@cerasphim​ asked: ❛  beauty  does  not  solve  problems .  ❜ || SOFT THORNS

            “No. Beauty doesn’t fix a thing. It just covers up the things people don’t want you looking at. All well and good slapping a pretty name or a face on something...but it doesn’t do a whole lot except distract. And sometimes ‘pretty’ makes more problems than it covers up...” A train of thought that sounds like it might come from experience--though what experience that might be, Raiden never cares to tell. Not time, nor place, the subject not quite befitting. Even if he seems to have more than enough to say about it.

             A silence hangs brief in the heavy, golden air, thick with summer heat, that Raiden is almost glad he can’t quite feel as the sinking sun burns out its last for the evening. Another job well done, today--that should be enough cause for congratulation, relief, but neither of them seem quite in the mood.

             “But you learn that young in this life any way--that beauty doesn’t bring much for people like us. It doesn’t have a place out there on the killing field. It doesn’t stop that place from existing, or stop people wanting to keep it existing…no matter what pretty things they’ve gotta trample over to make that happen.”

@cerasphim​ asked: ❛  i  never  thought  i  would  be  a  good  mother .    ❜  || SOFT THORNS

“You may well have fooled me, given just how many ways and strays you take under wing wherever you go. Every time that I see you, you have another. Wherever it is that you find yourself, you are mother to someone. I suppose we are the very last people to see we are all our dreams and more...the many children you have now would be the first to tell you as much.” Assuming they haven’t already, though there lives not one doubt in Ophir’s mind that they have. The thought makes him smile some, distant and amused but eerily without mirth as some other, bleaker feeling passes over the devil’s eyes (where his smile, as small as it is, never quite reaches.)

“...I had dreamed of a child, once.” His own candidness both does and does not surprise him as his gaze wanders the temple walls--all marble and stone, familiar only because it was an old friend’s hand that had made them. It is, too, an old friend’s moon-pale prodigy standing in the garden that catches his eye, making Ophir honest. “Very long ago. When I was prince some place else and had been thought misshapen for longing for something so human.”

@cerasphim​ asked: “hey, i can see you. come on out here. i can see you hiding.” || THE FALL

“I’m not hiding.” Though the bite in his town suggests more offense than was taken--nerves rankled and his devil bringer throbbing hot with pain sure to blame for that much as he sidles out from the dark he was sheltering in. His face is pinched, eyes narrow with suspicion as he eyes the spot of night air boiling where another creature entirely had moments ago been standing. “Just didn’t want to interrupt you two, is all. That guy--” His hand gestures, where a thing in red had loomed and seethed and even from afar made Nero’s arm hurt till his head spun. Wrong--something was wrong. But Seras seems to be unflinching in the face of it as his gaze tracks back to the woman’s eyes. “Man, I’ve seen some pretty nasty things in my time, but he reeks like nothin’ I’ve ever known before. Who even was that? He a friend of yours?” The idea tastes sour even to speak as a frown creases Nero’s face.

@cerasphim​ asked: ❛  no  one  likes  to  be  alone .  ❜ || 𝒑𝒍𝒂𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒄  𝒉𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒕𝒔

“Guess not.” There’s a smile in Nero’s voice, however slight and however quiet as he wipes down Blue Rose’s silver face. “Thought I did not so long ago. You ask me to play nice with the rest of the Order and I would’ve laughed right in your face. I wasnt there to be a team player anyway. I was just there to toughen up...” A considering pause hangs in the air, Nero’s pale head tilted to level their gazes together, shoulders tilting with a shrug.

@cerasphim​ asked: ❝ green is the color of earth, of living things, of life. ❞ || GREEN KNIGHT

“Same as my old man’s eyes. Think he’d find all that whimsy you’re talkin’ pretty flattering, given that...and hey, I guess it suits, even. He was always waxing poetic about what life’s all about, what life should’ve been--what his life and his world was to him then. Living against all the odds. Yeah. Suits, alright.” An off-handed answer for an off-handed comment--nothing, after all, is green at this time of year when the cold has killed the colour in all things and the last of the leaves are shedding out of their colour and their clinging to the trees alike; the park isn’t much a pretty sight to look at it, but its not the smoke-ridden smell of the van, or the too-loud halls of home and that somewhat makes it kinder to behold. At least today.

Perhaps the green the woman is talking about is the bookmark peeking between the leaves of the book, a warm olive against age-old off white, slipped into place as Nero closes the cover. Like always, there’s a pretending of mirth in his voice that his eyes never bother to mimic.

“Starting to worry he’s been rubbin’ off on me even when he’s not around anymore. How’s that even work, huh?” The book cradled in one hand thumps its spine into the other, the noise heavy and dull and strangely comforting.

@cerasphim​ asked: ‘ some names will always be cursed ’ || POETRY STARTERS

“Mine among them. At least, the name that I have now...it shall always be wrought with curses and fearful stories of the star that blackened the dawn. But I would cast it off for no other. My newer lord is chagrined with me always for refusing him that honour.” There’s mirth to be had for that much, some petty pleasure in denying quite as many shackles as they could have been given--enough that their eyes smile even if Ophir’s mouth never quite does. It’s another day to be spent pondering in the temple’s inviting garden with its flowers and its fountains and the grass that never seems to stop being green (no wonder, knowing there is an angel that walks among it every day.) Seras is sat beside on their shared stone bench as the two of them look out upon the sleepy peace of the evening together, and Ophir has to wonder what brough this topic to mind to begin with.

“What names do you know that are cursed? Your master, surely. I am only peripherally acquainted with him...he is none of mine, certainly, no true devil so much as a man that gave his life to resemble one--but he lives a life that is fraught with rot just the same, does he not?” A glance is spared from the corner of Ophir’s dark, dark eyes, curious, pondering.

Munday Memes //Open

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SHIIIIIIIIII

Funny enough, my first muse was a Hellsing OC that I had made, Anastasia Arkwright. She was daughter and only child to a Scottish lord and a Russian vampire huntress.