The Arena

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1; this area is meant for entirely entirely platonic archives, meaning there will be no nsfw nor romantic writings here. Just platonic interactions, since there do not seem to be that many… however, there will be inclusions of Angst, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, and Yandere fics, but there will be no NSFW or romantically coded relationships.

Fandoms I write for:

Twisted Wonderland. (All characters).

Obey me. (All characters).

Blue Lock. (All characters, except Ego).

Record of Ragnarok. (All characters).

Spy x Family. (All characters).

Genshin Impact. (All characters).

Honkai: star rail. (All characters).

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I don’t write romantic things particularly often, since I prefer platonic x readers, and this blog is made for those specifically- but I had this thought and wanted to get it out of my system, because the angst potential is soul-crushingly delicious.

In Hans Christian Anderson’s original little mermaid, the merfolk are stated to have centuries to thousand-year long lives, with humans being mere blinks to them.

So what if the octatrio were the same? What if they also had lives that were ten, twenty, or even fiftyfold that of yours? Not as long as the fae, by any means- those things don’t die even if the world is burning down, but long enough for it to be painful.

I thought about this with Azul, in particular.

You mean the absolute world to him. You’re his veritable everything. His pearl, his light, his sea star, angelfish- you’re the bounty of the sea made sapient, and he doesn’t go a day not wondering how on earth a clumsy octopus like him managed to keep someone like you in his life. He’ll lay beside you at night and just… stare. Tracing each line of your face, every twitch of your brow and mouth as you dream, folding that one stray bit of hair behind your ear, or brushing that single lash off your cheek. Really, just any excuse to touch you that won’t have his mind screaming to recoil, lamenting it’d dirty you with his gross suckers and slimy tentacles, even when they’re nowhere in sight. Even when he knows you’d still love him if he showed you the clumsy, ugly, unwanted side of him that even he detests.

You came into Azul’s life like a beacon of hope. You gave him worth beyond contracts and madols and that suave mask he strains himself to put on each day. You were gentle with him, patient in the months upon months it took him to open up, never wavering in your desire to show him kindness even when he made loving him difficult. For that, Azul owes you the world itself; but he’ll settle for a contract and a ring, and a home together, if you’ll let him. One he’ll fill to the brim with all the clingy, mopey, lovesick affection you’ve plagued him with since you snapped him out of that blot. You can’t really complain, not when you’re you, and he gets to lay eyes on that every day of his life.

But he wakes up one day, and instinctively, he turns over. He’s already murmuring something akin to “good morning, my pearl”, when he stops. You’re not there. Your side of the bed is cold. There’s just a blanket where your waist should be, and a perfectly fluffed pillow where your head ought to have been. For a second, his sleep addled mind wonders if you’ve already gone to work, and he chuckles to himself, making a mental note to make you dinner in compensation for your efforts, before the haze of his fresh mind wears off, and it strikes him, seeing your photo on the wall.

You’re gone. Not to work, not out shopping, not on a trip with your friends.

You’ve been gone for 300 years.

That photo of you on the wall was one of the last he’d ever taken of the both of you. Amidst a bloom of you and him in your primes, smooth skin and hale bodies, sits the one he’d taken of you on your 90th birthday. You’re old. Wrinkled. Sitting on the wheelchair you’d been growing more and more confined to, looking down at your birthday cake, a proud “90” flickering back at your soft expression, setting your sagging cheeks aglow. Azul’s perched on the side, the only hint of his age being the crow’s feet pricking at his smiling eyes as he kisses you on the temple.

That photo was taken 300 years ago. 300. Your grave, where it rested on the beach, was probably algae ridden and half decayed from the waves splattering against it. That is, if there was anything left. Azul had stopped visiting almost 120 years after your death. The pain was just too much.

And now, he feels it again. That warm feeling, the morning greeting, that uncharacteristic chuckle of his, it all dies down, alongside the light in his eyes.

Right. You hadn’t been with him for 300 years.

Your life was a fraction of his. If not less. He would still be around, beautiful and powerful as he ever was, greeting your grandchildren and your great grandchildren, spoiling them callously and rolling his eyes at the chidings of his in laws, and he’d be around to watch them be lowered into the ground, right alongside you.

He’s come to terms with it. Tries to make do with what he has. He’ll spoil his family line with his truly disgusting amount of wealth, and be the rock you were in your time with him, 300 years ago.

300. That damn number makes ink stain his shirt collar from where it spills past his trembling lips. 300 fucking years. That’s how long it’s been since he’d last seen you?

That’s how long you’ve been waiting for him…?

Regardless, he readies himself. Neatens his hair, straightens his tie, and heads to work. He’d shifted to land with you, following your relationship becoming official. Albeit sometimes, he still checks in with Jade and Floyd at the secondary location under the sea.

Sometimes.

He can’t really stomach going to the beach anymore. Not without spitting up ink onto the sand. And he’d rather become sea foam than stain your resting place.

He walks in to the lounge, slumps into his chair in the VIP suite, and puts on his best smile as a client walks in. The same one you’d softened off his face with your warmth, 300 years ago.

He sometimes wonders if you’d be saddened by him now. He makes a note to ask you in 5000 years, when he sees you again.

And for that reason, I think analyzing power disparities among the actual cast itself, is a little skewed of a task, because we are looking at the best of the best.

NRC is home to the best mages across the entirety of wonderland. Think about that. What we’ve seen is the absolutely pinnacle of what magic is capable of in this world, both among the staff, and among the students. I can imagine the rest of the world outside of wonderland is fairly.. plain, for a lack of better word.

Small spells to wash the dishes. A tiny feat of telekinesis to lift a bath towel. Maybe something to keep a room cool in a blistering summer or heat up floorboards in a skin-peeling winter.

Nothing akin to opening the literal gates of hell, summoning lightning at will, stealing and/or trapping magic completely, turning entire towns to sand, or duplicating yourself. Nothing like that in the slightest. I’d say that Yuu isn’t all that different from the average mage-, don’t get me wrong, being magicless is still absolutely a horrible thing, and I doubt mages treat non-mages much differently than the boys did when they first met Yuu, but the gap isn’t nearly as stepp as with the cast. We’re looking at the outliers on the magical power scaling graph. The strongest mages in all of wonderland.

In it, Aventurine adopts a young child who’s lived in similar circumstances he once did; enslaved since a very, very tender age. It leaves a permanent scar on their mind, engraving a doctrine into their skull that he fights at every turn to try and deconstruct. They’re convinced they’re a worker.

Every time he plays with them, hands them treats and scoops them up, tries to tug out the childish side of them he knows exists beneath that ostensibly impermeable layer of brainwashing, they just point to the scar on their throat, just like his, and mumble “worker.”

He tries to ignore how it makes him want to tear it out of their skin. He truly, truly does. He tries to ignore taking it out on himself, keeps his eyes facing forward instead of lingering on his marching mark in the mirror. Ineffably, the ordeal leaves him deconstructing many of his own harmful ideologies, those age-old scars that have shaped him for so long, too. Parenthood is not a singular journey, but one that tugs out the most vulnerable parts of yourself all the same. Aventurine knew this from the beginning- he’s not a man to leave threads hanging lame, unaccounted variables, uninsured gambles, make him antsy. And an antsy stoneheart is the last thing anyone would want, especially the sweet little soul he’s so diligently been working to help.

This is all the basic context of the idea, but this is the actual meat of the concept:

Eventually, Aventurine brings his little one home. The sort of circumstances they’d lived in prior desperately required a hospital visit, to heal the open wounds that went unattended by their old masters, and to bring their weight back up after ages of mistreatment and malnutrition. (Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but he actually stepped out of the hospital room when he got to see their progress. Their round cheeks, pudgy hands, and chubby stomach after months of intensive treatment sent a wave of emotion he was so unused to letting himself feel that he couldn’t maintain his signature poker face. The tears that welled up were wholly genuine, and he’ll take them to the grave). He takes them home that day, still recovering, yet better than before, and brings them to their room.

It’s a pompously soft space, airy and open and invoking of a freedom he’d ensured the architects accounted for when he tasked them to design the room. No hard corners, no windows that couldn’t be opened, direct entryway into the gardens, and the rest of the estate. He wanted every inch of his home to be theirs all the same, and any attempt at isolation (even in the name of Feng Shui and “privacy”) was shot down handedly. He watches them explore the space, rove their eyes across the carpet, stare at the still disorganized shelves, trace the shapes of bunnies embroidered onto the fresh sheets, and marvel at the number of plushies and toys in the opened but yet-to-be-unpacked boxes. (A stylistic choice, something he’d strategically placed to imply that more was to come).

He’d done all of this, to ensure they’d feel at home. To get the chance to marvel at the sight of wonder in their eyes, to reassure himself that yes, yes he’d done something right. That things would get better for them. That they’d soon revert back to that kiddish flightiness.

But then they turn to him, a plushie in their hands, and state, astutely.

“S’for a baby, the room. Do you have a baby? When are they coming..?”

He’s felt the world collapse many, many times. There’s no overt reaction on his face when the words strike him through the chest and gut and pour out his quiet screams onto the supple carpets. There’s nothing but a sly little smile, as he thinks the words over while they continue to explore.

They don’t understand. They’re the baby. They’re the little one. The room was for them, them, them, THEM. Not some prissy IPC brat debutante BITCH WHO NEVER FUCKING DESERVED IT.

But he says something wholly different.

“Yeah. It’s all for a baby. I know you’re an export on these kinds of things, so-, you mind helping me out, my little nursemaid?”

Everything can be twisted. Words can be turned into faith is you play your cards right, and Aventurine is always the final victor. He could use this. The disbelief in their voice would never, never not hurt. Never not make him scream into pillows and frantically text his few trusted associates in the middle of the night, pleading for help, venting and shouting and riddling their chats with typo-stammering paragraphs of how they don’t understand, they don’t know, why can’t they just know it’s them? Why do they keep calling themselves a worker?!

But he can still use this. Can reform and metamorphose the gentility that comes with preparing for a new baby. Transition from nursemaid, to sibling, to little one themselves. The process is slow, and more than arduous- it is torturous. But long games are nothing he is alien to, nothing he cannot work around and work alongside.

So he kneels beside them, and carefully takes their soft-voiced advice about where to put what, and what this supposed new baby may like.

Who's your favorite video game protagonist?

Feed your dashboard by answering my question, blogger.

Don’t know what on earth this is, but I’ll bite.

It’s such a sordid thing to say on its own, isn’t it? Saying you like sifting through the corpse of something so vibrant. So beautiful in its own time. Wouldn’t you want some sort of heartbeat in the pillars of its ribs? In the hallways of what had once been a spine, don’t you want some life? Some artwork? Some sculpture, or maddening chatter? Something inexplicably reverent in the cacophony of its indulgence?

I say two things.

Yes. And no.

Because these dead echo chambers are a beauty unto themselves. These long dead annals feel like a museum to me. Something brilliant that now chatters only in memory. In some broken reverie I twist and wind across these narrow gateways that have since narrowed themselves with dust and the caulk of time. I brush off old, dilapidated works and translate their meanings and contexts with no help from any great source. Because that would ruin it all, wouldn’t it? That would spoil the spirit of the people whose souls still share their shards in these old walls.

I think of titans, when I think of them.

You walk in these vacuous spaces of common psyches, you tumble down green hills and steep up rocky cliffs, in search of something to climb on. You are a nomad. A wanderer. Seeking something new, and exciting. Something to sink yourself into and lose yourself between. You suddenly feel a plop of something beside you. A painting, maybe. Or is it a talisman? Something macgufifn or doo-dad that really has no use when on its own. But you treasure it. And soon enough, you’re tailing after something the size of a skyscraper. You’re chasing after its legs, you’re flippantly jumping from rocks and tall reeds to hang onto its bony fingers. Because the creature won’t lend you a hand to lift it. Its thoughts are mulled by noise, noise, noise, noise! Lively noise! broken noise! Brilliant noise! Something ineffably itself and nothing all the same. You scream your own piece to the throttle, and it will finally turn to look at you.

It kneels before you, and your eyes meet its own. It asks you something, something’s, millions of things, all at once every time. Ten thousand voices all throw upon you their vices, and they proclaim and challenge and boast and invite and diminish. A test, you can note, to see if you can keep up. And if you do, don’t be alarmed. It’ll swallow you whole, you see. It swallows you whole, and you become a part of the chatter.

And perhaps, you’re happy like that for a while. And I’m happy for you, too.

Because yes, there is joy in reverie. There is a delight in the violent coming together of these zeitgeists, and you will ravish yourself in these things like any other oligarch in the skull of that beast.

But I take care of the skeletons. A vulture, maybe. Picking on the cadavers.

But the point is not the meat, champion. The point is the etchings. The research.

Because no historian worth their salt will ever just use the bones, would they? No. They see past those crooked teeth from years of fossilization, and those calcified remnants of ribs and femurs. They’ll gingerly wrap it in muscle, and sinew, and flesh, and skin. They’ll make eyes from glass and teeth from enamel, they’ll make skin from rubber and resin and tendons from wire and bolts. That is what I do. That is what I love.

To see what the world has left behind, to see what these things used to be.

Initially this was stuff I wrote pre-release to Boothill. I just wanted a semi-angsty little thought about him adopting a baby after he got mechanized, only for his canon story to absolutely o b l i t e r a t e my heart. So I figured that I’d post this here. Everything below is what I thought Boothill would be like holding his baby for the first time, pre-release.

So I had a thought about Boothill from hsr.

And it’s this;

I feel like, if he would ever have a child, he’d be enamored by how small and squishy they are.

He used to be human- used to have that same delicate softness to him. But he’s long forgotten that feeling of delicacy. Now, nothing about him is delicate. He’s all sharp edges and harsh lines, metal scraping against synthetics and rubber, everything optimized for bounty hunting. Everything made perfect for his job, his purpose, and his new life.

But let’s say he did have a child. Maybe he retired, and maybe through some means procured an infant-, most likely adoption.

I think towards the beginning he’d be averse to touching them with his hands. He’d tried before, gently caressing their cheek when they were just born, reveling in how small and sweet they were, before shrinking back with despair in his eyes when they whimpered uncomfortably at his inhuman touch.

He’d been so excited, so happy and relieved when he’d heard they’d been safely born. He’d walked up to the crib, and just stared with glossy eyes for a minute at the sweet little bundle cuddled up into the blankets. Their round face, their chubby little cheeks, and soft skin… it all felt like something out of a dream to him.

And yet they hated it when he touched them. When their own father touched them, they recoiled, disgusted by his robotic form. He couldn’t say he blamed them, and yet a part of him had hoped that maybe… just maybe they’d enjoy the cool taste of his automata hands.

It was a nurse who had saved him, positing to him of how he could hold his baby with blankets instead. And though he was hesitant, he eventually agreed to carefully hold the little one close. And when his tiny bundle of joy finally filled the space in his arms, he couldn’t help but sob in ardent pride and joy, squeezing them softly and pressing his face close to them; the only human part of him that remained.

“Papa’s sorry, baby… papa’s sorry he’s not as warm as he used to be.” He whispers to the bundle, pressing his lips to their small head with a teary smile, nuzzling their cheek with tender protectiveness. They’re so unbelievably beautiful and delicate, he can’t stop the tears from flowing. He almost feels unworthy of even touching them, of being able to hold this precious little sweetheart so close to him and his metallic heart. Yet almost paradoxically, he’d fight the world itself if they ever tried to separate him from them.

When he feels their tiny hand gently touch the bridge of his nose, he shudders a small breath in joy. He’d never felt more grateful that at least his face preserved his former humanity, keeping him from devolving into some gunslinging Hephaestus of his own making, just another mech wandering the outlands in search for another bounty.

He kisses their tiny knuckles tenderly, so light it’s almost not even there. Their little eyes open, looking up to him with so much curiosity. No hatred. No prejudice. No disgust. Just curiosity, and even joy. His smile is absolutely darling, as are the words that spill from him, praises that feel so sweet they could cause cavities.

“Papa loves you so much, my little baby.” His voice loses its confidence and white-hot recklessness, displaced and lost in a fog of sweet affections and gentility. It feels alien, coming from his sharp mouth, but he could care less when he sees how his little bundle smiles so brightly.

“Do you even know how much he loves you? All the things he would do for you? How far he would go to see you happy and safe?” His forehead rests against theirs, bending himself over to where he stands above them in a protective arch, hiding them from the world. It was maybe an act of jealousy, something done to keep their curious eyes on him and him alone. In that moment, nothing should have mattered more to them than him; just as nothing mattered more to him than them.

*Finds out the IPC nuked his planet and killed his baby daughter who barely knew how to walk*

Anya always calls Loid “papa” despite towards the beginning of the series he had initially requested her to call him “father”. Throughout the show and series he never minds it, but imagine this;

One day Anya comes home from school and just randomly starts calling him “father” because she thinks it’ll get her closer to Damien (who also calls his dad father) and help Loid with his mission.

And Loid… feels a little weird about it. It’s not bad. If anything, it’s evidence her vernacular has improved! But, he can’t help the stinging feeling in his gut when Anya begins to call him “father” around the house. Nothing else has changed, Anya is just as bubbly and lively as she ever was, proud of how sophisticated she’s being, but the term just feels so… cold, to Loid. Empty. There’s little heart behind it, he’s gotten so… averse, to the very notion of Anya calling him that. And he has no idea why.

Cue Yor needing to be his shoulder angel and explain why he keeps flinching and stiffening up when Anya calls him “father”-, he feels like he has to go lie down when he realizes what he has to do.

Come to terms with the fact that he’s gotten quite attached to the term “papa.”

For both TWST and Obey Me, what if the MC had a child after the events of the game? Here are some upcoming long-fic ideas I have;

Notes; the MC here is mentioned to be female, and her child is given a name for clarity. MC also has no romance with anyone, so the child isn’t related to any of the in-game characters. The character mentioned is not the MC, but their child.