#anyways if we ever get any evidence that points towards this theory being onto something. I WILL lose my mind

[tmae3114]

So there's this theory I've had bouncing around in my head for *checks notes* about three years now and, well, it does not have nearly the level of evidence I tend to prefer before I make a theory post - it is, in fact, Predominantly Vibes Based - but it has, again, been bouncing around in my head for three years and I refuse to be alone with it any longer

(...also, if I'm right, I wanna be able to go "I KNEW IT" and have a timestamp to point to XD)

OKAY. So. Basically.

I think Alinua might be a twice-born.

Hear me out:

Firstly:

We know that Cloud Elves live pretty much exclusively on the Archipelago Nimbus and are isolationist (Extra Lore: The Three Elder Races - "The Islands have minimal contact or trade with the outside world, [...]" & "These Cloud Elves are unique in many ways, most notably their isolationism [...]" and Page 1.6.12 "I suppose a cloud elf outside of the Archipelago Nimbus is fairly unusual-") but Alinua has been down on the surface since before she can remember

That suggests unusual circumstances. Isolationist people who have minimal contact with the outside world don't just lose a baby in said outside world

Alinua's theory for this is that her birth parents "probably reasonably assumed [she] had the Chimeric Plague and dropped [her] over the edge" (Page 1.6.13) but, crucially, there is no actual evidence of this. It's what she assumes probably happened but she has no memory of the actual events (Page 1.6.23 "I don't even remember it. I've never met my birth parents […]")

Therefore, it is entirely possible that Alinua is wrong about how she ended up not on the Archipelago Nimbus. And I, personally, think it's pretty likely that she's wrong because we know that the Archipelago Nimbus can sometimes be even higher up than the peak of the Throne of the World (this post) and even with it usually being lower down than that, I find it... somewhat doubtful that an infant (toddler, at best) would survive that fall. Not impossible in a fantasy setting but... doubtful.

Secondly:

We know that the Chimeric Plague was Life attempting to connect with a vessel who could be her eyes and give her perspective (Pages 1.20.20 - 1.20.23)

Even before Life finally broke through, Alinua was incredibly unusual for a carrier of the Chimeric Plague. She didn't even find out she was one until she was about ten (Page 1.6.13 "I had a normal life and family for ten years- and then I learned I was a chimera bomb [...]") when most die before they turn five (Page 1.2.10 "I shouldn't have made it past five years old" and Extra Lore: The Chimeric Plague "[...] it is inevitable in every case that the child will lose total control of their magic within the first few years of their life [...]"). She was twice the expected age of a carrier when she found out.

We don't know why Alinua is the successful attempt that finally worked. Not only do we not know, Alinua herself brings it up while talking to Life (Page 1.20.23 "I… don't know if there's anything special about me that kept you from overwhelming me like the others, or if I'm just the lucky one you finally got right."). The question is open: is there something special/unique about Alinua that allowed her to survive where none of the other children did? And if so, what is it?

Thirdly:

So. Carrion crawlers.

We have not actually met any in the story itself yet, only heard Caliban bring them up in the context of an insult (Page 1.12.10 "Twice-born son of a carrion crawler! You had a plan this whole time?!") but fortunately! the Aurora tumblr exists! so we have additional information!

Carrion crawlers eat dead things and sometimes give birth to baby clones of one of their recent meals, which are called twice-born. A twice-born is a healthy infant, identical in every way to how the original would've been as an infant, and age normally for the species they were produced from. Additionally, they have no memories from their source material (so to speak) and develop their own, unique soul, though if they came from a mage, their soul will develop the same channels (this post and this post)

...now, I mentioned at the start that this theory does not have as much evidence as I would like and is mostly Vibes Based, and we have now hit the point where I run out of evidence and switch to vibes. I do not have any evidence which actually points to a connection between any of this.

However, I do still Have Thoughts

We know that Alinua was adopted had a happy (or, at least, "normal") childhood prior to figuring out she was a chimeric carrier (1.6.13, see above) and seemingly doesn't think about her birth family very often. It's entirely possible that she didn't ask questions about where she came from as a child. It's not been brought up yet how her adoptive family found her but, given that she assumes she was thrown off the edge of the Archipelago Nimbus, the possibility that they found a seemingly-abandoned baby just lying around doesn't seem too out there. And if Alinua is a twice-born, yet clearly doesn't know that herself, her family may also not have known that... or may have known and opted to keep it hidden, even from her, given that twice-born are generally considered "deeply unnerving and grotesque" (this post).

As for how Alinua came to be in this theorised scenario, there's two possibilities I've considered.

The first is that an adult life mage cloud elf was outside the Archipelago Nimbus for Some Reason, died somewhere where there are carrion crawlers, and things went from there.

The second, much sadder, possibility is that the "Chimeric Plague carrier baby thrown off the edge of the flying islands" possibility did happen... the baby in question just wasn't Alinua because the fall was, in fact, not a survivable one. And then, just as a twice-born will inherit being-a-mage, Alinua inherited having the Chimeric Plague.

And, in either of these cases, something about being twice-born subsequently protected Alinua from being overwhelmed by Life.

#aurora #webcomic aurora #aurora webcomic #comic aurora #HOW have I been reading this comic for four years and still don't know the main tag #first theory post for this comic! woo! #next time I have a theory I will hopefully have Actual Evidence for my point and not just disparate lore I am conspiracy boarding with XP #tmae overanalyses #(haven't used THAT tag for a while. I need to write up more proper theory posts again it's been mostly off-the-cuff meta lately) #tmae overanalyses aurora #NEW TAG! #anyways if we ever get any evidence that points towards this theory being onto something. I WILL lose my mind #now if you will excuse me. it is past midnight and I have a bed calling me

[blookmallow]

hi i binged through all of salad fingers for the first time in like 8 years and im fixating again here are. My Theories. pls talk to me if anyone else has Thoughts or wants to discuss things. this is really long i am sorry :’ ) 

also shout out to the salad fingers wiki for helping me keep track of details and also for this 

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thought: salad fingers is not violent on purpose he did not mean to kill that kid 

this is less a theory and more “if you slander my boy with accusations i will Get you” but listen. i see people going “but he mURDERED A CHILD!!” because of the oven incident but listen. listen to me. he didnt mean to and cannot be held to the same standard of morality and understanding consequences as a. person who isn’t..... in whatever situation and mental state he has going on

- yes, the kid getting trapped in the oven was his fault. but it was not intentional or malicious and i sincerely doubt he understands what happened or why. 

he was asking for help reaching the fish (there’s no reason to believe he wasn’t just genuinely asking for help. he tears up in gratitude. theres no evidence of him Tricking People Maliciously in any other context i do not believe he would do that) and was distracted by the rusty nail, causing him to let go of the door. it wasn’t “he cares more about rust than about a child’s life” or something, i dont think he can actually hold “hey look at that i gotta check that out” and “i need to hold the door open so the child doesn’t get hurt” in his head at the same time, rust is his favorite stim/an impulse thing that takes over everything else and his perception of reality and the things going on around him changes very quickly and easily. more on that later. but the important point here is it wasn’t a malicious plot, or a neglectful careless action, he literally did not realize letting go of the door would cause harm 

he stabbed himself accidentally with the nail and passed out for a while (the fact that he immediately bled that much is concerning too, he probably has hemophilia which is. a medical condition outside of his control, as well) and after all that he had completely forgotten about the child altogether (and says “i must have dozed off” so he doesn’t even understand he passed out. and might not remember the nail thing in the first place) 

we don’t see what happened after this, we don’t know how he responds when he investigates the fish and inevitably finds an unexpected charred corpse in there, but i guarantee he won’t remember why its in there or understand that its a corpse. we dont see it again so its. entirely possible he didnt recognize it as a person and either just disposed of it or, uh, ate it. but if he did, it wasn’t with the knowledge and comprehension of it being A Corpse or the memory of how it got there 

theory: on salad fingers and memory / comprehension of death and consequences 

more on that subject

- we see him frequently doing things and then immediately forgetting he did it or forgetting what was happening. he accidentally squishes the bug (which also was not malicious or intentional, he intended to pet it but just. went too hard) and has no understanding either that its dead, or that he killed it. she has gone flat and gooey for some unknown reason. that’s strange. she needs to go have a wash, that’s no way to be. 

he eats the jeremy fisher puppet at one point and then immediately goes “where have you gotten to??” 

he even briefly forgets hubert cumberdale’s name and immediately comes up with another one without realizing it, and then later goes back to hubert cumberdale again with no mention of barbara logan-price 

he refers to the same little yellow guy as “young child” and also Auntie Bainbridge later on. he keeps up the fantasy of... whatever the fuck yvonne was being his child for a pretty long time but then when he arrives at “auntie bainbridge” ‘s house he suddenly forgets why he’s there, and even apparently forgets what yvonne is and uses  ‘her’ as a window rag instead and never mentions it again (I also don’t think she was in the sandwich at the end either. it’s hard to see but the sandwich contents are vaguely brown and theres a visible lump in the black goo behind him. i like the idea that the lil yellow guy made the sandwich for him) 

salad fingers is constantly subconsciously adjusting his reality to fit Whatever Makes The Most Sense At The Time and does not consistently remember things (sometimes even major things. he remembers his puppets the most consistently and still even forgets hubert’s name) or have a concept of cause and effect 

i think he possibly has some sense of recognition, “I’ve seen this person before,” but doesn’t always remember Why he knows them, and his mind just automatically fills in the blank with whatever makes sense to him. he doesn’t remember who the yellow guy is, but knows he knows them Somehow, so, ah, of course, it must be auntie bainbridge out for her sunday stroll :) and he knows he’s there for a reason, but not what that reason was, so he decides it must be time to clean the windows 

- milford cubicle was already dead when salad fingers opens the door, but he has no idea that hes dead. this isn’t even a cause for concern. my, he must be tired, that’s all. he kept milford there until he rotted away, too, so there was never a point where he realized anything was wrong (until he became skeleton. more on That later too) 

- he finds a corpse buried in the yard and rather than confronting the confusing and alarming reality of that situation, why it must be kenneth, back from the great war! at no point does he understand kenneth is definitely dead

theory: kenneth vs glass brother

i think he really did have a brother named kenneth who probably died in the war. could be some subconscious connection between “recognizing” a corpse as his brother, but i dont think he realizes any of that. i think the glass family is probably a trauma based hallucination, but a... well, reflection. pun not exactly intended lmao. on how his real family was and how they treated him

i dont think glass brother is the same brother as kenneth, since salad fingers interacts with them completely differently 

kenneth is a corpse that salad fingers projects a personality on and speaks for, while glass brother seems independent and malicious toward him. i think he had a good relationship with kenneth (so, when salad fingers imagines that he’s here, it’s cause for celebration and he’s projecting onto something inert and “safe”) and also had another brother (who was probably his twin) who bullied him and acted violently, so when that trauma resurfaces, he hallucinates a vicious Other that he cannot control or speak for.

it also tracks that the abusive brother was his twin - he sees himself reflected in the mirror, and something in his own face reminds him of that lost brother until it “becomes” him

he refers to kenneth as his younger brother, and sees him as a being that does not look like him, while glass brother is literally his reflection, so it would make sense if he had one identical twin and one younger brother 

ive seen theories that he had a real sister named bordois too, but i think him calling the bug “little sister” was just. a term of endearment or one of his little odd language quirks, he seemed to be talking to it more like a pet than like a sibling 

theory: regarding mable

- ok people are saying salad fingers killed mable at the picnic but i Really Don’t Think He Did

we never see him acting out violently when he gets scared. he tends to try to escape situations that stress him out, he shrinks, he cries, he goes into his cupboard (which is. incredibly upsetting given the fact he was almost definitely abused by his family) 

he takes on a kind of Authoritative Tone often, he gets sort of ruffled up and disdainful toward things, but that’s not what he does when he’s scared

when he’s actually distressed (rather than irritated) he tends to break down and retreat. this includes when other independent beings act in ways that unsettle and upset him 

so i dont know where the “he freaked out and killed her” idea is coming from. he suddenly goes from outside at the picnic to having a breakdown in his house so. he most likely just ran 

i think the Only time we see him act out violently is when he decides he has to punish marjory for not getting a haircut like he asked - he tears her hair out, but for me that scene was particularly concerning because it was so unlike him. that was an anger response, not a fear response, though, and he tends to be harsher toward things that he’s actually controlling (I don’t think we ever see him decide to Discipline something that was independent from him other than the horses, and he didnt hurt them) 

ordinarily when something irritates him he just goes “hmph! so distasteful. how rude. i shan’t have this behavior, you know” but doesn’t really actually do anything about it, and moves on

anyway we never see mable again so i think either he freaked out and ran away and she just didn’t come back, or he scared her and she ran away, or both 

there’s a dress visible briefly when salad fingers is making his Flesh Boy which could be mable’s (he did comment he liked it) but it’s not 100% clear, and that doesn’t necessarily mean he KILLED her for it. she could have changed into something else and left it somewhere and he found it. she could have died under unrelated circumstances, and salad fingers found her - he doesn’t comprehend death, so. probably he decided they’ve made amends now and she’s given him her dress as a token of friendship, or something 

i dont think it really looks that significantly like hers but the fact that it stands out so distinctly from the rest of the Pile could mean something 

but i just feel like if he had killed her we would’ve seen her corpse again, he doesn’t have a concept of murder, or death at all, or consequences, and his memory doesn’t hold out that consistently, so if he killed her, he probably would have calmed down later and then forgotten what he did and came up with a new way to explain the corpse in front of him - oh, how rude of me, mable’s here dozing right off and i havent even offered her a blanket. let’s get you to bed

like, he probably would have dragged her home with him, with the intention of being a good friend/host to his guest, not understanding what happened. he kept milford cubicle around a really long time  

it wouldn’t be like him to have any concept of hiding the evidence

speaking of milford 

theory: regarding milford cubicle 

salad fingers keeps milford’s corpse around until it starts rotting, and then after a very confusing series of events, the corpse is suddenly a skeleton, which surprisingly alarms salad fingers considerably, and then he goes out to find a whole bunch of himselves eating various bits of gore. they give him a present, which is a hat very clearly made of milford’s skin 

my conclusion: salad fingers, in some kind of dissociative fugue state, skinned and ate the remains of milford cubicle himself and turned the remaining skin into a hat. he also saves some of it to make hubert cumberdale (the real boy) later as well, probably forgetting where it came from. he does not realize he’s done this or remember doing it, so his scrambled mind tries to make sense of it with other selves eating unknown flesh, and a lovely hat appearing (which he doesn’t seem to notice is made of flesh) 

you can also see milford’s original name tag in the drawer later on when he’s building the flesh boy, so. he kept that after the mysterious disappearance of milford’s flesh, apparently. more evidence that that skin is probably also his

some other scattered thoughts regarding the most recent string of episodes and salad fingers’ mental state: 

ive been trying to figure out what the fuckhell happened with the yvonne incident and everything that happened in the birthday episode

im really concerned for salad fingers’ health and mental state, as it seems to be deteriorating 

some yvonne theories ive seen:

1. he ate the burned corpse of the kid who died in the oven, and it made him very sick, which ultimately resulted in a charred mass he couldn’t digest - he steadily gets worse, until his body finally ejects it (yvonne’s “birth”) and after that his health starts to recover again. since the oven incident happens really early on, all the times he mentions his stomach being upset after that until he becomes deathly ill would make sense, so i think this is plausible 

2. the hair he found in the cupboard was actually a parasitic worm that grew in his stomach after he ate it and became yvonne. i think this is Possible, it is a really strangely wormy looking hair, but it doesn’t move and he mentions stomach pains before this, so it seems less likely to me 

3. i also saw the concept that salad fingers is a trans man who suffered a miscarriage at some point in his past and yvonne represents that, and i can definitely see where the idea is coming from but i do think something really physically happened to him in the present time, i dont think it was all a trauma-based hallucination, since the yellow guy reacts to the black ooze and something was definitely making him severely ill 

so. i Don’t Know what the fuck that was about but i think the burnt corpse theory makes the most sense 

on that note: there’s a lot of cannibalism imagery in salad fingers 

we have no IDEA where he’s getting food from. im pretty sure its been confirmed that he is Not a zombie, we see him bleed, pass out, sleep, etc so it seems like he must be a living person who has ordinary needs. but we see him eat... his own puppets. hairs. sand. the soup glass mother instructed him to make, which made him very sick. he has a working oven but doesn’t seem to have consistent access to water. he had a fish somehow but who knows where it came from. it’s very likely he doesn’t get food often and some of his hallucinations and mood swings could be caused by starvation (and when he does eat, it’s things that are outright inedible or probably not good for him) 

the burned corpse disappears and is never mentioned again (though salad fingers is very sick afterward). milford’s flesh disappears and salad fingers violently hallucinates multiple selves gorging themselves on unknown flesh

and what concerns me the most about that is that he loses a lot of time in that episode 

he passes out in the woods and when he wakes up, it looks like a shit ton of time has passed

we don’t know how much is reality and how much is his warped perception, but it looks like a tree has grown and his physical condition has deteriorated 

he looks really, really unhealthy and haggard for the rest of the episode 

i think he had a huge dissociative episode and lost possibly weeks of time, probably due to starvation, and he ate milford cubicle and very possibly other people as well 

so my question is. how often does this happen to him

and what happens to him during that state? does he become violent and dangerous without being aware of it when he returns to himself again? or has he just been ravenously scavenging corpses when he gets desperate enough? 

its possible dr papanak is another personality he has, one that’s “buried out in the woods” that he becomes when he’s in a really, really bad mental and physical state 

he looks much better in the next episode (though that’s also when he has his outburst with marjory. could be that he’s still staving off the violent urges/hasn’t fully come back to himself after the last incident) and I’m really hoping the fact that he was able to finally stand up to his family (at least in some sense) and smash the mirrors could mean he’s making steps toward recovery after whatever the hell all that was 

there’s not really much space to do anything with his life or get much help given the circumstances but watching him slowly losing himself even more is Awful :( 

i hope we get more episodes im so desperate for more information now 

lastly, some random observations 

i tried to read this newspaper and it looks like it’s actually written in french, which is interesting given that salad fingers seems to be british (but fond of france, and seems to speak french or at least knows one phrase) 

i wonder where he got this, or whether it ever meant something significant to him

theres a lot of evidence that he can’t read (takes no notice of the “harry” nametag and immediately names him something else, “reads” a letter that is actually a newspaper clipping in another language he’s holding upside down, “writes” a letter that is just scribbles) so i dont think he learned his one french phrase from this or anything but, still. vaguely interesting. maybe he has been to france before and brought this back with him for some reason. maybe he’s actually in post apocalyptic france and was just originally from england. We Don’t Know 

theres a weird little face in the. heater? whatever that is in the background for a second and i dont like it  

salad fingers leaves horace in charge, but then sees him (as a live horse) in the woods, but then comes back to find him both still on the shelf (as a toy) and in the room (as a live horse, now with his, uh, surgery scars) but doesn’t seem to notice this and doesn’t comment on it 

i dont know what the hell that means other than possibly his reality is even less consistent and logical than usual/a reflection on his mental state deteriorating 

#salad fingers #pinned #media analysis

[thatasianstereotype]

Fuck. I’m Gay.

I’ve been reading a lot of ml salt fics lately (mainly @unmaskedagain which is a literal goldmine of saltiness). And getting into the Damienette ship. Marinette really does deserves better (Fuck Canon) but so does Adrien. He is not a “sidekick”. Chat Noir and Ladybug are partners = equals. So I decided why not write a fic where Adrien gets his own happy ending in the form of a grumpy assassin-turned-vigilante that loves animals more than people. 

Somewhat of a crack writing where creative liberties were definitely taken. 

.

.

.

Lila Rossi is a bitch and everyone knew it. Well, by everyone, Adrien means himself, his good-amazing-make-pastries-for-him friend Marinette, his maybe-not-really-sure friend Chloe and his-not-that-close-really-classmate Nathaniel. 

Yeah. It was a small number. 

But Lila is still a bitch. 

Anyway, Lila’s lies and manipulations have disturbed the status quo and not in a good way. She ended up making the majority of the class fawn over her like she was a perfect goddess and not a pompous-temperamental-hormonal teenager. Teenagers were prone to be gullible; he can understand his classmates being inclined to believe her. But this was utterly ridiculous (man, Chloe is rubbing off on him). No. You know what’s even more ridiculous? Ms. Bustier letting Lila get away with it. She doesn’t even stop the class mistreating Marinette who claimed she was a bully just because of you know who - Fucking Lila Rossi. The audacity of that bitch and her bitchy followers, am I right? 

Growing up he watched the tv shows and the animes. High schools always had their drama but he thought that was to get some plot going on. He didn’t think it was an actual thing that happens in real life. But he was proven wrong. Françoise Dupont High School had their drama and it was way worse than what he watched on screen. 

The worst part was that he couldn’t get away from Lila. Or he’ll be pulled from school (Fuck you Dad). He had to sit next to that bitch and listen to her drone on and on about things they both knew she didn’t do, about things she promised to do for her ever gullible followers friends. And couldn’t say anything against it if he wanted to stay in school. But even his discreet questioning didn’t do that much. It got some of the class to think something’s possibly fishy with her stories but not enough to think Lila was evil. So he just gave up. Because what was even the point? 

He was distancing himself from Alya and Nino. He couldn’t really be friends with people who thought Lila held the sun and moon. They didn’t hang out as much as they used to and he made excuses when they did invite him to stuff. Lately, he was making outrageous excuses - like he had to take his cat to the vet even though he didn’t have a cat - to see if they caught on. They didn’t. It was fun but he didn’t know whether to feel happy or sad about that. But feeling sad-depressed-pain over it was a bitch so he decided to take his victories as they come. 

Chloe had left the school earlier on. Her mom wanted to spend one-on-one time with her daughter (Yeah, Audrey is better at being a mother here). She was completely out of this drama mess. And Nathaniel kept his head down to not paint a target on himself. 

His only consolation and ally in this whole mess was Marinette. His darling angel. His sunshine incarnate. His own goddess (not like that bitch Lila let’s get one thing straight). 

When he was feeling overwhelmed (which was a lot), he spent it at her house. They spent it discussing fashion, trash talking Liar-la and the sheep class, playing video games, and making/eating the best baked goods in all of Paris. If he wasn’t at his photo shoots or at school, he was at her house. And with how often they spent time with each other, it wasn’t long before they accidentally revealed their alter egos to each other. 

(The class’ Everyday Ladybug was actually Ladybug. How amazing is that! Isn’t Marinette the absolute coolest?!) 

Since they outed themselves to each other, they had to give up their miraculous. And new heroes had to be chosen. As the guardian, Marinette decided to give the Ladybug miraculous to herself and the Cat one to Adrien. And make them the superheros of Paris. 

(Just when he thought that Marinette couldn’t get any cooler) 

They both collectively decided that being friends were for the best and put away their obsession crush over the other far far away. Now they were best friends-almost siblings. Oh who was he kidding? He was an honorary Dupain-Cheng. Marinette and her parents said so. And who was he to deny the goddess? 

All was well. 

Until he met this gorgeous boy with raven black hair and piercing green eyes that made him question everything in life. 

Like fuck. His life wasn’t hard enough already? 

.

It was a slow patrol. Just stopped a few petty crimes. No akuma tonight. He wasn’t really expecting much to happen.

Mari said patrolling regularly gives citizens a sense of security and it helps if one of them were on scene if an akuma does appear. 

He didn’t mind. He loved running on the rooftops and feeling the wind in his face. After some time, he stopped and stood on top of one of the tallest buildings. Just soaking the view. The peace and serenity of it all. Seeing the glowing lights of his beloved city. Seeing the Eiffel Tower standing tall and proud. 

(Forget school. Forget Liar-la and her hoard of bitches) 

This was his city. This was why he fights Hawk Moth with Ladybug. They had something precious to protect. 

He was done patrolling the regular routes and all his schoolwork was already finished. He could go to sleep but he didn’t feel that tired. And he really didn’t want to go back home. Mari shared her theory on his dad being Hawk Moth. She had really good reasons and a plethora of proof. If they could switch miraculous, why couldn’t he and Mayura - most likely Nathalie? Which would explain how Gabriel got akumatized.

After all her support with dealing with Lila, he was way more inclined to believe her even without the evidence. But those things just made him more wary of his dad. And he wasn’t too stoked on spending more time than what he can get away with with the guy. Because his dad being Hawk Moth explains why he wants Lila (his strongest supporter - Chameleon and Oni-chan, anyone?) close and makes Adrien play nice with her. And anyone who enables Lila’s bitchiness is on his enemy list. 

Anyway, he was out here to enjoy the good mood not think about evil bitches and evil dads. So he sat himself down and enjoyed the sights. It was more calming than you would think. 

He heard cars blaring and even a dog barking. The slight breeze felt nice. The moon was pretty bright tonight. The stars too. There was a lone couple walking through the park. There was also another teen in black running on rooftops a few buildings away. 

Wait. 

What? 

He blinked and looked again. Huh, there was another teen in black running on rooftops. And it was not a hallucination. 

What the actual fuck?

He was instantly on his feet, baton already in hand as he raced across the roof to reach said stranger. 

“Hey!” 

But because he was the lucky owner of the unlucky miraculous, the moment he said that, the guy was about to jump off a building to presumably roll onto the next one like Chat was watching him do beforehand. But his call made him lose focus and Chat watched horrified as the guy slipped and started falling into the alley. 

Oh fuck! Mari was going to fucking kill this dumbass kitty!

He hoped to everything that Mari thinks is holy that he makes it in time. Extending his baton, he used it as a huge Pogo stick to basically catapult himself towards the stranger and wrapped his arms around him as he braced himself for the full weight of hitting the gravel at this height and speed. But he wasn’t that that concerned. His suit protected him from the majority of the injuries that would’ve occurred if he wasn’t wearing it. It hurt but it isn’t as bad as it could’ve been. Remember earlier? He takes his victories as they come. 

This was not the smartest of ideas, he’ll admit. Mari had the brains to be honest. But it wasn’t bad if he say so. And he does say so. 

He rolled over and immediately looked over the stranger that was remarkably unharmed in this whole mess. 

And oh.

Oh.

The stranger was taller than he was with a lithe and lean frame. He had raven black hair that complimented his tanned skin and gorgeous green eyes that pierced through him, making his heart do funny things. 

He was not expecting him to look as hot as he did. He wore a simply black t-shirt and jeans but he looked like a fucking Adonis, what the fuck.  Even the moon shone down on him, highlighting his handsome features even more.  

He shook himself of those thoughts and focused on what was more important. “I’m so sorry. Are you alright?” 

He was rudely pushed away, but he didn’t take offense. He did cause the guy to fall after all. 

“Do not touch me.” (What kind of accent is that?) “I’m fine. You are truly a moronic imbecile of the highest accord to yell like that. And what are you even supposed to be? Some kind of knock-off Catwoman?” 

At that, Chat looked at Hot-And-Sexy weird. “Are you new here? I’m the superhero Chat Noir. I protect Paris with Ladybug.”

“You’re joking.”

“I know I come off as the goofy hero because I make purr-fect puns all the time but I’m not joking about this.” 

He took out his phone to show the foreign (since he’s obviously not a Parisian) stranger the akuma attacks and Ladybug and Chat Noir being a dynamic duo, saving Paris and beating Hawk Moth. Ok, he showed the stranger a lot of stuff. Sue him. He gets to brag about his Princess. And himself too.

“I never heard about this before.” Hot-And-Sexy (he has got to come up with a better name) said afterward. “3 years this has been going on? Why didn’t you ask for help from the Justice League or other superheros?” 

Chat shrugged. “We tried. But they said we’re obviously pulling a prank and making this all up. So we stopped asking for help.”

For some reason this made Hot-And-Sexy angry. “They ignored your plea for help and left you to fight for yourselves?”

“Pretty much, yea.” 

“You and Ladybug are children.” 

“Excuse me? Are you doubting our ability to protect our city?" He was not apologetic at the sharp edge his voice took. Forget looking hot. How dare he? The audacity really. 

Hot-And-Sexy shook his head. “I’m not. I know some child superheroes who are adequate at their jobs and a few who are remarkable like Robin in Gotham. But the majority of them had adult mentors to guide them. From what you’ve shown me, you and Ladybug had no one. You were left alone to fend for yourself with essentially no help.” 

He never thought of it that way. But hearing it like that made him think: Fuck Adults Who Chose Children to Fight Their War For Them and Fuck Hawk Moth For Putting Them In This Position In The First Place. 

You know what. Just to clear all his bases - Fuck Everyone But The Dupain-Chengs. 

Chat couldn’t help but shrug, not quite knowing what to say to that. “Life is a bitch, I’ve come to find out. But enough of that. Why were you running on rooftops anyway?”

“It calms me down.”

Relatable. 

“Is...Is your tail moving?” 

“Huh?” He looked behind him to see his tail was indeed moving lazily. “Yeah. I’m called Chat Noir for a reason.”

“May I touch them?” Chat was used to people (usually kids) pulling on his tail to see if it was real (It was). And it really hurts because they usually rough. Not that he blames them. Kids don’t know any better. Still, he usually says no when people ask. 

But Hot-And-Sexy had such a sincere expression that he said yes. To his surprise and delight, Hot-And-Sexy was extremely gentle (Can this guy be anymore perfect?) and it felt nice to be petted like that. Curse his touch-starvation (again Fuck you Dad).

Hot-And-Sexy was apparently fascinated by his ears and tail. 

“Are you a meta?” He noticed how Hot-And-Sexy’s voice turned softer and fonder (or was he imagining that?).

“Nah. I’m fully human. I just got powers to transform into this.” He looked down at his phone seeing that the time was nearing 2 am.

“Have you suffered any injuries from your stupid stunt?” 

“Hmm?” Chat looked back at him before gesturing to his body. “Don’t worry. I may not look like it but I can take it.”

He can practically feel Hot-And-Sexy rolling his eyes. “What an utter dolt.” 

But there wasn’t any heat behind it so he didn’t take it to heart. 

“Thanks, babe.” 

“That was an insult.”

“And I’m taking it like a compliment.”

Chat stood up and stretched his limbs. Hot-And-Sexy doing the same but dusting off his clothes instead.

“So, uh, need any help getting home?”

“I am perfectly capable of finding my own way, thanks.” 

“Ok. Have a nice night.” He was about to leave when he was caught off guard by Hot-And-Sexy staring at him for a good few seconds, making his limbs freeze in place at the heavy attention.

Before he said. “You should try contacting the Batfamily in Gotham about Hawk Moth. They’re used to dealing with weird things. I’m sure they won’t turn you or Ladybug away.” 

Chat was a bit distracted by how intensely those green eyes focused on him, making his heart beat faster and his cheeks turn a vibrant red. 

He was so screwed. 

He used his baton to shoot himself up so he can run on rooftops, hurrying to the Dupain-Cheng bakery. 

.

“Mari! I think I’m gay!”

“It’s 2 in the morning, Chaton. Go to sleep and we’ll talk about it in the morning.” 

.

After a good night’s rest (and thank everything that was right in the world that today was a weekend), Adrien told Mari all about Hot-And-Sexy. And yes, he did call the stranger that out loud. His everything-that-actually-matters sister simply took it in stride after giggling a bit. They spent the majority of the day discussing emotions and everything that came with that bundle. 

Before he finally came to a conclusion. 

He is definitely gay (He liked girls but not like like them). And most definitely had a crush on Hot-And-Sexy with the pretty green eyes. 

Good news: He is no longer having a sexuality crisis. 

Bad news: He is going through an emotional crisis. 

Like dealing with these feelings that is making his stomach flip flop over and over again? The only one he ever had to deal with was the one he had on Ladybug and that (he talked with Mari about it months before. She was amazing with these emotional matters) was more of a hero-worship crush than anything really romantic. 

And his crush on Hot-And-Sexy was so much more. 

.

So it’s been about 2 weeks since he encountered Hot-And-Sexy. And he still haven’t figured out what else to call him. But the nickname was growing on him. 

(He also told Mari about asking the Batfam for help but she was a bit apprehensive after the disastrous attempts of convincing the Justice League. He shrugged, trusting her opinion and left it at that) 

Anyway, Lila was being her usual bitchy self. Father was being non-existent like always. Mari was his only source of sanity at school. And Hawk Moth was being a bitch. 

Because of course, the day before they have a huge test, he decides to akumatize someone (in this case, a businessman who was really unhappy with getting fired) and cut in on study time. And this akuma took a while to defeat. Guess he drew a lot of strength from his burning hatred of the failings of the corporate world. 

And just yesterday, a teenager who was upset at being grounded got akumatized and terrorized the city for 3 hours before Ladybug could purify her. It did however confirmed her fears. Hawk Moth was getting stronger. It took longer to defeat his monsters. They needed to find him and ended this fast. 

Adrien landed on Mari’s balcony and slipped in her room, crashing on her big comfy bed, de-transforming on the spot. Plagg sleepily floating and laying next to him on the pillow. He was so tired. And photo shoots and school drama were not helping things.

.

For the record, he was not at all expecting to see Hot-And-Sexy in a bookstore of all places. 

He was so engrossed in looking through the latest Boku no Hero Academia manga (can’t wait until Season 5 comes out) that when someone touched his shoulder, he was not proud to admit he squeaked a bit.

He turned around and his eyes widened his surprise. 

“Hot-And-Sexy!” 

It was indeed the Adonis Adrien had a huge crush on. Today he was wearing a white t-shirt paired with a blue denim jacket and black ripped jeans. Wow. He really can make anything look hot.

No. Bad Adrien. Don’t let him know you actually have a crush on him.

And oh fuck. Hot-And-Sexy was staring at the blonde and Adrien tried not to let himself get flustered. He has a very intense stare. For all he knew, Hot-And-Sexy stares at everyone like that.

Calm the fuck down, heart. You too brain.

He raised a handsome eyebrow in amusement. “Excuse me?”

Adrien felt himself burn with embarrassment, his face turning bright scarlet. No wonder he was fit for the unlucky miraculous or was this just a side-effect? Note to self, ask Mari about this later. 

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t get your name last time. And I just started calling you that in my head. Cause you’re really hot and you have pretty eyes.”

Fuck mouth! Why won’t you stop talking! Please for the love of everything that makes Mari a BAMF stop. Stop digging further into the hole of embarrassment! Abort mission! Abort!

“When did we meet?”

At that, he blink a few times. Oh fuck. He was not Superhero Chat Noir. He was Civilian Adrien Agreste. Mari was definitely murdering his dumbass tonight. Lightning please strike him down right now. Where was an unlucky lightning strike when you need it?

After a few seconds of his horrified silence, Hot-And-Sexy chuckled (he had such a nice laugh). “You are extremely lucky I already figured out your alter ego beforehand, Chaton.”

Before Adrien could even unwrap that statement, he held out a hand and had a dangerously sexy smirk on his face. “My name is Damian Wayne. Would you care to get a cup of coffee with me?”

And Adrien nodded his head, not trusting himself to speak. He can deal with the superhero thing later when he can think straight (hah!) and is not distracted by Damian’s beautiful smile and alluring green eyes and perfect everything.

.

Guess what?

Ya Boi got game.

(At least, he likes to think he does)

After a successful coffee date (was it a date? Please let it be a date), they exchanged numbers (cue internal squealing) and met up a few times afterward to hang out.

Apparently, Dami was here on business to deal with something for Wayne Enterprises.

“Aren’t you 17?”

“Father believes in preparing us when we’re young.”

Dami was amazingly sweet. Arrogant and pretentious with a stick up his ass but sweet. He treats stray animals with such reverence that Adrien’s heart melt every time he sees it.

It was an added bonus when Damian scorned Lila with cruel words and disgusted looks when she tried to cut in Adrien and Dami’s date(?)/meetup(?)/spending-time-together event.

She cried and whined afterwards and Adrien has to endure his father’s lecture. But it was totally worth it.

Oh yeah. Mari was not pleased that he accidentally outed himself to a civilian. But nothing that a couple of sad kitty eyes can’t fix.

“You are so lucky you’re cute, kitty-cat.” Mari grumbled but she was smiling. “I just need to have a good talk with him on the importance of secrecy.”

.

That day Damian Wayne learned to fear a certain Marinette Dupain-Cheng.

.

It was 2 weeks later when Adrien woke up to a package next to his futon in Mari’s room. When he opened it, he saw the Butterfly and Peacock miraculous inside.

There was a card beneath it. And in beautiful cursive script read: 

I dearly hope you enjoy my courting gift, mon amour. Allow me the honor to formally ask you out on a date. I look forward to hearing favorably from you soon.

- Damian Wayne

He couldn’t believe it.

“Mari! Damian likes me back!”

“Chaton, I swear. It is 2 in the morning.”

Next

#ml x dc #ml salt #ml salt fic #lila rossi salt #marinette deserves better #but so does adrien #adrien deserves better #adrien agreste #sexuality crisis #gaydrien #adrien agreste x damian wayne #adridami #oneshot #how the fuck did this crack idea span 3K words #apparently I'm down with this ship

[artistic-mathematics]

sentience in animatronics, particularly in sister location?

Major FNAF lore spoilers ahead. Also, this is a very long theory post. Consider yourself warned.

This is a list of the main animatronics that are possessed, or have sentience in some way or another. (This list might be a little shady, so bear with me):

Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, Golden Freddy (First Missing Children’s incident, FNAF 1)

Toy Freddy, Toy Bonnie, Toy Chica (Second Missing Children’s incident, FNAF 2)

Mangle (from the fruit maze minigame)

Puppet/Marionette/Lefty (for... obvious reasons)

Springtrap (also for obvious reasons)

Looking to each of their behaviors, it’s shown that the person who possess said animatronic (aside from Puppet) were stuffed into their respectful suit, which is how said animatronic gains sentience. For the Puppet, Charlie’s spirit kind of merged with the Puppet’s because the puppet wanted to protect Charlie, even after death (or something like that. That’s basically how MatPat explained it in one of his videos.) For this, we’ll kind of just... ignore the Puppet, because that’s clearly an exception and isn’t really useful here.

Now, if we look into everyone else’s behavior, we see the following. The main animatronics and the toy animatronics are weary of adults (including Mangle, btw!), especially night guard, because they look the most similar to William Afton (or their murderer). Springtrap is, well, William Afton, and he always comes back because he has the plot armor of every Disney princess ever. They all have a proper motive -- the children and the dog looking to avenge their own deaths, while William Afton murders more people and does more of his twisted experiments with souls and wreaks more havoc overall.

Sister Location is different. We know for a fact that Elizabeth Afton possesses Circus Baby, but even then, it’s an extremely fuzzy grey line. What was her motive in killing her own brother? Michael mentions that the Funtimes thought he was William, so actually, what was her motive in killing her own father?

For my fic (which is why I... started overanalyzing this to begin with...), I’ve written this off as the fact that maybe Elizabeth’s soul wasn’t fully merged with Baby’s yet. There seems to be a bit of a consensus on there needing to be time before a spirit fully merges with the animatronic, so maybe that is the case. Maybe Baby just had sentience and decided to do whatever it took to leave, despite knowing that he was Elizabeth’s father and her own creator.

We know that in FNAF 6, Elizabeth has some control or some say over Scrap Baby. I get that an animatronic literally made by William could call him “daddy”, but realistically, Elizabeth would be more likely to do so.

For the sake of this post, let’s just assume that Elizabeth had no say over Baby in Sister Location, but in part gave Baby sentience (because she obviously is sentient by then). The true motive that Elizabeth has, while actually possessing Baby, is to make her father proud, considering that the very last thing she did while alive was disrespect orders and disappoint him. She wants to make amends and make him happy.

We have all of these possessed animatronics with a clear end motive, one that relates directly to their death in some way. So what on earth is going on with the other Funtimes?

Let’s start with Ballora. The most commonly accepted theory is the theory MatPat proposed, that Ballora is actually Mrs. Afton (whose name has not been confirmed yet). The biggest issue I see with this theory, though, is the fact that not once does she actually display true sentience throughout all of Sister Location. Sure, she has a few lines that were definitely not coded in, but that doesn’t really determine anything. There is one major difference between Baby (who we’ve already determined to be sentient) and Ballora,

Ballora doesn’t learn. I don’t think Baby only meant that Ballora couldn’t learn to pretend in order to avoid getting scooped. When Baby first mentions Ballora, she simply tells you how to get past her. Ballora is predictable, and Baby knows that. She knows exactly what Ballora will do, because she doesn’t learn from her failures. You’d think, after being in an underground facility for so long, that any human (even a child!) would be willing to change their tactics. And yet now we’re talking about a fully-grown adult who’s possessing this animatronic? It just doesn’t seem likely.

I do believe that she is at least partially sentient, though, due to her voice lines and the ability to at least listen to Baby. She also has a less than fun reaction to the controlled shocks and is very, very hostile to you after that, showing that she has at least some capacity to understand that Michael hurt them. Also, if Ennard’s inner dialogue is to be believed in night 5, then I can see Ballora bringing up the fact that he had hurt them. (I do believe that Baby planned this whole thing out and told the other Funtimes to act hostile towards Michael, but uh, Ballora may have just held a grudge regardless.)

Another thing that’s worth mentioning is that it’s been generally confirmed that Circus Baby’s Pizza World opened after the first missing children’s incident. If this is to be believed, then William Afton would have already done experiments with remnant and whatnot. In this case, I think it’s actually quite likely that Ballora may have had Mrs. Afton’s remnant, but not her spirit. This would explain why she’s not as sentient as Baby, but is at least somewhat sentient. I think this was extremely deliberate -- I do agree with the part of the theory in which Ballora was modeled after Mrs. Afton in some way. He must’ve done this to honor her memory or something along those lines.

Now onto Funtime Freddy and Funtime Foxy. We know that the both of them are also sentient in their own way, considering the fact that they were also able to listen to Baby (while Funtime Foxy does have the same motives as Ballora when it comes to attacking Michael, Funtime Freddy does not. so I do believe that Baby must’ve talked to him beforehand to some extent in acting hostile.) My theory is that both Funtime Freddy and Funtime Foxy must’ve had remnants of other people, since they both also seem to have at least partial sentience like Ballora. But who, and why? It makes sense for Ballora to have Mrs. Afton’s if she’s modeled after her. But what’s the point of making these other two sentient?

The best solution I can come up with is to enhance the AI in them, so they do a better job of kidnapping and killing children... or whatever. I have absolutely no proof to back this up, though.

Then, well, Ennard happens. And the three of them vote to kick Baby out. While the three of them kinda just... let things happen in Sister Location, I think the reason for their rebellious behavior was actually due to Elizabeth being merged with them. I think that maybe she passed on some of that sentience to the other three, giving them just enough willpower to boot Baby. Do I have evidence for this? No. Is this entirely based off of headcanons? Yup. Honestly, I’m just spitballing at this point. I am so, so very tired of trying to figure out how sentience even works in FNAF at this point.

(Don’t even get me started on Bon Bon, the Bidybabs, and Minireenas. I have no goddamn clue how any of them even fit. The Bidybabs saying “She’s watching us!” or something along those lines just... my one braincell is crying.)

Anyway, please let me know what you think. This was long and convoluted and I want some opinions from other people, because I really am just overthinking all of this now.

PS. I have no idea how this remnant stuff even works. Couldn’t you tell? I probably should’ve researched it but I’m too braindead for that now. Literally putting this out there before anyone flames me.

#fnaf sister location #fnaf pizzeria simulator #circus baby #elizabeth afton #scrap baby #funtime freddy #funtime foxy #ballora #fnaf theory #my theory #william afton #ennard #mrs afton #fnaf lore

[taeescript]

VI. Script of the Angel

𝔰𝔶𝔫𝔬𝔭𝔰𝔦𝔰 >> This is the story of three very different people. A successful novelist, a blossoming artist and a dedicated cop. They seem to have nothing in common. Yet, they are continually drawn to each other. It is as if their fates have been intertwined. Written. That they must meet.

𝔭𝔞𝔦𝔯𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔰 >> ft. jungkook and jimin primarily.

𝔤𝔢𝔫𝔯𝔢 >> policeman!jimin, author!jungkook, painter!reader, serialkiller!XXX; a classic game of cat and mouse

𝔴/𝔠 >> 2.3k

𝔴𝔞𝔯𝔫𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔰 >> mature themes depicted. due to the explicit nature of the topic (serial killers, murders, violence, sexual content, infidelity etc.) this is rated 18+. to spare storytelling: please consider yourself warned.

𝔞/𝔫 >> there is a lot going on tumblr these days, and a lot of things just going on in life right now. i still hope to continue to share chapters with you although they may all be a little shorter than usual now. nontheless, i hope you enjoy (: 

previous part || masterlist || next part

Wax – a diverse class of organic compounds which are hydrophobic, malleable solids at ambient temperatures. Typically containing melting points above at 40 C, they are obtained from multiple resources such as animals or plants. Wax can also be extracted chemically in petroleum. There are many uses for wax such as the manufacture of candles, final coatings on wood products and thickening agents amongst others. One of the most popular artistic use of waxes is the creation of statues from Madame Tussauds.

“Another what?” Jimin asks when he is dragged out of the interrogation room again by Namjoon.

“Dispatch just gave me a call. They want the homicide team on site because…well, you know the reason each and every time we’re called into site,” Namjoon runs his hand through his hair. The news had come as a shock to him as well. “You’ll have to release him, Jimin.”

Jimin shakes his head. “No, Namjoon. I was in the middle of something with him.”

“Jimin, be reasonable here! There’s another murder that’s been committed while you were here questioning him. It’s quite obvious that he couldn’t have killed this person.”

“I’m so close to cracking him!” Jimin yells in frustration. “Beside, how do you know he hadn’t gone and done this before he came in?”

Namjoon has to bite back his words.

“Fuck!” Jimin kicks the door. He doesn’t care that Jungkook could hear how angry he is on the other side. There really isn’t anything to hide between the two of them anyways.

After a minute, Jimin has calmed down. “I’ll meet you on site,” he says to Namjoon.

Namjoon doesn’t leave.

“Look, I promise, alright? I’m just going to send Jungkook off properly and then I’ll drive straight to the site. Text me the address,” Jimin says.

He only has one choice so Namjoon nods and leaves.

Once Jimin is left alone in the room, he punches the air blindly.

Jungkook sits calmly inside the room. It seems that luck is on his side. Perhaps whatever this case was would have Jimin off his back. It would be a little hard to continue any of his extracurricular activities if Jimin continuously monitors all his actions.

“You’re free to go, Mr. Jeon,” Jimin opens the door and speaks without looking at Jungkook.

Jungkook raises his hand and the handcuffs that link him to the table clang as metal hits metal.

Jimin walks up to him and opens the lock. Jungkook rubs his wrists and picks up his jacket on the way out.

“I really do hope you catch the killer, Detective Park,” Jungkook gives a light pat on Jimin’s shoulder.

...

Jimin recognizes her when he brushes under the caution tape onto where the rest of his team stands in a circle. It is not so much that he recognizes her facial features, but it is the outfit she is wearing. The same black and blue leggings.

“Fuck me,” Namjoon says the instance Jimin slides up besides him, “Fucking bat shitting balls.”

Yoongi has one hand placed over his mouth and his index finger pressing against his nostrils. There is a strange smell emitting off the corpse.

“A missing body part, again?” Jimin says. He swallows the bile that threatens to rise. The forensics team does not need to tell him what part is missing this time. It is glaringly obvious to the observer.

Replacing where it usually sits on the body is the head of another species – a buck’s crown with antlers and all. The girl is still standing although it is clear that she is deceased. Her body had been manipulated such that it looked like she was mid-sprint before being shocked by her attacker. She was a live manifestation of a deer caught in headlights.

“Let’s see if we can move her; bring her back to the lab for analysis,” Namjoon barks an order at the forensics team. They nod and move towards the body. Right as they put their hands on her, a loud voice yells,

“Don’t!”

It is too late, however. The team has already lifted her an inch off the floor. At his shout, they drop her immediately and that is when she crumbles, literally, at their feet. Jimin stands as her foot rolls in front of him. He stares at the shoe and foot that has been broken off at the ankle.

“Fuck!” Namjoon exclaims in alarm, jumping back.

Taehyung stands with his arms at his side, defeated. “You shouldn’t have tried to move her,” he mutters.

Namjoon’s face conveys both astonishment and confusion as stalks away to find somebody who could clean the body parts and move them back to the lab.

Jimin carefully tiptoes around the fragments of her body and walks up to Taehyung. “What the hell just happened?” he demands.

Besides being the team’s blood spatter analyst, he was an expert on a multitude of other subjects. “You saw how her body was positioned, didn’t you? Usually, victims are sprawled on the ground because gravity pushes on them, and their muscles have collapsed. She was standing. Something is keeping her muscles rigid post mortem,” Taehyung explains.

“Kim!” someone calls amidst the rubble. The victim’s body had been broken at most of the joints and a gathered team was currently packing each section in a bag.

Both Taehyung and Jimin walk up to the jacketed individual who had called out. She is bent over what looks like the forearm. A brown, semi-clear substance is pooling around the limb.

“This started seeping out all of a sudden. It’s happening to a couple of the broken parts, although most of the liquid is contained in the bags that we have stored them in,” she tells the two of them.

Taehyung bends down to examine the liquid. He is wearing gloves and when he extracts his fingers from the surface of the substance, it is slightly sticky between his index finger and thumb. He wipes his hand on a piece of tissue before slipping that into the bag as well. “Take that and all the parts back to the lab. If you can get a vial of the liquid to analyze, that would be helpful as well,” Taehyung told the assistant. She nods.

As the scene is being cleared, Taehyung walks back to the patrol car with Jimin. “What are you thinking about?” Jimin inquires, seeing that the gears inside Taehyung’s head are turning.

“Tell me, what’s the temperature right now?” Taehyung asks.

Jimin checks his phone and reports, “20 C, but with sunshine it should feel like 24 C.”

Taehyung takes note. “Slightly above room temperature,” he mumbles.

“What was that?”

“Slightly above room temperature,” Taehyung repeats louder. He stops walking and faces Jimin. “I’ve got a theory on what that is, but I can’t be sure yet. I’m going back to the lab and once results are out, I will call you immediately.”

Jimin nods. “I wanted to take a look around the site anyways. I’ll see you back at the station.”

Taehyung waves before leaving.

By the time Jimin returns to the crime scene, the majority of broken body parts have been cleaned. There is only a lone photographer who is packing up his camera into his bag. He greets Jimin with a slight bow on his way to leave the site.

“Any witnesses?”

Namjoon returns by his side. He shakes his head, answering Jimin’s question himself. “This is not a common runner’s route. It’s a short cut from the left side of the park to the right so not a lot of pedestrians know about it.” He sees how Jimin is still standing there with an unreadable expression on his face. “Are you okay?” he asks Jimin directly.

Jimin taps the bridge of his nose. “I know that girl,” he says softly, “Not personally. But I bumped into her before. It was at the park near our station. I also saw – ” His sentence is suddenly cut off.

“Saw what?” Namjoon asks further.

Jimin cannot continue his sentence. He knows what Namjoon will say already. Besides, if he really wanted concrete evidence against Jungkook, he must absolutely make sure that Jungkook was there at the park when the running girl was there. “Saw a red bird. I think it’s called a cardinal,” Jimin lousily finishes his sentence.

Namjoon gives him a strange look. “I’ve never pegged you as a bird watcher,” he comments.

Jimin shrugs. “I’m heading back to the station. Taehyung also says he has something on the possible C.O.D.,” he reports to Namjoon.

“You’re leaving me again to handle the crowd? That happened last time with Sara Michel’s case,” he groans.

Jimin shrugs again as if to say, “Sorry, what can I do?” He gives a reassuring squeeze on Namjoon’s shoulder before leaving.

This time, he is going to find unshakable evidence.

...

“Welcome back,” you smile at him when he enters the door. You are sitting at the table, pencil and sketchpad in front of you.

Jungkook smiles ever so slightly back before bending down to untie his shoes. They needed to be placed in their usual spot; if they weren’t, he would feel the irritation spread throughout his body until he went back to fix it. It is better that everything is perfect the way it is the first time.

After he has made sure that his laces were also tucked into the shoe as was his preference, he walks over to you. He can’t help but muse at how exquisite you look whenever the afternoon’s sunshine would brush through your hair. You are like a marble stature carved by the Greeks and placed on display in the middle of a garden. He moves his eyes over you like a curator would when assessing a piece.

You have your back turned towards him and do not hear when he walks behind.

“What are you drawing?”

Immediately, you stand and hold your sketchpad to your chest. It shields your work from his curious eyes.

“Something!” you blurt, your face flushing.

He cannot read why you are acting so strangely so he does what he always does around you: smile.

You clear your throat and tuck your disheveled hair behind your ear. “A package came for you. I left it in your room!” you say the tumbling words. It is your lame attempt in shifting his attention away from you to something else.

Thankfully, it works as he nods. He sends you a last playful smirk before making his way towards his makeshift bedroom. It is tiny, as you had originally used it as your storage room for your art utensils, but they had recently moved a mattress into the room for him and it helped that he did not have a lot of personal items with him anyways. The said package sits just beside the doorframe to his closed room, and he wonders again of whether or not you are scared of him. You never seemed to want to enter his room and insisted on speaking to him from outside in the hallway.

The package is not heavy and rather small in his hands. He is able to pick it up with one and balances it on his left palm as he opens the door. The blue walls welcome him into his small, personal haven. Carefully, he tiptoes his way between the old canvases and dried paint palettes. He passes by the yellow smudge on the wall and then collapses on the mattress in the back of the room. His suitcase squeaks as the wheels press against the body of the case while being wedged in the small space.

Once he is comfortably sitting cross-legged on the bed, he carefully finds a cutter and slices through the masking tape that conceals the contents of the cardboard box. The movement is as smooth and practiced as slicing through butter to him – a flick of the wrist. Once the tape no longer holds, he pries the flaps open. There is another small box tied with a red ribbon. A single white card is attached to the side. This is what he first takes out.

The envelope is embossed with a strange swirling design. He breaks the seal with another slice of the cutter, sliding out the cardstock letter. It had been written in elegant matching swirling cursive with a golden fountain pen.

“I’ve been waiting for you. Welcome to my town. A small home-warming gift.”

It has not been signed and Jungkook wonders if the writer was the one who wrote the words; each letter had been carved so delicately onto the material. He tilts his head as he thinks of who may have sent this to him. He has not told anybody that he is planning to stay in LA for the time being. He had never been one to open his circle of acquaintances and thereby it had remained small. Digging through his mind, he comes up empty-handed on any of the known possibilities.

Well, there is one person who definitely would not be the sender.

The bow becomes undone by a light tug from his fingers. It falls delicately onto his lap like a ribbon of red liquid. At that, the walls of the box fall easily to reveal its treasure, akin to the opening of an oyster.

His usual stoic expression becomes all the more frozen on his face when he sees what the gift is. Somebody has been watching him. Somebody knows about him. Somebody is out there.

For a single eyeball, pupil and iris augmented in aquamarine and azure hues, stares right back at him. The crystalline gift plucked so delicately from the girl who he had been planned as his next angel.

...

next part

#bts #jimin #jungkook #bts fanfic #jimin fanfic #jungkook fanfic #btx s reader #jimin x reader #jungkook x reader #bts fluff #bts smut #bts angst #jimin fluff #jimin smut #jimin angst #jungkook fluff #jungkook angst #jungkook smut #bts scenario #jungkook scenario #jimin scenario #namjoon #seokjin #yoongi #taehyung #hoseok

[firelxdykatara]

So I was at work thinking about Zutara (as you do) and my mind drifted to a kat@@ng argument I tend to see a lot of. About how Aang would be so sad if Katara never returned his feelings and therefore Zutara 100% //can't// be endgame which... a) homeboy is literally 12 and would get over it, and b) BUT WHAT ABOUT KATARA THO. But it got me thinking. Is there even any evidence in canon that Air Nomads believed in wholesale monogamy or marriage? I mean, Aang never knew his parents (1/2)

(2/2) -and Aang was raised communally by the Air Nomad monks and nuns. So like, why would being with Katara (specifically JUST Katara) //forever// be something he'd hyper focus on so badly? Also, Aang is shown wanting to adhere pretty strictly to Air Nomadic teachings but in this instance he gets a pass? It just boggles me tbh. Anyway, your meta and responses are just plain amazing and would love to hear your thoughts on this.

I’ve actually talked a lot about Aang’s willful disregard for his people’s culture and customs when it clashes with something he wants, but I think most of these discussions have happened in private server spaces and I haven’t actually spoken much about it here, so let’s remedy that!

You are absolutely right--Aang’s lifelong monogamous relationship and Katara being his ‘forever girl’ clash with literally everything we actually know about Air Nomad culture. And it’s actually kind of frustrating, because this would have been an excellent chance for some worldbuilding--speak about how the Air Nomads did not hold with typical family structures, that monogamy simply wasn’t done because they practiced detachment and while that doesn’t mean they couldn’t love one another (Gyatso loved Aang a great deal, for example) it means they most likely would not have practiced relationship exclusivity.

Honestly, it would have been really cool to see a culture where monogamy was not the norm, and we get hints of it--Aang never knew his parents, and he wouldn’t have been discovered as the Avatar until years after his birth (I believe they do the toy test when the kids are toddlers or older), which means he was likely removed to the Air Temple shortly after being born. His parents most likely lived at separate temples--nuns had their own, as the temples were separated by gender--and its not a stretch to believe they didn’t have any sort of monogamous relationship. One theory I’ve seen proposted is that the AN practiced something like a yearly or bi-yearly fertility festival, where adults from the temples came together in celebration--of life, of love, of their people, of the element they breathed that informed every aspect of their lives--and I’m not suggesting wild orgies, but that many would pair off, have their own smaller celebrations, and return to the group, and this is where most pregnancies would happen.

That is, of course, pure speculation, but it would be a lot more in keeping with what we do know of the AIr Nomads than Aang deciding, at the ripe old age of twelve, that he’d found his ‘forever girl’ and he would be with her, and only her, for the rest of his life, no matter what.

It’s also very... odd, though, that Aang would even come up with this idea on his own. It’s not like there are tons of examples, as the gaang travel the world, of aggressively heterosexual couples pairing off and spending Forever together, because, well, they’re in the middle of a war and everyone has more important things to think about. And Aang’s crush, while cute and seeming more like puppy-love than anything else book 1 and most of book 2 (he literally imprinted on the first girl he saw when he hatched from the iceberg ok), becomes almost disturbingly possessive in book 3, and it really comes out of nowhere. When did Aang decide, without ever once asking, that Katara must return his feelings? And why? Because, as established, it makes absolutely no sense given what (admittedly little) we know about his own culture and how he was raised.

I realize that the Doyalist explanation is that Bryke are, themselves, aggressively heterosexual, and had decided from the jump that they wanted Aang to Get the Girl in the end, and so were determined to Make It Happen even when, given the story and how the characters had developed, it no longer made any narrative sense. (And yet they never thought to make Katara’s feelings a focus when trying to force Kataang to happen. Odd, that. Or maybe not so odd, considering their treatment of Katara in LoK. But I’m stopping myself here cause that’s a whole other rant.) But the Watsonian one paints a very unpleasant picture, especially given Aang’s actions towards Katara in book 3--during EIP in particular.

And it’s funny how Aang’s complete and total disregard for his people’s beliefs and culture, when it would deny him something he wants, is never mentioned in those ‘but Aang couldn’t kill Ozai, it goes against his culture’ posts. If Aang had demonstrated any willingness to uphold his people’s beliefs before this--like, say, following through on letting go of his attachment to Katara and understanding that if she didn’t feel the same way he did, he was not entitled to her affections and would be able to move on--then I’d be much more inclined to give those arguments credit.

As it is, however, the only reason I agree that Aang shouldn’t have had to kill Ozai is because he was just a child, and he should have been able to preserve the innocence of childhood as long as possible--but I still dislike the way his battle with Ozai ended, because he had disregarded his people’s beliefs over the entire book, he had done nothing to regain the Avatar State except get slammed against a pointy rock, and energybending was handed to him on a silver platter by a lionturtle who literally came out of nowhere to give it to him.

Not only that, but the discussion about what he would do once he actually faced the Firelord came much too late--the subject wasn’t even broached until The Southern Raiders, and thus Aang’s insistence that he can’t possibly take a life seems to come out of left field because a) he never felt any guilt over the lives he took while in the Avatar State at the end of book 1 (and this isn’t to say he was at fault for what Koizilla did while he was fused with it, but he has felt guilt over his actions in the Avatar State that were just as uncontrolled before this, and you’re telling me that he wouldn’t have seen any of that as blood on his hands? that if he killed Katara, or Sokka, or Toph, in one of those rages, he’d have just shrugged his shoulders and blamed it on the Avatar State? no), and b) there was absolutely no discussion of this before the eclipse, leaving one to wonder what, exactly, Aang was planning to do in that eight minute window where Ozai would be powerless. I don’t think it was a dance-off in the cards, that’s all I’m saying.

I’m sorry, I got incredibly off-topic. but the bottom line (TL;DR:) is: I absolutely agree with you. And it’s suspect, from both a character arc and a worldbuilding perspective, that Aang is only committed to his people’s beliefs and his culture in the one instance where he might have been asked to do something he didn’t want to, but not at all when following his own culture might have meant losing something he wanted. This not only paints him as incredibly selfish (something that is hard to dispute when looking at his behavior in book 3, though I would point out that if his arc actually followed a natural progression from books 1 and 2 he would have grown up rather than... that), but puts his culture in an incredibly simplistic light. We never get any deeper insight into what his people believed or how they lived, because Aang latches onto the first girl he sees and is determined to make her his ‘forever girl’, and there’s never any talk of how he was raised or what his people actually believed.

And even when he meets the Guru--someone much more well-versed in Air Nomad culture than Aang is, because Aang went into the ice at twelve years old and never had an opportunity to understand his culture--he almost immediately disregards what the Guru told him when it conflicts with his own desires. Sure, he says ‘I’m sorry, Katara’ when letting her go at the end of the finale (although....why he’s apologizing to her, when he’s had no indication she has feelings for him, and he certainly never asked, is beyond me), but come book 3 he’s right back to wanting to have her, and assuming he will just because he kisses her--without preamble, without any discussion of feelings, without even asking if she wants to be kissed--and flies off before the invasion.

Any way you slice it, it really doesn’t make sense, unless they wanted Aang to come across as selfish and pigheaded throughout the entirety of book 3. But I suspect that isn’t actually the image they wanted to project, and it makes me really sad when I think of what his arc could have been if it weren’t for Bryke’s insistence that he get the girl at the end of the story.

#atla #aang #air nomad culture #kataang salt #atla meta #salt for ts #just trying to cover my bases #book 3 critical most of all #asked #Anonymous

[cornappreciation]

It's been a while. Episode 40 discussion post below! Spoilers, obviously.

hi! wow! its been a while! sorry about that, brainrot said i have to think about nothing but warrior cats for like six months straight so ive been busy with that. but im back, hopefully? not sure if anyone really recognizes my specifically (or if they ever did), but anyways. since i didnt make an analysis post for the past,,, two (?) episodes, some of my cited evidence will just be "trust me bro" as i dont have notes to look back on, only my own memory. now! episode 40!

this episode was very corn-heavy, so that's gonna be the focal point of this post. ok, time for a quick recap. ive already established in my previous episode analysis / theory posts that corn is almost definitely been *replaced* by xolotl, not possessed or altered. its also likely the beast in the cave near metztli is quetzalcoatl (though this could be a manifestation of xolotl as well), and xolotl is trying to rid of him (this is why im working on the assumption is it quetzalcoatl and not xolotl in the reflections, however this could be some amalgamate of the two "getting rid" of xolotl….. who knows!). im going against my previous theories here! i said in a previous post the shadowy figures were likely xolotl, but im leaning towards corn here in the replacement theory, ill detail why later in this post. he also said at some point in episode 40 that he "got rid of his negative traits" (paraphrasing) which could be a reference ot getting rid of his twin. As for the evidence for replacing rather than possession: mind the difference in hairstyle in his human form, difference in facial markings, and his lack of transformation back into nagual form (likely because it would be markedly different. it could be that xolotls nagual form is reminiscent on corn's dream self with the face covered in hands? yall know what im talking about, ill cite the episode later. but this is unrelated).

All of this happened directly after he failed to shoot the mercy bow. Not sure if the mercy bow or the town is relevant here, but i figured its worth bringing up. This scene in episode 35 is the last we see of regular corn. He has been in human form since this point. He seemed to panic while holding the bow, which could be a mark of his personality in general, *or* something to do with being in metztli, bringing us back to the monster in the cave the citizens of metztli keep at bay with blood. This beast is likely xolotl (although as ive outlined above this could be an incorrect assessment) when the gang first enters the town, and has perhaps "switched places" with corn, leaving quetzalcoatl trapped in xolotl's reflection. This ties back to episode 40 itself, with xolotl (im going to be referring to the impostor as xolotl from now on, its easier for me) requesting that the nurses remove the mirror from his room and give him a wooden spoon rather than a metal one (that could give off his reflection). I'm not sure what this means for corn himself, perhaps xolotl just doesn't want to look at and be reminded of him, or this could be a strategy for getting rid of him? if anyone has any ideas feel free to tell me lol. Not super clear here. Maybe it can be explained by the mythos?

back! to! the! mercy! bow! which isnt really relevant to episode 40. most of this post isnt relevant to episode 40! because i think this episode mostly served to build tension and let us get to know xolotl a little better. but why not give myself a refresher and go back into some of my old stuff? just to get the ball rolling again. ive said in previous posts that i thought the reason the quetzalcoatl and xolotl,,, "thing" happened was because of the mercy bow presumably being destroyed or lost during the eruption of the red tezcatlipoca, since it isnt seen on screen after this happens. im going to tentatively retract this! i dont think its right (though it IS still a possibility….. maybe xolotl was able to take over bc corn disappeared WITH the bow??? but im not sure if the fact he was never able to use the bow disproves this……. hm.) we know *corn* is the proper wielder of it, yes, but i honestly think its more to do with the spooky cave than the bow (something i overlooked previously). its possible the bow being destroyed allowed xolotl to take over? honestly kind of stumped on xolotls method here. its also possible that my replacement theory is totally off mark and theres something im missing!

heres a timeline rq, starting with the gang entering metztli. corn and others enter metztli. they make their way to the temple with the mercy bow. corn attempted to use it, but is scared off by something or otherwise flys away for an unknown reason. this is the last we see on him. he appears only in human form from here on, with his altered facial markings and hairstyle a mark of him being changed. my theory explains this as xolotl pretending to be quetzalcoatl, from some point after corn left the temple and the red eruption. xolotl is likely the creature in the spooky cave the citizens of metztli keep at bay with blood. somehow, xolotl trapped corn in his place (his reflection), while he roams free, pretending to be corn. he avoids reflections of himself (as a shadowy figure is seen on them. This figure is likely corn. Others can see this reflection, as we see a guy at Blackwell drop his spoon after noticing it), and is "maliciously compliant" (uncooperative) with authority. It's likely he purposefully "got rid" of corn, as he says in episode 40 that he got rid of his "negative qualities". spooky! but this episode did not bring a lot of answers. great way to build up tension though! loved the constantly clock ticking as a buildup. cant wait for the next ep :)

apologies if anything ive stated has already been speculated on or confirmed otherwise ! like i said, i havent been active in a while (i even stopped using my main blog, so i dont use tumblr too often), so for all i know i could be the only person left in the no evil fandom on tumblr. feel free to add onto this or correct me or anything ive gotten wrong! ive missed interacting with yall on these theory posts :) might add on more later if i have any revelations.

#No evil #No evil Betsy Lee #Betsy Lee no evil #Corn no evil #Quetzalcoatl no evil #No evil corn #I forgot what tags I used to use AAA #Xolotl no evil #No evil quetzalcoatl

[stillness-in-green]

Part 2 of the response to this ask:

Part 1 was about where I think Geten’s story is going, and if I think it’s likely that Dabi will kill him; it dealt mainly with how those characters are set up in canon. Part 2 is far more about the fandom, and the assumptions people make that lead them to theories like the one above--specifically, the assumption that the League was always planning on bailing on the PLF. Hit the jump below with me and I'll go over why I think the common arguments for that are misguided at best, and willfully misreading the text at worst.

WARNING: Contains some generalizations about parts of the fandom that I have mostly taken steps to avoid seeing on my dash, so some of my characterizations may be out of date. I’ve tried to desalinate this post as much as possible, but as an unapologetic fan of the MLA and of Spinner (who I do not bring up incidentally), this is a topic I feel particularly strongly about. Apologies, but I Have Seen Things.

DISCLAIMER: I like Geten better than Dabi. I don't think he's better developed; I don't think he's a better character--I just like him better. This is largely down to the fact that I find the MLA fascinating from a worldbuilding perspective and its members compelling personally, whereas I’m less interested in Dabi personally than I am the Todoroki Drama on the whole, and have been tired of Fanon Dabi for approximately 83 years. I’ll also be the first to admit that my take on Dabi is pretty mercenary--hardly the irredeemable psychopath the Hero Stans on Twitter see, but nothing close to Secretly Soft Big Brother Touya, either. If that’s not your bag, you may want to skip this one.

So, here's a bullet point list of the reasons I have personally seen on why the League was always planning to turn on the MLA:

Dabi and Toga mention "getting started early," and Shigaraki mentions a plan, suggesting that the League had a plan in place independent of the one they arranged as the PLF.

Shigaraki says he won't forgive the Liberation Army for messing with peoples' feelings, so he would never really mean it when he forges an alliance with them.

The MLA is quirk supremacist, like Endeavor, so Dabi would never work with them.

Dabi is just using Skeptic against Skeptic's will; it’s not a willing partnership.

Mr. Compress rejects the PLF moniker for Shigaraki, ergo Mr. Compress didn’t genuinely associate Shigaraki and the League with the PLF.

Toga hated Curious, so she wouldn't want to work with the MLA either.

Twice would never forgive them for what they did to Giran.

[Error: argument about Spinner's opinion on the PLF not found.]

So, let's go over those, shall we? Note that a lot of what I'm going to lay out below isn't conclusive. What I want to establish is simply that the canonical evidence isn't conclusive, certainly not as much so as the people who support this view espouse.

|| Dabi and Toga mention "getting started early," and Shigaraki mentions a plan, suggesting that the League had a plan in place independent of the one they arranged as the PLF.

In responses to my recent Overhaul post, I defended Viz’s official translation as an accurate rendering of the dialogue in question. In general, I feel like Caleb Cook is pretty reliable in his translations, if sometimes kind of stiff or dry in localization. However, there are times he makes assumptions about lines--as indeed a translator for a currently-running series will sometimes have to--and sometimes, those assumptions don’t pan out. This is one of those times.

Dabi's line, "Shall we get started early?" is based on an assumption Cook made about a line that doesn't have an actual subject. In the original dialogue--Hayame ni hajimaru ka--there is no “we,” not even in the form of some implicit collective in Dabi’s grammatical inflection, nor is there a question of "should." All Dabi’s doing is musing that the start (again, there’s no subject, and so no indication of the start of what, or the start as initiated by who) is happening early.

Toga's line communicates much the same, save that she does specify that the schedule/plan/arrangement is happening earlier than expected--which is totally true, since her line is in response to Dabi observing that Machia moving must mean Shigaraki's awake, and Shigaraki was supposed to be down for another month.

Shigaraki's line, like Dabi's, lacks a subject to describe what exactly is supposed to start as soon as Shigaraki wakes. He's saying something that would, in a more stilted way, be, "I wake up and then it's the start, right?"

None of these lines suggest that the characters are necessarily talking about any plan other than the one the PLF laid out. Yes, it looks somewhat damning that Shigaraki's first action (after getting himself a cape, anyway) is to have Machia bring him the League, but heck, maybe that was always the plan. Just because Shigaraki wants to rejoin his comrades doesn't mean the rest of the PLF didn't already have machinations that they were supposed to set into motion the moment Machia left. After all, the plan as Hawks understood it did involve simultaneous attacks on major cities--maybe the League was going to be spearheading one of those attacks. Further, Shigaraki knew something was wrong from the moment he regained consciousness, and we don’t know how that knowledge affected the call he made. Hell, maybe the original plan was for the League to be brought to meet him somewhere in a chartered limo; we don’t know.

It's telling that this idea that the League had a Secret Plan to screw over the MLA rarely seems to account for Mr. Compress and Spinner being confused over the suddenness of events. The response to questions about this seems to be that the "villain trio" knew about it, so the ignorance of the rest of the League can just be handwaved--the important members knew, and that's enough. This is ungenerous towards both Twice and Mr. Compress, but I have got particularly little time for Spinner, the narrator of MVA and guy who decided to devote his all to Shigaraki, being disrespected in this fashion. More on that later.

|| Shigaraki says he won't forgive the Liberation Army for messing with peoples' feelings, so he would never really mean it when he forges an alliance with them.

Shigaraki does say he won't forgive the MLA, but consider what he did to the MLA and its leader. He destroyed most of their stronghold, killed scores of them, is directly responsible for Re-Destro losing his legs, and saw that vaunted descendant of Destro about six inches shy of full forehead-on-the-ground dogeza. The League Shigaraki commands killed a great many more of them, including one of their inner circle. He commandeered the Liberation Army, its resources, and its grand cause. I think it’s safe to say he’s more than responded in kind!

I'm not saying Shigaraki feels for the MLA the same way he does about the League, far from it, but I do think he's practical enough after two hundred chapters of character development not to throw them away out of spite. In Chapter 246, he tells Ujiko explicitly, "When someone offers me something, I take it," and, "I'm done taking the heroes lightly. I'll use everything I've got to obliterate the dregs All Might left behind." From a purely practical standpoint, if he intends to throw everything he has at the heroes, he has no reason to throw the MLA under the bus, and 116,000 reasons to keep them around. I'm altogether sure that, so long as they stood to be useful to his plans, he would have kept them around.

|| The MLA is quirk supremacist, like Endeavor, so Dabi would never work with them. + || Dabi is just using Skeptic against Skeptic's will; it’s not a willing partnership.

I hadn’t seen the second point in the wild, but I suppose it must be how the “The League will betray the MLA” theorists are getting around Dabi and Skeptic’s clear collaboration and how that collaboration totally scuttles the first point, huh? Hilarious.

Anyway, setting aside the fact that Dabi showed up to the one planning session we were shown when even Geten didn’t, there’s evidence in the canon that Dabi was working with Skeptic since even before the raid. Consider that Dabi’s video was filmed at the villa (the wall paneling and the style of the couch both match) and ask yourself where the camera he used came from. Once the filming was complete, where was the video stored such that Skeptic could access it from his laptop? If Dabi’d had it on an SD card and Skeptic was seeing it for the first time, why didn’t Spinner, Compress and Toga watch it alongside him? Surely Skeptic would need to watch it through at least once to know when to splice in the footage of Jin’s death for maximum dramatic impact? On that note, by far the most telling piece of evidence is this: if Dabi wasn't already working with Skeptic, then why was he wearing one of Skeptic's body cameras during his confrontation with Hawks?

Further, Skeptic's protest when he’s pulled onto Machia isn't that he doesn’t want to be with the League; it’s that he doesn’t want to leave Re-Destro behind. Once he's resigned that it's going to happen, though, he's cocky about his talents and complimentary of Dabi's big reveal, even if he is exasperated about the League's antics. It's ambiguous, I admit, but given that Dabi's wearing his cameras, he had to have known Dabi had a reason for them--and given that he is both abrasive and mouthy, I can’t imagine he wouldn’t have demanded to know what that reason was.

Hell, Dabi even thanks Skeptic for his editing work, which is more direct positive approval than he's ever shown anyone in the League (give or take the high-five with Twice, which, genuine or not, he would have known he was doing on camera). That much-vaunted panel of Spinner telling Toga to come back to the League? Dabi's grinning, which in isolation you could read as a certain rueful affection, but with the full context of the chapter, it becomes apparent that Dabi is grinning at Skeptic's laptop, seconds after telling Skeptic to "hurry up." Skeptic is, at that moment, probably gearing up the video to project nationwide, and Dabi’s more focused on that than he is Toga’s crisis, even when Compress directly appeals to him for aid. He tells Compress he doesn’t care, the same way he told Hawks he doesn't give a damn about the League.

Let me be clear here: I'm inclined to take Dabi at his word. I think Dabi hangs around the League because, for all that he says one man's conviction can shake the world, he also knows his own limits, and the League offers safety in numbers and an avenue to pursue his revenge. Maybe he finds them acceptable enough company, maybe he even does like them a bit despite himself, but I think any affection he might have for them is entirely incidental to his views on their usefulness. In the same way, while he's willing to bail on the MLA when the heroes attack, I don't think it was his plan to do so, especially not given his apparent immediate regard for Skeptic, as seen in the deleted scene here. Sure, he dislikes Geten, but ultimately, Geten is a stupid kid too tied up in his care for Re-Destro--who's now worshipping the ground Shigaraki walks on--to really be getting in Dabi's way.

Maybe if the MLA really were as quirk supremacist as Geten makes them out to be, Dabi would be actively looking for a way to see ‘em burn, but as I’ve said countless times before, Geten is not a reliable narrator vis a vis the MLA's doctrine. Now, obviously I don't expect Dabi to give them an unearned benefit of the doubt,(1) not after what he heard Geten say, but if Dabi has been working with Skeptic, it doesn't take a genius to realize that while Anthropomorph is a perfectly good quirk, it is categorically not what primarily defines Skeptic’s "worth" in the MLA societal microcosm.

Nothing that Skeptic does reflects the way Geten talks about "elevating one's ability" or "sheer strength" in the way that HeroAca fandom tends to understand as referring to flashy and offensive quirks. And yet, Skeptic is a ranked advisor warranting an introductory panel with RD's inner circle and Geten is not. Perhaps, just perhaps, this might have led Dabi to reevaluating his initial assessment just slightly?

|| Mr. Compress rejects the PLF moniker for Shigaraki, ergo Mr. Compress didn’t genuinely associate Shigaraki and the League with the PLF.

So, this one's pretty wild, because, in the same chapter that had people crowing about Mr. Compress's dialogue, Mr. Compress's actions show the exact opposite of the conclusion this theory would demand. Specifically, if it was always the League's plan to ditch the MLA, Mr. Compress would have darted right past Skeptic, ignoring the man's cries for help. He doesn't--he picks Skeptic up on the way past and (at least in the volume corrections) deposits him safe with Dabi in Spinner's scarf. Of course, Skeptic still stands to be useful, but if one acknowledges that Skeptic's usefulness is reason enough not to abandon him, then what exactly is the argument for leaving 116,000 perfectly useful warm bodies behind?

But let's set aside Compress rescuing Skeptic and focus on the actual point, because that point in itself is still flawed. Mr. Compress's thoughts on the PLF in the specific talk bubble in question are somewhat ambiguous. It's another case of the Viz translation making a couple of assumptions that are just that--assumptions.

Compress's words in the Japanese are as follows:

Chōjō Kaihō Sensen.… Viran rengo no Shigaraki Tomura ga…

Viz then renders the line like so:

The Paranormal Liberation Front's… No, the League of Villain's Shigaraki…

Note that in the Japanese, the possessive no is only included once, to indicate Shigaraki's association with the League. Further, the original doesn't indicate any negation in Compress's thoughts. Yes, he could be rejecting the PLF association for Shigaraki, but he could as easily be narrowing his scope to Shigaraki as the figure he represents to the League, rather than the figure he represents to the PLF--not rejecting wholesale, but rather becoming more specific. Compress might also be thinking first of the PLF as a general organization, then narrowing down to Shigaraki specifically.

Rather than reading this line as an indication that Compress regards the PLF as temporary, I was heartened by the fact that Compress thought about the PLF at all! If the League really had been planning to discard them this entire time, then there's no reason for Compress to have ever taken the Front seriously enough to have thought about them in that moment of crisis. You can carry this back further, too. In Chapter 258, when Twice is asking Hawks for help, he says that Spinner and Compress have been in meetings for days. Coupled with Compress's first thought about the entity that will carry out Harima's desired reformation being the Liberation Front (or possibly "the Liberation Front's Shigaraki"), this indicates to me that Compress was taking it seriously, not just gorging himself on sushi on the MLA's dime.

Indeed, back in Ujiko's lab, when it was just Shigaraki talking about his backstory and his dreams of destruction, Compress looks the opposite of impressed; we know from his narration in 294 that he liked the League because they didn't place any importance on one another’s pasts. Yet, at some point, his view shifted to believing that fulfilling his ancestor's ambition, his bloodline’s duty, really might be back on the table. We as readers don't quite know when that shift happened, but given, again, his initial mental invocation of the PLF, I think we can assume that it's tied to that alliance, those resources. And sure, when the moment of crisis happens and he's really defining who and what Shigaraki is to him, and where his values and priorities lie, it's with the League and Shigaraki as the leader of the League. But that doesn't mean he never had his hopes for the PLF at all, or was partaking in plans to ditch them.

Also too, this is a man who was lamenting the loss of their partnership with Overhaul, a man who personally maimed him, on top of killing a comrade. You're telling me the guy who shrugged off his animosity towards Overhaul would willingly allow the League to plot sabotage against even wealthier collaborators against whom he has even less reason to hold a grudge? Come on, guys.

|| Toga hated Curious, so she wouldn't want to work with the MLA either.

This one's easy: Toga pretty explicitly hated Curious, but she's even more explicit that she likes the MLA because she thinks the world they want to create is wonderful. She says this verbatim at the end of 225, after Curious has spent the entire chapter hounding her with explosions and intrusive questions. What turns her animosity on Curious is not some reveal that the MLA's world would be terrible after all, but Curious calling Toga's "normal" miserable and tragic. Essentially, she doesn't object to the world the MLA wants to bring about; she objects to being turned into a martyr for that world, especially when that martyrdom requires that the things that make Toga happy be characterized as horrific misfortunes.

Toga doesn't like Curious; she kills Curious. And then she comes into a position of leadership, and we don't know a lot about how that position takes her, but she seems delighted to be walking out onto the stage to be announced as such, and she makes active contributions to the discussion of the PLF's plans in Chapter 245. We are, again, given no indication that her lethal response to Curious means that she's planning to ditch the MLA on the whole.

Incidentally, Curious asserts what she does about Toga only in the context of the world as it stands. The world's rejection of Toga's normal, and the extremes that rejection drove Toga to, are what Curious considers tragic and miserable, not Toga's fascination with blood in and of itself. She clearly believes that, in the world the MLA envisions, Toga's life would not be so miserable because she would never have been oppressed to the degree that she snapped. And frankly, Curious isn't wrong. The only reason she is a villain in that scene is that she's willing to murder Toga to project that tragedy to the world. If she'd been willing to sit down and have a civil interview with Toga to print it in a relevant magazine, she would have been fine.

|| Twice would never forgive them for what they did to Giran.

You know, this is a totally fair point. It is, however, somewhat complicated by the fact that Giran himself never left the PLF. Now, there’s almost certainly something to be said about Giran’s whole information broker shtick being terminally compromised by his capture, his maiming, his client list being hacked, etc. He had a bunch of identifying items strewn all over the country that were covered in the national news, items that people who associated with him closely certainly would have recognized. Maybe he’s laying low for a while?

I don’t know why Giran was still around by the time of the raid. I can theorize about his pragmatism or what have you, but the canon really doesn’t give us anything to go on. Still, if he really hated the MLA all that much, as he would be totally justified in doing, it’s pretty bizarre that Horikoshi showed him twice in PLF crowd scenes post-Deika looking nothing worse than kind of confused and uneasy. Heck, you’d think he would at least have merited a better seat in the crowd for the big merger announcement.

Giran aside, the fact that Twice never does hit it off with anyone in his regiment is, I think, telling. If there’s anyone in the League that intentionally kept himself at a distance from the MLA because of hard feelings, it’s likely Twice. After all, if he had befriended anyone, he presumably wouldn’t have needed to go to Hawks for tutoring almost an entire month after Deika. That said, the fact that Twice does go running to Hawks for tutoring shows that he’s at least doing his best to act in accordance with what he thinks Shigaraki and the rest want. That doesn’t preclude the League having a secret plan that he’s either in on and playing along with, or hasn’t been told about because he might not be able to stop himself from vocalizing about it. Still, while absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, obviously absence of evidence is not evidence of presence. So, lacking any sign that the rest of the League is planning treachery, I’m not inclined to assume Twice’s lack of forgiveness is indicative of anything other than his own feelings.

|| [Error: argument about Spinner's opinion on the PLF not found.]

:: INCOMING SALT WARNING :: INCOMING SALT WARNING ::

This is the one that really gets to me. I have never seen an argument that the League is planning to betray the PLF that convincingly explains the fact that Spinner, to all available evidence, threw himself wholeheartedly into trying to make the PLF succeed. To be more precise, I have seen one explanation, and that explanation is that the plan to ditch the MLA was a secret that only Shigaraki, Dabi and sometimes Toga knew about, and to reiterate, that is bullshit.

In my experience, this is an explanation proposed by people who care about Spinner only insofar as he can be a Soft Gaymer Boyfriend or score them rhetorical points, but have little to no interest in his ongoing--and, indeed, increasing--importance to the League generally and Shigaraki’s arc specifically. The dude who talked about how Twice’s home was the League, who got through to Toga while still respecting her choice when no one else could, the guy who recognized the hollowness within Shigaraki but also bonded with him over video games, the man who Mr. Compress said was Shigaraki’s most devoted follower(2)--this man did not do all of that for people in this fandom to say, “Oh, well, the others probably just kept it a secret from him because they thought he’d be bad at lying.”

Really? “Bad at lying?” And that’s an adequate justification, is it, for Shigaraki letting Spinner toil for months under false pretenses? For lying to the man who adores him the most? Of course it isn’t, but the people who theorize this don’t really care about Spinner’s adoration for Shigaraki, or the fact that Shigaraki rewarding Spinner’s feelings by allowing him to dedicate himself unstintingly to something Shigaraki was planning to discard from the beginning would be a blatant abuse of Spinner’s trust.

I have never seen anyone try to argue that Spinner was in on a plan to betray the MLA all along. That’s because it’s patently obvious that Spinner--forthright, direct Spinner, who named the merged organization with Re-Destro, spends all his time in meetings, has a direct exchange with Re-Destro about the state of their plans, and is probably the reason RD started wearing polka dots--went all-in on the PLF. But for the people who propose the “the League was always going to bail” theory, Spinner and his labors are an afterthought.

Spinner is not an afterthought. Where Mr. Compress has been captured, Toga could hypothetically be peeled away from the League via Uraraka, and Dabi almost certainly will be peeled away via the Todoroki plot, Spinner’s driving motivation at this point is Shigaraki himself. He connected to Shigaraki’s nihilism, his hatred, but also his humanity--the humanity in Shigaraki Tomura, not in Shimura Tenko. His empathy didn’t spring from contrived psychic glimpses of crying 5-year-olds, but from long months of observation, doubt, and gradually deepening wonder. He’s the only person currently with Shigaraki that I can see caring enough about Shigaraki’s welfare that he might sacrifice his own goals and desires to help Deku save him.

Spinner is not an afterthought, and I refuse to build or entertain theories that treat him that way. So as to his opinions on the MLA? Despite having his own reasons to be leery of them based on how shabbily Trumpet treated him, he was obviously trying to make the Paranormal Liberation Front succeed, which means he must have believed that Shigaraki wanted it to succeed. Therefore, unless you’re prepared to assert that Shigaraki (and everyone else who was in on it!) was cruel enough to lie to Spinner about something he was devoting so much time and energy to, the inescapable conclusion is that Shigaraki also wanted the Front to succeed.

(Note: After letting a friend pre-read this, I have been informed that there is, in fact, one explanation offered for Spinner knowing the League was going to abandon the PLF but working his ass off on the venture anyway, and that explanation is, “Something something wants to prove himself because low self-esteem.” This is so ridiculous I can’t even bring myself to edit this post accordingly. Low self-esteem! Because nothing would alleviate Spinner's low self-esteem like toiling for months over something that holds no worth to the people he actually cares about, right? Right?? Bah. Humbug!)

And but so, to wrap all that up: I fundamentally disagree that the League viewed the Paranormal Liberation Front as a temporary arrangement, at least to the extent that they were actively planning to betray their newfound--new won--allies. The fact that I don't think the League intended to discard the MLA out of hand does, thus, influence my opinion that, whatever Geten's fate will be, I'm pretty sure it's not going to be, "He gets murdered in a way that resembles nothing so much as a sick revenge fantasy dozens of chapters after the last point when such a death would have been remotely tonally appropriate."

Thanks for the ask, anon! Sorry about-- *waves at all of this*

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

(1) Not that Mr. “Burns Random Delinquents Alive For Not Measuring Up To His Standards For Villainy” has any moral standing to criticize others for how they determine the value of peoples’ lives, mind.

(2) Other translations for the verb in Mr. Compress’s Japanese line of, “You are the one who ____s Shigaraki the most,” include yearn for, long for, pine for, miss, love dearly, adore, idolize, and revere. “Most devoted follower” is accurate enough, but considerably less homo than some of the things we could have gotten there.

#bnha #stillness answers #paranormal liberation front #league of villains #stillness has salt #spinner defense squad

[ooc-but-stylish]

freezedive:

I think I said it in one of your other beautiful posts, but I thought I’d mention it again. All of the ridiculous cutscenes did give us a golden nugget of information on Luna that most of us who are brutally critical of her (like you and me), suspected all along: Luna openly admits to Gentiana that she doesn’t think she has anything to offer Noctis outside of being an oracle. And Gentiana makes it worse by speaking in fancy words by saying some bullshit about her being the oracle is her being human or something and that she is fulfilling her true calling and that is what Noctis needs? Idk but it reeked of emotional manipulation. 

I hold little to no regard for Ravus because there’s evidence Luna was being brutally beaten right under his own nose while he was busy being the Emperor’s lapdog thinking it could maybe give him the power to save his sister? The man should have opened his eyes and defended her against the men that kept them jailed

I happened on this reply to roxainn’s post while trying to recapitulate all my other FFXV critical posts and reblogs on the way to making new ones. 

Crawling back to find anything about this point, I find that it was posted 3 years ago. But at least I reblogged the reply to it.... and missed that it was literally @ ME. Goddamn did I slack.

But here’s my reply, 3 years late, which should elaborate on where I stand on this.

Yes, the flashback that gets triggered by a random creepy little girl in Tenebrae is about Luna and Gentiana. Somehow the little girl knew about that conversation even though she wasn’t there to witness it first-hand? Or maybe Noctis was imagining what the conversation would be like between Gentiana and Luna off of the vague suggestion from the girl, and it’s just him telling on himself that his imagination of Luna says all that? Otherwise the not-altogether-tinfoil-hat theory says it’s Gentiana in the form of a little girl, telling Noctis something that IMO should piss him off but just makes him sad and guilty because Luna loved him so much, don’t you see. She loved him so much that after wrapping her entire life around him, she’d just want to keep that going for the rest of their lives!

Gentiana opens the conversation with, “At first, the father had mourned the fate of his chosen son. Yet in Tenebrae, the two found solace. It was not the Oracle who assuaged their fears. But the girl…she holds…the true power.”

Then Luna replies, “I have little to offer a king, other than the voice afforded the Oracle. Nevertheless…” She turns to look at the wedding dress. “And—I’m afraid he might find this foolish… But…to be together with Noctis again, even if only for a short while… It…would mean the world to me. I do not seek to guide him, merely to stand beside him.”

The exchange is all types of fucky.

First off, she was twelve. What comfort could she have offered Regis and Noctis? What comfort was she capable of when Sylva was right there, an adult with experience of an Oracle and a personality thanks to a presumable full life not hampered by grooming of the gods? 

Second, every other scene of Luna as a child is of her telling Noctis his duty, and that it was her duty to see it through. Did that assuage his fears-- the fears he didn’t have at the time since he never knew the entire meaning of his fate and was being told a saccharine, embellished version of it by Luna right there? Did that comfort Regis, knowing a little girl would also die to protect his son if the gods wanted it, but that she wouldn’t have the will to avert their fates whatsoever? 

Third, even she thinks Noctis would think her desire to be with him is foolish. So... was she expecting that Noctis himself didn’t have feelings for her or want to spend time with her of his own volition for reasons outside of her job? She was looking forward to a marriage with no emotional security, where her desires are one-sided and unreciprocated, and the man she cares for think she’s worthless outside of her powers? She would’ve been willing to put herself through that, given a choice?

We know what we know and think what we think, but the fact that this was placed right in the vanilla game and no one thought that was wrong, and instead they doubled down on it in patches, is pathetic on their part.

Moreover, what does The Girl have, that was separate from The Princess and The Oracle? Every facet of her being wrapped around Noctis since age 4. She was nothing but her duty by the time Noctis met her; they had no scenes where they acted as children would. Even supplemental/promotional art for other XV media and related locales cement that. Little Luna serves Little Noctis pastries, she’s not seen eating with him. Luna teaches Noctis how to play piano, she’s not playing with him. Dawn of the Future came out with its own art, and Noctis is afforded the liberty to sit in a chair, and his son(?) sits on his lap, while Luna and her spitting image child(?) are both on their knees, looking up at the dudes. 

In most of their art together, Luna and Noctis are either not meeting each other's gazes, she's bending or kneeling to him, or he's supposed to be holding her close but he hover-hands her, or there’s that one time where they took a selfie and the picture was of their Pocket Edition versions. They’re still not looking at each other in that one. And it’s not canon.

Anyway yeah, any conversation Gentiana has with Luna about Noctis is emotional manipulation on Gentiana’s part, but the writers manage just enough to make everyone involved seem creepy and reprehensible in their own way. 

In DOTF, Luna has a death soliloquy that confirms she sunk into the water at the end of the game’s Chapter 9, but the soliloquy is about how she was prepared to die even at the age of 12, and she put on a smile and resolved to be strong for Noctis’s sake, so that he wouldn’t remember her having a look of despair. There’s a line there about how she would cry herself to sleep but Gentiana would wipe her tears. Gentiana does nothing else except allow her to cry and wipe her tears afterward, and makes no effort to save her from her fate or at least take her out of terrible situations so that she would cry fewer tears. But there is cut dialogue from the game, and used in the novel, where Gentiana revealed herself as Shiva when Luna was <16 (probably still 12 at the time), when she thought she was being held back from forming the covenants, so there’s that. And Luna still somehow ignored that this meant Shiva allowed Sylva to die, and thanked this useless goddess for her nonexistent generosity. 

For whatever reason they had to add a passage where Luna superimposes the image of an eight-year-old Noctis onto the adult version-- quote, "the image of him as a child, burned into my eyelids, overlaps with his now-grown face"-- even though Noctis has canonically sent her photos of him as a teenager (15-16, around the time he met Prompto in high school, see: Brotherhood). Granted, that's a translation from Luna's voice actress reading an excerpt as if it were first person POV. The English version says she sees the child image first, then the adult version is superimposed. Then not much after that there's a passage where Noctis smiles as his child self and it was "that smile she loved that had been in her heart all these years, giving her strength, always and forever".

So she was groomed and turned into a shell since age 4, believes she has no value outside of her job and turned her grooming on a similarly vulnerable child, and her strongest image of him, the one she fell in love with and kept in her heart, is of the helpless boy that promised her the world without knowing the cost. The smile of the carefree boy that didn't know his journey would end with his soul annihilated. It couldn’t have been that hard to have her see an image of him as the 30 year old True King of Light that he would become. At least she'd sound a little less like a weirdo who continually places herself (and is placed by the narrative) as below him, unworthy of him, etc. but also has strong feelings and memories toward a goddamn child.

Re: Ravus: you already got a reply to that, but for real? Ravus was also shafted by the plot and beaten down by terrible, amateur writing. The narrative shits on him as if it’s written by a high schooler or otherwise emotionally arrested adult trying to push a Mary Sue Protagonist. The modus operandi for those stories is that everyone who disagrees with the protagonist in any way has to suffer tremendous humiliation including but not limited to death, because the Protagonist Is Just So Good And Perfect And Always Right. 

Nothing Ravus does justifies his treatment in-game or in-fandom like he’s a one-note out-and-out villain who wanted nothing but to kill Noctis and disrespect his sister, to the point where his corpse is defiled multiple times in Chapter 13 and he’s twisted into a perversion of himself that begs to die.

Chapter 13 has Noctis land next to Ravus’s corpse and all his letters to Luna, and Noctis has piss all to say about it, either out loud or to anyone. He looks at the Sword of the Father, glances at Ravus, and without a word takes the Royal Arm and lets the Magitek arm-- still dripping, still gross-- fall onto Ravus’s body and doesn’t even move it.  

He had no way of knowing beforehand that Ignis and Gladio knew of Ravus being killed. WE didn't even know they saw security footage until Ch13V2 was added in. Noctis happening on his late fiancée's dead bro sounds, I don’t fucking know, like something you’d want to tell everyone else about later. Along with the letters he wrote evidencing that he intended to return the Sword of the Father to Noctis!

An aside: The Letters from Ravus are just weird to behold; it isn't 100% clear whether Luna ever received all of those letters. She had to have received the first one, at least. But the idea that Ardyn intercepted even one other letter so that Luna never heard from her brother between Tenebrae and Altissia is farfetched. He shouldn’t be able to intercept those messages as if they were delivered conventionally. Luna has a pair of magic space-bending Shiba Inu that send letters instantly across continents. If she’s sparing their use to send Noctis one-liners and stickers but can’t afford that for Ravus to send her discrete updates on Noctis’s status, she’s a piece of shit. 

They do meet in Tenebrae as Ravus wanted her to, and they have the conversation where he gets on her case about her “throwing [her] life away” for Noctis. So chances are higher that Ardyn only got a hold of all three letters after Luna received them and no sooner, but then he shouldn’t be tossing letters from Ravus at the dude’s body when it makes more sense for him to toss down letters to Ravus, since the writers wanted to make a point of Ardyn having a vicious streak. It makes way more sense for Ardyn to deprive Ravus of Luna’s writing, then insult him with them post-mortem, unless Ravus’s notes were really all he could acquire, meaning Luna never once wrote back to her brother. 

The Doylist explanation is that the writing team sucks and couldn't be assed to think of anything for Luna to say because they didn't think of her at all. The Watsonian explanation is that Luna’s a piece of shit and that tracks with her in Kingsglaive watching her brother burn alive in response to the Ring, but ignoring him and running to Regis’s aid instead, but then the rest of the plot presents her as morally pure through her white clothing and “unconditional, self-abnegating love” for Noctis.

Back to the topic: I don’t know, maybe I’m being old fashioned, but Noctis should’ve given more of a shit that his dropping the Magitek Arm on Ravus’s body was probably what turned him into a mutated abomination begging to die, and he thought so little of Ravus that the dude isn’t even in the glimpse of "people who helped me get this far" in the Beyond. Ravus doesn’t even get a spot to wish Noctis and Luna well on their afterlife wedding, not that it makes any sense for any of them to have words to say since Noctis is already dead, no one was there with them, and none of the bros expressed any sign that they knew that Noctis was bound to get married after his sacrifice (he sure doesn’t mention it in the final campfire scene and that’d be a better place than any). But anyway, Regis is in the Beyond at Noctis’s side even though he never told Noctis a damn thing and still never spoke to him from within the Ring, but Ravus? Nah, he’s the real asshole somehow and doesn’t deserve any recognition whatsoever.

The only other characters I know of that have a remotely similar dynamic to Noctis, Luna, and Ravus (lovers, but the girl has a straight-edge protective brother working for the bad guys) is Nero, Kyrie, and Credo (see: Devil May Cry), but as much as I think the writing in that series is hokey as fuck, at least the writer(s) for DMCs 4 and 5 had enough sense to make the love story simple and based it from a line from Amagasaki City-- “I love you, so I love the city that you love.”-- and opted against portraying Credo as an outright villain because if Nero killed him, Kyrie would resent him for it even though she knew Credo was working for the same Order that threatened her life. 

Shouldn’t Noctis care about the shit Luna cares about even if he has no personal investment in it or it’s inconvenient to him? Shouldn’t he care about Tenebrae and its prosperity? or about Ravus? Nah, it’s okay, Noctis doesn’t have to respect Luna’s love for her brother or her kingdom because for all intents and purposes, she doesn’t care for Ravus or for Tenebrae as much as she loves Noctis. Her love for Noctis and her looking forward to the wedding is what matters here.

The yaaaas queen vicious clapback from Kingsglaive!Luna about how Ravus is the Empire’s dog is especially rich coming from her when she’s fellating the gods all through the game even though Eos’s equivalent of The Holy Bible says the Hexatheon’s Revelations destroy cities and that undoubtedly means people are killed by the gods, and their summoner is complicit, because there’s no such thing as a perfect evacuation. See: "Revelations left great devastation in their wake, with entire cities being laid to ruin," noted in the Cosmogony long before the True King even exists. 

Luna herself didn’t see a problem with this and helped in the effort, with no regard to the collateral damage she would cause with the summoning: bonus points for the part where Leviathan is hostile to humanity and threatens to eat every living being if Noctis fails! She had even less regard to the damage Niflheim would cause in their attempt to kill the gods even though she was first-hand witness to them sacking Insomnia. Waking and defeating Titan deprived Lestallum of the meteor they derived power from. Waking Leviathan destroyed Altissia. Luna’s refusal to leave Insomnia when told to by Regis led to her being used as bait and taking the whole of the Kingsglaive out of Insomnia in time for their Face Heel Turn and Insomnia being destroyed. Everything else leads to the eventual World of Ruin where people also die. 

All because she killed herself prematurely from the covenants and didn’t hold back the longer nights as she promised to the public’s face and on her honor as Oracle she would do. Her dying words in Chapter 9 were her being completely satisfied with her fate because “[her] prayers were answered, [her] calling fulfilled”, even though the calling requires that she dies and she should’ve known better than anyone that her death, even if it was for Noctis’s ascension, would endanger the rest of the world for 10 years and helped the Starscourge spread. But instead of fighting for her own life to stem the plague for as long as possible, she let herself die under the belief that "Noct can handle this" to give him the chance to be the revered King of Light. She also didn’t make a single appearance on the world of the living in her spirit form during those ten years until Noctis needed help with a piddly imitation of the Magic Wall, only then does she come down in her ghost form with seemingly all of her power intact, and summons five of The Six as if Noctis can’t easily do it himself.

But Ravus is the lapdog? Luna’s the one with her “ends justify the means” behavior and what looks like general neglect for actual human beings.

Anyway, Ravus stabs Caligo in the back and kills him, and that move only makes sense in light of the idea that Caligo was manhandling Luna as seen in the Dawn trailer. Ravus was 16 when Tenebrae was overrun, and there’s no reason to believe he was magically immune to institutional abuse, so there’s a high chance that he was abused by the Empire too, held resentment of that, and waited for the time he’d be able to retaliate with no repercussions. Gentiana as a goddess is 1000000% more on the hook about letting Luna be beaten than Ravus is, since he saw his mother die in front of him while Regis ran away. Regis had the power of the Ring and could have used elemancy to put out that fire, or void magic to banish Glauca and his MT army, didn’t do that, but he totally spares enough magic during the treaty signing to toss around Thunder spells straight from his hand, cast barriers, and summon some Royal Arms straight at Iedolas, and that’s bad enough. Gentiana who’s been the Fleuret family attendant since Luna was born and also is Shiva who can freeze people with her fingertip had even less excuse to let that fire rage, to let Sylva die protecting her son, and to stand by and allow her ward(s) to get thrown around by some random Imperial soldier.

#freezedive #ffxv critical #ffxv criticism #lunafreya critical #gentiana critical #regis critical #lunafreya nox fleuret #ravus nox fleuret #regis lucis caelum #ravus deserved better #long read

[holy-hyuck]

Hocus Pocus, Please Focus!

Trying to make a sleeping potion for your parents so you and your best friend can sneak out to a senior party is only ever good in theory; especially since Lee Felix really sucks at being a wizard.

Pairing: Wizard!Lee Felix x Reader

Word Count: 2.2k

Genre: Comedy, Platonic relationship

Warnings: A dead rat?

happy halloween y’all!!!

“Is that a dead rat?” Felix questions just as you enter his parents’ office. He picks up the rodent by its tail, inspecting the bloody ball of fur, and you nearly gag as he dangles it in front of your face.

“Don’t look at me like that! It’s that bloody book of yours that called for it,” you tell him as he puts it back in the box you brought it to him in. “Why do we need it anyway?”

The freckled boy wipes his hands on a rag. “Because-” he picks up the small book, bound in scarlet-red leather, “-it’s in the recipe for a sleeping potion. For our parents. Well, more specifically mine, but you get the point.”

He drops the book back on the table and returns to mixing the liquid inside a small, store-bought cauldron. He said a pot would do but Felix’s just extra like that.

“Have you ever considered, I don’t know...asking them to let us go to this Halloween party?”

Felix shrieks in laughter as an answer, causing you to roll your eyes. “Yeah, and then I’ll ask them for a million dollars.”

“Don’t be silly.” You plop down on a chair. “They’re more likely to give you the money.”

Your eyes lock and you smile at each other. You roll on the office chair towards the table, grabbing the leather book and opening it. A faint smell of roses hits your nostrils, and you trace the pressed flowers with the pads of your fingers. They’re imprinted onto the pages and the covers, and you feel delighted every time Felix lets you even touch that book. He doesn’t trust you any more than he trusts himself, and he’s a shit wizard, so that’s saying enough.

Hearing a plop, you look up to the grimace on Felix’s face.

“The rat?”

“The rat indeed.” He takes the book out of your hands despite the frown it causes on your face. “Eighteen drops of coffee, locust twigs and weeping leaves, lemon juice, hydrochloric acid, and a dead rat.” He sighs. “Well, if they don’t fall asleep after this, they’ll probably drop dead.”

“And we’ll get to go to Brooke’s party! Yay!” you exclaim, urging your best friend to finish the sleeping potion. Only two more hours until the party starts, and you still needed to iron your outfit.

You watch Felix chant, eyes flicking back and forth between the bubbling liquid and the book in his trembling hand. A large bubble pops, creating a vile sound and smell, and despite Felix’s chanting, the bubbling stops.

“Great, it’ll fart them to death at this point.” You turn and grab a newspaper, sending it flying at your friend’s hand. You miss, and it falls into the cauldron.

“Look what you’ve done,” Felix cries and fishes it out but there’s only half of the paper there; the ridges are burnt off, black liquid dripping off of them. “On the contrary...”

“Hocus pocus, Felix, focus!”

Felix groans at your words as you shoot him a stupid grin, ushering him to continue. As much fun as you're having - and, let's be honest, it's not every day you get to witness Felix's failed attempts at magic - the clock is ticking, and the last time your friend's parents found him doing magic without supervision, his voice sounded like Mickey Mouse for a week straight. Yes, you do have evidence. And yes, you are planning on using it as blackmail.

"Okay, done," Felix alerts you after about five more minutes, closing the book and setting it down, then adding, "I think."

You sigh. "So much thinking from you today, Felix, I'm proud."

He smacks you on the head with the half-burnt newspaper as both of you gather around the table, inspecting the liquid swimming inside the cauldron. Felix takes a long wooden spoon - the one you used last night to stir mac and cheese - and moves the liquid around. It comes out thick in consistency, like syrup, except it's dark green and when you look at it in the artificial light, you see specks of glitter.

The boy brings it up to his lips and you look at him, incredulous.

"What if it works and you fall asleep?"

“What do you mean 'what if'? You really have that little faith in me?" The look you give Felix answers his question. "Besides, they need a bigger dose for it to work on them, don't worry."

He offers you some and you reluctantly lick some liquid off the spoon. It tastes tangy, like when you add too much salt to your tomato salad and the taste is so overwhelming it leaves you swimming and drowning in sodium. Well, at least it doesn't taste like a dead rat...not that you know what that tastes like.

"Okay, you get this ready and I will get myself ready. Expect me here in an hour. Don't screw things up." And with your words of encouragement, you leave Felix to do his thing.

The good thing about the large glass embedded into Felix’s front doors is that you can check yourself out whilst waiting for the boy to haul his ass downstairs, admiring the black-and-gold short robe reaching your mid-thighs, with a giant hood and some old, lace-up boots with the crispy remains of mud still atop.

The bad thing about the large glass embedded into Felix’s front doors is that when you lean forward to check you have nothing between your teeth and start using your fingers as a toothpick when you notice doughnut remains wedged between the two top incisors, is the exact time Felix decides to open the door to his house, leaving you looking like a freak of nature by choice.

“Gross,” he comments but locks the doors behind him promptly and changes the subject. “They’re out cold. These potions work for up to six hours but-”

“-with your magic?” you interrupt.

“-I wouldn’t count on it,” he finishes up, giving you a death glare.

Just before you enter your car, you clock the blue, black, and white tunic over the thinnest leggings you’ve ever seen draped over Felix’s body and you shiver at the thinness of the material. Isn’t he cold?

“Is that your actual hat?” you question after you start your car and make your way to Brooke’s summer house, and Felix adjusts the pointy hat on his head.

“Yep, and look at this-”

“I can’t look, I’m in a- Is that your ring? Your actual magic ring? Lix, your parents are gonna cut off your fingers and feed them to squirrels if they find out you’ve taken it outside without their supervision. I mean, you’ve already been doing magic without them knowing, and used a sleeping potion on them, and- and-”

You hear Felix snort.

“Relax. They’re sleeping, and we get to sneak out. That’s all that matters. Besides, I got you something too.”

Finally parking your car in front of a medium-sized house, you get out and rush to your friend’s side. “What’s that?”

“It’s a magic mirror. It’s connected to every mirror in my house, so we’ll see if my parents wake up, so then we can change our names and flee the country. I want you to keep hold of it.” He pushes the small mirror into your hand and you pocket it inside the rather humongous pockets of your robe.

You thought it’d be ironic if you dressed up as a witch because...well...you know. Felix is a wizard? No? But then Felix decided to do the same and you already know you’re never gonna hear the end of the comments from your classmates.

Well, here comes what you’ve been waiting for.

About an hour into the party you’re already tipsy but you expected nothing less going into this. Felix is nowhere to be found, although to be fair, it’s not like you bothered looking for him. He’s probably with Seungmin, Jisung and Hyunjin - his other friends from a book club he promises isn’t as nerdy as it sounds - and up to no good, as always. The last time you left them unsupervised because you couldn’t stand being around Jisung for any longer than necessary, Seungmin’s hair was neon green, and Hyunjin had a bald patch at the back of his head. It was fun being a witness of their stupidity instead of a victim for once.

You walk outside to enjoy the fresh air, into a grand garden decorated with white fairy lights. It’s so beautiful you actually let out a gasp as you admire the work put into it until the sight of the pool makes you sober up on the spot. The pool is small and at first, you think the water’s just unfiltered, giving it its green hue.

But then you feel it; the sticky substance beneath your feet as it makes the most obnoxious sound you’ve ever heard when you lift up your foot. The dark goo travels across the tiles and the grass only to end up in the pool, staining the water green.

It looks...stupidly like what you and your best friend have given your parents - and at that realisation, your eyes widen and you scurry back inside to find Felix.

“Lix, there you are,” you say after good ten minutes of searching, “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

He turns to you with the smuggest grin plastered on his face as he hands you a drink.

“I’ve heard this new energy drink kicks ass. Try it.” He ushers you to take a sip and you do, alongside him. It does taste nice, almost like pink lemonade, and you find yourself drinking the whole cup before you know it.

“Where did you get it from?”

“Oh, someone gave it to me.” You slap his arms, causing him to yelp. “What on earth was that for?!”

“Felix! What idiot accepts drinks from a stranger?”

“The one that wants to have-” he stops himself, getting dangerously close to your face, so much you can clearly see his freckles, “-fun. Ever heard of that?”

You push him away with a shove to his stomach, eliciting a laugh. “Whenever you have fun, someone ends up paying the price, Felix.”

You look over to him and brush away some orange hairs from his cheek, only to find them stuck to his skin. You shrug it off.

“Oh, I remember now!”

Without another word, you drag him into the garden, and he spills a bit of his drink in the process.

“What am I looking at exactly?” he questions when you finally stop, motioning to the pool, which brandishes clear water much to your surprise.

"What the..."

You both jump up at the loud thud behind you and whip around to see a body dumped on the ground. You feel like throwing up, clutching Felix's hand, which is...hairy?

Looking down, you notice more of those ginger hairs growing on the back of his hand and you jerk your own hand away.

"How does that feel?"

You hear a female voice alongside a deep laugh and slow clapping. From the shadows of the trees surrounding the garden, Felix's parents emerge, and suddenly you feel yourself sinking into the ground, knowing it won't be long before you join your friend on the floor behind you.

"Mum!" Felix yelps. "Dad! What are you doing here?"

"Well you see, your dad and I were planning to have a movie night but it seems like we took a little nap. Must be something to do with that wretched slime you slipped in our drinks."

"There was a bit of a branch in there, have you noticed, love?" his father interjects, pulling out a familiar book from behind his back. "Eighteen drops of coffee, locust wings and weeping leaves, lemon juice, hydro-"

"W-wings?" Felix stutters out and you observe him for a second before the realisation seeps in.

"Fucking wings," you mutter under your breath so his parents don't hear.

"Yes, I do believe the spell calls for locust wings, but you always were bad at grammar son." His dad smiles. "So anyway, after we woke up, we saw the house number through that magic mirror I believe you gave your friend."

"Um, (y/n)." Felix traces his finger down your cheek with wide eyes, and you do the same, the feeling of roughness underneath your fingertips.

Taking out your phone, you look at the dark reflection on the screen and gasp in horror. The green and yellow scales reach all the way up to your eye, which begins turning a fiery orange colour. You blink your slit pupils and drop your phone in shock.

"I hope you enjoyed your drinks tonight, by the way. We added something special. You'll find out in the next hour anyway. Or, well, sort of."

The adults laugh, and you look to Felix's arm, now covered with thick orange fur.

"That should serve both of you a reminder not to perform magic unsupervised. Because you, Lee Felix, aren't very good at it." His mother comes up to him and pats his hairy cheek. "At least you'll make a cute weasel."

#skzwritersclub #stray kids scenarios #felix scenarios #lee felix scenarios #stray kids imagines #felix imagines #lee felix imagines #stray kids comedy #felix comedy #lee felix comedy #stray kids x reader #felix x reader #lee felix x reader

[tatticstudio55]

Jon and Dany – both beyond the Wall at the end?

DAY SEVEN (Sunday, August 2nd) Leadership  |  Free Choice  |  DoS: Royal Retirement / Passing the Torch

This is less meta-ish and borders more on the speculative side, but I’d like to discuss a Jon and Dany (potential) ending I’ve never seen anyone talk about before: them ending both beyond the Wall, living with the free folks/as free folks. So, basically, the ending Jon got on the show, but with Dany by his side. I would even go as far as to say that the showrunners might have considered it.

This is not by any means “my ideal” Jonerys ending. That would be Jon and Dany settling on Dragonstone with a bunch of targlings and wild dragons. I do not, alas, think this is where the story is going. I do not expect either (or both) of them on the IT either. On the other hand, an ending with them both beyond the Wall seems to me like it could work with the overall story. There is already some book evidence/foreshadowing pointing to Jon’s endgame there, notably in ASOS when he (forgive my French) “finds himself” beyond the Wall:

“On the edge of the haunted forest, where the tents had been, Jon found an oakwood stump and sat.

Ygritte wanted me to be a wildling. Stannis wants me to be the Lord of Winterfell. But what do I want? The sun crept down the sky to dip behind the Wall where it curved through the western hills. Jon watched as that towering expanse of ice took on the reds and pinks of sunset.

[…]

He wanted it, Jon knew then. He wanted it as much as he had ever wanted anything. I have always wanted it, he thought, guiltily. May the gods forgive me. It was a hunger inside him, sharp as a dragonglass blade. A hunger . . . he could feel it. It was food he needed, prey, a red deer that stank of fear or a great elk proud and defiant. He needed to kill and fill his belly with fresh meat and hot dark blood. His mouth began to water with the thought.

It was a long moment before he understood what was happening. When he did, he bolted to his feet. "Ghost?" He turned toward the wood, and there he came, padding silently out of the green dusk, the breath coming warm and white from his open jaws. "Ghost!" he shouted, and the direwolf broke into a run.

[…]

He had his answer then.” Jon XII, ASOS

Dany is more of a wild card, but even the show gave us SOME reasons to believe that D&D played with the idea at some point: the pregnancy bait, Dany’s comment in 7x07 about King’s Landing and how “constrictive” the Dragonpit felt, Dany’s “we could stay here a thousand years. No one would find us” line in 8x01. Most importantly, back when I was watching season 7, this is the impression I was getting (from the showrunners):

Dany is a good person at heart, but she would not make a good queen nor would she like being queen.

I do not wholly agree with this, especially if we are talking about bookDany, who would make – and is – a much better queen than she is given credit for, but it looked to me like this is where the show was going with her. Or, at least, this is the message they were trying to communicate. They were not trying to “hide” Dany’s dark turn from the audience by making her or trying to make her bad-good-bad-good-bad-good, they simply had another endgame in mind for the character. I do not want to make this about the show but had to get this out of the way.

Now onto bookDany:

A while ago, I posted a meta where I discussed a pattern in Daenerys’s story: twice she succeeded at something magical, highly dangerous and related to dragons, and twice after she ended up in a desertic environment, thirsting, starving and nearly dying from exposition. Following the rule of 3 (which is especially predominant in her arc), it will probably happen again and – since there is no Great Grass Sea in Westeros – the “desertic environment” swallowing her afterward will be the frozen lands beyond the Wall. It could mean that she will die there, but it could also mean that she will simply disappear there. Her fate could also be revealed to the reader while remaining unknown to most characters. This would fit with Dany’s current representation in the story so far: she is an enigma, a rumor; nobody really knows her whereabouts, who she is, what she is, what she wants, what she has, if she is even real.

There are numerous parallels to be drawn between Daenerys and Mance Rayder, which I covered here. I would love the irony of Dany coming to Westeros thinking she is reclaiming her family’s lands, only to settle in the only part that was never conquered by the Targaryen. There is the (disputable, ok, but) fact that the only region in all of the continent where dragons could turn up useful for tree planting would be beyond the Wall (so frozen soil can be thawed and warmed up for plants to grow there again). Martin hung a pretty riffle on the metaphorical Wall when Silverwing refused to fly across in Fire and Blood. There is this pattern of wildling women making up Jon’s romantic prospects; first a wildling “commoner” (Ygritte), then a wildling “princess” (Val), then a wildling “queen” (Dany, eventually, if this theory proves to be correct). So of course, you will ask –

If this is Martin’s intended ending, why couldn’t the d’s just go with it?

Well, because the d’s never gave Dany any incentive to go beyond the Wall, apart from a brief rescue mission back in season 7. If Dany must end up there, something has got to bring her there and the show scrapped or discarded all of it : no Lands of Always Winter, no curtain of light, no this, no that, no nothing. And once she gets there in the books, because I am quite sure she will, she will not come back. The North is Dany’s ultimate destination. No yoyoing back and forth North and South like what the show did. That was just dumb. Travel time and distances should mean something, even if you have dragons (plus, Dany’s armies would have to travel on foot, horseback or by boat, like everybody else). The closest of yoyoing we have ever gotten in asoiaf was probably with Catelyn, it spanned three books, and she never made it back North anyway.

Did the d’s consider going with that ending? They might just. The clues were certainly there (see above…) but at some point, they must have realized that it would not work with the hole they had dug themselves in.

Now about the elephant in the room

I know some people will think that Dany ending beyond the Wall does not make much sense for her story, which technically (so far) does not have much to do with the lands beyond the Wall. In a way, I agree. Some people would also find such an ending anticlimactic to her arc and a waste after everything she has learned about leadership and politics in Meereen. I also agree. On a watsonian level, an ending with, say, Dany as a queen in Westeros – I think it works. Of course, I do. Where it does not work is on a doyalist level. Dany already had her arc of becoming queen. She achieved that by the end of book 3. Then she had to learn all the nit and gritty and dirty work of ruling over the rubble of a corrupt system while trying to make the lives better for everyone. If Dany becomes queen in Westeros, the same thing will happen again. Different setting, different people, same story. Some people have criticized the underlying message of Dany’s fight against slavery as “only a preparation” for what comes next in Westeros, saying it would undermine the real value of Dany’s work in Essos. I agree. However, the same problem applies if Dany becomes queen in Westeros: then her time in Essos is reduced to a prop up, a preparation, as if ruling Essos were somewhat less important than ruling Westeros. Furthermore, I cannot imagine an ending where Dany, still in possession of significant military forces – significant enough to secure her a crown, anyway – could choose to settle in Westeros without being plagued with guilt over leaving Essos’s slaves behind. I am sorry, I just cannot.

This is also, I think, where part of the “Dany is not a peace time queen” mentality comes from. Dany will never be a peace time queen, not because she prefers war, or because she does not want peace, but because what she is trying to achieve, in these times and places, means a lifetime of war. You cannot undo and rebuild an entire system that is rotten at its core in a single lifetime (heck, even show!Tyrion said this to her, for what the show is worth now…), much less in a few years. Dany is not a peace time queen because she is not a queen that is interested in maintaining the statue quo. At least that is how her time in Meereen revealed her. Arya would not be a peace time queen either. Jon would not be a peace time king. They could never be, less they abandoned their ideals and their ethics for a more comfortable life.

Then you might say that an ending where Dany goes back to Essos works too. It does – once again, on a watsonian level. What is the problem with this on a doyalist level? It turns Dany into a deus ex machina, coming to Westeros just in time to save it, then leaving it right after, as if neither the Others, nor her had ever been there.

The two remaining options are: either she dies a queen in Westeros, most likely during the Great War, or… the queen, Daenerys Targaryen, dies, while Dany lives.

That means that all reasonable possibilities, or choices, to keep on fighting as a queen are taken from her. Maybe her forces were severely depleted during the Great War. Maybe her dragons died. Maybe both. Maybe her function, not as an individual, but as a character in a specific story called A song of ice and fire, was to destroy an old system (AND to inspire others to follow in her footsteps, ensure that her efforts were not in vain, that the first steps will not go wasted, that the work she started will be taken up by other peoples, and others after them, and others after), not to rebuild the new one. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Frodo Baggins’ role in The Lord of the Rings was to destroy something evil. His gardener Sam was the one who planted the trees and went on to become a mayor afterward. One was a destroyer and the other was a builder, but in the end, they were both heroes.

Not to mention that Frodo did not die at the end. You could say that he went on to live beyond the Wall too.

#ADOS speculation #jonerysweek2020 #jonerysweek #jon snow #daenerys targaryen #asoiaf #jonerys #bookjonerys

[f1birb]

An Essay on My POV Behind Quirk Science and the Traits Implied Thereof

A friend and I were discussing some quirk stuff and my science brain got going and I couldn’t help but write an essay on it. First, my initial headcanon’s on my hawks:

My initial hc explanation:

I hc that, while he has an animal quirk, he's human first. His genome is human with some hawk addons. His sexual habits reflect that of humans. The only way his quirk affects that is by making him have a higher sex drive.

I just get tired when everyone always goes more in favor of animal traits when writing humans with animal appendages. Yeah, sure, he has wings, but that doesn't mean his genetic make up is more closely related to an animal than a human. He has a human body, human face, human teeth, human sex organs. He'll have human habits.

Their counter argument: 

Well it doesn't mean that it's primaraly animal traits it means it's secondary instincts etc

With human primarily

Which as an example if you look at mixed dog breeds they'll pull from both parents on rng basically

So I think that's what it would be like with the primary traits being human ofc

Also look at nezu he wasn't even human but has entirely human traits psychologically

It really is just up to chance w quirks

That's why i wouldn't say that the other hcs are illogical

 There are good arguments, but by that point, by science brain woke up from its sleep and started the engines. I had to write an essay. I’m sorry, I just really like quirk science.

 Second Counter Argument:

                 I agree there will be secondary instincts. Didn’t mean to say that there wouldn’t be. Only that they are just that, secondary. The dominant instincts, and reasoning, would be human. Hawks giving in to the urge to say, bundle up a bunch of pillows in a nest, would be similar to me giving in to the urge to eat with only my hands and quite messily, akin to the instincts of a toddler not having reasoning to attempt it a more civilized way. Hawks has the human reasoning to decide if he wants to give in to base instinct. 

         For instance: the bird analogy that Hawks would like, pick up, and collect shiny things. He may have a preference for items that have a shine, and may buy jewelry to satisfy this, but I do not believe he would pick up any shiny object on the street. His human reasoning would allow him to have opinions and control over said instinct. He may like the shine, but he is not some base animal without control.

         Your dog argument, I find a few flaws with. While I believe a comparison between two vastly different species breeding would apply, different dog breeds are still part of the same family gene pool. While they have some traits specific to breeds, they all share the same overreaching biological instincts. The animal example is hard to fall back on because animals of far different species cannot breed. A horse and a zebra can breed, but only because they are part of the same family. The same with a lion and tiger.

         Humans and animals are far too different to ever be able to breed, and as such there are no concrete examples of evidence to fall back on. The only thing we can fall back on is the splicing of animal species with the human genome. Which, in the scientific community, is a science that is heavily frowned upon, and as such there isn’t much research to reference.

        But one thing that is common with most splices, is that most embryos never form fully to fruition. The DNA is just too different to properly connect and form life.

        What I’m trying to say by pointing the above out, is that, if quirks are implied to be able to be explained by science, some science should apply. Which is to say that because of how hard it should be for animal DNA to form onto human DNA, the DNA is going to be LARGELY human. Only a very small variant of the human DNA would support a mutation before it fell apart. 

       So with this fact being true (in this scenario), very few animal instincts would come across. And if they do, they would not override that of human instincts. So Hawks is a human with wings and perhaps a few urges that could be called reminiscent of a hawk. Urges. Not instincts. Because an instinct is something you feel you must act upon. An urge is that instinct held back under rational thought. You may have an instinct to follow an appetizing smell and consume it, but it becomes an urge when you realize you cannot eat it if you do not have money to buy whatever food the smell is coming from.

       As for Nezu, we never get too much information if he has animal instincts he acts upon. Is he smart, yes. Insanely so. Nezu is an animal with sentience. But so are humans. We are animals with sentience. We are simply different species. When I say ‘human rationale’ in my earlier points, I only call it ‘human’ because we are the only species to have gained true sentience. Thus we have rational thought to turn our instincts into urges. Nezu has gained sentience, thus he has gained rationale over his instincts.

       What is an instinct of Nezu’s that he has? He is always compared to a mouse or a bear, and they both like warm, cozy spaces. Thus, Nezu likes to perch in Aizawa’s scarf because it is warm. Is this an instinct? Perhaps, but he is able to explain he chose to sit there because it is warm. He chose. He realized he had the choice to deny that urge. Thus he has ‘human rationale’, or as I’ll rename it, ‘sentient rationale’.

       So do I believe quirks are up to chance? No, not really. I think too scientifically to believe that. Others may not think the same way I do, and that’s fine. I just like coming up with believable fictional science. Because quirk’s are implied to have science behind them in MHA. They are mapped on the genome. There are research papers, in the fictional universe (stated by Izuku’s pediatrician, the evil mustache man), that have been conducted that prove the quirk gene is connected to the human DNA, and the only proof is the absence of the joint of the pinky toe. All this implies there is a science to quirks. And I want to apply science to my theories. Because I love that shit.

        Do I believe other headcanon’s are illogical? No, I believe people used logic to achieve their theories. Thus they are not illogical. Do I believe they are scientifically correct? Not all the time, no. I believe most of the headcanon’s people come up with are enjoyable fantasies that make them happy. Of course Hawks portraying bird-like traits would be cute and lovable. I don’t believe they are scientifically correct, but they are enjoyable to read anyway.

        So to wrap this all up, I personally prefer headcanon’s that lean more towards a humanistic approach to quirks. That while they may have some animal traits, like preferring silver or gold jewelry because it is ‘shiny’, or preferring to eat meat on the rare side because of a latent urge to hunt prey, I do not believe Hawks or any other character with an animal based quirk would have uncontrollable instincts that they have no choice but to obey.

        Which is why I write Hawks with so few common ‘bird-brain’ headcanon’s.

#mha meta #quirk meta #mha #bnha #mha quirks

[accioharry]

 find my way back to you | brightwell {post 1x19}

i call this "12am running with a theory to soothe my pain from last week's episode". please ignore any mistakes, i'm exhausted and not happy with the writing tense issues, but here we are. regardless, i hope you enjoy. the title and inspiration for this fic come from the song "find my way back" by eric arjes.

read here on ao3 | word count: 2k

He didn’t want to see her. He wanted to see anybody but her. 

Trust was never in her vocabulary, and especially not in his, but Malcolm found himself on a mission to get Dani Powell to trust him from almost the day they met in the elevator with Gil. She was a case he wanted to solve, a mystery he wanted to know every single detail about. Something about her intrigued him and every day he felt as though he needed to know more. She was annoyed with him at first, and probably always is, but slowly, he caught her starting to open up, bit by bit. Once he saw that, he caught on to it and never wanted to let go. 

Which is why as he sits handcuffed in the interrogation room, the same handcuffs she put on him an hour ago, he prays to whoever will listen that Gil or JT walk in the door because he physically can’t look at her right now. Not when he ruined everything he had worked so hard for. The silence in the room feels as though it is crushing him alive, and he doesn’t have the strength to fight back. His survival instincts aren’t kicking in anymore, and he realizes he’s not even a little upset about it. 

He winces when the door opens because of course the universe is never done with him, and Dani walks in with a file in her arms. Her leather jacket is missing, presumably at her desk, and her long-sleeve gray shirt covers her fingers like mittens. She doesn’t even bother to look at him.

A defense mechanism, Malcolm notices. He feels his heart start to break even more. He had always considered Dani a friend, nothing more than that because he never let himself go to that point. He didn’t want to push her too far away by encouraging the idea of them ever being anything more in the distant future, but it looks like he did it anyway. How did he screw up without even trying?

She sits across from him, still avoiding his gaze, and Malcolm gives up to stare at the metal table he is handcuffed to. Dani had not said a single word to him since she muttered, “I’m sorry,” as she handcuffed him in his apartment. What on earth could she be sorry for? She’s not the one who ruined the best thing that had ever happened to him simply by existing. 

The two of them sit in silence for a moment before Dani softly slides the file across towards him. He’s seen enough interrogations to know how it works, knows he should get a lawyer, and stay quiet. He couldn’t convince her, let alone the team that he was being framed, and it seemed like everything he did would incriminate him more. His eyes widen to see Dani open the file, and it’s completely empty. He whips his head up to look at her. For the first time in his life, he has no idea what is going on. She stares back at him.

Her voice is soft, as though she is afraid to speak out loud. “We had to get you out of your apartment.”

He wants to joke with her to make her feel better, but he decides not to. “By arresting me?”

She nods. He notices the dark circles under her eyes, circles he hadn’t seen since the time she came to visit him in the hospital after Watkins. When was the last time she had slept, and how did he not notice? He answers his own question, the gut-wrenching memory of Eve’s body flooding his memories. He was so preoccupied with her murder, he didn’t pay attention to what was going on in his surroundings. It wasn’t like him to do that.

“Dani,” he starts, not missing how she doesn’t look him in the eye. “Please, you know I didn’t do this.”

She doesn’t answer him. If he thought losing Eve was painful, why does this hurt so much more? Why does Dani avoiding his gaze make him feel as though Watkins stabbed him all over again?

“Dani,” he pleads, “come on, you know I didn’t kill him!” It takes everything in him to not get mad at her. Dani is a detective and a damn good one at that. She looks at the evidence and makes her conclusions, just as he does. Her mind is already made up. For someone who spent his entire life avoiding emotional confrontations, he just wants to see her feel something. “Dani!”

“Stop,” she mutters, barely loud enough for him to hear, but he does. His posture changes, he goes into red alert because just as he did when they first met, he latched onto whatever she gave him, regardless of how small it was. “Not now.”

The way she says it implies there’s something more going on, but Malcolm can’t figure it out. Dani had always been good at putting up walls, but this was an entirely new side of her Malcolm had never seen before. A side he wanted to hold and keep safe from whatever demons hurt her in the past, but now? He was one of those demons, and he hated himself for it. 

“You’re not telling me something,” he says after a moment of silence. He feels himself getting agitated.

“What, you’re going to profile me?” She scoffs. Her eyes narrow directly at him and she puts her elbows on the table. “This is already decided, Bright. We know what you did, I know what you did.” 

“No you don’t!” He knows better than to argue with her, let alone the NYPD, but he was frustrated. For a profiler, for someone who knew every interrogation tactic back to front, he thought he was going to lose his own mind. 

“Really?” Her demeanor changes suddenly, and Malcolm finds himself leaning back in his chair when she stands suddenly, kicking the chair back behind her as she leans towards him. “You didn’t kill him? Just like you didn’t shove Watkins in a box? Just like your Father didn’t kill those 23 young girls? You didn’t end up just like him?” 

He wants to stand up and fight her, and he almost does. If it was anyone else, he would have. He feels the rage in his blood, for Dani to turn around and to use this against him, knowing how he spent his entire life fighting everyone’s opinions of him before they even met him. How he let himself believe Dani was the one thing in his life he hadn’t screwed up.

Wait a minute. 

He holds her gaze for a moment as his brain does the rapid calculations. He remembers her demeanor when she came into the room, the sudden rage she had when she looked at him. He remembers sitting in the car with her, talking about the terrible movie that played in his head. He remembers the wedding, of working together nearly perfectly. He remembers her opening up about her undercover years, about her past. He remembers her soft smile when he admitted that she was the one he liked talking to. He remembers Dani, the woman who never judged him for his family, and the woman in front of him is not her. 

He glances up at the camera in the corner of the room, at the window behind her where he knows Gil and JT are watching and listening to his every move. He glances down at Dani’s hands, one still covered by her sleeve. He looks at her face, noticing how her eyes keep blinking back what look very closely to be tears, tears she refuses to let fall. 

“Okay,” he speaks slowly, cautiously. His brain remembers how Eve died, how she got too close to Endicott. How Endicott easily wove his way into the lives of his mother and his sister. “I didn’t do this.”

The door opens, JT and Gil enter the room swiftly. JT reaches to the camera on the wall before unplugging the power. Gil starts to undo Malcolm’s handcuffs. 

“We’re good,” he says, and Dani collapses into the chair she stood from. She buries her head in her arms. 

“Thank God,” she shivers, and Malcolm stands when his hands are free, shaking his wrists out. 

“What the hell is going on?” He looks between the three of them. 

“Your apartment was bugged, Endicott set you up for murder to get you off of his case. Your mom and Ainsley are on their way here,” JT speaks fast. “We didn’t know if the precinct was bugged, and we didn’t want to hold off on the interrogation while we checked because that could take a long time—”

“and Endicott would catch on if there were delays,” Malcolm nodded, his eyes never leaving Dani. “So you had to make it believable.” 

Dani looks up at him then, and Malcolm realizes how drained she is from the past ten minutes. “You know I…we know you didn’t kill anyone.” 

“Dani,” he wants to pull her into his arms to reassure her that he knows her, and knows she didn’t mean the words that came out of her mouth. 

She shakes her head. “I need some air,” she leaves the interrogation room suddenly, and Malcolm immediately follows her into Gil’s office. She’s shaking, and her hand is running over her face repeatedly. She’s anxious, borderline terrified, and Malcolm recognizes it instantly. 

“Can we talk here?” He looks around the room. 

“The entire precinct is on lockdown, this place has been swept from top to bottom, we’re fine. I’m fine,” she goes to brush him off, but he’s faster and catches her wrist. 

“Hey,” he tilts his head to the side, studying her with the amused look on his face that always earned an eye roll from her. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not,” she pulls her hand away from him. “Even if it wasn’t real, I should never have used your father against you—” 

“Endicott would expect you too,” he cuts her off. 

“Well, Endicott isn’t here—”

“You didn’t know that,” he cuts her off again. “Dani, I’m not hurt or mad at you. Please don’t think I am.”

When she meets his gaze, he visibly relaxes because he recognizes the eyes staring at him. Dani is back, his Dani, and for a moment he feels okay again. 

“I just don’t want anything to happen,” she admits. Malcolm knows her walls are still up, but these are walls he’s worked through many times, and he’d do it a million more if it kept her in his life. 

“You know we can’t promise that,” Malcolm says, and part of him still wonders if he’s technically under arrest, because if he’s been framed, what exactly does that mean for him? He shakes it off. “We’ll get through this Dani, just as we got through everything else thrown at us.” 

“I’m not worried about that,” she chuckles softly, and Malcolm forces himself to not think about how much he loves her laugh. Now is not the time to reconsider the idea of being something more with her, someday. Not when he’s been arrested for murder. 

“I just don’t like change,” she admits. “If we can’t prove you were set up…and Endicott somehow wins and you go to prison…” she trails off, which Malcolm had previously noticed she did when she did not want to finish a sentence that seemed personal. 

“That’s fair, prison isn’t as glamourous as my father makes it look,” he shrugs, and Dani laughs for real at that. “I wouldn’t have my partner to keep me from being reckless either,” he laughs when Dani glares at him. 

“I take it back, maybe prison would be good for you. It’d give me time to get my sanity back.” 

“Haha,” he counters. “You’d miss me, you just won’t admit it.” 

She walks past him to the door. “While you keep telling yourself that, I’m going to save your ass, again.” He laughs and watches her walk out the door before his face falls. “Wait, what do you mean again?!”

#my fics #prodigal son #brightwell #malcolm x dani #malcolm bright #dani powell #otp: the one i like talking to #brightwell fic #prodigal son fic #one shot #malcolm bright fic #prodigal son fox

[eirabach]

For @gumnut-logic 's FabFiveFeb Challenge

Prompt Two - Gordon

[Can't / No clothes]

Also inspired by Nutty's TAG ages meta, because it gave me *emotions*. I'm super sorry. Added Vance Joy because it’s Gordon.

---

Under the surface you don't know what you'll find,

Until it's your time.

---

The night that Jeff Tracy took humanity's first step on the surface of Mars, he had three little boys watching at home. Gordon, he liked to say, was born of the fall out. A child created in a whirlwind of press tours and ticker tape and eventually brought home to that quiet little homestead that would never be truly quiet or homely again. 

By the time Gordon became a Tracy being a Tracy mattered. And sure money's great and influence is better, but Gordon's sixteen years old with sunlight in his hair and his eyes and his soul, and for him, for him the best part of being a Tracy is that no one ever tells you you can't.

Not that Gordon would listen if they did.

Because the other important thing to know about being a Tracy, is that Gordon isn't very good at it.

He's uninterested in physics or engineering or math. He has minimal desire to blow things up or shoot people or study space dust. He likes a party and he loves people, but he's miserable in a cummerbund and he kinda never understood capitalism.

When you're fourth, you gotta find your own way to be first. And all right Scott's a fighter pilot and John's a genius and Virgil's some sort of goddamn savant, but at least Alan can't even tie his shoelaces yet so Gordon's got one up on him. Gordon doesn't even wear shoes. Doesn't wear much of anything at all except teeny weeny trunks splattered red, white and blue.

Gordon won't be a hero, won't have a theory named after him, but what Gordon will have will be his.

Gordon's going for gold.

His muscles burn and his hair turns green and he sweats chlorine into his sheets every night, but that doesn't matter. Nothing matters but the next millisecond, the turn, the cleanness of his touch. He can't care about anything but his coach's thumb hovering over the stopwatch and the crest of his fly because it's coming. Gold. It's coming, and it's everything.

Everything.

---

Dad calls on Wednesdays at three. Alan calls at midnight just to hear him swear. He gets weekly updates on daring-do from Scott and a monthly serving of sarcasm and space babble from John.

Virgil calls because they tend to forget.

"You gonna come home, you think? Before?"

Virgil looks different, his floppy black hair cropped short, band shirts exchanged for some weird quasi military uniform. He's still watching Gordon shovel food down his throat with an expression of disgusted awe, though, so some things never change.

"Dunno." Gordon shrugs, mouth full. "Gotta keep training. Four months to go, can't lose form now."

"You should come, there's -- there's a lot changed around here," says Virgil, like that's a reason. Then, when Gordon just chews at him in reply, "Dad built you a pool."

And maybe that's a reason, after all.

Cause sure, his dad's never told him he can't, but Gordon's been gone a long time, and he's not sure he remembers the last time his dad told him he could.

---

Home's not the farm anymore, or the ranch, or the townhouse in Manhattan. Home is some island a billion miles from anywhere, where huge portraits of his older brothers stare expressionlessly down at him and his shoes squeak on the super shiny floor, humidity making his tracksuit stick to his back. 

Gordon has only really spent a few weeks here, his training all taking place under the eagle eye of Uncle Sam and sponsored entirely by Old Glory, but he doesn't remember it like this. 

The decor is still retro spy movie meets crazy billionaire with paranoia problems, and his bedroom is pretty much as he left it, but nothing else seems familiar at all. He'd left Tracy Two in a great cavernous hanger that would have been overkill even for one of dad's crazy projects, Kyrano had rushed him past huge shadowy behemoths that suggested, pretty damn strongly, that Jeff Tracy is in the midst of another too easily financed midlife crisis.

"Please tell me he isn't planning world domination," Gordon had only half joked as they’d emerged into the brightness of the villa proper. "He'd look awful in lycra."

Kyrano had glared at him, swirled back into the bowels of the island, and left him with Scott.

Scott is wearing lycra.

He's sitting behind their dad's desk, two high points of colour in his cheeks and his eyes bright with something Gordon can't name as he pours over datasets. All he's missing to complete the look is a fluffy white cat and a maniacal laugh.

"Hey. Hey." Nothing. Scott mutters to himself as he sweeps his fingers through warning signs. "Scotty, hey!"

Scott looks up.  Blinks. Blinks again.

"Gordon?"

"The one and only."

Scott stands, still grossly tall, and moves to ruffle Gordon's hair. It's not as easy as it used to be, there's an actual lift of his hand, and Gordon can't help but feel satisfaction creep into his bones. 

"You grew."

"Hear it happens."

"Got a girlfriend?"

"Got a pillow."

"Tragic."

"That's me." Gordon throws his arm across his eyes and flops backwards onto the sofa. "Sacrificing everything in pursuit of a noble goal. Hold tight, beautiful people. Only three more months and I'm yours."

He peeks out from behalf of his elbow to see Scott standing over him, arms folded, lips twisted into something a bit like a fond smile. A bit. 

Something unpleasant settles in Gordon's stomach.

"What are you doing desk work for? I thought you were out there --" He gestures to the cloudless sky beyond the glass wall. "Y'know. Saving the world."

Scott opens his mouth, but then there's a chime from the desk and Alan hollering from the staircase and Grandma crushing him to her chest, and Gordon is left to wonder.

---

Scott isn't the only thing that's strange.

There's a fish tank in the corner, empty but for a little model sub from that docudrama he and John used to love to watch with Mom, but when he lays his hand on the glass it hums beneath his fingers and makes his teeth ache. 

John's not here, replaced as resident super nerd by some guy they call Brains who makes John look dumb. Dad isn't there, either, but that's okay. Nor is Gordon, really.

He's lived apart from his family for the best part of two years, he shouldn't be surprised that they've changed. That's he's changed. But somehow, it doesn't feel like he has.

Alan's finally learned to tie his laces but still never bothers, Virgil's taken out his piercing, Grandma is being followed by a robot dog, but Gordon is still the same kid with the same dreams and he isn't sure what anybody else's dreams are anymore. Virgil's in a uniform and Scott's out of his and John is gone and Alan's looking at him like he knows stuff.

This is impossible, of course. Alan is an infant. This is the abiding certainty of Gordon's life and he intends to prove it this evening with three rubber spiders and a trapeze but whatever.

It's just that Gordon isn't quite sure where he fits, just like he doesn't know where to sit when holograms of the great and the good appear in his living room. Doesn't quite know what to make of the way their eyes skip over him to rest on Scott, or Virgil, and where the hell is John, anyway?

"Top secret," Alan says, all pre-teen smugness, "can't tell you."

"Dad'll be home soon," Virgil adds, ever the peacekeeper, "I'm sure he'll tell you everything."

Gordon's not so sure and Scott says nothing at all except a vehement 'no!' when Gordon dares to suggest going for a swim. 

So much for the pool, then.

---

Night is falling and Gordon's already ready for bed when the roar of engines fills the air and the whole family dart for the window, faces pressed against the glass. Gordon hovers behind them, unsure of his place, until Scott grabs him bodily by the elbow and drags him downstairs to where the deck leads down to the pool.

"Come on! You got to see this!"

It's a thing to see, all right. The pool withdraws beneath the villa itself, leaving a great gaping hole in the earth into which a great silver plane descends, jets first. And Gordon remembers the TV-21 and his father's fascination with speed and grace and more speed -- it's the one thing they have in common after all -- but this, this is something else. 

She disappears into the ground, and the pool sweeps over her, only the sway of the water left as evidence. Scott turns to him with an almost hysterical glee.

"Did you see that!?"

Gordon would have pointed out that he'd have to have been dead blind and comatose not to have seen it, but Scott's practically bouncing on his toes, his expression full of what Gordon recognises as real, true love.

"Isn't she beautiful? Come on, come on, Dad's gotta debrief and then --"

"Scott!" They both snap to attention, immediately turning to where their father stands, towering over both of them from the top of the stairs. "Debrief can wait. Let me see your brother."

Scott darts off, probably to hump the shiny thing, and Dad approaches Gordon, his eyes shining, dirt on his cheek.

"What do you think of her, son?"

"I think you've safely guaranteed Scotty won't be bringing you home any surprise grandbabies."

Dad snorts, clapping Gordon on the shoulder and turning him back toward the pool. They head out across the deck together, Gordon barefoot in only his sleep shorts, Jeff in a uniform like Scott's only gently singed.

"I've missed you. How's training?"

Gordon half shrugs. "Wet. Good. Pretty tiring."

Jeff looks him up and down with a critical eye "So I imagine. It looks good on you."

Gordon stretches and grins. "No more noodle arms, right?"

Jeff blinks, and for a moment Gordon almost thinks he sees something like sadness in his eyes, but it's soon gone and his dad's turning him to face the pool again.

"Will it do? I know it's not Olympic standard but we needed some room for the house and --"

"Dad," he says, because his dad is rambling and his dad never rambles. "Dad what's going on?"

Jeff looks down into the pool. The stars flicker into being in his reflection.

"Forest fire. Family home was cut off."

"Your rescue thing. You saved them."

Jeff looks at him, Gordon watches in the water as he schools his features, tightens his jaw. "This time.

"Scott and Virgil?"

"Are involved, yes."

"And John?"

Jeff looks up then, up to the darkening sky, and points. "We built a satellite. It monitors distress calls from all over the world - and beyond."

"Makes sense. Space case."

"Play to your strengths, isn't that what they say?"

"What about Alan?"

"Alan's eleven, Gordon. Even my insanity has its limits."

"And you built me a pool?"

"And I built you a pool. Is it -- " a breath where Gordon wouldn't expect to hear one "is it all right?"

"All right?" Gordon turns to him and grins. "It's perfect."

Because okay, so it's only a short course, and it occasionally has a supersonic plane blasting through it, but it's a pool and it's for him, and that's better than Scotty's super special plane. 

His dad's clapping him on the back again and smiling and that's better than any top secret technology. 

It makes a strange island full of strange things feel a little bit more like home.

Jeff's off again already though, gesturing to the round building above the villa and going on about blast radius and Gordon's content to just watch for a moment, to bask in that feeling for as long as it lasts. Then the subject changes.

"We'll be in Cape Town for the opening ceremony, of course, and I've made arrangements to ensure we can all make your races. I'm sure it won't shock you to hear Alan's made t shirts and John's bringing a banner. I hope it's safe for television."

His eyes snap to his dad's.

"John's coming?"

His dad's eyebrows twitch. "You think he'd miss it? Gordon, none of us will miss this. Not for the world. And as you now know, I mean that quite literally."

Gordon nods, mutely. There's a build up of something in his chest. Lactic acid squeezing his heart. His dad takes pity.

"What about September? Are you still planning on marine biology?"

Gordon scuffs at the tile with his bare heel. This is a conversation he's been avoiding for a long time, now. The after.

"Yeah. UCLA."

"California?"

Gordon shrugs.

"You don't seem keen? Sydney have an excellent program, do you --" Gordon feels more than hears the shudder in his dad's exhale. "No, no Jeff stop it. You tell me, Gordy. What do you want to do?"

Gordon's voice is never small, but it's as close as it's ever been. "Was thinking WASP."

Both of his dad's eyebrows disappear into his hairline. "The military? You?"

It's not an unexpected reaction. Gordon scoffs. "You wound me, Dad. Maybe I have hidden depths."

"I don't doubt that for a moment," his dad says, then he looks up, right up, to where the milky way swirls and John sits. “You’re not old enough.”

“Yeah, I know, I thought, college first - couple of years of credits and I can join as an officer.”

“You’re my son, you can join as whatever you damn well please.”

“Dad--”

"Sorry, sorry.” And his Dad’s looking into space and Gordon’s looking down at the water and it’s kinda always been like this, between them. Gordon suspects his dad hates it even more than he does.”You know I'll support you, if that's what you really want."

Gordon finally follows his gaze, imagines John in the vacuum of space, alone with his books and his stars. He wonders if Dad had had this conversation with him, before sending him up there. "That sounds kinda like a don't do it, Dad, I'm not gonna lie."

"Can I be honest?" Gordon nods, because saying no seems kinda harsh, but his heart is thundering faster than after a sprint. "Gordon, when I designed International Rescue, I designed it for you boys. A legacy, I suppose. I wanted --" he shakes his head. "I'm getting to be a selfish old man."

Gordon scowls. "You're the least selfish man I've ever met. Pretty sure those people whose lives you saved today would agree."

Jeff shakes his head.

"I want you to know," he says, "that there will always be a place for you, here, with us, if you want it. But only if you want it." A twitch of Jeff’s lips. “God knows, I could never make you anyway.”

"Thanks, Dad." Then, a wicked grin pulling at the corner of his mouth, "Race you?"

A splash, a shout, laughter rings out into the night and hell it's cheesy but it's true; for a moment Gordon kinda feels like he's already won.

---

The Olympics are due to start in June.

May, and his father dies.

Gordon flies home immediately, thirty thousand feet over Cape Town without even looking down.

He can't.

He has a place in a legacy.

---

#fabfivefeb #fabfivefeb2020 #thunderbirds are go #gordon tracy #jeff tracy #oh look its angsty #theres a wild shock #idek #there might be a part 2

[nakoujou]

Detention: One-Shot

In which Class A gets detention, and the only priority is to find out who got caught making out in the boys’ locker room (Crackfic, slight Todomomo, warning for lots of cursing).

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

They had only wanted to escape the gruesome, summer heat. An innocent group text inviting everybody to sneak into U.A.’s swimming pool. It was supposed to be a chill kickback, just to lounge in the cooling sensation of the waters. 

But here they were on Sunday afternoon, stuck in their homeroom to write a 5 paragraph apology essay after Aizawa and Midnight caught them. Nobody wanted to be here, already struggling to deal with one of the hottest days of July. Midoriya wondered how many would actually complete the assignment. Half of them were already dozing off, defeated from the cruel heat waves seeping through the window.

Aizawa-sensei - already annoyed from the normal school week - entrusted supervision duties to the only other student worthy of disciplining his troublesome classmates and not ignoring curfew.

"This is an embarrassment to our class!” Iida yelled, unraveling the list of strikes. “Underage drinking, unsupervised Quirk battles, inappriopriate ki-”

And suddenly, everybody’s energy zapped right back at Iida’s loud gasp. It wasn’t like their Class President to halt in the middle of a lecture, clenching the paper.

Iida took a big gulp, lowering his head as his hands shivered. “’I-I-Inappropriate kissing in the boys’ locker room.”

Across all desks, Class A shared the same expression: wide eyes, jaws dropping, blood-curling screams blasting from their mouths. 

“KISSING??!!!”

“Are you shitting us?!” Ashido gasped. 

“Wait, everybody at the pool party is in detention right now,” Tsu pondered. “Which means...”

"WHICH FUCKER HERE GOT A HICKEY?!!” Kirishima screamed.

“H-Hickey?” Yaoyorozu gasped, covering her mouth. “W-W-Why-”

“So innocent, Yaoyorozu!” Sero teased her. “No guy takes you to the locker room without gunning for second base.” 

"W-Wait! We should be more respectful of the person. What if they’re not ready to talk about this?” Midoriya said. Whoever it was here, he couldn’t imagine the embarrassment they were feeling right now.

“We’re Class A! We’re family, and family tell each other everything!” Ochaco declared. “We need to know!”

“URARAKA HOW COULD YOU??!!” Midoriya wailed. He thought she would at least be on his side.

“We’re not that close,” Ojiro muttered. Except no one cared to admit that.

“Mou, which two lovebirds here got some good action?” Hagakure giggled.

“Everybody needs to calm down and resume the essay!”

“Come on, Iida, I bet you wanna know too.”

“This shit is fuckin’ stupid,” Bakugo groaned, head falling onto his desk.

“Let’s go to the boys’ locker, find a bra, and match it to the girls here!”

“Mineta, don’t be disrespectful! It’s rude to target only the girls!”

“Iida is right. And who’s to say it’s a hetero boy-girl relationship? We should be considerate of those feelings when we talk about this,” Yayaorozu trailed off, twiddling with her jacket sleeves.

“Yaomomo has a point,” Jiro replied. “Still...”

“It’s definitely a guy and girl in this room, mark my words!” Kamimari declared.  

“So that rules out Bakugo.”

“WHAT’S THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN, EAR FREAK?! NOT LIKE I WANNA KISS YOU BITCHES ANYWAY!”

“Language, Bakugo! Especially when it comes to our fellow sisters!” Iida lectured.

“That’s right, we must cherish our sisters!”

“They ain’t sisters if we’re shoving our tongue down their throats,” Bakugo scoffed. Iida and the rest of the class glared at him.

“Well, it ain’t Uraraka cause Midoriya would faint,” Kamimari laughed.

“W-W-W-WHAT ARE YOU IMPLYING???!!!!”

“M-m-m-m-m-me k-k-k-kiss--” Midoriya stuttered under his breath, avoiding any eye contact with Uraraka.

“I have a theory-”

“We don’t care, Bakugo.”

“FINE! GO WASTE THE HOUR WITHOUT ME, WORTHLESS EXTRAS!”

“It ain’t Ashido; she would have told everybody.”

“Ne, why are we so focused on the girls when it was in the boys’ locker room?”

“Tsu’s right,” Yaoyorozu complained. “Why don’t we start with the guys first?”

“They make a valid point,” Shoji replied. “Since it was our locker room, we need to interrogate the guys first.” 

“Let’s be real; which guy in this room actually has a chance to kiss, let alone makeout with a girl?” Tokoyami spoke for the first time. 

The room fell into a swift depression, with Kirishima, Bakugo, and Kamimaro glaring at him.

“That’s so cruel...” Yayaorozu tried to hold back a snicker. 

“Aren’t you speaking about yourself too?” Uraraka pointed out. Tokoyami shrugged. 

“Recognizing one’s weakness is the key to greatness.”

“YOU’RE SAYING NO GUY IN CLASS A HAS GAME?!!!”

“HOW COULD YOU BETRAY US, TOKOYAMI?!”

“I’LL GET ALL THE GIRLS TO PROVE YOU WRONG, BIRD SHIT!”

“Regardless of who it was, this is a highly inappropriate discussion. We should respect our friend’s privacy and get back to your essays.” 

“Iida, don’t be a buzzkill.”

“But seriously, which guy here did it?!”

“Not Aoyama; he only loves himself.”

“This is hard; Tokoyami is pretty right about the guys in our class,” Tsu sighed.

“Look, everybody,” Midoriya walked to the front of the class. “This is fun, but someone here may be dealing with feelings they’re not sure of. What if it’s a new relationship they don’t want to reveal yet? Plus, we’re now making fun of each other for being single.”

The shouting subsided, followed by slumber faces. Murmurs spread across the room, and Midoriya could hear their regretful tones among each other. Midoriya dared to glance over the Uraraka, who gave him an approving smile. He stood up straighter, spiked with a new confidence to face this ordeal. 

Yes, it is always right to protect someone...

 “If this class is family, the we have to act like one: Give them their space, and be there to support when they need us.”

“As expected from Midoriya...”

“Such a powerful speech!”

“It’s so much better than me, the person entrusted to lead Class A through good and bad! I have failed as your President!” Iida cried.

“So everybody’s given up, huh?”

Everybody turned back to Bakugo, sitting with his arms crossed and a grin that looked ready to unleash the next natural disaster.

“What do you gotta say, Bakugo?” Jiro snorted

“I dunno, will everybody finally trust my god-given talents?”

“Get on with it,” Shoji sighed.

Bakugo raised his hand to the ceiling, everybody rolling their eyes at his dramatics. Then, his pointer finger landed straight directly at...

“Yaoyorozu?!” Midoriya gasped. 

“Our Class VP?”

Yaoyorozu, however, did not flinch, She shook her head, unfazed. “Now you’re just being ridiculous.”

“I can see through your shit, rich girl.”

“It’s not funny, Bakugo! Yaoyorozu would never!” Uraraka defended her friend.

“Isn’t it obvious?! She’s been too diplomatic, playing peacekeeper but getting all riled up. Telling us to interrogate boys first so we wouldn’t suspect her. Also...” Bakugo grabbed his own shirt collar, lifting it slightly as he motioning towards Yaoyorozu. “Her jacket has been zipped up the whole time, and it’s a fuckin’ sauna in here. When does Ponytail ever cover up that much?”

Midoriya caught the first hint of red flush appearing across Yaoyorozu’s cheeks. Sweat beads begin to form on her forehead.

“W-W-Why does that m-matter?” Yaoyorozu scoffed, fiddling with her jacket collar. Strange how Midoriya didn’t notice that until now. As if she was hiding...

“Take off your jacket,” Bakugo demanded.

“THAT’S SO PERVY, BAKUGO!” 

"YES BAKUGO, BREAK HER BOOBS FREE-”

“YOU’RE THE LOWEST OF THEM ALL, MINETA!”

“SHUT UP! I DON’T CARE WHO BOUGIE PRINCESS MAKES OUT WITH, WHAT MATTER IS THAT I AM RIGHT!”

“OH MY GOD, BAKUGO HAS TO BE THE CULPRIT!”

“ONLY YOU WOULD SINK SO LOW TO ACCUSE YAOYOROZU!’

“DID NOBODY HEAR ME?! I HAVE REAL EVIDENCE!” 

“I bet he dragged Kirishima and Kamimari for a good three-”

“Stop!” Yaoyorozu cried. “it was me, OK?! Is everybody happy now? Can we not taunt Bakugo like that and just finish up detention in peace?” 

Yaoyorozu unziped her jacket and lo and behold, the evidence was there. A small, purple bruise...right on her neck. Midoriya couldn’t believe it; Yaoyorozu Momo had lured herself. Not only as a rule breaker, but something even more critical to this situation. If not, worsen the mood.

“WHO GAVE YOU THAT HICKY??!!!”

“WHICH FUCKER HERE GOT YAOYOROZU??!!”

“WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL THE GIRLS FIRST?”

“THIS JUST GOT WORSE!” 

“I WAS RIIIGGGGHHHHHTTTTT!!”

“AHHHH YAOMOMO HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?!”

“YOU NEVER HAD A CHANCE, MINETA!”

“DON’T EVER UNDERESTIMATE ME AGAIN!”

“It wasn’t anybody here,” Yaoyorozu grumbled, avoiding everybody’s death glares. However, Midoriya could still see her face reddening with each second passing.

“THEN WHO??!! CLASS B DOUCHES?!”

“PLEASE, YAOYOROZU, ANYBODY BUT CLASS B!”

Midoriya got startled when Tokoyami tapped his shoulder. He nudged at Midoriya to speak privately, away from the chaos of their classmates and the unfortunate victim that was Yaoyorozu.

“I don’t want to make this a big deal with them but...” he whispered under his breath. “...The only students who knew about the pool party was our class, but someone’s missing.”

“Ah, you’re right! But why does that...” Midoriya drifted off, coming to a silent conclusion alongside Tokoyami. “Wait, you don’t think it could be...”

------

“Normally, I throw everybody in the same room, but given the circumstances of your delinquency...” Midnight began, lips gradually transforming into a mischievous grin. “...It made sense to keep you two separate.” 

“Works for me,” muttered the young sixteen year old, as he mopped the teachers’ lounge.

“Think of this as a generous favor, Todoroki-kun. No one will know about you and Yaoyorozu yet.”

The emphasis on “yet,” which Todoroki tried hard not to cling to. Unfortunately, it backfired in mere seconds when he heard the voice of his explosive classmate hollering throughout the entire building.

"IT’S HALF-N-HALF BASTARD!!!! I KNEEEEWWWWW ITTTTT!!!!”

————————

That’s a wrap! I hope you guys enjoyed this fic! Please feel free to leave any feedback as I’m always striving to improve as a writer.

#todomomo #todomomo one shot #my hero academia #boku no hero academia #todomomo fanfiction

[nomimits7]

Undecided Chapter 9 (Final)

Title: Undecided Pt 9 Final

Genre: Investigation, murder, masked behavior.

Warnings: murder, psychotic behavior, might be triggering. This chapter touches on the subject of having more than one personality. I do not know anything about this subject, so I interpreted it as I saw fit for the story. DON’T COME AT ME YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. Also, I kind off maybe describe a murder so there’s that. I think that’s it… I might need help, mentally.

Members: detective OT7 x Forensic scientist Reader

Note: Phrases are just add-ins to help with the storyline… If they confuse you, feel free to ask!

Summary: Moving overseas for a once in a lifetime job offer was one of the scariest things Y/N ever did. That was until she got stuck in a twisted investigation of random murders, all with one link but no leads. Closing in on the culprit(s) Y/N doesn’t realize the danger she’s getting into. With no family or friends, can Y/N dare to trust those seven closest to her with her life?

Chapter 8

•♡•

Undecided: Not settled or resolved

•♡•

They were seven. Lucky for them, bad for you.

You hesitantly retold your livid dream. You tried to read their expression but ended up looking at the floor and nervously playing with the blanket as you finished your story.

“- and then I was in the elevator, Namjoon somehow calmed me and in the end, Seokjin gave me something to help me calm down more and I fell asleep. Now we’re here.” This was it. This was where the guys all would realize how fucked up you truly are.

The silence that followed your little story was unbearable. You couldn’t quite decide what was worse… them responding and sending you to the looney bin or them not responding at all. This uncertainty only grew with the silence. Causing you to fold into yourself more. You really started liking these seven men. You felt a connection with them and hoped they would be different from the previous people in your life.

You knew you were a bad person, but that’s something you tried to hide from them. It’s already bad enough that you had to tell them your ridiculous dream. You don’t even want to know what they’ll think of you when they learn the truth. That you, in fact, are a-

“Y/N. hey sweetheart. Look at me” It was Namjoon who interrupted your spiraling thoughts. Hesitantly you lifted your head. You kind of expected to see anger or hurt, maybe even betrayal in his soft brown eyes. Yet, that’s not what you saw. Namjoon’s gaze was filled with something close to admiration, maybe even a dash of sincerity.

This wasn’t out of character for him. Actually, those same emotions were visible in all seven of their eyes from time to time. What confused you now though, was the fact that those emotions were still present even after what you have told them. You didn’t deserve their admiration or sincerity. You were a monster compared to these lovely men. These men that always only protected you, cared for you like you weren’t just another stranger passing through.

They showed you more love than you ever received from anyone in your past. And a past you indeed had.

“Don’t zone out on us baby. We’re here for you. All seven of us.” Yoongi said as his arms snaked around your waist, successfully securing you in place. Being touched like this was nothing new to you. You had your fair share of boyfriends and boy friends. Only now, this was one of seven men you considered more in the latter category than the first. That little space being the friend zone secured a few lines that could not be crossed. So, with this knowledge, you stiffened.

Noticing your shift, Hoseok also snaked his arms around you for two reasons. One, he just wanted to hold on to you to make you feel safe. And two, what they were about to tell you required a few precautions. One of these entailed you being held in place, be it by choice or force was up to your reactions.

Feeling another pair of arms make their home around your waist had you beyond confused. Didn’t they know the unspoken rules of friends? Cuddles is as far as you would dare go if there was a secure blanket wall in place. But never in your time here, did they ever do something like this. Okay, to be honest, you kind-of expected Jimin or Jungkook to be the ones to risk something like this. They were the ones that lived for attention. But Yoongi was, well how can you put this nicely? The most un-affectional human you know. He showed he cared through small stuff like placing water randomly on your desk or making sure you had an extra helping of your favorite dessert. He never did something like this with any of the others. Hoseok, on the other hand, was just always so hyper you actually believed if he ever had to sit still for more than one hour he would die.

“Y/N, you asked us to be honest with you if you relayed your dream to us, right? Well, can you promise us to listen without interrupting until we’re done?” Seokjin asked, pulling you from your spiraling thoughts.

A simple nod from you was all the boys needed to start their very own story.

“Well, our story started 4 years ago. I befriended Yoongi at one of the local police stations. He was one of their tech guys and I was a young police officer starting out a new career. Okay, maybe I wasn’t that young, but that’s beside the point. Soon after I met Yoongi-hyung we met Hoseok-ah and Jin-hyung at one of the bars cops were known to hang out. We became friends rather quickly. The 4 of us started talking about going private, I mean we had all the skills needed to maintain a small private firm. So, 3 years ago we founded Z-investigators.

I believe it was in that very same bar where Taehyung-sie got into some trouble. I believe he picked a fight with a local? Or was it the other way around? Anyway, naturally Yoongi-hyung was the one to stop the fight and it was Hoseok who successfully made both men shut up with a simple stare. We soon learned that Tae was a newly promoted detective and that’s how he somehow joined our firm. But we also soon learned that wherever Tae went, his two best friends would follow so naturally Jungkook and Jimin became part of the Z-family.” Namjoon began. A soft and longing look in his eyes as he recalled the memories that started all of this.

But his face fell as the memories kept replying in his head. Something made him frown, you did not like that. You had to repress the urge to say something, you did promise to not interrupt. So, you just sat in Yoongi and Hoseok’s embrace and waited for someone to continue.

“Things went well in the beginning. We got a few cases here and there and slowly started building a good reputation. But then after our 10th murder, we started wondering. We started wondering what these people that take lives felt while their victims held onto the last bit of life. We also started wondering what methods would work best to stay unsolved.” Hoseok continued behind you, slightly tightening his arms around your waist.

Flashbacks to a 16-year-old you played in your head. Her eyes were all you would see as you tightened the rope around her throat. The color draining from her face as the oxygen failed to reach her face. Her life slipping out of her eyes until only empty orbs were left staring back at you. You also remembered the satisfaction that filled you as you got up and stared down and her lifeless body.

She was a bad person. She was the woman that seduced your father and threatened to tear your family apart. You’ve always been a snoop and found this secret by accident. Your years of watching and learning from unsolved murder cases helped you erase yourself from that allay way. You were smart for a 16-year-old girl, to this day her murder remains unsolved and your family is none the wiser.

You also got curious about how you could improve in such a way so you can start taking risks. You have awakened a lust for blood that day and you would do anything to satisfy it.

“We did tons of research. And soon we all began planning on how we would test our theories without getting caught. At first, we wanted to do this to better the system. You know? We wanted to make the life of an investigator easier.” Taehyung continued. None of the boys dared make any eye contact with you, yet you held no judgment towards them. You understood where they were coming from.

“We soon realized that the system was more corrupted than any killer’s mind. We were disgusted when we found out how many people out there were roaming free because some fucker tampered with the evidence to save his buddies ass.” Jimin said in a dark tone. His face even took on a darker shade as he kept his gaze fixed in the ground.

“Daniel was our first attempt at bypassing the system on fair terms. Weeks of planning went into killing him. You see Daniel was a very well-known drug-lords pet out there. he was responsible for almost everything. From people that stayed loyal to his boss to the ones that dared cross him. He even led some of the missions to ‘take care of’ these unfaithful people himself. To say we didn’t feel bad killing him would be a crime in itself.” Jungkook explained as he finally dared meet your eyes. You saw the sincerity in his eyes and that alone told you that these boys weren’t lying to you. Your eyes softened at this, making a faint smile find its way to his lips.

“Ultimately we decided that I would be the one to end his life. We all played a part but I had the final blow, or push so to speak. I was the one who forced the golfball down his throat. But we all stood there and witnessed as his life slipped from his eyes. The fear, the realization that it was truly the end for him. None of those things affected us in a negative sense, on the contrary, there was a sense of relief that settled between us.” Yoongi added. His form small and bordering fragile. He was scared, of what you do not know.

“After our first kill, we became braver. We did less planning and more doing. The only planning we really did was the names and the ones who got to kill them. We even made a catalog that wasn’t part of the investigations to keep track of what we actually did and how much we could prove. It's strange, we didn’t see the victims as our killings. We saw them as victims. Just another case we had to do. You can even double-check us, we did no tampering what so ever. Everything we logged and collected is true. But still, we aren’t even close to finding the real killer, even if we are the real killers.” Seokjin explained even further.

At this point, your head was running its very own race. They were investigating their own deeds, but they were still fair in doing so. Once again your mind drifted back to when you were well into the killing business as well. One of your biggest secrets on how to get away with murder was to evolve. You never used the same methods twice in one year. You kept changing up your style. There wasn’t a single -method out there which you haven’t done or mastered.

The only difference at this points between you and the men sitting in front of you was that you killed for the bloodlust you got. They killed for the sake of bettering the system. It’s this exact thought that made you use your voice for the first time since they started talking.

“You guys killed for the sake of bettering the system. I killed for the sake of fulfilling the bloodlust I had. You aren’t monsters. I’m the monster here. How can you guys stomach being in the same room as me?” you broke into a sobbing mess as your hands reached for your face.

“Even serial killers get bored Y/N. We got bored of trying to better the system. So, we ended up killing for the trill. We couldn’t understand why but killing felt like a deed we did for our country. And after Tae discovered you… we felt less alone. We finally knew someone else out there knew what we felt, what we craved” Yoongi explained as he tried to make you understand that you weren’t a monster.

You had no idea what any of their words meant so you decided to stay silent. You had some thinking to do.

•♡•

The boys soon allowed you to retreat to your room. They didn’t put any pressure on you to answer them after their confession. They simply allowed you to go. You needed time to process everything.

Closing your door, you could finally let out the breath you were holding. Head facing down, you leaned against the door. Your carefully constructed face falling. The face you worked so hard on when you were 16 years old. The face you had to create after that faithful day you first tasted blood.

If anyone could see you now, they would probably say that you seemed like two different people. One is the sweet and innocent Y/N that got her honors in Forensic Science to make the world a better place. The one that wouldn’t hurt a fly. The emotional, scared, helpless foreign girl that wanted to escape her controlled life back home.

The other girl would be the one most only saw in their final moments. The determined, bloodthirsty girl that wouldn’t blink when she pulled a trigger. The fearless girl that would stare death in the face a thousand times without thinking twice about it. The heartless murderer that would smile while watching the life drain from her victims' eyes.

Those same emotionless eyes now snapped up as your thoughts began swirling. How did they find out about your past? They had to have known, right? How else would they know so much about you? You weren’t even close to being a person of interest in any of the investigations. Well, there was the exception of Norman’s case, but that was a minor hiccup you had to deal with.

Hang on. They compared themselves with you. They fucking compared their killings with yours, those narrow-minded idiots. They dare compare their amateur crimes to yours. What a fucking joke. You have years of experience and they only started about 5 months ago, with planning no less. Did they really think that you would just understand and accept them?

Okay, maybe you do understand and you kind of like the idea of not being so alone. Sure, killing was fulfilling but it was a very lonely road.

You frantically started pacing back and forth as your mind kept running the possibilities and questions in your mind. One of these questions kept playing on repeat.

What’s going to happen now.

Yes, they’re still new to the whole murder scene, but they outnumbered you seven to one. If they were just two, no problem! But they were seven. Seven really well-built men that wouldn’t think twice about pulling you over their laps and giving you a good spanking. Wait, what?

Startled by your own thoughts you stopped dead in your tracks. Where the hell did that come from? Taking a seat on your bed, you forced yourself to take a deep breath.

Think Y/N, you have to think! You needed a plan if things turned sour, just in case.

•♡•

The boys all stayed in the living area as you retreated to your room. You needed time and they understood that, but that didn’t keep the tension at bay. They were scared of what you would do, although they had a backup plan they didn’t plan on using it.

The silence stretched out for another minute or two until Hoseok abruptly stood and moved down the hallway. None of the other boys cared to see where he was going as each was to busy sorting through their own questions. The atmosphere grew heavier as the minutes stretched. The only sounds were heavy sighs from time to time. Well, that is until Hoseok returns somewhat ten minutes later with a visible spring in his step.

“So, I kind of stood outside her door and listened to her vocally have an inner conflict with herself”

At his words, the rest of the boys visibly perked up. You were usually a quiet girl. You never voiced any inner feelings towards anyone, given if they didn’t force you to engage in such a manner. Hearing you have a vocal conversation with yourself must have been a whole new experience.

“She sounded so different. Much more mature, and so confident. Well, she did call us amateurs and idiots for comparing our track record to hers, but it was like there were two different people speaking. The one would belittle our work while the other would kind of be on our side and voice how nice it would be to have friends in the field” Hoseok continued while retaking his seat next to Yoongi.

“What else did she say? What will she do with this new information?” Seokjin hesitantly asked. They liked you. They would hate for you to end up as one of their cases.

“She’s scared. She knows we outnumber her by far. I also think she might have some sexual troubles but that one we can discuss later. She didn’t say anything else other than she needs a backup plan” Somehow this news made the guys excited.

Jungkook was visibly vibrating in his seat, Taehyung actually had emotion on his face, even Yoongi looked more awake.

“I can’t wait to meet the real Y/N”  

•♡•

45 minutes

That’s how long you were left alone in your room. You were just about to drift off to sleep again when the knock came. The knock that sealed your undecided fate. The dreaded thump thump against the door that stole away your precious sleep and left you on high alert.

You were beyond annoyed at this point. How dare they deny you your sleep. With an intentionally loud groan, you reluctantly got up and made your way to the door. Only to find the hallway empty, no living soul in sight. You probably stood there for a good minute or two before you heard the hushed whispers from the living room. Curiosity got the best of you as you crept closer.

The universe must have had it in for you because the moment you came within earshot of the whispers… they stopped.

“Come take a seat Y/N. We’ve been waiting for you” you heard Taehyung call. Momentarily forgetting the intensity of the whole situation, you slowly made your way into the room.

“This isn’t just another dream or something, right?” at your voice, all seven men locked their eyes onto your form. Yes, you might be a very dangerous serial killer, but that didn’t mean you didn’t get intimidated. Seven gorgeous men were watching you, S-E-V-E-N.

Taking the seat furthers from them, you crossed your legs as you took on the role of the shy foreign girl again. All seven of the men silently observed you. Something was different about them. Mere moments ago, they told you some of their darkest secrets AND revealed some of yours. Yet, here they were. No indication of fear, shyness or guilt.

“So, as you can see, we outnumber you seven to one. But you out-rank us by far and we’d kill to have you as one of us. Almost like a mentor of sorts. We like you Y/N and we really want to become your friends, but you need to want this too” Namjoon spoke up. His eyes never leaving yours as he took in your shy exterior.

“W-why would you thi-“you began, only to be cut off by Jimin’s stern voice.

“Oh, lose the mask Y/N. If you wanted to bolt, you would have done so already. Someone like you always has a way out. We want to get to know the real Y/N. So, stop this shy, vulnerable crap and show us who you really are”

Taken aback by the sudden harshness of his tone, it didn’t take much to lose the weight of pretend. Looking down, you readjusted your position. Uncrossing your legs, you threw your hair over your shoulder as a slow smile formed on your face. It felt so good to not pretend you even let out a sigh of relief.

The boys watched on in amazement as you visibly changed into someone else right in front of them. They expected to see the difference, but never in their lives did they ever think they could witness something like this. It was like you were a young caterpillar going through metamorphism to turn into the biggest and brightest butterfly known to mankind.

“Holy shit that was probably the hottest thing I have ever witnessed” Taehyung groaned out as Jungkook, Seokjin and Yoongi all hummed in agreement.

“Hi boys, it’s nice to finally meet you. So, when do we start your training?” you said with a smirk and a suspicious glint in your eyes. It’s been a while since you had the satisfaction of taking another’s life and to say you were beyond excited, was a crime in itself.

None of you knew if you made the right choice by trusting the other, yet your future seemed a little less undecided than it was this morning.

Victim catalog 

•♡•

A/N: Congratulations! You’ve managed to make it to the end of the series!!!   Thank you so much for reading! I really hope you enjoyed reading this story as much as I enjoyed writing it! Please don’t hesitate to ask if you would like to know more or just want to tell me it’s trash! Any ask is welcome!

Also, tell me what you would change in the story. Or maybe even tell me what you would like to read next. I’m always open to ideas. Mits you lots <3

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