I wanna know about "So If You Had an Apocalypse Girlfriend..."
This is the sequel oneshot to the Tome timeloop fic! In this case I think the excerpt is pretty self-explanatory:
"Yeah," says Tome, "The evil government did make it legal for girls to marry other girls, so . . ."
"Wait, what?" says Reigen. "Why?"
Tome shrugs. "I guess because one of the high-up Claw lackeys had a girlfriend she wanted to marry or something. I don't know. They didn't give a lot of rationale behind their policy briefings."
"Huh," says Reigen, with the vaguely dazed tone he gets whenever Tome starts talking about the other world she'd lived in.
"So," she says. "If you and another person only sort of know each other in this timeline, but she was your apocalypse girlfriend and you still really like her, but she thinks of you as an acquaintance at best . . . is it weird to tell her? Is it weird to not tell her? Should I shoot my shot?" She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. "Also I'm sorry we hooked up in your abandoned office while you were dead!"
"I—" Reigen begins, and then he stops for a second and she can feel his brain screeching off into a new direction. "First off, do you need to talk about it like that?"
"Like what?"
"The 'while you were dead' thing." He shudders. "It feels creepy."
"I can talk about it however I like!" says Tome.
"Yeah," says Dimple, "I am dead, and I don't think it's creepy. In fact, I take offense at the idea that it is!"
"Thank you!" says Tome, and Reigen sighs.
Oh there are so many good titles, if I can, I'd like to ask about 'how many guys are in this guy' 'hurting killing and harming him' and 'found wanting'?
[from this meme]
Did "Found Wanting"!
the story behind "how many guys are in this guy" is that there's a line in Mogami arc where after Mob's unsuccessful exorcism Matsuo says, "They're actually fusing into one now!" Horrifying! We never get any elaboration on this and it never happens again but I think about it frequently. Anyway this fic is a oneshot where a job goes very wrong and Reigen and Dimple get fused into one entity so the rest of S&S has to figure out how to separate them before Reigen's body takes too much damage. Eventually Mob tries to astral project into their mind so he can sort things out there, so the answer to how many guys are in that guy is "At least three." Just like the genders.
Part of the cold open:
As Reigen stood up, apparently unharmed, Serizawa was filled with an equally overwhelming surge of relief. His aura flared around him but he pulled it in close, one hand still clutching the business cards that he wielded like a holy relic. He hurried across the room to where Reigen stood, blinking shrewd but unfocused eyes at him.
"Reigen . . ." he said, in an oddly deep voice. Maybe it was Dimple. Or maybe it was the dust. "Yeah. It's his body, so I can be Reigen."
That, technically, was the point at which Serizawa actually knew that something had gone very wrong.
"What do you mean?" he said. "Dimple, is that you?"
The man in front of him laughed. Now that he looked closer, Serizawa could see a strange green cast to his skin, like he was glowing faintly from within. "Sort of," he said. "Maybe. It's complicated."
The stack of business cards began to vibrate against Serizawa's hand.
"Well, whoever you are, get out of him!" he barked.
The man's lips curled up in an exhausted-looking smile. It wasn't quite Dimple's sharp grin. It wasn't quite Reigen's expression of well-practiced authority. It was somewhere in between. Almost like . . .
Serizawa's eyes went wide.
"You see, that's the problem, Serizawa," said the entity in Reigen's body. "I don't think he can."
"hurting killing and harming him" . . . is a doozy so I'm putting it under a cut. warning for discussion of sexual assault, including my own experiences.
Okay so. The Tome timeloop fic, for thematic reasons, is strictly Tome pov. But there are several things she doesn't directly witness that I wanted the space to expand on, which means that when the main fic and its related side stories are finished, it will include a wacky little sequel, a story about Inukawa's Very Weird Day where he and the rest of the Telepathy Club learn about the organization of evil psychics that just kidnapped their friend . . . and a couple of oneshots elaborating on some really bad stuff that happens to Reigen offscreen.
The main fic is already pretty rough because, well, it's about someone trying to make sure that Claw wins, and Claw is fundamentally stupid and pathetic but that doesn't stop them from being very scary, especially if you don't have psychic powers or the element of surprise. And part of the impetus behind these oneshots is like . . . demythologizing the Evil Organization, treating what they do as fundamentally banal and stupid instead of cool and titillating. Like, they aren't cool, they aren't special: they're just hurting people, which is one of the most childish things you can do.
There's scraps of two stories in this document. The first is Reigen trying to get away during a loop when Claw breaks into his apartment to kill him, because it's important to me that he almost makes it. He's clever and quick and resourceful and he goes down swinging, even if nobody in the main fic learns about it.
The second one takes place during a loop where he's being held prisoner by Claw and gets sexually assaulted. I'm very nervous about this one but also feel strongly about it because like . . . sexual violence is treated as so much worse and more taboo than any other kind of violence, in a way that makes it much more difficult for people who have experienced it to actually talk (or write!) about despite it being hugely common. There's often a weird gap where villains will happily kill and torture but rape is a bridge too far for them--and not in a way where it's an active character choice, just that sexual violence is Off Limits. This is often positioned as being for the protection of survivors. It is not a choice that makes me feel safer. And this framing also reinforces the positioning of sex as The Most Important Thing. Consensual sex is supposed to be uniquely transcendent and rape is supposed to be uniquely evil. And because it's so taboo, people, in the name of protecting survivors, create so many rules around depicting it that if you take all of them seriously you'll never be able to depict it at all. And that doesn't actually help anyone. I feel like when I see fics that do engage with this, with a few exceptions they're either fetish material and thus not concerned with realism or they're . . . well-meaning but kind of a paint-by-numbers attempt at Doing Things Right in ways that do not resonate with me and feel very stilted and limiting.
Because. Okay. As someone who has had a significant amount of sex that they didn't actually want, yes it's traumatic but it's also, like. Boring. It's boring and mundane, and for some people it's the worst thing that's ever happened to them and for some people it's just unpleasant and forgettable and like. There are a variety of experiences and I don't think we should be locked into only being able to talk about one or two of them because they're the most acceptable.
ANYWAY. I don't have any excerpts but that's what the fic is about. nobody be mean to me about it.
Rules: Make a 24hr poll listing the titles of every WIP you want to work on. (It’s fine if you only have one, still make a poll for the vote count). Whichever WIP title gets the most votes, write 1 sentence for every vote received.
I was tagged by @marypsue (thank you Mary <3) and tagging anyone who wants to do it! Also I will try to (eventually) add a sentence for every vote, not just the winner, because I *do* want to work on all of these. Not including Brassica Heresy bc it's nearly done or the collab I'm doing with Nate bc the issue of who writes which sentences is more complicated there.
Which fic should I work on?
In Case Of Emergency (every psychic in Seasoning City is out of commission)
Spiritual Union (qpr ekurei vs a gang of spirits led by Dimple's ex)
Ghost Polycule (self-explanatory at this point)
the one Shinra fic that isn't ghost polycule
Tome Timeloop fic (Claw Vs. Girl)
ekurei acefic (did you know sex can be consensual but also Bad? Reigen doesn't!)
Found Wanting is the document for when I was foolishly imagining that I could fit the romo ekurei continuity into a single oneshot which I have since realized is not going to happen, so bits of what I've got will have to be split up into a series of fics! The title (which will probably still get used for one of the fics) refers to the crisis Dimple finds himself in after he finally admits to himself that he's into Reigen: the last time he really wanted something, he brainwashed the entire city and nearly killed his best friend. How can he be sure that having another desire won't lead him back to a darker path? Can he actually trust himself to go after what he wants? (Obviously it works out but I'm having fun with the Ghost Insecurities). Here's a scene post-Realization where Dimple goes to bother his emotional support fifteen-year-old:
"I mean, look at him. He's pathetic! Surely that means he'll have low standards, right? And I was almost a god once! Really, I'm the one who's too good for him! Right, Shigeo?"
"I don't know," says Shigeo. "I don't know why you're talking to me
about this."
"Well, who else am I supposed to talk to!?" Dimple complains. He's zipping around the lighting fixture in Shigeo's room. "I've granted a listening ear to all of your problems!"
"Hm," says Shigeo.
"I would have been able to give you great advice about Tsubomi if I hadn't been erased from existence at the time!"
"Well then," says Shigeo, frowning, "Can't you just take your own advice?"
Dimple sighs and spirals to the ground. "It's different when you're a spirit!" he grumbles, flopping onto the floor. "We don't usually . . . do this sort of stuff."
It's not exactly true. There were evil spirits that still loved people they'd known in life—or that were just obsessed with them. And there were evil spirits that would stalk pretty girls or young men, and even some that tried to lure people into more . . . physical situations.
But Dimple wasn't like any of those assholes.
"Why'd you have to go and convince me that brainwashing people was a bad idea?" he whines. "I could have skipped all this worrying and just made him—"
"Dimple." The kid stares at him with the serious face and intense eyes that make Dimple remember just how scary he can be.
"I know, I know, I'm not gonna do it!" he protests.
It wouldn't work anyway. All that business with the broccoli had taught him that. He wanted someone to actually choose him, and cheating with mind control was never going to scratch the same itch.
"I have to go to sleep, Dimple," says Shigeo. "Good sleep is very important for developing strong muscles."
"But—"
Shigeo drapes his arms over his knees and stares intently at the wall. "When Tsubomi rejected me," he says, "I was very sad at first. But we talk more now than we did before. It let us be friends."
"Yeah, well we're already friends! At least we bother each other all the time. Do you have any idea how mortifying it would be if he found out about this and wasn't interested?"
"Yes," says Shigeo, unhelpfully.
"What if he tells everyone else? What if he thinks I'm possessing him in a creepy way?"
"Are you?"
"No!"
"Then you shouldn't worry about it," says Shigeo.
In Case Of Emergency is a post-canon ensemble fic where the ensemble is Reigen, Dimple, Tome, Musashi and Onigawara investigating why every psychic in Seasoning City has been taken out of commission. There's 30k up on AO3 already and it's been languishing for years but I do really want to finish it! Here's a snippet from later on, when Reigen's trying to infiltrate a group of former Claw members:
“Wait!” One of them pointed at Reigen. “I know him! It’s the Pink Tie Sorcerer!”
The other three gasped in horror. Reigen looked down at his tie.
“The what?”
“I heard he brainwashed the entire Seventh Division into quitting!”
“I heard he stole one of the Ultimate Five out from under the President’s nose!”
“Don’t let him say anything!!”
Reigen backed away, waving his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “Hey, hey, calm down! You guys sucked away everyone’s psychic powers, right? So you don’t have to worry; I’m just like the rest of you!”
One of them paused. “He has a point . . .” he said.
“Look!” The square-jawed one gasped. “He’s doing it!”
“Get him!”
“Don’t listen to his seductive words!”
Taking advantage of the fact that they'd all stopped to clap their hands over their ears, Reigen turned tail and ran.
I have been trying to write this fic for three years and I swear it will be posted someday! It's the one where Reigen is sex-repulsed but doesn't know it because he's never heard of anything related to asexuality, so he and Dimple start sleeping together because they're both like, "Well, this is what you're Supposed To Do in a relationship, right?" and it's perfectly consensual but also leads to Reigen having panic attacks in the massage room because he hates it so much. Eventually I will force them to talk about it. Unfortunately getting Reigen to talk about anything is a nightmare which is why this has taken me three years.
Excerpt under the cut (because it's longer, not because there's anything explicit in it):
****
Once Dimple has left, floating placidly through his wall and out across Seasoning City, Reigen allows himself a single moment of pure, unfettered panic.
Because the thing that Reigen is absolutely not going to admit to Dimple in a million years is that he has a grand total of zero experience in this regard. He's only a single short-lived attempt at romance back in university away from Dimple being his first kiss. He just hadn't prioritized it; he's been so busy in high school and university and then so bored at his water cooler job and then so busy again once he'd opened up the office.
It wasn't like he'd intentionally put it off. It just . . . he didn't want to be with the sort of person who liked the facade he put on, and they wouldn't want to be with him, either, once they found out what he was really like. He'd more or less resigned himself to bachelorhood, much to his mother's disappointment. And somewhat to his own.
Not that he'd fully written it off. He'd just been idly biding his time in case he ever stumbled into the right circumstances. The right person.
Who is a ghost. As it turns out. And even someone who did have more experience would probably have some questions about getting intimate with an evil spirit. They would just probably be better-informed questions than anything Reigen can come up with.
So. He doesn't know what he's doing. That's not really a problem, though, because Reigen lives his whole life not knowing what he's doing! Step one: bullshit something believable enough to give himself some breathing room. He'd done that, sort of. He's not sure how much Dimple believed him, but if he's suspicious at least he didn't say anything about it, and now he's left, which means that Reigen can move on to Step Two: Gather information.
He pulls out his laptop and hovers his fingers over the keyboard. Okay. Hmm. He's great at finding just enough information to know how to check a house for termites or an appliance for a busted fuse. He can look up massage and photo-editing techniques with the best of them. He can pull up as many old news stories as his heart desires.
He's not exactly sure where to go from here. The relief that Dimple had left without calling him on his bluff had given him a burst of confidence that he could figure out a solution to his problem, but now he's not so sure. This probably isn't something where there's a lot of information on the internet. What would he type? "Dear Mobgle: how do I show my ghost boyfriend a good time?"
He tries a few more general queries but ends up slamming the laptop shut with a red face as soon as the first image loads.
Okay! Gathering information is not going to help! That's fine! He manages without all the time. Never mind Step Two. He's back to Step Zero, the Reigen Arataka default: completely and totally winging it.
"Hurting killing and harming him" or "the horrors" please! ♡
[from this meme]
Just did "Hurting killing and harming him," so The Horrors it is! I also got two other asks about this one, so Horrors Anon and @philcoulsonismyhero this is for you as well.
The background for this one involves some stuff that only happens in the manga version of the Mogami arc, some stuff that happens in the spinoff manga, and also some stuff that happens in one of my wips that I haven't posted yet. So it's a little more complicated to explain!
Basically, I really love Shinra and I think constantly about a scene in the manga version of Mogami arc where all the other psychics decide they can save their own skins if they kill Minori and Shinra tries to stop them. It doesn't work, and the rest of the psychics beat him brutally into submission while Reigen looks on in horror. And this never really comes up again because the story is about Mob and not these adults but like. It haunts me a little bit not gonna lie.
So part of the impetus behind The Horrors was to manufacture a similar situation where all the other members of the Rising Sun Spiritual Union descend into "kill or be killed" mentality and then actually take the time to examine that and make them face the consequences of it.
The other impetus was that I have a fic that will someday have a real title but is for now just "Ghost Polycule" that's Reigen/Dimple/Shinra and I was having so much fun with the dynamic that I felt the need to throw a plot at them.
So the basic setup is that Jodo, who is full of vindictiveness and also hubris, arranges a retreat for the Union members where he will exorcise part of the most cursed and evil place that he knows of! Even more cursed and evil than the place that he was exorcising a few feet of in the Reigen manga to show off his vast power and that Mob then completely cleared without breaking a sweat! And also because he knows that Shinra and Reigen have been spending more time together he invites Reigen along in what he claims is a gesture of reconciliation but is actually an attempt to saddle him with a bad-luck curse that will finally take him out of the psychic business. Because Jodo sucks.
And, well. The exorcism goes wrong. Instead of driving the evil presence back, Jodo releases it, trapping the whole group in its domain until it can be appeased by an appropriate sacrifice.
Reigen is very unpopular with the Union. They're pretty unified in deciding who the sacrifice should be.
Shinra and Dimple manage to escape from the group with a severely injured Reigen and find a place to hide. But they can't just wait things out, because they still need to find a way to get the evil spirit to let everyone leave, and Reigen is fading fast . . .
(Short version: I am planning to lure everyone in with intense Reigen whump and then force you all to care about my favorite side character)
This is definitely going to get some edits, but a snippet:
Shinra blinked, and he was somewhere else. Large trees and rocks loomed around him, forming a small depression that had clearly been chosen to make them harder to see when the rest of the Union came looking.
Reigen lay on the ground in front of him, pale and gasping, blood staining the jacket of his suit and the ground beneath him. Shinra felt faint looking at it.
Dimple darted back and forth over Reigen's body, a blur of worried green.
"Is he . . ." Shinra began, but he wasn't sure how the finish the sentence. Reigen was clearly alive now. Whether they'd be able to keep him that way was anyone's guess.
"I need your help!" Dimple snapped.
"What—"
"That stupid flail had spirit tags on it!" Dimple circled around one of the wounds in Reigen's side, right below his waist. The wisp at the top of his body lashed back and forth. "I can't possess him!"
Hey, can I ask about Tanka prose and Found Wanting, please?
*limps into the wip meme four days late with Starbucks*
I already did Found Wanting, but I will tell you about Tanka prose! As you know I love poetry and including songs and poems in stories and also just writing in verse, and a while ago I was getting a hankering for something poetic but since my current fandom is Japanese it felt a little weird to do Western-style poetry about it. So I did some research on Japanese poetic forms and various things that people have done with them in translation and ended up reading a bunch of articles about English-language Tanka prose. This is a type of prosimetrum (a piece of writing that combines poetry and prose, also incidentally my new favorite word) that combines five-line tanka poems with short prose passages. There's a lot to be said about what counts as a tanka and to what extent English tanka are actually related to the Japanese form, but I didn't necessarily want to get into the weeds of all that. I wanted to write weird anime fanfiction.
. . . and then I got stuck on pronouns, because tanka are usually in first-person but I don't know that the Vibes of that are clicking for me in this peice, but third-person also sounds wrong and I can't get away with the whole thing being in sentences with no clear pov no matter how hard I try. It might end up second. Ish. We'll see.
This wip is also not a classic example of the form because I'm also attempting to do some stuff with non-linearity and contextless dialogue and various other things. It'll be a wacky little piece. Kind of dream-state. I don't want to explain too much of what it's about because I think it'll be most effective to go in blind, but here's the two tanka I've got about Tome and Mob respectively (I like them as poems but don't know how good they are at being tanka specifically. But that's why we practice.)
Her arms inscribe
Familiar calligraphy
In the still air.
The echo of a dance
She learned following [your] hands.
The boy
Black-fledged as a crow
Is a prism—
All the colors of the world
Refracted through his heart.
You've actually heard a lot about Hashtag Feminism 2! That's my document title for the Tome timeloop fic. The genealogy is that when I was writing my BttF fic "Time Is Out Of Joint" it was the first time I'd really played around with major character death (even though it was technically temporary), so to make myself feel better I kept joking "Look, I'm killing off the men for the woman's character development! Hashtag Feminism!"
And, well, this fic is doing the same thing (sorry Reigen). However the working title is now doing double duty because I decided that the villain has to be an evil woman! For thematic reasons and also because there aren't enough women in Mob so whenever I have a chance to make an OC I add more in.
You know most of this, but since I don't think I've fully explained it on here before, the conceit of the fic is that there's a former Scar with time manipulation powers who eventually reaches a point where she can rewind time to try to make past events play out differently. She's still bitter about Claw dissolving and has learned that Mob and his master (because obviously a child couldn't have done it by himself) are the ones who stopped the world domination attempt, so she decides that she'll just go back in time and take them out before they become a problem. Tome's the only one who retains her memories because the rock she got from the aliens appears to protect her from time distortions. Unfortunately for the Scar, Mob proves surprisingly difficult to kill. Unfortunately for Tome, Reigen doesn't. Faced with ???%, the Scar jumps back in time again, and this time Tome knows what she's planning, so they enter a series of increasingly elaborate loops where the Scar attempts to secure Claw's ultimate victory and Tome tries to find a way to get back to the timeline she's used to, or, failing that, at least make sure that everyone she cares about survives.
Here's a snippet of Tome on the first loop before the horrors start:
It feels almost like trespassing to go back to Salt Middle School. Not that Tome minds. She hurries through the halls like a spy on a secret mission, scanning for the shape of a familiar bowl cut.
A-ha.
"Mob!" she calls, dashing over to him. "Are you responsible for this?!"
He gives her the classic Mob look, blank-faced and contemplative. Tome's thoughts are constantly shooting through her head like a school of fish hyped up on energy drinks. Mob always seems like he has to wait a while for a thought to mature, like it's a seed he's watching sprout or a model he's putting together.
She's so fantastically patient as she waits for the thought in Mob's head to unfurl its leaves.
"Responsible for what, Tome?" he says.
Inukawa, who'd been talking to him before Tome arrived, sticks his head around Mob's shoulder and says, "President, are you all right? You've been acting strange this morning!"
"I've been acting strange," Tome says, striking a pose, "Because I'm actually from the future!"
