#dyke-mecha

🥺🥺🥺🥺 oh…..

3 parts hurt, 1 part comfort (mind the warning tags)

Okay. So. I have a WIP in the works called Lariat: Wake the Devil, and that walks through some early Daigoro and Hikage relationship development. I am a very slow writer, but it IS one of my priorities. ….Which means it’s coming out sometime in the next two years.

However, there is plenty I can say about the backstory I imagine behind “3 parts hurt, 1 part comfort” - my badly-titled oneshot in which Hikage’s face splits open. (I gotta say. The 3:1 title is based on word count, but. Vibewise, it feels like it’s about 5% comfort, just to let anyone know who wants to read.)

So I’m keeping a liiiittle Hikage and Daigoro backstory in my back pocket for that. But I’d definitely like to talk about the backstory in 3:1 of Hikage’s mystery illness, and Daigoro’s awareness of it:

I have a scrapped scene sitting around wherein Hikage has one of his “fits” for the first time that Daigoro witnesses. Daigoro takes his symptoms for a stand-alone medical emergency- his local hermit has just stumbled to the ground, clutching at his face in clearly intense pain.

No cracks yet. This is back when OFA is pounding on the door from the inside. Trying to crack him open.

(Well. Not trying to. That’s an utterly mean way to say that. OFA, if it itself is going to be personified, can best be described as desperately sad to be doing this to him.)

It comes in waves, presses as if to break him open like a balloon, and then recedes. He experiences a debilitating, sharp pain.

Daigoro has of course not been told any of this. Hikage isn’t especially interested in telling his newish friend about the completely debilitating episodes that he cannot do anything about until, you know. AFO is dead, ideally, although with the medical mystery he is beginning to feel the terror of a clock ticking down on him.

In the meantime, Daigoro does not yet KNOW about AFO (at this point in the past), and Hikage is not interested in being thrown into- exactly the position he’s about to be thrown into.

Because there’s a specific image in my mind of a scene where Daigoro voices aloud that… okay, he’s got to make a decision, Hikage needs a doctor, and goes to pick him up, and Hikage physically fights him off, *no doctors,* until Daigoro is going ok ok ok I- ok I’m not going to. I’m not going to. Please don’t hurt yourself.

This gets referenced a little in 3:1 - that when Hikage is touched during one of these fits, he sometimes still instinctively begs it off, the fear still burned into him that Daigoro’s gonna try to take him to a hospital.

(Knowing what we know about Ujiko. Hikage was probably right not to trust hospitals. He knows AFO has a finger in every kind of major institution, and the idea of stepping into one such institution specifically while weakened and dependent on someone whose job is to take notes and records on you, and touch you, and can run any manner of test they please? Even Kudou and Bruce had access to genetic sequencing technology of some kind that could demonstrate the presence of a quirk, and how many quirks a person has. AFO has so many reasons to be taking advantage of hospitals.)

(And he does use them, canonically. Whether** Hikage has ever known that to be something AFO does, or has just logicked this out as something to worry about and come to the correct conclusion: Absolutely hell no.)

But Daigoro didn’t know this back then.

He knows it by 3:1.

I really like the beginning of that scene I never finished. It’s in Hikage’s POV, and begins -

The broad side of a tree’s trunk slammed into his back, a tendril- Blackwhip- wrapped around the back of his skull. For a moment, but only a moment, his attention was snagged by the unfamiliarity of not having known it was coming.

From the outside, Hikage was no small horror: face slick with sweat, heart hammering if one were to lay their hand against his pulse. Daigoro did, but focused on moving him, interspersed with questions all the while—first down to sit…

—

“the unfamiliarity of not having known it was coming,” of course, because this is the first time Blackwhip has failed to come with a ping of Danger Sense. Hikage and Daigoro train together out here, and that’s the primary context in which Blackwhip would be coming close to him- that or hijinks. Even when it’s not a direct attack, Blackwhip is so emotionally bound to anger that I wonder if Hikage has a general situational awareness of it even if Daigoro is just using it to swing from a tree.

So it’s an entirely new experience almost, Blackwhip Without Danger Sense. I liked that scene - some of my earliest Hikage and Daigoro writing - even though I was never sure if the meaning of that sentence was clear in its context without me explaining it.

—

A little more of it -

“‘M gonna get your hand away from your face,” said Daigoro, eventually, unsure whether it was the right call but uninterested in watching his teacher gouge his own eye out.

“It’ll pass,” Hikage rasped back. As if hearing the threat independently, his hand dug in tighter, with a feverishness that, for all its failures to assure him he’d hold himself together, could have Daigoro believing the man would crack himself like an egg.

Doing so had shifted his hold enough, at least, to let him see through his fingers to his pupil’s pout.

Daigoro had stayed crouched in front of him, scrutinizing, but now finally let his butt hit the dirt. “Your symptoms say stroke,” he said plainly, subdued. He could get a particularly Daigoro edge in his voice, at times, that meant I’m not quitting. “Stick your tongue out.”

As little as he wanted to, he wanted the conversation to be over more and wanted to worry his pupil less. He did so.

“…Huh. Okay. It’s a headache, right? Did it start all of a sudden?”

“It’ll pass.”

“If it’s happened a few times before, it’s probably getting worse.”

“Banjo.” Hikage’s tone was sharp and warning. It was hard to keep it that way, when the rest of him was shuddering and hyperventillating on the dirt.

—

LONG aside about one word choice from way back when, ajshdjjfjf -

You’ll see the above was written with a more regimented (for now) master-pupil dynamic for Hikage and Daigoro. I’ve long liked that dynamic. I mostly spent my early years here in a totally platonic mental banjomori canon, although I think their platonic partnership has always been there unspoken but undeniable - but for the record I don’t think it presents any amount of problem for romantic banjomori like 3:1. (For my sanity I need to explain this.) Hikage has no institutional power first of all, and secondly, Daigoro approaches the mentorship very much as an adult trying to learn more about one (or two) specific things - fighting (and Not Being Ruled By Your Emotions). There’s a level of traditional respect that comes with being trained in martial arts, but on the other hand, Daigoro isn’t very traditional, especially with who gets to tell him what to do. He wouldn’t consider Hikage an authority figure in any other capacity, and I think that’s clear from their canon interactions. And Hikage, not being super crazy about power dynamics and authority figures, is not exactly trying to emulate that idea out here in the woods.

With everything about Banjomori, one has to consider that they are making up society all by themselves in the middle of the woods, And Thank God For That. Society Can’t Stand These Bitches, And The Feeling Is Often Mutual! Okay that’s not true Daigoro clearly got licensed. But I like to imagine his bosses were like oh my god can you please tone it down and Daigoro was like. Only when you’re watching <3

(After all. Doubt that much of ANYONE higher up would have enjoyed him going after AFO—something he surely did in secret. It’s technically unclear how much AFO is known at this point, but I tend to figure that the infancy of the hero system is part of when the national government started trying to reclaim the narrative and be So So Definitely In Control Of Everything, We Have It Handled. There’s No Unmanaged Mega Crime Boss Over There.)

That said, interestingly, Lariat: Wake The Devil is finding its way to more of a peers kind of backstory.

Oddly enough I couldn’t for the life of me tell you which early dynamic I was picturing for 3:1. In any universe though, I feel a master-pupil dynamic is only a place where they start and that a strong power dynamic begins to develop outside it. Unlike Bruce and Hikage, who retain more of that formality.

—

**I actually think there’s a way to use canon to make an inference about this? But it contains manga spoilers.

so darkharvest00 and the horror minecraft series' collinlock16 and andrewgaming67 i've been talking abt recently are different things!

darkharvest is actually an oldddd live action/found footage slenderman web series (part of the "slenderverse") among the likes of marble hornets, everymanhybrid, mlandersen0, whisperedfaith, etc. but after years of hiatus it's finally come back for the finale (and next ep is the last part, i believe)! it's Very Good despite how small it is in comparison to other slender series, and i highly recommend it <3

Alts under cut!

[ID: Kitten yawning, captioned: "I'm falling asleep... So here's a quick Good Night!" End ID.]

We are handing out dinosaur memes this halloween in honor of our beloved nanotyrannus coming back from the dead <3