#mobliterated

From this pallete challenge. Been sitting on this one for a while, here you go bestie ily <3

@mobliterated asked: not to be biased (i'm biased) but 51 with best boy Blue?

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(Also combined with a prompt from @terminasymphonic, who asked for Vio and blue with #36 - Walking by a place that is said to be haunted.)

This would have been an excellent fic to post on Halloween, if only I'd written it about a week earlier ^^;;

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The Last Laugh

Vio and Blue friendship, rated G, humor / horror (?)

"This place is creepy," Blue grumbled, crossing his arms over his chest and scowling around at the dilapidated yard.

It had once been a large and well-maintained house, but it had been abandoned and fallen into disrepair many years ago. Leafless trees rattled in the autumn wind, their jagged branches dark against the light gray overcast sky. Roots pushed up under the cobblestone path, making it uneven and treacherous. The walls of the building were almost completely hidden under a thick mat of ivy, except here and there where a broken window or the snarling face of a gargoyle would poke through the tangled greenery.

"You didn't have to come," Vio replied levelly, not taking his eyes off the locked door he was examining. He had brought his lock picking kit, but the mechanism was rusty and not cooperating.

"Red and Green would bite my head off if they came back from that wilderness survival training thing with Dad and the new squires and found out I'd let you run off to investigate a supposed haunting by yourself."

The world is black and white.

At least, that's what Vio had always thought. Good is good. Evil is evil. There is right, and there is wrong, and what isn't wrong must be right and what isn't right must be wrong. There are no excuses, no compromises to the inevitable truth.

Vio was good, Shadow was evil. Vio was right, Shadow was wrong.

The world is crumbling before him. Shadow constantly surprises him, shatters his expectations and assumptions like glass. He thought manipulating Shadow would be easy, like playing with a thoughtless, mindless puppet on a string. That's why he agreed to go with him- to play along at his side, a hero betraying his comrades.

Shadow is anything but thoughtless. He's impulsive, sure, and quick to annoyance and anger, but never at Vio. He places spells on Vio's room to keep it cool, blocking out the oppressive Death Mountain heat. He makes an effort to bring him edible Hylian food, after their first meal where Vio couldn't eat anything for it being either too raw or too blackened to chew. He's eager to please, always asking if Vio is happy.

He is anything but mindless. Vio can talk to him for hours about anything (well, almost anything- it's not like he can reveal that this is all fake). Shadow is adventurous, dragging Vio on exploration after exploration of the Fire Temple, winding through secret passages and pointing out ancient carvings and statues in the walls. They spend hours discussing the history of the place, the iconography, what this chamber or that chamber might have been used for.

Shadow. . .cares about him. He admits, red-faced, that he spied on them often, and always saw Vio with a book in his hands. He admits this in the middle of a library enchanted to stay cool and every book within enchanted to survive the heat of the nearby caldera. It is a gift for Vio.

Sure, most of the books within were stolen from Hyrule Castle, but it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him. Shadow is evil, but he did something both evil and good. The idea haunts him as they spend the rest of the day in the quiet of the library, reading book after book after precious, thoughtful book, and Vio questions himself for the first time in his very short existence as 'Vio.'

Is Shadow good? Is Vio. . .evil? Or are they both more than what they seem, and what does it mean when Shadow calls him a friend and he feels his heart flutter in response? What does it mean when Vio wants to call him a friend in return, and bring him to the others and insist they give him a chance too?

The world is not black and white, Vio realizes. Because if Shadow were truly evil, he wouldn't care so much. And if Vio were truly good, he wouldn't be standing in front of a mirror with a hammer, steeling himself to destroy a friendship too young yet to blossom.

The mirror is black. The moonlight is white.

I just listened to it and I’m absolutely HOWLING like these absolute weirdos!! I have never heard of a setup that begins “OK, so we used to have this joke in our friend group where we’d send one another videos of us violently shitting into the bowl as hard as we could” and I thought to myself OK. there’s a toilet. what could go wrong?

turns out lots. I want to turn this into a comic.

Inktober 2019 - Day 22

@mobliterated said: