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silverskye13 · 2 years

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The thing about the void is, it's empty. People forget just how distant the distance between stars is, even Joel, who seems convinced at all times that he knows all things. Seems. People contain nearly as many multitudes as the void. That's what Etho finds so thrilling about this whole soulmate thing, really. The fullness. The intensity.

Etho is only skin deep, not because he's shallow, but because he's empty. That's the thing about the void. The distance between stars is nearly unfathomable. It can be calculated, but it cannot be filled. Etho spends a lot of time feeling empty, like the distance between his heart and his lungs in measured in light years. Feelings come to him as distant impressions, constantly traveling, brushing by his edges so small they're less than ripples on water.

This probably makes no sense.

See, the thing about being made of void, born from void, called to void, is you resemble it a great deal, and resembling nothing is very hard to describe. He's alive, obviously, and something resembling a human shape, but the depth of him is different. Etho feels like the void feels - soft and muffled by distance. When emotions finally collide with something, the explosion is brilliant enough to create light, noise, cacophony, and it burns and it fades, and in a million years it might happen again.

He had expected to drown Joel in his emptiness, when their souls tethered. And maybe at first he did. But Joel was so much it was intoxicating.

The Relationship is burning. Etho on his own might not be too bothered by this. Sure, there's the chance that anger and dismay might collide somewhere in the distance between his desperate pieces and create some super nova emotion, but he doesn't expect it to. Joel, however - human and small and contained and a multitude in the space between skin instead of the space between stars - feels almost everything at once and Etho basks in it like it's the sun. Joel is anger and dismay and the inevitability of it all and he's running, and Etho has to focus on that light that is Joel just to follow. They run to their home, up in flames, and Joel is shouting and Etho is shouting, and he's feeling everything Joel is feeling and it's intense. It leaves Etho breathless. He feels tears in his eyes. And then Etho is filled with the greatest concern, a mournful feeling like a canary caged in his ribs, and Joel circles back from their home to hold his hand.

"We knew this would happen," Joel tells him, trying to be reassuring, and all Etho can do is nod. The concern is baffling. It stuns him just as surely as any punch could. It wants to cup him in its hands and keep him safe, it wants to remind him this is all just a game and really it's no big loss. It's only five words. We knew this would happen. Joel might as well have told him he would never feel pain again. Concern. Concern is the color of a white dwarf, bright and small and tenacious.

They dig through the remains, they recover, and Etho feels it. Soft like the vibration between planets, like a solar storm invisible and deadly scattered into the atmospheres of a thousand foundling gas giants. Joel is angry. It bubbles up from the depths of him, prickles beneath Etho's skin like the acid rain on Venus trying to crawl out of his pores.

"If the Relationship burns," Joel repeats, vicious and red, red, angry, red, "everything burns."

There's a flint and steel in Joel's hands, a grin on his face, and his anger is giddy in a way that flutters in Etho's chest like laughter. Joel feels so much, so much, all the time. Is this what it means to be human?

Etho has never felt more human in his life, and he wants to feel it all. He wants Joel to get angrier. He wants to taste rage and ambition, hopelessness and despair. He wants to chart their colors, the frequencies they make, the way their atoms collide. He wants the space between stars to be full and teeming, he wants every solar system to boil.

Etho follows Joel like the rings around Saturn. They're chanting together. If the Relationship burns, everything burns. Etho feels giddy. Joel sounds manic. Mania. That's a good word for it, this feeling like the very stars are rioting beneath his skin. If Etho is made from the stuff of the End, maybe this is what the Beginning felt like. They set fire to the server one home at a time. Flint and steel crack together like colliding asteroids, they light like solar fire.

"Not the box!" Ren howls at him, and Etho laughs as he passes him, chanting under his breath every word Joel says. "Etho! Control your wife!"

Etho laughs. It's funny. It's hilarious. It's unthinkable. Control Joel? Control Joel? He might as well try to capture the universe in the palm of his hand. Joel is a multitude, an endless ocean that washes over him in waves. Etho wants more of him. He wants to feel everything in that same ravenous way a quasar devours space and time. He wants to wrap these moments around him into a singularity so intense it settles in his chest like a second soul.

The Box burns.

Etho has never felt so out of control in his life. He follows Joel like chaos does, his closest companion, the haunt to his steps. He doesn't care if they win. All he cares is that Joel contain his multitudes, and those multitudes spill.

The laws of gravity dictate a great many things. An apple will always fall from a tree to the earth. So will a person slipping from a height, or a piece of dripstone thrust from its mooring. The planets will always turn around their stars, the moons around their planets, their satellites. A solar system will always fly, careening through the universe so quickly you cannot even fathom its movement.

An area of high pressure will always diffuse into an area of nothing, until at long last they reach perfect equilibrium.

#the barking writer #ethoslab #joel smallishbeans #smalletho #boat boys #the Relation Ship #anyway Ren telling Etho to control Joel was i think the funniest thing ive ever heard in my life #you'd have better luck binding Fenryr my dude #in which my headcanon that Etho is some kind of eldritch creature and Joel is The Most Intense Human combine #dlsmp #double life smp #dls5 #i realized because i tagged it with spoilers but no session number people might confuse it tomorrow with session 6 XD #god im tired

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leiandroid · 1 year

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otayuri week | day five - workplace au

otabek works the nightshift of a movie store, and yuri is a film and photography student that comes to rent&buy movies.

@otayuriweek22

canons and scenes of this verse discussed at length under the cut >>

as usual, i can't write for shit and bridge ideas to anything cohesive or create dialogue that isn't cringe and unnatural so have this list instead (i need y'all to get the full picture ya know) >>

yuri is a film & photography student (more interested in photography over film, which ended up meaning he has a lacking knowledge of movies and the programme requires him to know and watch a lot of them)

otabek is the night shift worker of the movie store. georgi works the day shifts.

yuri started going there to rent/buy movies. at first he went during the day and had initially asked georgi for suggestions but after his third time coming back with georgi's recommendations, which was another over dramatic and terrible romance, he stopped asking. one day, he was late going home from university so he stopped by the movie place at night and that's when he first met otabek on his night shift.

otabek is a semi-pretentions "film not movies" kind of guy, when he saw the stack of films yuri intended to leave with he didn't say anything, only had a look on his face which yuri straight up asked "what's that look for asshole?" to which otabek said nothing and just rang up the tapes and asked "you buying or renting?"

when he returned the movies the next time it was during the day, and yuri went back to rent movies some nights later after evening classes. this time, when he entered the shop otabek was digging through a box of new arrivals and was stacking them on the shelves. yuri browsed whatever movies were on display til curiosity brought him to the box and he asked otabek if there was anything interesting to watch in there.

otabek, finally puts his largely useless (but in this case, useful to yuri) movie knowledge to action. he rifles through the tapes and hands him a film. yuri looks at it with with pursed lips but takes it anyway "this better be good" he warns. otabek just shrugs. yuri adds 2 other movies to take with him from the new arrivals.

this time yuri intentionally returns at night to catch otabek, he puts the tapes on the counter and says "i liked it" then turns away to go peruse the movies. he comes back with 3, and otabek rings them up as yuri watches with mild interest. then asks if he has another recommendation to which otabek stops what he's doing, bites into the lollipop (cherry) he was sucking on, and chews on it as he goes around the counter and walks towards a specific shelf and grabs a tape off of it and rings it up without consulting or showing it to yuri. yuri rolls his eyes before leaving.

yuri takes notice of several things: otabek has a barbell piercing on his left eyebrow, an eagle tattoo on his neck with the wings wrapping around the sides (the lattice of the kazakhstan flag is a band tattooed around his left upper thigh, but yuri doesn't know of it), and a small hoop earring on his right ear. (the gay ear). (also this is set in the 90s). yuri momentarily wonders if he's gay but immediately dismisses it because otabek seems painfully straight and concludes he probably just didn't know about it. it's more ironic than a rule anyway.

yuri has both ears pierced with black studs. he likes to wear rings on both hands and carries his camera with him everywhere. he develops his own photos, has developed them for a long time. he had a bugdet redroom he made in his wardrobe at home in moscow (with blackout curtains, drilling a hole into the back to put in a bulb he painted red, and lined the floor of it with a basin and enlarger). now he uses the university's lofty development studio and practically lives in it. (they are in st petersburg).

otabek smokes and when he isn't smoking he sucks on lollipops and hard candies, his preferred flavour is cherry but he fucks with cola flavour too. he bites lollipop sticks to shreds through the course of his shifts. he tries to keep it to 2 smoke breaks maximum during his shift. the nights are slow so if he doesn't have that self imposed restriction he could spend the entire night on the curb outside the shop smoking till someone came in.

there are bins of candy and snacks on the counter of the movie store, otabek helps himself to the hard candies and lollipops regularly. he drops in a weekly tenner in the register to cover the cost of what he takes (it doesn't, but he deems it close enough).

weeks pass by in similar fashion, otabek's movie recommendations keep making their way into yuri's purchases, they talk about the movies every time yuri comes back to exchange tapes for new ones. yuri rants about the arthouse movies, deciding he hates the genre. he cites that photography is for telling fragmented stories, movies are for telling complete ones. those pretentious films that tell nothing but drone on and on with useless imagery and jarring soundtracks make him furious with hate. otabek drops in an especially awful film of that genre just to piss yuri off and hear the epic rant that yuri will no doubt have prepared for the next visit.

up until that point, all of their interactions have been in the movie store. one day whilst otabek was driving through the streets on his motorbike, he spots yuri and pulls up to him to say hello. yuri had just finished class and was going to grab a bite to eat and asked otabek if he wanted to come with. they become friends. they hang out frequently.

otabek is a hacker by trade. he learns code and hacking shit and does odd jobs for companies to test their security networks by breaking into them and giving them a rundown on their weaknesses and what they need to lock their shit down better. he lives on energy drinks and cigarettes and thinks working out offsets his unhealthy lifestyle.

a handful of times otabek and yuri go into the backroom to watch a movie together from the pile yuri intends to rent. otabek keeps the door slightly ajar, plus there's a small cctv set up of the store in case a customer walks in whilst they're in there.

otabek discovers two things: one, yuri does not shut the fuck up during a movie, and two, his commentary is hilarious. yuri also discovers two things: one, otabek tastes like candy sweet ashes, and two, the earring was definitely a signal.

EXTRA

some details about the shop itself since they wouldn't leave my head and it's hard to represent it in 1 drawing. the shop in the art looks way more clean and official than it does in my head. in reality it's a more dilapidated back alley shop with shitty lighting, old movie posters and sellotape marks littering the walls. the walls have some stains from previous water damage. it smells of air freshner, dust, and a hint of cigarette smoke.

i'm operating on 0 knowledge of a russia in the mid 90s and just borrowing details from unofficial/pirating dvd stores from my home country, but the place makes copies of movies to sell. original vhs tapes are for rent, whereas copies are sold. the backroom is a work station for downloading movies on shitty dial up and copying vhs tapes. the backroom smells of stale smoke since otabek sometimes smokes in there whilst running the recording machines and downloads, etc. he was hired because he knows how to rip files and find movies and hack his way into movie databases to get new/old/obscure releases.

if they don't carry a movie that a customer wants then they can request it and otabek will click around the internet to find and download it and put it on a tape. in the picture, otabek is holding empty vhs tapes that he plans to record movies on to. the shelves have the legit movie copies, but if you want to buy them, a copy is made and you're given a regular tape with its factory sleeve and the movie title written on the label.

they sell and rent originals of russian movies bc they're not hard to obtain and are in demand, especially ones that star russia's heart throb viktor nikiforov (he is especially popular amongst mothers). christophe and the crispino siblings are actors in this verse.

yuri primarily rents the original movies and comes back to buy copies of ones he really really likes after returning them.

the shop is owned by yakov, georgi works the dayshift, and otabek works the nightshift. yakov mostly leaves them to their own devices bc they do a good job. georgi and otabek think he really should hire one more person so they can have some liberty to switch around their shifts when needed but yakov is a stingy old fuck that does his best to not have money leave his pockets. they are open from 8AM to 12AM. they're one of the more popular movie stores in the area since they carry a lot of western movies that aren't easy to find elsewhere and for so cheap.

10pm to 12am are pretty dead hours which otabek uses for pirating shit. similarly the early hours of the dayshift have light traffic so that's when georgi finishes otabek's work from the night prior.

#otayuriweek #otayuri #otabek altin #yuri plisetsky #yuri on ice #otayuriweek22 #todaydrainedme.tiktok #i spent way too much time on the BG details and hounding my cousin for russian translations of things #most of the vhs titles are gibberish #honestly the written part of this was more important lmao #god im tired #my art #leiandroid #woops i forgot to put details on the pins #too late i dont care anymore

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