How many cartoons can you name where a Black boy is the hero? Not the sidekick, not the comic relief, but the center of the story, the one who gets to dream, to fall, to grow, to save the day. For too many Black boys, the first time they see themselves reflected back isn’t in a world of imagination it’s in headlines, obituaries, or mugshots. That kind of visibility shapes how the world sees them, and how they begin to see themselves.
FLY exists to shake up that narrative.
A coming of age story about Black kids who finally have power to fight back against systems designed against them.
i might be a video game masochist but i will always defend ppl who mod their games to be easier 🙏🙏 videogames are quite literally made to be fun. if you're not having fun you should do everything in your power to make it fun again
Accidentally Wrote An Eigong Fanfic Here You Go (Picture Above Unrelated)
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Text version:
You hadn’t noticed it before, but standing so near to the Root Core, you passively realize there’s a sort of hum. Or, hum may not be the word, no—you’re not referring to anything you can hear, but you can feel it against your skin, a faint buzz, like a layer of static noise draped over your body. Most likely, it’s energy from the roots dispersing into the atmosphere of the room—or perhaps it’s nothing, isn’t really there, perhaps it’s just you—but regardless, you feel this pervasive thrum in the air.
It’s invigorating, in a way. It helps you tune out the dull ache of your injuries.
You press your sword to your throat.
Standing here in position at last, you’re ready to take this final action, this final culmination of effort that will redeem all the years you spent struggling. This is the ending step of a winding, arduous plan—one that led you more than you led it, yes, but a worthy plan—one barely separated from completion now, in the same way your blood is separated from the open air only by the skin of your throat. You can manage this, an actualization, an achievement of this dream you’ve been grasping at for your whole life. You took far too long to get here. It’s within reach now, so close.
The Root Core itself is blindingly bright, a ball of light burning into your retinas at the periphery of your vision, but you pay it no mind. The only thing necessary to focus on right now is the solid, reassuring weight that is the hilt of your weapon in your hands, that certainty with which you’ll accomplish your goal. Nothing else matters. Nothing else has mattered for a very long time. You are nothing if not determined—the Tiandao Research Center that carried you to this point has fallen into disrepair, the other Sols are gone, Penglai is gone—yet here you are, in spite of it all. The dim aftertaste of the blood you were coughing up earlier hangs in the back of your throat, ignored. You look now to the future, to the era you’re ushering forward by your own two hands. Look forward, now.
Yet, somehow, even as you try to focus yourself on the correct thing, your gaze inexplicably flits to the ground below. One last time, so far down, made so small by this insurmountable distance, you see Yi. You find yourself looking at him.
Your student.
His hand is frantically shot out in some desperate attempt to stop you, and he’s looking up with this expression on his face. You can’t see it very well from so high, but you know you wouldn’t understand it any better even if he was right in front of you—wouldn’t understand him any better. His eyes are wide, something like shock, or fear, or anger. A face that relays he doesn’t understand you, either. Even where you are, more certain of your purpose than you’ve ever been, sword pressed so surely to your throat that you can feel the heat of the blade’s red-lit edge, there’s this strange twinge in your chest at that.
He used to be such a good student. And he’s still skilled, of course, continues to be one of the few people who can rival you, as evidenced by some internal injury inflicted by a talisman of his that’s paired a persistent pain to your shallow breaths. You taught him well.
Still—not well enough, apparently, so he’s ended up opposed to you somehow.
It’s such an odd feeling. A sort of muted regret, like some part of you was hoping that this time you’d be able to convince him, and he’d finally come to see that you’re doing all of this for a reason. An important reason.
You don’t know what part of you would ever hope for that now, or why. If there was ever a point when he could’ve realized how important your work is, it’s far passed. Too late. It’s been too late for centuries.
At what point did his beliefs become irreconcilable with your truth?
You remember the first time you met. A memory hundreds of years distant from the present, but you still remember it all very well.
A long time ago, there was a boy put in front of you. You recall a vague, detached thought crossing your mind (or perhaps it was something you said?) of how he was so young for such terrible injuries, so young for a near-fatal accident. He was barely hanging onto life by some miracle of the Fusang, brought to you to be saved, and soon, you were pouring your time into doing just that. It’s been made slightly blurry in your mind by the passing of the decades, but you remember constructing a stabilizer for him, closely monitoring its effects, overseeing his recovery, and eventually—in what seems in hindsight like no time at all—he was able to open his eyes again, speak again, walk again. There he was, a living, breathing achievement.
He was an innovation in and of himself, proof of your skill, proof that your work wasn’t in vain, his very existence a modicum of progress toward your dream to defy mortality—and even as notable as that would make him on its own, you’d somehow gain one more thing to consider about him once you ended up as his teacher.
You’d realize shortly that he was an excellent pupil.
Admirably eager, like striving for knowledge was as innate to him as breathing, he’d managed to gain your respect very fast. At some times, impressively, it seemed like he exceeded your own skill compared to when you were his age.
He was a student in your own image. Your favorite.
You’d allowed him to become the tenth Sol after years of contributing to the Tiandao Council. He’d certainly earned it. A title and seal granted to him, one of Innovation, and he lived up to that epithet with his invention of the Eternal Cauldron project. It was then, nearing the launch, that things fell apart in a flash, and there he was again like an injured child.
The precipice of a rocky cliff. One of his eyes shut, twitching, fur soaked in blood, barely hanging onto life by the tips of his claws. His wounds that time weren’t an accident.
You remember looming over him with your face obscured, vision darkened by your veil. It was windy that day.
Still, even tracing the events back all the way to that confrontation, that turning point, you can’t decidedly mark when his priorities became so fatally different from yours. How did that gulf between your beliefs arise? When?
Maybe it was always there, your fault that you failed to see, blinded by your reflection. Just another mistake in a long line of mistakes. Another exhibition of your tendency to only notice flaws and aberrations when it’s too late. By the time they rear their head high enough for you to catch sight of, they’re already lethal, irreversible. The Tianhuo began that way, did it not? Expectations and oversights. You had never seen your student so emotional before that encounter.
What is this?
You’ve lost track of your thoughts. This wasn’t a mistake. None of this was a mistake—that lonely path may have seemed uncertain as you were walking it, but you’ve arrived at last at your destination, and every twist of that sinuous road has been revealed to you now as necessary. You don’t need to look back to know that.
This is not the time for reminiscing. Pointless. Now is the time for action, to follow through on a decision you made long ago. This is the end.
You turn your gaze away from Yi, after however long it had been fixed on him, and settle once more into the smile on your face. The mutated Fusang roots are heavy at the back of your head, and you can feel their uneven pulse, an irregularity of movement like they’re learning to breathe. You will grant everlasting life to your kind. There’s pink at the edges of your vision.
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