Better Than I Was Yesterday

Hi anon!!!

I'd like to believe that Celine's treatment from her mentors was a mix of "you're a demon and you're only alive cause we need you" and "demons are cold, heartless murderers." which together is not great. Celine was dealing with a lot of inner repression and trauma for so many years that she just buried the secret of her being a demon (cause she would be a full demon in this AU) that she kinda forgets it from time to time. @fakelawyerbug and @secondtolastrow were talking about this in their own post (link here) but this does lead to her gumiho side becoming weaker and not growing like it's supposed to.

“Shhh. Shh. It’s okay, Cece. It’s okay.”

Celine, barely 5 years old, wraped her fox tail around herself and pined her ears down, “I’m sorry!”

“Why are you sorry?” Zoey pulled Celine in close, similar to how her mother used to comfort her after she and her father fought. She would also have rocked her but that might have been too much for Celine right now.

“I’m the problem.” Celine whispered, “I’m a bad demon, so they’re mad.”

“Oh! No, no, no, no! Celine, they’re not mad at you at all. They’re just trying to figure some things out about how we’re going to take care of you.” Running a hand through Celine’s hair, Zoey can see tiny nail marks in her fox ears and her stomach drops.

“Cause I’m supposed to be big?” Celine asked. When Celine first shrunk, the result of a very annoying demon attack, the girls felt it was best to explain to her who they were and what was going on, just in simple terms. That way they didn’t have to deal with Celine asking for her mom or Miyeong or being scared by 2026 technology.

“Exactly. We don’t know how to make you big yet and Mira and Rumi are just arguing about that.” It wasn’t a total lie. Mira and Rumi had been arguing about that earlier but their argument had shifted from that to ‘Celine lied to us again’ vs ‘Celine kept this huge secret and I’m mad but she’s also a kid’, “They’re not mad at you, Celine. I promise. I know Mira and Rumi can seem scary but they’re both huge softies.”

“Seem scary.” Celine buried her face into Zoey’s neck when she hears them use her name again, “I didn’t mean to be bad. My-my tail and ears don’t work right. I-I-I can hide them better! I’ll hide them better!”

“Shh. Shhhh.” Throwing caution to the wind, Zoey rocked Celine in her arms, quietly singing one of their more calmer songs until the child in her arms stopped shaking, “You have done nothing wrong, Cece, and you have nothing to apologize for with your tail and ears. They’re amazing. Tell you what. Why don’t we have dessert in the tv room? We can watch a good movie and make ourselves sick with bungeoppang?” Then after Celine went to bed Zoey could have a long talk with Mira and Rumi about yelling in front of a clearly scared and traumatized child.

“….Okay.”

Imagining Celine curled up next to Zoey as they watch a kids movie (I'm imagining like... a Korean kids movie that has the same vibes as the Fox and the Hound or Tarzan)

And Zoey, trying to get some more information out of her, asking, "So how did you get here, Cece? Did you live nearby?"

Celine, getting real quiet because this is things she's not supposed to say. And Zoey having to coax it out of her with, "it's okay, it's just us. And we're all hunter, right?"

And Celine telling her that she had been bad and wasn't supposed to leave the den but she heard the hunters singing and followed their voices. And she hadn't meant to be seen but she was and;

"Then then they started yelling and I thought they were going to kill me but then they didn't."

"Oh, did your parents come looking for you?" Zoey asks.

Celine shakes her head and then she shrugs.

♥ ♥ 📓 ♥ ♥ ԅ (👁 ᴗ 👁ԅ) [esteemed fanfic author] have a new chapter

(づᴗ _ᴗ)づ♥️♥️ !!! ♥️♥️ omg thank u

♥ ♥ 📓 ♥ ♥ ԅ (ꈍ ᴗ ꈍԅ) wait till that diabolical angst hits ooooooo

When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.

The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?

This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.

No One Like You

now, it took us a while to realise it meant "(there is) no one like you". at first, we all parsed it as a botched "no one like(s) you"

except its the most savage playfighting anyone’s ever seen, so much so that it looks like Actual Fighting to everyone else

there are like, full on punches being thrown and dodged. theres a LOT of biting, mostly from rumi and zoey (“is this sexual or is it just a thing you guys do while playing” someone asks online. “yes” zoey says in response). someone gets kicked in the face and the person who does it barely remembers to give a half assed apology. mira gets rumi into a headlock (people who have over analyzed the footage realize rumi fucking MOANS when mira does it. rumi has no comment about that). zoey repeatedly wrestles the other two into…compromising positions, usually with her ending up…on top. someone twists someones arm in a weird position. theres some strange noises coming from pile that sound furious and yet also like laughter

all of it is so brutal and savage that logic dictates they SHOULD be walking away with bruises and scrapes and all sorts of other, more serious injuries.

and yet they just…dont. theyre a little scuffed up but they’re otherwise fine. footage from like ten minutes afterwards shows them happily munching on snacks and curled up together on a couch, and completely unharmed. people are losing their minds online about this.

later, when asked about it, the three members of huntr/x are very confused by people being concerned for their wellbeing. “that stuffs fun to us” mira says. “we just have so much energy, yknow” zoey says. “please dont talk about the moaning. wait i mean. what moaning. there is no moaning. i didnt moan.” rumi says.

We… were not. 

War had ravaged us, and sickness, and war once again, until our population dwindled beyond the point of recovery. We struggled against that, of course… we used genetic manipulation, and cloning, and even more desperate measures. None succeeded. When the humans came, we were sinking into apathy, only a few tens of us left. We had begun to discuss whether we should commit a mass suicide, or simply wait to fade away. 

And then the young species came, in their clumsy ships, and they asked us why we were so few. 

“We are becoming extinct,” we told them. “We have passed the point of recovery.” 

It is custom to avoid the races that are dying – once a species reaches the point of inevitable extinction, even war is suspended, and the fiercest enemy pulls back. The custom was born of plagues and poisons that could be carried forth from a dying world to afflict a healthy one, but it has the implacable weight of tradition now. After we are gone, after they have waited for the prescribed period of quarantine, there will be a fight for our world. Habitable worlds are few, and this is a good one, with plenty of free groundwater and thriving vegetation. It is a bitter thing to be grateful for the custom that allows us to die in peace, but we are grateful.

But the humans don’t know that custom, and they do not leave. They seem distraught, when we tell them we are dying, and try to offer their aid - but their technology is behind ours, and it is too late. When they realize that they can’t save us, though, they do something that bewilders us.