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softquietsteadylove · 1 year

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Hi!! I love 5+1 things and wanted to share my request with you! Please choose the AU you think it fits!

5 times Gil remembers her little quirks and habits, and 1 time she remember his.

The first time he noticed one of her habits, he was quite sure he wasn't supposed to. They didn't know each other that well--him and the Ice Queen. And he was even more sure that she liked it that way.

They were across from each other at a quarterly meeting between some of the largest territory holders in the area. Ajak was checking on everyone; she had a bit of a habit of worrying over them, like a mother hen of sorts.

Gilgamesh admittedly didn't always pay a lot of attention in said meetings. Koreatown was pretty self-contained. He mostly showed up to maintain mutual respect and then spent the whole time looking around the room like a kid in a class.

The Ice Queen had painfully good posture. Back rigid, shoulders poised, that lace shawl that was always dangling around her was ever present. Sometimes it was up around her shoulders and sometimes it sat in the crooks of her elbows like a scarf or something. It looked sheer but it had some kind of design in it if seen closely enough.

Not that he looked at it that much.

The Ice Queen, although sitting like a perfect porcelain doll, also seemed lacking in attention. Ikaris was briefing them about something and her eyes had drifted away from him and just downward slightly. She could pretend to be paying attention again in an instant.

She was tracing her fingers over her lace.

Gil was silent, leaning in his chair and watching her move her fingers gently, almost subconsciously seeming. She was tracing that pattern that was so delicately and lovingly woven into the small but strong strands. It reminded him of when he got his first gang tattoo as a young kid; he would trace his fingers over it when he was bored.

As if sensing him smiling at her, her eyes flicked up to him, sharp and cold as the knives she carried.

He rushed his eyes away; the last person he wanted to anger was her.

Then, when they were having 'private meetings', he noticed something else about her. His Ice Queen - as he liked to call her in his head - was not good at...initiating things.

Even though they always ended up in her office, it was always him that ended up calling her about business. She would be the one to say that they should meet at her office instead of his, and he didn't blame her if she wanted the extra security of familiar territory in which to...meet.

He would come over, transition from his security into hers. He would wait for her to finish her work, lying on her couch until she was ready for him (his heart pounding and blood rushing already). When he heard her set down her pen it was a sign that she was done and he could approach her.

She was the one in control--in power. She made him approach her, make the first move, initiate things. And he kind of loved it. He had never been afraid of a powerful woman, and Thena was about as powerful as they came.

Gil stared at his phone, swiping through his calendar. He had put off three rather important meetings just to be here, today in particular. It wasn't good business, and his assistants and security of his own business were starting to get concerned.

He knew they knew, and they knew that he knew that they knew. But tight lips could save a life, in their business. And even more than that, everyone knew better than to be on the bad side of the Ice Queen.

They knew how down bad he already was.

"Ahem."

Gil startled, looking up from his position stretched out on the couch.

Thena started down at him, her arms crossed, "am I interrupting your busy schedule, Tyrant?"

"Uh," he blinked, his phone nearly slipping from his grasp as he rushed to sit up properly. He hadn't even heard her walk over to him. "S-Sorry, I-"

"If you have other engagements, Gilgamesh," she started in a tone that sounded miffed. But it soften just the slightest bit when she added, "you could have simply said so."

His eyes brightened, but she was already looking away from him. The Ice Queen didn't do softness (not by her own choice, at least). He grinned, practically throwing his phone across the room in his eagerness to give her his undivided attention. "C'mere, Ice."

Thena huffed, "you do not-!"

He pulled her down to him, settling her on his lap as he kissed her. For all her attempts to seem like she was resisting him, she moaned as their lips met, just like he did.

They were already pulling at each other's clothes like horny teenagers. But they didn't have all day for these private meetings of theirs. Thena's lips dragged away from his as she tore his shirt open, "you couldn't hear me?"

Hear her? He didn't...he searched through his mind. His eyes had been on his phone, but he could remember a sound a little ways away. It happened once, then twice, and it got louder and louder.

She had been putting her pen down again and again, harder and harder. She had been trying to get his attention...in a very Thena way. His face lit up again and she turned away from him, some pink rising in that pale skin of hers.

She had been initiating things, in her own way.

After the whole Little Heiress debacle, when he was still proving himself, he got to notice even more. In Thena's efforts to shut him out again, he still got to see more of her than he had before.

She still didn't let him take her on dates, or even 'meetings', as she was still calling them. They either met about business or they met to fulfill a physical need. It was only sometimes when he would manage to convince her to have a meal with him while he was loitering around her office.

But her affections were still there, just in smaller ways. She wouldn't let him call her 'baby' or 'princess' or 'sweetness' as much, but she would let him kiss her cheek before they parted ways. It was something.

And she wouldn't let him hold her hand for no reason, but she would let him brush her hair out of his way to touch her shoulder sometimes. It was something.

And she wouldn't say 'I love you' back. He didn't blame her for that one. But she had stopped ordering him to stop saying it, and that was at least something.

"Hey," he said gently as he sat up from lying around on her couch. She barely looked up from her paperwork. He slipped his phone into his jacket pocket, "I have a meeting I have to go to."

He was in his own office so seldom these days, reluctant to be away from her for too long.

"Hm," she sighed, going back to her own work. It was as good a send off as he was going to get, probably.

He came over to her desk anyway, though, putting his hand next to hers and leaning down, "it should be over by 4. Can I come back then?"

He always asked, now, never assuming he was welcome unless she told him.

Rather than just shrug at him, she sighed, "I have a meeting until 5--after that."

He smiled, kissing the back of her head on her silken hair, which she allowed. It was something. "I'll bring dinner."

Thena's hand moved away from her papers and to his, her finger delicately tapping against the ring tattooed on his finger. "If you like."

It was as good as an 'I love you', and that was something.

He had become pretty comfortable at her place, even before the whole 'getting shot' thing. And in the time following the shooting and his recovery, he had only come to know it as his own place more and more.

Thena always reminded him that he didn't live here and wasn't technically moved in with her. And yet she would include his stuff in her laundry service, had his car added to the building's security clearance for the garage, and even started entrusting him with her grocery deliveries.

She was a terrible cook. He knew that already, but the first time he had seen how truly little there was in her fridge he had nearly fainted.

For the first few weeks after the shooting, he would only work from home and go into the office for meetings. She was back in her office full time, of course.

She would get up, and that would wake him up too, since they slept so entangled with each other. He would kiss her good morning and she would tell him to go back to sleep. And at first, he did, the latent fatigue of injury and his meds suppressing his desire to get up.

But as time went on, he started falling back asleep less and less. Even when he laid back down and tried, he didn't necessarily fall back into slumber. And he started noticing something.

He would listen as Thena went into the luxurious bathroom attached to the bedroom. She would do whatever skincare or makeup she did, brush her hair, get ready for the day--all that. And perhaps because she thought he was still asleep, she would come over to his side of the bed.

She would lean over and, now with minty toothpaste breath, kiss him again oh-so gently. Her hand would press over his heart lightly and she would whisper an 'I love you' against his cheek. Then she would take her lace from the hook on her side of the bed and be off.

He heard the tap shut off and the spit of toothpaste. Something about seeing the polished and pristine Ice Queen so human--so mundane and domestic, really enchanted him. He loved that she had a real, human life under all the sparkle and image and power. He loved that he was a part of it.

Thena came back in, her heels soft on the rug below the bed. She tucked her hair behind her ear as she prepared to lean down to him and kiss him goodbye a second time.

Gil caught her hand atop his heart, opening his eyes just to wink at her, "hey, Ice."

She huffed at him, although he could tell she didn't appreciate the embarrassment of being caught. "If you're already up, you could get some work done, you know."

"Soon," he chuckled, letting her protest in her own way. He leaned up, kissing her properly, tasting the toothpaste she used. His other hand came up to run through her hair and over her cheek, clinging to her.

Thena moaned gently, leaning up until he couldn't follow her anymore. She pressed him back down to the bed and flicked her hair over her shoulder again, "was that all?"

He loved her. He grinned, "I guess."

"Hm," she gave him a little hint of a smile too, poking him right over his heart to press him into the pillows again, "rest, Tyrant. Koreatown will need its King back in the throne."

He sighed, still lying around on her silk pillows, naked under her cotton sheets. His head rolled to the side, watching her walk to the door of her - their - bedroom. "I love you, Thena."

She paused at the door, smiling (just not in his direction). "Get up and take a shower, Gilgamesh. You need it...after last night."

Now that they were engaged, he was certain that he knew everything there was to know about his Ice Queen. Every little habit, all of her little thoughts and quirks and fears. If his Ice Queen had fears, that was to say, because obviously she was fearless. Almost.

He couldn't blame her; his aunt was truly terrifying. But Imo liked Thena! He kept telling her that, but Thena was still a little nervous around her, despite his attempts to talk her out of it.

"Hey," he whispered as he came over to the sink with more dishes and plates in hand. He set them on the counter, reaching for Thena's hand in the sink, "will you sit down? Let me take care of these."

Thena glanced behind her for just a second, "you should visit with Imo."

Gil chuckled, pulling Thena's hands out of the water and patting them dry, "I've visited with her plenty. I'm sure she's sick of me by now anyway. She keeps asking me where her daughter has gotten to."

Thena smiled shyly, looking towards Imo's beautiful dining room again. Imo had changed her tune quickly from wondering what Gil was doing staying in America to accepting Thena as his wife-to-be. "I'm trying to thank her for her hospitality, especially after making such a beautiful meal for us."

"Hey, I helped," he pouted at her.

Thena just shook her head, but she was smiling when she leaned in for a gentle kiss. "You always make beautiful meals."

"Thena!"

Gil held back a laugh as Thena jumped at Imo's sharp and sudden calling of her name. He whispered, "she won't bite."

"Y-Yes, Imo," Thena answered demurely, walking back into the dining room and leaning against the door frame.

The matriarch waved her hand at her, the sleeve of her jeogori moving with it, "you leave him to that. Come and talk with me."

"I-" Thena turned, but he already had his sleeves rolled up, ready to finish what Thena had started.

He grinned, "you girls chat. I'll join you when I'm done."

He kissed her cheek as he slipped her ring back onto her finger for her.

"Dishes, Gilgamesh!"

He sighed; Imo was suddenly Thena's biggest fan, but still scandalized whenever he wanted to so much as kiss his fiance. "Yeah, yeah."

"Come and sit," he heard her say to Thena much more gently.

"Yes, Imo."

Gil groaned as he slid back into the bed--their bed, in their bedroom, in their penthouse home. "Fuck, it's nice to be home."

"It was a very nice trip," Thena sighed as she also slid into bed next to him. She pulled her lace off and hung it up next to the bed, adjusting the straps of her little silk nightdress. "It was nice of Imo to have us at her home."

Gil just smiled up at her from his pillow. Imo loved Thena--just adored her. She told him herself that she had apparently given up on the idea of having a daughter-in-law because he didn't seem to have any prospects when he left Korea (rude).

"I'm going to ask Kingo to arrange for some flowers to be sent to her from us," Thena narrated as she settled onto her pillow next to him. "Do you think that would be acceptable to her?"

Gil unfolded his arms and brought hers up to his lips, kissing the ring on her finger, "she'll love it, baby. She's already bragging about you to her business associates."

Thena just smiled, letting him kiss his way up the inside of her wrist. "I should be bragging. She is a revered business owner, and in a time when it was even harder for a women to build her own syndicate like that."

Gil nodded, rolling onto his back more to flail his hand at his bedside table. "I can look up what companies there will do deliveries."

"Gil-"

"Imo likes traditional stuff, I'm sure there'll be plenty of options for old lady flowers."

Thena laughed faintly, "Gil."

He sighed, turning over and not finding his phone at all, just his lamp and his watch and wallet. He turned over, "Princess, did I leave my phone-"

Thena pointed over her shoulder, where his phone was sitting in a little nook in the headboard. Usually she left her keys and her knives up there, but there was his phone, wirelessly charging and everything.

Gil blinked at it. "Was there always a charger there?"

"No." Nothing if not concise, his Ice Queen. She smiled, though, lying down and tucking herself into his side with her hand on his heart, like she always did. "You're always feeling around for your phone with your right hand in the morning."

It was reflexive. He was right handed, but his right hand was always occupied with holding Thena's shoulder. His left was just a little slower at reaching for his phone in the morning.

"So I put it up there so you can reach it easier," she sighed, nuzzling her head in under his chin just the way she liked it.

Gil just stared at her (at the top of her head, at least). He hadn't thought anything of it. If anything, it was just something that he did when he was half asleep and hadn't had any coffee yet. But she had gone to the trouble of getting a wireless charger installed in the frame of their bed so he could reach his phone better in the mornings?

Thena sighed as he pressed a kiss to the crown of her hair. "I can feel you looking for it when we get up for work. I don't know where you put it before we were sleeping together."

He sighed as well, adjusting his arm around her delicate, beautiful frame against him, pressing his cheek to her forehead. "I prefer not to think about that sad, sad time in my life, Ice."

#Ice Queen/Tyrant King AU #it's time for a classic #I did think about a couple different AUs for this one #but I really wanted to explore more of the in betweens in their relationship #the times between the big things and events #when it's just them #the little beats that make up the grand story of their situationship turned romance #turned engagement #everyone knew about them fucking #Kingo would take an extra long lunch break when she and Gil were having 'private meetings'#and I've said it once and I'll say it again #Imo loves Thena #loves loves loves her #a friend of mine told me that the concept of in-laws isn't really a thing #like once you're in the family that's it #you're our daughter now #so Imo is like yes finally I have a beautiful daughter and not just my lazy foul mouthed nephew #and Gil is like bro wtf

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shadowtraveled · 3 months

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"mithrun is the only real monsterfucker in dungeon meshi" is objectively the funniest bit you can get out of his everything, but in all seriousness i think his attraction to his love interest is deliberately overstated—and that makes sense, because romantic jealousy is a classic and digestible motive, which is explicitly what kabru was aiming for in condensing mithrun's backstory, and also because until chapter 94, mithrun wasn't willing to admit to the true nature of his desires.

but because romantic envy is both classic and digestible, it probably isn’t a unique enough or complicated enough desire to tempt a demon’s appetite. mithrun’s wish, as far as we can figure from kabru’s reduced retelling, was to have a life in which he had never become one of the canaries, and that carries like 3857 implications and desires within it. that’s delicious. his love interest acts as sort of a red herring to his motivation for making it, though. (side note: i'm saying "love interest" here because, keeping in mind that i barely speak japanese on a good day anymore, "想い人" is something i'd usually take as just kind of an old-fashioned and romantic way to refer to a lover, but in context i wonder if both the connotation of yearning and the vagueness are intentional, and i think this phrasing gets those aspects of it more effectively. anyway.)

mithrun considered his love interest to be untrustworthy. there was a minute where i thought that comment might be about a similar-looking elf (yugin, one of his squad members), but comparing the two…

the "sketchy" arrow is definitely referring to the elf we know as his love interest—the bangs go toward her right, she only has the one forehead ornament, and, most notably, her ears aren't notched.

every time she’s given a full-body depiction in his dungeon, she’s drawn as a chimera, with the body of a snake from the waist down. (side note: the “what if a dungeon has chimeras before reaching level 4?”/“then the dungeon lord is unstable” exchange just being mithrun grilling his past self alive is so funny. he’s so. but anyway) there are a couple things about this.

first, the snake part of the chimera appears to be modeled after some species of coral snake mimic

which, in the biology-for-fun manga, i… doubt is a coincidence, especially with the added context of the “untrustworthy” comment. the dungeon’s conjured illusion of mithrun’s love interest was a harmless copycat of a venomous original. for whatever reason, he felt this person was a threat and made up a "safe" version of her to be in a relationship with, and while it’s definitely possible to be attracted to or even love someone you find to be toxic and/or intimidating, when you take that into consideration alongside the configuration of her body, you get some interesting implications.

which brings us to our second point: if we assume that mithrun was not in fact fucking a snake, then sexual attraction, at least, was so far removed from his idea of a relationship with this person that he did not even bother to keep her dungeon copy human enough to maintain the illusion of the option of a sexual relationship. this is somewhat echoed in the depictions of their interactions, which also imply a frankly unexpected romantic distance. she kisses his cheek and he doesn't seem to react; she's at the edge of a narrow bed with only one set of pillows, on top of his blankets while he's underneath them.

the kiss is particularly interesting because it seems to contrast the text. kabru's narration tells us this was everything mithrun could have asked for, but mithrun is there looking unreadable to pensive, likely because this is right before the panel that makes it clear things in the dungeon are beginning to go wrong.

walking through this backwards for a minute, we have the physical barrier of his bedding and the spatial separation inherent in a bed made for one person, the emotional barrier of his mounting anxiety getting in the way of his ability to enjoy the affection he sought, and... the snake, which historically carries the connotation of temptation, yes, but also mistrust, barring physical intimacy. okay. ok. if a dungeon reflects the mentality of its lord, all of this might suggest that mithrun was not able to have any real desire for a relationship with this person. his unwillingness to be vulnerable or let another person in was insurmountable. but in that case, why was she such a focal point that she remained to the end, after his dungeon had stopped creating iterations of his friends to come and visit him? why would he get so upset over her meeting with his brother that he became lord of a dungeon about it?

well. mithrun's brother was also interested in her, probably genuinely. and mithrun had to win.

you have an older brother who your parents completely ignore, probably in part because he is chronically ill/disabled and almost definitely in part because he received a ton of recessive traits that resulted in rumors that he was an illegitimate child. you are aware, most likely because those same parents fucking told you, that you actually are an illegitimate child. but they keep you around because you had the good fortune of looking just like your mother. what can that possibly teach you but that you, like your brother, are disposable?

it's utterly unsurprising that mithrun, under these circumstances, developed a pathological need to be better than everyone around him. people don't keep you otherwise. i'd argue this is also why he says he looked down on everyone he knew while milsiril claims his dungeon reeked of feelings of inferiority—he sought out people's worst traits and prioritized them in his mind to protect his already extremely fragile sense of self-worth, and all the while he tried to be as likable and high-performing as he possibly could be. his parents disposed of him anyway, but even then he tried to keep up the performance. he was kind to everyone. he never once lost to a dungeon.

when he saw his "love interest" meeting up with his brother, what he saw was himself being replaced by a person his parents had always treated as worthless, and if that was what they thought of the child they'd kept, what value could anyone possibly see in the bastard they'd given away to die? mithrun and kabru tell the story like he wanted to win this unnamed elf's heart, but it was never about being with her. it was about cementing his worth, proving that he didn't deserve to be thrown away.

and so it's particularly cruel that his demon discarded him, too. but maybe it's also particularly gentle that, in the end, there was someone who refused to even consider giving up on him.

kui laid it out in three panels better than i could hope to.

yeah. it's love. you wanted to be loved, even when the only way you were able to understand it was through the desire to be wanted, and you wanted that so badly that the idea of being consumed felt like the promise of finally mattering to someone.

#dungeon meshi spoilers #mithrun #dungeon meshi #this has been rotating for a while but i wanted to check my evidence before getting into it thanks user angelspenance for posting that meme #half of this is just the text and the other half i'm sure has been said before but it's making my brain [radio static] so here this is #someone did for sure mention this but i do find it very cute that in his fucked up conjured world meant to portray his ideal reality #his teammates came to visit him. like part of the fantasy was then explicitly that they cared about him and were his friends. even though #he says he tried to see the worst in them.#hm it does feel important to note that i do also believe 100% in mithrun suicidality--his desire to be eaten does seem to focus a lot on #wanting it to be Over. wanting not to be left incomplete and empty anymore.#but that loops back around a bit to the hole in your heart that appears when you feel unloved. it's many things and the same thing at once #snakes #long post #severe problems #meshy

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