not every story has to have a cruel ending!

Little solace comes to those who grieve when thoughts keep drifting as walls keep shifting and this great blue world of ours seems a house of leaves moments before the wind

[avatarjunko]

Nodoka: Fernanda Ly, Jeon Ji-Yoon, Yella Bambi

Chiyu: Yuko Suzuhana, Meng Jia, Hieu Cao

Asumi: Nyane Lebajoa

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this is the sound of us digging our grave

[avatarjunko]

[avatarjunko]

prompt: sun / moon rp: will to live  characters: jericho & joshua david ( @scyllass) warnings: codependent sibling relationships, lack of self worth / self esteem / depressive thoughts

"You never change. I suppose that's why people find you to be reliable. You'll be just as you are now, no matter how many times they come and go, and it will be so until the end of your days."

“Sweet boy, take care of your brother. He needs you.”

They were never equal, they were never the same. The two of them, the same size and height with the same exact DNA that gives them mirror faces, mirror hands and hearts and bones. Joshua considers them split in half, one person living two different lives. But Jericho knows better. They were never the same, not even in the womb, where one egg split into two.

“You’re such a good boy, you’re so responsible, take care of your brother. He needs you.”

Once, he was ahead of his brother, when they both came out it’s said that Joshua followed Jericho clutching onto his ankle. (Impossible, they were a cesarean.)

Twice, he was ahead of his brother, because he found his voice first. Strung childish sentences together while Joshua remained silent, refused to look at anyone else, refused to acknowledge.

He remembers in the back of his mind the way to movie his hands, recognizes immediately when Joshua’s move in his. A method of communication, because Joshua refuses to communicate with anyone else, and Jericho thinks he needs someone to make sure no one takes advantage of that. Take care of your brother. He always has.

Once, he was the focus, because he was the only one who spoke. Because he was a polite little boy, and because despite others’ interest in Joshua they could only ever get at him through Jericho. 

Isn’t this too much for them? Isn’t this too early? They’ve never been apart.

“Joshua has the whole world in his hands, he can go anywhere. He can do anything.”

“Jericho’s such a sweet boy, a kind boy, a generous boy. I’m sure he’ll understand.” And he does. Joshua is brilliant, Joshua is a genius, Joshua can do anything.

Jericho is sweet, kind, reliable. Jericho will understand.

(What is it that he understands, though?)

Without Joshua beside him at school (with Joshua in a private school, one his parents couldn’t pay for one let alone two children, one that was offered to them free of charge, but only for the brilliant one), Jericho feels like something’s been ripped from him. It was always him that had been there, like a shield in front of Joshua, like a shadow

and now

well, maybe that was all he really was. (”Take care of your brother.

He needs you.”)

"I can find you anywhere. I'm not the one who needs your reliability." 

Maybe that’s all he really has.

[avatarjunko]

prompt: space rp: will to live (space au) characters: leonor de la cruz, jonah lemieux, & elwood nodl warnings: cheating (kinda?), obsessive / possessive relationships, violence?, jealousy, a relationship based on some mixture of this and all parties are kind of into it a little

He tugs at it, just a little, once when he and Nor are together. Just to see if she noticed, to see if she wouldn’t notice even if he slipped it off entirely and threw it out an airlock the next time he was alone.

She notices. It doesn’t surprise him that she does, it does surprise him how disappointed he is to see the look on her face when he tries it.

“Elwood,” she starts, with that pressed tone of voice that sounds a little like concern. Instead of talking, he smooths back her hair, draws his hands over her face, and then leaves to goad Jonah into smashing his face into the floor, to fucking and fighting and cracking open his skull to release those thoughts inside. It doesn’t work, which fucks him up because it always works. Nor’s inspecting hands or Jonah’s angry ones, at least one of them has always worked since they started all of this.

Until they hit a groove, a pattern, a routine

and Elwood started noticing where the space between him and them existed.

There’s light years between the three of them and the next living human being

and meters at most between the three of them at any given time.

Still, now when he sees the two of them together, Elwood can’t help but think he must be on another planet entirely. 

It doesn’t get better with time, it doesn’t get better when Nor abandons her shared bed with Jonah to slide on top of him, the weight of her body and the rhythm of her hands sliding under his shirt, over his almost perpetually bruised ribs.

It doesn’t get better with action, not even with his hands threaded through Jonah’s hair, nearly tearing it out when he forces him to the hard floor where both of them end up with something broken, something bruised, and mouths of blood and skin with teethmarks that they try not to let her see.

He has a piece of both of them that neither share with the other, he knows it should make him feel closer than this but

it’s those fucking rings, he thinks. Has to be.

(The vows themselves weren’t much without them, he thought, not when he’s seen them fight and separate and come to him instead. Without those rings they were easily forgotten, banished away, and didn’t have their papers left all the way back on earth, because who needs to prove such an Earthean construct as marriage when you’re so far from it with no promise to return.

But those fucking rings. There’s nothing else that separates him from them, to be sure.)

It doesn’t take long for him to become fixated on them.

When Jonah hits him, square in the face, breaks a rib, twists his arm, forces him to the ground, he’s all too aware of the slip of cool metal that embeds itself into his skin, his hair, his clothes. It’s like Nor is there with them, even if she’s holed up in the infirmary pretending she doesn’t hear something crash to the ground all the way across the station. When Nor slips into his bed at night, fingers tracing their way along every wound Jonah’s made, outlining his face, tipping his chin forward so she can press her mouth against his, it’s the same thing. Cool metal, Jonah is there in her fingertips even if his body lies sullen in the greenhouse or his own empty bed.

It’s fucked up, having nothing but both of them on his mind no matter what he’s doing, no matter which one he’s with. It’s fucked up that he’s so focused on them in the first place

back then, on earth, he never cared for the idea of a ring slipped over his finger.

But here, now, with the three of them alone together for the rest of their lives, there’s something that burns across his body, every place that they’ve put their hands on him, especially when he’s the one left out. It comes when he pulls up the monitor in their room, when he falls asleep to the screen on his stomach showing Nor and Jonah’s figures so close together he can’t tell which is which under blankets.

They have nothing on them there to remind them of him, nothing that inserts himself in the space between them even all the way across the station.

And that’s too much like being forgotten.

[avatarjunko]

prompt: forgotten

rp: will to live

characters: pepper coake & monica imahara ( @scyllass )

warnings: child abuse / neglect implied, casual ableism

When he asks her if she remembers the day they met, she always acts like she's forgotten. Rolls her eyes hard, "no, why would I bother to remember something as stupid as that?"

He thinks it would be hard to forget, especially for a girl like her who grew up with money and luxury. The way that he found her, the way that she was when he did, a dirty child laying in an alleyway for god-knows-how-long with only a handheld game to keep her company (it was at least two days, because he passed her one morning, on his way to school. And then again on his way back.

"Hey, uh, kiddo? You lost?"

"Fuck off shitlips, mind your own business."

"Geez! You don't have to be so rude! How annoying!"

She'd thrown a rock at him too, he remembers that.)

It was the second day, on his way to school again, and she was still laying there in that alleyway. Dirty and soaked now, her handheld game slipped into her pocket, because it had rained the night before.

(He'd been unfortunate enough to have conscience enough to stop, worry.)

"Were you seriously out here all night?"

"What does it look like, genius?"

"Why are you so rude? Geez."

"Because dumbfucks like you don't leave me alone."

"You're like, twelve, stop swearing so much."

"Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck."

He'd skipped school that day, dropping against the dirty damp wall of the alleyway to argue with a girl who'd slept there all night.

(She was eleven, not twelve, he learned. And when he asked sarcastically, "what, did you forget your way home or something?" he's shamed when she bites back:

"No, stupid, I can't walk.")

She couldn't walk.

So he picked her up.

("What the fuck are you doing you weirdo! Let me down!"

"I'm - stop kicking me holy fuck - I'm gonna take you - stop it - home."

"I. DON'T. WANT. TO. GO. HOME!"

Complete with a punch that nearly knocked the breath out of him, had him crumpling to his knees to keep from dropping her. Both of them, at the end of that, breathing ragged and staring at each other.

"Dude you're eleven and you're, like, crippled. You can't stay out here."

"Why not?"

"It's just fucked up, okay!")

He skips school entirely, chooses instead to argue some more until she finally agrees to let him lift her up, take her to his house. It took the promise of an outlet, for her to charge her game in.

It had been more than a full day, then, of her insulting everything about him. His home, his cars, his clothes, the bathroom where she cleaned up, the makeshift wheelchair he'd fashioned for her, his food, even the outlet on the wall.

"You're a brat, you know that?"

Hard to forget.

Just like when his father came home, burning with anger at how Pepper had brought a stranger home. Fed her food that cost them money, upped the water bill, made waste to a perfectly good broken chair. Hard to forget: the ice cold look in her eyes while his father yelled

and the way she spoke up, in such a weird tone. Sickly sweet, pitiful, nothing like how she'd been all day.

"Monica's super sorry, Mister Coake! I'll have my daddy make it up to you, promise!

Don't worry, he can pay!"

(And then, she nearly made Pepper's heart stop when she said:) "Imahara, should I spell that for you?" all innocent like that.

Hard to forget, a girl like that with a family that powerful

alone and dirty in an alleyway for god-knows-how-long.

"Are you sure you don't remember, Moni?"

"For the last time, I'm going to kick your ass if you ask me that again."

He never reminds her.

Maybe she wants to forget.

[avatarjunko]

prompt: lipstick, flowers

rp: from the ash

characters: persephone hua & hyacinth mandira @traumataako

warnings: abusive relationships implied, violent imagery

"I'm sorry," Persephone is saying, over and over with her pathetic sobs. "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry -"

she's always been inelegant. More like a weed than a rose.

It's what Hyacinth always liked.

Even with her hair dyed away from her bright pink, and skirts instead of shorts, she still sticks out of their garden like a sore thumb. A girl who can't put on lipstick.

Lipstick red as roses is smeared across her cheek, smeared across the back of her hand where she's wiped it from violently, angrily. Her hair is floaty, picture perfect and a coppery color like a thousand pennies that belonged to his hand, useless as the change was. Hyacinth wants to tear it out of her head.

Persephone looks like she wants to tear it out of her head.

She's crying, and Hyacinth thinks that every romantic drama has it wrong when their heroine cries. She has an ugly face when she does it, red cheeks all blotchy and eyes rimmed just the same.

(She resists the snide thought in her head: that's because she isn't anything like a romantic heroine. That she, Hyacinth, if asked by her brother could do better.

Has done better.

That isn't anything to be proud of, she knows.

So does Persephone, her bruised kissed lips and smeared lipstick. This is nothing to be proud of either.

She has to remind herself: it's neither of their faults this went bad.

It's him.

It's always been him.)

Hyacinth wants nothing more than to press her hands against the girl's mouth, smear the red so it comes out more wrong, so it comes off in her hand sloppy and imperfect. He'd hate that, she thinks. Both of them ruined by each other. He hates that, that they ruined each other for him, that they broke each other apart to their smallest pieces and smeared each other across their mouths.

More like weeds than flowers.

When her fingers touch down, brush against Persephone's mouth, the girl jumps back. Her own eyes wide, her sorrys cut off halfway.

"Hya," not Cinthie, "Hya I'm so sorry, please -"

"That was never the right shade for you anyway, he was stupid to try," Hyacinth says, cutting her off. "Come on, I'll teach you how to take it off properly. It won't leave a trace."

(As good as a smear and mess was, she knew a better revenge was to make it all disappear completely.

All evidence of him gone, forgotten, cleaned away.)

[avatarjunko]

prompt: monsters

rp: will to live

characters: jericho david & kat de la cruz & tb degawa @traumataako & @michirukaioh

warnings: disturbing thoughts, unreality, horror

He sits back, quiet and sober after Kat sets down her controller and stretches. After she turns off her recording, camera and microphone, and turns back to the two of them with a look that Jericho reads as curious.

"All of that went over my head," he admits, scratching the back of his neck as he looks to T for their response.

T has their eyes on the screen proper, that look on their face like they're inside themself, searching and searching for something they can't find. They look like that a lot, Jericho finds

especially in times like these, where Kat is in her own fugue in a certain game and even Jericho has paused to watch.

(They also look like that shortly before they leave again, weeks at a time

and shortly when they return home as well.)

"What do you think would be dragged out of us, if we were sent there?" T says finally, several minutes after Kat has already flipped on their laps with her DS in hand.

"What are you talking about?" Jericho asks, a little rough because he doesn't want to think of anything horrifying being dragged out of him.

"Psychological horror-monsters," T replies, dreamily, like they don't even notice Jericho's tone

which, isn't really that hard to believe.

"I think I'd like mine to have a spear through the gut. Just like... here," they say, pointing to a spot just above Kat's nose where her head sits on their lap. She hums, concerned, looks to Jericho for help.

"You gotta stop saying stuff like that. You're going to freak yourself out."

"Really? I haven't yet."

"Yeah... well..."

"I wouldn't let either of you go there," Kat interjects quietly. "We start driving into a fog, I'm making you slam on the fucking breaks."

T lays back, laughing the way they do

nothing in the world seems to bother them.

"It was just a thought," they say, mild as they can. "But, what if you couldn't stop me?"

[suzumurasango]

prompt: milk & warm beverages

rp: from the ash

characters: xiomara cruz & pierce samuels ( @michirukaioh )

warnings: n/a

He always puts just a little bit of milk in her tea when he makes it.

She reads voraciously, with single focus and blinders, and has had one too many accidents spitting a hot drink over her pages during a particularly climactic moment.

He tried an ice cube before, but she’d barely touched the cup after the first sip, not caring for the way the cube bumped against her lips, drawing her out of the pages. So, now he adds a bit of milk, just a little, and let’s it settle and cool there before he sets it on her table.

It works, and he pretends to himself he isn’t happy to see something so simple make things so much easier for her.

He rolls his eyes when she mentions it, idly,

“Yeah, alert the media. You don’t have to drink it if you hate it, alright, Xo?”

And, of course, she bristles: “I didn’t say that.”

But the next time, when she’s already there in the kitchen, making some for him because she’s already there making some for herself, he catches something in his first sip. “You put milk in here.”

“It’s no big deal, right?” she huffs, like he’s trying to start a fight. “Just stuff from the fridge. You like it that way, right?”

He tries to hold back a grin. “Didn’t say that, did I?”

Xo throws up her hands

and then curls up next to him on the couch, book and mug in hand.

[avatarjunko]

prompt: words / actions rp: will to live characters: gardenia & yarrow moreau ( @traumataako) warnings: mentions of death (implication of animal death), parental neglect, creepy child shit, dysfunctional family relationships

It’s always been the two of them.

Its only natural they would come up with such ideas.

(Young, alone for the evening, maman patting their identical heads equally when she says take care of each other now, maman will be home soon, though “soon” for eight year olds and “soon” for adults is a time zone that spans hours. They never think she returns home soon enough. Almost always, they’ve already tucked each other into bed, read stories and given each other “good night pecks”. Almost always, they’re already dozing off by the time the door opens.)

It’s been the two of them, alone for hours that maman calls “soon”. No friends to speak of except an old cat that maman has had “soon” before they were born, and a vast and empty old house that made strange noises of settling at night.

“Did you see Enzo today? He always makes the lights flicker when I make mac and cheese.”

“Lola was in the bathtub today.”

“She’s part octopus, did you know?”

A single crayon drawing starts the rest, it is entitled: ma sœur, moi, Hugo le chat, et Romane le fantôme and hosts four figures (child, child, cat, black scribble) and Veronique had to come into speak with the teachers more times than could be counted. Do you think... maybe...

The accusation prompts Maman to hang the pictures on the refrigerator with colorful Y and G magnets and coo to the girls how beautiful it is. It prompts them further, and it’s almost planned the way the rest of the doodles come out. Maman sticks them all on the fridge, a rainbow of magnets, until they run out of room and then she buys a magnetic board she hangs on the wall and fills that up too.

Yarrow’s personal masterpiece is: Le Mort d’Hugo, and features a cat displayed prominently on a cross. She and her sister are depicted kneeling underneath

or so she says.

Gardenia is particuarly proud of: Marlin et Moi, showing her as the genius behind black scribbles and thick black lines that protrude from either the Marlin or the Moi, and attach across the page to each other. In her twelve year old voice, still fumbling with some words, she tells Maman and the teachers: “It can be interpreted either way. However you see it depends on you.”

They’re given places of glory on the magnetic mantel. Maman stops going out, and “soon” turns into a word to describe when she’s leaving, rather than when she’s coming home, and then is dropped forever. Turns into: “when will you girls let me cook dinner for once (even though I’m no good at that at all)”, “we should see a movie together (it’ll be childish, silly, you’re still babies right?)”, “should I read you a story, didn’t you love this one (when you were eight)?”

(”When will we get another cat?” is met with going out that evening and meeting Alice, the only time the sisters say merci with awe in their voices instead of contempt).