✦ i am a youtuber and you can find me on instagram
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this will be updated when new fics (one-shots and long-form fics alike) are added to this blog
Polished Fangs (Avatar x Fem Sully Reader) – Series
A Rather Slippery Slope (True Detective: Night Country x OC) - Series
This is a collection of all of my miscellaneous one-shots. Some of them were requested by you guys, others crafted up in my own head through strangely detailed fever dreams.
Please check my Rules for Requests page before making a request; that way you know what fandoms I write for as well as my hard limits.
Hiya 🪷 :) I saw that you’re into AoT and was hoping you would be down for a Levi one-shot…..maybe hurt comfort? Maybe a little bit of angst *blink* *blink*? x reader of course unless there is an OC you’ve been dying to write about. Anywho, I hope you have a nice day, and thank you very much for accepting if you so happen to do so.
- Lily
P.s. omfg I’m in love with polished fangs it’s been my only motivation to write/get out of bed everyday.
There was a reason you were a Squad Captain within the Survey Corps. But even the most perfect soldiers make mistakes.
Content Warnings: graphic descriptions of violence, implications of former child abuse, most definitely OOC Levi ngl i have not consumed AOT content in a hot second
A one-shot requested by Lily!
You’d nearly been severed in half.
That was what the nurse treating you told you. Her smile was forced. You could see it in her eyes as she met your gaze, hunched over your form and carefully applied a medicinal salve to the edge of your abdomen. She had you laid back on the sterile white bed, fully flat. She told you it was so she could treat you easier, but you could hear the truth under her words:
She didn’t want you to see the wound.
The Calaneth District was technically within Wall Rose, but it was one of the four districts which bordered Wall Sina. The district was well-off. The quality of treatment you were getting was some of the best. The Survey Corps didn’t have the money to send all of their wounded soldiers to receive such excellent care; which meant you were here, safely nestled near Wall Sina and the royal capital, Mitras, because your injuries were just that incredibly dire.
But, again, given that the nurse had told you that you’d almost been bisected horizontally just above the belly button, it made total sense.
It hadn’t been easy to get where you were now.
First had come it—the tragedy that had led you to flee your "peaceful" life in Orvud, a district adjacent to Stohess, and make your journey to enlist in the 92ndTraining Corps at eighteen years old. You needed an escape. And that in and of itself had been a grave challenge. There were always eyes everywhere. Ears were always listening to you. Hands were always loosely holding onto kitchen knives, ready to grip them tighter or throw them in your direction if you ran too loudly or too quickly or too obviously in any other aspect. You had needed to be as discreet as humanly possible to leave her and the house, and you had set up a means of transportation out of Orvud weeks in advance.
But once you left the district, it was relatively smooth sailing.
Even within the 92nd Training Corps, you found yourself to not be struggling nearly as much as you prepared to. You’d never considered yourself particularly strong, only fast enough to dodge whatever she threw at you, and even then you weren’t always faultless. But, to your utter dismay, you toppled opponents with ease during sparring practice. You learned to operate the vertical maneuvering gear rather quickly, too. There were some challenges with using swords—the blades were too sharp, too familiar in the worst ways. But once you reminded yourself that they were yours, not hers, you caught on fast.
In the year 838, you graduated in the Top 10 of the 92nd Training Corps.
It was assumed you would do as the rest of the Top 10 of your year did. The Military Police Brigade only accepted the best alumni of the trainee squads right off the bat. After the enrollment period, only excellent soldiers from the Survey Corps or the Garrison could move into the Military Police, and they needed connections to enter the sector. And the best part of the Military Police was that they were considered the most prestigious. After a few years of service, you wouldn’t even need to live in the barracks. The pay was wondrous and the safety of living in the Inner Wall was an added bonus.
But she was still living along the Inner Wall.
Your selection couldn’t be more clear. You signed up to join the Survey Corps.
That was when the challenge returned. Only this time, it was a challenge you rather enjoyed. The training was more specific in the Survey Corps. The reliance upon the vertical maneuvering equipment was higher than in either of the other factions of the military. And, if you’d been good enough at science to join the research division, you’d have had access to a vast degree more texts on the titans than you’d ever had before. It was a struggle, but it was a fun struggle, and you could visibly notice the change. You’d put on muscle in the Training Corps—now that you were a Scout, you had also gained higher flexibility. You were far more agile. You could think on your feet faster and smarter than before.
You were strong.
It was a feeling you would’ve had the privilege of experiencing if you’d remained in Orvud.
And in the year 841, just three years after enlisting, you became a Squad Captain.
The expedition beyond the Walls hadn’t gone completely off plan. As a Scout, you were more than aware of the fact that you were bound to take losses whenever you ventured outside of the safety of Wall Maria and into the Titan-infested lands that lay past it. As a Squad Captain, you’d seen your own direct subordinates die at the hands of the gargantuan beasts, and you prided yourself on how few and far between those personal losses were.
Because you were an excellent soldier. And in a faction of the military where, more often than not, people didn’t last long enough to become excellent, you were a rarity.
Still. Even with all the contingency plans and formation flexibility and the vibrant flare colors to streak through the sky to communicate between squads, there was nothing that could have prevented your squad from being targeted by an Abnormal titan.
The beast had come out of nowhere, almost as though it had been buried in the dirt underfoot. One moment, you were telling your subordinate, Analisa, to fire off a green flare to confirm your squad’s position. The next, another subordinate, Hector, was firing off red powder into the sky as Analisa—poor, sweet, wet-behind-the-ears Analisa, was plucked up off the ground, horse and all, by a 9-meter tall Abnormal titan. Your swords were already in your hands as the beast started to pull her screaming body apart. By the time you were in the air, roaring in outrage, the sound distracting the monster enough for it to look up at you as you flew at it, Analisa had lost her left leg.
She didn’t lose anything else. You made sure of it.
The red flares went off in rapid succession, staining the pristine blue sky like blood tainting water. Some of the powder caught on your clothes as you zipped through the air, latching the hooks of your vertical maneuvering equipment into the titan’s body itself, breaking the skin as you twisted and spun around it.
Your swords made quick work of its hands. But the steam told you they would just grow back, so you didn’t waste a second.
Forcing the grappling wires into its chest, you spun over the top of its gargantuan skull, ready to slice the nape of the neck on one fell swoop.
But Abnormal titans didn’t go down easily, and this one was no exception to that rule.
Your blades were so close—maybe less than a meter away from the beast’s skin—when it took ahold of your wires and tugged hard. In a blink of an eye you went from being seconds from killing this monster to your lower torso being inside of the mouth of the creature. Its teeth were coming down and, if not for you jamming your blades viciously up the titan’s nostrils, it would’ve felled you right then and there, snapping you in half. Instead, just a split second after its teeth sliced into your gut, its jaw unhinged with a bellow of pain and you fell. If not for the wires still held in the titan’s palm, you’d have hit the ground.
Instead, in a flash of post-near-death clarity, you retracted the wires. You lurched upwards, over the beast’s head again.
This time, your blades struck true. The Abnormal fell to the ground face-first, steaming impossibly hot as it died and evaporated into nothingness.
You lost consciousness not a second later.
To say that you knew Levi Ackermann personally would be a grave understatement.
To say you were close would be something between truth and dishonesty.
To say you were friends would be ridiculous.
There was a level of mutual respect between the two of you. He was the very best Scout in the Survey Corps, perhaps in history entirely. You were close behind. Your squads often trained together. You knew of his near obsession with cleanliness and order wherever possible.
He knew you were hiding something.
But just as you didn’t press for answers as to where his frantic need to clean nearly every surface he ever laid his eyes upon, he didn’t dig. You were a good soldier. Your loyalties were so obviously with the Survey Corps that he didn’t really have reason to believe you had any ties to the corruption of the Military Police Brigade. You were a reliable Squad Captain.
Compared to everyone else in the Survey Corps, the two of you were the closest thing to perfection.
Which was why you weren’t too surprised to wake up to the sound of him stomping into your room at the clinic, his expression dry besides the arch of one eyebrow to denote annoyed confusion.
“Nine meters,” he drawled, “and it snuck up on you?”
Your eyes were closed as you leaned back into the pillows. “Some-fucking-how, yeah. I’m not happy about it either. Analisa lost a leg.” You winced slightly as the words left your lips. It wasn’t your fault—but you were her captain, her commanding officer. You felt the weight of that loss on your heart. Analisa wouldn’t be allowed out on the field again more likely than not. And the severance pay (god, that word was horrible here, wasn’t it?) for a Scout of her rank was abysmal.
God forbid the government pay their soldiers a livable wage.
“She’ll survive,” Levi said, snapping you out of your thoughts. “Nobody in your squad died. Stop wallowing in self-pity. You didn’t lose a limb.”
You poked one eye open and gestured to your bandaged abdomen.
“Work on your bedside manner,” you snarked. “I almost died.”
“We all almost die all the time. It’s the job. Don’t complain like you didn’t actively choose this.”
You rolled your eyes. “You were worried. Admit it.” Before he could deny it—though you knew he really wouldn’t—you smirked up at him. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here to lecture me. And I know the lecture is coming. Wanna just get it over with?” You shut your eyes and leaned back into the pillows. “Do it now, while the medicines are still working. If they taper off, I’ll start to get angry.”
Levi Ackermann was not a man of hesitation. You heard the scrape of wood on wood as he hauled a chair over to your side and sat down, undoubtedly glaring down at your form.
“You were careless,” he scolded harshly. “A nine-meter titan doesn’t just pop up out of nowhere. Either you weren’t paying attention to your surroundings nearly enough or you were intentionally luring that monster towards you.”
“We weren’t paying enough attention,” you confirmed. “It was a stupid error.”
“It was a fatal error,” he snapped. “You almost died. Your subordinate almost died.”
“I thought you said not to complain—”
“You can’t be so stupid.”
You closed your mouth. Levi’s voice had cracked, actually broken on the word stupid like it hurt to say in more ways than one. He was angry, certainly. You really had been phenomenally unwise to not pay closer attention to your surroundings, and now you and Analisa were paying the price of your negligence. He was annoyed that you were out of commission and likely would be for an extended period of time because of the extent of your injuries, meaning someone (namely him, probably) would be assigned to train your squad until you were back to work.
And he was scared. He’d been worried, hearing you were injured. But then he’d been given the more detailed report and his heart had gone still, the blood in his veins going icy cold with horror. You’d nearly been eaten, nearly torn in half. You were unconscious for over a week, he told you, the words coming out in a visceral hiss, and they’d been told that your recovery wasn’t looking too good. The chances of you surviving past that week-long coma were so slim that the nurses and doctors at the clinic in Stohess had told the Survey Corps that they should begin funeral preparations and contact the family.
You’d stiffened at that and Levi’s jaw had clenched as he scrutinized your expression, trying to determine if your reaction was from physical pain or the mention of a family.
“No family to contact,” you told him simply.
“Nothing in your files,” Levi confirmed. “Not from the moment you joined the Training Corps. Generic surname.”
You just shrugged. “Dead parents. Never had siblings.” That much was true. “I… stayed in a Girls’ Home.”
“What Girls’ Home?”
Her home. A dangerous place. She had no qualifications to raise children, just the money and the need to trap little girls in a labyrinth-like mansion in Orvud. No one cared for orphans. No one would bat an eye if she took them in and they were never seen again. Who would throw a search party? Who would issue a warrant to search for a child nobody really had any claim over?
“A bad one,” was all you told Levi.
Levi was quiet for a moment. “Is it still standing?”
You shrugged. “How should I know? I’m not going back.”
“You’re not,” he whispered, almost as though he was trying to be reassuring. “You’re too old.”
If you hadn’t been slightly worried that your organs would fall out, you might’ve offered him a laugh, even if it would have been forced.
“Way too old,” you muttered. “And I’m alive. So no funeral yet.” You shot a wry smile in his direction. “Disappointed?”
“No.” Levi’s voice was hoarse. “Don’t be an idiot. You don’t have that luxury.”
Your brows lifted to your hairline. “Wow. You’re so sweet.”
“It’s not ‘sweet’ to not be disappointed that you’ll live,” he hissed. “It’s the bare minimum.”
“How romantic of you to say that.”
“Your view of romance is distressing.”
There was nothing more you could really think to say after that, so what followed was a few minutes of quiet. The sunlight filtered into the room through the windows behind you, casting warm white-yellow rays through the blinds. Tiny, tiny dust particles caught the light as they floated in the air. At some point, you closed your eyes and leaned back against the pillows again. A few moments later, you felt Levi’s hand brush the back of yours. And then slowly, his fingers interlocked with yours, pulling your palm into his.
You’d done this before. You’d never done more. But that was fine with you. Pain recognized pain, even if the details were hidden under skin so thick it might as well have been armor. Trust was hard to earn among people like the two of you, and though you had his and he had yours, your line of work was too dangerous to make deeper connections. Even this—holding hands and worrying over each other—was foolish. It could go wrong at any moment.
So this was enough for you.
“Let me see it.”
You knew what he was asking for without needing to open your eyes. With your free hand, you pulled up your shirt just enough for him to see the bandages wrapped nice and firmly around your abdomen, concealing the bite wound that had nearly killed you.
“Is it bleeding through the bandages?”
“No,” Levi said. “It’s not. I’m going to unpeel some of it.”
Your hand dropped to your side. “Knock yourself out.”
He said your name lowly, like he was scolding you for your blase tone. Still, he let go of your palm and carefully unraveled some of the bandages, exposing the wound just enough to inspect it. You were asleep for nine days, so you were fairly certain he’d seen this gash at its worst. The way he exhaled with barely concealed relief confirmed your theories as he rewrapped your wound.
“It’s improved. A lot,” he told you.
You nodded. “That’s good.”
“You’re going to be out of commission for a long time,” he continued.
You just nodded again. “I’d better be.”
“You should be demoted,” he snapped.
You snorted. “Erwin won’t demote me.”
“He should,” Levi insisted.
You blindly swatted at him, fingertips brushing his forearm. “Oh, lay off. Clearly I learned my lesson. I was imperfect once.”
“You weren’t imperfect.”
You opened your eyes to find Levi’s resting glare had softened. His eyebrows were still pulled together the way they always were, like the muscles in his face were just naturally set that way, but his eyes were wider than they normally were. And they looked almost glossy. He took ahold of your hand again, gripping you tighter.
“You weren’t imperfect,” Levi whispered again. “You were human. You made a human error.”
“Still almost killed me.”
“Even I’ve almost died on missions,” Levi reported. “It’s part of the job. Even the most ‘perfect’ of us risk everything. It’s just how it is.”
You didn’t know how to respond to that, so all you said was, “I know.”
“Good,” he decided, nodding once.
For a moment, the quiet came back. It was nice. You ran your thumb over his knuckles and watched his eyes harden again into their natural, impossible-to-decipher state. It would have scared anyone else off. But given that her eyes were always practically glowing with malice, this was the best thing you could’ve seen in the eyes of the man you were involved with. The calculated, intentional emptiness was comforting almost.
Maybe that meant you were sick in the head.
But you had to be a little insane to be in the Survey Corps.
And you had to be significantly insane to do so well.
“I still think you should be demoted,” Levi finally said, ruining the moment.
“I think you should shut up,” was all you said back, smiling.
It's genuinely so evil that ChatGPT trained itself off of millions of fanfics to learn "creative writing" (reminder: AI cannot be creative). And growing up, I literally emulated the writing styles of all of my favorite fanfics and authors when I finally started making my own stuff.
So now EVERY time I'm writing, I'm subconsciously like, "Oh God, my writing is reading like some shit that ChatGPT would crap out," because the tone comes out looking so similar to what it does. And it doesn't help that I fucking LOVE overusing the "—" thing when I write, which GPT also does.
I literally made a reddit post (ew) a while back and all of the replies were like, "Ermm we can tell chatgpt wrote this for you," and I immediately got so sad and deactivated because no one would believe me when I argued otherwise lol. And it's been a complex of mine now that when I'm writing something seriously, THAT'S how it comes across to people?!
And it's all because so many fanfic writers use similar styles and speech patterns that ChatGPT just fucking chugged and threw up when its creators trained it and I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it
There are genuinely people out there who think that fanfic authors might not even be real people behind the screen because of it
Edit: Also, just to add because I'm curious — How any other Ao3 writers noticed a BIG plummet in hits/kudos/comments/interactions in general ever since AI character chatbots became a common thing?? It's so lame.
Do you think sweet cub would use the thanator cubs baby teeth for stuff? Like they get pretty big even as juveniles, I can see their larger teeth being made into a dagger to replace the one she lost
Oooooh, this is a really good idea! I feel like their baby teeth might not be big enough to turn into daggers, but I like to imagine they just keep regrowing teeth like sharks do (Do sharks do that? Or am I hallucinating that? I dunno). So she might use their baby teeth to braid into her hair and then, when they get bigger and their teeth become more formidable, she uses those as proper weapons.
Like she starts with braiding the tiny teeth into her hair. Then they get bigger and she makes throwing knives because the teeth are still small and rather lightweight but sharp as Hell. Then they get even bigger and she makes daggers.
Thank you for the idea! I'll try to incorporate it!
Something I think is neat and really cute about fanfic is that there’s a personal version of each character in it? Like, each writer focuses on different traits and qualities and even though there can be a hundred fics with the same character, they’re really not exactly the same.
So even if you and I are writing a fic with the same characters, they can still be uniquely different despite having the same core and they’re each dear to us personally as our take on the person.
I don’t know, I just think it’s cute that each writer cherishes these characters in personal and unique ways.
I've tried to reverse image search to find the original artist but I haven't been able to! But I am absolutely in love with the braids and the expression and the fiery hue of the feathers—it's all just so stunning!
Some poor goofus makes the mistake of dismissing Neytiri
Neytiri: do you know who I am? I am Neytiri te Tskaha Mo'at'ite! the wife of Toruk Makto! Mother of Palulukan Makto! Blessed by eywa to ride a palulukan of my own at the battle of ayram alusing! My daughter was gifted their strength in my womb! She rides defending our lands from the sky demons with the lessons I taught her! How dare you!
The goofus in question: ( ꩜ ᯅ ꩜;)
Aka neytiri goes full navy seal copypasta
the goofus as Neytiri lists all of her and her daughter's badass credentials
It’s going to break Neytiris heart if she sees her daughter act afraid of her.
All that desperate searching, running herself ragged, pushing & pushing to find her baby even when her own mother tells her to let it go, only to see her baby shrink away from her in fear would absolutely crush her.
Neytiri would be sick with the need to hold her baby but forcing herself to keep distance because every time she gets too close her baby flinches like she’s going to run, trying to call comforts and reassurances from across the kelku only to see every sentence send her babys shoulders up higher with tension and discomfort…
In the (hopefully not to distant) future Neytiri will probably proudly recount how she never doubted that her daughter survived the fall and never stopped looking for her to bring her home.
I have the mental image of her holding the finger bead to her nose as a nonverbal i love you/be safe/reassurance when they’re across the room from each other and don’t have time to talk.
If someone asked her about the finger on her waytelem she would absolutely use it as a way to brag about how her daughters iknimaya bonded her to a palulukan
Idc what anyone says Neytiri is openly proud of all her children and will brag about them if given the opportunity
Oooh, I actually had that idea for her return—where, when Y/N turns to her parents in doubt or in a crowd where she needs their silent assurance, they lift the amber-encased pinkie finger to their lips and kiss it to show that they will love and support her. Or that her siblings will rub the amber beads on their own weytelems if Y/N is away from them and they want to feel as brave as they think she is.
And, yeah, Neytiri is going to be insufferably proud of the fact that she never once doubted that Y/N was alive. I know Jake would feel tremendous guilt both for not believing his mate but for (what he believes is) giving up on his daughter.
its probably a normal sign for the economy that all of my adulthood fantasies are like "imagine having your own kitchen living room and bathroom to decorate" "what if i could get on a train" "maybe one day i could purchase a sturdy pair of shoes" "i should save and invest in a single bicycle"
