#minute writes

taps my fingers together. remember a couple months back when we wrote a gitm ramathan fic and thought that was the end of it? welp we did it again, eid mubarak folks!

So, despite the fact that we're nowhere near it being relevant, we finally finished that Ramathan-based gitm fic we mentioned! I'm a little nervous and very much embarrassed, but here it is!

Solar Flare knew Eclipse from Eclipse's second iteration. That was nearly two years ago. They were forced headmates for months. Solar Flare is probably on of the few people (second or arguably more than Lunar as well as Ruin) who actually understands the way Eclipse thinks.

Remember those interactions they had in that laboratory on the sun? Remember that last moment they shared before being blown apart in that alternate dimension? There's no way either of them forgot that. For Flare, that's probably one of the freshest memories he has of Eclipse. Being there and providing the comfort he could and assuring Eclipse that he understood his intentions and that he really could have been a better person if he'd wanted to be.

It's been two years. It's not the same Eclipse. That Eclipse had a star and a superiority complex and an inability to find a new purpose. This Eclipse has four children and a pet dog and a platonic co-parent friend and is quietly grieving over so many events that happened so quickly. And Solar Flare is such a stark reminder of the past for him. Someone who would have encouraged him to be better, someone who saw past the visions of grandiosity and found the person who just wanted to prove himself to be as capable as who he used to be. And he isn't that person anymore. It's been two years and two more iterations of himself and he is so tired of being what he used to be.

“Sunshine, give yourself a little credit.” His voice has a strange, tinny quality. It reverberates the words lightly. “What you’ve done so far is no small feat.”

You squirm under his gaze. He watches you as one watches an ant climb a concrete wall, as if your behavior surprises him. You feel the capillaries behind your skull buckle under the pressure. 

“That’s nice of you to say,” you murmur quietly. “But staying alive doesn’t really take much effort-“

“Everything that you do takes effort,” he tells you firmly. There is no room for argument in his tone. “Blinking takes effort, twitching your hand takes effort, speaking takes effort, learning and breathing takes effort. Staying alive takes effort. The fact that you are still here is no small feat,“ he squeezes your shoulders at this, “no matter what others may have you believe.”

You stare at him with wide eyes. He has not broken eye contact with you throughout the entire tirade, and you search his optics with a rawness you yourself cannot comprehend. 

He meets your disbelieving gaze steadily, refusing to take back his statement, daring you to tell him otherwise. 

You flounder for words like a fish plucked out of water, like a suffocating man given a full breath of air. The concept doesn’t fit. The refutation sits at the well of your throat like a stone, solid and unmoving. You are without words.

His optics keep the same brightness. You can make out the soft light of your reflection in them. 

A small, teetering noise. Once, twice. The stone plunges deep into your chest. Your heart constricts, then seizes. You can’t get enough air. You are gasping, hiccuping, between quick breaths of oxygen. Something hot and wet and ancient spills down your cheeks.

You haven’t registered the Attendant moving closer until his arms are already around you. He pulls you to him, wrapping you gently in his embrace, and you are overwhelmed with emotion. You want to recoil, to vomit, to cough so hard that everything spills out, organs and viscera and feelings and all. 

You want to move closer, to bury your face under the crook of his shoulder, just beneath his curved ruff, and take in the soft scent of butterscotch and chamomile and bittersweet coffee, and let his segmented digits smooth out the fistfulls of ugly rumpled emotion balled up by years of experience. 

Sun tucks you further into him, one hand protectively cupped behind your head. He makes a soft shushing noise, rocking you back and forth. You want to let go of him. You don’t him to let go. You don’t deserve this, don’t deserve either of them, and you wish with all your selfish heart that they never find out. You don’t want to lose this. You have to, you can, but you don’t want to have to. 

You start babbling then, a waterfall of half-coherent sentences tumbling out of you in garbled strings. You love them, you love them and you love them so much it hurts, and you love living so much it aches, and you know it’s not okay, you’re not okay, but you don’t know what you’ll do if everything falls out. You can’t go back. You can, but you don’t want to. You can, but you don’t want to.

And they hold you close, and they rub circles over your back, willing away your persistent storm clouds with the cyclical motions of their hand. You don’t know if you can tell them that it’s no use, that those clouds are yours, that there is no blue sky beneath them. There hasn’t been for a long time, and you don’t know if you can handle shooing them away if nothing comes after. And they smile like they always do, and your matted lashes stick together, and they hold you against them with a tenderness that you don’t know and cannot name. 

They will make the sky for you, they tell you. They will be the heavens above your head, brightening with blues and purples and oranges and yellows, and you will be a star, like you always have been in the sky that is their own.

“ Even with their connections to FazBear almost entirely severed, the Celestial Family have still found themselves very much involved in the company's endeavors - former Daycare Attendants, entertainers, and experiments alike find themselves embarking on the Ares mission to map out the surface of Mars. But because nothing ever goes smoothly, a storm hits their campsite, with Solar assumed dead in the chaos and the rest of the team back on the flight home. ...maybe they were a bit hasty to announce him MIA. “

waves waves

guys you’ll never believe it you’ll never believe it. minute actually managed to focus on one of her tsams aus long enough to start writing a fic for it. Wild, right?

um! Here's that December fic I mentioned earlier! It's a little late, sorry bout that...