Tag: marsh writes silly things

If Only Tonight We Could Sleep by sleepmarshes

Ok but, even if you’re sick of this post, at least @tilliquoi’s bomb-ass cover art is gorgeous and worth looking at, amirite

So hi everybody! I entered iotwcs in a fanfic contest on inkitt, and I think I have until the 21st of Oct to get enough votes to ride on the top 10% wagon train. Every vote helps me, so I humbly ask you, blessed lurker and/or excitable fanperson, if you have the time and you liked the story, please consider dropping in and giving these weird-ass spagettios and pickles a heart.

I am told reviews really help you in the contest, and I know a lot of you have made (wonderful, gorgeous) reviews for me on this fic already on ffn/ao3 (thank you SO much you guys!), but if you haven’t and would like to, or for whatever reason would like to review again on inkitt, it’d be much appreciated!

[a lot of SE fandom authors have also entered the contest! you can find them here: 

(if there are others let me know and i’ll update this thing)

Please consider dropping by and giving them your love too! Fandom represent!]

If Only Tonight We Could Sleep by sleepmarshes

If Only Tonight We Could Sleep by sleepmarshes

/scratches head

everyone else was doing it i guess? i had this all nice and already edited so i threw it up there ‘cause who knows? there are quite a few of us in SE fandom in this contest! way to represent! if you like our fics, give us a boost (and a heart on the fic on inkitt!) if you have the time! ❤

If Only Tonight We Could Sleep by sleepmarshes

unboxing of the printed version of If Only Tonight We Could Sleep.

if you’re interested in making your own copy, here’s some information: beep

if you’d like to read the story, try it on for size here: honk

thank you so much for helping me make this happen you guys T-T

the audio got cut off but I’M JUST BASICALLY BEING EMOTIONAL AND THANKFUL AND I LOVE EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU 

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

nsfw week 2015 part three

marshofsleep:

marshofsleep:

i interpret ‘week’ as ‘whenever i can get a thing done hopefully in this lifetime’. here is part three of the quantum entanglement/WoW/anime trash fic of no name. part one can be found here. part two can be found here.

still not nsfw yet, unless you wanna include accidental happy trail sightings.

Part three_Dance

A week later, his brother happens.

“Nice makeout photos, dorkwich.”

This is the absolute worst thing to hear when he’s in the zone, dancing the fine line between maximum damage per second and aggroing a gigantic raid boss off ReaperMan.

Keep reading

pretty short and uneventful compared to the first two parts, but reblaggin for the morning crowd anyhow.

i’m already 1k into the next chapter! thanks for all the support and lovely retags, guys <3. you’ll forgive me for Wes’s boyfriend, right?

nsfw week 2015 part three

i interpret ‘week’ as ‘whenever i can get a thing done hopefully in this lifetime’. here is part three of the quantum entanglement/WoW/anime trash fic of no name. part one can be found here. part two can be found here.

still not nsfw yet, unless you wanna include accidental happy trail sightings.

Part three_Dance

A week later, his brother happens.

“Nice makeout photos, dorkwich.”

This is the absolute worst thing to hear when he’s in the zone, dancing the fine line between maximum damage per second and aggroing a gigantic raid boss off ReaperMan.

Half a foot away from the microphone, Wes loudly slurps the airy remainders of his doubleshot on ice. Soul quietly panics. Just as phase two of the boss fight begins, Death barks, “Eater, stop drinking like a slob.”

“Sorry, Mom,” he quips back half-heartedly before covering his mic with his free hand and awkwardly navigating his character to his assigned spot with only his mouse. To his brother, gritting through clenched teeth, he says, “Asshole. What are you talking about,” as if he doesn’t have every clue. Soul’s eyes are trained to the screen, but it’s not like he needs to look to know Wes is wearing the grin that has plagued him for his entire life.

In one-to-one voice chat, Reaper in his ear like her mouth is touching him: “You okay over there?”

Heat shoots down his spine. Ever since the con, she’s been using a microphone during raids, though she mostly only talks to him on private binds, which is equally the best and worst thing that has ever happened to him. He is now at maximum multitasking – if any more distracting bullshit occurs after this moment in time, he is going to be fucked proper.

Soul lifts his hand off the mic for half a second to shoot back, “M’fine,” before covering it again. Of course she’d notice – she notices any character in her field of vision running around like a moron.

His brother leans on his desk like it’s a photoshoot prop designed to hold his ass. “I dunno who the pretty princess was, but if I were her father, you’d be six feet in the ground before the week was out.”

Soul shrugs one side of his headset off an ear with a shoulder, glaring at his brother. “How the shit did you find a bunch of nerd-con pics taken by Nintendotakus?”

“They’re viral, guy. There are gifsets.”

Left ear, Death, full-on bitch. “Eater, stay out of the fire.”

“FUCKIN’–” Soul blurts, mousing wildly to safety.

“Some of those shots’re positively filthy, little brother. I’m proud,” says Wes, shaking ice into his mouth and crunching loudly in the exact way Mother always hates.

“Just– not now, you stupid crotch.”

ShadowStag this time, smooth and deadly: “I’m not wasting a battle res on you, Eater. Move.”

Soul growls angrily, taking his hand off the mic and returning it to the keyboard in an attempt to avoid the many possible ways of dying during phase two of his life sucking this much. “I’m going, I’m going,” he gripes.

Seizing the opportunity, Wes chirps with, “I hear you have a fanpage on Facebook, now.”

“Uhhhhhg, go the fuck awaaaaay–”

Wes gets personal with the mic, pushing Soul’s head aside with a sturdy hand and completely blocking the computer screen. “They had to photoshop your hair and eyes,” he says, defending himself from Soul’s flailing fists, “but that dumbstruck look on your mug when Zelda plants one on you has the masses pissing themselves in fandom euphoria.”

For the second time in as many weeks, voice chat implodes. Despite this, ReaperMan continues to dutifully tank, spamming a text macro that floods every possible game chat channel with fourteen counts of, “I WILL TURN THIS DRAGON AROUND.”

SoulEater dies in a fire.

“Also, I tweeted some of the juicier ones. You should’ve stayed in the business, kid.” Soul sinks low in his chair as his brother whistles Epona’s song, strutting out of the bedroom.

“I hate every single one of you,” he says into the din of voice chat.

“Even me? I made the fan page,” BlackStar cackles, heedless of the feedback bouncing over his own speakers.

“How the f–” He rubs his face with a hand. “You’re a shizno, Blake.”

“Am I the only one here doing my fucking job?” ReaperMan says, the sounds of her spamming her keys echoing across the internet.

\

The Kiss really is viral. Another week goes by and his Facebook is a slurry of notifications and friend requests. He’s forced to disable alerts on his phone to be able to concentrate on anything for more than five minutes. He even goes grocery shopping just to get away from the internet.

Arms laden with heavy plastic bags, he walks into the apartment and finds some half-naked redhead making out with Wes in the living room, happy trail like a Colorado forest fire peeking out from an unzipped jumpsuit.

Soul doesn’t have it in himself to scream about it. “‘House renos’,” he says accusingly.

Wes is straddling his boyfriend’s lap on the futon Soul had once enjoyed taking naps on until right this moment. “Hi bro,” he smiles, flush from activity. The swollen-lip-look is a million times better on Reaper, Soul thinks, and he refuses to take that thought back out of sheer contempt. “His kid’s got homework to do, so we’re here for the weekend. Go hang out with your princess, ‘kay?”

Well, that confirms that the boyfriend is, by definition, a dilf. He considers throwing up in the entryway just to make a statement. “First off, she’s not ‘mine’. Second, why must you defile everything I hold dear? At least put a sheet down or something, fuck.”

“You can take the caaaaar,” his brother sing-songs, which is actually code for: Get out or I will leave condoms in your bathroom.

Soul unceremoniously drops all the groceries and goes to his room to pack a ratty, highschool-era messenger bag. Tells himself he’s only complying because he doesn’t actually live here, and not because he’s had to purchase a full body suit to sanitize his bathroom in the past. “YOU GET TO PUT THE FOOD AWAY,” he yells.

\

He’s in the Taco Bell parking lot, sucking up the air conditioning in Wes’s car, digesting one-too-many crunchwrap supremes. Calls BlackStar while simultaneously glaring at all the birds that dare sing as if today is a great day.

“Begin,” Blake answers, loud road noise already indicating that this will probably be a dead-end.

“Wes is loveshacking the apartment. I need a place for the weekend.”

He sits through the required laughter at his misfortune before Blake says, “Denied. I’m goin’ on a yoga retreat with Stag.”

“W-what? For real?”

“Yeah man, I’m gonna be the hardcore-est yogi of the century.”

The problem with Blake Strickland is that Soul can never tell when he’s being serious or psyching himself up to look like he’s serious when he’s actually just cluelessly diving headfirst into something.

“Are you sure you’re not doing this to see ShadowStag contorting on some beach?”

“It’s important to embrace all aspects of a ‘sitch, dude. Will I surpass the limits of my body and become a god? Yes. Will I also have mindblowing flexy-fucktimes with the best druid in Azeroth–”

“I hate you.”

“-Yes. Also, Sid and Miranda are renovating the townhouse, so my place is unlivable.”

Soul repeatedly thunks the back of his skull on his seat’s headrest. “I feel like I should be compensated for what you did to my Facebook.”

Blake scoffs. “Bitch, you should be thanking me. Or at least thank me for dragging your grumpy dick to the meetup, because looks like you’re gettin’ fuckin’ cozy with the MT.”

He’s torn between cursing ten different ways and desperately insisting that cosplay makeouts don’t count for anything worthwhile, and he just ends up whining, “Noooooooooooo–”

“Namaste, blueballs. Oh. And Tsubaki is making a lot of hand-flapping that indicates you should ‘just call her already’, sparkly heart, butcher knife, butcher knife, butcher knife emoji,” BlackStar recites.

Soul sighs, regretting the various crunchwrap and friendship decisions he’s made in his life. “At first I wondered how she puts up with you, but now I realize it’s a symbiotic relationship,” he says before hanging up.

Tosses phone into passenger seat. Takes conditioned air into his lungs and holds it, staring at the reflected sky glinting off the touch screen. He is not going to think about his brother and Blake being in what appears to be successful long-distance relationships (that, on top of it, are frequently getting ass). He is not.

Lets out his breath with a groan in that pressurized, throat-scratching way of toddlers throwing a fit in a cereal aisle.

Most viable option for the weekend that wouldn’t involve touching questionable hotel bedsheets would be staying with Mom. But if he’s driving out that far and has even the slimmest possibility of avoiding clowns, he should take it, right? Under threat of butcher knife emoji, this is what he tells himself as he picks his phone back up. He’s avoiding clowns.

One and three-fourths of a ring is all it takes for her to pick up. He blinks, her voice rendered differently over the phone than voice chat. “Eater? Hi!”

She actually sounds kind of happy to hear from him, despite all the shit the guild had given them over The Kiss. He’s smiling like a moron at the Maserati emblem on the steering wheel. He blanks. “Uhhh, hey.”

“…What’s up?”

He closes his eyes. He hears her four nights a week. This should not be any different. “Right. So, I saw Wes’s boyfriend half-naked on the couch and I’ve been exiled for the weekend.”

She doesn’t quite muffle her laugh fast enough. “O-oh my. Wow. Did you… see anything?”

“More than I would like. Is there, like–” He sighs. “Could I crash at your place? Or, oh. Do you live with other people? I guess I should’ve fuckin’ asked if–”

“I’m staying at my parents’ for school,” she interrupts. “My mom doesn’t live here anymore though. And Papa’s on another one of his ‘business trips’,” she says with heavy-handed skepticism, “and thank god, because I have so many finals to study for–”

“Aw, fuck,” he blurts, combing a hand through his hair. His head is spinning with all this information, trying to sift through it and determine if that was the all-clear to stay at her place or not. “I don’t wanna bug you or anything.”

Her voice comes back just a bit shaded, like she’s talking to him through his headset, or they’re alone at Denny’s. “Just come over.”

Soul shifts involuntarily in the driver’s seat, the parking lot fading to oblivion. “You sure?”

“Yes.” The simplicity of her delivery makes his mouth dry. “If you don’t mind driving out here, that is. It’s kinda far, isn’t it?”

He almost says ‘it was either you or the clowns’, but he feels that would cheapen something, so he doesn’t.

“Naw, I don’t mind.” And he, the one who does not pursue, wishes he minded at all. “Text me your address?”

\

She has her hair up in Chun-Li Street Fighter buns, and it’s the first time he’s ever considered the style attractive, his eyes helplessly following the wispy hairs dancing on the back of her neck as she leads him to the living room.

“Your dad’s not gonna like, bust in here and destroy me, right?” Admittedly, Wes had given him something to worry about. He’s too young to be put six feet under by the father of someone he’s not even dating.

She hums thoughtfully, which is not an encouraging sign. “In theory. I told him I was gonna study all weekend. He may be a fuckboy manther, but he does respect my education.”

He laughs, but only because he understands her mortal pain. “Thanks again.”

“Sure! I mean it, though, about the studying. I’ll be really boring. Guest bed’s this way.”

Following her down a hallway, he tries not to be curious and guess which door is hers.  “You’re always boring.”

The buns wobble when she whips her head around to stare at him, horrified. “What?”

“If you’re not talking about dead poets, you’re spouting diminishing return algorithms on fuckin’ crit chance stats or something.”

She looks affronted at first, but an undeniable amusement creeps in at the corners of her face. “Nothing you just said sounded boring whatsoever,” she sniffs, a smile in her voice, leading him into a room.

The guest bedroom is mostly sparse, though one wall is entirely covered in a blown-up, high resolution image of space, courtesy of what could only be the Hubble.

He’s reminded of her desktop wallpaper, but doesn’t pry. “Just tell me your wifi password, nerdlord.”

\

Facebook is as annoying on his laptop as it is on mobile. He logs into the game instead, though it runs choppily compared to his machine at home, and checks his mail and chats with a few people. Gets a few quests done on one of his low-level alts, which he’s more inspired to do today than he ever has prior, as any reason to get the reality of being in Reaper’s house out of his head is a welcome one.

It’s a quarter to midnight when his body finally forgives him for the Taco Hell abuse, and he wanders out of the guest room to see if Reaper’s still awake and wants some ice cream or something. Finds her in the living room, on the floor, surrounded by an educational mess.

This is the exact same position he’d found her in two hours prior, when he’d been looking for the bathroom. She’s one of those: the type who uses so much brainpower that basic necessities are forgotten, such as food. The concept is completely alien to him– nothing gets between him and food (except, perhaps, string cheese wrappers, but only temporarily).

Soul is about to try to catch her attention without startling her, because she has headphones on and they are blasting some awful high-BPM dubstep, but then, god save him, she starts dancing.

Just a bit–  just a torso-centric movement that makes her shoulders look a faintly mesmerizing, even if she is totally off the beat.

It’s more for his sake than hers when he waves a hand in front of her face to interrupt her. She blinks owlishly, trying to focus on him after being hunched over a textbook. Knocks her headphones off her ears to hang around her neck.

“Oh hey, what’s up?” A yawn. Small, pearly teeth, to which his tongue has already been introduced.

He’s getting sidetracked. “Have you eaten anything since I showed up?”

Reaper lolls her head to one side, looking at clock hanging over the fireplace. “No, I was just gonna wait til… dinner.”

“It’s so not dinnertime anymore.”

“Urrggh, this keeps happening.”

He sticks his hands in his pockets and scowls at her. “I was gonna get some ice cream but I think you should just give me your kitchen instead.”

\

Reaper’s family’s kitchen is surprisingly sparse, but against all odds, he has procured pre-made waffles slathered in peanut butter, some probably-still-safe grapes, and a giant pitcher of blue Kool-aid that he may or may not have supplemented with some vanilla flavored booze he’d found buried in the freezer.

“I didn’t know we had Kool-aid,” she says, shoving half a dozen grapes into her mouth at once. “Are you magic?”

“Survival skills acquired from living with my airheaded brother. By the way, we’re getting drunk.”

Reaper shoots him a confused look before leaning over and smelling the contents of the pitcher. “But I gotta studyyyy.”

Biting into a waffle, he points an angry finger at her, imitating Black Rock Reaper at an over-booked hotel. “You’ve been studying for the past five hours, and that’s only since I got here. Drink the fuckin’ Kool-aid. I fought cobwebs in the bottom of the cabinet for this.”

She makes one long, obnoxious caw for the better part of a minute while shutting all her textbooks and shoving them to the side. “Fine. Considering your vendetta against spiders, I will drink the spiked blue stuff,” she says, carefully bringing the entire jug of Kool-aid to her lips and drinking directly instead of using the cups he’d brought.

He’s ten-million percent sure he’s never told anyone about his thing about spiders, especially her. “W-what makes you think I have a vendetta?”

Reaper gives him the driest side-eye while picking up her waffle. “For the most part, you ignore critters in dungeons, unless they’re spiders. You’re always smacking spiders between trash pulls. I’d say there’s some history.”

She openly laughs at his flabbergasted face.

They end up watching that one Ghibli movie with the wolf princess on his laptop. ReaperMan uses a pen she’d been taking notes with and draws sharp-toothed smiley faces all over his arm, and he lets her, because they’re both tipsy and her hand is warm and her eyes are nice to watch when she’s giggling and not worrying about aggro.

“Maka,” he says, experimental, trying it out on his tongue.

She grunts automatically. Then, a little shocked, she looks up, pen poised. “Oh. Hi? Um, Soul.”

He smiles, and it’s probably pretty goofy looking, knowing him. “Hey.”

Maka beams back at him, blush tinting across her cheeks. And, after scrutinizing him very briefly, she reaches gently for his face with her hand, drawing a mustache on his upper lip.

\

He visits his mom for lunch while he’s in town, but he spends the majority of the weekend napping around Reaper’s house while she studies, or distracting himself with Warcraft but inevitably thinking about kissing her a lot. 

She continues to dance from time to time, off-tempo to ear-grating electronic madness. He thinks about that a lot too, of her body shifting so subtly, of what that might feel in his lap without costume props and cameras.

He doesn’t fucking need this.

Sunday afternoon, he’s throwing his junk back into Wes’s car when she says, back ramrod straight, “We should do this more often.”

He turns around, shutting the car door behind him, wondering just how hopeful he can get in the span of seconds without hitting the redline and exploding. “Yeah?”

“Well, with less studying, maybe,” she says guiltily. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it– you took me in at the last second, remember?” He shrugs. “Taking it easy is more my thing anyway.”

It’s as he’s saying this that she sidles in close, suddenly giving him a light, non-invasive hug. She won’t look him in the face afterward, but she does smile in his direction. “Raid tonight. Don’t be late.” And she turns and shuffles back into the house, only turning to wave at him briefly in the doorway.

He shoots back, “Yes, tanktress,” before getting in the car. Starts it. Gives one half-wave towards the back window before pulling out of her driveway and down the residential street.

At the first stop sign that is out of view of her house, his body does some weird possessed dance of its own, excitement and agony twisted together.

look another 5.5k because i have no self control

here’s part two of the quantum entanglement / WoW / anime trash fic, which does not yet have an official name. you can find part one here.

no nsfw yet, but things get a little heated?

super thanks to the b4p chat for encouragement, and mega thanks to victoriapyrrhi for setting me straight and putting eyes on this for me.

Part two _ Mouth

Parking is a nightmare. He squeezes Wes’s Maserati into a spot that he’s pretty sure isn’t an actual parking space, but hopefully no one will care that much during a con. It would have been easier on the bike, but if the sun is out in Vegas, he wants air conditioning. And also, maybe, having a car would be convenient if certain bikini’d death knights could use a ride somewhere.

Remains sitting in the car for five minutes wondering why he’s even bothering, but he ultimately knows the answer to that question and wishes he could rewrite the code of his excitable heart just a bit faster. 

He climbs out of the car and walks into a mildly outdated hotel lobby, finding Black Rock Reaper refusing to be consoled by some other chick dressed up as the wolf princess from that one Ghibli movie.

…He thinks, on second glance, that the princess is Halbird, one of the non-raiding hunters in the guild that had been at Denny’s last night. Further observation reveals Memenesia and Commontary as the princess’s white wolves, monk and paladin, respectively. Their blood-stained, white-furred costumes somehow make the Black Rock Shooter getup look tame.

Reaper makes a noise that sounds like it’s ripped from a Jurassic Park sound reel.

Halbird knots her fingers together in worry. “We have a panel to go to, but let me know if you need a ride home, okay?”

Now or never. Soul sidles up to the group of girls, dodging a pile of luggage and feeling out of place in his streetclothes. “Hey.”

Reaper whirls on him, her trenchcoat flapping open like a Hollywood slow-motion sequence, all previous thoughts of ‘tame’ rocketing out the window. Her eyes are almost as fiery as those google images, green subbed in for blue. “No one is talking to y– Eater?” Her countenance seems to shrink before his eyes, her arms crossing protectively over her bikini-clad chest. “Wh– hi? What are you doing here?”

“Uhhhh,” he says as Commontary quietly tugs on Meme and Halbird’s arms, exiting stage Anywhere But Reaper’s Aggro Radius. Then, to Soul’s increasing distress, the platinum-blonde paladin gives him a smile that leaves him feeling painfully transparent – this must be the ShadowStag’s cultist source from earlier.

He only has himself to blame for this. He’d known he’d be stepping into the fucking Twilight Zone the moment he texted Stag this morning. He waves Commontary off and hopes his pits aren’t sweating like a friggin’ hurricane.

“You buttdialed me,” he finally says, turning to Reaper. “Sounded like dumb stuff was happening and Stag said you’d be here. Thought I’d see what’s up.”

After a few seconds of long false lashes blinking in confusion, ReaperMan looks down at her chest, and so he, unfortunately, does that too. She slowly pulls her phone out of some kind of holster attached to the side of her bikini, hidden under her trench coat.

She frowns, a crinkle forming between her eyebrows. “Iiiii’ve called a lot of people. Apparently.”

He doesn’t bother covering up his laugh. “Boob-dialed. An honor, indeed.” Reaper gives him a barbed look that makes him quickly looks away and wish he could feign death. “You were yelling about the rooms?” he offers, and once she’s reminded of why she’s here in the first place, she’s thankfully sidetracked by her earth-melting outrage.

“My room’s gone! I was supposed to share with someone else, but their psychotic mother cancelled the reservation behind my back.” She tilts her head back and actually hisses at the ceiling. “The resort didn’t even notify me.”

“Well… that’s shitty. Guessing everything’s full?”

Reaper scoffs. “Yeah. Along with every other place near the con. It could be worse – I only live like an hour from here but I rode here with Tsugumi– er, Halbird and them. Their room already has six, but they said I could sleep in their bathtub…” She scratches the side of her face very carefully, unwilling to smudge her makeup as she seriously contemplates sleeping in a bathroom for the weekend.

“Man,” and he’d known that this was his hopeless heart’s plan all along, but he didn’t think he’d actually execute it, “My mom’s place is ten minutes from here. You can crash there, uh, if you wanted.”

Her face, despite being framed in moody anime eyeliner, lights up like a supernova. “Really?!” Soul’s dimly aware of the collective sigh of relief of everyone else crammed in the lobby in wake of Reaper’s improved mood. “A-are you sure? I have a lot of stuff… You’re not doing anything? Like I can get a cab or–”

Soul’s trying to reconcile this scarily attractive, polite creature to the main tank who calls him a lazy bitchstick at least once a raid, and is failing with flying colors. “I’m free. Not doin’ anything important.”

Reaper tackles him with a shrill caw of victory, and his immediate world is filled with tiny bikinigirl-induced asphyxiation, six foot long styrofoam megagun smacking him in the head.

\

She’s buckling her desktop into the backseat, trying not to get her wig tangled in the seatbelt.

“Are you kidding me right now?” he asks, trying to fit all her cosplay luggage into the trashed trunk Wes’s car – it’s already crammed with likely thousands of dollars’ worth of photoshoot freebies and designer shoes. “You even brought your machine.”

“I’m the MT, Eater,” she says, tossing black bangs out of her eyes. “Death’d blow up the guild bank if I missed a night. …Um, is this your car?”

With a drawl, he says, “What, didn’t expect me to drive a Maserati?”

No hesitation whatsoever. “Nope.”

Soul frowns. “What kinda car were you expecting?”

“…Public transportation?”

He doesn’t dignify that with a response; merely shuts the trunk with narrowed eyes.

“Look, you autofollow me through dungeons ninety percent of the time because you’re too lazy to steer yourself. I’m just saying.”

Well. He’ll give her that one. “It’s my brother’s car. Also, Death wouldn’t blow up the bank if you missed a raid– we have other tanks, you know.”

Reaper backs out of the car and stands, leveling him with a haughty stare over the car’s roof that’s dreadful to his blood pressure. “But are they as good as I am?”

He wishes the solar flares in his veins would stop trying to answer that question. “Okay BlackStar, your ego needs a time out. When do you want me to pick you up?”

“O-oh,” she stutters, no longer the snarky death knight and suddenly the girl he doesn’t quite know. “Um. Is there a good time, for you?”

He rolls a shoulder. “I’m not doing anything today. Well. Maybe grocery shopping, but let’s not get carried away. I’ll probably just go to Taco Bell.”

She gives him a laugh for that before fidgeting a bit. “Are you su–”

“Just text me,” he says. “I’ll show up.”

A slow smile picks up the side of her mouth, and some part of his brain is dutifully writing this image in the permanent archives. “Okay.”

\

Back in the car again, hand hovering over the ignition button. The heat is climbing, Nevada sun slowly baking him alive.

He hadn’t needed to enter the con, so his Shadow Cultist voodoo pass had been for nothing.

He hates crowds, doesn’t know anything about anime, and is running on less than six hours of sleep. There’s a pool at the house. There’s over-processed Taco Bell nachos calling him. There’s nothing for him here.

Hand still hovering over the ignition button. “This isn’t your scene, Eater,” he says to the car.

Her mouth, slinking to the side.

Soul curses.

\

First impression of con: Stank.

It’s like there’s a world shortage of deodorant. He supposes wearing multiple layers of anime-inspired costume in Vegas could only be a recipe for disaster, but damn. People walking by occasionally stir up a serious, sweet onion jockstrap breeze, and Soul is a few whiffs away from some highschool war flashbacks that center around Blake Strickland’s harrowingly belated rise into personal hygiene.

After a nearly eternal wait in line for his pass, in which he’d almost talked himself into ditching half a dozen times, he’s managed to merge into some human fast-travel lane without getting run over, wondering where it’s going to take him and if the dude in front of him knows his asscrack is showing.

No sign of Reaper, though he does find a drool-inducing ocean of computers set up with varying multiplayer games. Ends up sidetracked by a Starcraft II competition for a few minutes. Then, hooked by the nose, finds himself in front of an overpriced nacho cart like it’s destiny. Inhales this while keeping an eye out for over-sized megaguns.

Passes by a Nintendo merch table when someone shoves a Wii U controller into his hands and now he’s somehow in an SSB competition getting his ass kicked by a pokemon.

“…Eater?”

Uh oh. Quick glance to the left: skin and green eyes. Soul refocuses on the screen. “Hey, uh, shit–” He loses, his character flying off the screen.

As if being destroyed by a pokemon wasn’t bad enough, the winner turns to him and says, “Nice game, Kaworu.” Soul realizes belatedly that it’s Asscrack from earlier, and he’s holding out a hand for a clap and a fistbump.

“A-ah, yeah. Thanks,” he says awkwardly, returning the gesture as the tiniest snerk is heard behind him. Soul turns around with his lips pulled into a thin line, stalking over to a widely-grinning Reaper.

“Will you please tell me who the fuck Ka-wo-ru is,” he grumbles.

She hands him her gun and pulls out her phone. While she’s typing and struggling with her giggles, Soul is tempted to heft up the gun and smack people with it. “What are you even doing here?” she asks. “What happened to Taco Bell?”

“I don’t know,” he sighs, which is more or less true. “Shadow Clan?”

“Ah, yeah. That sounds right,” she replies, holding up the phone with some vintage anime art enlarged on the screen. “Meet your twin.”

Kaworu is apparently some stick-legged, effeminate, white-haired anime boy. Red eyes. Soul blinks at the kid’s outfit and, in sweat-inducing panic, looks down at his own clothes: white fitted button down, dark pair of Wes’s designer jeans, white converse high-tops.

“Son of a fuck.”

Reaper puts a hand over her eyes, bowing over with laughter.

His face is heating up. “Shut up. I do not smile that creepily.”

“You could, with practice.”

Soul’s jaw drops open, pushing her phone away. “Hoooh no, I am NOT gonna start roleplaying some scrawny 90’s-era potentially gay–”

“Canonically,” Reaper interrupts, still snickering as she takes her gun back from him. “Canonically gay.”

“Motherf–”

“All you need is a plugsuit and you’d be famous.”

Soul splutters. “I don’t wanna be famous– what the hell is a plugsuit?” he asks, horrified, which only makes her laugh harder.

\

He has determined that cons, on top of causing strife to one’s sense of smell, are painfully awkward in about seven ways at any given time, loud, and are flamboyantly outrageous – yet the event also, in some strange fashion, comes across as down to earth, which is pretty cool.

It’s his turn to spam instagram with the some of the coolest costumes he’s ever seen, and he may or may not have some killer shots of Reaper doing action poses for passersby. An absurd amount of cash has been dropped on things he doesn’t need whatsoever, various gaming merchandise weighing down his arms and cutting off blood circulation.

Not to say he hasn’t enjoyed himself, but he’s relieved when Reaper says she’s ready to go– they have a raid tonight, after all – because he’s mentally exhausted being around so many people for hours on end. He wouldn’t mind spending the next few days floating in a sensory deprivation tank filled with hand sanitizer.

He’s too tired to even put forth any real effort into freaking out about bringing The Cute MT to the house, so it’s not until she’s carrying her computer in her arms and he’s holding open the front door for her that he suddenly remembers the freak show inside.

Soul frantically pulls the door shut before she can cross the threshold. “UH. Shit.”

ReaperMan is tired too, her eyeliner smudged and accentuating the bags under her eyes, but she is determined to raid come hell or high water. “What, are there naked people having sex in there?”

“No… that would be easier to explain. Um. How do you feel about clowns,” he asks, face pinched with the knowledge that the next minute of his life can only end in mortification.

Black Rock Reaper gives him a wary side-eye, hitching her PC a little higher in her arms to adjust the weight. “How do I feel about them?”

“Like, do you have phobic reactions to red noses or things of a circus-pantsed nature?”

“I don’t think so?” she says, looking as if she wants to laugh but hasn’t decided if it’s a good idea or not.

He nods. “That’s good. Maybe we should stay here so you can enjoy the last few moments of a normal life while you still can.”

“Just open the door, Eater.”

He gazes skyward, towards a heaven that is showing him no mercy right now, and pushes open the door for the second time. ReaperMan walks in, all business, her boots clack-clacking against the hardwood floor. Soul, rooted, waits in silence on the porch.

The boots stop. Her voice echoes from the parlor, a little breathless. “Clowns,” she says, the word having a new, radical meaning in her lexicon.

\

“The good news,” he says while madly trying to de-clown one of the guest bedrooms, “is that you can’t walk ten feet in this place without running into a TV.”

Reaper sits on a circus-themed floor rug, plugging cables into the back of her computer. “It’s not that bad. I might be becoming a little blind to all the stripes already.” Soul focuses on removing the family collection in an effort to not stare at a scantily-clad girl hooking up her rig to the guest room television. “So, do you live with your mom? Here?” she asks.

Focus. Focus on the clowns. “Nah, I live with my brother. LA. He’s the one who was supposed to house-sit this weekend, but dumped it on me to hang out with his boyfriend.” Soul shoves sadfaces into a closet with a foot, struggling to shut the door. “He’s in this long-distance thing with some dilf – try HDMI-4,” he advises.

She changes the input channel on the TV and does a weary fist-pump when her desktop appears on the screen. Her wallpaper is a photo of a younger Reaper and someone who might be a sister or mother standing on a beach, a shuttle launchpad in the distance. It’s kind of adorable.

Reaper doesn’t even try to hide the fact that she’s googling ‘dilf’. After adjusting her knowledge, she glances over her shoulder in curiosity. “How old is your brother?”

“Twenty-eight going on twelve.” He huffs at the closet and then throws his weight at it, finally getting the door to shut. Walks over to the guest bed and wearily collapses. “When his last girl broke up with him, he moped for three months straight.”

Pulling off her wig, Reaper makes a sleepy, disgruntled face. “Heartbreak is kind of a big deal, Eater.”

He waves a hand. “Yeah, I get it, but they were together four days and she dumped him because she didn’t want to play with his ass.”

There’s a long beat of silence before Reaper curls up on herself, her laugh/cry hybrid muffled against the floor rug. “Some things just aren’t fated,” she says sagely between giggles.

“Some things just aren’t possible. His expectations are hopeless.”

Reaper rolls to her back on the floor and rubs under an eye, frowning when her finger comes back coated in heavy makeup. She asks, “What expectations aren’t, anymore?”

“Shit,” he blurts, sitting up. “For example: all I’m hoping for is someone chill and who doesn’t get upset about not being done in the butt four days into a relationship,” he pauses here, because Reaper’s laughing too hard for him to continue, “which I think is perfectly reasonable. That, and I don’t like weird mind games. Just someone straightforward. Cool and honest.”

“Someone you can trust,” she says simply, a mourning dove lilt in her voice that catches him off guard.

He tries to get a read on her face, but she’s looking at her desktop, one hand lazily stretched across the floor to push her mouse towards the World of Warcraft icon.

“Um. Yeah. I guess so.” Remembering her last night, in the Denny’s booth, asking ‘should I not trust you?’  Heart-rate picking up now with a vengeance. “…What about you?” he asks, hoping that hadn’t sounded too interested.

She shrugs against the floor. “Basic spec. Loyal. Honest. Intelligent.”

Well, there goes that.

“Kind, or at least not a big bag of dicks.”

This is looking bleaker by the second.

“Likes poetry and dubstep and can deal with me raiding four nights a week.”

He scoffs, propping an elbow on his knee and resting his chin in his hand. “Good luck with that. Go adopt a few cats. Get started early.”

ReaperMan’s head rolls towards him and she gives him a thousand-yard stare. Very seriously, she utters, “I already have one.”

Soul cracks up.

\

She hadn’t brought a mic, so he plants his system and a spare monitor on the floor with her so they can share his for the raid, though she admits that she probably won’t say anything loud enough for it to register.

Watching her tank (on a giant television, at that), is nothing short of amazing. He can’t comprehend how her keyboard hasn’t been smashed to splinters with the force she uses to type and spam abilities.

Death gets on his ass about his shitty damage per second tonight (he’s distracted – she’s a skilled player and she still hasn’t put on pants), so Soul grumbles into the mic, “Careful what you wish for.” Then, because he’s immature and playing a video game, he ignores the threat meter, recklessly nuking the boss with a couple of fluke crits and grinning like a fool.

Continues in this manner until Reaper, fake-lashes fluttering as she watches the threat meter, screeches, “BACK OFF DIPSHIT OR YOU’RE GONNA GET FUCKING STOMPED ON,” which, one: is so startling he screams, and two: hearing it originate from her actual mouth is hilarious enough that he rolls away on the floor, nearly in tears while his character gets tail-swiped into lava.

She laughs at his expense, cackling in earnest, and his mic catches that too. Voice chat then erupts, the rest of the guild suddenly realizing SoulEater and ReaperMan are in the same room together.

The raid wipes in quick order, Death predictably losing his shit.

\

Morning of day two of the con, his brain bleeding to wakefulness against the insistence of his still-exhausted body because he hears her struggling with clowns in one of the bathrooms. Rolls off the parlor couch with a bad case of post-raid aftertaste in his mouth. Relying heavily on the railing to plod up the stairs.

The bathroom door is open, so he peeks his head around the corner. She’s fresh out of the shower: short-shorts, black tee with ‘For the Horde’ across the shoulders, wet hair twisted up in three-foot-high towel turban.

“Why the fuck are you awake,” he rasps.  

His voice startles her, Reaper flailing so violently that a clown is knocked off the sink to cartwheel through the air directly into the toilet.

She makes a noise like a dying chew-toy. “He fell in,” she squeaks, hands flying to her mouth.  

Soul tries to tell her it’s not the first time that’s happened, but it comes out as, “Coffee.”

\

“There’s a panel I want to go to this morning,” she explains at the kitchen table, using the front facing camera on her phone to help aim where to glue her elf ears.

Soul slurps his macchiato, fresh out of his mom’s candy-apple espresso machine. He needs to get one of these for Wes’s apartment. He numbly gestures towards his own ears. “Dare I ask?”

“Zelda,” she answers, mouth stuck open on the ‘-da’ as she concentrates.

Oh. At least he knows this one. “Where’s Link?”

Reaper looks up at him, one hand holding her ear together while the glue dries. “About that.”

Soul very slowly sets coffee mug on the table and says, “Why do I have a horrible feeling I know what you’re gonna say?”

“That’s a good sign, actually! I bet we’d be great in PvP arenas.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

She gives him a meek little smile that is nothing short of captivating, and he’s terrified of its power if it’s this good with only a few hours of sleep backing it. “My friend who couldn’t come was going to borrow my Link cosplay today, so I have it with me, and I think it might even fit y-”

“NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO.”

\

His knee hurts from resting on the concrete floor. “I am very, very displeased with you right now,” he growls, camera flashes going off.

Zelda smiles a regal smile, knighting him with a foam Master Sword. “Well, I’m a little put-off that you can fit into the pants. I mean everything was baggy on me, but that means you look better in them.”

The pants, actually, are about a foot too short in the legs, but luckily there’d been a pair of adequate riding boots in his brother’s car that were enough to hide the hem.

“How come I don’t get the sword?”

“You get an ocarina!”

“I do?” He stands, adjusting the shield strapped to his back for the millionth time. “Where is it?” Because if he’s forced to look like an elf, he wants a toy to play with, damn it.

Princess Reaper clucks her tongue, digging into the leather bag tied on his waist. Goosebumps fly under his shirtsleeves. She produces the instrument, in canonical blue, slapping it into his hand. “Now summon me a pony.”

“Uh.” He glances to the various photographers and rubbernecked bystanders. Reaper’s costumes are really legit, seems like – she can’t make it fifteen feet before someone asks for a photo. “How’s it go again?”

Her face falls, one hand coming up to fiddle with one of the long bits of hair tied to the sides of her face. “I’m pretty tone deaf, so… Hey!” she says, turning to the cameras, completely fearless in the face of strangers. “Somebody whistle Epona’s song!”

The room breaks out in a cacophony of whistles, but after a few moments it magically solidifies into a synchronized performance, which is both fucking weird but also really neat and somewhat of an encouraging mark for humanity. Yeah. Okay. This is pretty cool.

And, completely against everything he’s ever felt about putting on a show in front of a crowd of peers, he finds the simple notes and plays it back to them, an out-of-place nerd trying to speak to the mothership.

The con-goers bursts into cheers and whistles, and Zelda gracefully claps her evening-gloved hands, her face plastered with a big, dorky grin that makes him spit-laugh all over the ocarina with a rotten shriek of music.

\

He’s editing a frame-worthy insta of Zelda shoving a clusterfuck blob of cheese dip and jalapenos into her royal face, when he’s startled by some kind of blue-armored ninja wearing a white mask. Somewhere behind him, Reaper is shelling out cash for a carefully-wrapped fan comic, which leaves Soul to handle this sudden stranger alone.

“Uh. Hi?”

The cosplayer says nothing, merely hands out a flyer, pointing first at Soul and then at Reaper.

Soul reluctantly takes the flyer with a bemused frown. “Thanks…”

Turning the paper around in his hand, he recognizes the giant royal wingcrest from the Zelda games emblazoned across the top. It’s an announcement for a party of LoZ nerds or something.

“Was that Sheik?” Reaper asks, walking over to him while tucking her doujin reverently into a backpack.

Oh, Sheik. He should have recognized that one. Soul looks up, but finds the cosplayer has already disappeared. He blinks, wondering if he’s hallucinating from all the nacho cheese and lack of sleep. “Did that just happen?”

Reaper takes the flyer out of his hand. “Oh, we are so going to this.”

\

‘We’ being the both of them, despite his protests, and ‘this’ being an outdoor impromptu gathering consisting of mostly green-garbed elves all carrying Master Swords. Soul had it in his head that he would simply be a spectator on the sidelines, auto-following the tank around, but is reminded he is also dressed up as a green-garbed elf.

Reaper’s voice has gone bright and extra cheery with this many people around, chatting about sewing patterns, armor shaping, and other cons she’s been to. She appears to be somewhat known for her detailed costumes. He’s happy that she’s enjoying herself, but he also kind of wants to disappear – the energy here is fast-paced and dizzying, and Soul’s struggling to keep out of the by-proxy limelight because he’s hovering near her for social protection.

The gathering is centered around one of the resort’s decorative gardens, a dedicated photographer organizing group shots around a large water fountain. People are squealing at each other constantly. People are squealing at him, asking him if he’s some alternate ‘Dark Link’ because of his hair.

“No, he just refused to put on the wig,” Reaper cuts in, bless her, even though this is a thousand percent her fault. “I kinda bullied him into being my Link today.”

Hers. Soul sighs, defeated.

Someone says, “Oh, you two came together? Go stand by the fountain,” and now he and Zelda are having a photoshoot, apparently. The other cosplayers at the gathering are getting into it, too, helping the photographer with light reflectors and arranging the princess’s gown just so.

Well, he’s used to photoshoots, more or less, by virtue of being Wes’s brother. Had a miniscule stint as a teen model, too, though he abandoned that ship the moment he could.

The majority of the poses the photographer is giving them he’s already mastered throughout the day inside the con – kneeling at Zelda’s feet, miming a kiss to her hand, accepting the sword from her, blah blah blah. This isn’t so bad. He can survive this much if he doesn’t have to talk to people he doesn’t know.

Zelda turns a little pink when someone suggests the two of them look like they’re about to kiss. Face blank in an attempt to act his age and not revert to a teen model who gets jittery at the thought of kissing a cute girl, he watches her as she steps closer, cautiously taking his gloved hand and very purposefully slipping it, snug, on the curve of her waist.

Okay then. This is apparently how they’re rolling, now. She’s warm through her dress and his gloves, and her eyelashes do this downcast, sultry thing that makes the sun feel twelve times hotter than it had a minute ago. The photographer waves for him to move in closer, so Soul tilts his head down just the tiniest bit. The LoZ nerds start up the squealing again.

“I’m not really sure what’s going on,” he murmurs between shots, praying that his costume is washable because he is sweating buckets under it.

“They really wanna take our pictures together for some reason,” Reaper replies, tilting her body towards him. “I-I don’t mind so much, but if you wanna stop…”

His chest is thud-thudding as he clings desperately to the group’s growing excitement. “It’s fine.” This is more than fine – this is a miracle in his hands. “I’m cool if you’re cool.”

“Yeah.” Zelda’s fingers hook into the leather strap that’s keeping his shield on, tugging him even closer with just enough force to light his blood on fire. “May as well make it look good.”

Their poses become more risque by tiny increments, his hand inching down to the small of her back for one shot, holding still as she grazes his jaw with her nose for another, and as long as he doesn’t think about how these few insane minutes will torture his memory for the rest of his life, he could say this is kind of fun.

Sitting on the fountain’s edge now, creamy-necked Zelda in his lap with her gown being micro-managed to fanatical perfection. Soul, attempting to call on all the ‘guarded, but painfully hormonal’ fuck-faces his brother makes in pretty much every magazine advertisement, presses his lips to Zelda’s temple as she’s looking at the camera. The crowd eats it up, and he’s so close to nervously laughing he almost ruins it.

Someone finally shouts it: “Make out, for Hyrule’s sake!”

This, despite coming in at number one of the top nerdiest things he’s ever heard in his life, causes him to lean forward, tugged along by weird second-hand fandom momentum, to meet her halfway for some staged fake kiss.

“Oh, no, we’re not actually–” she stammers, tense and anxious in his lap. He is audience to the eerie, almost imperceptible shift as Reaper resurfaces out of the Zelda mask, wide-eyed, a bright blush inking down her neck. Predictably, photos of this face are also taken, but he vaguely feels, by way of churning gut-twist, that they shouldn’t have been.

Very abruptly, he remembers what she’d said two nights ago at Denny’s, admitting her general distrust of guys. Remembers how he’d plowed right over that statement without a second thought as she turns that cornered look on him, panic flashing in the forest of her eyes.

Soul becomes achingly aware of himself and this budding crush of his – the one he’d decided that he wasn’t going to have.

(He’s the one being neither cool nor honest, entertaining any excuse to be near her, to pretend he’s near her at all.)

(This, therefore, probably qualifying him as a big bag of dicks.)

He gives her a close-lipped smile, and a bunch of camera flashes go off for that one, too. The moment feels more like paparazzi than studio, now, and he reflexively arms himself with his tried and true, generic expression of apathy. Leans away as casually as he can, but it’s already clear to everyone in a twenty mile radius that he’d been right there, ready to kiss her glossy princess lips.

This isn’t his scene at all, and his tenuous grasp on his brother’s skill for this situation has been thoroughly lost.

But then Reaper says, voice pitched high and tight, “Just one, understand?” The noise of the gathering, which now includes stray con-goers who’d been passing by, grows by an order of magnitude, the photographer scurrying around for the ideal shot.

Reaper shifts in his lap; the crowd instantly disappears from his awareness.

“…What,” he tries to say, his arm automatically coming around her waist to keep her from falling.

She’s fussing with his hat, tucking his erratic hair into place. “Sorry about this,” she murmurs only loud enough for him to hear, the world bursting into camera flashes. “You lead, okay?”

Lead? He can’t lead, he’s only ever followed her around. But his stupid mouth parrots back, “Okay,” automatic.

Twisting to face him, she places her hands on his shoulders, slowly bringing them up to his jaw to cup his face. Leaning down. Pressing in.

She could fake it – mime a kiss like a high school play behind her shielding hands – but even before she does it, he already knows she won’t. She doesn’t half-ass anything, and he’s entangled with her, so it’s impossible for him to do anything less.

The arm he’s using to support her back brings her closer, fingers playing in the laces of her dress. She sighs raggedly between his teeth, and then he’s taking one of her hands from his face, holding it away as his lips work against hers, leading, teasing, tasting.

Her lip gloss is sticky. She doesn’t do much, stoically accepting his mouth as is fit a royal princess, but there’s a blood-burning bit of curiosity in her tongue when he presses his own against it and feels her test his mouth. Her fingers fall down his jaw, crawling to his neck to fist in his collar, and he lets out the smallest accidental noise, praying the crowd is too loud for her to hear it.

He risks a small bite on her bottom lip, gently feeling up her leg just enough to ruffle her gown, and Zelda pulls away slowly, in character, with bright, bright eyes. He can feel her breathing heavily in his arms; the blush reaching to her ears dead-ends at the pointy elf extensions.

The crowd morphs into a lot of sloppy cat-calls and wolf-whistles. Soul nervously offers her a shaken-up smile, and it’s very much Reaper who gradually, girlishly returns it, shoulders hitching with a giggle as she takes a gloved hand and wipes lip gloss off the edge of his lips.

That picture is taken, too.

Her mouth is a little swollen, and it hits him then, with the force of a landslide, that he is in deep, deep shit.

here have like 5k for some reason

marshofsleep:

marshofsleep:

I’m stringing together all the NSFW prompts into one big fic I guess, so this doesn’t actually have anything porny in it. Yet.

This is a story about nerds and I have absolutely no explanation for you.

Part one _ Long Distance

His brother is in a long distance relationship. It’s a lost cause, Soul thinks– perhaps not doomed to fail as quickly as all of Wes’s previous flings of varying romantic ineptitude, but it’s still, inherently, fucked.

Wes noisily tosses various shoes, sunglasses, and other model-level swag ornamentation into his his hardshell luggage. “I’ll be out for the weekend. He’s picking me up so you can use the car to go get laid or something.”

“I’m not you, thanks,” Soul says, leaning against the doorframe of his brother’s bedroom. Also, he has a raid, tonight. “Isn’t he like in his forties? What happened with that one chick you were crying about? With all the leather.”

“Not cool to live in the past, bro. And anyway, this guy pilots jets. Looks real good in a flight suit,” he says, grin wide, bright, and insured for at least thirty grand. To Soul’s eyeroll, he adds, “Or would you rather I bring him here so we can make out and watch house renos on TV–”

“God, no, just go, friggin’ dilf chaser.”

“’Dilfchaser’. I like it. Sounds like a good name for one of your elf characters.”

“Okay, one, I only play Tauren. Two, I would purposely shit myself if that name hasn’t already been taken by some other creep like you,” he replies, and this is when Soul’s phone begins to sing in his pocket.

Wes, having recognized the tune, immediately blurts, “I’m not here.”

Mom’s ringtone: fifteen seconds of the opening to Gaga’s Poker Face, ‘mah mah mah maaah,’ repeated in mantra-like, dance-pop chant.

Keep reading

reblag for the morning crowd as i frantically try to get day two’s prompt finished before midnight again.

here have like 5k for some reason

I’m stringing together all the NSFW prompts into one big fic I guess, so this doesn’t actually have anything porny in it. Yet.

This is a story about nerds and I have absolutely no explanation for you.

Part one _ Long Distance

His brother is in a long distance relationship. It’s a lost cause, Soul thinks– perhaps not doomed to fail as quickly as all of Wes’s previous flings of varying romantic ineptitude, but it’s still, inherently, fucked.

Wes noisily tosses various shoes, sunglasses, and other model-level swag ornamentation into his hardshell luggage. “I’ll be out for the weekend. He’s picking me up so you can use the car to go get laid or something.”

“I’m not you, thanks,” Soul says, leaning against the doorframe of his brother’s bedroom. Also, he has a raid, tonight. “Isn’t he like in his forties? What happened with that one chick you were crying about? With all the leather.”

“Not cool to live in the past, bro. And anyway, this guy pilots jets. Looks real good in a flight suit,” he says, grin wide, bright, and insured for at least thirty grand. To Soul’s eyeroll, he adds, “Or would you rather I bring him here so we can make out and watch house renos on TV–”

“God, no, just go, friggin’ dilf chaser.”

“’Dilfchaser’. I like it. Sounds like a good name for one of your elf characters.”

“Okay, one, I only play Tauren. Two, I would purposely shit myself if that name hasn’t already been taken by some other creep like you,” he replies, and this is when Soul’s phone begins to sing in his pocket.

Wes, having recognized the tune, immediately blurts, “I’m not here.”

Mom’s ringtone: fifteen seconds of the opening to Gaga’s Poker Face, ‘mah mah mah maaah,’ repeated in mantra-like, dance-pop chant.

Soul pulls his phone out of his pocket, watching his brother shy away from it like a vampire facing a rope of garlic. “Damn it Wes, what did you do this time–”

Mah mah mah maaah~

Wes speeds up the packing process. “Uhhhhhhhh, I may have forgotten about house-sitting?” He actually smiles when he looks up and finds Soul’s flat, icy stare, which makes the eternal curse of getting the short end of the second-son stick that much more demoralizing.

Soul resigns himself to simply saying, “Man, fuck you.”

Mah mah mah maaah~

“Little brotherrrrr,” Wes pleads, wearing an ugly, spoiled face that would probably still land him at least a few modelling gigs. “But I hardly ever get to see my man! Please please please please take one for the team for me pleeeeeeeeeeeaaa–”

Soul’s face pinches at Wes’s ear-shattering plea. “STOP. FINE. FUCK. FINE.” His kryptonite is loud noises – he can’t think straight while listening to something hideous enough to make his skin crawl. “You owe me so much for this. Now shut up so I can answer the phone, asshole.”

“You’re my favorite brother, and I love you.”

Mah mah mah maaah~

He scoffs. “You are, literally, noise pollution. Go away, use condoms, love you bye.” Then, unlocking his phone, which displays one of his mother’s many over-exposed facebook selfies. “Good afternoon, Matriarch.”

“It would be,” replies his mother in a smooth voice that soothes the damage Wes had caused, “if I could get a hold of my firstborn.”

Soul waves his brother away for the weekend, who quietly oozes out the front door. “Sorry, Mom, but you’ll have to settle for the spare. He said something about house-sitting before he took off for some… last minute thing.” Closes his eyes, trying not to think about his brother and some dude nearly his mother’s age.

Mom sighs, the sound of her Tesla spitting out its door handle for her in the background. “You keep letting him do that to you, you know.”

“Yeah… He bribes me with expensive shit though. You know how it goes.”

A self-indulgent laugh, for that one. “Yes. Yes I do.”

\

He’s packing up his desktop for the trip to his Mom’s – hardcore raiding guild schedules aren’t a joke – when someone Kramer’s through the front door like they own the entire apartment tower.

Soul looks over his shoulder and tries his best Dad Just Found My Shitty Report Card face. “Why the fuck do they keep letting you in the building–”

“Such hostility, brosephina,” Blake Strickland says as he jumps and sail-planks his way through the air to land in a heap on the living room futon. He already has his phone out and is scrolling through instagram before the furniture has settled. “Why’re you still packing? We’ve been plannin’ this for like two months. B-Star is not to be kept waitin’.”

Blake, game name BlackStar, has hair as blue as his in-game character and is the only person in the guild Soul knows outside the game. The chances of this guy having been born with a megaphone fused to his windpipe are staggeringly high.

“I dunno what you’re talking about, but what will it take for you to understand that I despise you?”

“Not being my facebook friend, for starters,” Blake shoots back, unperturbed. “Gives a bro mixed signals.”

Soul grits his teeth and unplugs his monitor. “Just tell me why you’re here.”

This, apparently, is offensive enough to cause Blake to look away from his phone. “IRL meetup? Vegas? We’re staying at your mom’s for the weekend. This has been discussed.”

“Discussed? With who? I didn’t agree to shit.”

“Whom.”

“Fuck you, you can’t even spell.”

“Is this about RNGesus deeming you unworthy last raid, because I can’t help it when the heavens acknowledge me as superior, okay. Put some ice on your ass, let’s go.”

“No,” Soul insists before blowing dust off his case fan. “I hate meeting people, I hate get-togethers, and I HATE being stuck in a car with you for four hours. Plus we have a raid tonight.”

Blake scoffs and goes back to his phone. “Raid was moved to tomorrow for the meetup, noobert. And if you aren’t going, why’re you packing?”

“I have to house-sit for Mom over the weekend.”

Soul gets a couch pillow to the face for that.

“Your mom’s house, which is in Vegas. Where everyone else will also be.” Blake momentarily pauses his ire to flex and take a selfie before continuing his tirade. “Did you have to take classes at Impossible Bitch School to get like this? Just fucking go to the thing! It’s not meeting new people, it’s dudes you’ve been talking to online for like two years.”

“You know what’s great about online friends?” Soul asks with a heavy sigh. “I can log off and they go away.”

His best friend just clucks his tongue in disappointment. “Your loss. But you’re driving me and letting me crash at your mom’s.”

“Fifty bucks.”

Blake flips him the bird with both hands. “Suck me, I gotta explain to Reaper why you ain’t going despite fuckin’ around clown town ten minutes away.”

Soul pauses in tucking his keyboard into a duffel bag, hands halfway buried in computer cables. Looks up and warily takes in Blake’s self-satisfied arch in his thin eyebrows. “…Reaper’s going?”

“The great B-Star convinced our silent main tank to attend, yes. The shit I do for you, seriously.”

“Pfft– What do I have to do with anything?”

Blake rolls off the futon to swagger into the kitchen and check out the fridge situation. “Man, you and Reaper could be at opposite ends of Azeroth but whatever bullshit one of you is doing, the other is totally involved. It’s like physics. Y’all are quantum buttbuddies.”

Unable to process anything that has vacated Blake’s mouth without triggering some kind of bewildered, brain-seizing meltdown, Soul scrunches his eyes shut with such force that he sees neon swirling on the backs of his eyelids.

“I hate you so much.”

“Okay but consider this: if you go, you get to hear what Reaper sounds like.”

\

It is hard to resist that kind of bait.

The thing is, ReaperMan never talks in voice chat, only relying on lightning-quick responses via in-game text channels, and usually in raging capslock. Spartoi’s main tanking death knight has one of the more rotten (and therefore entertaining) mouths in the guild, so Soul feels cheated, maybe even betrayed, when he learns ReaperMan’s a chick and her voice is cheery.

And she could have played him so easily, knowing from the start that he would have no idea who she is, or that she’s the one he’s been bullshitting with four nights a week (or more) in private messages about how stupid pick-up-groups are. But she doesn’t.

Doesn’t beat around the bush. Just comes clean right at the start.

“Hi,” she says to him after she ends a call on her cell and tucks the phone into her hoodie pocket. Waves with a blunt-nailed hand, voice bright as the sun. “I’m Reaper. Uhm, your cosplay looks great! Kaworu, right?”

He’s sitting next to her in the booth, trapped against her, really – Blake has squashed the three of them together on one side of the table. This girl looks like she’s thirteen, but he’s not about to give her shit for it because when your guild’s main tank is one of the best on the server, you try not to make her mad. Soul sends a withering glare over his shoulder at Blake (who ignores it as easily, if not more so, than his brother), and spreads complimentary pseudo-butter on his pancakes.

Who the fuck is Kaworu? Gotta be an anime thing – he’s not sure he could repeat that name back without stumbling over his own mouth.

“This is my actual hair color, but I’m eight months pregnant, to save you from assuming anything else about me,” he spits, feeling like the world’s largest asshat for having equally assumed ReaperMan wasn’t anyone but a man. “Why the hell would I cosplay at a friggen Denny’s?”

He watches her blush red in his peripheral, which is more satisfying than he’d like to admit, but the overall expression on her face reads dawning recognition.

“…Because there’s an anime con tomorrow-oh-my-god, you’re SoulEater!” Reaper slaps her hand on the table, an old-man move so juxtaposed by its performer that it makes his head spin. Various tableware jingles at their booth. “Sorry, I thought you were like some 60’s hipster Fifth Child. Now I see it’s just the eternally grumpy music snob in the flesh.”

God damn it, she really is Reaper. He’s kind of pissed, but he’s also amused despite himself because now he can put a voice to all the ridiculous snark she spouts to him in private tells, and it matches up too perfectly for him to stay angry. It’s Reaper. His friend.

Soul waves at his model-brother-acquired, haute couture Ugly Shirt in nauseating neon. He likes directing as much attention away from his face as he can. “Paisley’s coming back, okay? And when it arrives, I’ll be wearing something else,” he retorts with a confidence he doesn’t actually have.

Reaper tilts her head back to laugh, a note to her voice that makes her suddenly nowhere near thirteen. Different and more base parts of his brain waking up now, on alert, which is something he’d wanted to avoid because that whole sublevel of social interaction is fruitless at best and tiring always. He didn’t come here looking for cute girls. In fact, he’d wanted to get through this stupid IRL-meetup with as little effort as possible and maybe bullshit with Reaper as a bonus.

Except ReaperMan is pretty.

Soul concentrates intently on pouring syrup over his pancakes, but is interrupted by the continual focal point of his hatred for the evening.

“Attention!” Blake announces to the entire diner, hands cupping around his mouth.“Professional bamf has entered the building!”

While Soul’s sensitivity to horrendous noises is withering away in his soul, mortally wounded, ShadowStag waves politely from the front door of Denny’s, clearly accustomed to her arrival being broadcasted on the regular.

Soul has never actually met her, but she’s recognizable because she has a massive nerd cult on instagram. One of Reaper’s IRL friends, she’s also a hell of a druid, so adaptable she’s practically nine players at once, and is therefore his class leader in raids. He actively tries to stay on her good side. Blake actively tries to get in her pants.

Trailing behind Stag is a type-A-looking dude Soul immediately and instinctually knows is the guild’s raidleader despite never having seen him before. Death the priest is a stuck-up perfectionist jerkhole, and only the absolute dick who yells at them for hours on end throughout the week could have a bitch face like that. Meeting your raidleader in the flesh and watching him order a veggie omelette directly across from you at a Denny’s booth is a surreal experience only comparable to seeing your mother without her bra on.

More guildmates show up in bursts, and the group takes over three booths and two pushed-together tables. They shoot the nerdy shit well past midnight, some people floating between tables to meet everyone and complain about how BlackStar seems to have bribed the server gods for his good luck on loot rolls.

Socializing with them is a lot easier than Soul had thought it would be, made more so by everyone else at the table being adept with all the back-and-forth conversation ritual that he had never managed to learn. He’s easily caught up in their conversation, and it’s a nice distraction from his online friend-turned-cute-woman sitting next to him.

“The more important issue at hand,” Death says, carefully stacking tiny cups of half-and-half into a pyramid, “is that if we recruit any more recreational drug users, we won’t be able to live through hard mode. Once they’re high, our effective healing goes down by a third.”

“Ohhhhhhh my shit,” Blake whines. “The issue is that I don’t have my extra bacon. Don’t talk math at the table, I get enough of that from Reaper and her stupid ‘optimal threat rotations’.”

“I’ll remind you that my math saves your dumb ass,” Reaper chirps back.

Stag takes a mouth-watering insta of her crepes, fine-tuning her filters. “Well, we can either ban bongs on raid nights or start asking recruits if they get high, but once they realize the consequences, they’ll simply lie.”

Soul carefully accordion-folds his straw wrapper and doesn’t look directly into anyone’s face, because it’s easier to pretend he’s merely in voice chat and this conversation isn’t something worth sweating nervously over. “Just start kicking healers when they can’t perform up to standard.”

“Right?” Reaper adds. “They don’t wanna be replaced, so they’ll either stop using or start playing better while they are. They could lick fuckin’ toads as long as I don’t die twenty times a night.”

The absurdity of Reaper’s girl-voice saying things like ‘lick fuckin’ toads’ is problematic. Soul bites the inside of his cheek, stifling a laugh.

BlackStar eyeballs a heated carafe of artificial maple syrup for all of two seconds before pouring some into his coffee.  “I’m glad we can have this super serious weed meeting over pancakes, but like are we gonna go drinking later or mayhaps do something actually entertaining? This’s Vegas, isn’t it?”

\

Thankfully, somewhere around that liminal, two-in-the-morning hallucinatory hour, ShadowStag shuts up BlackStar by offering him a ‘ride’ (to where, Soul does not want to think about in detail if he can help it), and some of the raiding crew make plans to go to a bar and attempt to get Death the Hardass drunk.

The rest of the party filters out, crashing for the night, until only ReaperMan remains – well, her and the ninja waitress who keeps refilling Soul’s coffee when he’s not looking.

His ass is asleep and he doesn’t think he can stand to get to the other side of the table, but he does scoot to the side to give Reaper more space in the booth. “Are you, uh, cool with being alone with a guy this late?” he asks, as if they haven’t spent scores of hours chatting privately online.

She shrugs. “Yeah. You’re a good healer.”

He waits for some kind of punchline, but she doesn’t say anything. “That’s it? That’s your basis on judging a person’s character?” Soul narrows his eyes. “I’m not even specced for healing.”

“I know. That’s why I run five-mans with you.” With the lack of people at the table, her voice has gone darker, deeper, playing inside his ears in a way only music usually can, not so much direct sun anymore as it is reflected moonlight, and he determines he has officially had too much coffee. “You’re always the first name that goes by when heals are thrown at me after I do something reckless.” She smiles. Moonshine, 120-proof. “I like that.”

Fuck him. He is fucked. He doesn’t know where the waitress is, so he puts his hand over his chipped mug and deigns to keep it there permanently.  “Because you’re insane,” he insists. “I had to write a macro to save your ass whenever the real healer’s AFK because you just throw yourself into danger.”

“That only proves my point. And aw, you wrote one for me? I’m honored.”

“You should feel guilty.”

She tilts her head, brown-blonde fringe scorching to gold in the overhead lights. “You always write the smoothest macros though. I have like seven of yours on my hotbar for raids.”

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuc– “If you’re trying to butter me up, it’s only working a little.” He needs to get out of here, away from her, but he’s house-sitting for his mother and going back to an empty mansion is presently less desirable than possibly developing a crush on the guild’s main tank. “Seriously though, you probably shouldn’t be basing your trust on some heroic encounters. My actions stem from dodging an expensive repair bill, not because I’m trying to save you, personally.”

Reaper yawns behind a hand before drowsily reaching down to his plate and swiping leftover syrup with her finger. Sticks this in her mouth in the least sexual way possible, though it doesn’t particularly save him from any mental images. “So are you saying I should not trust you?”

“Bwuuuh.” He scratches his head at that, caffeine-addled brain making sloppy connections. “Well, okay, I wouldn’t hurt you. But if you’re relying on me to save you if someone else tried anything… I’m pretty much the same as in-game – a hit or two and I’m down, not gonna lie.”

That laugh of hers is more potent than the five or twelve cups of coffee he’s had. “I’m the tank, fear not. I’ll protect you.”

His heart is thudding at an unhealthy speed, so he takes a sip of some guildie’s untouched ice water. “Right. All hundred-ten pounds of you, I’m sure.”

“One-seventeen, thank you,” she sniffs. “Besides, I carry mace.”

“What, like two-handed?”

“The pepperspray, stupid.”

“It was a joke.”

“Yeah, your jokes are awful.” Reaper pulls her legs up on the booth cushion, crossing them. She’s wearing a schoolgirl skirt, which doesn’t help the thirteen-year-old look, though her really god-damn amazing thighs are another story. “That’s kinda why I started talking to you online, really. That and I thought you were a girl until I heard you in voice chat one time.”

Soul chokes on water. “What?” he croaks.

“’Cause I don’t trust guys that much. That’s why I never use my mic–”

“No, back up. Why did you think I was a chick.”

She shrugs. “I dunno. The emotes? You wink a lot.”

“What does that have to do with– forget it. Let’s clear up any misunderstandings now: I’m a guy.”

“Yeah I know, already, sheesh…” Reaper’s head then tiredly lands on the backrest of the booth. “Uhg, I better go. I’m getting delirious and I have a cosplay to finish.” She pulls out a cellphone too big for her hands out of her hoodie pocket. “Do you have one of these things? Stag’s been trying to get me to talk about stuff that isn’t, like, efficient threat generation.”

They exchange numbers, and he tries to tamp down whatever seizure his guts are having right now. After she takes his photo for her contact list, he can’t help but quietly blurt, “Why the username?” 

(Why had he, the one person he’d like to think talks to Reaper the most online, never known this girl?)

She smiles brightly, though her green eyes are a dark, dark contrast that make his toes twitch in his shoes.

Very carefully, she says, “It’s a Terry Pratchett novel,” and leaves no room for further discussion on the subject.

\

Driving to Mom’s place, his brain blazes with thoughts and bad ideas.

Pushes this away with logic. Once he’s done house-sitting, he’ll go home, and Reaper will return to being a capslocking friend-slash-entity on the internet, because they live four hours apart.

There’s no way for him to say ‘let’s hang out sometime’– he’s not the type to casually drive that far to see a friend just for some overpriced coffee. That would insinuate a certain level of above-average interest; of pursuit.

He doesn’t pursue.

Better to stay away from her. Whether or not she’s even interested, he knows if he gets any closer, it is very likely he will end up miserable. He’s afraid he could really like her, and Soul is not cool with long-distance shit; he need only look at his parents’ marriage, his brother’s multiple failed relationships to know that distance breeds distrust every time.

He will cull the fruitless ideas of something other than online friendship with her. He hadn’t been attracted to ReaperMan yesterday, so it’ll be easy to erase tonight and go back to that simple, straightforward camaraderie.

Decides this firmly after he pulls into Mom’s driveway in his brother’s car, trudging through the yawning garage door into a silent house.

\

Wakes, needing to piss, just shy of six hours of sleep, in last night’s clothes on the parlor’s couch that no one is allowed to sit on. Shuffles in his dad’s dinosaur slippers to the nearest bathroom. Does not stare too long in any particular direction, because his mom’s place is 4,200 square feet of clowns.

He is thankful that he had not acquired the same propensity for collecting terrifying-as-fuck antiques, but it doesn’t make the guest room any less impossible to sleep in, which is why he’d passed out in the parlor. Deftly avoids eye-contact with porcelain, red-nosed sadface on the back of the toilet while getting rid of possibly two gallons of coffee. Dinosaurs his way to the kitchen.

There’s a pile of mail on the kitchen island with his name on it – he forgets sometimes that his place of residence is still, technically, here, though his room has long since been sacrificed to Mom’s ever-expanding closet. Peruses through this, though it’s mostly junk, as he debates on taking a dip in the pool to wake up or grabbing some food first and then taking a dip in the pool, but then his phone cackles in his wrinkled pants.

ReaperMan’s ringtone: Emperor’s New Groove’s Yzma, evil cat version, laughing maniacally in a deranged squirrel voice, which had seemed the most fitting at two in the morning for some reason.

And he’d been doing so well, blood pressure nice and apathetic until just now. He pulls the phone out of his pocket. Answers while picturing Reaper’s game character instead of the leggy girl-thing from last night.

“Mornin’?” he tries.

What he hears in reply sounds far away, but still loud enough to shatter glass, like she’s been taking lessons from BlackStar in the past six hours.

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN MY RESERVATION’S CANCELLED?  I BOOKED IT THREE MONTHS IN ADVANCE!”

Conclusion: butt-dial.

“MAKA. ALBARN. Check again!”

Oh. Her real-life name. “Reaperrrrr, pick up! Your ass is talking to you!”

She doesn’t hear him. He hangs up, vaguely remembering the anime convention she’d mentioned going on in town. He calls her back, not really expecting her to answer. She doesn’t.

Soul, alone with clown magnets and teacups in the kitchen, recalls his stance on pursuit, on his decision to not dwell on fruitless possibility. Shoots a text, despite knowing on a molecular level that it is probably a bad idea, to ShadowStag.

[[ hey. i think reaper buttdialed me and was yelling about hotel rooms? do u kno wat con she’s going 2 ]]

Then, realizing it’s not yet eight in the morning, adds, [[ if ur not bangin my friend rn ]]

Stag appears to be a real human being with real life goals and responsibilities, but she’s also eerily integrated with technology to a level that makes even him somewhat uncomfortable, so he figures she’ll respond soon enough. He opens up the gigantic, clowntowned refrigerator to grab some string cheese. Leans on the counter and struggles with the wrapper.

His phone vibrates across the kitchen island. Stag has texted him an address downtown. [[ Not answering her phone? ]]

[[ neg ]]

The ease of which he predicts her next message borders on the painful, if only because it means he’s already had the same idea.

[[ You should go find her! I bet she would be glad to see you. =D ]]

Soul is extremely unhappy about ShadowStag’s intuition. And if she’s getting the smiley faces out this early in the game, he doesn’t stand a chance at winning. Heaven help him if she starts with emoji.

He bides his time, finishing off the string cheese before typing what she probably wants to hear (which also happens to be what he’d like to know).

[[ y me? ]]

Immediately after sending, he nearly throws his phone to the ground. This is not highschool. He is supposed to be above doing the text gossip bullshit thing, damn it.

His phone buzzes, Stag’s reply sent at a speed well beyond acceptable, casual conversation. He reads it eagerly.

[[ Well, you’re the only contact on her phone with a photo. ]]

How the fuck does she know that already? And why does she says this like it means something? He got one of Reaper, too – it doesn’t mean anything.

[[ ur speculating now ]]  Yeah. Exactly.

[[ Observing! ]] she replies, followed by heart, sunglasses, and winking emoji.

He can’t handle this insanity. [[ hallucinating ]], he insists, and then, trying to abort mission, [[ don’t i need like a ticket or something to get in anyway? ]]

[[ Hold please. ]]

“Oh god,” he says aloud, dread setting his nerves ablaze. Next to him, the ice machine in the fridge groans and crashes with another load, startling him. He realizes he’s slouched over his phone, absorbed in this ridiculous conversation.

Stands up. Walks to the french doors leading to the sparkling pool and pretends he doesn’t give a damn about specific nerds being less than 15 minutes away from him.

[[ You’ve just been registered. Go get your pass. ]]

“Are you fucking shitting me,” he blurts, startling the birds in the sprawling backyard. He starts to furiously type ‘i didn’t ask to be registered for shit’ but he is interrupted.

[[ Don’t worry about paying me back. There’s always some Shadow Clan eager to support a good cause. ]] 

Soul holds his phone as far away from his person as he can, like one daintily grasping a very poisonous snake by the tail, fervently wishing he knew some exorcism chants or whatever to cleanse bad, bad juju.

Shadow Clan: the creepy instagram fan base Stag had somehow accumulated online. They shower her with gifts at all hours of the day; sing praises to her both in-game and IRL.

[[ do NOT get me involved with ur freaky cultists ]]

She is not phased. [[ I won’t force you, though you know Blake would if I let him. ]]

How rude. She’s had him in her clutches for less that a day and BlackStar is already one of her minions.

[[ Show up or don’t. I’m just saying that Reaper is Black Rock Shooter today. ]] Devil face.

She used the devil face.

Soul sits on the edge of the pool, taking off the dinosaur slippers and dipping his feet in the water while he mourns his expectations of having a shenanigan-free remainder of the weekend. He waits a few minutes to see if ShadowStag has anything else to say, but gets only ear-grating silence. Scowling, he pulls up a search bar on his phone and types in ‘black rock shooter’.

An image search returns multiple iterations of tiny pigtailed girl in tinier bikini. Big Fucking Gun. Blue fire.

“Whaaaaaat the fuck is this,” he nearly wheezes, trying to parse this carefully-honed, sex-appeal-schoolgirl creature with the main tank in the booth at Denny’s last night.

…Thinks more intently about this for an additional five seconds.

His phone vibrates, just when he thinks he’s finally alone with his bewildering dilemmas:

[[ From one of my sources. ]] followed by an instagram link.

It’s not Stag’s usual filters, so some Shadow Cultist had evidently taken this artistically crooked snapshot of black-bikini-clad ReaperMan pointing a dangerous finger at a hotel receptionist, shapely legs parting her trench coat.

Completely unnecessary, Stag adds, [[ She’s been doing yoga with me. =D ]]

Soul sighs very loudly at the pool.

[[ ur the absolute creepiest person i kno ]]

\

TBC

soma week 2k15, dragon

marshofsleep:

here’s some pretty straightforward Spirited Away AU for today’s theme. i’ve set Soul around 14 or 15, here. potty mouth, but still growing up, you know?

rated T/PG-13 for language.

He makes a graceless dive for the bucket of herbal soak tags and grimaces as the ooze catches up with him. There’s oily muck between his toes and he’s pretty sure his nose hairs are curling from the stench of this stink god. He should be looking for a way to find his pork chop of a brother and save him from being turned into bacon, but something in the despairing blobby face of the filthy god in the tub inspires Soul to do what he can.

It’s kind of a novel feeling, to be honest. Usually he’s not inspired to do anything.

Read More

reblag for morning crowd and my nerves @~~@;;

soma week 2k15, dragon

here’s some pretty straightforward Spirited Away AU for today’s theme. i’ve set Soul around 14 or 15, here. potty mouth, but still growing up, you know?

rated T/PG-13 for language.

He makes a graceless dive for the bucket of herbal soak tags and grimaces as the ooze catches up with him. There’s oily muck between his toes and he’s pretty sure his nose hairs are curling from the stench of this stink god. He should be looking for a way to find his pork chop of a brother and save him from being turned into bacon, but something in the despairing blobby face of the filthy god in the tub inspires Soul to do what he can.

It’s kind of a novel feeling, to be honest. Usually he’s not inspired to do anything.

This smell is gonna make him hurl, though. All around them, he feels the eyes of his gigantic, judgmental audience, and it’s unnerving enough that that might make him hurl, too. He hates being the center of attention, but he’d asked for a job and he has one so he’ll do it, god damn it.

Still, he has no magic tricks like Maka, or any experience in the bath house like Liz and Pat, so he doesn’t exactly know what the hell he can actually do.  

The stink god, whose stink and god-like slime has polluted the water in the tub and overflowed to the point of being waist-high on Soul, opens its mouth and says something rumbly and so low-pitched that Soul can only feel it swirling in his lungs. …And smell it. Guy’s breath is beyond rotten. But Soul gets the gist of what he says, maybe. He’s got a bucket full of tags and very limited options, so he manages to put one and one together.

“Uhhh. Yeah, okay. Hang on guy! Or Sir. Or …whatever you are. I’m on it.”

Soul wades through muck, silently repeating a mantra of don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it, and pounds his fist on the wall, feeling dumb because he can’t find the stupid panel that should be like, right here–

“OW, frickin’ son of an ass,” he says when the panel pops open and he finds it with his head. He blindly grabs one of the wooden tags that creep-face slenderman guy had nicked for him (what had that been about, anyway?) because he has no idea what any of the symbols painted on them represent. He hopes none of them are like acid windex tubwash tags and he accidentally poisons his client, though honestly that might be an improvement at this point.

His hands are slimy – don’t think about it don’t think about it – and he fumbles the stupid tag and drops it out of reach behind the panel. Behind him, Stank-God makes a melted face that reads somewhat like ‘Are you kiddin’ me?’

Soul gripes back, “I’m workin’ on it, okay?” and grabs the next tag, grateful he has so many. He attaches it to a clip on a long line, pulling it back to watch it slingshot up and away into the dark. Almost immediately, a tall, long section of the wall tilts down – a water chute – its pull string hovering over the bath tub.

He orders his stomach to not barf on the job, hiking up his uniform pants and duck walking through goop made up of only the gods know what (and he’s fine with not knowing). He feels kind of heroic as he, a pathetic, scrawny-legged human kid in a bathouse full of employees too lame in the butts to help a guy out, climbs the sloping sides of the tub like a moron going the wrong way up an escalator. Soul stands tiptoed on the ledge next to the god of stink to reach the pull string that is clearly not designed for cool dudes of his modest height, jerkwads.

“You know, it’s a good thing,” he chokes out while straining for the string, “your mouth isn’t wide open and your breath isn’t about to murder me to death.” 

The god seems to have a sense of humor, because it just opens its mouth wider and breathes warm assbreath directly into Soul’s face.

Soul angrily growls, making a poorly-executed leap of faith for the string above. His fingers graze the edge of it before he loses his balance and slips into the tub.

And now he’s stuck. He’s face-down in goop, underwater, and he’s pretty sure he’s about to die on the job in a bath house filled with ghosts, frogs, and stank-gods. Soul kicks his legs around wildly in the tub, unwilling to die in the first place but also because this whole situation is one of the more humiliating ways to go. Plus, Wes is still a pig and that’s messed.

A giant, paw-like hand wraps around his entire torso, lifting him out of the tub. Water pours from above like high-dollar tea from heaven, completely covering the god. That paw cradling him brings Soul forward until he’s right up against the waterfall.

He feels that strange rumble in his lungs again, though he doesn’t think the god has opened its mouth to speak this time. Soul just knows the words, somehow, beckoned by a current rushing through his soul.

Captivated, Soul reaches blindly through the water and feels something that doesn’t belong in this world at all. It’s familiar, and after a few moments of tracing the shape, he gets it, suddenly understanding this bath house and its customers, the purpose of this psychotic place in the spirit world.

“Eater!” Liz shouts over the loud cascade, face behind a handkerchief for the smell. “We got Stein to send everything he’s got!”

Pat, holding a veritable arsenal of deck brushes and mops, says, “We came to help to help ya, Toothy!” She looks excited about it, which shouldn’t be surprising, really. “Gonna kick this stanky’s butt!”

At any other time, Soul would take a moment and feel a little happy for having some allies in this circus show, but he’s got something metal and plastic in his hand, man-made and lodged in the stink god. He calls out, “Thanks!” the word sincere and no longer alien like it usually is. “Hey, there’s a bike in this dude!”

“What?” the sisters ask in unison. He really wishes all these derps would stop saying ‘what’ to everything that comes out of his mouth like he’s another species – even though he is. It’s still annoying.

“There’s a BIKE in this DUDE, okay? We gotta get it out!”

“STOP THE PARTY,” bellows Kim from overhead, jumping off one of the many balconies and hovering in the air with all her ruffles and frills next to the tub. Her tanuki tail twitches with excitement. “That’s no stink god we got here.”

With a flourish, Kim conjures a rope from between her hands, pink and gaudy as her hair. Hell, it may be her hair. She tosses it to Pat, the end of it beelining for her like a possessed snake. “Tie this to it! We’ll yank it out.”

Liz, being the oldest, helps him and Pat wrap it around the bike handle with her longer arms. Over the roar of the bath, Kim cracks a magical whip in the air, ordering the other employees to tug on the rope. The whole bath house cheers in unison, urging the workers to pull together. Soul finds himself shouting along with them, bracing against the slope of the tub and pulling til his hands burn.

The bike gives way a little, parting through the waterfall and covered in muck. It’s attached to all sorts of trash – things that Soul recognizes, all piled and twisted together – and he doesn’t care about the slime anymore, letting go of the rope to tug on the garbage directly. A few more pulls from the team and it all comes out at once, a mess of pollution and human civilization rushing past and knocking Soul off balance.

Its then that he suddenly remembers he’s afraid of heights and he’s standing on the rim of a massive tub sized for gigantic gods. Standing in tall places is not his strong point. 

(And, to be honest, neither is swimming, which is worrisome as all of Stein’s soak water has created a torrential flood in the bath house.)

(If Soul even had a strong point, it would probably just be whining a lot.)

He’s going to fall. He reaches blindly for the garbage spewing out of the god, and his hand finds a bit of fishing line. He accidentally pops a bobber out of the dude, and then something hella weird happens:

It’s like he’s hit his head, maybe, or like the – do NOT think about it – contaminated goo water must have gone in his mouth and made him trip balls, because he’s pretty sure this is what all the D.A.R.E. classes in middle school described how hallucinations go.

‘This is your brain on meth’, they said.

Water wraps around him, holding him in a cocoon of it with no air to breathe, yet he doesn’t suffocate. Something like rough, unforgiving river rapids roar in his ears, but he’s strangely calm with the cacophony. Soul floats, suspended, and memories stir quietly in the back of his mind, this feeling of being enveloped vaguely familiar.

He closes his eyes, body going very still, and he hears a voice.

“You did alright, octopus head. Good goin’.”

The water releases him, and Soul is left standing on the edge of the tub, the bath house silent and calm as glass. He breathes in crisp, clean air. There’s something in his hands.

It’s some kind of weird-ass meatball. His lungs rumble a little and he mentally amends it to ‘medicinal herbal cake, ok, geeze, my bad’.

Behind him, the staff is wigging out because as the flood waters ebb away, they find little nuggets of gold between silt and garbage. Soul doesn’t find himself caring a whole lot though. He’s still studying the herbal cake in his hands, surprised to feel hope blooming in his chest. 

He thinks this meatball might turn Wes back into his normal, annoying self.

“Wait,” he murmurs to aloud. “Octopus head?”

“Eater,” Kim says, distracting him. “You’re in our guest’s way.” She gestures towards the still water in the tub, which suddenly isn’t still anymore – it begins to boil, bubbles reaching high for the ceiling, and Soul scrambles off the tub, scooting off to the sidelines.

“OPEN THE DOOR, DIPSTICKS!” Kim roars, resident slave frogs hurriedly opening the front gate.

And then, as an ancient river god – a dragon red as blood – bursts from the water and swirls overhead with a laughter that shakes the marrow in his bones, that twisting, glittering joy reminds Soul, somehow, of Maka.

He wakes in daylight from a nightmare about his brother. He’d been surrounded by pigs, all wanting to eat the herbal cake, and Soul couldn’t tell the difference between Wes and everyone else.

To make matters worse, he kind of can’t remember what Wes even looks like.

Sitting up from his futon, he notices the sleeping quarters are completely empty, though most of the employees usually sleep during the day time. He wonders why no one had bothered to wake him – typically they’ve always been more than happy to give him hell.

Soul puts on his uniform, safely tucking the not-meatball into a pocket. He walks out to the balcony, making a habitual glance to the pens where the pigs are kept and wondering if his brother is okay. Worry pools in his gut.

He notices smoke is puffing from the boiler’s chimney, so Stein must already be awake. Maybe he could give him some advice about… pig sorting, or something? That’s a good a plan as any, Soul decides.

But when he goes down the service elevator and ends up just outside the kitchens, he’s surrounded by madness.

Frogs and slugs scurry around with massive trays of food and refreshments in a desperate excitement. Jacqueline shouts orders, looking almost happy as she demands they serve even the leftovers. Standing off to the side, Soul avoids the crowd, wondering what the hell crawled up everyone’s underpants.

“Morning sunshine,” Pat says, peeking her head from around the corner, startling him. 

“AHH! Hi. Sheesh.”

The girl doesn’t even pretend to look sorry. “We were just gonna come wake you uuuup~”

“Did daylight savings time happen or something?” he asks, waving vaguely at the crowd.

Pat makes a face, forehead crinkling. “What?”

He looks askance, swallowing an irritated groan. “…Nevermind.” Soul watches Liz push through a traffic jam of employees to meet up with the two of them.

“Check it! He gave it to me,” she beams, holding up a gold pebble in front of Soul’s face. “Real shit. This guy’s a high roller. S’why everyone’s going nuts – he’s just givin’ it away.”

Had the river god had come back for another stay? It’s only been a few hours since he’d left, which is weird, but he supposes ‘weird’ is a commonplace thing, here. Soul scratches the back of his neck. “Um. That’s cool, I guess.”

“Let’s go, Toothy,” Pat says. “Kim’s still snoozin’ so now’s our chance for a bonus!”

Money is pretty damn close to the last thing on his to do list (followed only by ‘summer break homework’), so he says, “I’ll pass, I wanna go talk to Stein.”

“Ehhhh?” the girls complain in unison. Liz adds, “I wouldn’t bother, he’s grumpy as hell ‘cause they woke him up so early. But do what you want. Let’s go back for more, Pat.”

“Latas,” Pat says with a casual salute, and the sisters rush back into the crowd.

Soul slouches against a wall, at a loss. He doesn’t want to deal with a grumpy Stein – that guy is weird enough as it is – and he probably shouldn’t interrupt him while he’s busy in the first place. All he can do is kill some time until the craziness dies down, so Soul heads upstairs until he’s back on the balcony of the sleeping quarters, gazing across an ocean of rainfall that separates him from the pig sties in the distance.

He curls over the railing with a sigh. Wes is probably a fat porker by now, that carefree idiot. The thought of it makes Soul’s eyes sting a little, but he blames it on the sun brightly shining off the water.

It’s lonely up here, and what he wishes for the most right this second is for Maka to be around. He feels better when she is, and he thinks if she were with him he might not be so afraid of trying to find his brother in a herd of hundreds.

Sometimes, in the right light, her eyes are a determined copper-green that make him feel a lot braver than he really is, her straightforward personality the most stable thing in his life anymore.

Liz had told him Kim makes Maka do shady errands and stuff, like some kind of slave, and now Soul can’t help but feel worried for her. Kim only ever has profits on her mind, and seems pretty willing to mow over anyone who gets in the way of her and making coin. And she turns people into pigs! 

All this worrying isn’t getting him anywhere. Soul closes his eyes, resting his chin on the railing. He’s still pretty tired after last night, and wonders if he can manage a quick nap on the balcony. Working all these night shifts has left him missing the sun and blue sky.

And home. He misses home a lot. He misses his brother’s shitty stick-shift driving and bad orchestra jokes. But he also misses Maka quietly coming to him in the middle of the day, eyes bright and wheat hair glittering in the light as she wakes him and spirits him away from the bath house.

The wind picks up, carrying a strange noise with it, and Soul cracks open an eye. Then, with surprise, the other. Then his spine straightens, eyes wide and hands white-knuckled on the railing.

Something rattles on the wind, and far below, just above the water’s surface, he sees a twisting, serpentine dragon, scales flashing gold in the sun, rippling like a field of wheat. The beast dances in a swarm of birds, and the longer he watches, the more he begins to think the dragon is under attack.

It climbs, higher, higher, into the clouds only to fall like a dead thing to the ocean, but it’s a ploy – she cuts through the water towards the bath house, evading the birds for a few seconds.

She. Because he knows, doesn’t he? He’s seen her before, a golden ribbon swirling in the sky on a hot afternoon, tufts of fur iridescent and copper-green.

The birds chatter loudly, sailing after her, and as they approach, Soul realizes they’re not birds at all. The dragon bullets straight up out of the ocean and into the sky, passing inches away from the balcony and flinging water on him with those not-birds right on her tail. Soul hangs over the ledge, her name burning on his tongue.

“Maka, this way!” He watches her twist and writhe, feels her voice in the bottom of his lungs as a faint whisper. “Maka!”

The dragon twirls in the air, sloppy with blood, and then she’s suddenly rocketing towards the sleeping quarters at an alarming speed. Soul only just manages to get out of the way of her whipping tail. She crashes indoors, and he fumbles with the balcony’s window screens, desperately trying to force them shut before the thousands of paper birds catch up.

The stupid screens are wedged, a huge gap still between them, and he makes an unseemly noise as the birds begin to plaster to the windows and his face. Before he can truly lose his shit over it, however, any of the birds that make it through the crack mysteriously fall away from him, harmlessly floating to the floor. Some of the papers even pick themselves up, going out the way they came.

Bewildered and catching his breath, Soul stares after the flock, watching them soar back across the ocean in neat rows, fading away like a dream and leaving his head spinning.

“This place is an absolute freak-show,” he wheezes. But even so, it’s real. Behind him, the blood dribbling out of Maka’s vicious mouth is dark and real and everywhere. He turns and finds her tangled in bedclothes and spare uniforms, spine arching as her claws dig into the wood floor.

She hisses at him, whispering things he can’t understand, dark and crazy in his chest.

“T-that is you, isn’t it? Maka,” he says. His legs are filled with little tremors, because everything is insane and Maka is a dragon and that dragon does not look very happy right now. “Those things are gone, it’s safe. …Probably. Are you hurt?” Of course she is – she’s covered in blood, and paper doesn’t bleed so that gives her full ownership. “What can I do?”

Her eyes are the same green as always, glittering and familiar, but in this moment they are also frighteningly feral, and they keep him from coming any closer to her.

His mouth is dry. Soul realizes that he has no idea if Maka the girl is the same as Maka the god. Her fangs suddenly look a hell of a lot sharper, but he’s worried about her so it doesn’t really matter what she looks like, does it? 

He cautiously reaches out with both hands, watching her coil up on herself. “I’ll help you through it.”

He blinks, and she’s moving, twisting past him and out the half-open window screens, her blood flinging on the glass with her flight. He’s stunned for a breath, but then he’s stumbling after her, hanging off the balcony with no regard for heights so he can watch her clumsily fly to the very top of the tall bath house.

She’s headed to Kim’s quarters, and his gut sinks to the bottom of the ocean. What use would someone like Kim have for a dying slave? Would she even help her? …What if she just turns the dragon into sushi or something?

Soul decides he has to help Maka for once, instead of the other way around.

Never mind his blood pressure and the way the world danced on its end as he climbed the longest ladder in the universe to get to Kim’s office without being noticed. Forget the bigass baby with neon blue hair that tried to break his arm because he wanted to play a round of some spirit-world knockoff of Counter-Strike (seriously, kids shouldn’t be playing games like that while still in diapers– where are his parents). Forget the kid’s freaky, antlered bird-guardian, darker than a shadow, that tried to gouge his eyes out. Forget those three severed HEADS with ridiculous haircuts and glasses, bouncing around and trying to push Maka down some hole that totally has to be a bottomless pit of doom or some equivalent.

None of that bullshit matters, right now. The point is, Dragon-Maka is bleeding to death in his arms and the world has decided to be even more impossible, just to fuck with him.

Some hologram of a cat lady with really nice cans has appeared from one of those paper birds that had apparently hitch-hiked on the back of his uniform, and admittedly he did kind of cheer her on when she turned Blue Baby and Shadow Hawk into a mouse and tiny hummingbird thing, because karma working out in his favor just doesn’t happen that often. He may have even laughed a little when she’d turned the three creep-heads into a clone of the giant baby, because anything that punks Kim is something he can rally behind. 

But now cat-witch Blair wants Maka, and he is so done with this clown house.

He tries to shield the dragon as best he can with his body. “The hell do you want with her? She’s dying, I won’t let you touch her!”

Blair flippantly tosses her purple hair over one shoulder, golden cat eyes gleaming, predatory. “That snake’s a thief, yanno? My little cousin’s doormat. Slave. She took somethin’ of mine and that’s real rude, yeah?”

“Maka wouldn’t do anything like that! Kim musta done something to her,” he snarls, baring his teeth. “Also who just kills thieves? This isn’t the dark ages.”

The hologram of the witch tilts her head to one side, cat ears perked. “The wha?”

Seriously. Clown house. So done.

Blair shrugs, putting a clawed finger to her pouty bottom lip. “Whatever. It’s too late for her anyway, cutie.” Soul merely stares, dumbfounded as this witch simultaneously flirts and threatens Maka’s life. “The thing she stole from me’s cursed. Anyone who takes Bu-tan’s hat dies.”

He’s too young to be developing an eye twitch. “A hat. Really?”

“Nya~”

He’s caught somewhere between frustrated fury and just outright wanting to cry for Mom, clutching to Maka’s long neck without any earthly idea of what to do to make this madness stop. 

Luckily, it is this moment that Fake-Baby starts beating the floor with his gigantic, pudgy hands, aiming for mouse-sized Former-Baby and his bumble-bird sidekick.  

Blair turns, tail curling with distaste. “You naughty kittens, whatchoo doin’ that for? Get back in your room and shoot some bad guys and junk!”

The blue-furred mouse and the bird flee together, scaling Soul’s back and clinging to his shoulder. Then, Soul feels Maka take a heaving breath between his hands, and he watches, breath caught in his throat, as her tail lifts and whips the single paper bird that Blair projects from.

“Oh, shoot,” the witch says as her hologram splits and dissipates.

Soul manages one single sigh of relief before he realizes Maka’s effort has caused her dragon body to slide off the edge of the pit, taking him with it. His voice does stupid, cracking things as he shrieks. 

The hole is dark as midnight and seems to go on forever. “Maka! Maka, hey, uh, we’re falling?! Right now. To our deaths!” 

She doesn’t respond.

He sees the mouse and bird floating away from him, caught in the air rushing past Maka’s scales, and he stretches out and carefully pulls them against his chest, though he doesn’t think it’ll help much, all things considered. 

The tunnel they fall through suddenly opens into a wide cavern, torches lighting the bottom; there are things lurking down there that look a lot like his nightmares, shadowy, incomprehensible, blinking up at them with glowing eyes.

They are falling from a very, very tall height, in the act of the one thing he has always been terrified of doing. It figures he’d die this way. 

He’d tried to save her, but it hadn’t worked out really well. Soul reaches forward, fingers sifting through Maka’s wind-whipped fur for her delicate, golden horns, pulling himself closer to her face as they plummet. They rapidly approach the creatures Kim keeps in the bowels of the bath house, their eager arms reaching for them, and Soul simply presses his face into Maka’s copper-green mane.

It comes to him in a flash behind his eyes, a warm, watery memory that makes him feel like he’s done this before; has met her in a life he hardly remembers. They’re connected in some intangible but undeniable way, and he realizes his heart is simply too close to hers to allow him to give up, even now.

Stein had said to finish what you start, and he’s not finished yet. Soul calls her name into her hair, reaching for her heart with his. 

With a rumbling roar that shakes his bones, Maka comes to life.