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commsroom · 1 year

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to me, the question of whether hera would want a body is first and foremost a question of autonomy and ability. she has an internal self-image, i think it's meaningful that the most pivotal moments in her character arc take place in spaces where she can be perceived the way she perceives herself and interact with others in a (relatively) equal and physical capacity, and that's worth considering. but i don't think it's about how she looks, or even who she is - and i think she's the same person either way; she's equally human without a body, and having a body wouldn't make her lived experience as an AI magically disappear - so much as it's about how she would want to live.

like most things with hera, i'm looking at this through a dual lens of disability and transness, both perspectives from which the body - and particularly disconnect from the body - is a concern. the body as the mechanism by which she's able to interact with the world; understanding her physical isolation as a product of her disability, the body as a disability aid. the body as it relates to disability, in constant negotiation. the body as an expression of medical transition, of self-determination, of choice. as a statement of how she wants to be seen, how she wants to navigate the world, and at the same time reckoning with the inevitable gap between an idealized self-image and a lived reality, especially after a long time spent believing that self-image could never be visible to anyone else.

it's critical to me that it should never imply hera's disability is 'fixed' by having a body, only that it enables her to interact with the world in ways she otherwise couldn't. her fears about returning to earth are about safety and ability; the form she exists in dictates the life she's allowed to lead and has allowed people to invade her privacy and make choices for her. dysphoria and disability both contribute to disembodiment - in an increasingly digitized world, the type of alienation that feels like your life can only exist in a virtual space... maybe there's something about the concept of AI embodiment, in particular as it relates to hera, that appeals to me because of what it challenges about what makes a 'real woman.' when it's about perception, about how others see her and how she might observe / be impacted by how she's treated differently, even subconsciously. it's about feeling more present in her life and interfacing with the world. but it's not in itself a becoming; it doesn't change how she's been shaped by her history or who she is as a person.

i think it comes back to the 'big picture' as a central antagonistic force in wolf 359, and how - in that context, in this story - it adds a weight to this hypothetical choice. hera is everywhere, and she's never really anywhere. she's got access to more knowledge than most people could imagine, but it's all theoretical or highly situational; she doesn't have the same life experiences as her peers. she has the capacity to understand that 'big picture' better than most people, but whatever greater portion of the universe she understands is nothing next to infinity and meaningless without connection and context. it's interesting to me that hera is one of the most self-focused and introspective people on the show. her loyalties and decisions are absolute, personal, emotionally driven. she's lonely; she always feels physically away from the others. she misremembers herself sitting at the table with the rest of the crew. she imagines what the ocean is like. there's nothing to say that hera having a body is the only solution for that, but i like what it represents, and i honestly believe it'd make her happier than the alternatives. if there's something to a symbolically narrowed focus that allows for a more solid sense of self... that maybe the way to make something of such a big, big universe is to find a tiny portion of it that's yours and hold onto it tight.

#wolf 359 #w359 #hera wolf 359 #idk. processing something. as always i have more to say but it's impossible to communicate all at once #it's a meaningful idea to me and i think there's a LOT more that can be done with it thematically than just. the assumption of normalcy #so much of hera's existence is about feeling trapped and that's only going to get worse on earth and within these two contexts #that's something i really feel for. especially with. mmm.#i don't like the idea that who hera is is tied to the way she exists because it seems to weirdly reinforce her own misconception #that there can never be another life for her.#and all of these things are specific to hera and to the themes of wolf 359 and NOT about AI characters in general #in other stories there are other considerations.#the best argument i can make against it is that she says getting visuals from one place is weird and she doesn't like it. but that's #a totally different situation where it's a further limitation of her ability without a trade off. it's a different consideration i think #when it allows her more freedom. to go somewhere and be completely alone by herself. to feel like she has more control and more privacy #to be able to hug her friends. or feel the rain. it would be one thing if she felt content existing 'differently'#but she... doesn't. canonically she doesn't. and i think that has to be taken into account.#i think you can tell a meaningful and positive story about disability without giving her physical form on earth too #but i think it has to be considered that those are limitations for her and that the way she exists feels isolating to her.#idk. a lot of the suggestions people come up with feel like they're coming from a place of compromise that i don't think is necessary #there are plenty of ways that having a body would be difficult for hera and i guess it's hopeful to me to think #maybe she'd still find it worth it.

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ikemenomegas · 1 year

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loss is a condition acquired to bury our pity

pairing: Uchiha Madara x Reader a/n: I should be working on something else, but it's like dragging rocks to do that one, and this one emerged somehow; title from the unnatural apologie of shadows; morning glories sometimes stand for short-lived love, yes red ones do exist c/w: omegaverse (alpha reader), grief turning into anger, nihilism, reader and madara both have post-warring states trauma, hints of characters experiencing war-crimes, madara's terrible plans, 18+ below the cut - reminder that alphas of all sexes have cocks

There is no kind love between you and he. Madara lays on his side, watching you wake slowly. He can feel the sun, low and heavy on the horizon.

It feels as he does, autumn reluctant.

He shifts on the futon, relishing the ache between his thighs and the sharper pain of new wounds on his body. He never knew how to love without a fight - brothers, father, friend, and now lover.

But his hands knew precision, they knew gentleness, they had known surrender.

He watched your chest rise and fall in a great sigh, your face turning towards him. With the red blush of dawn starting to peak through the window and splashing across your skin, you reminded him of asagao, morning glory, blooming with the dawn.

This was how you had met: the first two dark-eyed travelers awake in a dusty inn as far away from other people as you could get. He had been alone for too long, the day he had given into speaking with a stranger, seeking news from across the nations.

And then it had amused him to travel alongside you for awhile, as you were going the same direction as he was.

Until one day had stretched into two, and on into many, and you laughingly admitted to his late inquiry into your destination that you had none in mind. So you had been following one another, in an odd roundabout way.

It was the laugh that had done it, he recalls as you stir and wriggle beneath the covers, the heat of your body beginning to rise. It was bitter and biting, aching, like the empty places punched into his own heart.

He'd made you take him that evening, made himself open up to you like he had not done in years to anyone who was not an enemy. He had needed to, to find the right way to get what he wanted.

And what he wanted was not kind. He knew you were capable of it. He had seen your hands too, precise, capable of gentleness, capable of surrender, capable of a fight.

"Where are you from?" he asked.

"Does it matter, anymore?" you had asked, heavy and ironic, lighting the fire with a look that told him you knew he could do it as well and was shoving the duty onto someone else.

It was rather Uchiha of him, although you didn't know that. Fire was new life of all kinds. Maybe he should have given into this sooner. You've built one up more nights than he had on these near-nonexistent roads. In the old ways, it was one of many forms of courtship.

But he knew what you meant. Boundaries were shifting, alliances with it. Loyalty. You were clearly not one of those who bent yours easily.

But he needed to be sure.

"Not making one of the new villages your home then? I've heard they offer safety, negotiating power so we're not all used up against each other."

You gaze at him, long and wearied, as you stir a pot over the bright, flickering flames.

You don't fear exposure on the road, which tells him your are strong enough to do something about it. You are also clearly old enough to have survived many battles, which tells him more.

"It may be misguided of me, but I think you also know that the wars do not end so easily. Peace happens only too late, when both sides have lost too much. It won't last."

There again, that hopeful flicker of something familiar when you said It won't last.

"What will you do, when it starts again?"

You are quiet a long time, long enough for the soup to be done to your satisfaction, the game he caught so easily before this simmering and tender. You have salt carefully stored in a battered wooden container which you have sprinkled over it. The taste of it is, as always, divine.

Salt is still a coveted commodity, but he has seen you pay only with coin, never offering anything more valuable.

You ladle up a healthy portion for him and pass it over before serving yourself and expertly scraping the embers around the pit so the leftovers won't burn while you feed strips of dry wood to the live fire.

Your eyes flicker right to his and it's thrilling. No one wants to look an Uchiha in the eyes.

It feels like being in a time long ago, neither of you have given the other your family name all this time, as is shinobi custom. He wondered if you would look at him so dead on the same way if you knew what he was. He wondered if somehow you didn't know already. He wondered if you knew what it meant to share words and food like this across a living fire.

He cannot call the look in your eyes haunted. There must be some out-of-time out-of-place spirit inside for such a thing. This was the hole in his own heart, the place where regret and sorrow should live.

It blinked away when you found whatever you were looking for.

"Fight if I must, and die in whatever way I should."

It was an oddly unsatisfying answer.

"Why should you die?" he demanded.

You raised an eyebrow at him. "You're oddly inquisitive today. What will you do?"

He shrugged and smugly observed the irritated twitch of your eye.

It was all the opening he needed to goad you into further snipping at one another. It felt good, to feel the fire of another mind set against his.

Complaining of the repetitive movement of the road drew you to your feet and although only one person could match him blow for blow, it felt good to spar, to flex those muscles, to see the admiration in your eyes at the smoothness of his movements, to see the vital ferocity in yours.

He did not let you get him down in the dirt, only limited his power so that when he went down it was for real, but when you did, he kissed you, lips pressed full to yours.

You pulled back, full of surprise and questions. He glared at you, full of challenge and accusation until you glared right back and got to work seeing how far you could push him.

It was an alpha thing to do, but not done the way he knew most alphas did things. It was rough, but you were so in tune to every shift of his body, learning him.

It amused him to see you spread out a bedroll. The ground was soft sand and rough, but cushioning grass. It would not have bothered him to do this on the bare earth, but he felt a flash of affection as you ran a hand through his hair and undid the tie before laying him down again, combing out what dust had gathered in his thick, coarse hair, careful, never tugging hard enough for pain.

Tugging at your clothes irritated you. He knew this already because he'd seen the flash of ire as an irritable horse had caught your shoulder when bargaining with some farmer, and then the farmer's children had brushed too close and the reaction had been shinobi-muted, but you'd been in a terrible mood for hours.

He did it now because he refused to be the only one bared. You let him because you understood as much, and Madara relished the first warning nip of teeth against his collarbones as a certain galling heat in your scent spiked. You tugged your arms free of your sleeve with a defiant flash of movement, dragging your teeth over the same spot in a way that made him twist into you, hissing.

You pulled back, pausing. "I hate this world," you said. "It can be nothing but hateful when it has none of what I once loved or protected left in it."

"That is not what you want to tell me," Madara said, his breath hot on your ear as he bit the lobe. Your breath hitched in response.

The ties closing his coat had come apart easily but you could not bring your hands to go any further.

"How did you lose?"

"Slowly," Madara growled, yanking on your other sleeve and relishing the dark bleed into your eyes. "And too much."

"Did you watch it happen?" You shivered beneath his calloused hands, tracing over your shoulders and down, catching on the low edge of your sarashi when he skimmed your hip.

"Oh yes," he groaned as you leaned down and sucked a mark at the hollow of his throat. "I watched him die by inches, for days, while his mate fought to save him."

"Who was it?"

All at once it was too much and it was with an easy surge of strength that Madara flipped the two of you so he was leaning over you, teeth bared.

"Who was yours?"

Your hands were clasped with his, and you turned your head, pressed your lips to his fingers as you answered.

"They held me by my robes while they gutted her slowly, right in front of me. It was not fast enough."

You tilted your head to look at him and he saw that same detached absence in your eyes that he knew filled him whenever he spoke of his own last, worst loss. He was also certain that the full story of the event was worse than your abbreviated explanation.

He let you go slowly, untangling his fingers from the bunched fabric pulled down from your shoulders and pooling around your ribs on the bedroll. He sat back and you lifted yourself on an elbow.

He knew you were watching his hands when he shed his jacket. The high collar caught scent and held it close to his skin and he could see the way your pupils blew out as it released and wafted over you.

The scent of your own arousal pleased him. He'd been told before that he was handsome, and it was nice to be admired, thought beautiful.

There was no one else for miles and miles. Without shame, Madara reached down, slid his hand under his waistband and cupped himself. He was slicked-wet.

When he withdrew his hand, he caressed your cheek, felt how you shuddered and turned toward that concentrated portion of his essence.

You did not care that he smelled like blood and the sweet bite of rice grain alcohol. Maybe he would find more like you if he spoke to more people, but he had found you.

You tried to trade places with him once more, but he resisted you, his teeth bared and expression wild. You attempted to lean back and he snarled, deep and feral.

That sound called out to something in you, and you snarled back. He tugged on the exposed mesh armor that covered your chest and arms, and you made an ugly sound in the back of your throat.

"Take it off," Madara commanded.

And suddenly you were angry. He wanted so badly to see what the world had done to you?

He was alight with some kind of victory as you pulled the disarranged top over your head and extricated yourself from the mesh.

He finally did the same as you finished, pulling off his own thin layer, baring scars that spoke of survival.

You came together in a bruising collide, upright like wrestlers, nails scratching at one another as though to mark the moment as different from a state of blind existence.

It was a different kind of violence, but one that he thought perhaps he could get used to. He had already learned there was no replacing what was lost, but here was someone who understood as no one else had.

He pulled his pants off only enough to expose himself, impatient suddenly for something more. You bit his lip when he did the same to you, pulling at the ties on your pants until he could get your cock to spring free.

He was at such an angle where the tip immediately bumped up against his slick opening and the sensation surprised him, invigorated him.

But you were watching him ever so warily.

He moved his hand so that it was beneath him and shivered as he began stretching himself open, the slick sounds of his fingers in his own opening goading you into biting hard on his chest, your fingers digging into his shoulder blade hard enough to bruise.

His scent was a riot around you, heady and clean somehow. He did not smell like the sick, dead tang of a battlefield, but like new iron, ready for steel.

You licked a stripe up his sternum and he shivered, back arching.

His fingers were cooling and wet when he gripped onto your shoulder, nails grasping like claws. The flash of pain spurred you onward and you guided his hip with one hand and yourself with the other until you were pushing up and inside of his hot, wet heat.

The sharp spike in his scent, like the exhale of breath over a clear cup of rice wine, spilled over.

Madara ground down on you, pulling you deeper.

"It's all a farce," he murmured into your ear finally.

You were breathing hard against his chest, buried to the hilt inside of him. You didn't know if it had hurt, to take you all at once, but you knew if it had that he would not care.

"What is this reality worth?" He showed you for only a few seconds the type of pace he wanted you to set, and then urged you on, scoring a line of red marks over your ribs.

You bucked up into him, hitting deep places that put stars across his vision, better even than being dashed over the head or bled near dry.

He straddled your hips. Your legs were braced against the ground to give you more leverage. Yes, his intuition had never truly failed him, and he could feel the strength of your body pressed against his, inside of him.

If he were the type for children, you would have made a good enough sire.

You took him with a warrior's precision and knowledge that time was never on your side, but you also held him in your warrior's perception. He let himself shiver at the intensity of that focus.

You took advantage of the way every shift of his body made his insides tighten around you and heighten his own sensation. You played the remaining soft points on his body like an expert at the koto.

It had been so long since there was time for music, he had not thought to check your callouses for the kind of wire that didn't mean to draw blood and kill breath.

He should ask you to play, he decided as you dragged a shiver from him like a run from the instrument, your nails dragging a pattern across his back and down to his hips and thighs.

He came when you drew blood on him, your teeth digging hard enough into the muscle of his breast to mark him for days.

As ever, once the pulsing shocks had calmed enough to make him want it, he gave as good as he got and reared back, leveraging himself enough to bite down on your shoulder. Hard.

You bared your teeth, some of them outlined in his blood, but locked the roar away in your chest, well practiced in keeping essential silence.

You felt the force of Madara's will lock down against your own, pushing you towards your own completion. Because that wasn't just a retaliation bite, which would have been welcome and well-deserved.

That was an omega's bite, placed over a scent-gland with the intent to own.

Madara did not bite down in a normal way either, sinking his teeth in carefully to leave an elegant scar. He bit like you were enemies, twisting his head as he did, as if daring you to watch him, to stop him, to stop pressing up into him, coaxing his finish long.

It was a very, very old way to do things, a fire way to do things, in more ways that one. The Sarutobi had regimented ways of doing this, now, involving agreed upon combat, and a certain amount of posturing. Some of the other close-fire clans told old tales of mates courting by fighting, long and hard until someone gave in.

You placed your fingers in a loose ring on the nape of his neck, the only moment you would give him to change his mind. He could feel the swelling of your knot at his opening.

Uchiha Madara did not easily change his mind.

You bite was cleaner than his but broke the skin all the same, shredding down until you could taste him, blood and blood and that sharp fragrant note underneath of it.

You bucked up into him, harder, faster, abandoning the normal course of seduction, and lighting his nerves on fire instead of easing them.

He groaned, hard and euphoric, with blood still in his own mouth. Your knot, filling him full, pushed him back over the edge, easy enough, and he let it go, felt the pulse of it behind his eyes. He felt your warmth fill him and it felt right, satisfying. He had been his own fire for so long.

"Madara," you groaned in turn. You did not stop moving, even as he pulsed and fluttered around you, even though it must be causing you your own discomfort.

You laved your tongue over the mark you had left behind, which both eased the ache of it and made it sting as you disturbed the fresh wounds.

It was enough to remind him that all the pain in the world was just a moment, bright like sparks.

All will be as it should, better even, someday.

He had not quite meant to bond with you the first time, but it seemed fitting, after. You had stayed knotted within him long enough to send him into a third, near painful finish, and there were many more bites across both of your shoulders.

He touched one of those now, which had scarred fainter than the bondmark, but still showed evidence of that first, true encounter.

You started, suddenly perfectly alert, half-sitting. Alert to the world around him, around you.

"Wha'sit?"

He smirked a bit at the stumbling stiffness of your tongue. A low, rumbling purr coaxed out from him, filling the room. You spared a brief brush of awareness over him, which was wise of you, but otherwise flopped back down among the cushions.

He curled up against your back so that you own chest cavity was filled with the echoes of him, your senses vibrating with it.

It was not comforting and was not meant to be.

"It's today?" you asked, after you knew the words would not slur and your heartbeat was back to rock-steady.

"Mhm," Madara hummed through the purring.

It wasn't really the right answer. It could have been any day, but if you said so -- well, you had a sense for these things, a nose for disaster that he'd seen develop among some of his own clansmen.

You certainly had a nose for the restlessness that took him, that demanded satisfaction the way his heart had once demanded escape to the riverbank. And despite what Hashirama thought, he did plan their little competitions. Around his own whims, certainly, but they were not entirely random.

"I'll find you, after" he promised. The purring faded, but the warmth of sunlight filling the little room took its place.

It invigorated him, warmed his muscles. You were not so in tune with such things, but he felt the quiet flex and extension of your hands and feet and then your wrists and ankles as you shifted beneath the covers.

He leaned over you, pressing his lips to one of those old scars, fingers finding one of the new marks he left on you.

He will want a bath, before he goes. This is his. He's not interested in Hashirama accusing him of an accomplice. Although he of all people should forgive Madara of no longer being so alone.

You stroked over his knuckles, scarred and toughened with over two decades of battle. "You always do."

With him here, you could believe that the lonely, aching emptiness was just a dream.

With him, it was not kindness, not like the closer, comforting love he had observed between other mates, but you knew his dream, knew his loss and did not deny it.

He thought again of his plan, and looked forward to what would likely be the last time he met his once and only friend. He no longer had the Nine-tails but for a final feint he himself would be enough.

Just as this was. He would not be alone on the other side.

For now, that would be enough.

#uchiha madara #omega!madara #alpha!reader #omegaverse #io.omegas #loss is denial anger bargaining #pity is regret disappointment sorrow #but maybe more importantly feeling what has happened and understanding that there is nothing to be done about it #this is two people who cannot get there #who got stuck in that moment of loss and are unwilling to move on from the patterns of the past #Madara is so much more lost than any of the other characters in the franchise I find him incredibly difficult #he cannot be reasoned with #he cannot even be bargained with #he has only wanted one impossible thing and no one is his equal #but i've been toying with the idea what what a mate for him would look like for months #and he does acknowledge different kinds of strength #so this seemed as close to reasonable as I could get #Madara is possessive and decisive and petty and pushy #naruto x reader

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