maybe a weird and personal connection but to me that eat you when you died post really hit for me in terms of thinking of how when someone very close to you dies their actual living self gets consumed by reminiscing..... people often try to tell me that my brother is always with me/lives on in me etc and they don't GET it when i say no thats a SUBJECTIVE MEMORY IMAGE its not truly him its something else!! so i was like yeahhhhh you get it.
nodding the weird heavy experience when your idea of someone goes from being a thing they shape and refresh for you themselves via interactions to being something it's your responsibility to maintain from your own resources, is certainly a thing
literally about to "i dont know you" softblock when i was like now wait a minute. That sheep uses it/its. Omg hiiiiii
yeahhhhhh it felt weird following your sideblog but I also didn't want to bother you with a "don't be startled!!" DM so I was like well either my icon will give me away or i'll get blocked, lol
my toxic asoue-netflix trait is i do not care for the spyglasses </3 imo they feel like theyre from something else and they never really meshed with the world to me
Well this is where the kamil-a & Becca comedy duo must come to an end :/ no spyglass slander allowed
I didn't forget! And thank you for asking! Here, something at the beginning, something when they aren't quite to the words that matter yet. But it's a little rambly... (With a little added Touya. Just because. It took two months OK, I figured there could be a bit more.)
“Hey, you dropped your eraser,” Touya said, handing it to Yukito as they walked out of their classroom after the last period of the day. “…you OK?”
Yuki shrugged, bumping him companionably with a shoulder as they began the walk across the campus to the front gate. “Yeah, why?”
“It’s just…” Touya scratched at his ear and gave Yuki a sidelong look. “You seemed distracted,” he said at last. “Is it regular stuff or…other stuff?”
Yuki shrugged again. “I’m kind of tired today,” he said honestly. “Not like it was before, I don’t mean that, but…Yue was out late last night.”
“Yeah.” Touya kicked a pebble and scowled. “Sakura nearly missed breakfast.”
Yuki reeled back, hand to his chest. “The horror.”
“Yeah, yeah, she didn’t though. And dad made her lunch too.”
“Good. That’s… good.” Yukito sighed and stretched. “May I just need a nap. I know I was going to work with you at the amusement park tonight—do you mind?”
“Nah.” Touya walked along in silence for another minute. “Do you want me to stay with you?”
Always. Yukito gave him an enigmatic smile in lieu of saying the truth. “I’m all right. I thought maybe… Yue and I might have a talk?”
Touya blinked. “I thought you couldn’t.”
“Well, not directly, I suppose.” Yuki made a vague gesture with his hands. “We need to figure out something though. An exchange diary? Maybe a whiteboard like your family has?”
Toya snorted. “I’d like to see you two try to figure out that whiteboard.”
Yuki stopped, dropping behind Touya a few steps. Touya turned around. “What’s wrong?”
“Uh…” Yuki could feel his fingers clenching into his palms. “You… do think of us as two, still, right? Not one person?”
Touya strode back to him, dropping his schoolbag, and gripped his shoulders gently, forcing Yuki to look at him. “You’re Yuki. He’s Yue. I know the difference.”
Yuki nodded, mesmerized. “I… OK.”
Touya released him and Yuki tried not to look crestfallen as Touya returned his stare. “…Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Know the difference.”
Yuki took a deep breath. “I don’t know. I think so. Most of the time.”
“Sounds like you do need that talk then.” Touya slung an arm companionably across Yuki’s shoulders. “So I’ll cover for you tonight, you get that nap, and then…I don’t know. You’ll figure it out.”
“Thanks.”
Touya hesitated a moment longer, hand held stiffly out to his side as if he wanted something, but said nothing. After a minute, he made a tch noise that Yuki wouldn't let himself decipher, and he picked up his bag. “OK, well, I gotta head home and change clothes. See you tomorrow?”
Yuki nodded and watched Touya jog away. Something must have rattled him—he usually walked Yuki home. He tried not to feel bereft as he walked home. After all, he wasn’t exactly alone, now was he.
His home didn’t do much to help him remember that, though, nowadays. He remembered his grandparents in an abstract way. The flash of his grandmother’s smile, the smell of his grandfather’s aftershave, and yet he knew that had been conjured as well along with all the rest that made him…him. It had been hard to learn that his truest self was Yue. Yukito wasn’t sure he knew what to do with that information; he’d thought he’d known himself only to find out he knew nothing about the matter.
Despite what he’d told Touya, he wasn’t really tired anymore. He sat down at the barren, painfully clean kitchen table, bereft of the warm clutter that made up a family—how could he not have seen what a difference it was from the Kinomoto household?—and pulled a notepad and pen from his school bag.
“Should we try an exchange diary?” he said aloud, and waited. Nothing happened and nothing appeared on the paper.
“Ummm… Yue?” Still. Silent.
“Come on. I want to get to know you.”
Another long pause, then Yuki blinked and looked down. On the paper, in an elegant scrawl, the words lay, “You know me.”
“No.” Yuki shook his head. “You know me. I don’t know you at all.”
Blink. “You could ask Sakura.”
“I could. But…I’m asking you.”
“We are similar in some ways.”
“Like what?”
“Our thought processes, perhaps.” A long pause, in which Yuki almost thought Yue was done, and began to get up. “Our preferences.”
“Huh.” Yuki didn’t pretend not to know who Yue meant, although it was a little galling to remember yet again that even his thoughts weren’t his own in this arrangement. “I see.”
The next scrawled words were a little stiff, as if Yue had struggled with them a little. “You resent me.”
“No.” And Yuki didn’t. Not really. The situation maybe? The feeling that his personal identity was mutable, certainly. But not the being that lived in him. From his understanding of Yue’s past, limited though It still was, he’d been through this too, in a different way. They were both tools.
“I don’t need your pity.”
“You know, for someone that lives in my head you don’t really get me, do you.”
Yukito got up, put the paper away, made himself a quick (but large) bowl of rice and threw some protein on.
“Maybe an exchange diary isn’t what we need,” he mused aloud as he ate. “I mean, it’s a good idea and I think we should, but maybe it’s not enough--”
He blinked. The dishes were done and the paper lay on the table, pen aligned neatly next to it. “We have a lifetime to learn about each other. Some things don’t need the written word.”
Yuki nodded. “I would still… like to get to know you. The way you know me. I’d like for you to…not resent me.”
“I don’t. And I don’t think of you as a tool either.”
“Anymore, you mean,” Yuki said, but without rancor.
“A maker has no affection for his tools, only the creation he uses them for. And maybe not even” The rest was scribbled out in a way that wasn't elegant at all.
Yuki drew in a breath. That was a lot Yue had just given away there, given what he knew of Clow. “Can a tool have affection for—”
The paper was crumpled and the pen lay across the room when his eyes opened again.
“You know, not writing it down doesn’t mean I don’t know your answer.” Yuki smiled a little. There was satisfaction in that smile, and a little mischief, and a lot more understanding than he’d had. “Some things don’t need the written word, right.” He picked up the pen and put it away. “But hey, I’ll grab a notepad from the stationary store tomorrow, and we can at least start there.”
Already answered but honorable mention for Zero Time Dilemma, despite the cool thing it does with the flowchart and the mostly cool atmosphere of its midgame and some very fun puzzles and choices. There are big things I do not like about the previous ZE games too but they pale in comparison.
A game that’s changed you the most?
Oh. Myst. Ever since I saw Riven's cover in '97, and then again in 2007 and onward. (credit where it's due, the game that's changed my life the most due to things I've done and people I've met in its fandom has got to be Zelda OoT to tWW)
