thinking about exy skk au............. dazai and chuuya going to the same high school and then going to different colleges....... competing in the finals....... them having a very famous rivalry and always getting in trouble for shittalking each other in interviews....... one of them having to transfer eventually and the whole team going Oh Fuck bc now they have to deal with Exy's Biggest Feud on their court...... and they're RIGHT bc oh god they never stop fighting UNTIL its game time........ dazai and chuuya being an UNSTOPPABLE pair on the court, always in sync, barely needing a glance to know what each other plans to do, already flawlessly executing plays that the team didn't even know about......... the team finding out after their first match that dazai and chuuya played together in high school and were known locally but their high school team was never big enough to get on the big channels so they were never really discovered and whenever people would talk to their families or people who knew them in high school they were never believed when they would talk about how good the two worked together and how well they got along.
Thank you again @oc-growth-and-development for the prompt. This scene is an AU of Nora Sakavic’s All For The Game/The Foxhole Court, with my original characters. Finley and Siobhan belong to me, John and ‘puppy-eyes’ aka Amadeo belong to @hopelessimpressionist.
In this au, all the characters are Ravens. Siobhan is captain, position striker. John’s striker. Finley is the starting lineup goalie, and Amadeo is a backup goalie. Yes, I am writing about fictional sport. Me. A twink.
Trigger warning: abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, violence
She pulled her arm back, racquet swinging with so much force it sang. The ball was in its net, and then a few inches away from the goal. Finley felt the deep, aching burn of his muscles as he lifted his own racquet on muscle memory. The pushback made his shoulders feel like they were going to pull apart by the joints, but he tightened his grip anyway, knuckles going white under thick gloves.
Still, it only managed to slightly change its trajectory. The whole gym echoed like thunder as the ball hit the plexiglass wall.
Siobhan wiped the sweat from her cheek, seethed quietly as she stared at either Finley or the goal, though he didn’t know which was better. “Again,” she spit out in between the heaves of her chest.
Finley didn’t argue, tossing the ball back. The two of them had been at this for hours; they’d practically watched the sun set from the windows in the far back of the gym. The rest of the team, though ever keen on practice, were nowhere to be seen, had been since practice ended with a standoff that had escalated into a full on fight.
While Siobhan could hold her own, and years of swinging racquets had translated well to swinging punches, he could still feel her dissatisfaction with every purse of her lips, every furrow of her brow. With a quiet huff, she tossed the ball into the air, catching it in her racquet. Though his throat had turned to sandpaper and he didn’t know how much longer his arms could hold up against this onslaught, he didn’t take his eyes off her.
She stepped back, took a running start to grow momentum, then swung her racquet in a harsh, curved arc that could shatter bone, if anyone was stupid enough to stand that close. Finley moved. She’d aimed it to the exact spot at the corner where he would have to strain hard to even have a hope of deflecting it. Two, three pounding steps, his ears static as he reached, reached. This time, it just barely bounced off his racquet, thumping loudly as it bounced back. Brute strength traded for precision; Finley let out a small sigh.
The next time Siobhan took a swing, she made it powerful and merciless, aimed right at Finley’s face. If he had the time to react, to duck, he would have. It punched straight into his helmet, right above his faceguard, and bounced off to hit the goal.
“We’re done,” Siobhan said. Finley only vaguely heard it through the static in his head as he regained balance. She tapped the butt of her racquet against the floor, and then stalked off to the door of the exy court. He squeezed his eyes shut, opened them again, and then hurried to follow her out. Her shoulders were strung tight still––not the boneless but satisfied exhaustion of a practice well spent, but the frustration that even swinging a racquet at speeds that could shatter plexiglass couldn’t seem to tame. Still, she held her head high, her blonde ponytail swinging behind her like a ticking clock.
They both hurried to their respective locker rooms and got changed, put out gear and uniforms that needed to be washed after a whole day of practice. Finley changed quickly and waited outside for Siobhan, who came out freshly showered in a Ravens shirt and athletic leggings. He followed her as they walked out, hunched the way tall people often tended to do. Finley ran his hand over the stubble of his red hair, cropped so short people could barely tell its color.
“You won the fight,” Finley said quietly, though he knew the devil was in the details. She’d given John a pulled arm and a black eye that he wouldn’t be forgetting anytime soon, but he’d returned it with a punch to the jaw that was growing green and purple beneath Siobhan’s jaw. His spit on her shoes hadn’t helped much with her mood, but he suspected it was the passing glances and whispers of their teammates that mattered more. Finley waited carefully for her response.
Siobhan tilted her head, her blonde ponytail swinging to the side. “I’ll win more than just a fight when I’m done.” Finley didn’t doubt it for a second. There were a lot of things Siobhan was––merciless, single-minded––a liar was not one of them.
There was a reason why people didn’t pick fights with Siobhan; she made it an oath to hit you back twice as hard.
Well, Finley turned over the events of the day. Most people at least. People with a brain in the cavity of their skull and an inkling of self preservation.
“They’re evaluating the starting lineup again next week,” she glanced back at him, “Think puppy-eyes is going to beat you on this one?”
He snorted, but fear still raised its hackles in the back of his mind, like an old curse. He turned over thoughts of his roommate, a short boy with golden curls that cried in a way that Siobhan found particularly infuriating, all hiccups and pathetic whimpers. He pictured it, stomped it to dust in his mind, let himself breathe. “Your next lineup partner is probably a better point of debate.”
Siobhan’s lips curled into a mirthless smirk. “We’ll see if Barron still has a smart mouth when he’s bottom of the list.” Finley shrugged, but noting his silence, Siobhan turned to stare at him with dark eyes. He felt her look through him like he was made of glass.
“Maybe not last,” was what he gave up, reluctantly.
“You don’t want him to be?”
“I do,” he said, biting the inside of his cheek, but when Siobhan’s mouth curled into a sneer, letting him know she’d caught him out on his lie, he found himself adding on, a bandaid on a festering wound “Everyone knows it’s he deserves it, but it’s improbable, is all. For all the time he spends wiping the floor under your shoe, he’s at least good at what he does.”
“He’s what,” Siobhan hissed, like a viper ready to strike.
Finley bit his lip hard. “He’d struggle to even fight Mya for the second spot on the starting lineup, but––”
She turned and shoved her hand into his face, grabbing him by the sides of his mouth. Finley shut his trap as her short fingernails dug in, never taking his eyes off her.
“I’ve heard all I need from you,” was Siobhan’s verdict. The thing about Siobhan’s anger was that it never showed on her face, pale and wide-eyed as always. Not a single contorted smile, not one ugly sneer on her face. She tilted her head up at him, ponytail swaying slowly. He swallowed and stood absolutely still as her nails dug deeper, pulled, leaving shallow, bloody scratches in their wake.
She let go. Finley pulled back like he’d just been shocked, and he didn’t follow her as she stalked away to her dorms. Closing his eyes for a moment, he opened them to an empty hallway.
Hallways that were lit like horror movie sets and left him an easy picking for whoever was also loitering around, looking for something, anything to do. Fear came to his side like an old friend. He let it guide him back to his own dorms, unable to stop the grinding of his teeth and the pick of his fingernail against the bloody first joint of his thumb.
The next days were occupied with purposeful silences and biting jabs that bit into him when he least expected it. He didn’t say anything. Didn’t ask for forgiveness. Didn’t beg for mercy. He felt the weight of the racquet under his hands during practice. Didn’t look to Siobhan for help when the taller backliners grabbed him by the back of the neck and slammed him against the glass for letting in the losing goal of their skirmish.
And when Siobhan brought her racquet down on John Barron’s knee during a skirmish, a blow powerful enough, resolved enough, furious enough to shatter bone, Finley didn’t say anything at all.
Hands running down his back. Trembling beneath their touch. Fingernails digging into his skin. His fingers tangled in their hair. Lips pressed together so hard that they were starting to bruise. Bite marks beneath his earlobe, along his collarbone. Electricity down his spine. Calling out a name that he knew wasn’t his own.
Ricky lay tangled in the sheets, his partner for the night lying next to him. It sounded more intimate, that--partner for the night, not just a one night stand. Easier to pretend that he wasn’t just trying to prove something to himself that way. Easier to pretend that it was real instead of just a mindless fuck, time after time, a different face each night.
It was easier to please people when they thought that you cared. It was easier to get hurt when you really did care about them, and when you cared too much about someone else.
They snored softly next to him, curled up with the blankets tucked under their arms, hair splayed across the pillow like a halo around their head.
It wasn’t him. It never would be.
Ricky stood up, doing his best not to disturb them, and stumbled blindly to the washroom, pulling on his shirt as he went, until he found himself kneeling comfortably on the cold linoleum floor, his head hanging over the toilet. His stomach threatened to revolt and his throat closed up until he could hardly breathe any longer. A face danced in his mind’s eye, smiling and wielding his exy racquet as a sword, challenging Lex to a duel at the end of their last game. Laughing during dinner. Helping out their goalie during practice.
“Fuck,” he whispered, and shook his head as if that would get rid of the pit in the depth of his stomach, the nausea that wracked his body.
Hands running down his back. Fingernails digging into his skin. Bruised lips. Bite marks. Someone else’s name.
You need to stop doing this to yourself. A conversation with Kaspar, with Elliot, with Letu. The sex, the money, the nights spent with strangers. Who had it been that told him that? He didn’t honestly remember at this point.
When he was able to move again, Ricky gathered up his clothes by the bathroom light, silent as he could be, got dressed. Turned off the light and stepped out of the room, though he felt awful for it.
It was two in the morning, and Ricky certainly hadn’t been expecting anyone else to show up at the court. Everyone should’ve been sleeping, unlike him. But that was optimistic, for a team like the Foxes.
“Whoa, spike,” Kaspar’s voice said from behind him, and Ricky jumped, turning to face him. He hadn’t heard the door open, hadn’t heard anyone come in over the crack of his racquet against the ball, the sound of the rebound. “What’d the poor ball ever do to you?”
Ricky pulled off his gloves, his helmet, grinned at Kaspar. Tried to push down the feeling that he was going to be sick all over again. “Figured something had to pay for my insomnia tonight, and this was the one place I wouldn’t bother anyone.”
Kaspar ran a hand down his face and gave Ricky a tired smile. “That makes two of us, I guess. You’d better watch out--sometimes Mya or John or Dusk come here ‘round about this time.”
“Nightmares?” Ricky asked, only half expecting an answer, and when Kaspar just shrugged he didn’t push. “Want to play?”
“Why else would I come here?”
He forced a smile, trying to ignore the way that his heart seemed to twist at that. “Need a hand with your gear?”
Kaspar shook his head. “I’ll be out in a minute though.”
Hands running down his back. Teeth at his earlobe. Fingers in his hair. Bruises on his thighs. Cuts on his hips. Tears in his eyes.
Ricky batted the ball at the plexiglass shield, rebounding it and rebounding it again and again, aiming differently each time. He feinted against himself, aimed for different quadrants. He wasn’t a good player, he knew that. But the Foxes didn’t take people on because they were good players.
That didn’t mean he couldn’t be. Didn’t mean he didn’t want to be. But there was too much going on, too many hands running down his back and teeth at his neck and fingers in his hair. The bruises came equally from sports and recreation and he told everyone that they were only from the latter, if they ever asked. Certainly if Kaspar did.
“Ricky!” Kaspar said from behind him, his voice raised but not irritated--rather, filled with concern that Ricky almost didn’t want to hear, and at the same time desperately needed--as if he had called for him a few times already.
He turned to face him, and the ball hit him on the helmet, causing him to wince.
“Are you alright?” Kaspar asked, stepping forwards. He dropped his racquet, put a hand on Ricky’s shoulder, and Ricky forgot how to breathe for a moment despite the many layers of padding and protection between them. Kaspar pressed their helmeted foreheads together, stared at him through the grating that protected their faces.
Hands. Teeth. Fingers. Bruises. Lips and legs and eyes.
“Hey,” he heard Kaspar say, as if underwater, “hey, it’s alright.” It took Ricky a moment to realize that Kaspar was talking to him, about him--took him a moment to realize that he hadn’t answered, that he was grinding his teeth together and squeezing his eyes shut--and when he opened his eyes they met Kaspar’s, and he felt like he was falling apart with the memories of hands teeth fingers bodies pressing together but not Kaspar, never Kaspar.
He closed his eyes again for a moment, thought about Lex’s smile and the way that she gave him hugs, thought about Antonia and her laugh and Ez, the little girl who followed them around. Thought about Calisto, short and vicious and so full of energy, and Amadeo and Finley and Dusk and John and Letu and everyone else who had helped him stay standing for so long.
And he opened his eyes, and curled a hand around the back of Kaspar’s helmet, looking into his eyes as he smiled, did his best to. “I know, captain,” Ricky said, nodding ever so slightly. “I know.”
Throughout last academic year my friends and I played in various DnD games. We then made AU's with our characters, placing them in various scenarios and partnering them up.
If you recognise some of the names/characters that's because I then adapted them into my own WIPs. My friends, Yves and Remy, have both given me permission to share this with you, tho most of the work is my own anyways. Regardless, will always credit accordingly.
Charcaters: Lor & Ori, Temper & Roa/Straight Up, Nina and Aeleine, Micah and Finn, Blight and Ara.
Lor, Oriana, Temper, Straight Up and Nina are tieflings, Aeleine and Finn are half-elves, Blight and Ara are genasis - earth and water respectively - and Micah is human.
Lor, Oriana, Nina and Aeleine are my own characters. Temper, Blight and Ara are Yves'. Micah, Finn and Roa/Straight Up are Remy's.
Click ReadMore and you will see explanations for all the AUs, as well as a basic set-up of the world. Go here for all of the same info in one place, and links! for Pinterest boards and the posts when I have them up :)
The AUs
- dystopian au (just text)
The first one we did and the one most based in DnD/our DM's world. Realistic fantasy, we took the normal tiefling racism you see in most DnD setting to its logical extreme, with a hefty dose of religious control, and shit has hit the fan.
Lor joined the rebellion out of necessity after their girlfriend almost died in a racially motivated attack a few years back, Straight Up is turned into a tiefling by the religious leader of the city and blackmailed into joining the rebellion so he can spill all their secrets. Ara was already a member, and Temper joins them when Lor stumbles on him in a dungeon they too have been thrown into, and they both break out together. With nowhere else to go and quite a lot of memories missing, he takes Lor up on their offer for shelter and some payback.
- uni exy au (just social media edits)
exy is the creation of Nora Sakavic, as found in the All For the Game series. This is an au where they are all human and magic doesn't exist, and all meet at uni. Loosely set in the AFtG universe and in the US, in a fictions city (Talra, name taken from our DM's world)
Lor is a goalkeeper and the vice-president, Roa (SU) is a freshman striker, (the two don’t get along), and Temper has nothing to do with exy, nope, nothing at all. Ara and Zalral are TAs. Oriana is alive and well and Lor and her are very happy.
- band au (mostly social media edits)
Lor, Temper and Straight Up are in a punk rock band. It goes about as well as expected. Very low magic, just enough to justify keeping them as tieflings and keeping SU's backstory (he was turned into a tiefling by a cult in-game)
- dance au (both, including a lot of text. we went a lil silly)
What if they all went to a prestigious dance academy? Loosely set in London, they are meant to be at high school level. All human, no magic.
Mostly written with Aeleine and Temper cause it’s surprisingly fun to make them interact.
- Pacific Rim au (just text for now)
Just as it says on the tin. There isn't much on this one yet. Set more or less within the timeline of the first movie. Yves is absolutely to blame for this one, and for dragging me along down the rabbit hole. All the others I am the one who is mostly to blame for xD
Thank you @oc-growth-and-development for the prompt, as always.
This is three bros, two of them roasting Pacific Rim to hell and back. I’m a big fan of this movie I swear.
This is a continuation of the Exy AU, following Finley (from OCtober Day 2: Mercy). He’s in a new team, and he doesn’t need friends, they disappoint him. Very Regrettably for Finley, the friends don’t agree.
Fluff with some mild angst at the end. We stan found family. Kaspar and Finley are my characters, Mantis/Margot is @statistical-improbabilities character. I also named dropped @statistical-improbabilities Mya and @carry-on-my-wayward-brain Dusk.
“This is absurd,” Finley said, watching the robot on screen slam a cargo boat into the monster’s face with a deafening crunch.
They were sitting on the floor of Kaspar’s room, rough carpet under their legs, Mantis’ laptop in front of them as an action movie flashed on screen. Finley watched the big robot slap the godzilla-like thing repeatedly in the face, only for the creature to grab them by the tail and rip their boat-made-baseball-bat into half. He vaguely wondered, not for the first time that night, how he’d even gotten here.
“I don’t know about that,” Kaspar said, a tub of ice cream in his lap as he put another spoonful of it into his mouth, never taking his eyes off the screen. “It looks pretty realistic to me.”
“Please,” Mantis said next to him. Or Margot. She’d introduced herself as the former, but Kaspar used the latter almost exclusively. Finley had simply avoided calling her by name. “I’ve seen Green Lantern movies with better CGI effects.”
“Touche,” he said, but didn’t sound the least bit insulted. He ate another scoop of ice cream. With a certain degree of fear, disgust, and strange admiration, Finley saw he was almost done with the tub. “Shhh, guys, the next part is my favorite fight scene.”
Mantis fell silent, so Finley turned back to the screen. The monster was now playing hide and seek with the robot. How anything as tall as a skyscraper managed to hide, even in a metropolitan like Tokyo, was beyond Finley’s comprehension, but he’d never been to Tokyo, so he stayed silent.
A flashy action shot of the monster, oh so surprisingly, ambushing the protagonists. He let the lights flash from the screen as he thought about what had gotten him here. After spending hours on schoolwork in Mantis’ room, he’d been dragged along to dinner with the two of them. Kaspar suggested they all go to his room to relax before he and Finley went to the gym to do extra practice that night.
Finley hadn’t been pleased.
“Come on, Finley, a little fun never hurt anyone,” Kaspar had said. When Finley had stared back, wholly unconvinced, Kaspar merely smiled fondly and rolled his eyes, as if he’d seen that same look hundreds of times before. “I’ll stay an extra hour to help you on overhead drills.”
“Dusk or Mya are going to get there first,” he muttered, but followed anyway.
Finley watched the monster beat its previously unnoticeable wings and lift the robot into the sky. Tension was supposedly rocketing as fast as that 500 ton beast could fly, which was apparently a thousand miles a second. He was owed a lot of overhead drills for this.
When the protagonists looked like they were about to die, all hope lost, the solution was found in a dramatic twist. The robot fell unceremoniously to the ground from an altitude of 50,000 miles above sea level. Everyone was unscathed.
Kaspar paused the movie.
“Thoughts?” he asked, a smile playing on his ice-cream coated lips as he glanced over at Finley.
“If this movie wanted any shred of my respect, they should’ve both died right there,” Finley said. Despite the fact that he knew Kaspar had a good temper and couldn’t kill a fly, he glanced over to watch his reaction.
“Exactly what I’ve been saying,” Mantis said. Finley blinked in surprise “At the very least, the whole Jaeger should’ve fallen apart. It was way too big to have gotten out of that with just scratches.”
“Yeah, but then it wouldn’t have been as cool,” Kaspar said, leaning back lazily. He seemed completely undisturbed by the fact that both Finley and Mantis had been insulting what he had introduced as his ‘favorite movie of all time’ for the last hour. Mantis, who had evidently watched it a few times already, had said something sarcastic, but sat down to watch it all the same.
In the last 57 minutes, she’d pointed out the main male lead’s horrible haircut, roasted his fashion sense, and cut into three major worldbuilding flaws. Finley joined her cringing, covering his eyes like a vampire in sunlight, when the female lead accidentally walked into the male lead’s room while he was shirtless.
“Proper physics is cool,” Mantis said. She reached for the bowl of popcorn, and popped a few in her mouth, before washing it down with an energy drink. Finley didn’t want to know what that tasted like.
“This whole thing doesn’t make any sense,” he said, irritably.
“What about it doesn’t make sense?” Kaspar asked. Finley glanced at him. He seemed relaxed. Happy, even, with a content smile on his face.
“Everything. Why are giant robots the best weapon in this scenario? They’re going to be rebuilding that place for years with the footprints it left on the roads, let alone the infrastructure damage. Second of all, how do the kaiju keep following the scientist guy around?”
“Because he mind-melded with them,” Kaspar said, “The Kaiju are a hive mind.”
Finley snorted. “Why the fuck would anyone mind-meld with a hive mind race of monsters?”
Kaspar shrugged. He tapped his spoon against his chin for a moment, thinking.
“Science?” He said, almost to himself, and turned to Mantis questioningly.
Finley pulled a look so skeptical he could’ve made Newton doubt whether gravity was real. Mantis, however, thought only for a moment before she nodded, “Science.”
“This is stupid,” he huffed.
“To quote,” Mantis pointed out, matter-of-factly, “it’s either the most awesome dumb movie ever made–”
“–Or the dumbest awesome movie ever made,” Kaspar said, almost gleefully, as he pressed the play button. Finley sighed.
He stayed for the rest of the movie.
---
He waited for Kaspar outside the dorms while the other man was grabbing his things to go to the court to practice. It was late by now, the sky ink black save for the few stars visible through all the light pollution. Cold wind made the chilly temperatures just that much colder. Finley waited under a street light, his things all ready, a change of clothes, water bottle, and a pair of gloves in his gym bag. With a sigh, he unzipped it, pulled out the gloves. They were black and maroon––ravens colors––and the only pair he had.
He wrapped his arms around himself. Though years of playing exy had even him lean muscle, he was still scrawny, and not the biggest fan of the cold. Glancing at the door of the dorms, he waited. The two hours he spent watching a dumb action movie indoors would’ve been a luxury unheard of in the Ravens. Siobhan had never been a fan of movies, anyway, so there would’ve been no one for him to watch it with. For that, he was almost grateful; the movie hadn’t gotten better in the second half.
Still, the image stayed in his mind. Kaspar and Mantis, exchanging quips and inside jokes. Mantis didn’t glance over for his reaction when she criticized the protagonist’s haircut to hell and back. When she had run out of her energy drink, Kaspar had promptly pulled another one out and passed it over to her.
He tried to picture himself and Siobhan in those shoes. Finley didn’t have a favorite drink, and what Siobhan said was never a joke.
But they had stood next to each other for so long. A menace on the court, the two of them. An impenetrable defense and an unstoppable offense. It had never been perfect. Admittedly, nothing in The Ravens had been, but still, he sometimes tried to find Siobhan’s triumphant grin on the faces of his new teammates. Her iron will in Kaspar’s eyes when he swung his racquet.
He sighed, staring up at the night sky. In another life, perhaps, though he doubted that concept was anything more than an impossible wish.
“Hey, sorry that took awhile,” Kaspar said, stepping out of the dorms. He had obviously rushed, his shoelaces untied, and the horrible orange color of his hoodie clashing with the gold and red of his Trojans track pants.
Finley merely huffed, and stalked down the path without him.
