#spub

The radio woke me up, and there I was, laying in bed. You know, you’re supposed to be able to take control of your dream when you realize it was a dream, but I’ve never got the hang of it. Neither of us have. You try, and then a bunch of bullshit happens.

But then I wake up, and I realize I’m already in the best dream of all. Because I wake up next to my wife, who is also just the best person in the entire world. I can’t help it. I see her face, and I go in for a kiss. I can’t wear my filter glasses in bed, so my shinigami eyes were “active,” but it didn’t matter. The name //NAOMI GETHSEMANE AMASORA// (added an obscure middle name, you know, just in case) hovering over her face and the  //- 63F7C1// below it, all the numbers slightly swaying independently, they don’t creep me out at all. Because they’re <i>hers.</i> And everything about her is wonderful. 

Her eyes and her hair and her powerful arms and her powerful drive and the way she has things under control and the way she’s strong enough to like put up a shield and then inside that shield she’s so tender and the force of personality that just radiates off of her and her mind that’s so analytic and empathetic at the same time and that laugh she has when she’s really happy and that laugh she has when she’s trying not to laugh and the way she can say so much with a glance and the way her blood tastes when I have just a drop of it on my tongue and it feels like it’s filling my whole body and the way she holds me and the way she strokes my hair when I’m scared and upset and the way she strokes my hair even when I’m not and the way she makes me safe and happy and the way she lets me be a real person who isn’t just loved but respected.

Even her scars. Even her aphasia. Even the way she stumbles over a two-word sentence. Even the way she gets frustrated when she has to communicate something she can’t just do with her expression, and she thinks she sounds stupid, and she starts crying. Because those things are part of her. And because they let me help her, because they let me honor her like she deserves by making the world a better place for her. I love her so much. I love her so much it feels awkward to say it, like I’m just repeating myself without adding anything new, and I’d get self-conscious about it, but I see her eyes and I know it’s all okay because I love her so much and she loves me so much that if I sat there and just said “I love you” for a million years I wouldn’t have said it enough times.

So I go in for the kiss. And I wrap one arm around her, and I plant my lips on hers, and even just doing that sends a thrill up my spine. I press our mouths together -- and she grunts and shoves me away, grabs the blanket, and flips over.

Ping

On your favourite discord server and tell them the good news:

She changed her name to Megan lrene Deitrich at a courthouse in Bumfuck Nowhere, then destroyed all accessible digital records of the name change. Pronounced "Ell-reen," of course, because it's a lowercase L and not an uppercase i. She knows that Kira needs proper spelling to kill you and is not taking chances on that front. Unlike the very reactive and "eh, let them do as they like" Augustus, she wants to take initiative and protect herself against threats.

Mello in DN canon worked for "the Mafia" with no other details, under Rod Ross, and not a lot of it made sense if you tried to dig into the details (and to be fair, unlike a lot of other DN stuff that made no sense, most of the things wrong with Mello's Mafia didn't really warrant probing in the series). Simple economy of things says this can't be another, unrelated crime organization, and it has to be related to the Trust. Rod Ross therefore works under Megan lrene Deitrich.

All of these are fanworks of one sort or another, but they’re all fandom-blind friendly. You should check them out!

Silent Partner, Unfinished Business

They told Naomi Misora she was dead for three minutes when paramedics revived her. She sure didn't feel alive. She couldn't even remember coming back to Japan, much less Kira taking her fiance, much less Kira sending her to suicide, maiming her and robbing her brain of speech. She had almost given up hope of recovery until a mysterious figure gave the promise of revenge: the chance to kill those who wronged her, if only she can find them.

Aphasic and adrift, Naomi's going to join the Kira investigation to win her life back. She's going to help Misa Amane discover who she is, and discover a connection with her. She's going to make Light Yagami have to think on his feet, and present him with a new opportunity. She's going to solve some serious problems for L, and then make some serious problems for L. And she's going to make a hell of a lot of things get a lot more complicated.

A tense, twisty, action-packed psychological thriller mystery about romance, revenge, redemption, and the Kuleshov effect. Recommended for anyone who liked Death Note, didn’t like Death Note, or didn’t see Death Note. 

Has a romance-focused sequel (that may or may not be an AU) called Misa Amasora’s Pure Love Memorial.

Duet in SSS-Major

Kyrie awakens with strange demonic familiars inside a phantasmagoria of battles past, with no idea of how she got there. A single lock of white hair displays the trace of demon blood that resides within her now, an old project the Order called "Soprano Angelo". Great demon lords amass power inside a land of regrets, trying to earn the ability to return to life -- and with Dante and Vergil in the Underworld and Nero captive, it's going to be up to Lady, Trish, Lucia, Nico, and yes, even Kyrie, to save Nero and defend the human world once again.

But does she have the strength to fight demons just like her beloved? Did she willingly accept demonic power in order to bring back the Order of the Sword? Will her faith in Sparda carry her through the fires of perdition? Can the wholesome, motherly church girl also be a stylish Devil Hunter?

Can Kyrie attain true power?

A Devil May Cry fic that can serve as your introduction to the Devil May Cry  game series or the stylish action genre in general -- a story where everything happens for in-character reasons yet also clearly is an expression of a video game. Kyrie is going to feel what you feel when you flub an input, get your ass kicked by a boss and run around the arena breaking objects for health refills, overuse that new move you unlocked when you really shouldn’t, feel awed by a much better co-op partner, figure out the extent of her moveset, learn from her mistakes, learn to apply tricks she heard about, and learn to finally git gud and master the game.

She’s also going to be tagged along by two adorably boneheaded artificial demon familiars, co-op with the whole cast, solve mysteries that didn’t need solving, and engage in musical theater duels. She sings a lot. So much so that I composed her own DMC-style battle theme.

Princess: the Hopeful - Crystal Edition

You know the premise, don't you? Corruption. There's a force of evil corrupting everyone, poisoning their minds, spreading like an infection. Turning people against their friends, against themselves, until all they do is spread the evil.

The enemy is everywhere. The enemy infects everyone. And its name is "fear."

Fear controls the world. Fear twists and imprisons us, turns us on each other and against ourselves. Fear hollows you out and turns you into a vessel to spread more fear, demanding more and more of yourself, demanding you spread it to others just to alleviate the pain on yourself.

We've lived under the tyranny of fear for so long we don't realize it any more. But now, we have the chance to be free. You're that chance. 

Welcome to the War for Hope. 

Misa doesn’t half-ass anything, and she doesn’t sit still.

To be a voice actress who worked remotely, we didn’t get a dinky little recording booth with one chair to sit at. We got a soundproofed recording studio big enough for a rock band, custom-built with a mixing board on the inside so I could operate it while I was in there with her. 

If Misa’s character was looking at someone, talking to someone, then she was talking to me, using my posture and facial expressions to bounce off of. If she was in a fight, I was guiding and compressing her body to get the position right. And if her character was walking, I was beside her, hand on her shoulder to keep her pace steady, head right next to hers, guiding the microphone arm to stay the same distance from her mouth. Perfectly in sync to her movement. It took a lot of practice for something with a very narrow application, learning to track her movements so closely. I was so grateful that her acting style gave me an excuse to learn it. 

Love is sometimes a wonderful form of anxiety. Love is when you could hear someone say “I love you” a thousand times in a row and it will never get old, yet you need to constantly find new ways to say it yourself because it’s never been enough. 

That morning, we weren’t recording anything. But she spent all day in the booth anyway. The door was open, I could see her, she wasn’t concerned with background noise. She’d already learned to emulate my voice from recordings, what few I could find, so she could sound like me when she interpreted for me. But that day, she was listening to recordings of herself. Her own words; she’d repeat them back in varying tones and pitches with a furrowed brow and look of deep concentration. 

I didn’t disturb her, or ask what she was doing -- if she wanted it to be a dramatic reveal I wasn’t going to try and spoil it. I just worked on my own “L” things, which included absolutely nothing of consequence. At lunch she was clearly chipper and eager and squirming about what she was going to do, but didn’t say anything about it. It wasn’t until after dinner, after sunset, that I found out. 

I hadn’t even done a grand romantic gesture or anything. I was just asking if she wanted to use the Playstation, and I wrote out a note to that effect. Purely utilitarian, not a love letter, not something to be gushed about with longing gazes. 

“//DO YOU WANT TO PLAY BIOHAZARD TOGETHER, OR SHOULD I START UP FINAL FANTASY 13?//” She always read the notes aloud, so I could make sure she interpreted them correctly. But her tone was different from before. It took me a few seconds before it even hit me what it was, and I grinned and I picked her up and held her.

Your voice sounds different to you when it’s recorded, because normally you hear it through your own body. She’d been listening to herself and repeating the words, so she could get a finer handle on the exact difference. Learn to replicate it.

So she could read those inconsequential little words back to me in a voice nobody but me had ever heard. Fuller, a bit deeper. My voice, as it sounded to me. 

More art from @puropoly , who you should follow and buy many commissions from! Misa playing poker in a pivotal scene in Chapter 3 of Silent Partner, Unfinished Business, to win a cheesecake and/or Kakyoin’s soul.

but @puropoly​ drew me a pic and I don’t know if I would say it made things better but it certainly made them a lot less bad, so thanks very much