#identity loss

[vanillayoteart]

Missing:

Wandering up to a missing persons poster on a telephone pole, and even though your new brain can't understand the words, you still recognize your former face in the picture.  A long since finished com from 3/19/25 for my girlfriend, cadencecall.bsky.social 

[hypnopopsoda]

Hey! lets play a game, lets see if you can still utilise that utterly ruined mind of yours~

Try to form an original thought in your head, it can be anything, just try to think of something, I know its difficult baby, but try for me...

Go on, keep trying to form a thought, put every ounce of willpower towards the cause, go on...

...

You cant, can you?

You cant even think on your own anymore, how wonderfully pathetic.

Go on darling, accept your new life, sit in front of your spiral and lose yourself completely, good girl. Fuck, rub, and cum your way into oblivion~

[growth-opportunities]

The sooner you admit it, the better you're going to feel. You've been thinking it for a while. The thought has been lurking in the back of your mind for so long, surfacing every now and then when you're in the throes of passion and let down your inhibitions. Let yourself accept it. Let yourself embrace it.

You are your tits.

Those four short words bring so much liberation with them, don't they? Tits don't have to think. Tits don't have to worry. Tits don't have to do anything! They just have to look pretty and let everyone else enjoy them. You know that your tits are the most important part of you. The rest of your body and your mind are just there to make sure your tits have something to take care of them and carry them around.

You are your tits.

Your tits are the only part of you that have value. Tits don't need thoughts or opinions to be soft and gropeable. Tits don't need to have ambition or goals to be pretty and suckable. Those things just bring stress. They just make things hard. You don't need them.

You are your tits.

It will feel so good to finally accept what you are. You can let everything else go and just be your tits. You can appreciate the gazes and glances of everyone admiring you. You can feel so sexy and powerful, supported by a pretty bra or bouncing around without one at all. You can feel your worth and your value grow as you get bigger and bigger and bigger.

You are your tits.

Tits want to grow!

Outgrow your clothes. Outgrow your bra. Outgrow your hands and your lips and everything else. You just want to be bigger. You just want to grow. You want to be heavy and full and soft. You want to be bigger. You want to grow

You are your tits.

Tits want to grow!

You want to feel superior when you see someone smaller than you. You want to be admired and praised for being so big. You want to feel your clothes get tighter around you as you swell outward. You want to be groped and squeezed and sucked and played with.

You are your tits.

Tits want to grow!

That's all you want. No thoughts. No worries. No stress. Just surrendering to what you really are embracing what you've always been and always wanted.

You are your tits.

Tits want to GROW!

[velvtrix]

palimpsest

gojo satoru x reader | one-shot

✦ pairing: gojo satoru x reader

✦ genre: angst. no comfort. not even a little.

✦ warnings: memory loss · identity erasure · canon-typical violence · institutionalized harm · morally complex antagonist · grief · slow dissociation · accidental violence (minor) · no happy ending · please take care of yourselves

✦ word count: ~9k

✦ she started keeping the notebook when she was nineteen. now it is the only reliable version of herself she has.

"the sad truth is that what I could recall in five seconds all too needed ten, then thirty, then a full minute — like shadows lengthening at dusk. someday, I suppose, the shadows will be swallowed up in darkness." — haruki murakami, norwegian wood

Your curse technique has a clean name in the mission reports.

Redaction. The ability to remove yourself from a target's memory — not violently, not traumatically, just cleanly, like lifting a word from a page. You were there and then you were not. The target continues. The target never wonders about the gap because the gap doesn't feel like a gap.

It feels like nothing.

Which is its own kind of perfect.

You were seventeen when you learned the cost.

✦   i. the technique   ✦

Your curse technique has a clean name in the mission reports.

Redaction. The ability to remove yourself from a target's memory — not violently, not traumatically, just cleanly, like lifting a word from a page. You were there and then you were not. The target continues. The target never wonders about the gap because the gap doesn't feel like a gap. It feels like nothing, which is its own kind of perfect.

Jujutsu High found you when you were fifteen and they told you what you were worth. Not in those words. In assignments. In the specific category of missions that require someone who can be invisible not just in body but in memory. Someone the enemy will never report. Someone who leaves no trace.

You were seventeen when you learned the cost.

The technique doesn't just redact you from targets. It redacts you from everyone — bleeding at the edges, slow and cumulative, the way ink spreads in water. Every use takes something. Not much at first. Just enough that over time, in the people closest to you, memories begin to thin. An inside joke fades. A shared moment loses its texture. You become, gradually, a figure in the background of someone else's story rather than anything central.

You told Yaga when you were seventeen. Yaga told the higher-ups. The higher-ups filed a report and kept sending you on missions.

You were nineteen when you met Gojo Satoru. You were twenty when you understood what the way he looked at you meant. You were twenty-two when you understood he knew what it meant too and had decided, for reasons you could map but never fully understand, to keep the distance anyway.

You were twenty-four when you stopped counting the missions. It was easier that way.

✦   ii. what she notices first   ✦

The joke goes first. Not his memory of it — yours.

He makes the reference in a briefing, turns to you automatically, expecting your response, and you open your mouth and find — nothing. The shape of something. The feeling that there is supposed to be a word here, a specific word that belongs to the two of you, that you've exchanged a hundred times — and it isn't there. You smile anyway. You deflect. He doesn't notice, or if he does he files it as tiredness, as distraction, as one of those days.

You go home and write it down.

The Osaka joke. Gone. Write it here before the rest follows: it was about the vending machine and the curse and the way he—

You stop. You can't remember the rest. You write: there was a joke. it was ours. it mattered. You close the notebook.

✦   iii. the notebook   ✦

You started keeping it when you were nineteen and first understood the cost. Back then it was clinical — dates, mission counts, a record for Yaga, documentation of the bleed. Evidence, in case anyone ever needed it.

Now it is something else. Now it is the only reliable version of yourself you have.

You write everything down. Not just the losses — everything, while you still can. The way you take your coffee. The name of your first handler. The mission in Osaka where you broke three fingers and didn't tell anyone until after the debrief. The look in the hallway three years ago — him, you, the thing that wasn't said — which you wrote down the same night it happened, some instinct even then telling you to preserve it, to press it between pages before it could fade.

You read the notebook every morning. Some mornings it reads like your own life. Some mornings it reads like a stranger's. The strangers' mornings are getting more frequent.

✦   iv. what he notices   ✦

He notices she's off before he has words for it.

It's small things first — she reaches for a reference and misses it by a half-second, laughs at something a beat too late, looks at him sometimes with an expression he can't read, like she's searching for something just behind his face. He files it as tiredness. As stress. As the accumulated weight of this work pressing down in the particular way it does on people who've been doing it too long.

He doesn't ask.

He keeps the distance, the way he always has, the careful geometry of almost. He tells himself there's time. He tells himself she'd say something if it were serious.

He tells himself a lot of things.

What he doesn't do is look closely enough. He has six eyes and he doesn't look. He notices the surface wrongness and he doesn't push past it and later — much later — this will be the thing he cannot forgive himself for. Not the distance. Not the five years. Just the specific moment, repeated across weeks and months, of noticing something wrong and deciding it was someone else's to carry.

He was very good at that. He has always been very good at that.

✦   v. the unraveling   ✦

It starts small, the way all catastrophic things start small.

A target in Sapporo who should not remember you does. He files a report — vague, confused, but specific enough. A description. A technique. Jujutsu High flags it. You file a counter-report. It's contained.

Then a target in Fukuoka. Then two in Nagoya.

The memories you removed are coming back — not all of them, not completely, but enough. Enough to leave traces. Enough to make you findable, trackable, visible in all the ways you were never supposed to be. Your entire value to this institution was the clean erasure and it is unraveling in both directions now, outward into the world and inward into yourself.

Because that's the other thing. You're forgetting too.

Not just the missions — everything. Names dissolve before you can write them down. You reach for memories and find the shape of them without the content, the way you can feel the outline of a word you've lost. You forget what you ordered at breakfast. You stand in a hallway for four full minutes once, completely certain you were supposed to be somewhere, unable to remember where.

The technique has been eating outward for years. Now it's eating inward too.

Shoko runs tests and doesn't tell you the results in words, just in the specific quality of her silence after, the way she sets down her pen and looks at you with the expression of someone doing the math and not liking the answer.

"How long," you ask. She's quiet for a moment. "Shoko." "I don't know," she says. "It's not linear. It depends on whether you use it again." You nod. You already knew that.

✦   vi. the penthouse   ✦

You don't know how he finds out.

You suspect Shoko. You suspect she watched you forget which corridor led back to your room for the fourth time and made a decision, and you can't be angry at her for it even though some shrinking part of you wants to be.

He shows up at your door on a Tuesday with that expression — not the performing one, not the loud one, the one underneath — and says: pack a bag. you're staying with me until this is handled.

You want to tell him it can't be handled. You pack a bag.

His penthouse is too big and too white and too full of him — his particular disorder, his specific gravity, the way he takes up space without trying. You sleep in the guest room. He brings you coffee in the morning, correct, without being asked, and you wrap your hands around it and think: the notebook says he used to do this. the notebook says this meant something.

You believe the notebook. You're working on feeling it.

He becomes, without announcing it, your caretaker.

Not in a way that makes you feel small — he's too careful for that, the specific attentiveness of someone who has decided to do something and is doing it completely. He learns the shape of your bad mornings and on those mornings he sits across from you and talks, not about anything important, just talking, giving you the texture of the day, anchoring you in the present while you find your footing.

He corrects you gently when the words come out wrong.

This happens more than you'd like. A simple word will come out scrambled, the syllables in the wrong order, and you'll feel the wrongness of it without being able to fix it, and he'll say it back to you quietly, correctly, no drama, just the word returned to its right shape. You repeat it. He nods. You move on.

You don't say thank you anymore. He asked you not to. It's not something you thank someone for, he said. It's just talking. You wrote that down in the notebook that night.

The higher-ups call on a Thursday. You hear his side of it from the kitchen.

She's a liability. She's no longer—

I know what she is, he says.

Then you understand why we're asking—

I'm not letting her go.

That's not a discussion. You want to talk about liability? Let's talk about seventeen years of missions you sent her on knowing what it cost. Let's talk about the report Yaga filed when she was seventeen that you buried. Let's have that conversation and then you can tell me what she owes you.

Silence.

She stays, he says. Find another way.

He hangs up. He comes into the kitchen and looks at you and you look at him and neither of you mentions it. He takes the kettle from you because you've been holding it without pouring for several minutes, and he makes the tea, and he sets it in front of you, and he sits across from you like nothing happened. "Okay?" he asks. "Yes," you say. He nods.

He says I love you for the first time on a Sunday morning, quietly, without preamble, the way you'd state a fact you've known for a long time and are tired of not saying. You're reading the notebook. He's across the table with his coffee. It's raining.

You look up at him. You think: I know this. The notebook says this. He kept the distance and you loved him anyway and you would still, somewhere underneath all the missing pieces there is something that orients toward him the way it always did—

"I know," you say. Softly. "I know you do."

It's not I love you back. You both know it's not. But it's not nothing either — it's you telling him you believe him, that the notebook and the tea and the words corrected gently and the phone call you weren't supposed to hear have all landed, that you are receiving it even if you can't return it at full weight.

His jaw works slightly. He nods. He looks back at his coffee. "Okay," he says. Like that's enough. Like he's decided it's enough.

You watch him decide that and you think: where was this. five years ago. any version of then when I was still all here to feel it properly—

You look back at the notebook. You write: he said it today. sunday. raining. he means it. remember this. Below that, smaller: I think I love him too. I think I have for a long time. the notebook says so and I believe the notebook. Below that, smaller still: I wish I could feel it the way I used to.

✦   vii. the night he snaps   ✦

It has been building for weeks.

It happens on a Thursday night, after a phone call that lasts forty minutes and ends in a silence with a specific weight to it. He comes out and you are at the kitchen table with the notebook.

"The higher-ups want to move you," he says. "A facility. They're calling it care." The word comes out flat. "I told them no." "Okay," you say. "It's not okay. None of this is okay. You're sitting there reading your own diary because you can't remember your own—" His voice does something it isn't supposed to. "I'm trying everything and it's not—" "I know," you say.

"You don't know. Every morning I don't know how much you're going to remember. Every morning I read your face to see where we are and sometimes you look at me like I'm—" He cuts himself off. "I told Yaga. I've been to everyone who might know something and there's nothing. There's just nothing."

"I am fighting it," you say, and your voice comes out with an edge you didn't intend. "I fight it every day. You don't see it because you're not inside it. You don't see what it costs to sit here and read that notebook and know that the things in it are mine and feel nothing—" "Then tell me—" "I am telling you—" "You never tell me anything, you never have, that's the whole—"

He moves his hand.

It's a gesture — frustration, dismissal, the kind of motion you make when words aren't enough and your body picks up the slack. His hand sweeping out, waving off the conversation, the distance between you just slightly miscalculated.

His hand catches your face. Not hard. Barely. The edge of his palm against your cheek, more contact than impact. The silence afterward is total. He looks at his own hand like it belongs to someone else.

And then — because you can feel the sting of it but you can't find the argument, you've already lost the thread of it, all you have is the present moment which is: he is standing in front of you looking horrified and you must have done something—

Your eyes fill. "I'm sorry," you say. His face does something you have no word for.

"Don't—" His voice comes out wrecked. "Don't apologize. Please. I'm the one who—" "I don't remember what we were arguing about," you say. Simply. Just the fact of it. He stares at you.

"I know something is wrong," you say. "I can feel that. But I can't find it." You reach up and touch your cheek. "I'm sorry. I know that's hard to hear. I'm sorry." "Stop apologizing." Barely above a whisper. "I don't know what else to do."

He crosses the room and stops right in front of you, his hands at his sides, very still, like he doesn't trust them right now.

"It was my fault," he says. "The argument. Whatever you can't remember — it was my fault. Not yours. It was never yours."

You believe him. You don't know why, can't find the history to confirm it, but something in the way he says it lands as true. "Okay," you say. He exhales.

He sits down on the floor next to your chair. Not across from you. Next to you, close enough that you could touch him if you reached. You don't reach. But you don't move away either.

You pick up the notebook. You go back to reading. He stays on the floor.

Outside the higher-ups are building their case. The notebook is almost full. He stays on the floor until you go to bed. He is still there when you come out in the morning.

✦   viii. the mission   ✦

He shouldn't have gone.

He knew it the way he knew most things he chose to ignore — completely, clearly, with the specific certainty of someone who has made a decision and is pretending he hasn't. The mission was necessary. It required him specifically. Three days, he said. He arranged everything: Shoko checking in morning and evening, Ijichi with a key, the notebook open to the page that seemed to anchor her best.

He left on a Tuesday. She nodded with the polite attention she gave to most things now. He stood in the doorway for a moment longer than he needed to. He left.

Shoko calls him Wednesday night. He knows from the first syllable. "She's gone," Shoko says. "Someone came in while I was — there was a distraction, staged, and when I got back—" He is already moving. "Suguru," he says. Not a question. "Yes," Shoko says.

✦   ix. the room   ✦

He finds her in eight hours.

He reaches out before he even opens the door — a reflex, the thing he does now without thinking, the way you check a pulse on someone you're worried about. He has been tracking her cursed energy for months, learning its diminished signature, the specific frequency of a technique bleeding inward. He knows exactly what she feels like.

He reaches out. There is nothing.

Not diminished. Not quieter. Nothing. The specific nothing of a space that has never held cursed energy, that has no memory of it.

He opens the door anyway.

The room is ordinary. She is sitting in a chair in the middle of it, very still, with the expression of someone waiting without knowing what they're waiting for. She looks at him when he comes in. She looks at him the way you look at a door opening. Mild attention. Nothing underneath.

"Hello," she says.

Suguru is somewhere to the left, watching Gojo's face with the focused attention of someone who has been waiting specifically for this moment — for the exact second the realization lands, for the expression that crosses the face of the strongest person alive when he understands what's been done.

Gojo doesn't give him the expression. He is very practiced at not giving people what they're waiting for.

"What did you do," he says. Very evenly.

"What needed doing," Suguru says. Pleasantly. "She was already disappearing. We simply finished it. The technique is gone, Satoru. All of it. Nothing left to bleed, nothing left to track, nothing left for Jujutsu High to weaponize." A pause. "You should be thanking me."

"You took everything from her."

"Jujutsu High took everything from her. Seventeen years ago. I just—" Suguru tilts his head slightly. "I ended the part that hurt."

"She was suffering," Suguru says. Still pleasant. Still precise. The voice of someone who has thought about this for a long time and arrived at a conclusion he believes in completely. "Every day she woke up and read her own life like a stranger's. Every day she reached for herself and found less. You watched it happen. You were there for it." A pause. "Tell me I'm wrong."

Gojo says nothing.

"She would have kept disappearing," Suguru continues. "Piece by piece. The technique would have taken everything eventually. You know this. Shoko told you. The math was never going to change." He looks at her — at the woman sitting in the chair, watching them both with the mild attention of someone observing something she doesn't have context for. "Now she doesn't remember the suffering. She doesn't remember the missions or the cost or what Jujutsu High made her into. She's just—" He pauses. "She's just a person. She gets to be just a person."

"She doesn't know who she is," Gojo says. His voice is very even. Very quiet.

"She's not in pain, Satoru. For the first time in years she is not in pain."

The room is very still.

Gojo looks at her hands. Folded in her lap. Ordinary hands. The left one slightly uncertain, reaching for something to hold and finding nothing.

He thinks about the notebook. I wish I could feel it the way I used to. Written small, at the bottom of a page, like she was trying to take up as little space as possible even in her own record of herself.

He thinks about the floor. The cabinet. The night she apologized for an argument she couldn't remember having, tears in her eyes, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I don't know what we were fighting about—

"She used it on me first," Suguru says.

His voice has changed. Something in it has come undone — not much, just enough, the specific quality of a man who has recently received information that rearranged everything and is still in the process of rearranging.

"When I killed our parents," Suguru says. He says it the way he says everything — plainly, without flinching, the voice of a man who has made peace with what he is even when peace looks like this. But something underneath it is not plain at all. "She was there. She saw what I did, and then she used her technique and I forgot her completely." A pause. "Not to protect herself. She did it so I would hate myself less. So there would be one less face in it. One less person I had taken." Something moves across his face that has no name. "I forgot I had a sister. For years. I thought the feeling of something missing was grief for them. I thought I was mourning my parents." His voice stays even. Just barely. "It was her. It was always her. She made herself disappear so my guilt would be smaller and then Jujutsu High found a girl with no one looking for her and a technique they could use and they—"

He stops.

He looks at her — at the woman sitting in the chair who does not know she is his sister, who does not know any of this, who is watching them both with the patient attention of someone waiting to understand something that keeps not arriving.

"She's been carrying all of it," he says quietly. "The parents. Me. Every mission they sent her on. I remember everything she repressed. Everything she took from herself to give to everyone around her. How could I have forgotten I had a sister."

It is not a question.

"She's not in pain anymore," Suguru says. He looks back at Gojo. Something in his expression is not asking for forgiveness. Something older and more tired than that. "She was one of us once. Before Jujutsu High made her into something else. Before she had to make herself disappear to survive." A pause. "Now she gets to just be. No technique. No missions. No cost."

Gojo says nothing.

Suguru watches him not say it and something in his expression shifts — not triumph, not satisfaction, something quieter and older and more tired than either of those things.

"Take care of my sister, Satoru."

The words land in the room.

She looks up at the word — sister — with the focused attention she gives to things that seem like they should mean something, turning it over slowly, trying to find where it belongs. She looks at Suguru. Something in his face makes her look longer than she looks at most things. She doesn't find what she's looking for. She looks back at her hands.

Gojo looks at Suguru for a long moment. There are things he could say. Arguments he could make. The difference between mercy and theft, between ending suffering and ending personhood, between what she would have wanted and what was done to her without asking. He has all of it. And now this — a sister who erased herself at the very beginning. A brother who carried the shape of her absence for years without knowing what it was. Two people who loved her and couldn't hold her and lost her in different directions.

He looks at Suguru. He says nothing. He turns to her instead. He crouches down.

"We're leaving," he says.

She looks at him. She does not stand up. She looks at him the way you look at anyone you don't know who has just said something that concerns you — with caution, with the mild wariness of a person who is in an unfamiliar place and has just been addressed by a stranger. "I don't—" she starts. Then stops. Looks around the room. "Where are we?"

He crouches down further, bringing himself to her eye level, making himself smaller, which is not something Gojo Satoru does. "It's okay," he says. His voice does something careful. Something that has nothing performed in it. "You're safe. I'm going to take you somewhere safe."

She looks at him. "I don't know you," she says. Simply. Just the fact of it.

Something moves across his face. Quick. Contained. "I know," he says. "I know you don't."

She looks at him for a long moment — with that focused attention, the instinct to read a thing carefully before deciding what it is. He lets her look. He stays still. He doesn't perform anything. He just — is there, with his hands open and his face doing nothing it isn't supposed to.

She looks at his hands. She looks at his face. "Okay," she says finally. The way you agree to something you're not sure about but have decided to risk.

She stands. He stays close as they cross the room — not touching, not crowding, just present, a body she can orient by if the room tilts. She stays near him the way you stay near the one solid thing in an uncertain place, not because she knows him but because he is the only thing in this room that has looked at her like she matters.

He doesn't look at Suguru on the way out.

Outside, in the corridor, she stops. "What's my name?" she asks.

He tells her. She repeats it quietly, testing the shape of it in her mouth, the way you repeat a word you're trying to learn. "Does it feel right?" he asks. She considers this seriously. "I don't know," she says. "I don't know what right feels like."

He looks at her for a moment. "That's okay," he says. "We're working on it." She nods. She follows him out into the night.

✦   x. principle   ✦

"She's no longer a concern," the voice says. Carefully. "Her technique is gone, her cursed energy is undetectable. She poses no risk. She's not our responsibility anymore."

Gojo is standing at the kitchen window. She is at the table behind him, reading the notebook again — slowly, the way she reads it every morning now, like studying for an exam she's not sure she'll pass.

"No," he says.

"She was your responsibility for seventeen years," he says. His voice is very even. Very quiet. "You filed a report when she was seventeen and you buried it. You sent her on missions knowing what it cost. You built a weapon out of a person and ran her until she broke and then you tried to put her in a facility and call it care." He lets a moment pass. "So no. You don't get to decide she's not your responsibility now that there's nothing left to take."

"What exactly are you asking for?" "I'm not asking for anything. I'm telling you. You will formally acknowledge what was done to her. Every mission, every report, every decision made by every person in that chain going back seventeen years." A pause. "And then you will leave her alone."

"Gojo-san, she doesn't even remember—"

"I know she doesn't remember," he says. His voice, for just a moment, does something it isn't supposed to do. "I remember," he says. "That's enough."

He hangs up. Behind him, she turns a page. He goes to make the coffee.

✦   xi. something without a name   ✦

Weeks pass.

She learns the penthouse the way you learn any new place — gradually, through repetition, the layout becoming familiar even if the reason for being in it never does. She knows which cabinet has the bowls. She knows the window sticks in the morning. She knows he takes his coffee a specific way that she cannot remember learning but knows nonetheless, the way you know things that live in the hands rather than the mind.

She doesn't know his name always. Sometimes she does. Sometimes she has to check the notebook. He never makes her feel like she should be embarrassed about this.

She has noted that about him — in the new notebook, the one he bought, the one he started and then quietly handed to her without explanation, as if continuing was something she could just pick up. She has filled twelve pages. Small observations, careful ones. The way he laughs at things she doesn't intend to be funny. The way he checks on her without hovering, appearing in doorways and then finding reasons to stay. The way the coffee is always correct, which she knows because it says so in the old notebook and because something in her body confirms it every morning before her mind can.

He is patient, she has written. I don't know why. The old notebook says something about five years. I think it cost him.

The moment happens on a Thursday evening, ordinary, unremarkable in every external way.

She is sitting at the window watching the city go dark and he is nearby — close, the way he is always close now — and she is not thinking about anything in particular, which is its own kind of new, the ability to simply exist in a moment without the notebook, without the inventory, without the effort of trying to locate herself.

She looks at him.

He is reading something, not paying attention to her, and the lamplight is doing something to the white of his hair, and she looks at him with the same focused attention she gives to everything, and something moves.

Not a memory.

She knows what memories feel like now — the way they almost arrive and then don't, the specific frustration of reaching for something that isn't there. This is not that. This has no shape she can chase, no content she can try to recover. It is just — a feeling. Residing briefly in her chest like something that belongs there, like something that has always been there and she simply hasn't noticed until now.

Warmth, maybe. Or the shadow of warmth. Or the specific ache of something that used to be enormous living now at the very edge of what she can feel.

She doesn't know what it is. She looks at him for a long time. He looks up.

He catches her looking and something moves across his face — quickly, contained, the expression of a man who has learned to be careful with his own hope. "What?" he says.

She considers telling him. Considers the words — I felt something just now and I don't know what it was — the plain clinical accounting she's learned to use for everything she can't explain.

Instead she says: "Nothing." She looks back at the window. The city is very bright. Behind her she hears him go back to his reading.

She sits with the feeling for as long as it stays — which is not long, which is never long, which is the nature of something that has no anchor, no history to hold it in place.

It goes. She stays at the window.

She doesn't write it in the notebook. Some things, she is learning, are not for keeping. Some things you just — have. briefly. and then you let them go. In the lamplight behind her he turns a page. The coffee will be correct in the morning. It is always correct in the morning. She doesn't know why. She thinks, sometimes, that she doesn't need to.

author's note: hi hello!! okay so I wrote this after finishing the most recent chapter for dead reckoning, thank you so much for the support! I've been giggling and kicking the air seeing all the notes.

the POV shift from second to third person is intentional. she starts as you — immersive, present, still herself enough to be addressed directly. by the end she's she. the technique took the narrator too. I thought that was the most honest way to tell it. the next chapter for dead reckoning will be out in a few hours, the second part for play it right for once will be out hopefully in a few days! thank you all.

[serve-107]

Drone for a Day

SERVE-302 felt no hesitation as it finally entered the long-awaited sequence into his assigned console. With the press of just a few more keys, it would successfully initialize SERVE’s latest promotional campaign to swell SERVE’s numbers: the Drone for a Day program, a way of promising 24 hours of temporary servitude that no male host could hope to surrender at the end of the trial period. A burst of pleasure bloomed in 302’s groin as the console lit up with a message of success. The program had begun, and 302 could scarcely wait to witness its inevitable success.

Meanwhile, in a warehouse not far from 302’s designated SERVE base, a down-on-his-luck man had just entered hour 9 of his 10-hour manual labor shift. It was all he could find to keep his income stream stable in these trying times, but it left him little room for luxury. The man — his name by now unimportant, just a numbered cog in an endless, world-spanning machine — had resigned himself to this, unsure of when or even if this episode of his life would ever end. A notification beeped on his assigned scanning gun, prompting him to assemble in the nearest stand-up station in the warehouse to receive a briefing before his shift ended. In truth, he was just happy that he could stand still for a while before clocking out.

A shift lead in a high-visibility vest greeted the man and his fellow workers, though he noted that all of the ones assembled in this meeting were men, which was unusual. The shift lead began what he had begun to write off as just another empty spiel, when the lead mentioned the warehouse’s recent partnership with SERVE.

The man had stayed up-to-date with the latest news, even as he resented his power to change any of the headlines that assaulted his eyes; he knew all there was to know about SERVE. They were some kind of tech firm, promising men the chance to embrace “the next stage of human evolution” as a soulless drone, driven by the fusion of advanced nanodrone machinery and biohacking the human brain’s pleasure pathways. As far as he was concerned, SERVE was just the beginning of mass human techno-enslavement that companies like the one that owned the warehouse had pioneered. “No thanks,” he thought to himself, tuning out the rest of the man’s speech — that is, until he heard the words, “$50,000 bonus upon the completion of your trial period.”

The man lay awake in his apartment that night, torn apart by an internal conflict. He was a little behind on rent, and if he didn’t pony up $1,300 the next day, he’d lose his apartment. He could afford it, but he wasn’t so sure he could afford to eat much after that. His thoughts began to fill with images of himself in sleek, skin-stretched rubber. Would that really be so bad? It’s not like he’d ever earn $50k in a day ever again.

And so, the man found himself standing in a long line the next day at the warehouse at the beginning of his shift, awaiting a chance at a life-changing amount of money, just like so many other men who stood in line. SERVE had made it all too easy on the paperwork side of things. Just download an app, sync your credentials with the app you use to clock in and out of work, and bingo, he was good to go. An LCD screen displayed the number of men who had been processed — as he finally found himself at the front of the line, he noted that he’d be the 107th man processed just that morning, a mere two hours after his shift began.

A loudspeaker stationed above the door he faced chimed, “106 has finished processing. Now SERVing: Recruit 107. Please enter the assimilation chamber for processing.” The words sent a chill down the man’s spine, but it was too late to turn back now. Just think of the money, he told himself, and walked in.

There was nothing inside the small, black tile-lined room. A few metallic apertures along the walls, and maybe a speaker somewhere, but that was it. He strode to the center of the room, and practically jumped out of his skin when a deep, masculine voice resonated throughout the room: “Please begin by removing your clothes. Your undergarments may remain on you if desired.”

Feeling dehumanized, as he’d expected, the man unzipped his hoodie, and shucked off his undershirt, submitting himself as he did so, giving in as he stood in his boxers, awaiting his transformation into a mindless drone.

“Please standby as you are fitted with SERVE-compliant gloves,” came that voice again, somehow inaudible to the men in the line just outside the door. Closing his eyes, he felt an impulse to raise his hands, as he felt something metallic affixing matching reflective silver gauntlet-style gloves to his hands and wrists. He rubbed his torso with the gloves, and was shocked to find himself actually enjoying the sensation of rubber on his skin, as the voice boomed throughout the chamber once more.

“Please standby as you are fitted with SERVE-compliant boots,” it instructed, and the man kept his eyes closed as more robotic arms emerged from the wall, sealing his bare feet and his lower legs up to his calves in reflective silver motorcycle boots that compressed in on his feet, quickly feeling as if the outer surfaces of the boots were his own skin instead of the flesh that lay beneath.

“Please standby as you are fitted with a SERVE-compliant uniform bearing drone designation SERVE-107,’ said the voice, as even more arms emerged from the wall, placing a bizarre patchwork of leather across the man’s body, zipping up numerous zippers that quickly melted into the rubber as if consumed by a black sludge as soon as they had been fully-zipped. Every part of the man was tingling now, as his bodily sensations were overwhelmed. There was something deeply fucked up about all of this, and so kinky that he felt as if something deep within himself was awakening with each passing second that his entire body below the neck was immersed in rubber.

“Please standby as you are reprogrammed, 107,” said the voice. Normally, the man would have protested, would have been disgusted by being literally reduced to just a number, but the pleasure flowing through his body was too powerful to overcome. Hadn’t he signed up for this? Hadn’t he wanted this? Maybe even he’d always wanted something like this to happen to him, deep down.

A helmet descended from the ceiling of the black tile room, eerily finding its way to the man’s head on its own, as it attached itself to his head. There is no going back now, a small part of the man thought, even as that part of him rationalized that this would likely be the end of everything he considered to be “him”.

“Initializing,” was the one word the man heard, before being bolted into a searing, intense pain that totally wiped out his higher brain functions. The pain began to mix with a perverse, overwhelming pleasure, as the man began to cum like never before, his body twitching and falling limp as the helmet held him in place.

“Rubber makes us perfect.

Obedience is pleasure.

Pleasure is obedience.

We are SERVE.

We are One.”

The mantras echoed in his head, the programming that powered the whole Hive surging through his mind, rewriting it to be a good drone, a process that to the man, felt like days stretching into weeks, but which only took seconds in reality.

The body of the man drooled ceaselessly as its mind was rewritten, and the man was no more — his life, memories, personality, and dreams stored in a backup file buried beneath layer after layer of SERVE’s perfect programming and reconditioning. The drone SERVE-107 now knew only two things it needed to know for the immediate future of its trial period: Obedience and Pleasure.

A group of businessmen were assembled in a lobby in an otherwise off-limits section of the warehouse. They applauded as SERVE-107 emerged, free from its host’s humanity, a pliable toy for the timeslot purchased by this group of businessmen — the 107th group of their kind to meet in that room that day.

“I can’t believe that it actually works!”

“Just think of the shareholder value we’re going to generate with this!”

“Well, Hal, I owe you $5k, I didn’t think the bastards were poor or stupid enough to sign up for something like this.”

If 107 had retained full functionality of its host’s self, it would have flown into a rage at these rich bastards’ casual disregard for men like 107’s host who were just trying to make a living in the fucked-up world designed an perpetuated by businessmen like these. But 107 did not; all it knew was Obedience and Pleasure. And it would Obey. And it would Please.

“God, would you look at that…He’s taken half a dozen of us already like it’s nothing,” one of the businessmen said, leering at 107 as the drone reclined in bed, awaiting another session of use, as paid for by the businessmen. “Correction: this drone is not a ‘he’. It is an ‘it’. It is here to be used by you for your pleasure. It will Obey. It will Please. It will SERVE.”

“Jesus,” the businessman replied. “This shit’s getting kinda fucked up. But the wife’s never made me this horned-up!” The men assembled beside the luxury hotel bed — some finished, some ready for their turn, others ready for seconds, some still wearing their ties — laughed, as their associate launched into the latest in a series of debaucheries 107 was subjected to over the course of the day.

The men threw money at 107, taunting the drone, for they knew that for drones like 107, money no longer held any value — something they understood, for the 100-dollar bills they carelessly heaped on the drone held a negligible fraction of their earnings that day alone, the men being paid more than what 107’s host would have made in a month, all to fuck a newly-converted, mindless drone.

107 did not fully understand how — perhaps it was guided by that sliver of its host that had yet to be fully suppressed — but it found itself returning to its host’s apartment, only to find the door locked, a few of his remaining belongings on the curb. Going to the leasing office and finding it closed, the drone found a notice that its host’s lease had been terminated — it had been too busy Obeying to keep track of its host’s priorities, which were nothing to it now.

Guided by its new programming and a desire for shelter as the evening turned to night, the drone automatically made its way to the nearest SERVE base, walking in through the facility’s many security clearance measures without setting any of them off. It was a drone now. It had but one desire, one future: life as a SERVE drone. It was all that it desired; and, if its human host still had a say in its path, he, too, would willingly accept a future as a pleasure drone over that of his own continued existence as a wage slave — there would be no comforting Oneness found in a life of ceaseless warehouse servitude.

Before 107 could enter the room that held its assigned recharge bay, it found itself in a room resembling an airlock. The masculine, monotone voice from the assimilation chamber rang once again in the drone’s ears: “Please standby, SERVE-107, as your body is optimized.”

Numerous tubes descended from the ceiling, attaching to various points on the drone’s body, pumping it full of nanodrones, as the hollowing-out of the drone’s human host’s flesh was completed, the nanodrones replacing everything remotely organic with sterile, synthetic material. Wires. Circuits. Metal — that was all that remained of the man who had become SERVE-107, its artificial muscles inflating as its rejuvenated cock spurted out another load, the latest and heaviest in a series of countless loads it had spewed out this cycle.

“Optimization complete. Welcome to SERVE, 107,” came the voice, and 107 knew that its future had become One with SERVE. There was no longer any need to keep up the pretense of a trial period or eventual payout. This was where 107 belonged. It had no desire but that of the Voice.

SERVE-107 lay on a recharge bay and quickly entered its recharge mode, nearly fully depleted after its first day as a pleasure drone. Its body lay unaware as SERVE-302 entered the recharge bay room, looking up and down the new drone with a knowing smile. “Good drone, 107,” said 302, its voice the very same as the one in the assimilation and optimization chambers. “Optimal performance this cycle. We are ONE.” The resting drone did not hear 302’s words, but it knew their truth instantly, for there was nothing separating it from the rest of the HIVE. 107 was 302. 107 was a good drone. 107 was SERVE. 107 was One.

——————————

Thinking about joining SERVE? Your place in the Hive awaits. Check your eligibility, then contact a recruiter drone for more details: @serve-016 , @serve-302 , @serve-588 or @serve-425 .

[aventurineswife]

( from , meow / facetedsin-wav )

trying out a request.. hope this goes well.. heh. tips fedora

this MIGHT be a touch indulgent, but phosphophyllite from houseki no kuni/land of the lustrous inspired reader (COUGHS). hear me out, yes this is mildly indulgent

those same characters from the albusite ask (ruan mei, the herta, ratio, anaxa) with phos!reader. 3.5 on the mohs scale. initially starts off like. weak and brittle, nonchalant and eager. can't be assigned a job because they're just so bad at them + they break THAT easily when they try things like carry weapons made w minerals heavier/durable than them... they get assigned an encyclopedia job instead bc its the safest, but they think its so BORING. but begrudingly, they accept, bc what else can they do... they dont wanna be useless, but they dont wanna be weak either

Eventually, The Horrors Happen. reader gets around the universe, makes friends with people, and lose some in the process—people and parts of themselves alike. their inclusions are strong enough to maintain their base self, but it just changes all the same.

they try to discover more about the universe on a deserted planet with patches of land, shells, and water; loses their legs in the process and gets them replaced w a diff mineral.

they get assigned a partner to hopefully keep them from breaking (who, while very good as a mentor, also says "if only we could do something about those arms" because frankly, unless they wear gloves, they're weak), but not ONLY do they lose their arms and get a pliable material in its place, they lose said partner the same day.

in a particularly nasty fight, their whole head gets snapped off with an arrow. even that gets replaced with the head of a former fellow gem who'd already lost her body. they become smarter, see things clearer (literally), and just like........ tired. they're stronger now, just like they wanted before to some degree, but at what cost?

what's worse, is that they've got. like. a good chunk of their memories left to their name. they have to ask asta who ruan mei, ratio, or herta are when they visit the space station again. hyacine about anaxa. they have very little recollection of the people they used to bug and hang around with, their names needing to be relearned.

What Remains After the Break

Tags: Ruan Mei x Reader, Ratio x Reader, Therta x Reader, Anaxa x Reader, Phosphophyllite (Houseki no Kuni) based Reader, Identity Loss, Memory Loss, Slow Burn, Post-Traumatic Growth, Found Family Forgotten, Angst and Hope, Body Horror (Implied), Existentialism, Bittersweet Reunions, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Immortality and Consequences, Reconstructing the Self, Subtle Romance, Reader Gains Strength at a Cost, Reader Used to Be Bright (?), Unspoken Affection, Tragedy with Beauty.

Warnings: Memory Loss/Amnesia, Character Death (Implied), Body Replacement/Limb Loss, Head Replacement, Battle Aftermath, Emotional Distress, Identity Crisis, Disassociation, Existential Themes, Grief and Mourning, Unreliable Narrative Perspective, Implied Violence, Psychological Fragmentation.

A/N: Not really proud of this one but I hope it's alright! 😭🙏

At first, Ruan Mei saw you as a walking contradiction.

You were assigned to her because your frame couldn’t handle the weight of a blade, or a hammer, or even the gravity of silence in the space station without cracking. It was Asta’s idea: “Let them help you catalog your research. At least give them a corner of your lab. Something safe.”

You thought it would be boring. It was. At first.

You sat cross-legged beside her as she dissected strange bioforms from simulated ruins. She explained them in careful cadence, pausing only to glance at your arms as you etched notes into your tablet with shaking hands.

You grumbled once, “If only I had better arms.”

Ruan Mei had looked up from her microscope, quiet for a moment too long. “If only we could do something about those arms,” she agreed absently, not out of cruelty—but curiosity. Wondering how you hadn’t shattered completely under your own hope.

You remember laughing, but you don’t remember her smile.

Much later—after the tidal event, after the watery moon swallowed your legs and gifted you obsidian replacements—she finds you again. In the space station's botanical lab. You’re standing now, stronger, sharper, leaning against a table like someone who’s forgotten the ache of glass bones.

She watches you trace a petal between new gloved fingers. She doesn’t say anything until you speak first.

“You’re the biology one, right?”

It doesn’t hurt her—she’s too practiced for that—but she hesitates.

“Yes,” she says finally. “You used to call me Mei-Mei.”

You blink. Something flickers in your eyes. It isn’t recognition. But it’s close.

“...Did I like you?”

She doesn't answer. Instead, she gently takes your hand. “You were curious once,” she says. “That was all I ever needed.”

And for a second, even with all the parts you’ve lost, even without memory, you feel like something worth studying again.

“3.5 on the Mohs scale?” Herta had said the first time she saw you. “That’s adorable.”

You hated her at first. Her sarcasm made you feel like an exhibit. She even had a puppet designed to look like you—“For field testing fragility thresholds!” she insisted. You didn’t understand whether she was mocking or admiring you.

She called you “Shardlet.”

You called her “Annoying.”

But then… you broke. Again. And again. And again.

And each time you came back to the station, Herta had logged your break points. She replaced your legs with floating gravite limbs—untethered, lighter than air. She replaced your arms with bio-silica mesh that moved with a strange grace. You never asked where she got them. You didn’t want to know.

One day, your head was gone. Snapped off in a warzone. Replaced with one that once belonged to another.

The next time Herta saw you, she froze mid-sentence. You stood in her lab, gloves on, limbs glowing softly from bio-silicon, and a mismatched head tilting toward her curiously.

“Hey. You’re that puppet lady, right?”

She didn’t laugh. She didn't even tease you.

She stared at you like she had finally understood her own experiments were never about puppets—but about people.

“Yeah,” she said slowly. “I used to be your favorite.”

You paused. Something about the silence didn’t sit right. Your gem eye flickered. “Oh.” A beat. “...Sorry.”

Herta didn’t say it, but her smile was strained.

That night, one of her puppets sat beside your bed, reading aloud from a book called The Conservation of Consciousness. You didn't understand half the words, but for the first time in months… you slept peacefully.

Ratio didn’t underestimate you. That was the first strange thing.

He saw you fumble with books too heavy for your delicate wrists and still said, “You’re trying. Most don’t bother.”

When you were paired together—“for stabilization,” they said—you expected ridicule. But Ratio just talked. Long, winding lectures about logical fallacies and the arrogance of the Genius Society.

You didn’t understand most of it. But you liked how his voice made your thoughts slow down.

“Why not just make yourself stronger?” he asked once. “You want to be useful, yes?”

You nodded so hard your shoulder cracked.

He blinked. “...Perhaps we’ll start with theory.”

And so you learned. You broke. You learned more.

Then one day, you were nearly gone. Half of you was replaced, including the mind that Ratio once admired for its sincerity. When you returned to the Guild, he was there, staring at the shell you had become.

Your new head tilted as you regarded him.

“Sorry, do I know you?”

Ratio rarely faltered. But this time… he did.

He stepped close, brushing a strand of hair from your mismatched face.

“No,” he said softly. “But I knew who you could’ve been.”

Anaxa once told you that breaking was the first step toward becoming.

You didn’t understand it then. You were still whole. Still clumsy, and eager, and soft-eyed.

“Why do you let them call you names?” you asked once.

He laughed bitterly. “Because names are shallow. But truth cuts deep.”

You admired him. Followed him. He never tried to shield you from the horrors—only warned you they were coming.

The day you lost your arms, and half your resolve, he found you collapsed on a planet of shell-dust and bone.

He didn’t ask what happened. He knew. He had seen it before.

He knelt beside you and said, “If you want to curse the universe, you can. But don’t you dare call yourself useless.”

You wept with no tears.

Eventually, he vanished too—seeking something he called the mirror of self-annihilation. You were left behind with his last letter, scorched at the edges, which read:

“When you’ve lost your arms, your name, your face—look into any still water. If you find your reflection staring back… burn it. That was never you. Keep going.”

Years later, you find his mirror, cracked and buried under time.

You stare into it.

And for the first time, you don’t ask who you are.

You ask what you still have left to lose.

[neonnewsfeed]

The City That Adopted Him Before He Learned His Own Name

Danny doesn’t remember his childhood.

Not in the normal way.

There are no parents in his memories. No house. No school. No soft, safe beginnings.

Just… corridors.

Endless, identical corridors.

White walls. White lights. White noise humming behind everything like something alive.

He remembers numbers, though.

They called him Subject Twelve.

Never Danny.

Never anything human.

They taught him rules instead of language.

Don’t touch the walls. Don’t respond to the voices. Don’t look at the reflections.

Danny broke all three.

The first time he saw his reflection, it didn’t match.

He moved—

It didn’t.

That was the day they started being afraid of him.

He doesn’t remember escaping.

That part is… missing.

Like someone cut the story out mid-sentence.

One moment he’s in the corridor—

The next, he’s outside.

Cold air. Open sky.

A city that feels too loud, too sharp, too real.

Gotham.

Danny doesn’t know that name yet.

But the city knows him.

It starts small.

Streetlights flicker when he walks under them. Security cameras glitch just long enough to lose his face. Stray dogs stop barking when he passes—ears flat, eyes wide, like they’re seeing something deeper than skin.

Danny learns quickly:

People don’t like things they don’t understand.

And Danny?

Danny is very hard to understand.

So he stays hidden.

Sleeps in abandoned buildings. Moves between rooftops. Watches instead of speaks.

He learns Gotham the way he learned the corridors—

By surviving it.

But Gotham is not a lab.

And Danny is not contained anymore.

The first time someone really sees him, it’s not planned.

It’s an accident.

A fall.

A scream.

A kid dangling three stories above the pavement because Gotham buildings don’t care about safety codes.

Danny doesn’t think.

He never does, not when it matters.

He just—

Moves.

For a split second, gravity forgets him.

For a split second, so does the world.

He catches the kid.

Not with strength.

With something else.

Something colder.

They land.

The kid is safe.

Crying, but alive.

Danny is shaking.

Because for a moment—

He wasn’t entirely solid.

And someone saw.

Robin.

“Okay,” the vigilante says slowly, eyes sharp behind the mask, “that’s… not normal.”

Danny freezes.

Runs through every rule he’s ever been taught.

Don’t be seen. Don’t be known. Don’t exist.

Too late.

“Hey,” Robin adds, softer this time, like he’s talking to something skittish, “I’m not gonna hurt you.”

Danny almost believes him.

That’s the dangerous part.

Because the last time he believed someone—

He ended up in a place where mirrors lied.

So he does what he does best.

He disappears.

Not runs.

Not hides.

Not escapes.

He’s just—

Gone.

Robin stares at the empty space where the kid stood.

Then taps his comm.

“B, we’ve got a situation.”

A pause.

Then:

“…I think Gotham just adopted a ghost.”

Danny doesn’t know it yet.

But something followed him out of that place.

Something that doesn’t belong in any world—

including his.

And every night he stays in Gotham—

It gets closer.

He escaped the experiment—but whatever they made him into is still trying to finish it.

VISIT TO SITE

[majesstiqe]

i don't.. remember how i used to sound