Liu Qingge had personally never paid much attention to the interactions between An Ding and Bai Zhan. He knew relationships were structured in a way they weren't between any of the other peaks, and vaguely participated in the basics, but that was essentially it. He would have most likely continued forever in this manner, except then he became Head Disciple and everyone started saying that Liu Qingge was set up to marry the head disciple of An Ding.
Liu Qingge had successfully ignored that for a while also, up until his own Shizun said, "I'm setting you up to marry the head disciple of An Ding."
Yes, Liu Qingge knew the Lord of An Ding and the Lord of Bai Zhan were married. No, he hadn't realized exactly what kind of effect that would have on his own future marriage.
Liu Qingge had met Shang Qinghua before. He hadn't particularly liked Shang Qinghua, but at the same time, he hadn't particularly liked a lot of people, so this didn't mean much. If asked about his own preferences in partners, Liu Qingge would prefer someone who enjoyed fighting more, but there was nothing truly objectionable about Shang Qinghua. In any case, Shizun seemed happy enough with his relationship with Shibo, and when asked, fully admitted to arranging things like this because he was happy with his relationship with Shibo. Looking at it like this, this engagement seemed to have been made with the expectation that Liu Qingge would be happy with Shang Qinghua. Liu Qingge dutifully resolved to do his best.
Then one day Shizun had walked in sour-faced from a meeting, and had announced that the engagement to Shang Qinghua had been dissolved and Liu Qingge was instead going to get married to Shen Qingqiu.
have you read @adhdavinci's J&D fic The Red Prison? i'm only on like ch 5 right now but this shit's already broken me multiple times and i'm having a PROBLEM (/positive, effusive, holy shit)
like just
Meanwhile, the bottle of gin is empty.
He drops it onto the roof below, expecting it to shatter.
The dull, empty thud echoes in his ears.
[...]
A sudden maelstrom of emotions whirl through Torn's head. Waves slam against the dam, again and again, and -
A crack forms -
Clammy hands grip at the railing, and he's falling, falling.
When he lands, it's with not a thud, but a shatter.
FUCK
@adhdavinci if posting snippets like this isn't cool pls lmk and i'll take it down i'm just literally vibrating right now and i have no one to scream at thx
As a child, Wei Hua had spent a good portion of time really fucking confused. Of course, "really fucking confused" was the natural state of a child -- things didn't normally make sense when you were experiencing them for the first time, and there were a lot of first times! -- but Wei Hua was special.
Really! It sounded super self-absorbed, but he was serious about this! Normal children didn't speak in tongues! Normal children didn't know how to write before they were ever taught! Normal children weren't confident that their name wasn't -- that their parents weren't -- weren't --
Yeah, Wei Hua had been a fucking weird kid.
His father had taken it in stride, but then again, Wei Changze had married Cangse Sangren, who had cheerfully claimed that all of this weirdness was obviously Wei Hua's inheritance from her.
hi there, welcome to wip <date indeterminate>. today, i'm addressing July 3rd, and the 7 asks/replies i got that day, all for the file [ REDACTED ]. now to be honest, i repeatedly lost track of how many sentences i wrote/edited in this file, but i'm almost certain i've hit at least 21 at this point, so i'm calling that done.
anyway.
@eriquin @post-and-out @adhdavinci @zyrafowe-sny @gnomer-denois @aparticularbandit @auburnlaughter have a bunch of sentences i wrote in a different file
.
A-Hua had had an imaginary friend for as long as he could remember. 'As long as he could remember' felt like a very short time; it, in fact, was a very short time, since A-Hua was only three years old. Three seemed to be an awfully small number. Often, he found himself thinking this number should be much bigger. Twenty-something? Thirty-something? Maybe even bigger than that? But his friend always told him not to worry about it, so he didn't.
His friend's name was System, and it was a cheerful voice in his head, paired with glowy floating rectangles that made funny noises when he poked at them. System always had jobs for him to do, and A-Hua was always happy to do them. They weren't always fun, but they were different, and anyway, there were lots of pretty pictures and colors once he finished them.
System said that once A-Hua got bigger, it would give him bigger jobs, which was a little scary if he thought about it for too long. "Will they be fun?" A-Hua asked.
[ Of course! User 01 can rest assured that the larger the task, the larger the reward! ]
System said A-Hua was going to play an important role in the fate of the world. He was going to be the An Ding Peak Lord one day and he was going to be a very important person and boss over an entire mountain of people and none of this sounded good for some reason? It sounded weirdly dangerous and bad, even though it should sound really cool and awesome?
System told A-Hua not to worry about it. System knew everything, and System told A-Hua that everything was going to be fine, so everything should be fine?
System was a fucking liar.
System didn't know shit, because if it did, System would have known that it was going to get its ass kicked out of Shang Houhua's head.
Of course Yue Qingyuan was biased. In this aspect, Sect Leaders were allowed to be human. His Shizun had personally never made it five sentences with the Qing Jing Peak Lord without an argument, arbitrarily picking positions that placed them in opposite sides of a debate, no matter what his actual opinions were. If Yue Qingyuan had gone the opposite direction, then, well, what of it?
It was only natural, trying to treat Shen Qingqiu well. Doing otherwise was like pretending the past never happened; letting his jaw relax, unclenching teeth sunken in the remnants of his own identity, moving on with a life that was barely his own, finding some purpose that wasn't wrapped up in a dream that two children had made, such a very long time ago.
It didn't feel like Yue Qingyuan was supposed to move on with his life. It didn't feel like he was supposed to be alive at all.
It was obvious to Jiang Qingchen that Father and Mother hated each other. There were moments where you could be forgiven for mistaking otherwise, but there were only so many screaming arguments Jiang Qingchen could overhear through half-closed doors before he had to start wondering why Father and Mother had ever gotten married to begin with.
"You hate Mother," Jiang Qingchen said. If this were anyone else, he might have tried talking around it; but this was Father, and Father was always weirdly satisfied when Jiang Qingchen was straightforward about things nobody ever wanted to talk about.
Father paused. "Your mother is possessed of many admirable qualities," he said, with a slight shake of his head. "Her personality is not one of them."
so the WIP intro is here if you want the long version. the short version is: dark jak AU.
i started this one because i replayed tpl for the first time in like 15 years and accidentally Reawakened the Special Interest. it was supposed to be a short thing until it... wasn't. and somehow it went from 'a fun story about this thing i loved when i was a kid' to '300-ish page existential trainwreck clusterfuck about trauma and loss and learning to forgive yourself for not being the same person anymore' and i'm not sure how it got here but hey i'm having a great time :) and i'm almost done with the second draft edit (on pause until nano is over), so maybe the finished thing will see the light of day in spring sometime (assuming i'm very persistent and can keep the other plot bunnies at bay long enough)
thanks for the ask and listening to me rant 💜 for your suffering, have an excerpt from chapter 2:
This was fine. It was. They’d shared Jak’s bed in Uncle’s loft for… six years? Seven? Right up until the KG had taken Jak away. And it’d been fine.
But in all those years, the tiny, animal part of Daxter’s brain had never been convinced that Jak was going to go cuckoo for cluckatoos in the middle of the night and shred him into confetti.
Which he wasn’t. Jak’d had plenty of chances to maim him, and hadn’t taken a single one. Not in the prison, before he’d realized Daxter wasn’t a hallucination. Not when he’d killed the prison guards. Not any of the times Daxter had touched him without thinking, when any rational person would’ve stayed the hell away.
Because Jak was Jak, and Jak wouldn’t hurt him.
He also wouldn’t sleep, apparently.
Jak, still in his street clothes, lay at the very edge of the bed with his back to Daxter. A minor earthquake would have sent him tumbling to the floor. Every few minutes he tilted his head to watch something else. The door. The window. The door, again.
Which was ridiculous. Babak Village was the safest place on the Haven Peninsula. There was nothing to be—
Daxter bit down on his tongue.
His chest burned, bile rose to inflame his lungs. He shut his eyes against it.
Jak was the brave one. He’d always been the brave one.
The mattress creaked.
Indigo eyes watched him, luminescent in the magma’s faint glow.
“Yeah, definitely keep doing that. ‘S not creepy at all.”
“How long?” Jak signed small, close to his chest.
No-context questions. That was something to get used to again.
“Two years. Three months. Twelve days.” Since Daxter had climbed out Thad’s window, leaving Jak behind. Since he’d run into the jungle, had gone home alone, had waited five whole days before even trying to leave Sandover—
“Thanks. For saving me.”
Daxter’s mouth dried and his eyes burned. He didn’t dare reply out loud. “You already said that,” he signed.
“Can’t say it enough.”
Fuck. What was he supposed to say to that? ‘Didn’t have a choice, turns out my life sucks without you’? “Well, we can just add it to the life-debt you owe me and call it good. Twenty years sound fair?”
The corner of Jak’s lips curled into a smile. “Got to be at least two or three life-debts deep with you, by now.”
“Two hundred forty-three years, but who’s counting?”
From my October 2nd post here; Just in Time for @stonemaskedtaliesin and @adhdavinci, thanks!
He wondered if he’d said that aloud, because the leader glared and punched him, and this time when Kiryuuin stumbled backwards he reeled right into someone else’s solid frame. He winced, hurrying to pull away, and a light hand slid over his back, steadying him.
He looked around, eyes widening as-
Kyan stepped forwards past him, hands on his hips. ‟You didn’t learn not to play so unfair last time we met?” he asked, lifting his chin, and Kiryuuin shook his head a little, bringing one hand up to his bleeding nose. His eyes crossed as Kyan ducked the swing of a baseball bat and knocked it from its owner’s hands, then sent him flying back with a punch.
