You worked alone, you preferred it. The only friend you had was Scrapper 142 and that was hardly a friendship- more just a rivalry you both had your fun with. There was a mutual respect, and a feeling about her you couldn’t explain, but that was it.

When you met Mando, you almost killed him. You had heard a tip from a local shop owner a ship had landed rather roughly, and you made haste to be the first one to investigate, determined to beat 142 if there was a capture worth making.

Carefully navigating your way through the wasteland, you had finally found the ship in question. It was a model you had never seen before. You stay crouched behind a pile of trash, your stun gun aimed at the ship waiting for it to open.

You stopped and lowered your weapon when you saw the armored passenger had a very small creature by his side. A baby.

You hadn’t seen a baby on this planet since you’d landed. Sure, people have children, but you had never seen anyone bring their child to Sakaar. All the children whom you’ve met, had been born there- no one with a child willingly travels to this part of the Galaxy.

A metal man and a green baby. You scoffed. What an interesting duo.

You took in the appearance of the armored man. Sakaar had a very basic premise that determined your survival. Are you a fighter or are you food? This one was very clearly a fighter. Not necessarily one that you think could be a gladiator- not the right type. But you could tell by the way he walked out of the ship, he was a force to be reckoned with. The baby was really throwing you off of your game. You could have this man halfway back to the Grandmaster by now if he wasn’t traveling with a kid. Sakaar has not yet made you completely heartless, as much as you tried to be. You decide to compromise your position, in a hope of being able to just talk. Learn why he’s here.

No one comes to Sakaar. It’s never on purpose. Lost souls are dumped here. Yet, this man seemed like he was the only creature to intentionally travel to Sakaar like he was just passing through. If you couldn’t bring him in, maybe you could at least salvage parts from the ship.

“What’s your business here?” You ask, from behind the pile where you hid. You could see him but he could not see you. You watch as his first move is to close the floating pram, protecting his child first as he desperately looked around for the source of the voice.

“I’m passing through,” he replies, looking around at his surroundings.

“Nobody just passes through,” you reply. “No one comes here on their own accord. No one leaves once they arrive. What is your business?”

“I’m looking for someone,” he says nondescriptly, further irritating you. You stand up, slowly, your gun still pointed at the man as you walk closer.

“Who?”

“Bounty”

“You’re a bounty hunter?”

“No, I came here for vacation.”

“Don’t be a smart ass.”

“Don’t ask stupid questions.”

“Who are you here for?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t know.”

“What kind of bounty hunter are you?”

“One of the best.”

“Oh really?”

“Don’t test me, Princess.”

“If I’m a princess what are you?”

“Knight in shining armor?”

“Are you really hitting on me right now?”

“Only if you’d want me to be.”

“Gods.”

You can’t see his face from under his helmet but you could feel the smirk he was making. He clearly didn’t view you as a threat and it really annoyed you. Maybe you came off too friendly? No, you’re still pointing a gun to his head.

“Who are you?” He asked.

“Scrapper 451,” you said blankly. “Who are you?”

“You can call me Mando.”

“Mando?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of a name is that?”

“What kind of a name is Scrapper 451?”

“It’s a title.”

“Not going to tell me your real name?”

“Are you gonna tell me yours?”

“How-?”

“I’m not stupid.”

“What’s a scrapper do anyways?”

“Bring mouthy tin men in in exchange for a generous amount.”

“You’re a bounty hunter?”

“You could say that?”

“Are you going to turn me in?”

“That was my plan.”

“What’s stopping you?”

“The baby.”

“Slave catcher with a heart of gold?”

“I’ll get that on my tombstone.”

“Sooner rather than later I hope.”

“Ouch. Mando, I thought we were friends.”

“You know I didn’t mean it, Princess.”

“Who are you here for?”

“Someone who calls themselves the God of Mischief.”

You freeze, and you lower your weapon. You’re stunned. You hadn’t heard that title in years, and although you never forgot about it, you were great at pushing it back so far away where you couldn’t access it. The man is able to read your body language and can tell you know the man he’s looking for.

“He’s not here,” you finally manage to say, your knuckles turning white at how tightly you grip your blaster.

“He is here,” he says slowly, pulling out a bounty puck. Clear as day, Loki’s face shows up on the holographic screen. Your stomach churns.

“He’s not here,” you insist. “If he was, I wouldn’t be here. Trust me.”

“So, you know him?”

“Not at all.”

“Really?”

“Really,” you take a few steps backwards to walk away. “I wouldn’t stay on this planet long if I were you. Sakaar has a way of just pulling you in.”

“I think I can manage.”

“Get lodging,” you advise with a smile, “the next person who finds you out here won’t be as nice as me.”

With that you left, leaving the Mandolorian dumb struck. What was this planet?

Mando knew well enough to take your advice. With the Crest secured, he and the Child made a journey into the city.

Your words lingered in his mind. He knew you had information about the bounty you were withholding. He needed to run into you again. He reasoned with himself it was for the sake of catching the bounty, but part of him also wanted to see you again. He just wouldn’t admit it.

He found a place where he could get a room. An elaborate casino, with ornate decorations and loud music playing constantly. A large bar and lounge also attached. He received his room key and ignored the festivities that occurred in the bustling establishment- his first order of business to make sure the Child was settled and would be safe in the room. He regrets his decision to not ask Peli to watch him, but he knew he’d be distracted being so far away.

He figured he was far enough across the galaxy; he wouldn’t need to worry about those after his own bounty or the child’s. But he realizes that he forgot about needing a sitter. If he absolutely needed to, he could bring the child with him, but that was not ideal. Especially, since gauging your reaction at the mention of his new bounty, this didn’t seem like it would be any easy task. He sat down on the bed in the middle of the room, and pulled out the puck- reading over what little information he had.

He needed to find you again and desperately needed any information you’d be willing to share.

You were worried. There was no way Loki was here. You knew he wouldn’t have come for you, even if you thought about it when you first arrived. You thought if anyone would come after you, it would’ve been Thor, convincing you to return to Asgard and cleaning up another one of his brother’s messes. It hurt when no one from home reached out once in the last three years. However, you decided you were better off because if Thor had convinced you to return home, you’d have to face Loki again, and you were adamant on keeping your word you would not see him again.

***

His funeral was devastating. Although many on Asgard did not care much for Loki or his antics, the throne had lost a prince. It was a dark day. Weather on Asgard usually always seemed to be perfect, but on the day of Loki’s services, the God of Thunder was so distraught, he was unintentionally causing a gray and gloomy sky. Thor and you were affected the most.

You stood next to Thor as Odin spoke, but your gaze stayed fixated on the ground. It felt so unfair and you felt an indescribable amount of pain and loss. Your face was stained with tears, as was Thor’s, and you felt like you had just cried until you were physically unable to do so. He was gone and you couldn’t get him back.

Odin watched you solemnly throughout the services. He had told you that he knew how much his son loved you and how despite his absence, you are still considered family. He insisted you had an open invitation to be at the castle whenever you wanted. You could only nod and offer a very, very meek thank you.

You took advantage of that offer, and honestly, you knew you were overstaying your welcome under the palace walls. You found yourself coming, and spending the days in his room, trying to just feel him in anyway you could. You’d run your hands across the broken spines of his books, look at the kingdom from the view of his window, laying on the bed over the elaborate bedding to just try to feel him. You didn’t even know what you were hoping to feel, but you somehow thought this would help you be closer to him.

At events on Asgard, you continued to wear green, almost like your own twist instead of just the traditional black of mourning. It felt right to wear green in his memory, but it was nothing more than just another attempt to pretend like he was there.

You could imagine how he would react to seeing you wearing his signature color. When he was there, he looked at you like you were the only living soul in the room that mattered. He’d shower you were touches of affection and whisper nothing but praises to you, making you think he had actually loved you. This was back before you knew how foolish you had been, blinded by your own puppy love and your affections towards him.

***

You now sat in the lavish home of the Grandmaster. He always had hundreds of people in his home, a constant party, a group made up of Sakaar’s elite being entertained by drinking, drugs, or entertainment of sorts from his um… staff. Drink in hand, you sat cross legged on an elaborate circular couch lost in thought while a dancer performed on a table in front of the group you sat amongst. You didn’t even look up- you hated this part of earning the Grandmaster’s favor. You hated these parties with your whole being. They were hedonistic and you would avoid them if you had the choice. However, you knew the Grandmaster would take offense if you were not in attendance.

Music was loud, and there were many flashing lights. You couldn’t rely on any of your senses to navigate in a place like this, but that was intentional. The Grandmaster set this up on purpose. His parties were meant to be a completely immersive experience. It was probably great for those who wanted to be there, but for you, you wanted to escape and slip out as early as you could.

You weren’t interested in the company and you weren’t interested in the weird substances you didn’t recognize being passed around. You didn’t want to relax, and honestly, these attempts to relax always seemed to make you feel worse. Being sober at these events was invitation for horrible eye strain and a hefty headache.

“451! 451!” you heard a familiar voice call over the loud music in a sing song voice. It was the Grandmaster. He would be the only person at this party who would actually be looking for you.

“Grandmaster,” you smile, getting up and walking over to him. You kiss both his cheeks quickly as a greeting. “You look radiant,” you smile, the compliment going right to his head as they usually did.

“451! Look at you, let me see the ensemble,” he would say, talking a step back, and you would twirl once. It was a long golden dress that draped your body, with a plunging neckline. It was paired with golden arm bands and an elaborate gold necklace. You also had gold flakes throughout your hair. “Stunning,” he praised, “I wish 142 would be more involved like you 451- she’s the best, but ugh, she doesn’t know when to relax. Anyways, I called you over to meet a new friend of mine.”

“Are you replacing me, Grandmaster?” You say with a tone of mocked offense and it makes him laugh.

“451, there is no replacing you- you are the three B’s,” he chuckled, lightly guiding you over to another area of the party. “beauty, brawn and brains, a very rare combination indeed.”

“You flatter me, Grandmaster,” you laugh. If you went along with him to keep him happy, the Grandmaster was actually a pleasant creature to interact with. You had the ability to match his banter and he liked that about you.

“Anyways, anyways 451,” he says, as he remembers his train of thought, “I want to introduce you to someone. He’s devilishly handsome and talks like some stuffy aristocrat, he arrived here a couple of weeks ago and I was finally able to convince him to join us.”

“Did he say where he was from?” you ask curiously.

“Get this,” he chuckles, “Ass-guard. What a hoot, am I right? Anyways, there he is. We got to get whatever stick is out of his butt. I’m hoping you’ll help me to uh, loosen him up. Loki! I want you to meet one of my best, 451.”

Based on the look of surprise, you knew he didn’t expect you to be here. He looked like a deer in the headlights and it angered you that he was here. You felt your teeth clench, and you wanted to just get out of here as fast as possible.

“451 is one of the best scrappers I have,” the Grandmaster talks, “Of course, nothing compares to my Champion but she is ruthless. She’s second in the most gladiators she has been able to bring me.”

“Impressive,” Loki smiles, and you feel the urge to just scream. “I’m Loki, prince of Asgard.”

What an asshole.

“It’s an honor to make your acquaintance, Your Majesty,” you say between your teeth. You could kill him.

“I’m gonna mingle,” the Grandmaster announces, “I’m leaving you in 451’s hands.”

“Please let me explain,” he immediately tries to say as soon as the Grandmaster is out of earshot. You scoff.

“I’d tell you to drop dead if you hadn’t already,” you spit, “Don’t talk to me. I want nothing to do with you. Get off this planet.”

“Please, just allow me,” he begins.

“Fuck off, Loki,” you snap, and make a fast exit. You leave him standing there bewildered and you watch how stunned he looks as the elevator door closes behind you.

You felt small again. Like all the progress you had made gone in a single instance, and you knew tomorrow you’d face the Grandmaster but for now you didn’t care. You craved a warm bed and sleep more than anything else in the world.

You had planned on staying here so you didn’t know how you were going to make it back to your little apartment. You assumed just walk. You weren’t armed and that was always a terrible idea on Sakaar. You didn’t have anything except a dagger that was fixed to your thigh under the dress you wore. You wished you had your blaster.

“You clean up nice, Princess,” a voice modulated voice you recognize says when the elevator door opens.

“Mando,” you say curtly, stepping out of the elevator.

“You clean up nice,” he states.

“Thank you,” you reply.

“Leaving the party so soon?” He asks. You nod.

“Not really my scene. What are you doing here anyways?” you ask, crossing your arms over your chest for a little bit of warmth.

“I received a tip that my target might be here,” he answers, you nod, not elaborating on that you knew for a fact Loki was upstairs. “Did you see him?”

“No, I didn’t.”

PART TWO

Taglist:

@msclifford

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willowbird · 4 years

Note

prompt: aaron had a slight ED that he developed as a kid and is now being noticeable to the rest of the foxes even andrew and nicky kinda knew he forgot to eat but the stress from school and exy makes it worse....

I could easily expand on this and maybe one day I will. It hits kinda close to home tho so I’m going to err on the side of brevity just for my own mental space. Thank you so much for the ask! I hope this is what you’re looking for ❤️ ❤️ Take care of yourselves!

Warnings for depression, eating disorder.

Edit: this has been expanded and can also be found on my ao3

Part 1 | Part 2 | Ao3

-----

Wednesday | 6:04am

The alarm was screaming.

Its cries crashed against his senses like sea-storm waves and Aaron was without shelter. The sound had been crowding him for four minutes now, and he still couldn't lift a hand to make it stop -- even though he was perfectly aware and wide awake. He wanted to stop the sound, he needed the quiet back, but for whatever reason his hand just wouldn't listen to his brain no matter how many times he willed it to move.

Aaron hated days like this.

Wednesday | 8:43am

Nicky slung his arm around Aaron’s shoulders, a grin plastered on his face. His hair was slicked back like a low-budget greaser, halfway between wet and just damp. They’d just finished morning practice and he, Nicky, and Kevin were waiting out in the player’s lobby for Neil and Andrew to finish showering and changing so they could leave.

“Aw man, I am hungry. Please tell me that Andrew and Neil are gonna finish up soon so that we can go get a real breakfast.” Nicky's whining was easy enough to ignore most of the time, but today Aaron was tired and his patience was thin. He had three tests to study for, two essays to write, they had a game coming up on Friday, and Aaron didn't have the bandwidth for Nicky, too.

He shruged his cousin off with a snort. "I'm just gonna hitch a ride to the library." There were still a few hours before his first class of the day, and he needed to use that time for something productive.

"Aww, c'mon Aaron come to breakfast with us! We'll drop you at the library when we're done. It won't take too long!"

"What won't take too long?" When Aaron looked over, he saw Neil and Andrew coming out of the locker room, clean and changed.

"Breakfast!" Nicky announced. "Neil, tell Aaron to join us! It's a family breakfast -- he should be there!"

"You can't just label things "family" events as a way to require people to be there," Kevin said with a long-suffering sigh. Even so, Aaron noticed he already had the menu of their usual breakfast joint pulled up on his phone. The pictures of pancakes topped with glistening syrup and fluffy omelets made his stomach clench in an unpleasant way.

Aaron looked away.

"I've got a shit to do," he said. That would be his final word on it, and to demonstrate, Aaron turned to head toward the doors.

Except Andrew had moved to block him, though Aaron hadn't registered when his twin had circled them. Aaron frowned, lifting his chin in challenge.

Andrew just studied him for a long moment before looking just past Aaron, gaze darting over his shoulder to the others behind him. He lifted a hand and a second later a slim object snapped into it. When Andrew then held it out to him, Aaron saw it was a granola bar.

A quick glance over his shoulder exposed the granola bar thrower as Kevin, who was zipping his backpack shut. They matched gazes briefly and Kevin nodded toward the granola bar in Andrew's hand.

"If you aren't going to come to breakfast with us make sure you get something on your way to the library."

Aaron glared at him, then rolled his eyes and turned back to his brother. Andrew just looked at him, expression blank, and continued to hold out the damn granola bar like he could stand there all day without a care in the world.

A flash of resentment boiled through him. Of course Andrew could stand there so fucking unbothered. Barely anything affected him at all.

With an annoyed huff, Aaron snatched the bar out of Andrew's hand and shoved it into his pocket before stalking out of the building.

Wednesday | 1:15pm

Katelyn ❤️ (13:15): Hey baby! Prof Dixon bailed again ~ you free?

Aa. Min. (13:15): McCallister's?

Katelyn ❤️ (13:16): See u in 5! 😘

Wednesday | 1:23pm

Aaron stood inside the confused cacophony that was McCallister's, an on-campus restaurant that was the love child of a deli and a pub but four times too big, regretting his choices.

It wasn't even the noise that was bothering him the most. It was the smell.

Aaron took two steps into the restaurant and his stomach roiled. It twisted and tightened, curling in on itself in disgust at the sharp, slimy stench of cold cut deli meat cushioned on a waft of double-baked potatoes that filled the restaurant like wildfire's haze. He and Katelyn met here for lunch two or three times a week when their schedules lined up. They both liked the food and they had several corner booths where they could hide in and study together after eating. It was one of their favorite places. But right now, Aaron was fighting not to gag.

“Aaron!” Relief warred with dread at the sound of Katelyn’s voice and he hastily plastered on an imitation of the smile he usually didn’t even have to think about, that always rose to his lips whenever she was around all on its own. It didn’t today, but for Katelyn he could make the effort. For Katelyn, Aaron could do anything.

He turned around once that smile was fixed in place and wrapped his arms around her when she joined him, indulging in a quick kiss that soothed some of the nausea churning in his gut. When they broke apart, Aaron turned to lead them toward their usual booth but Katelyn stopped him with a hand on his arm.

“Babe is everything alright?” Worry painted a crease between her eyebrows, her mouth drawn down as she studied him.

Most days, Katelyn’s concern warmed him. It made him feel seen and loved and cherished. Today it put a slash of anxiety through his lungs, breath seeping out through the cut and concaving his chest under the weight of her scrutiny.

Aaron arranged his smile into something tired and unalarmed. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just a long week, y’know?”

Katelyn hummed like she wasn’t sure she believed him but was deciding to trust him anyway, then she smiled and she released his arm only to take his hand, giving it a small squeeze. “Alright, then let’s get some lunch and shut out the rest of the world for at least a little bit, yeah?”

The smell of the restaurant was still choking him and even his skin felt tight. The absolute last thing he wanted to do right now was stay there another second, let alone the hour he had until he needed to think about heading to his next class.

“I’m so sorry Kate, I’ve got to meet with the TA for my history class. I remembered right after I texted you but I still wanted to see you so I figured I’d just tell you when you got here.” He offered an apologetic smile and did his best to ignore the way guilt was now mixing uncomfortably well with the sick already sloshing around in his stomach. Aaron did not like lying to Katelyn, it felt wrong. But he also couldn’t... he couldn’t explain what was wrong with him right now -- not because he didn’t know, but because he was sure explaining it was going to make him sound crazy and that was just the last thing he needed right now. It was better to slip away, go somewhere he could focus on homework or something and just... wait for it to pass.

Katelyn’s expression fell, flashing disappointment, then a sad understanding as she nodded. “Of course. It’s okay babe, really. I’m just glad I got to see you at all.” She smiled then -- that bright, warm, just-for-him smile that always had Aaron’s heart skipping. A small knot of tension loosened in his lower chest, just enough that he was able to take a small breath and offer a more genuine smile of his own in return.

“I love you,” he told her.

“I love you too, Aaron. Take care of yourself and I’ll see you later, okay?”

He made no promises before he made his escape, just a smile and a wave.

Wednesday | 3:37pm

The granola bar tasted like ash in his mouth. It felt like there were iron weights attached to his jaw, making it impossible for him to chew. A fist of repulsion locked around his throat, and it was a physical struggle to swallow.

This was the worst part about days like this.

Aaron knew he had to eat something, because he knew what could happen if he didn’t and the only thing worse than having to put up with feeling this way, dragging himself through the mud of his own psychosis one step, one mile, at a time -- was doing it with everyone watching him struggle.

So he forced himself through half the granola bar. He knew better than to push for more than that, or all his efforts would be wasted into the nearest trash can.

Wednesday | 7:51pm

Practice had been brutal. It had been so bad that even Nicky hadn’t been able to cheer himself through it and was just as bitter and on edge as the rest of them by the time they hit the showers.

Aaron sat in the lobby and waited for the others, feeling old. He felt tired. He just wanted these stupid pissing contests to stop and everyone to shut up. He wanted the world to be completely silent, completely empty. Emptiness sounded nice. Sounded peaceful. Sounded right.

The sharp scuff of shoe-rubber against tile had him cringing so hard his shoulders ached and he peeled his eyes open to glare at the source. Andrew stood there, hands in his pockets, blank-faced and too knowing.

Aaron snorted and looked away.

The couch shifted slightly as Andrew took the spot next to him. There was the soft shk of a blade cutting into something crisp and when Aaron looked over, Andrew was holding out a small sliver of apple. His brother wasn’t looking at him. Instead, the other Minyard was dispassionately staring at the tv, which was playing some sports channel that Aaron knew very well Andrew didn’t give a single shit about.

For a long moment Aaron just stared at the side of his twin’s face, but it was impossible to know what, if anything, he was thinking about. Finally, he looked at the sliver of apple. It was pale, small, unobtrusive. Aaron’s stomach clenched, a mix between hunger and repulsion. All he’d had today was that half a granola bar -- which had been both too much and not enough. His throat tightened as he stared at that innocuous slice of fruit, but he was almost focused more on the hand holding it. His eyes burned and he looked away, but not before taking the slice.

#aftg #aftg fanfic #tw: depression #tw: eating disorder #tw: ed #aaron minyard #andrew minyard #twinyards #of course i made it a twinyard drabble #because i'm a sucker for the boys supporting each other #going into a small headcanon in the tags here #i hc andrew struggles with food #similar to what aaron goes through here #but more intense #because he has a very complex relationship with food #based on his past #and then the manifestation of his depression does not help #i actually have a wip based on this #from andrew's pov #where we see him dealing with his ed #and the way the monsters support him through it #sometimes his ed crops up due to his depression #and sometimes its separate #anyway #this was an unnecessary a/n in the tags here #but that's why andrew took the approach he did in the drabble #because how he treats aaron in this is how he needs to be handled when he has his own episodes

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hot-wiings · 3 years

Text

The One Where Dabi Gets Involved With Overhaul’s Girl. Part Fourteen.

Edited: 1-15-2021

The days with Dabi soon turned into two weeks. Two explicitly passionate and exquisite weeks. Somedays you stayed inside your room with him and played games together, uno and monopoly, were two of your go-to games. Dabi had told you he hadn't really played games besides sports with his siblings when he was younger, you had decided to set out to change that. Other days you would leave your room to make your presence seen by Kai's lackeys, both you and Dabi would be seen by his 'loyal' men in a friendly bodyguard and protected manner. Nothing more than what they would assume is a work relation.

It was so arousing and thrilling. One minute you were in Kai's bed, having glorious sweet and precarious sex with Dabi, the next you were eating dinner in the Shiehassaikai bases kitchen and nobody had a clue what you and Dabi had done. No one knew, no one suspected. It was a well-kept secret between you and Dabi, but you had to suppose all things had to come to an end.

"When is he coming back?"

The question rolled off of your lips as you crawled across the bed and over to Dabi's lap. His rough hand comes up and grabs your hips, both giving you support and trying to stop you from sitting down on him or grinding against him.

"He texted me, he'll be back in an hour."

"You think we got time for, um...?"

There was desperation in your voice, practically aching for him to take you again before Kai came home. He was straining against his belt, hot and heavy at you throwing yourself on him, begging him to take you for a second time that morning.

"No, I don't wanna risk it. If he came back while I was in you he'd kill us both on the spot, and I’d like to take my time with you."

Your cheeks burned crimson red, you felt hot and needy yet Dabi and you had already passionately fornicated that morning. You plopped down on the bed next to Dabi and took his hand into yours. You were nervous about Kai coming home. Nervous that things between you and Dabi would change, nervous that Kai would somehow know.

"Nothing’s gonna change when he comes back, right?"

"Course’ not doll."

Dabi placed a swift kiss against your head. It was tender and loving, so reassuring and special before he muttered out more reassuring words to you.

"Nothing's gonna change. I'll still love you even when he makes you cling to him. I’ll love you, but we just can’t be as close. Can’t have as much sex, or kiss. I’m gonna get you out, don't forget I promised you that."

"I can't wait to get out. I want to be far away from him, I want Eri to be far away from him."

Dabi swung his legs off of the bed and turned to you with a half-lidded smile. It churned your stomach every time he smiled at you. Every time you saw his turquoise eyes, every time you saw the glint in his staples. You couldn't remember ever feeling this way about Kai.

"Strip."

"Oh, so we do have time for it."

"No, I want my shirt back, and I want to change the sheets before Kai’s back. You've been awfully horny, Kai must have a tiny dick, or am I just that good?"

You pulled Dabi's shirt up and off your body. You scrounged around in your dresser for a shirt and pair of pants after you threw Dabi his shirt back to him. You supposed you should get in the shower, there was cum on your leg. It wasn't dried, but rather kind of pastry having decided to cuddle instead of clean up after yourselves earlier. Just the knowledge that Kai would be disgusted at you for not immediately cleaning up afterward was euphoric.

"You are good. You're gentle, but rough at the same time. You pay attention to me and what I say... It’s pleasurable."

"That's how it should be."

Dabi collected your sheets and left your room to give you privacy to shower. His heartfelt heavy at your words. He had seen how Kai treated you, he saw the roughness, the violence. It shouldn't have come as such a surprise that he was the same in the bedroom. Getting you out wasn't enough for Dabi, he wanted to hurt Kai, but he supposed getting you and Eri out would have to be enough for now.

Once Dabi left your room you grabbed your clothes, placed them on top of your dresser, and went into the bathroom. You turned the shower handles to make the water hot and climbed in. The water hit you, wetting your hair as it proceeded to run down your back. You watched as it hit your legs and made a milky white residue slide down the floor of the bathtub. Evidence that you and Dabi had been together so intimately.

Sometimes you felt bad, bad, and guilty. You were Kai's girlfriend, you should be loyal to him. You shouldn't be cheating on him, fornicating and fraternizing with a member of the league of villains, which Kai hated. With Dabi. You had to remind yourself what he’d done to Eri. You had to remind yourself that the way Kai had been treating you wasn't right, wasn't normal. You had to remind yourself that a relationship based on threats and hurt wasn't right. It had been happening for so long that you started to normalize it.

You watched the last remnants of your morning with Dabi wash down the drain with a smile on your face. Dabi treated you so well, so right. The last two weeks with him without Kai around were euphoric, completely euphoric. He wasn't there to hurt you, wasn't there to deliver some unjust punishment. Dabi had held you, touched you, and made you feel such pleasure in ways Kai would never accomplish and he would never know. He would never know of the betrayal you delivered to him. He would never know how you developed feelings for Dabi. He would never know how Dabi held you, touched you, loved you. He would never know until you and Eri were long gone.

You stepped out of the bathtub after rinsing the soap off of your body and stepped out into the bathroom floor. Water dripped on top of the towel you had previously laid out. Maybe it was from being around Kai so much, but you hated getting out of the shower and having your feet touch the cold, gross ground while they were wet. You grabbed the second towel you had laid out on a shelf and began running the item over your body, drying off every droplet of water. You grabbed a third and final towel and wrapped it around your head, trapping all the water on your hair in one place and keeping it there until you were ready to deal with it after you were dressed.

With one towel tightly wound around your hair and the other tightly wrapped across your body and chest, you walked back into your bedroom. Kai was back now, he's sat on the bed, perfectly still just waiting for you. It takes everything in you not to go back into the bathroom, not to lock the door and keep him away from you. The thought is silly and futile, he'd just warp the door. You notice the bed is made and clean now, indications of what you and Dabi did were no longer there. It brings a smile to your face, prideful and glorious, vindictive joy.

"Hi."

It comes out meek, but you try your best to make it sound happy. You have to play the game. Play the game to win the game, that's what Dabi told you to do. You need to play the game to win the game, play the game to end the game. Just play into him, do what he wants, convince him until you can leave.

"I missed you."

"Did you?"

His reply feels accusatory. Threatening and dangerous, and you have to clench your thighs together. It wasn't arousal or anything of that sort, it was fear. Pure, terrifying, fear. Fear that he somehow knew what you did. The fear he somehow knew of your betrayal. But he couldn't have known. He wasn't here, and he took a lot of his men with him. Dabi was the one who was supposed to watch you for this type of thing, and he wasn't about to snitch on himself.

"I did!"

Kai raises his eyebrows at you. Maybe it was the distance, but this was the nicest he’d spoken to you in a long time. He stood up and walked towards you, billions of nerves erupted in your body. You didn't want him touching you while you weren't yet dressed. His hand reached up like he was about to touch your cheek, but it never comes. He brings it back down to his side instead.

"I read there's an old virus making a comeback. Multiple cases in China, it hasn't hit Japan yet. I want both of us to go and get a check-up."

"Of course, Let me get dressed first!"

"Please be quick, I want us to get blood work done as soon as possible."

You walked over to where you had left your clothes on the edge of your dresser and took a deep breath. Kai was watching you, you knew he was. You hated getting dressed in front of him, you hated having his eyes on you. What he did that night, how he pushed you into letting him defile and touch you, it wasn't right. You were being cautious around him, trying not to entice him. That wasn't something you could afford.

Dabi’s words flooded through your head. You had to play the game. You had to play the game to win the game. Play the game to safely leave the game. You needed to convince Kai. You needed to make him think you were wholeheartedly and completely his. You needed him to think that you loved him completely, that you submitted to him completely.

Instead of discreetly trying to slide your clothes on with your towel wrapped around you, like you usually would, you let the towel drop to the floor. The cold air hit your skin making you shiver, but you paid no mind to it. You didn't look over at Kai, you just kept your eyes forward and head down as you tried to get your clothes on your body without any interruption.

Thank the lord Kai was worried about infecting you with some disease, he wouldn't dare try to touch you or incite some kind of activity right now. You finished pulling your shirt down on your chest, buttoned your jeans over your belly button, and slipped into some slip-on shoes before you turned to Kai, with what you hoped was a smile and not a grimace. You quickly pulled the towel from your hair, squeezing the water off as you pulled before you tossed the towels in the dirty laundry basket.

"I'm ready."

Kai grins at you. It's happy and charming. One of the smiles you used to have but no longer got from him. You would've even taken his hand to make him happier but you knew he wouldn't take it before you both tests ran. You had to suppose that his mysophobia, his fear of getting infected and sick, really made him afraid sometimes. He got ever so irrationally upset over checkups. He demanded everyone got them every three months, and he got completely irate when he saw an ill person. He was happy, grateful even that you weren't acting up at the moment. Grateful and ecstatic that you were being so submitted to him.

"Thank you."

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pucksnsticksnhockeyboys · 4 years

Text

cold soup

request: Hi love, could we have 74 and 63 with Mat Barzal? Love your writing 💕

prompt: “Why didn’t you call me?” & “You’ve been crying, I can tell.” / numbers 63 & 74 off of this list.

summary: you’re sick and don’t want to ruin Mat’s guys night so you suffer silently at home.

warnings: none

word count: 1.3k

requested by: @just-a-sad-chicken-nugget-xxx

The night had planned did not originally involve you laying on the couch, wallowing in self pity and sickness. But, there you were, wrapped up in not only your boyfriend’s sweatshirt but two blankets and still shivering.

You were supposed to have a fun night with your friends, catching up on the latest gossip that would probably end up with you a little wine drunk. This night had been in your calendar for weeks, and you even planned on missing the Islanders game. Though, per Mat’s request, you would stream it on your phone because ‘every goal I score is for you, but what’s the point if you're not watching?’, to which you’d tell him he was scoring those goals to get to the Stanley cup, and he’d huff and call you unromantic.

Since you had planned on staying late at your friends, Mat had arranged to go out for drinks with some of the guys. You figured that since they had won their game, they deserved a bit of celebrating.

When you had felt the symptoms of a cold that morning when you woke up, you cursed your luck and took some medicine. Work had been hell, and only worsened how you felt. By lunch, you had developed a runny nose and as soon as you got into your car to head home your scratchy throat had grown into full-blown cough that wouldn't seem to let up.

Mat was gone by the time you arrived, and sure enough you checked your phone to see that he had texted that he was heading into the rink a bit early. You were still holding out hope that you would be able to make it to your friend’s place, but all bets were off once you caught a glimpse of yourself in the bathroom mirror.

Your eyes were bloodshot and droopy, like you were moments away from passing out right there on the tiled floor. Your skin was paler than usual, and you were starting to see why your coworker had told you that you looked a bit green.

There was no way around it—you were sick.

You texted your friend the unfortunate news, stating that you wouldn't be able to make it and they quickly responded that they’d pour one out for you. The image of them pouring out a glass of wine in your memory made you giggle, which instantly triggered a fit of coughs.

By the time you had settled and caught your breathe, you had made your way into the bedroom you share with your boyfriend before grabbing a pair of sweatpants and one of his hoodies to wear instead of your work clothes. You made a nest of blankets on the couch in your living room, queuing up your current Netflix binge as you waited for the Islanders game to start.

And you were still there, hours later, your patience growing thin as you waited for Mat to return. You weren’t mad at him for going out, in fact you had encouraged him, but you felt like utter shit, to put it nicely. It may have seemed juvenile, but you just wanted your boyfriend to come home and take care of you like you knew he would if he knew the state you were in. But he deserved some time out with the boys, and you couldn't help but grin at the ridiculous snaps he’d send you of Tito wincing after doing a shot. Plus, you were certain the entirety of Long Island would come for your head if you got the Mathew Barzal sick.

It was nearing half past midnight when the self pity started to kick in. Your head ached and your whole body felt sore from staying in one position for so long. You knew you should try and make yourself something for dinner other than the bowl of canned soup you had heated up earlier, but the prospect of eating something in your current state had your stomach churning.

It was then that you started thinking about how badly you wanted to be cuddled up in your loving boyfriend’s arms, even if that would put him at risk of contracting whatever you had.

It didn't take long for you to start crying. You weren't even sure why you were crying exactly, probably a mixture of your sickness and being away from Mat that had you curling up into a ball on the couch.

Your outburst hadn't lasted terribly long, and soon enough you had composed yourself enough to quiet down to just some sniffles as you used the sleeves of Mat’s hoodie to wipe your tears.

As if he knew he was desperately needed at home, the front door opened and Mat appeared. When he spotted you on the couch, he didn't notice the sickness that clearly had its hold on you—or the mountain of used tissues piling in the small garbage can you had brought over.

“You’re home?” Mat questioned. You could tell he wasn't drunk by the simple statement—that, and by the text he had sent you earlier in the night saying he had lost rock paper scissors and was the one responsible for making sure everyone got home safe. You couldn't help but roll your eyes at him, despite the fact that you were making the grabby hands at him to silently tell him you need attention.

Mat was a few steps away from giving you the loving you’d been missing all night when he froze in his spot. You noticed the furrow in his brow as he examined your face, and you wondered if you actually looked so gross, your boyfriend refused to touch you.

“You’ve been crying, I can tell.” He stated, matter of factly, and you almost giggled. But that would've made you start coughing, and you weren't up for that. It was most likely very obvious that you had been crying—sobbing, actually. It was most likely certain that your eyes were bloodshot and red rimmed, not to mention how puffy your face got. Your cheeks even felt wet still, so you were certain there was still tear tracks that you hadn't managed to wipe away yet.

“I didn’t go out tonight.” You explained, pulling the blanket tighter around yourself. When Mat’s look on confusion showed no signs of lifting, you continued. “I’m sick. And I felt really gross, and I missed you so I kinda... cried.” You winced. Saying the words out loud made you feel a lot more childish than you originally had thought.

“Why didn’t you call me? I would've come home early.” Mat asked, as he moved to kick off his shoes before climbing onto the couch. He wedged himself between the back and where you were laying on your side, and you adjusted yourself so that your head was resting on his chest.

“I wanted you to have fun with the guys.” You mumbled, your eyes closing unconsciously as his hand found its way into your hair, massaging gently at your scalp. Already his touch was making you feel better.

“I see them practically every day, I would've been fine missing one night going out.” You could hear the chuckle in his voice and you hummed to let him know you had heard him. “Did you watch the game tonight at least?”

“Two goals, just for me. I missed the second one though, because I was making soup.” You stated absentmindedly, already halfway asleep. You felt his chest rumble as he laughed, and he spotted the untouched bowl of cold soup sitting on the coffee table.

“I see it was worth it.” He teased, the only act of retaliation you were capable of mustering up being pinching his side, though he barely felt it. You could feel his gaze on you, but you were succumbing to sleep so quickly you were losing the battle of staying awake. “I love you, you know.” “I love you too, Mat.”

#mat barzal #Mathew barzal #mat Barzal x reader #mat Barzal imagine #mat Barzal imagines #Mathew Barzal x reader #Mathew Barzal imagine #Mathew Barzal imagines #nyi #New York islanders #New York Islanders imagine #New York Islanders x reader #hockey #nhl #hockey imagine #nhl imagine

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moved-attre · 3 years

Text

Rewriting Cyberpunk 2077 into a bullet point list! LET’S GO!

(Disclaimer: I’m trying to be realistic. So no, “every single detail of the game changes based upon every single choice V makes” but just things I expected in an RPG from an AAA company in 2020. I take a lot of inspiration from the old trailers, and rumors of pre-2018 development.)

And this is really long, too. Sorry. 😜

Okay, so first off: Act 1 generally goes off the same as it does in canon. I’m open to other ideas, but I don’t think it’s a bad starting point. I do think V and Jackie should have had more time together, doing smaller jobs until Dex calls. Like, there should’ve been side jobs that were only available in Act 1. You have to get a minimum of 5 street cred before you get the conversation with Jackie about Dex.

The heist still goes to shit; Yorinobu kills his father, Takemura rebels against him and Arasaka factions split. V inserts the chip into their head, Jackie still dies and Dex shoots V in the head. Takemura rescues V, kills Dex, V wakes up in Vik’s and is told they have 4 months to live. (2 weeks is not enough!)

On to Act 2! The origins actually affect the game, so there’s three versions of it you can play. (Some things happen regardless of the origin, though.) For example: Corpo V has contacts in the Corpo world and pursues leads about the Relic there through their old friends. Street Kid V has contacts in the gangs, like the Valentinos or Maelstrom, who have dirty dealings with corporations and can get V in on Arasaka knowledge, Nomad V has leads out in the badlands about the corporations and gets in that way, hijacking transports to get some info. All origins can work with the corporations (like Hanako’s branch of Arasaka, Militech, Biotechnia, etc.) or against them. Like, the point is to snoop around the corporations and dig up some dirt on the Relic and Yorinobu’s Arasaka branch specifically but each origin goes about it differently?

Maelstrom vs Meredith Stout choice actually matters. It’s one point in a subplot I mentioned above, where V continually makes choices on whether they’re gonna side with the corporations or the gangs/people of NC against Arasaka in order to be rid of the Relic. Also affects V’s relationship with Johnny. You can also have a real, long term relationship with Meredith if you pick her side and get Militech support, or count on Maelstrom to help you in the main plot against Arasaka. Both sides will still attack V if they poke their nose in, meaning random encounters can still happen.

^ The subplot is like, making a deal with the devils (The corpos) or... other devils (The gangs). One person objectively could say one is better than the other, but they’re both awful. Night City is kind of rotten to the core, and V’s problems can’t be fixed by a pursuit of justice. V can still be a good person in either case, and it’s still kept kind of punk by going against the head honchos. I think this more suits the “Wake the fuck up, Samurai. We have a city to burn.” quote because V is churning up a path to the top, even if their methods are purely selfish. V themselves can be uninterested in righting wrongs, but they kind of turn NC on its head by challenging Arasaka so changes come anyway.

Point, is you fuck everything up either way. THEN, V can choose whether to trust the corporations and work with Hanako to “change the system from within” without disrupting people’s day-to-day lives (short term good choice I suppose?) or to let the gangs rise up and cause total anarchy. (long term good? since the downtrodden are rising up and maybe there shouldn’t be absolute power in the hands of a few.)

T-Bug doesn’t die. V thinks she’s dead, but sometime in Act 2 gets an anonymous call and meets up with T-Bug. She went underground after the botched heist, and isn’t eager to work with V again. Maybe you do a few missions with her, and she comes around? Or you fuck up and never hear from her again. I imagine she’d love to poke around at the Relic, if V helps her.

Giving Jackie’s body to Vik has real consequences. If you give his body to his mother, you attend the ofrenda and get his bike, his mom allows you to use his den as a place to stay... It’s basically the ‘good’ choice, if you care about the characters. If you give his body to Vik, you unlock a side mission where Arasaka steals his body to find the relic. You have to go and find it but it was destroyed(?) at some point by Arasaka. You can get his pistols (Which are, aside from Johnny’s pistol, the best weapons in the game. I don’t get why they aren’t in canon...) in this route and whole lotta angst, so his mom basically hates you because she blames you for not being able to bury her son and the bar is off limits. No getting the bike, either.

More content involving Alt Cunningham. V still witnesses the scene with her and Johnny, her kidnapping and death. But, Ghost AI Alt allows V to look into Alt’s memories for information on Mikoshi. V accidentally accesses some more personal memories. We can see Alt as more of a fleshed out actual person, not just a tragic backstory for Johnny. Some of the memories do involve Johnny, and the tone is very different from her perspective. We see that Alt has genuine affection for him, but Johnny is possessive and abusive... It’s far from the relationship Johnny recalls. Of course, Johnny can see all this too since he lives in V’s head. He and V have a heart to heart afterwards, with Johnny realising how badly he treated Alt and yeah. I wasn’t satisfied with how Alt was just used as a sob story for Johnny, but I was sent an ask by an anonymous person about how the memory was from his perspective and thus biased. It really got me thinking! If I was more creative, I’d come up with a way for Alt to live... But Johnny still needs to bomb Arasaka and Alt’s death was the reason why he did that.

You have to return one of your apartments/safe houses every few days to wash and sleep. If not, V will get a penalty that means they are less accurate when aiming and slower when breaking in a vehicle. Also some NPC’s will refuse to talk to you if you don’t bathe, because... stinky.

And you have to eat! Otherwise you get hungry, and get penalties for that too. Can’t concentrate on an empty stomach. I’d say eating once or twice a day would be enough.

Instead of fast travel points (that are supposed to be taxi services, I think...? But we never see a taxi! And why can’t we just call Del? Ugh.), V takes the metro. There are side missions that can sometimes only start once you get on or off of a train. (You meet NPC’s in the train, or waiting for one.)

Takemura and Johnny are romance options, and are available for all genders. They’re the most difficult to romance, with some (kind of obvious) dialogue choices ending the possibility. Like, for example: Takemura’s romance ends badly if you choose to go against the corporations, and Johnny’s ends badly if you go with the corporations. It’s the same with Meredith, essentially, in that going against her won’t allow you to romance her. I know a rival-mance system is possible, but I think that might be too complicated.

Takemura and V’s relationship is much, much deeper. They have more time together, and grow closer. Takemura trains V in combat, and takes over from Coach Fred in the street fights side missions. You go with Takemura to fights, he’s your coach, is very proud when you win. (He’s basically training V in the event that they have to take on Adam Smasher and Oda. Like, why did we have no training montages with Takemura?!) V is able to choose romance or stay friends with him. There’s plenty more missions with Takemura too, mainly espionage stuff against Yorinobu. Finding out his weaknesses, replacing his staff with people that are loyal to Hanako, digging for dirt on him. Lots of stake outs, hehe. 😉 Romance!™️ Also makes it that much more tragic if V doesn’t choose to trust the corporations, since Takemura will end things and leave NC.

There are garages to upgrade your cars but Panam can upgrade it further if you do her missions + befriend her, and you can find super secret parts for your cars that Panam needs all around NC by stealing them from gangs or Corpos! Like, make your car go 200 mph fast or a setting to make it hover. 😎

FOUND FAMILY TROPE... Involving the LI’s + more characters. I wanted Misty, Vik, Judy, Panam, River and Kerry to all know each other and be friends. Also, somewhere for them to hang out. Judy coming down and hanging out with Misty and Vik would’ve been so cool.

Missions involving Vik. I think he deserved his own personal missions. Also, he’s gotta be romanceable! I’ll add more to this later.

I’m still figuring out how Johnny’s romance would go. It’s a tricky one. Lots of tension, jealously if V flirts with anybody... Heart to hearts... Holding hands... Passive aggressive confessions of love...

River is introduced in the main story. Maybe you team up to hunt down somebody who knows stuff about the Relic, like Anders Hellman, or something else to do with it. River’s like “What the fuck is going on?” but V doesn’t really tell him. Then, of course, you meet him later on and recognise him in the BD given to you by Jefferson.

Meeting Kerry earlier in the story, say mid Act 2? Ideally there would have been 5 Acts, and maybe I’ll edit this to include more once I figure out how the story could have gone. AND he’s part of the main story.

Less generic, “get in, get item and get out” side missions from Fixers and more side missions like the Peralez’s and that guy who got crucified. More freaky Cyberpunk subjects like what constitutes a soul, what is “intelligence” (What makes a machine different than a human? Without shitty false racism analogies), human rights abuses (and in that: classism, racism, ableism, transphobia), pollution, more on “Cyberpsychos” and how harmful that term is, etc. Nauced and thought-provoking. Reminding us that this is a dystopia and the issues are different but not all that wildly so from today. I would’ve developed Brendan’s mission more, because it seemed like we were going to see an earnest discussion on Artificial Intelligence but instead it was just confusing and “Haha, tricked you!” 🥱 Like, what if he really was a person capable of free thought and emotion? And that company still owns him and can overwrite him? Isn’t that fucked up?! It didn’t need a happy ending, just something to unnerve me.

Adding to that, Delamain had plenty of opportunities to discuss AI and the rights of individual contructs. His “children” could be freed, but nothing really happens as a result? I wanted consequences! The emails about human staff being made redundant because of Delamain were so interesting, too. I wanted to see something about the consequences of that in a city with no basic universal income. What happened to them? What can be done to help people who are made redundant by machines? So many possibilities for truly emotional and scary side missions!

I’m gonna watch black mirror for more inspiration, but stuff like the IRL blocking feature? Freaky as hell and totally plausible. Would’ve loved if one of the side missions involved V getting involved in some dispute involving something like that. “I can’t see his face!” or the copyright stuff about people’s appearances! Imagine if there was a Johnny lookalike? Engram Johnny would either find it hilarious or get really pissed off.

I’m hoping the DLC will deliver on more Takemura, so I’ll hold my breath for critiquing the Arasaka ending.

More to come! I’ll probably edit this later, if there’s any mistakes and/or I realise I hate an idea hehe.

#CP2077 rewrite challenge #cp77 spoilers #cp77 critical #If CDPR just released the pre-2018 script I could write about that instead so here we are #I've forgotten so much so I'm doing this bit by bit as I replay!

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evolutionsvoid · 4 years

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Though the savannas are a rather simple looking environment, they are one that is filled with a huge amount of life. Migrating herds can cover the landscape, with fields of browsers and grazers stretching all the way to the horizon. While places like rainforests win out with diversity and the bizarre array of life, the savanna wins by the sheer amount of animals you can witness in plain sight. A fresh morning and a good chair has let me see more creatures in a single day than I have seen in months in other places! This terrestrial sea of life is truly incredible to witness, but these places aren't always packed full. You will notice odd holes and gaps in herds, or stretches of land where no herbivore wishes to step foot. In a world where being in a group is vital for survival, it is strange to see loners sitting out in the open. Usually these avoided creatures are predators, which the reason should be obvious. Some may be for massive creatures that are given a wide berth as no one wishes to be stepped on or knocked about. For one beast, though, there is a special reason. They aren't elephantine or vicious carnivores, but the Catoblepas are certainly dangerous to everything around them. Found grazing in grasslands and savannas, the Catoblepas is quite the peculiar sight. Their bodies are shaped quite normally for a stout herbivore, with a hefty frame and a humped back. The large armored scales are certainly an interesting addition, but not too strange since other herbivores grow their own armor. Their long scaly tails give a reptilian vibe, but still nothing too out of the norm. Then you get to the head of this beast and things get weird. While other creatures hold their heads up high, or at least just hold them up, the Catoblepas lets its noggin just sit on the ground. It isn't temporarily down there for grazing, it stays down there for good. Their long neck seems permanently pointed downward, to the point where old tales say that lifting it upward would suffocate them as they wouldn't know how to breathe or function in this position. This certainly isn't true, but since they rarely ever lift their heads up, you can see why it got started. One of the reasons they may not pick up their heads is because it is a bit bigger than your usual noggin. Looking at their skeleton is a bit comical, because you got this long thin neck and than a chunky skull sitting at the end of it. With their head always sitting on the dirt, one wonders how they move or function. Well, the Catoblepas has come up with some special adaptations to make such an odd position work! If you look at the bottom of the mandible, you will notice it is covered in thick hairs that sprawl all over the place. It is like a beard that is being used like a skirt, but that isn't the weirdest part. Hidden beneath all that hair is a bizarre structure that is made through a unique formation of muscles. The developing and enlarging of these muscles has created something that is akin to the foot of a snail. It is pretty much a fleshy pad of muscle that allows the Catoblepas' head to slowly slither about like a slug. This makes their movements quite interesting to watch, as they must lead with their head anytime they wish to walk. Since this form of travel is sluggish, their body is left waiting for their head to move forward before they can take a single step. When grazing, they will only need their face to get the job done, so their whole body will be sitting still while their head slithers all over the place. Quite bizarre! Still, this mandibular foot does not answer all the questions about the Catoblepas' day-to-day life. If your head is stuck on the ground and you travel with your chin, how do you eat? Once again, this problem is solved by specializing certain muscles. Their lower lip is elongated and specialized to create a proboscis that is similar to an elephant's trunk. This appendage is packed with muscles that give it incredible dexterity and strength, allowing it to pull apart vegetation or yank up buried roots. It also quite sensitive to touch and taste, which it uses to probe out viable food sources. With their heads so low down, eyes aren't really that helpful. You can see this with the messy tangle of hair that constantly covers them, as they don't have much use. Instead it relies on its powerful nose to sniff out food rich areas, than its lip will locate the individual pieces. Grass will be torn and swollen roots will be pulled up and fed to its maw. The Catoblepas chews its food with a front-to-back motion rather than side-to-side, which is assisted by its mandibular foot. It spends a lot of time chewing, making sure it's ground up to an absolute pulp. This is because its dinner has to be forced up its neck to reach its stomach, so the squishier and softer the meal is, the easier it is to swallow! As a strict grazer, the Catoblepas spends a large chunk of its day seeking out and eating vegetation. This lengthy process is mainly because these creatures move at a snail's pace. They are quite slow and never in a hurry to get anywhere. When night falls, they often just sleep where they are, then wake up in the morning and continue their dining. So we got a slow loner herbivore that doesn't take cover at night and has terrible eyesight. Surely these creatures are vulnerable to predators, right? The Catoblepas is not a species that fears running into predators, it is a beast that predators are terrified of running into.

While their goofy appearance and slow ways has made them quite famous around the world, they have another thing that makes them notorious. If one already does not know the answer, then perhaps a look at its colorful display may give a hint. Lots of creatures use their coloration to hide or blend in, but there are some who choose to stand out for a very specific reason. You see, the diet of the Catoblepas is mostly vegetation, but they have specific foods they like the most. Plants tend to develop toxins and poisons to keep herbivores from eating them, and that is what the Catoblepas seeks out. Any poisonous vegetation is free game to this species, as they seem to have an incredible immunity to practically any toxin. As they consume these deadly foods, the toxins and noxious fluids are absorbed and moved to special organs. Located near the respiratory system, these vessels mix these poisons with their own secretions, turn that soup into a vapor and release them on each exhale. This results in the Catoblepas literally breathing poisonous clouds, surrounding itself in a deadly fog. One good breath will get you a lungful of Catoblepas poison and whatever plant toxins it had ingested. This dietary mixture is what makes this weapon so dangerous, as its properties are affected by what it has recently eaten. That means making an antidote or building an immunity is useless, as each cloud will contain a unique mixture of plant poisons. The side effects of inhaling this vapor will also be different each time, as it may result in things like vomiting, paralysis, blindness, swelling, itchiness, muscle spasms and so much more. Whatever the poison of a plant can do to you, the Catoblepas can weaponize and put it in the air. I heard that an Ivy Dryad once fell asleep on a hunting trip and woke up to find a Catoblepas licking her. Though she ran off before it started chewing, that particular beast spent the next few days spraying her burning oils everywhere, which the locals were not a fan of. This incredible defense is why every creature gives a Catoblepas a wide berth. Herbivores and carnivores alike want nothing to do with these beasts. There are a few creatures that can withstand this deathly fog. Dryads can tolerate it, but sometimes it can even be dangerous to us. Some plants create toxins to halt the growth of surrounding competitors, and this poison can be added to the mist. It may not be lethal to us, but it will certainly mess you up for a week or two. Ivy Dryads and their hybrids seem to have the strongest immunity, for the obvious reasons. Funny enough, some say that the art of the Venoness was inspired by the Catoblepas. You can definitely see where one would get that idea! One of the other beasts that may survive the aura of the Catoblepas is their cousins, the Khalkotauroi. These hulking brutes have been seen happily grazing besides their brethren, unfazed by the poisonous air. Honestly, if you see this duo out in the wild, keep far far away. This pairing is certainly one of the most dangerous combinations out there. A mouthful of poison will leave you choking for air, just long enough to get your body splattered across the savanna by the Khalkotauroi. As if those ornery behemoths weren't dangerous enough as it is! With this deadly aura ever present around them, you can see why very few things ever try to eat them. Any attempts must be done during windy days, when the weather blows their clouds away. Even then, one must stay upwind so that the poison isn't blown onto them, but this allows the Catoblepas to smell the attack coming. When agitated, these creatures will snort and churn out even more poison. The best method to take one down is to bait it into using up all its poisonous gas, which will take a bit. Once its stores are all used up, you may be able to attack. This still doesn't guarantee a safe kill, as the Catoblepas has another line of defense. Since it spends all its life marinating in its own vapors, the gas tends to leave a toxic residue on its body. A single cut or scratch from its scales or tusks will introduce the poison into your body. It is best to kill it from afar, aiming for its vulnerable neck. Though I have heard of some tribes hunting Catoblepas before, I certainly wouldn't do it. Every inch of them is poisonous, and the method of making their meat safe to eat is quite lengthy. Seems more trouble than it's worth! I have heard that certain Catoblepas cuts are considered a delicacy in some higher circles, and that baffles me. I have had the chance to eat their meat before and it certainly isn't anything special. It is just beef with a bit of sharpness to it, that is all. For the locals who hunt them, I understand that they need whatever food that they can get. For the rich idiots who call it a delicacy, it seems like nonsense to me. They are just eating it because it is hard to get and expensive. Maybe I should start selling Swamp Basilisk livers for a high price and see how many oafs buy it. Yeah, it taste like bog and death, but it is a delicacy! I swear! As famous creatures, you can imagine the Catoblepas has made quite the impact. Their notoriety and bright colors make them a must-see for travelers and tourists. Their colorful pelts and shiny scales are sought after by collectors and hunters, though they must be very careful when handling them! This same armor is also popular for native warriors and hunters, as it offers great defense. Practitioners of Thericorium also value the sturdiness and strength of these scales. The added color is also a nice touch! While some good can be made from these beasts, Catoblepas are very much feared when they are alive and walking about. Their poisonous fog can create a whole lot of problems, and many of these issues can lead to death. Just breathing it in is an obvious danger, and it is hazard that can take out anyone. Hunters and travelers are advised to keep close attention to their surroundings, as a nearby beast and a strong breeze can be fatal. Local hunters often refer to these beasts as the "Killer of Fools" and a tool of the gods to weed out the sloppy and stupid. In their eyes, every hunter should be aware of their surroundings and be mindful of the beasts and environment. To be caught in the cloud either means you missed the big colorful ungulate that was shuffling about or you weren't paying attention to the wind which is vital for taking down prey undetected. Screw any of those two up and you are no hunter! Those out hunting the wilds, though, aren't the only ones who must fear its poison. Farmers and livestock owners must be sure to keep any of these beasts away, lest they poison their animals or leave a toxic residue on their crops. This can destroy one's livelihood, but some have found an advantage to this deadly fog. One local tale speaks of a farmer whose crops were spared from a locust plague due to a Catoblepas being nearby. This taught the people the idea of pest control, and using specialized poisons to protect their plants. There is a famous plantation in these lands that is run by Ivy Dryads and actually keeps several Catoblepas on the property. Immune to its poisons, they feed these beasts certain plants and mixtures so that their fog is tuned to warding off pests and parasites. It also has the added bonus of keeping away thieves, as these crops are poisonous until they are properly cleaned. It seems like a risky bet to me, but apparently their produce is top notch, so what do I know? To properly and thoroughly wash my fruits and vegetables is what I know! Catoblepas are also carefully watched to make sure they don't go near the village's water source. Though the small amount of fog that touches the water may be diluted and neutralized, having a Catoblepas dunk itself for a bath will certainly cause some havoc. There is even a famous story that speaks of two greedy brothers that angered the gods, which involved one of these incidents. Apparently this duo was taking more from the land than they were giving, hunting and killing every beast they saw. A Catoblepas was sent by the gods to stop them, but the clever brothers drove it into a pond where the water washed away all its poison. They then killed it and hacked off its tusks as trophies. After a few more days of butchering the local wildlife, they headed back home to their family for a celebration. The whole family cooked up their spoils and had a feast. During this indulgent banquet, though, everyone grew sick and died. It turned out that the mother of the two had gone and drawn water from this pond after they had killed the Catoblepas. This poisoned drink was unknowingly served to the whole family and struck them down. This tale no doubt drove many to come up with ways to keep these beasts away from their homes and resources. Funny enough, one of the ways to ward off these creatures is to put up low fences or sharp stakes on the ground. Since it can't really lift its head, any obstacle that it can't crawl over is avoided. I mean, if you had to walk with your face, you wouldn't be all that adventurous either! Due to their anatomy and poisonous aura, the Catoblepas has been used to describe a certain condition. It is called Catoblepas Syndrome, and it plagues researchers, archivists and students alike. It arises during long periods of intense research, or when exams are on the horizon. Those who hole themselves up to study and read for hours on end, burying their faces in books and scrolls. Permanently hunched over their desks and work stations, their necks forever point downward into their notes. As they feverishly read and write, they neglect proper hygiene and cease to bathe, resulting in the most putrid of smells! Friends, families and coworkers alike are driven away by this deathly cloud, fearful of the monster that created it! Truly this tragic disease has claimed many obsessed researchers, nearly taking me in its clutches! Thankfully I was saved by a coworker who got me to take a break and a bath! Disaster averted! Ha! But seriously, for all you studious folk out there, be sure to take a break from your work from time to time. A strong mind is a healthy mind! And be sure to bathe too, the whole world will thank you for that! I do have to say, I am very thankful that my work on these creatures is done through writing and not through verbal presentation. Their name is an absolute nightmare for me to pronounce and I am happy I have not humiliated myself on stage trying to say it. Props to the researchers who do speak to audience about the Catoblepas and nail the pronunciation every time. If it were me, people would be learning about the wonders and adaptations of the Catobleyplebusmoos. Chlora Myron Dryad Natural Historian ------------------------------------------------- This thing took me waaaay too many tries to draw. I would get halfway done and think "nah this sucks," then try again. After three times, I finished the piece, colored it in and said "nah this sucks." The colors were what killed the last version, as I went with bland grays and browns. I was trying to do the dumb "mammals are drab earthy colors" thing, but that is a boring restriction I somehow have. Mammals come in all sorts of colors, so there is no excuse. Then I also got to thinking that poisonous animals rarely want to blend in, as they advertise their dangerous nature quite blatantly. I figured a famously noxious creature like the Catoblepas would believe in aposematism and would make sure the whole world knew they were there. My sister picked out the ring-necked snake as an inspiration (which turns out isn't all that dangerous, but dang those colors are good) and I went with that! So these beasties are a lot more colorful now! May seem quite odd out in the middle of a savanna or grassland, but I think any creature would respect the visual warning from a beast that spews clouds of death.

#catoblepas #mythical beasts #mythical creatures #monster #creature #art #drawing

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keelywolfe · 4 years

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FIC: Separate Lives (spicyhoney)

Summary: Edge can't be anyone but himself, but he is nothing that Rus needs.

Notes: This story strikes me as almost an AU of 'By Any Other Name', what might've happened if Stretch and Edge didn't get together. Sadness ahead!

Tags: Underfell Papyrus, Underswap Papyrus, Undertale Monsters on the Surface, Angst, Self-Worth Issues, Post-Break Up, Yearning

Read It On AO3

Read It Here!

~~*~~

It was past dark by the time Edge returned home from work. The lights in the main room turned on automatically as he stepped inside, closing the door against the chilly evening air. He hung up his jacket in the closet, keys deposited in a decorative bowl on a small table by the front door, shoes lined up carefully on the mat.

Dinner was waiting for him, already prepared in the crock pot which in his opinion was one of the best inventions Humans ever developed. Perhaps some gourmands would be rolling in their graves if they were forced to taste his modified version of beef bourguignon, but if so, they could keep their complaints beneath the ground.

He changed before he ate, hanging up his suit carefully and dressing in a soft pullover and jeans. When the workday was done, it was best to get out of that mindset and a simple change of clothes helped to keep him from turning Embassy issues over in his head all night long.

He ate at the table in silence, washed his plate and set it in the drainer.

Mettaton was on and he watched the variety show. The detective movie. Even the Quiz show. If he were asked tomorrow what any of them were about, he wouldn’t have been able to think of a single word.

His sockets felt dry and grainy by then, exhaustion starting to pull him down; he was tired and tomorrow would be an early day, technically today, and--

But his cell phone ringing cut off anything else.

He waited for the second ring to answer, “Hello.”

“heya, bestie,” The voice on the other side of the line was low and amused. “didn’t wake you up, did i.”

Edge relaxed back into the sofa cushions and closed his sockets, allowing that husky, malted voice to roll over him. “Would you care if you had?”

“nah. we both know you were waiting by the phone.” Rus said it teasingly, unaware of the uncomfortable truth.

“With bated breath,” Edge said dryly.

“heh, well, you can cut your fishing trip short cause here i am. told you i’d call when i got home safe.” The blurred, liquid quality to his laughter implied several drinks over the course of the night. His eye lights would be bright from the alcohol, faint orange bleeding into the normal soft white. There was the sound of rustling, perhaps blankets, it could be that Rus was lying in the unmade mess of his own bed, looking up at the ceiling with Edge’s voice in his skull.

“At 2am?” Distantly said, the words weren’t ones he wanted to think too closely about. “Burning the late-night oil, were you.”

Rus made a rude, scoffing sound, punctuated by the creak of the bed frame and there was a soft thunk, quickly followed by a second; he must be kicking off his shoes. “it was a date, not a tinder hookup! gotta take a little time, you know, get to know them, takes a few hours. isn’t that what a date is for? getting to know someone, making a match, letting someone light my fire.”

“Knowing your jokes, he was probably ready for the burn unit by the end of the night.” Perhaps he took an Uber home, alone, perhaps he’d allowed his date to take him. A last few teasing jokes before he got out of the car or perhaps leaning in through the driver’s side window. Perhaps, perhaps—

“ouch, okay, i’m hanging up, i need to report a murder,” Rus laughed, then his voice dropped low, secretive. “speaking of fire, might not make it to the third date rule with this one, whoa, momma, he’s igniting something, all right.”

The low growl that escaped was not of his choosing and Edge stifled it immediately.

“didn’t catch that, what did you say?” More rustling sounds, Rus’s voice was muffled, likely pulling off his sweatshirt. There was a heavy flump of it hitting the floor and Edge could see it very clearly. The clutter of dirty clothing littered around with the occasional empty honey bottle sprouting through, a trash flower blooming through fabric. Rus lying back on the sheets, rib cage bare, the path of his spine leading to his pelvis where his pants interrupted the journey. Or perhaps not, perhaps he’d already kicked them off to join their brethren, another patch in his laundry garden. Perhaps he was dressed only in his own bare, lovely bones, perhaps--

"Oh, I was just thinking,” Edge said lightly, “that you might try playing a little hard to get. That is, if you’re hoping for something past date three.”

“we’ll see,” doubtfully, rich with amusement, “anyway, i’m home safe, worry wart, didn't end up in any stranger's dust pan. you can get some sleep now. night, edgelord, see you tomorrow.”

“Good night, Rus.”

Edge disconnected the call and sat on his sofa with his phone in his hand for a long time.

~~*~~

Once, he’d been the one on the verge of date three, all of Rus’s teasing flirtations forging a direct path to it. Edge was the one who stopped things there, halted them at the crossroads to choose a different path.

He could still clearly remember Rus’s face when he’d told him; the bland acceptance complicit with the way he blinked a little too often, a fraction too hard. There would be no third date, but when Edge offered friendship, Rus took it eagerly, and now, months later, they were best of friends despite their differences.

It was for the best, Edge knew, necessary, the only choice Edge could make. He’d needed to break things off before he learned how Rus’s mouth tasted, before he ever felt him in his arms.

Dates were a chance to get to know someone, Rus said, a learning experience of sorts, and what Edge learned all too quickly was that Rus deserved better than he could offer.

Truth be told, he should have cut him off entirely, kept his distance rather than endure this slow, aching torture. It was a weakness, Edge supposed. Too weak to properly let Rus go, but at least like this the only person he was hurting was himself.

They were friends, the best of friends, and it was enough. It was.

~~*~~

The next morning Edge got up with his alarm. He went to work, did his job, came home. Left his shoes lined up by the door and listened when Rus called him to let him know he was home safe from his date.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

~~*~~

“unf, how do you always make the best stuff for lunch,” Rus said around his current mouthful. His chopsticks were delving back into his bowls, scooping up more noodles before he’d even swallowed the first round.

They were sitting together in the Embassy cafeteria as they always did on their once a week meeting. It was nothing unusual, hardly a second glance was sent their way. Everyone else was focused on their own lunches and conversations, a roomful of meandering chatter

“I like eating.” Edge took a bite from his own bowl with more care. The broth was rich and salty, the noodles cooked to satisfying perfection and generously flavored with plenty of scallions.

“please, everyone likes eating. most people, anyway. not everyone raises their game to an art form like you, damn.” Rus slurped up another mouthful of noodles and Edge reached over to slap him lightly on the back of the skull.

“Show some manners or you’re going to get banned from the museum,” Edge told him dryly. He looked down into his ramen bowl, swirling his chopstick through the broth. “Speaking of which, the Embassy is sponsoring an event this Friday at the Ebott Art Institute. Did you want to come?”

“can’t,” Rus said around a mouthful of soft-boiled egg. It should have been the furthest thing from charming. “got another date.”

“Date number three, isn’t it?” Edge said idly. As if he didn’t know very well. “I’m sure that will be far more entertaining than ‘Monster and Human Art Trends Through the Ages’.”

“might be, i’m a little more into current events. ‘specially when its currently in my bedroom. eh, don’t worry, edgelord, i bet you won’t have any trouble getting someone else as a go along.” Rus offered him a sharp grin and cast a glance over the room, his eye lights touching on various Monsters consideringly. Edge didn’t follow his gaze.

That would only be true if one considered his shadow a companion.

Edge didn’t answer him and asked instead, “You’ll call me when you get home?”

“wouldn’t dream of not, captain concern.” He ran his tongue over his teeth, banked heat hidden in his eye lights. “might just be a text, though. could be busy.”

“Of course,” Edge said crisply. He took another mouthful of noodles, too soft beneath the force of his teeth.

~~*~~

“you’re an idiot, you know.”

Edge stopped just inside the door of his office, sighing to see his brother sprawled out on the sofa. Instead of at one end, Red chose to lay on the middle cushion so he could prop his filthy boots up on the arm.

“Yes, please do instruct me on how I’ve failed you this time.” Edge took hold of the untied laces and yanked those boots roughly off the fine leather. Red only rolled with it, shifting to sit upright. His coat needed washing and Edge absently began making a plan on how to get him out of it long enough to do it.

“ain’t failing me,” Red scoffed. He pulled out a slender vial, tipping a toothpick into his hand, and the faint smell of cinnamon rose in the air. “too busy failing yourself.”

It would be better to ignore him. Eventually Red would get bored and either wander off or fall asleep, adding drool to the dirt he’d already gotten on the sofa. Either way, he’d be silent. That would be the intelligent thing to do. “How so?”

There was enough disgust in his expression to sting. “you think no one else can see it, don’t you? just cause rus can’t find his coccyx in broad daylight with both hands and a map don’t mean i’m blind.”

“You’re being ridiculous.” The noodles were long since incorporated into his magic, it wasn’t possible for them to churn within him nauseously. He went over to the coffee maker and poured out a cup.

“oh yeah?” Red’s eye lights glittered, the color of old blood, and his grin widening to border on vicious. “what about last movie night?”

Edge stilled, cup in hand.

He should have known that was what would give him away. His weaknesses would glare out for his brother, as easy to read as the daily newspaper.

Rus always sat next to him these days at the movie gatherings, the line of his body pressed lightly against Edge from their shoulders down to their knees. Sharing a large bowl of popcorn that Edge would eat too much of, glutting himself on greasy kernels until he felt nauseous for the simple reason that their hands would brush inside the bowl.

An utterly pathetic excuse for a too-brief touch and he was greedy for it, every time.

But last week, Rus fell asleep halfway through the movie. Sagging in increments, until he ended up in Edge’s lap, and Edge couldn’t remember a thing about the film. His only memory of that night was of warm weight against him, of soft, even breathing, the lingering drowsiness when Rus awoke, blinking up at him with languid temptation.

If the phone calls were slow torture, that evening was a white-hot spike through the soul, and all he’d done afterward was help Rus sit upright, let the others tease him for getting drool on Edge’s pantleg.

Red’s mouth twisted into a knowing sneer, “yeah, s’what i thought. you’re forgettin’ all your lessons, little brother.” He leaned forward and his expression was savage, gleaming teeth and blazing eye lights were of memory long past, of Underfell. “you want something that bad, you find a way to get it.” Then the fiery blaze eased, leaving nothing but soft crimson as Red sank back into the sofa cushions, his sharp-fingered hands clasped together over his middle. “unless you’re getting a little too used to the soft life on the surface, eh, boss?”

“Shut up,” Edge told him, the words felt brittle between his teeth.

Red’s laughter cut, the honest amusement at his expense. “truth hurts, yeah?”

He was gone in a shortcut, vanished before the hurled cup could hit him. It bounced uselessly off the empty cushion, hot coffee puddling on the leather.

Edge stood for too long, panting, staring at the ruined sofa, before he called down to housekeeping to send a cleaner to his office.

~~*~~

“home safe, edgelord, no one stayin’ over on either side.” Rus was a lot more drunk this time, all his words a soft slurry, blurred nearly to nonsense.

Edge closed his sockets, listening. It was well past three am, the Embassy event ended hours ago to muted applause and well-funded success. He’d been sitting here alone in his living room, tearing a magazine into little strips. The confetti of them flutter to the floor as he sat forward, “Are you all right?”

“jus’ fine, honey, i’m doing great. came home ‘lone, but he gave me a swell time first.”

The temptation was there to go to Rus’s home, to burst through the front door, ignore Blue’s surprised questions that demanded to know what he thought he was doing. To go up to Rus’s room, to pull him close, ignore the scent of someone else on him and— “You didn’t take my advice to play hard to get?”

“can’t play hard enough, never enough, is it. never. never ever ever,” Singsong sweet, tripping over his tongue, and it trailed into something like a muted sob, wretched and wet, “edge? why’m i so hard to love?”

He needed to say something to that, couldn’t let Rus think that, he couldn’t, he needed—

“nah, s’okay, don’ matter anyway, it don’, you listen to me, yeah? worry about me, you do, every time, all th’ time.” Rus drifted off between words, those weak sobs slowing, evening out to only the occasional hiccough.

Edge sat up for most of the night, listening to him breathe.

~~*~~

“fuck, it’s so early. how could you sign me up for this?” Rus groaned. The darkened hollows beneath his sockets were stark, but Rus was up and moving, helping Edge carry the tables to the outside storefront.

“Believe me, you weren’t my first choice for the early shift,” Edge told him.

The fundraiser was one for a local family who’d lost all their possessions in a fire, a bake sale held by the local chapter of Wilderness Scouts group that was made up of Monster and Human children. The goal was one of more than money, it was part of a continuing an effort to familiarize the Human community with Monsters showing them working beside Humans in harmonious unity. Or at least that was the goal and as children tended towards adorable regardless of species, it seemed an excellent opportunity.

Not that Edge was planning on staying for the actual event; he’d baked an assortment of treats, another calculated move, chocolate chip cookies and rice krispie treats, familiar snacks to Humans from an unfamiliar people.

His baking skills notwithstanding, Humans tended to find his appearance somewhat unnerving. He’d volunteered the two of them to set things up for the children and after they were done, the rest would be up to the chaperones.

That was the plan anyway and Edge was hopeful.

“If we work together, we should be able to get this done quickly enough,” Edge said. Although his doubts grew on that as he watched Rus struggle with the folding table

“uh huh,” Rus grunted, finally battling the capricious thing into submission. “sorry if i kept you up last night.”

“What?” The table Edge was setting up seemed to be of a kinder temperament. “You didn’t.”

“no?” Rus unfolded a plastic tablecloth, fussing to spread it over the table with uncommon precision. “that call lasted for four hours.”

They weren’t actually talking about this, they weren’t-- “I must have forgotten to hang up.”

A touch on his wrist stilled him, cool fingertips against the slim line of bone showing between his gloves and his sleeve. His head jerked up involuntarily and Rus was standing too close, too too close, the shadows beneath his sockets garish and obvious.

"how long are we going to do this?" Tiredly, so terribly soft, too low to be heard by any passersby going into the store. Rus seemed worn, the world almost blurring around him as if he were nearly about to step into a shortcut.

"It shouldn’t even be a couple of hours,” Edge said doggedly. “Once we get set up, I think--"

"edge."

Rus didn't say another word, only his name, once. Anything else stayed unspoken and he was so close, his eye lights soft, pale, searching Edge’s face and it would be so easy to lean in, to take his mouth, to see if the sweetness of his kiss matched the rest of him, this endearing fool.

But Rus deserved so much better, he deserved a pure soul that glowed a silver to match his own, not the stony, LV-scarred one that was all Edge had to offer, the memory of murders bound within it in blood-shaded crimson. Rus deserved someone who could offer him their world.

Edge couldn’t even offer a piece of his.

Don’t do this, don’t, don’t be kind, don’t know how I feel, don’t, please, please—

He reared back, turning away to smooth the last tablecloth into place. "Let's finish getting this set up."

Rus said nothing, stood unmoving and Edge tried not to look at him, unable to bear seeing the banked unhappiness within him. Then, abruptly, "yeah, okay. guess we're gonna do this for a little while, then." Rus gathered up one of the boxes, pulling out baggies of cookies and setting them up in fairly neat rows. “we can go out for lunch after if you want, but i need to get home in time for a nap, i got a date tonight."

“You’ll call me when you get home.” It should have been a question. When Rus didn’t answer, Edge glanced at him, involuntarily, searching his face, and the taste of his desperation was flavored with shame.

Rus smiled a little, a faint curve of his mouth. “yeah, sure. i’ll call, let you know i got home okay. this is date number one, maybe i can make a good first impression, for once.”

“I’m sure you will.” Edge stood next to him, both of them piling up cookies and treats, readying them for the children to sell. They’d finish soon enough, go out for lunch, and then Edge would go home, alone. He’d line up his shoes on the mat by the door, sit on his sofa, and wait for his phone to ring. It was enough, stealing brief, borrowed moments of Rus, more than he even deserved.

Despite everything, Edge was still himself. It was all he could ever be.

-finis-

#spicyhoney #papcest #keelywolfe #underfell #underswap #underfell papyrus #underswap papyrus

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sparrowwritings · 4 years

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Writing Challenge Day Two: College

Day One -- Masterpost -- Day Three

Cottony clouds drifted high in the bright blue sky while two observers watched them go. One was a young girl, the other a man about twenty years her senior. She had light brown hair, grass green eyes and hundreds of freckles on her round face and skinny arms. He had dark, reddish brown hair, olive green eyes and a chin strap of a beard covering his strong jaw. Despite the difference in age, the two of them were absolutely covered in grass and dirt stains as well as leaves and straw. They both were letting loose the slow breaths of people who had done a lot of work and were now taking a moment to rest on the porch of the farmhouse. Half full glasses of lemonade sat between them, condensation gathering around where the cold liquid still remained.

Lindsey had missed being able to spend time with Verdei. It seemed like he had less and less time to spend with her as she got older. It was the same with her other, blood related siblings but she was especially sad when it came to him. Verd didn’t have any other family. It wasn’t fair that life and work had to take him away so often. Why couldn’t adults be able to have more days like today? By herself, gardening would have just been a chore. With him the chore became a competition, and then a game, and then jokes about the game and a chase with hands full of mud and--

Her smile faded as she realized that days like today would be less and less common as she grew older. Already, it was hard to remember how long it had been since she’d last had so much fun with her family, much less the few friends she had at school. Her dad was getting older, and the farm wasn’t doing as well as it used to. One day it’d be just her and Arlen running the farm while Thomas worked at the general store and Verdei would still be the lone law enforcement in town and Olivia-- “Looks like some expensive thoughts churning in there, Linds. Care to share?”

She startled and turned to look at her adopted brother. He was still smiling, but in that tight way that showed off the wrinkles that he’d been developing for years now. Lindsey’s staring had softened his expression, but she still knew he was worried. All of her siblings worried about her. It’d be annoying if it wasn’t so sweet. “Dunno about expensive thoughts.” She shrugged. “Just...a lot of them.”

“It’s too nice a day for a storm to go brewing in that lil head’ve yours.” Verd reached over and poked at her temple. “Let’s have at’m. I can take a hit or seven.”

With an eye roll, Lindsey took a moment to go back to what she was thinking about before she’d gotten side tracked. “I was thinking about what we’ll all be doing in the future.” She turned away from him in favor of looking back up at the clouds.

“Same thing we’re doin’ now I reckon.” He picked up his glass and slowly brought it to his lips. “Farmin’. Gardenin’. Sittin’ on the porch enjoyin’ a summer day. Not much else to do round these parts. Just like I like it.” Verdei tipped the glass back to take a drink.

Lindsey made a hum as she processed this. Olivia always seemed like she was doing something different all the time at her place in the city. Every time her older sister came back, she had some story about an encounter or an activity she’d done while living in the city. Some of her most interesting ones were even from when she’d first gone away to school--around the time that Lindsey had been a baby. Next to the usual bedtime stories, the tales of Olivia dealing with the strange world of the city had been the girl’s favorites growing up. And when Verd started visiting the city himself, Lindsey had begged him for any and all information about it. She’d even wanted to run away to the city a few times when she was little. Dad hadn’t let her, saying that first she needed to--

“Did you ever think about going to college?” She blurted.

Instead of an answer there was a choking sound. Lindsey turned her head in time to watch Verd spit out what must have been most of what was left of his lemonade. He coughed several times and she quickly moved over to pat his back, almost spilling her own drink in the process. Once the mini crisis was over, he gave her the most confused expression. “What??”

“Did you ever think about going to college?” She repeated. “You know, living in the city and stuff.”

Verdei scratched at his scalp, displacing his worn cowboy hat. “Not really.” He shrugged. “Had ta get my GED cuz I dropped outta high school. Even then I didn’t wanna leave. Still don’t.” He looked away, his eyes drawn to the clouds much like hers had been. “I love it out here. The people can suck, but I’ll never feel at home in the city.”

Something about his distant expression reminded Lindsey of a horse. A wild one that desired nothing but land clear of fences and people. It was yet another reminder that one day he could go off into the wilderness and never come back. A shudder went through her body at the thought. Maybe she wasn’t ready to let Verd know about everything she was thinking about. Especially if it brought him any closer to leaving for good.

“Not sure you’d feel at home there either, kid, but if ya wanna try out that life when you’re a lil older I’m sure Liv’ll put you up.” He shrugged again, his full attention going back to his adoptive sister. “You should give life here a few more years before you try it, though. You’re only what, ten?” Verd gave a grin. It wasn’t nearly as wide as his happier ones, but at least he was trying.

Like usual, she went along with the joke even though he knew full well how old she was. There would be time to talk more about growing up and life later. When Lindsey was ready to handle it. She was sure of it. “Thirteen, you dummy.”

He put a hand over his heart in mock shock. “Aw shucks, you’re right. I keep forgettin’ you’re growin’ up fast. You’re definitely way smarter than I was at your age so maybe you can get into that college bullsh--uh I mean nonsense.”

Lindsey giggled at his self censoring. She’d heard that word and worse in her life, but he still tried so hard to keep his mouth clean around her. Picking up her lemonade, she put it in Verd’s hands. “Here, a reward for cheering me up.”

“Well gosh, this’s indeed a fine reward.” Verdei downed the sweet liquid in one gulp. Leaving the glass on the porch, he swung himself up into a standing position. “Alright, enough’ve all this talk. Garden’s done, so now we oughta check in on Arlen and see what he’s got for us.”

She hopped after him. “Don’t you have police work you need to be doing?”

“Eh, it’s Sunday. Nothin’ happens on Sunday. Now c’mon! Unless you *want* a rematch of that mud fight we had earlier?”

“No, but I’d win that one too!” She laughed as she followed him.

#writing challenge #day 2 #sparrow writing #original fiction #prompt: college #writing challenge 2020 #lindsey lutum #verdei rendall #modern day AU #just waaay out in the boonies #verdei belongs to thedovahcat #but i figure she'll be okay if i borrow him for this #besides i love exploring this man who never really seemed to grow up #and his kinship with lindsey as she grows older #through rp or writing #either way #two down twenty nine to go #next prompt: wartime

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blessuswithblogs · 4 years

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The Best Games of the Decade, By My Estimations

With only a good month (ACTUALLY LIKE A GOOD 24 HOURS HA HA I WROTE THIS BACK IN NOVEMBER) or so left of the 2010s (we are regrettably not quite far along enough to really start giving them jaunty names like "the Roaring Twenties" yet, but soon we will be free of this chronological no man's land) I find my thoughts turning to my enduring hobby slash interest slash everlasting shame: video games. While a decade is ultimately a fairly arbitrary point of reference, in the business of video gamesdom, ten years is a small eternity and some very significant games have graced us since the clock struck midnight on January 1st, 2010.

I might still be too young for this kind of nostalgia, granted, but I can't help but think about the game experiences I've had in the last ten years that have been altogether Important to Me. I am less interested in ranking these titles than I am in exploring why they made such an impact on me, and why, if we were to borrow the esteemed verbiage of one Sid Meyer, they stood the test of time. ...or less so, if they came out more recently. Sometimes on these lists I sort of scrimp and scrabble to actually fill it up with enough games and I have to sort of cheat and put things on there I haven't really played, but fortunately I am not so destitute that I have only been able to play one new game a year since this decade began. To that end, this is more of a personal list than usual, that will have less to do with "well the game was kind of a Big Deal........" and more to do with "well the game was kind of a Big Deal to ME."

Dark Souls The First:

This game will likely find its way onto many such lists in the coming days, because it is such a singular thing. Honestly, I would put Demon's Souls on here too, but that was actually like. 2009ish? At any rate, its spiritual successor was a marked improvement in most ways, expanding upon the core design tenets that made the unassuming FROM software ps3 title such an unexpected success: deliberate gameplay that demanded players go slow and respect both enemies and environment until they were sufficiently skilled and experienced, boss fights against extremely memorable monsters and also sometimes trees, strange asynchronous multiplayer that worked in spite of itself, and a meticulously designed world filled with oddities, grotesqueries, mysteries, and tragedies. Dark Souls was a phenomenon. "The Dark Souls of _____" is dig at gormless games journalists that endures and is relevant to this day. It created a whole subgenre that remains fairly untapped because of how much of a gamble it is to really go in on what made Dark Souls good in a game without that kind of name recognition and marketing blitz, and it changed the way the zeitgeist thought about video games in a lot of ways.

Inscrutability is an incredibly important part of the Souls experience. Abandon all hope of transparency, ye who enter here, because you're not getting it. The games were designed with the intent of being a sort of collaborative community puzzle, where players who stumbled on secrets and treasures in the game could leave down messages for others to alert them to hidden prizes - or just try to bait somebody to jump down a bottomless pit. Patches does that. A lot. It's kind of this thing. There is a very specific mood and atmosphere that Miyazaki and company were going for with these games that creates a sort of artistic catch-all for complaints I would level at basically anything else. "These weapons are poorly balanced." Yep. It's not really trying to be balanced. "Half of these systems are unexplained and nonsensical." Oh boy are they ever. "A giant man-sized baby just invaded my world and tried to kill me with a ladle." Yes, yes he did. The bizarre, fever dream ambiance of Dark Souls is enhanced by all of this. It will put a lot of people off and I can't really say "oh you just don't get it." because like no in any other game this would be bullshit nonsense for idiots. Souls just kind of makes it work by being compellingly baffling.

This murkiness also serves to highlight one of the core conceits of the game: the simple joy of greater mastery. Dark Souls starts you out with very little. You have nothing, know nothing, are nothing, and all the npcs you meet are pretty sure you're going to fuck off and die pretty much as soon as you break line of sight. On your first time through, that's probably true, too. The skeletons in the graveyard are infamous. As you claw your way through the game, as you learn more about it, you start to see measurable progress getting made. What was once a bunch of very tired men in armor giving you unsettlingly sinister laughs is now the outline of a story, vague but extant, with more waiting to be discovered. Where you used to flail around and die to random hollows in the undead burg, now you dance circles around them and paste them in one or two hits with your fancy weapons (or enormous wooden club, depending). A world that was once borderline impossible to actually traverse gradually opens up and becomes more familiar. In Dark Souls, death serves a purpose, and that purpose is not actually to block your progress. Its purpose is to get you to learn the game and get better at it. It's actually very player empowering in a way a lot of 'press F to pay respects' theme park rides are not. I'm probably treading a very thin line between thoughtful analysis (ha) and "you cheated not only the game, but yourself." here, but I'm going to stand firm in my belief that the way Souls games endeavor to make you improve yourself over time is a legitimate and meritorious way to design a game.

Of course, Dark Souls the First is very rough around the edges in spots. The second half of the game is somewhat infamous for being unpolished and kind of slapdash. The online was questionable, the PC port was laughable until the community went in and fixed it, Lost Izalith is a whole fucking thing, the works. The fact that it's so good in spite of the rough spots is, I think, what made it such a singular game. I'm one of those hopelessly sentimental idiot bitches who thinks that things that are imperfect are kind of charming and compelling in ways that very cookie cutter, by the book, technically competent but aesthetically bankrupt things are not. Miyazaki had a vision when he made this game, and that vision created an enduring legacy. That's worthy of respect in a way not many games are. It's messy and flawed but those flaws are just kind of endearing because they're proof that the developers were trying to push boundaries and be ambitious and make something new and interesting.

Dark Souls The Second:

Dark Souls 2 has a kind of weird reputation in the online net-o-sphere. There are as many opinions about this game as there are people who have played it. Sometimes more, honestly. I spent a lot of time kind of convinced it wasn't that good until some things clicked and I realized it was HELLA good. That you kind of need the DLC to get the whole picture is... unfortunate, but such is the age we live in. Going into this game, I thought that a second Dark Souls was unnecessary. The first had ended satisfactorily, and I had no desire to see FROM get tied down to the world of Lordran. The quote B Team unquote that developed 2 seemed to agree with me, and created what is one of the most metacognitive games I have ever played. Now, let's not get ahead of ourselves. When I say metacognitive, I do not mean it in the usual facile sense of, say, whatever Jonathan Blow has churned out recently that beats you over the head with the fact that you're playing a video game and you should probably feel bad about it or the way Doki Doki Literature Club does the Epic Subversions! of visual novels by trying to convince you that the game knows it is a game, but failing because it cannot overcome the limitations that it has as a static, unchanging lump of code. Dark Souls 2 aims higher. And you know me - I always try to aim high.

Dark Souls 2 deals with cycles. Most notably, cycles of futility. Cycles that are so enduring and perpetual that it matters not how you choose to resolve it, it will simply keep going no matter what you do. Drangleic is a hollow simulacrum of Lordran - and that is exactly the point. The familiarity and design consistencies between the two games is intentional. The curse of life is the curse of want. It took me a long time to really understand what Dark Souls 2 meant by that. The World of Dark Souls 2 is a sort of unending purgatory. Thousands upon thousands of undead have made the journey, linked the fire, perhaps chose to become the Dark Lord instead, only for some other undying fool to go and light it anyway. Each time, a new order is built upon the bones of the old, and in time, joins its forebears in the ashes of history. When I beat the game the first time and felt that the ending was unsatisfying, I failed to realize that was, again, the point. If the game had shipped with all endings in it, I think I would have been less miffed, but, well, the curse of life is the curse of downloadable content. If you choose to take the throne, link the fire, you have essentially accomplished nothing. Another age of Fire will begin, and then end, and so on and on into the ages, an unending litany of suffering and violence, because people cannot let go of what once was. They seek and scrabble to claim scraps of glory in a systemic nightmare of self-fulfilling prophecies and false dichotomies. When Aldia eventually arrives with the DLC packs, things really start to take shape.

Dark Souls 2 is a commentary on itself. An admission of the futility of trying to recapture the unique spark of the first game, and the necessity of doing something -different-. The playerbase hated it on release. It was both not enough like the first game and too much like the first game. It wasn't like, reviewbombing on metacritic hate, but the consensus rapidly became that 2 was just worse than the first game and kind of a bummer, a half-hearted cashgrab by a "B Team" while the really talented developers worked on Bloodborne. So, basically, they proved 2's central thesis completely correct. A hollow cycle of just repeating and iterating on what has come before serves nobody. In the words of Straid of Olaphis, "it is all a curse." That is the true curse in Dark Souls 2. An undead might link the fire to try and preserve their fading sense of self and memory, but it is but a temporary measure, a prolonging of greater suffering by bowing to an order designed to oppress. Before the Ringed City was ever a thing, Agdyne and Vendrick were here telling us about how Gwyn was so covetous of his own perceived right to rule that he cursed all of humankind into a twisted state of mutually exclusive ideas. Die as a mortal in the flame, or endure as an undead husk in the darkness, bereft of heart and soul. Or... does it even matter? All of this has happened before. It will all happen again.

Those who slave away eternally under this paradigm are doomed to never find peace or fulfillment, because it was not designed that way. Gwyn's fear was so great that he got entangled in his own karmic vortex, reincarnating over and over again with his other lord friends in slightly different forms and circumstances that would continue, eternally, to make the same mistakes in the pursuit of the same misguided goals. Aldia, the Scholar of the First Sin, is presented as one of the few beings in this entire misbegotten affair with an inkling of what is really going on. Both he and Vendrick knew that Drangleic was destined for the same dreg heap as every other civilization built upon the power of the soul, but all of their efforts to prevent this fall were for naught, because they were all confined by the same twisted system in which there can be no change or joy. It is only after Vendrick loses his nerve entirely and fades away into a mindless hollow and Aldia loses everything in his increasingly unhinged and ethically questionable experiments that he realizes that they were doing it all wrong.

I think I've probably gone on too long at this point so I'll try to be brief: the "true" ending of the game, made available after all 3 DLCs were released, involves gathering the power of truly mighty souls in a crown and using them as a sort of... loophole. The empowered crown does not cure the curse of undeath. What it does is prevent -hollowing-. The degradation of heart and mind. And after the final battle, you leave the throne behind. But there is a very important difference here from the Dark Lord ending of the first game. By finding this loophole, and rejecting Gwyn's order entirely, you and you alone have broken free from the endless cycle of suffering, and by doing so, perhaps gained the knowledge necessary to take the first steps into forging a new path entirely. Beyond the reach of Light, beyond the scope of Dark.

So yeah basically it's like Dark Souls the First, with some improvements and changes and what have you, so it's got the same fun to play deliberate explorey dark holey kind of thing going on, it just takes the concepts and runs with it to places I never would have expected a game to ever go. It is legitimately one of the only metanarratively aware games I have played (that I can remember, anyway) that sticks the landing, because it is not obnoxiously explicit about it. Undertale was fun and a worthwhile game by any reasonable metric, but it falls into the same trap as all the others: when you are acknowledged as the player of a game in anything more than a briefly comedic bit of 4th wall breaking, any hope of cleverness or thoughtfulness goes out the window, because it brings to light an ironclad truth of the medium: you, the player, are just as constrained in what you can do as the NPCs in the game, who are also fake. When they start haranguing you about about brotherkilling or being a cheating visual novel boyfriend or possibly girlfriend or what have you, it's just. Meaningless. It is a contrivance of the developer, specifically included in the game as a programmed possibility designed to be experienced.

Dark Souls 2 gets around this by not engaging with the player on that level of metanarrative. It deals much more in metaphor and allegory. It's not, like, especially subtle, but it is subtle enough to let your mind draw parallels without immediately blaring at you in comic sans "THIS IS A VIDEO GAME, KID" and taking you out of it entirely. It's a fine line to walk. A barrier between worlds has to be maintained for these stories to work. I'm the kind of player who will never do a renegade run of Mass Effect because I hate being mean and nasty for no reason, even to bits of code in a game, because I try to engage with it all in good faith and do my best to let myself buy into the illusion that these bits of code are characters with thoughts and feelings. When an angry flower man pops up and says "OOHOOHOO LOOKS LIKE YOU JUST RELOADED THE GAME BECAUSE YOU KILLED SOMEBODY" my first thought isn't "wow fucked up..." it's "oh well there goes my suspension of disbelief" because like. If you're going to call me out on that then fuck I can just go into the code and make you say "there is a frightful hobgoblin haunting europe, and its name is ligma" and like. Yep. Bow before my mastery. I guess. I don't want to get into a slapfight like that with Toby Fox. He seems like a nice person.

I don't know maybe this is just something unique to me, and other people can deal with these stories without immediately becoming depressed by the deeply artificial nature of it all. It's complicated. I will say that I like Undertale a lot, but the reasons that I like it come very much from the character interactions, spritework, and music, and not the time Flowey closed my game. It's just the same pony island bullshit as its always been. "OooOOoOOoh uninstall the game or you're actually just going back and messing with events for your own perverse satisfactionNNNnNNnN" fuck off dipshit it's all fake garbage for idiot children and I am not causing a cartoon skeleton existential agony by considering that maybe I could play this fun game that I liked and payed cash dollars for again. Now, all this considered, my next game on the list might be surprising...

Nier: Automata

Okay so let's just get this out of the way. Nier does a very famous thing at the end when you get the true ending where you are given the choice to forfeit your saved data in order to help another player get past the final boss, which is... the credits. So how is this different? Well, for one thing, it's not like the central narrative conceit of the game. The sexy android psychodrama functions perfectly well without it. It's kind of its own thing. It's... an expression of hope, kind of. An admission that you -care- about the fates of these characters, in spite of being bits of code, because their personalities and their world and the way they interact are all compelling and endearing, and you would give up something of tangible worth and importance to maybe give them a chance for a better outcome in somebody else's game, too. It's a very strange thing that I can think of no real equivalent for. You even get to put a little personalized message on the extra shmup ship you send over to help some other player get through to the end. It's an act that... kind of exists outside of the story, but also kind of in it. I think the important thing here is that the conceit is that you are making this sacrifice to help somebody else, not because a small goat child said something Foreboding. It's a confirmation that if a game makes you feel things, makes you think, maybe it wasn't just a waste of time.

So enough about that. What about like the other 99% of the game? A lot of people in my peer group are super sweet on the original Nier: Gestalt game. I played through it. It was... okay. Like it absolutely had very charming characters and story and all of that but it was just kind of a slog to play through and I kind of wished the entire game was just that segment where you're playing a text adventure. Automata continues to have very charming characters and story and all of that, but it also actually like. It's fun? To hit the buttons? Like, that Platinum pedigree isn't just for show. It's not the most technical game they've ever made, but it's fun and varied (shmups! shmups!) and there's some fun character customization and you even have a self-destruct switch which is always hilarious. The real attraction is the narrative, visuals, and gorgeous music, but it's also just a solid swordswingy dodgy robot smashy time irrespective of that. So like. Yeah.

The story and characters are very interesting and well done and goes to some very dark and uncomfortable places sometimes about the nature of memory, artificial intelligence, the often arbitrary labels we give ourselves, and the implications of sexy robot men with no junk. The nice thing about Nier Automata is that the events in game are fairly straightforward and relayed in a way that people who don't compulsively watch lore videos can understand without too much difficulty, so I don't really need to go into a detailed summary of why it's genius because of tHe AlLeGoRy. It kind of speaks for itself, for the most part. Does 9S want to fuck 2B or destroy 2B? Maybe some other verb entirely! We may never know. Well, I do know. He wants to fuck her. That is obvious. But it does not preclude the other, which is a salient and disconcerting point the game tries to make with that whole sequence. 9S has really had a rough time of it, you know? All that stuff in his own game and then he pops up on the First only to get his face caved in by the Warrior of Darkness. Rotten luck.

Basically, Yoko Taro sets out to say some things with his strange brainchild about androids with very big butts, but when you think about it, the attractiveness of the YorHa androids is also kind of a statement, too. If you're building something in your image, wouldn't you want to make it as sexy as possible? I would. Like, if you could make your machine children smoking hot, why wouldn't you? It's only polite. Nobody wants to be an ugly robot. Maybe the machine lifeforms would be having a better time of it all if they weren't put in categories like "short stubby." Anyway. Saying things. He says things. The game is thought provoking and evocative and at times very very sad. I love to cry. More on that later. I feel like I'm coming up a little short on this after my small dissertation on Dark Souls 2, but sometimes you need to fuckin. Get that kind of thing off your chest. Automata is challenging, but not Souls 2 challenging, where you kind of have to look in all the nooks and crannies and paid DLC packs to really get what it's trying to say. Though I think you fight the president of Square Enix in one of the Nier DLCs. That's pretty intellectually formidable.

Bloodborne:

It is no secret that I love the Bloodborne. It's very fun, very tight, usually works right most of the time, blood vials are shit but what can you do, and is one of the most visually arresting games like, ever. Ever ever. Behold! A Paleblood Sky! indeed. It's got the Souls pedigree to make combat fun and challenging, but its also very squishy and visceral and kind of grody in a good way because it ties in heavily to the themes of what really separates people from "beasts" and how more often than not we're just fooling ourselves. We're all rancid beasts. Hunger makes monsters of us all. It is this thematic strength, and the uncommon aplomb with which the game takes a hard left turn into "wait what the fuck???" town, that I regard it so highly. It's a game with a lot to say, especially about our narrow view of "intelligence" and the imagined "right" it grants us to subjugate and victimize those we deem inferior. The Victorian setting is no accident - a lot of the horror in the game draws heavily from classic colonialist sentiment and the erroneous conviction that all things are there for the benefit of Mankind (Glory to them, see previous) that commonly defines that era. Also that architecture is some spooky shit I tell you what. Even when there isn't a large spider man with a brain for a head hanging off of it. There are those, in this game, by the way. You thought you were gonna deal with werewolves? Bitch your eyes have yet to open, strap the fuck in.

Bloodborne is the coveted "what a twist!" game I so laboriously search for. A game that expertly leads you to believe some things, then gradually shows you that you are a fucking wrong idiot baby and now there are mushroom men from mars running around casting magic missile at you. It gets this right in part because the clues were there all along, if you bothered to search for them. The first part of the game is fairly expected of what the promo material was all about, save for some weirdness with dreams and cryptic mutterings of "Paleblood." Then, you know, some shit starts getting wacky. You start running into giantass monster men clad in the trappings of the church. The NPCs you talk to start becoming more and more unhinged. Sometimes you will be randomly lifted bodily into the air and die and it is fucking alarming the first time I tell you what. Strange men with bags start appearing in random spots, and if they kill you, they don't actually kill you - they put you in the bag and kidnap you, the only way to reach a certain area of the game early. This hidden area is filled with more bagmen and some very angry giant pigs, because those are in this game too. Then you finally enter the big cathedral at the center of town and its lined with really odd looking statues of aliens and you touch a weird skull and you get a vision from the Mothercrystal about how to progress, and you tell the password to the gatekeeper, and he's like "ok cool get in here" but actually he is a fucking dessicated corpse and this isn't Dark Souls there ain't no undead here. Maybe. Are there?

Then you get into the Forbidden Woods and there are like, the weird mushroom men, if you go looking for them, and snakes, and really BIG snakes, and men who are made out of snakes and kind of give you weird nostalgic memories of Resident Evil 4 and the las plagas sphagetti heads. And there are more statues and giant fucking gravestones? That are really unnerving? And also if you went poking around you might have also met Patches again, who is back, but also a spider, and he'll show you how to get into college, except the college is in a nightmare and full of slime people, which is actually pretty normal now that I think about it, and then you can go out into ANOTHER nightmare, which is just another obnoxious poison swamp but the winter lanterns live there and those things are a fucking trip. Anyway you get to Bergynwerth eventually and there are weird insect guys and weird disheveled looking fellas that literally eat your brains if they get close and this awful npc hunter (the real horror of the night i tell you what) who casts fucking megaflare and you FINALLY get to the center of it all and jump into the lake except it's not the lake, it's actually like a fucking pocket dimension and there's just a big spider chilling out. You have to kill it to progress. And then when you do things just REALLY go to hell. And this is to say nothing of the Old Hunters DLC. This game is a fucking nightmare and it's great. Easily one of the scariest games ever made, genuinely frightening and weird and it doesn't just lose its edge when you realize the monster is a big goofy man with a flappy jaw. You are the monster, and that monster is a tiny squid baby. You're a squid now! Because you ate umbilical cords! Why!? I DON'T KNOW! INSIGHT, MOTHERFUCKER!

So what I just described is probably sounding completely absurd, random, and borderline early 2000s era monkeycheese style humor, but you gotta believe me, it is only absurd. It's actually very deliberately absurd. A lot of people will say that Bloodborne is one of the only games to get Lovecraft right, but I have actually read some of that dreck and I will say Bloodborne really only shares some aesthetic DNA and nomenclature with the racist tentacle man who ate nothing but canned beans. The themes are actually very different. Lovecraft wrote of a paradoxical contradictory world where Unspeakable Elder Things lurked behind every shadow, ready to emerge and destroy everything, but they were also very apathetic and noncommital about the whole thing. They didn't actually care that much either way, but they were still Bad, because they were weird and alien and inimicable to human life because of that foreign aspect. Like Nyarlathotep was originally envisioned as a travelling black guy who would go from town to town and show people some awesome inventions and shit and that was supposed to be evil. The dude's neuroses about race permeated -everything- he wrote.

On the other hand, Bloodborne takes a different tack. One of the central theses of the game is that the Great Ones are -not- evil. In fact, they're rather sympathetic by nature and will do what they can to help, if asked. The horror of the game comes not from the actions of the alien monstrosities who are actually nicer than most of the humans, but from what the human characters do in the pursuit of knowledge and power. Atrocities are committed by the dozen in some vague pursuit of higher understanding, against both the citizens of Yharnam and the supposed cosmic horrors themselves. This point is driven home by the fact that a number of the more alien entities you encounter in the game aren't actually hostile at all. Rom, the Vacuous Spider, will just chill out with you indefinitely at the Moonside Lake if you don't strike the first blow, and doesn't even really begin to actively defend herself until you prove yourself to be a determined murder machine. Ebrietas, the Daughter of the Cosmos, is found minding her own business in an out of the way corner of the Upper Cathedral Ward, mourning Rom after you, you know, killed her in cold blood. Again, she is completely non-hostile until you start shit. In the Old Hunters, Kos (or some say Kosm) is actually benevolent sort of mother goddess to the people of a small fishing hamlet. ...until the "scholars" of Bergynwerth murder her in the name of science, too.

All of the evil and horror and stomach-turning cruelty in Bloodborne comes from corrupt systems of power run rampant, not something as facile as the supposedly intrinsic malice of beings different from us. The terrors of the cosmos are nothing before the vile, willful depravity of mankind itself. That's the idea at the heart of it all. The Great Ones, who exist on a higher plane of existence, seem to have largely left this cruelty behind. Even the Moon Presence, the principle cause of the Hunter's Dream, is trying to help Laurence and Gherman - it's just that it's so different from humans, its idea of helping is a bit. Strange. It's this really fresh and unique take on the genre, this byzantine tragedy of miscommunication, good intentions, and mortal greed, that creates one of the vanishingly few games at are actually frightening. It doesn't even have to sacrifice being a good game to do it! No hiding in closets from the scourge of screen blur and heavy breathing here. In terms of gameplay, it's probably the most refined of quintet. I'm unsure if I should count Sekiro with them or not. It's a much different thing. Trick weapons and hunter's garb are iconic, extremely stylish, original, and honestly just fucking dope as hell. You've got a hammer that explodes when it hits things, a giant pizza cutter, a katana you coat with your own blood to empower, a gunrapier and a gunspear, a giant... wagon wheel... because Miyazaki just really likes those I guess, a bow that is also a sword, a giant fucking ship's cannon you just carry around with you, a portable flamethrower, an... eyeball, that shoots space rocks, for some reason. Like the weapon design and selection alone is worthy of considerable accolade. Bloodborne is fantastic, play it if you can.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I was a little bit kinda wishy washy on putting this on here, but I think overall that it deserves a spot. In terms of story and themes, it's honestly a bit whatever. It's Zelda. Don't be an asshole to your genius daughter who knows like ten times as much as you do about everything I guess. Prince Sidon is a nice fishman. Link is like, distressingly, "this is a kids game!!" hot when you put him in certain outfits. I'm pretty sure every configuration of sexuality interested in the act of boning probably at least went "hoo boy" when Link put on the gerudo outfit. That is, of course, not really enough to qualify for such a prestigious position as one of the best games of the decade. Where Breath of the Wild shines is its world design, music, and the masterful layer of melancholy it drapes everything in. The ruined land of Hyrule is beautiful and sad in equal measure, the vistas enhanced by a fantastic soundtrack with an incredibly rich personal voice. It takes a very certain kind of design philosophy, in my opinion, to create an open world that is actually meritorious and worthwhile and not just an excuse to spend a lot of time hoofing it through vast expanses of nothing interesting. There is enough raw Stuff in the land of Hyrule, from enemy encounters to happening upon NPCs to just finding something really weird and inexplicable that you feel compelled to check out, to justify the massive open world.

I think the enemy design in particular is worthy of some praise. The game gives you a whole lot of tools to tackle any given fight. Sometimes you can just whack something with your sword until either the enemy or the sword breaks and that will work fine. Other times, you can literally do the Tao Pai Pai thing from Dragonball and launch a treetrunk into the air, surf on it, and land it squarely in the face of some unsuspecting moblin. This is a very popular speedrun strat. The sheer amount of Weird Stuff you can do in the service of ultimately saving Hyrule is a lot of lot of LOT of fun, things not many other games would let you do. There's also something to be said for the moments where you're exploring, minding your own business, and find yourself face to face with something fearsome and big and dangerous, like a Lynel in the frozen north or one of the big cyclops guys. It's heartpounding and exciting and really hits that "oh hell yeah let's fuckin FIGHT" button. And fighting in Breath of the Wild is a hell of a lot of fun! Probably the most its been in any Zelda game. Skyward Sword please go away you're drunk this was never a good idea. To me, Breath of the Wild is kind of the platonic ideal of an open world fantasy fuck around game. That used to be Skyrim, but BotW sort of made me realize you can actually have a functional game on top of all the aforementioned Fucking Around, too, and that sort of enhances the experience.

This might be a little weird and personal and I apologize, but I think the one thing that really sealed this game as something very special and significant to me was the moment I entered the Rito village for the first time. I was greeted with an utterly gorgeous piano melody that gradually unfolded into a soulful, excruciatingly bittersweet arrangement of the Dragon Roost Isle theme from the Windwaker. I admit that I was not in a good place in my life when I was playing Breath of the Wild. I was still reeling from some bad brain stuff. Be that as it may, Breath of the Wild is the only game I have ever played - hell, the only piece of art I have experienced - that has brought me to tears with nothing more than a song. When I realized what I was listening to, when the memories of a time when I was still a child with hope and trust and innocence and any faith that life would ever be something more than cruelty and suffering came flooding back, I had to put down my switch, go lay down, and just ugly cry for a while. It's honestly making me a little misty-eyed just thinking about. It was such a personal, intimate, keening feeling of... I don't really know. Nostalgia? Longing? Melancholy? Now, believe me, I love to cry. I am a crybaby. Things make me cry all the time. But not like this. This was something else. Something I still don't really understand, or can explain. All I know is that if a game can do that to me with just a few notes, it deserves to be here.

Salt and Sanctuary:

This is probably the most niche game for me. Even people who share some of my more eclectic tastes and sensibilities didn't like this game that much, but there was just something about this Metroidvania mashed with a Soulslike that hit some very primal notes in my soul. The art style, a weird mix of cartoony and utterly deranged, the enemy design, the bizarre way the world is put together, some extremely creative boss battles, and above all, some masterfully done atmosphere dripping with poorly understood dread and a sense of complete disorientation combined to create an experience that seemed to be made for me, and possibly me alone. It's not a flawless game. The music is fine, but somewhat lacking in variety. The character progression system is a good deal more complicated than it needs to be by any stretch of the imagination, as is the weapon upgrade system. The difficulty curve is uneven, and the raw inscrutability of the whole enterprise can make progression difficult in ways that it never really was in Dark Souls and Demon's Souls, which at least had the courtesy to point you in the right direction from time to time. The ending is a bit on the weak side.

Even now it feels difficult to really like. Elucidate on why I like this game so much. Maybe it's because it was the heartfelt effort of an extremely small team with more passion than experience? Because it's so unique and bold in ways other games are not, even while being a self-admitted derivative of Souls games? I just don't know. It's just such a fun and plucky thing, even if parts of it are kind of bad. It's not like, Deadly Premonition or anything where the badness is also the primary attraction. It's like, overall a good game? I believe? It's just that if it wasn't also kind of weirdly flawed and broken in some ways I don't think I would like it as much. God, I don't know. Just. Play it if you get a chance and see if any of this makes sense. One of the weapons you can use is a giant ass ship anchor, which is just fantastic, and you can start out as a chef, complete with a goofy hat and an extra helping of salt. Salt is important. Gotta keep those electrolytes up. You can also put a pumpkin on your head, and there's a boss called the Tree of Men which is just this giant torture machine that hates you and everyone else. It's so weird! The lighting is so moody and unsettling! The Queen of Smiles doesn't have a jaw! You have to brand your ass with a metal iron to double jump! ...hand, not ass, to be fair. But ass would be pretty funny. And horrifying. If you join the Iron Ones religion your healing item is just bread. And that is a fucking mood.

Super Mario Galaxy 2:

This one barely makes the temporal cut, but it was 2010 when it came out, I'm pretty sure. As a Mario game that doesn't have paper in its name, it's also going to be a bit fluffier and lighter on actual substance than pretty much every other game here, and I don't have that much to say. It's just this gorgeously realized and scored platforming adventure that's so tightly tuned you could play Smoke on the Water on it. It is the still the best traditional jumpy wahoo boing boing Mario game I have ever played. It just makes you feel good about space, and going to space, and seeing all the wonderful things in space. Though there most likely are not charming little obstacle courses themed around bees and and toy trains in space, the various cosmic phenonmenon on display on the map screen and in the background of some galaxies are close enough to what you might expect to inspire a sense of wonder and awe. SMG2 is like the purest expression of Let's Just have a Good Time design in games I have ever seen. It induces good feelings. Not everything has to be deep and troubling and thought provoking. Like, I tend to prefer it when they are, but there's always rooms for exceptions like this. Just fantastic. And the music though holy shit. Honestly I think the only game on this list that doesn't have a fantastic OST is Salt and Sanctuary, but it's still like. Serviceable.

Darkest Dungeon:

Let me start off by saying that Darkest Dungeon doesn't always hit the mark with its central conceit of stress management and the importance of mental health in your small army of adventurers. Nobody is going to start screaming abuse at their comrades or start stabbing them to death in a fit of paranoia because a skeleton spilled some cheap champagne on them. That said, I think that it -tries- to address these things is admirable, even if it is fairly easily boiled down into a simple matter of resource management and cost/benefit analysis. The reason I like Darkest Dungeon so much is that it is a game that excels at emergent storytelling. In terms of actual plot progression and character development, there is very little. You can have a party of four Occultists, each with the exact same backstory and with the exact same pact to the exact same eldritch entity, killing the exact same boss several different times. If you want. The dungeon crawling primarily serves as a vehicle for two things: the first and most obvious, the primary gameplay experience where you command your brave or at least foolhardy group of heroes to engage the ancient horrors of Grandpa's Party House. By itself, this is compelling and demanding. A bit like Dark Souls, Darkest Dungeon is a game that is fairly exacting in what it expects out of you, and it will not let you make mistakes without slapping you on the wrist and saying "no, bad." Similarly, it is a game where mastery is rewarded, but both in somewhat lesser degrees because DD is much more random and capricious in nature. The difference between a new player and an old hand is obvious, but sometimes even veterans can get completely dicked over by things out of their control.

That leads us into the second purpose: having the Ancestor narrate your constant struggle against Murphy's Law while completely hilarious bullshit conspires to send all of your highly trained and well equipped adventurers to the grave. Let me tell you a tale. I was fighting the Countess, the extremely powerful and dangerous final boss of the Crimson Court DLC. Everybody was afflicted with some manner of madness, and things were looking grim. She had shuffled my party around into a formation wherein some of them couldn't act without switching places. I ordered my vestal to switch places with Dismas, my highwayman. Dismas, however, was currently under either "selfish" or "abusive" status and simply refused to move. This meant that my vestal could not actually act that turn, and simply doing nothing incurs a penalty of stress damage. This stress damage was enough to put her gauge to the maximum, give her a heart attack, and kill her. Dismas literally murdered the healer by being too much of an asshole. I was beside myself at the time, but make no mistake - it was fucking hysterical. I later fed him to the final boss as penance for his crimes.

Darkest Dungeon is a grindy game that takes time and effort to complete. This is one of the biggest complaints leveled at it, and it's a fair one. On normal mode, though, you are more than capable of going at it inch by bloody inch, throwing corpse after corpse at the eldritch monstrosities until they at last drown in the blood and give up. No matter how grievous the setback, you can come back from it, unless you're playing on stygian/blood moon mode, which adds a fairly strict time limit and a hard cap on how many hapless adventurers you can send into the meatgrinder before the Nameless Thing That Ends The World wakes up and gives you an auto-game over. It's designed to be a long, bloody slog where shit goes wrong. Hopefully, in the upcoming sequel which I am very much anticipating not being able to play because I am poor, Red Hook can perhaps find a better balance with this. I am, for my part, fairly forgiving of grindy games, and at times even enjoy them. They were going for something with the way they designed DD, and I respect that. If you have the proper mindset of "whatever will be, will be" and learn to embrace the senselessness of death, your adventures in the Darkplace Estate will be both rewarding and oftentimes absurdly funny because your Arbalest was too depressed to eat anything, took more stress damage from starving, and then died of a heart attack, which then further stressed out the rest of the party. If that sounds more "oh my god that's awful" than "hahahaha you fucking dipshits" to you, DD might not be up your alley. But if it is, it -really- is. It's sort of the Dwarf Fortress principle, though Darkest Dungeon is far more user friendly and nice to look at. ...you know if you payed him enough the narrator voice actor would probably do a dramatic reading of Boatmurdered. Just saying.

Stellaris:

Stellaris is kind of the odd spaceman out on this list for a variety of reasons, but it shares the same kind of compelling emergent storytelling that Darkest Dungeon has. It's just less likely to be about how your alcoholic bounty hunter missed every hit against a fishman and went insane, and more likely to be about how you found this really cool Orb in space but it was in another empire's territory so you basically fabricated Space World War 1 to take it for yourself. Maybe that was just me. Much like the many habitable planets in any given Stellaris game, Paradox's grand strategy space game falls in the Goldilocks Zone of "accessible for mortal minds" and "satisfyingly complex." I'm not a huge fan of most Paradox stuff because I don't really give much of a fuck about kings and their crusaders one way or the other, but I respect them for what they are. Stellaris was kind of a proof of concept for me for that - given subject matter I actually liked (space!!!!), the various nitty gritty systems of planetary management and fleet organization and robo-modding and gene templates became compelling rather than overwhelming. They were, granted, still pretty overwhelming at first. The game still receives robust free updates and DLC even as of this writing, sometimes drastically changing the way the game is played (alloys! consumer goods! aarrrggh!) and making my 500ish hours of playtime seem a little less nonsensical. Look, a lot of that time was idling on the galaxy map while I did something else.

It's just really polished and technically competent and -enormous- and there's space dragons and sometimes you get to fuck a black hole. Stellaris doesn't really have a narrative, per se, save what you ascribe to any given game, but that doesn't mean the game doesn't have writing. A lot of very interesting, well written, and sometimes really funny flavor text can be found in the various anomalies and in-game events your science vessels will encounter as they uncover more of the galaxy, or sometimes a planet will have a mysterious portal to Hell on it, or maybe it's actually just a huge egg for a terrifying voidspawn. The game also navigates the usual 4X/strategy game dilemma of securing an early lead and just kind of chilling for the rest of the game by introducing midgame and lategames crises. It's not a perfect fix, but the ever-looming threat of a khanate space uprising, an AI uprising either from your empire or another, or ravenous space bugs from beyond the cosmos ensures that you have to keep at least a little bit on your toes. The presence of spaceborne aliens that range from "a nuisance" to "well gosh that thing is actually eating that sun this could be problematic" also ensures that you need to pay attention to both military and domestic aspects of governing. Stellaris happens in real time (though you can thank god pause whenever you want to issue orders) so there isn't really a Civilization equivalent of "oh the tiny pissant nations are declaring war, time to buy seven tanks with my enormous hoard of gold and run over their medieval knights" in Stellaris. Stuff always takes time to make, and it takes time to get in position, too. Space being exceedingly vast, and all that.

The lategame can get simultaneously get very overwhelming and very boring, but there are systems put in place to help automate the process of ruling a huge interstellar empire and one of the nice things about Stellaris is that you can kind of just. Stop whenever you want. There are technically win conditions, if you're into that sort of thing, but a lot of the time I will just play it through until I'm like "hmm okay im good" and then just either start a new game as an extremely different kind of empire or play something else for a while. It's kind of nice. The idea of "winning" in these games is always so weird to me anyway. I kind of like the framework where it's just kind of like. You tell a story, rather than try to win a game. Recent changes have made it much easier to actually achieve victory, however. Part of the thing that kind of encouraged my "eh i'll stop when i wanna" approach in the first place was how unreasonable some of the old victory requirements were. Occupy sixty percent of the galaxy? Excuse me???? Fuck off. Also, it's not like. A really salient part of the game like it is for most other games on the list, but Stellaris actually does have a pretty nice soundtrack. It's much more ambient in nature and there's not really enough of it for the amount of Game there is, but what's there is nice, even if you will probably end up turning it off and listening to your own music instead eventually.

============================= =Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers= =============================

Alright so if you've like actually looked at my twitter or talked to me or to someone about me for more than two minutes, it's probably pretty obvious that I really like FFXIV. An unhealthy amount. I will cop to that. FFXIV is an MMORPG. Let's start with the basics. I enjoy the game's gameplay a lot. I would not have put 6 years of my life into playing it if I did not, I'm not a Dota 2 player, for Christ's sake. I like to raid, and have actively done it in every wing except for the Sigmascape. I even managed to beat the final encounter of the current Edengate raids! I'm currently sort of gathering my courage to try the latest Ultimate Raid, the Epic of Alexander. Ultimate Raids are fights that are absurdly difficult by any reasonable standard and further winnow the playerbase from "hit level 80->does endgame stuff->does savage raiding->clears savage raid tiers->does Ultimate Raids->.00000001% of the player base that clears ultimate raids". Ultimates are for a very specific kind of player. I'm just sort of mentioning it for context purposes, it doesn't really factor in to my overall evaluation.

Now, despite the fact that I personally enjoy the gameplay a great deal, it is not actually why I think this game is so good. This might puzzle you. What else is there to an MMO? Is the sense of community especially great? Well, I would say that I really enjoy the community of people I play with, but on the whole, XIV's community is about. Standard, really. Which is to say "a fucking dumpsterfire" by any human metric, but just par for the course for online video games. What keeps me coming back to the game is that in between all the endgame stuff and grinding and crafting and going to die in Eureka, there is a bafflingly compelling and superlative singleplayer experience. The game is actually like unironically the best mainline FF title since at least XII. I would personally say it's on par with IX as a narrative experience, which is no faint praise because i fuckin luv me some ffix. But how can an MMO have such a compelling story? It's kind of complicated.

History lesson for the ten people who still don't know: FFXIV actually launched way back in like. 2011 or some shit and it was -arrestingly- bad. "Embarrassment to the franchise name" bad. So bad that they decided to literally drop a meteor on the game world, bring in a new director, shut the whole thing down for a year or so, and then relaunch the game as A Realm Reborn in mid 2013. People really liked this version. It was nothing short of a miracle. It also layed the groundwork for something important: a real and genuine dedication to worldbuilding (and worldending, too). The destruction and rebirth of the realm of Eorzea is metanarratively (theres my favorite non-word word again) baked into the very DNA of the game as it is now. Learning about the people who lived after the Calamity and how they survived is a direct parallel to how the dev team had to survive and adapt to make this complete boondoggle of a game into something presentable. A lot of heart and soul went into the bones of the world the game takes place in, because it's an expression of that dogged determination to make it work. Yoshida and his team probably crunched like hell to get it all done, and that makes me really sad, but what's done is done. I wish it didn't have to be that way, but it is, and all I can do at this point is praise the team's hard work and vision and try to support them as best I can.

So there's this really weighty sense of reality to the game world, and all of 2.0 is basically spent just establishing Eorzea and how it works. If you were an early adopter of ARR, like I was (2.1 is early right. it's gotta be.) then you grew to genuinely care about the place you spent so much time in and looked so pretty and was kind of obnoxiously laid out but don't worry there will be flying in the expansion. The longrunning nature of the game sort of necessitated a sort of serialized story. It had much more in common with an episodic TV Show than a usual Final Fantasy story, which for better or for worse are usually self-contained little things until somebody decides its fuckin Nova Crystalis time. It created a really unique sense of anticipation and participation in an ongoing story and evolving world. I think this is where a lot of people find their attachments to MMO style games, why people are still faithfully playing World of Warcraft 15 years on.

So FFXIV gets two expansions, Heavensward and Stormblood, and they were very Good, and added lots of neat things to the game and advanced the story and introduced new and beloved characters and also Zenos yae Galvus I guess and the long-running nature of it all started forging a kind of personal narrative of necessity, if that makes sense? Like, your own protagonist, who is mostly silent, who you created and customized and further customized and maybe turned into a lalafell once just to see what it was like to be so short, has been an important part of this world for so long your brain kind of just fills in the gaps in spite of itself. What would my character think about this? What would she do? Why would she do it? That kind of thing. The Warrior of Light, as one is called, has had a leading role in the game's story since pretty much day one, but one of the things that compels me about the character is how much work it took to get where she is today. Like, it's not a Diablo 3 style "hmm well you killed those zombies really good so i guess you're basically stronger than god and also satan put together" affair. You start out as a newbie adventurer, you do newbie adventurer things, like helping orange pickers keep the orchard clear of bees or deliver packages for guilds or whatever sufficiently adventuresome task needs doing. You gain notoriety for doing things that are, well, worthy of notoriety. You really get noticed when you defeat the primal Ifrit in a pitched battle, get recruited by some organizations, and you keep steadily working your way up from there.

As of Shadowbringers, the warrior of Darkness is kind of stronger than god and satan combined, but it took a fucking -lot- to get there. One base game and two expansions worth of life or death battles against utterly intractable foes and also Zenos yae Galvus I guess. It is beyond the scope of this piece to just give you a full plot summary of six years worth of storytelling, so I will just cut to the chase and try to explain what I'm taking five million words to say. Shadowbringers did something I thought heretofore impossible: it made me care about my tabula rasa cipher avatar as a character in a story and not just as an expression of digital self that I had grown fond of. Don't get me wrong - Dazzlyn Reed the adventurer is absolutely an expression of digital self that I have grown -disproportionately- fond of. I figure I'm a few more patch cycles from becoming that girl in the Jack Chick tract about Dungeons and Dragons who had a psychotic break because her DnD character died. However, for the most part, that affection was more of... kind of taking pride in her appearance and the outfits I put together and the achievements I had accomplished with her and stuff like that. Shadowbringers made me care about her as a character in her own right, which seems borderline miraculous to me.

It's sort of hard to explain without totally spoiling everything. And even with spoiling everything. In vague terms, I'll try to express it this way: the game put Dazzlyn in a situation where she had failed. Like, spectacularly. Everything she had done in the course of the expansion had gone up in smoke, and her own life was in real and severe danger. When you play these kinds of games, your first instinct when things go wrong in the story is pretty much always to just flippantly say to yourself "okay okay just calm down and let me fix it i'm like level a billion it's fiiiiine". Shadowbringers turns that on its head. You went to fix things... and you couldn't. Despite good intentions, it's arguable that you only made things worse. Everything you worked for since arriving on the First was just utterly undone, and the game lets you see the toll that has taken on your character. It's weirdly heartwrenching in a really uncommon and compelling way. Dazzlyn had been on the outside looking in at this kind of situation plenty of times before, and she had always had a nice and encouraging thing to say as she helped shoulder the burden and get things back on track for Alphinaud or Lyse or Cid or whoever. The game has, since antiquity, given you much appreciated little dialogue choices that don't really matter much in the scheme of things but let you kind of carve out your own characterization, and the way Dazzlyn turned out was somebody who just really cared way too much about all of her dumb stupid impossible friends who kept fucking up.

One thing that longtime players of the game have complained about quite a bit over the years is that your NPC friends never seemed very. Like. Personally close to you, with a couple of exceptions like Alisae. Shadowbringers both fixes that by introducing the Trust system, which lets you take your Scion buddies into dungeons with you instead of other players, if you are so inclined, and sort of turns it back around to be a kind of poignant narrative point. After everything she had done for them, unconditionally and with a smile, none of the Scions could actually find a way to help Dazzlyn when she finally ended up being the one who needed it. And this -fucks them up-, emotionally. Like, bad. Alisae nearly has a crying fit over it in one of Shadowbringer's more affecting scenes. And just watching the whole thing unfold fucked me up, too. Like, I hadn't signed up for this. I was (relatively) safe in the knowledge that they would not have the gall to actually kill off the player character in an ongoing MMO, but it wasn't necessarily the fear of something happening to her that was getting to me. It was more just this feeling of "god, she deserves better. this isn't fair." The emotional pain that, well, everybody involved is going through is extremely real, even if the threat of genuine death is not. I know (mostly) (please god) that Dazzlyn is going to be okay, but she doesn't. Her friends certainly don't. And even when she does miraculously pull through, it's not like all of this grief and fear and anxiety is going to just vanish like it never happened.

I really have to stress how completely and catastrophically wrong this could have gone if the writers responsible weren't sufficiently skilled. I'm pretty sure if I idly suggested a BFA era World of Warcraft storyline like this to somebody who still plays they would have an apoplectic fit. It would have been so easy for this kind of exercise to ascribe character traits and emotions to a very personal interpretation of the Warrior of Light that they would never have, for any one person's vision of them. The FFXIV writing team avoided this issue entirely, probably because they knew if they didn't people would go ape, by focusing the brunt of the expressed distress on your friends and just leaving you yourself some time to take in the enormity of how badly things have gone wrong in customary silence. A subdued facial expression here, a dialogue option there. No more than strictly necessary. The game encourages you to draw your own conclusions about what your Warrior is feeling, how they're coping, if they even have any hope left, but it does not overstep its bounds and do it for you. It's just... really masterfully done. The overall arc of Shadowbringers can be described as "intriguing, well realized, and competently done." The overarching ideas presented aren't like, groundbreaking or anything. What is groundbreaking, at least to me, is this miraculous giving of life to a character that was originally intended as as simple player avatar.

At the end of the day, everybody rallies around you, as they usually do, but it is markedly different this time. It isn't some facile repetition of the idea that the Warrior of Light/Darkness/Pants-theft is this focal point of hope given form and life to everyone. Instead, it's this... oddly touching expression of friendship. Commitment. It's all probably going to end in tragedy. There's nothing anybody can really do. But they're going to stay with you until the bitter end anyway, because they care about you. If nothing else, they can't bear to think of you dying alone and in agony. Even the citizens of the Crystarium, with whom you do not share a bond that goes back literal years, show up to give you some words of encouragement. They show up to tell you that it's okay that you failed. It's okay that you got hurt, it's okay that you're in pain, that you're scared, that you're vulnerable, that you don't know what to do. After spending such a long time in the game's lore as being kind of invincible and infallible except for the occasional matter of pesky Imperial Viceroys and Old Kung-fu Men, it's just... affecting. It's not often done in games, at least that I have played and seen.

Does this one story moment justify making Shadowbringers the game of the decade? Honestly? Kind of. To me, art has always been about emotional reaction. This kind of reaction is something special, even for a crybaby idiot bitch like me. Moments like these are what make or break truly fantastic experiences. Finally finding Vendrick in the Tomb as that haunting, off-key melody starts playing. Realizing the true nature of the Upper Cathedral Ward. Hearing a beautiful piece of music in Rito Village and thinking about what that song means to you. Admitting that you care about your Warrior of Darkness more than you thought. They're all quite different, running the gamut from existential despair, stomach turning fear, a deep and abiding nostalgia and longing for what used to be, to a sincere, melancholy affection for a game world I've been a part of for almost six years. There's one unbroken thread: a cascade of genuine emotion. Something that goes beyond the simple pressing of buttons and jolts of serotonin as the numbers go up or the bad guys die.

Fortunately for my general credibility, Shadowbringers is also just really good in general. Soken's soundtrack is, as always, kind of spooky in how high quality it is. The presentation is top notch as usual. Encounter design is probably the best its ever been in terms of balancing accessibility and challenge and having mechanics that actually Work As Intended and not nightmarish garbage like Digititis and Black Hole Walking. Royal Pentacle! Server ticks! Server ticks! Uh. Sorry. Going slightly feral there. Anyway. Overall, I think Shadowbringers is the most polished expansion so far, in all respects, and its narrative quality in particular is kind of transcendent because of what it accomplishes in regards to how players see themselves in relation to an unfolding story. Also, it has an unfair advantage, because it's also a continuation of Nier Automata now! That's two games of the decade in one! Now, due to the serial nature of it all, I will allow that if something goes... like, inconceivably, catastrophically wrong with 5.2 - 5.5 I might be a little premature in my assessment. That said, 5.1 was just as fantastic as 5.0 and I don't see a reason to assume that the quality will so drastically drop in the coming months.

If you're somebody who really likes Rankings, here is a pretty noncommital list of them going from least good to best good but they're all special damn it.

10. Super Mario Galaxy 2 9. Breath of the Wild 8. Stellaris 7. Darkest Dungeon 6. Salt and Sanctuary 5. Dark Souls 4. Nier Automata 3. Bloodborne 2. Dark Souls II 1. Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers

And here's a couple of Honorable Mentions just because!

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

To be honest, this easily could have taken the place of like. Breath of the Wild or SMG2 if I was just a little bit more into Sekiro's aesthetic. It's easily the most technical and best-playing game that Miyazaki's team has put out so far, with a very simple to learn, difficult to master system of fighting based more around swordfighting than "shove large axe into monster butt" its predcessors liked so much. It also has a well-told story about a fairly down to earth conflict between an independent fiefdom and Japan's internal ministry trying to conquer it, with a splash of supernatural weirdness to give it some spice. There are monkeys with guns. Sekiro is just fantastically put together, and I really did end up loving Wolf as a main character, despite my initial misgivings about one of these games without a character creator. Wolf is kind of a lovable chuuni dipshit who tries his best in completely unreasonable circumstances and having him as an anchor lets Sekiro's story be more personal and self-contained in nature than the heady cosmological epics of the Souls games, which was a nice change of pace. Ultimately, though, I just find ineffably weird nature of the earlier titles to be a bit more interesting than shinobi and samurai, which is why Sekiro gets an honorable menchie and not a top spot. Don't get me wrong though shinobi and samurai are dope and Sekiro is not a -worse- game for their inclusion. It's just a matter of personal preference, and I could easily see this game taking a top spot on somebody else's list.

Pokemon X and Y

I am a Pokemon bitch. I play all of them, except for black/white 2 and ultra sun/moon, which seemed too similar to their predecessors to really justify spending my precious, jealously guarded money on them. I feel that in general, X and Y has overall, the best mix of available pokemon, world design, music, Fun Little Things, and general game flow of all of them. Sword and Shield excepted I am still in the middle of that one. Pokemon is absolutely kind of video game comfort food, and its kind of just. There's not a lot to it emotionally, though it does have some fairly in depth mechanics and shit if you want to look into it. I don't know I just really liked X and Y. I felt like it deserved mentioning.

Blade and Soul

This game is awful I'm pretty sure but I have so many fond memories of playing it with people I love and creating a ridiculous titty oil monster and having adventures with her sorry i'm trash

So there you have it. A very personal (sometimes maybe probably too personal) look at the ten games that I found to be the best that came out in the last ten years. Now, I usually consider my opinions on these things to be fairly well reasoned, but in this case, I did rely a lot more on the touchy feely qualitative things that are really important to me over the necessary but lamentable "yes i suppose this game is technically competent and plays extremely well" considerations a more objective list of this kind would entail. So you're free to disagree and think I'm stupid and wrong. I would prefer it if you did not think I was stupid, though, but the fact of the matter is I cannot stop you. Here's to another ten years of wonderful games that make us feel things.

#game of the decade #ffxiv #dark souls #bloodborne #botw #darkest dungeon

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blueoswin · 5 years

Text

Let’s make him jealous!

Summary : Eliott went back to Lucille. However Lucas can't forget him. For now he just has to try to get over him, even if the boys want to push them back together. They all come up with an awesome plan ( their words) in order to do so. Well Emma does : making Eliott jealous. How ? By hiting on Lucas obnoxiously. Too much for his taste. And for Eliott's as well.

Or : Eliott is sad raccoon pining from afar. Lucas is grumpy, Emma is a snake and the boys are elu stans #1.

_________

Chapter 4

_________

Eliott has been losing his mind for a few days now trying to find the right words to tell Lucas everything he needs to know . He longs to simply go talk to him, snatch his boy from Valentin's arms and make up, go back to the way they were before he ruined everything, possibly forever. He can't keep his stomach from churning whenever he sees them together, which is always. Feeling like throwing up from nerves has become a habit by now. The worst part is that Eliott never paid attention to the boy before, his focus solely devoted to Lucas but now, Valentin is the only person always in his eyesight at school. Hell they even share some classes together. Eliott is sat right behind him in his English Lit Class which he has never noticed before. Mme Lecureuil, his teacher has even asked him to stay after class to talk the previous week. She tought he's been quite distracted lately, how surprising. Funnily enough, it seems like Lucas has a type for Lit boys.

Eliott has been sneaking cute drawings in his boy's backpack, hoping Lucas would understand. Giving the complete silence from the other one, he's figured that he either didn't get his drawings or he simply didn't care. Putting his feelings into words was the last resort it seems, his last hope in a way. Unfortunately for him, Eliott never was a good poet, as soon as he catches a glimpse of messy brown hair, all his sharp wit and clever words seem to vanish into thin air. Sat at his desk in front of a new sheet of paper, Eliott is pulling his hair out trying to find the right words for his apology letter. Why are apologies so difficult?

He has been writing, writing, writing again since two hours already. In vain. None of these pathetic letters are able to express his true feelings. Screwed as he is he might as well stick to drawing his apology. But even through yet another drawing, he has no clue where to start. The ever growing pile of crumpled papers next to his chair is the proof. Frustrated, he decides to go for a walk, get out of his bedroom . He pities the fact that he can't actually go out, he'll have to make do with the hallways of the school. Classes are over at this time of the day so the hallways are eerily empty, setting a strange atmosphere.

All for the best, Eliott wants to be alone with his thoughts for once. He's tired of running away from them. Since he met Lucas, he's the only thing that matters. His thoughts revolve solely around him so he's not surprise when his mind goes back to the blank page on his deck, his apology letter still unwritten. He wants to see Lucas so bad, hold him tight in his arm, he can feel the craving for skin on skin contact, the whispered sweet nothing, the hushed promises, the deep thoughts in the dark of the night, the shared secrets, the intimacy, the connection, he misses everything Lucas related. Dearly. He wants to raise up to the challenge the boy gave him before leaving the cafeteria with Valentin, who now spends each seconds of his free time glued to Lucas, ever so tactile. Eliott can't blame the boy, knowing he'd be the same if their positions were reversed. Lucas is too precious, deserves all the love in the world. In a sense he is happy for him, seeing all his friends be supportive, simply being there for him melts Eliott's heart. Nonetheless, the nagging voice at the back of his mind has the depressing habit of repeating him that he's moved on, he's forgotten about you, he's better without you. Lucas is over you. This is your fault.

He shakes his head, taking control over his mind again. Hugo's word are still ringing in his ears.

Lucas hasn't moved on, he's trying to make you jealous.

Well his plan was working just fine in this area. However, he has a hard time believing it given how Lucas and the other boy were so close, in tune with each other, Casual intimacy were the first words to come to mind when you looked at them. This sort of intimacy is really difficult to develop, unless...

Unless you're in love.

The little voice inside his head keeps repeating those words on loop, but thank god his heart is bursting with hope for once instead of dread. Lucas has taught him not to give up, not to settle, to chase after his happiness and Lucas was his happy place . A fond smile plays on his lips, he has shared so many intimate moments with Lucas, precious memories he'll always cherish that he can't believe Lucas could wipe their relationship out in such a short amount of time, finding a rebound was even more improbable, not typical Lucas behaviour at all.

Without him noticing, Eliott's feet has brought him to the common room. Where it all started, where Lucas had acknowledge him for the first time.He remembers how the boy kept glancing at him during the first reunion, trying (and failing) to be subtle. He remembers when they locked eyes for the first time, the shiver that ran through his whole body, he had almost winked just to see how the other boy would react, he remembers how incredibly hard it had been not to stare right back everytime Lucas looked his way, he remembers the hard time he had trying to repress tiny smiles throughout their silent exchange, he remembers Imane sly smile, her eyes going back and forth between the two of them, carefully watching their game of push and pull. Thankfully, she was the only one who had noticed.

He almost passes by the common room, not trusting himself not to burst immediately into tears if he goes in. He starts walking again, having stared at the closed door for too long already not to seem sketchy, should someone stumble upon him. Through the surrounding darkness, a yellow line catches his eyes. A sliver of golden light is coming through the doorway. Eliott frowns.

Weird. Usually the common room is empty by now.

Before he can regret his decision, Eliott steps forward, breathing deeply as he turns the doorknob to open the door and steps in, squinting his eyes against the sudden light. Looking around the room, his gaze comes to a stop on the awful mural, still waiting to be painted over. His project, their project. A slight movement at the corner of his left eye makes him jump. Trying to calm his erratic heartbeat, he turns his head to find out where it has come from. He's taken aback, his eyes setting on a frail silhouette looking through the window, half engulfed by the darkness. The only source of light is provided by a dimly lamp in the corner of the room. The silhouette hasn't moved again; yet, completely unaware of the presence of another being behind them. Squinting his eyes, Eliott takes cautious silence steps, coming closer on order to get a better look, being careful not to make his presence known, not yet. He stubs his toe against the small table of the room and almost curses out loud. Suffering in silence, step after step, watching where he puts his feet now mind you, he gets close enough to discern the ourlines of the silhouette. He takes his time and really look.

Judging by his posture, his shoulders squared, hands clenched, head held high, the boy, at least Eliott assumes the silhouette belongs to a boy, is tensed, really really tensed. He seems deep in thoughts, looking at the sun setting through the large windows, casting mixing shades of blue and rose on the walls. Eliott creeps closer, slowly, he's so close he can discern the features of the now not-so-anonymous person in the reflection of the window.

His heart skips a beat, rhythm accelerating erratically once again although not for the same reasons at the sight of his face. The face he's allowed himself to admire only from afar for two weeks. He's missed this face so much it sometimes hurt. His eyes are still shut, earbuds in his ears, isolating him from the outside world, lost in the music. Eliott does a once over, taking him all in, his rosy cheeks, his sharp jawline he once left some marks on, his strechted out neck, his squared shoulders, his slim waist, his elegant legs. Eliott has always thought he could have been a dancer with legs like his. Perhaps he was, in one of his parallel universes. He's still beautiful. In all his universes his beauty will always be the only immuable constant. Eliott stares until his heart aches, until his fingers are twitching with the need to touch, to extend his arm and take his hand in his. A shaky exhale leaves his lungs.

Open your eyes. Please please please. Open your eyes.

Eliott is internally begging him, even though he's no telepath. Finally, after what feels like an eternity but is probably only a few minutes, his eyes slowly open, eyelashes fluttering. His features seem more relaxed, until he gazes up at the second silhouette in the window. He doesn't even bat an eye. His eyes become sharper, ocean blue turning into ice. He reminds Eliott of a statue, every fiber of his being tenses up. He doesn't turn around though. The night has set, he can't notice anything except for the reflection of their bodies, familiar to each other and yet unknown. Eliott takes a deep breath, coming closer until he's only a few centimeters behind the boy. The need to touch only becomes stronger, his fingers tingling, longing to reach out. His reflection is clearer, the window acting as a mirror in which Eliott's eyes meet deep blue ones he would recognize anywhere.

Lucas.

His boy doesn't seem happy to see him. For five agonizing minutes, Eliott thinks he's going to simply ignore him, either close his eyes again or walk past him, leaving him alone in the empty room. He inhales deeply, preparing himself for whatever Lucas decides to do. It's all up to him now, but Eliott fears he won't be able to handle his rejection. All the oxygen still present in his lungs leave his body when the boy turns around, staring him down with what can only be defined as dormant fury. He swallows laboriously, biting back a whimper.

I'm screwed.

#elu fic #elu fanfic #lucas x eliott fanfic #lucas x eliott #skam france #Lucas Lallemant #eliott demaury #okay I'm nervous about this one #I don't know why #i hope you enjoy it

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deviationdivine · 5 years

Text

Even Until There Is No End (RK900|Request!)

TLDR: The horrors of Cyberlife never seem to fade even after the revolution...

Word Count: 2,460

TW: Angst, Violence & Character Death (I don't know how it went there)

A/N: Prompts: 36. “They’re monsters.” & 2. “Hey, hey, calm down. They can’t hurt you anymore.” | Ahhh! Your comments make my year! Hope this turns out the way you like! Thanks so much for dropping me a prompt exchange. :) My queue is open!

How can it end like this?

A question swirling around in your brain ever since news broke about an incursion orchestrated by the very people who pretend to integrate with public opinion. The war was won. Androids were no longer at the mercy of persecution and everyone waited in baited breath about the outcome involving Cyberlife.

Following the revolution they proposed a peaceful continuation of the company. Skepticism is ripe for the picking. This isn’t just something androids were leery of. Humans, civilians having nothing to do with it, voicing questions.

Cyberlife never answers. They did now.

Your breath catches. More you attempt to find a flaw in this lab in order to escape the less hopeful.

Why throw you here in the first place? Easy. This is a higher level. Anyone who tries to get in will face a bigger accumulation of guards. Those same men who...

Tears threaten but nothing spills readily. People have died and you are bait.

“Nines,” you whisper defeated.

He went deviant too. Like so many others.

Cyberlife waits and waits to concoct a scheme. Now it’s in full swing because Detroit is chaos. Never imagined this will somehow be worse. It is. It is so much worse.

Connor is already gone. Everything is in shambles and it is all due to those...

Your head rises quickly. Shouting echoes down corridor becoming louder, closer up until thunderous pops of gunfire eclipse the original cacophony.

Pounding floods your ears. This time it’s an erratic heartbeat and everything tingles in a swath of dread. Sweeping down head to toe increases discomfort not that you’ve had a pleasant time here.

Apprehended like this despite being part of the DPD is ridiculous itself. When there are multiple security guards armed to the teeth there isn’t much proper training can do to alleviate that situation. Unless dying is what you want to do.

Makes you sicker knowing. Several officers cut down in cold blood. What is this all for except Cyberlife’s unwillingness to allow freedom for everyone to live together. Accomplishing another megalomaniac plan to control or eradicate and this time everyone’s caught.

Crossfire is a horrific thing. Innocent people will suffer the most.

As your thoughts swirl in this entrapment it’s obvious why. Part of you felt as much when they took you alive.

All of this started when responding to a generic emergency call. Ambushed. They knew. Somehow they manage to take you knowing that he-

The noise stops. It ceases everything even your thought because the door busts open under a powerful kick. Shrinking back on hard surface of table doesn’t last because nothing can make you flinch away now.

“Y/N.” The RK900 moves swiftly through lab.

“Nines.” The strangling whisper accompanies your spring up to feet. How did he even…? Your body molds with his as a key in a lock. It will always open because these two parts are of one whole. “They’re monsters.”

“Hey, hey, calm down.” His words soothe in a gentler less stiff timbre. Perhaps it is a bit more human than he realizes but this moment does not offer much time for analysis. With you in his arms it is far more imperative to protect, comfort. “They can’t hurt you anymore.”

Soft promises make your legs weak. Exhaustion eats away at your body. Only the firm sheltering embrace of your android lover keeps you afloat. Strange but this is the first time you realize how painstakingly soft he is.

Only in privacy far from prying eyes; Nines never wants to outwardly show affection for eye witnesses. He feels it’s none of their concern.

Why should he do that when he shows you how much emotion exists in your private sanctuary? You find it typical. Or so you did…

This means more. Even if he took out several guards to stop an audience at this point it really wouldn’t matter. Somehow this tells you how much Nines really loves you. There is no hesitation. Certain things just evaporate the fog of doubt encasing your heart and clear the way.

Peering into his face, gripping up onto broad shoulders serves as an anchor. All that’s on your mind now is how happy you are seeing him in one piece. After what they did to Connor –

His lips meet yours in urgency. Pulling both of you flush together settles indicator into flickering amber a drop from its initial scarlet warning because you are safe. He does not say it aloud.

Unspoken, intense and full of pure emotion the android cradles you as a delicate flower petal. Wild and untamed blowing in the wind and his presence abates its wilting chill.

“Nines.” Breathing up into his lips says everything and nothing at all. “Thank God you…”

“Step away from the human, RK900!”

Jolting back from Nines at the cutting demand fills your lungs in a shock of breath. Connor?

An immediate aim of handgun in your direction answers before you know what’s happening. A shove forces you out of range putting you in contact with one of those lab tables. Stabilizing on two feet is too late to act further.

RK900 grimaces in the path of fire. Preventing deadly precision striking in a vital area that will surely lead to your death, the android absorbs gunshot. The quick action allows a useful shield to protect.

A moment after he staggers in a collapse. Thudding to wall brings the advanced android down in a slide. Knocking every thread out of his system it is immediate:

Error

Critical Malfunction

Imminent Shutdown

Even so the sound of your terrified voice fills his core. “Nines! No!”

Frantic hands clutch at the front of his white jacket. Sinking down automatically brings you close on knees pressing hands over a hole in his sweater torn from gunshot. Blue blood stains your skin creating a sickening drop pit of stomach. It’s visceral. A grisly hue means life ebbing away and he is alive. He is.

He’s hit where his thirium pump is. It’s obvious from how horribly Nines slumped. Never did you ever imagine seeing him crumble in such a way. Not him. Not the very powerful storm that sweeps you away along his torrent.

Exactly what describes that initial attraction you held meeting him. Eye of the storm in steel unmakes you each night in his fiery regard. He can weather any tempest because he is that gale. There is nothing more you love.

“Faster, stronger,” the other android mocks effectively.

Coward! He shoots Nines when he’s distracted. That’s the only reason! He-he put himself in the way. No, he can’t do this.

“More resilient,” the duplicate continues unnecessarily smug. “But not for me.”

Tears blind in a messy streak unable to see this fake clearly. Instead he resembles a blur, a nightmare figment seemingly crawling out of the depths of every one of your darkest fears. The idea this thing is identical to Connor makes insides churn to the point of retching.

Never would the soft doe-eyed android hurt Nines. They held a peculiar relationship but in the end developed an understanding. This is not Connor. It even isn’t the one you heard about from the warehouse.

“Nines! Nines, look at me.”

Desperately cupping his face drew his crystalline gaze, icy but never frigid when he looks at you now. “Y/N…”

“No.” You choke on that plea. “Please, don’t leave me.”

The android behind you watches in disinterest. Brandishing weapon in steady footsteps brings him closer. “Why do humans like you wish to sacrifice for a machine? We do not feel anything.”

Anger twists the anguish in your features. Throwing a sharp glance up at the faux Connor evaporates all of this fear riddling your heart. “You don’t feel! Connor, Nines…they felt! They’re alive.” Were alive.

Liquid spilling from the ducts of your eyes forces a grimace on the goading duplicate’s face. Tears shed over a filthy deviant when he is loyal to their creators.

There is no denying this connection between machine and human is unsettling. It is enough to watch and feel a strange pull center of his chest. The loyal machine steps back in a huff against that unfamiliar sensation.

“Cyberlife will win,” the faux Connor promises. “All of these deviants will be destroyed. But…you may leave.”

Leave? As if that’s even an option! “No,” you sneer. “I’m not going anywhere!”

“Y/N.” Grabbing onto wrist breaks your heated exchange with Connor’s doppelganger. Nines looks to you with something far different in his once stoic shell. There is only you. “Go. My Flower.”

What is he-? “Nines, I won’t leave you.”

“I am shutting down,” he is blunt. To be unkind is not his motive but to save you still. “I-I love you.”

Always in your heart you knew it was true. While he may not have said those words before everything he ever did was a sign. Now they crush whatever is left of a soul because he is yours. How can this happen?

Please, please wake up!

This is a nightmare. All of this cannot be real. Unfortunately all the pleading in the world can’t undo reality.

“Listen to your deviant lover. You were taken as a tool to use in a lure. We have no further need of you.”

Thinking on how much time Nines has left fuels brand new determination. You rise to feet. Moving towards the fake Connor, heart hammering in chest, there’s something gleaming just under the surface. When he made this offer to let you go it clicks.

Machine he says. Loyal to Cyberlife who are nothing more than mass murderers at this point; you reach up to place hands against the clone’s chest.

Issue jacket with Cyberlife branding as Connor once wore but he stopped. This is the only sign needed to know this is not your friend.

The android stutters. Physically jolting from your touch it leaves his LED a flood of crimson. “What game are you playing?”

“Proving a point,” the response is dangerous to his unfeeling self. It’s in his eyes. He’s…afraid.

You squeeze eyes shut not to look when pulling the clone into you. Kissing him hastily brings a hand down to his. Fingers stretch for handgun, ready to snag and blow his head off.

Yet your movement knocks off kilter when this supposed unfeeling machine grabs on. Pressing a harsher, hungrier kiss back sinks your entire plan and self preservation.

All instinct to pull away kicks in as your ruse seemingly backfires. Until he thrusts you off himself both incensed at his participation and privy to where your hand grabs.

In a split second the gun goes off striking faux Connor in the shoulder. A heavy swat of arm knocking you down is what you receive harshly in return. The frazzled android’s attention on your trickery completely fails.

The RK900 locks a crushing arm around the machine’s neck. Coming up behind while your actions wrestle weapon away it is the only preconstruction offering high probability of success.

Holding upright onto the RK800 copy as much as struggling to gain upper hand careens them both into clinical table. Thirium stains the faux Connor’s jacket where Nines continues to lose volume.

Shutdown 1 min 23 seconds

A crack of knuckles connects revealing the white plastic beneath. Marring synthetic flesh clean off the duplicate’s cheek reveals more of the machine he so readily claims to be. Even with all those parts, circuitry exposing true internal clockwork, androids can be more living than other organisms.

Deviancy is not weakness.

Nines remembers. You told him that once. And that is what gives him strength while tearing open faux Connor’s shirt and ripping thirium pump cleanly from its port.

A gasp escapes where you pick yourself up off floor. Their skirmish hardly lasts but those seconds feel an eternity. Watching the phony twitch, attempt to crawl and swipe fingers out at Nines brings his digits in a vice on the android’s black shoe.

The same sole pulls free and crushes down atop the so-called loyal machine’s digits. Loyalty you disproved with a ruse that ultimately destroys him.

“Nines?” Your voice is thick. Watching him hunch over, tossing away stuttering red glowing pump, his back straightens stiffly in an all too human huff of artificial breath.

RK900 blinks. Processing, analyzing his system status. For now he is able to function to complete his mission: you.

“The RK800 is backwards compatible,” he explains, clearly seeing your tear stained face and no longer blind to critical warnings.

Backwards compatible? Why didn’t he say that?! You thought maybe in an act of desperation but there was no way of knowing for sure.

“Oh my God.” Part of you wants to punch him in the shoulder for that but the simple urgency to bury within his chest overwhelms. “I’m sorry.”

Murmuring quietly does not prevent RK900 hearing every catch in breath that spills from your lips, ones that he must reclaim over and over again after that pathetic clone. However, he is hardly irate on account of the dire circumstance.

“Don’t worry. I believe you are quite efficient.”

Praise from mister stoicism? That’s funny. Too bad it’s not in a normal situation because you would laugh. Thankfully there is a chance to do that again. With him it’s all you want.

“Are you OK, Nines? Tell me, please…”

A tug to his synthetic heart turns the advanced model into everything he originally fought against. At one time he held similar thoughts to the Cyberlife machine. Emotions cannot be for his kind nor will they invade his system.

Now you invade every single circuit. Each thread yearns to fuse itself with the core spirit of your body. This will not change that. He will destroy all who threaten to remove this one humane light.

“I am fully operational until I receive a proper repair.” Nines narrows eyes onto the fallen android while speaking softly.

The tremble in your body is all too apparent. Shock is a high probability despite how strong, savvy you behaved. It is an interesting ruse you manage but why must he question skills while in the same employment?

“The DPD is in the middle of everything. A chaotic turn of events,” cool sarcasm benefits your state. Discussing this will come later. He realizes his near death will have emotional and mental consequences.

“You are safe now. I-I will take you home with me.”

Any other case or important life threatening scenario and he would wind up staying. This time is different. He has something to lose. That something is remarkably you.

One thing is true. You didn’t lose him now. You can’t lose him ever. No matter what comes of this there is only the RK900′s shield to harbor you until the end.

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redfoxwritesstuff · 5 years

Text

Thorn (Loki x ofc)

Requested 11/15 by Anon to @loki-the-fox : cAn I rEqUesT mY bAbY Loki trying to convince himself that he isn’t falling for the rouge female warrior in Asgard, but ended up being saved by her in some sort of uber bad back alley brawl ((Unrealistic ik i’m sorry)) and then finally comes to terms with the fact that he fell way to hard for the beautiful warrior that should technically be jailed ((I’m sorry i’m not creative but like I love ur writing and shnuff and I uber duper super wanted to see this written by you <3<3 I LOVE YOU SM))

Well… This is awkward… I’m not @loki-the-fox but hopefully you like it just the same.

Loki x ofc, minor warning for violence, implied smut.

Summary: Young Loki ventures out of the palace into a tavern in a nearby village believing that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence where he repeatedly meets a smart mouth young woman who isn't fond of the royal family. It's hate at first sight but when she's mistaken for a whore and Loki's snide comment is matched by Blair's as she takes the last word. Loki's left to deal with the patrons who take it as a sign of weakness in the not so well loved Prince. When the fight spills outside the young Loki is no match for men who have him outnumbered he finds himself a unlikely savior and a messy scene. Perhaps he's let his station color is views as much as she had.

Thorn

Loki’s swift steps took him farther and farther into the village just outside the palace city. In the distance he could see the golden palace even now and how the sight of it made his stomach churn. His breath came out in angry huffs.

He was beyond angry. How dare they disregard him, yet again. He was smarter than Thor. He was smarter than Odin. Why could none of them see his potential? It angered him to be cast aside as if he was not good enough, as if he was nothing.

He had to get as far away from the palace as he could. It was the only way he could get some space and think clearly. It wouldn’t do him any good to scream at Odin. It wasn’t worth the punishment and he was bored of fighting with Thor.

Regardless, when Thor tired of his words he would use his fists. His elder brother was much stronger than he physically and his sorcery was still a skill he was developing. In time he hoped he would be able to hold his own or even surpass his brother’s brute strength with it.

Pushing open the doors, he took in the smoky tavern. It stank and the air was thick. It was loud and crowded. It was everything he thought he needed and he came here more and more often. There was only one seat open at the bar, regrettably near the hotheaded woman he know to be called Blair.

He hated her and her snide comments. He didn’t ask to be born royal and she could never understand the pressure and stress his title put on his shoulders. She thought he had it so damn easy but what meetings did she have to attend to? What structure was required in her day? She got to do all she wanted, when she wanted. Lucky bitch.

What Loki didn’t realize that she thought the same of him. In her eyes he thought he was so much better then her. Living the easy life in the palace and being served left and right must be nice. The royal family clearly didn’t know what it felt like to do a solid day’s labor.

Yet somehow they always seemed to end up sitting next to each other in the tavern. As she shot down gruff man after man asking to take her home. Some even offered coin for the right to claim her for a night causing Loki to scoff next to her.

“You’re not worth any more.” He snidely spoke into his mug of ale.

“And you know the going rate of bed warmers? I guess you would, how else would you get a woman into your bed.” Downing her drink, Blair tossed some coins on the bar and left.

Loki didn’t even have a chance to bite back and she was gone. He’d never been so thankful for a woman to leave his side. She was bash and crude. How dare she speak to him in such a way. He’d have no use of women of the night, he’d have any woman he wanted. He was destined to wed a Princess in time.

“Oh you’re just going to take it.” A man down the bar commented, laughing into his drink.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Only a little royal bitch would let her talk to him like that.”

That’s the last Loki could recall as rage clouded his mind. Surely he said something back and insults where shot back and forth. Somehow they ended up outside. Turns out the large man had some just as large friends. They each had as much if not more bulk on them then Thor.

They didn’t fight in any way Loki had seen before. For a start, all five of them rained down on him at once. They fought with no honor or respect. To them, they could have been beating a dog instead of a man. Loki only managed to land a few blows in his attempt to defend himself.

“Why don’t you boys pick on someone else?” A voice called out.

Loki knew that voice. It was her voice. Pulling himself up on his hands and knees, he saw her from in the distance between the legs of one of the men. As much as he hated her, she didn’t need to get beaten even if the situation was her fault. He wanted to tell her to run but she looked down right arrogant.

“Leave.” How he wished his voice sounded stronger but it gave way to the pain of his broken ribs.

“You want to play, lil girl?” One man licked his lips in a revolting manner as he spoke.

“Oh I’ll play your game.” Her hips swayed in a sensual wave as she walked closer.

“Damn right we will. We’ll leave the little prince alone if we can have you.” She laughed right in their faces.

In retaliation one reached out to snag a fistful of her hair but she ducked low, delivering a powerful kick to his chest and knocking the wind from his lungs. A sharp bow from her elbow to his crotch sent the man down to the ground.

Spinning around, she kicked the feet out from another large man. Her arm was grabbed and yanked harshly as she was drawn to her feet by another. He sneered at her and whipped her around into the wall by her arm. The arm hung limply as she fell to the ground among trash and broken crates.

Grabbing up a board in the arm that still seemed to work and ignoring the pain in both her other arm and back, she smashed the first goon over the head with it. The crack of wood against skull was sickening.

Loki staggered to his feet as Blair faced off against the remaining men. Clearly, this wasn’t to be a fair fight. Pulling a dagger from his boot, he plunged it into the neck of one man. The blade glanced forward off bone and cut into the man’s throat. Jerking away, the man quickly bleed out in front of Loki’s eyes.

The remaining men were quick to scramble away, leaving Loki and Blair alone with a very dead man and another who had yet to come around from the board he took to the head. All and all, it was not a good situation. Loki would be off the hook. He was a prince and but Blair was just a woman of little financial means and no status.

She would take the fall for the dead man. The fight would be blamed on her. She would be blamed for the beating Loki took. The story would change and twist until Odin had something that would make the royal family look good.

“Come on.” Loki grabbed her hand and took off down the ally.

“Where are you taking us?” Blair tried to ignore the fact that Prince Loki was holding her hand.

“In all honesty, I am not sure.” Loki admitted, looking back at her. When did her brown eyes get so bright? “We can’t stay there however.”

“You’re a prince, no one will care.” Blair watched as he pulled her along. His just a bit too long hair was ruffled and wild. It was a nice change from the perfectly slick and brushed back look he normally wore.

“You however are not. I’ll not have you suffer for what was my fight.”

Blair dug her heels into the ground, forcing him to slow as she yelled up to him, “This way.”

As she pulled him through the streets to an abandoned home, she did her best to ignore the pain from the dislocated arm flopping against her side. Once he was inside she slammed the door closed and sank down to the ground.

“Down. You don’t want them to see us in the windows.” Loki quickly sat next to her, back against the wall dusty wall.

“Your arm?”

“Yeah, I’ll need your help with that. After you can leave and be free of my ugly face until the next time you slum in the village.” With a deep breath she glanced over to him. “If you could help pop it back in?”

Loki nodded and he took up her arm as gently as he could. She told him exactly what to do but still he didn’t want to hurt her. Finally with a grunt of effort he pushed and the sound it made when it popped into place was sickening.

“Thank you.” Somehow she hadn’t screamed at the pain but still he saw it clearly written on her face. Blair grabbed some dirty strips of cloth Loki could only assume once had been clean bandages off the ground and bound her arm into place. “Why haven’t you left yet?”

“I should be the one to offer thanks.” Loki admitted finally.

“But I assume that’s as close as I’ll get to a ‘thank you’ so I’ll take it. You’re welcome. You can leave now. Don’t want to get your fancy clothes dirty… or dirtier at least.”

“Why did you do it? You’ve no love for the royal family let alone for me.” Finally her brown eyes met his again. She didn’t look away or down. “You hate them.”

“I don’t hate them. Or you.” Loki watched as her chocolate eyes first looked up to the ceiling and then down to the ground before meeting his again. “I just- what’s it like to have a full stomach every night? What’s it like to sleep on down rather than straw? What’s it like to be warm at night? You’ve got it so easy and it’s not fair.”

“You struggle for food?” The thought was foreign to Loki. “Yet you go to the tavern and spend coin on ale?”

That question did make her look down. “I know it doesn’t make any sense. But if I don’t go out, don’t pretend that everything is okay it will be worse…”

“How? You spend money on ale that you need for food?” Loki watched as she took a deep breath.

“Father kicked me out when I refused to marry the old man willing to pay for my hand.” She shrugged again, suddenly unable to meet Loki’s eyes. Just why did the Prince care about such things now. “I kind of… I live here. Please don’t tell, I’ve not had coin to purchase it but no one else is living here so I’m not hurting anyone.”

“I won’t.” Loki reached out and grabbed her hand up. It was an impulsive action and he had her hand in his before he’d even thought it through. “I won’t tell anyone.”

Swallowing the lump in her throat, Blair continued. “You saw how those men talk to me, about me. If they knew I was so hard on coin they would be even worse.”

“It would be more dangerous for you.”

When did he begin leaning closer to her? When did she begin to lean closer to him? Somehow they were but a breath apart. Loki could feel Blair’s body heat and wondered if she could feel his. Surely she must.

Her lips were soft and warm against his. Letting go of her hand, he ran his fingers through the brown hair and smiled to himself as his fingers got tangled in the loose curls. Her hair was so soft and god did she smell good.

Pushing her back and down Loki was quick to take control. Not once did be break the kiss as he found himself atop her. Her hand found itself in his hair, along his back and against his firm chest.

She shivered as his hands snaked under her shirt. Bunching her fist into the back of his shirt, she pulled it up and over his head, breaking the kiss for a moment before his lips were at her neck again. In the back of her mind, she knew they would probably regret it after. He would surely regret it after.

The next week the small home was purchased and Blair found the document on a table that most certainly hadn’t been there when she had left to beg for work for the day. In perfect calligraphy was her name on the paper that proclaimed her owner.

Each day she’d leave and something, small or large would be improved in the home. Loki would deny it when asked at the tavern but she knew. He was the only one who knew. They were doomed, ill fated and of two different worlds.

One day she thought there was nothing left to fix or improve. She didn’t expect there to be anything different. Perhaps it would end, finally. Maybe after the nearly year they’d spent having almost civil conversations in public and falling together again and again in the seclusion of her home, he’d had enough.

Instead, when she walked into her small bedchamber she found a black and green dress draped over her bed. It was made of the finest silk she had seen. Next to it was a small note written in a hand she had grown to know well. Under it sat an envelope with the king’s seal.

“Darling,

Tonight as I’m sure you’ve heard my King Father is throwing a ball. Noble women and Princesses from all the lands near and far will be in attendance. From them I am to pick she who shall become my bride and stand by my side for eternity. You’ve surely already noticed the dress but you’ll also find shoes and most importantly a royal invite.

Come, my Darling. That invite is not a trick nor a forgery. Come so that I may pick the most fitting rose from the garden. Come, my darling, so that I can pick the rose who has both the beauty of a flower and the thrones of a warrior.

Yours always, Loki”

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#loki fanfic #loki #loki (marvel)#loki x oc #loki x original female character #loki fanfiction

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