Time for a pinned post that I will fancy up + edit more later.
I'm Mango/Cosmos.
This is a side fandom art + writing account. It's mainly been Obey Me but may feature some other things when the hyperfixation becomes too strong and I need to create stuff for it.
As a general heads up: I am the slowest artist in the world, slightly faster at writing.
Obey Me writing will continue to primarily be posted at @inhuman-obey-me where I am Mod Cosmos (though I'll probably start reblogging some of it here too).
Tags of Possible Interest
🎨 art tag
✏️ doodle tag
✍🏽 writing tag
Can find me elsewhere with the same username, including Ao3.
Main is @sailormango
through the frays of a faulty wire - prologue. eddie x volt
⋆syn: Through Eddie's pain, something - someone - sparks into existence. Exploring how Volt comes to be, and how they navigate their first year of shared existence, together and apart. e/v masterlist. chapter 1/5.
⋆wc: 1.8k
⋆cw: m/m. contains references to drug and alcohol abuse, suicidal ideation, and depression. no explicit sexual content in this part.
⋆notes: This is a small, concentrated series of how Volt came to be, and how they navigate around and with each other over the first year of Volt's existence, taking place years prior to the start of the game. This can be read as a prequel to the Eddie and Volt that exist within the Power Dynamics series also by me, but is mainly just the two of them as we still know in canon. But a lot of how they interact, and their history, is also referenced in PD. One of PD's parts will also join this series once it's finished as a sort of epilogue.
⋆snippet:
He finds the man’s white eyes, finally studying him and replacing the anger with curiosity. He allows himself to feel the charge of the air that hangs between them, and again, he’s hit with a feeling of familiarity. He follows that thread as he searches this strange face, the realization surging over him like a wave.
“You,” he manages out, and white eyes watch him, rapt and waiting, “you’re… you’re my current, aren’t you?”
prologue
This has to work.
It has to. Because Eddie had tried, fucks sake had he tried, drowning this pain, this internal torture, with alcohol. Tried pills he knew Fayra kept hidden away - he’d cut the power in the bathroom, and snuck in while she and Johnny had tried to find whatever was wrong. Tried simply waiting it out, laying on the floor of the grid room for hours, through the night, letting his charge deplete and drain, but it just wouldn’t.
It felt like he was bursting, burning, like the wires inside him were being slowly stripped, being forced to hold and distribute charges too powerful for them to handle. Like whatever power he tried to circulate where needed throughout the house, somehow found its way back into his body, doubled in strength.
And he wasn’t sure how much more he could take.
He knew the house needed him. Knew they weren’t oblivious to the surges, the fluctuations, that he had been trying so desperately to control or prevent, to no avail. Knew the toll it was taking on those that relied on him most - all the appliances, Lux, Hector. Knew they all counted on him to keep them charged, running - alive.
But he couldn’t even be certain just how much longer he could ensure that for himself.
That was why this has to work, he thinks, ripping open the door of the grid system. If he could pour everything he had into the circuits, overload the system and force a reset, then maybe -
Maybe something would finally give. He’d tried, one of the first things so many months ago, resetting it normally, a few times, and while the relief did come for a few days after, the pain would return soon after, more splitting than before. But he thought, if it could force it to trip, maybe something new could start circulating, and he could finally, finally be rid of this pain.
Eddie studies the breakers, knows the maps of the wires behind it - they are part of him, after all - knows their inconsistencies and their kinks and their power. And it kills him that he can’t see what’s wrong, what he’s somehow missing, that’s causing this… dysfunction, this breakdown, that frayed him so.
He takes a deep breath, tries to steady his hands as he places them to the metal. He closes his eyes, and finds the thrum of his power inside of him, and channels it through his chest, down his arms, to his palms, sparks starting to fly from his fingers.
And forces it out.
It burns, it rips from him like the scream that comes from his throat. The current makes his arms shake and tremble, almost like his body is incapable of circulating the magnitude of what courses inside him - which is why he needs it gone. Even if it split him beyond repair, fried him from the inside out, at least he’d be free of it.
His body aches, and his throat is raw, but he can feel it, emptying out of his circuits and into the panel, and he knows he just has to push a little more, and then -
Then, all he sees is white.
It blinds him, overtakes his mind, and shocks his hands with a burn. He stumbles back, his body no longer strong enough to hold itself up, and he falls, weightless, to the ground, white light surrounding his senses before the unconscious dark falls over him.
It could be moments, could be hours, or even days later, he thinks, when he comes back to his senses. His body is aching, exhausted, and he can’t quite find the strength to open his eyes. But still, he notices, as the fog starts to clear, a… relief. That somehow, he’s lighter, his chest not struggling so much to keep a deep breath, and his mind - it’s like a storm has finally broken.
It must’ve worked. Eddie’s never felt like this before or after a reset, or even an outage. He tries, slowly, to find feeling in his fingers, give them a little curl, and with one more deep inhale, he opens his eyes.
Only to be blinded once again by a white, shining light.
He squeezes them shut again, forces his hand up to his face to rub his fingers over his eye lids, trying to reset himself, before trying one more time.
But still, when he opens his eyes, he sees white.
He blinks, focusing his vision and willing this haze away, but then it all starts to get clearer, less foggy.
It’s eyes.
He blinks again, because yes, it’s eyes, white and shining like a thousand watts, staring at him from only inches above his face.
His body jerks back, pushing himself up and back against the wall, faster than he would have expected to be able to. He pushes his current into his hands, needing some protective bolts to appear at his fingers - but they don’t come. He must really be drained.
But he’ll have to deal with that later. Because now, with this shot of adrenaline coursing through him, and his vision finally clear, he’s able to see what sits before him.
It’s… a man.
The white eyes sit on perhaps the most beautiful face Eddie has ever seen, but the glow radiating from them pales in comparison to the light given off by the being’s mess of white hair, bolts of electricity that remind Eddie of what’s missing from his fingers. The man is crouched to the floor, hugging his knees, but he already knows how big, how wide he is, with shoulders that connect to strong, long arms. And his skin -
It’s like it’s covered in lightning. Light blue, luminous streaks covering the expanse of his arms, his chest, his neck - even more, he guesses, but when Eddie realizes he’s naked, he halts his gaze. He can feel the buzz that emanates from him, like a pull, and it’s so strong, powerful - familiar.
“Who the fuck are you?” Eddie’s voice is hoarse, his throat raw, but his tone leaves no room for misinterpretation - he is demanding an answer.
The man blinks, cocks his head at the smallest angle. His hair crackles and pops as he moves. But he doesn’t speak.
Eddie tries again to summon his bolts, and still, they don’t come. So he steels his voice, tries again. “Yeah, you, how the fuck did you get in here? Who are you?”
Another blink, and dark, jagged brows come to meet at the center of his forehead. His hands come to rest on the floor, balancing his frame as he rests on the balls of his feet. His lips fall open, a deep exhale falling from them. “Eddie,” he finally says, so softly, and his voice sends a shock wave to Eddie’s gut. “Eddie.”
“Yeah I know who the fuck I am,” Eddie says, angrily, and he stands, needing some sort of advantage over this - this thing, if he can’t manage to make his sparks. He presses himself against the wall, and the man’s white eyes follow every inch that he moves. “You. You. Tell me who you fucking are. Now.”
But the man stands too, and Eddie realizes he’s most certainly still at a disadvantage - he’s taller, not to mention wider, and the muscles on his arms far outweigh Eddie’s. But the blue streaks that covered him are fading, dimming into white to match his skin. When he speaks again, Eddie can see him testing the words, how his tongue forms the sounds. “You’re… Eddie.”
“I’m not playing around. I - I can hurt you.” Eddie’s not sure if that’s true right now, but he didn’t need to know that. “So for fucks sake, answer me!”
The man gives a soft shake of his head, one of his hands coming to rest at the center of his chest, and the lightning marks on his chest are blue again where it lands. “I’m…” he shakes his head again, makes a fist with the hand. “I, don’t know.”
What the fuck. “Well, you fucking got in here somehow, didn’t you? So where did you come from, huh?” Eddie looks around the room for the first time since waking, looking for signs of intrusion, or hell, to make sure he was even still in the Breaker Box. But nothing seems amiss, nothing except the scorch marks that now adorn the walls around the grid controls. He looks back at the man, trying to control his breathing. “Are you - what are you, fucking lightning? Did you strike the house? Is that why I passed out?”
The man shakes his head more fervently this time. “No. Not… I’m…” he’s struggling, Eddie sees it, to make the words he wants to. He purses his lips, and pulls his hand away from his chest, bringing it palm up in front of him, and Eddie presses himself even further back into the wall. He’s about to say something again, but then, from the man’s hand, come white hot bolts of static, sparks and volts that dance around his fingers and circle his wrist, and Eddie stares with wide, shocked eyes.
Those sparks, those… those were Eddie’s bolts. The ones he was missing, that always came when he called them, that he could snap on or off with a whim. But here they were, no longer in his control, in this thing’s, this stranger’s hand, like they were part of his very nature.
But the bolts were a small part of a large picture, just one concentration of how Eddie’s power over his current manifested when he wanted it to. And if this man could create them -
Eddie wills his breathing to slow, and quickly takes stock his the sensations inside his body, looking for the central circuit that controls how he regulates his power - maybe, if he found that, he could assess how to recharge it, get it back under control -
But he can’t. It’s… gone. Not just the sparks of the current, but all of it - the harsh buzz of his electricity that flowed through his veins, his wires, for every day of his existence. He… he can’t feel it anymore. Can’t summon it, can’t control it, can’t… find it.
It should crush him, the weight of this revelation, the loss of something so intrinsic to him. And yet, he feels lighter than he ever remembers feeling.
He finds the man’s white eyes, finally studying him and replacing the anger with curiosity. He allows himself to feel the charge of the air that hangs between them, and again, he’s hit with a feeling of familiarity. He follows that thread as he searches this strange face, the realization surging over him like a wave.
“You,” he manages out, and white eyes watch him, rapt and waiting, “you’re… you’re my current, aren’t you?”
hold your head high, stand proud / keep your head down, power through
hiii i finally had the motivation to draw something non-project related and i got into date everything :3C i love these boys so much their story really gets to me. i wanted to do a cool poster for them that i can hopefully put onto my wall
alternate versions + individual parts down below as well as the process discussion as always!
volt
eddie
figuring out how i was gonna execute this idea was interesting. i’m also a photographer, so i knew how to execute this with pictures but not with an illustration. what i ended up doing was just doing the base layers in black and white values and adding colour on top, then bringing the file into photopea (an online free version of photoshop!!!) so i could separate the RBG values. it took a lot of messing around to get the look that i wanted — you can see in eddie’s separate layers that there’s a section of volt’s drawing within it. that’s how i made sure the red part would stay where i wanted while the rest of volt’s silhouette would be blue (the select pixels tool is a huge favourite of mine ✌️)
the textures are from studio AAA! the ones i used are all free, but i downloaded them a bit ago before they did some store cleanup or whatever so idk if they’re still up. the ones i used are the VHS and printer trash textures but if anyone wants i can just dm them the jpgs!
more into the story of this piece - i thought a duo tone overlay portrait artwork would connect to this idea i’ve been seeing that “volt can live without eddie, but eddie can’t live without volt.“ i wanted to show that through the way their layers are overlayed on each other. eddie is nearly entirely encapsulated by volts silhouette, but volt extends beyond eddie’s silhouette. he’s the face of the breaker box while eddie works away, at the back. they’re inseparable and complete each other. i always thought that part of their story was so beautiful and i really love how it’s portrayed. eddie does need volt but it’s not shown in a way that makes eddie seem weak or entirely dependant on volt…. i’d write more about them but it’s late and i have plans tomorrow whoopsiesss
all in all making this was pretty fun. i knew i just wanted to do portraits of them as my first actual illustration after so many projects so i did just that!! the first few times ive drawn them as warmup ive always had the hardest time with volt and not eddie, but this time that changed and drawing volt was so easy and i couldn’t draw eddie for the life of me 😭 idk if any other artists have this problem with them where one is hard to draw and the other is easy…. i just can’t figure out eddie’s hair for the life of me </3 but oh well!!! if you made it this far, thank you so much!! i hope you like my work!!
