► the Neighbor AU with Khan's family (mostly) alive (sorry fridged parents), Ingo is recovering from a severe injury (has amnesia) and moves next door to Khan's wild home with his own kid (akari). Emmet encourages Ingo to make friends with his neighbors, Akari befriends one of Khan's younger siblings, and Shenanigans Ensue. Emmet and Elesa watch Khan and Ingo's interactions like they're at a movie. Khan's siblings make popcorn for everyone to enjoy while they watch (occasionally instigating).
► Several stories further in the Peas in a Pod verse, including Ingo and Arceus meeting up to talk about Akari over a meal, Akari growing up in and around the Pearl Clan post Ingo becoming a Warden, and a Whole Lot of Angst once the frenzies begin ♥
►a lot of Zoroakari stuff in general bc she's my beloved
This isn't... quite what I started out to do?? It started out as a request fill but then it got a little bit out of hand, so now it's going to be its own little stand-alone two-shot thing.
Setting is my amazing bro's Lagtrain Verse (please go read it, they're a phenomenal writer!), with my OC Tee (on the right) as the stranger on the platform.
(cw: none. themes of loss and mourning.)
It's taking all my will just to run alone,
when are you coming home?
-'Die for You', Starset
***
The station is silent, the last train having long since left for its final docking, and Emmet feels the weight of the quiet like a stone around his neck. He hates how the station becomes a lonely liminal space at night, the once-bustling platforms now echoing nothing but his own footsteps as he finally calls it a day.
He barely looks around himself as he walks towards the exit that will spit him out closest to his home; he keeps his gaze on the floor beneath his feet and doesn’t focus on the lack of a matching pair beside him, doesn’t let himself drown in his own too-quiet footfalls, no longer in perfect synch with another’s. He rounds a corner, heading for the staff door beside the turnstiles…
…and nearly jumps out of his skin.
There, sitting utterly still on a lonely metal bench, is a silver-haired man in a long black jacket.
Emmet chokes.
He takes a faltering step in the man’s direction, shaking hand raising slightly as if to reach out. “…Ingo?”
His voice, already flat and low, comes out like a breath, like nothing; his brother’s name is barely a word on his tongue and what little there is quavers just as badly as his hands. But it’s enough. The man on the bench must hear something, because he lifts his head as though waking from a trance and looks to Emmet with a glassy grey stare.
It’s not Ingo.
Emmet suddenly feels like a complete and utter fool. Of course this person isn’t Ingo - looking at him now, Emmet sees that the man’s only similarity to his brother is the color of the coat he wears.
The man is thin; even sitting, he looks like a reed in the wind, with a graceful neck and long-fingered hands tipped in sharp black nails. He uncurls from his shallow hunch with an almost inhuman smoothness, turning his face to reveal high cheekbones and silver piercings in his nose and lips and brows. His hair is black on the bottom, a dark undercut accenting a tousled top and fringe the color of a storm cloud, not the pale silver-blond Emmet mistook it for at first.
But lastly, and most tellingly, are his eyes.
Behind a pair of thick rectangular glasses, the man’s eyes are a shade of grey too dark to match with Emmet’s - more steel than silver, deeper, duller - framed by smoky black shadow.
The man watches him curiously, seeming to search for something without so much as shifting his gaze.
“…Hello,” he says at length, finally breaking the bubble of impossible silence. His voice is calm, quiet, soft in both tone and pitch, and nothing at all like the one Emmet has missed for three long years.
Emmet bites down the sickly wave of disappointment that rolls inside his stomach, savagely swallows it down, feels it corrode into anger instead. He narrows his eyes at the stranger, the not-Ingo, and says, “Can I help you?”
It’s said with heat, with teeth. The words themselves are helpful but the sound they make is irritable and mean.
(He regrets it instantly; it’s not the man’s fault he isn’t Emmet’s brother.)
But the man simply smiles at him, painted lips stretching into something laced with a familiar kind of sorrow.
He shakes his head slowly and looks down towards his lap, at a spread of three tall, black cards balanced atop his thighs. “…Just waiting for someone.”
Emmet takes a second to school his tongue before speaking again. He presses it tight against the roof of his mouth to keep any more harshness at bay, and only once he’s certain no more will leak out does he respond with a tight, “The last train has already left.”
Again, though, the man just smiles. It touches the corners of his eyes, brows drawn down, and for a single brief moment, Emmet thinks that the man is about to cry; he doesn’t.
Instead, he brushes the tips of his long nails along the edges of a card, before delicately tucking them under it and flipping the card over.
“…I know,” the man says.
Emmet’s mouth flattens out into a thin, straight line. He can feel the irritation bubbling anew, and is about to tell the man to kindly leave, since the trains won’t run again until morning, but the man sighs mournfully before Emmet can speak. He flips a second card over and trails his fingertip over its paper face.
“They’re late, aren’t they?” He reaches for the third and final card, flips it over, picks it up between his fingers to hold in front of his face as if examining it. His expression saddens even further as he slowly looks from the card back to Emmet, then finally through Emmet to the tracks beyond. “Both mine and yours…”
Emmet doesn’t know how to respond. Habitually, he feels his hackles raise at what can only be an allusion to his missing brother, but then the man’s face crumples into something like grief for a long, agonized moment, and it’s too real a reaction to have been anything malicious - leaving Emmet with the realization that this odd stranger might just be missing a loved one of his own.
And now Emmet really feels like a dick.
Before he can properly ask if he can help, the man’s expression smooths back out into the eerie, controlled blank slate it had been at the start, with glassy grey eyes staring far ahead into nothing. The man blinks, and for just a tiny sliver of time, Emmet could swear the man’s eyes have changed to a glowing, brilliant gold; the man blinks again, and the steely grey returns.
Without another word, the stranger stands and sadly tucks the cards back into their deck before slipping the whole thing into the pocket of his jacket. He picks up a hat from beside himself that Emmet hadn’t seen a moment ago - black felt with a round, broad rim and a curved, tapered tip, accented by a braided band of white and black and grey leather.
“The waiting isn’t even the hardest part,” the man murmurs, slipping his hat onto his head. He exhales, deep and slow, breathing out what might be a faint plume of dark smoke despite his lack of cigarette. “...It’s that I can’t see when it ends.”
The man glances up once more and gives Emmet a tiny, raw, exhausted smile. “All I know is that it does. One day…”
He turns then, pivoting on his heel and heading towards the exit, while Emmet tries to think of something to say that isn’t everything he’d never wanted said to him after Ingo disappeared.
By the time Emmet unsticks his tongue the man is already past the turnstiles, a little purple espeon now trotting along beside him and nuzzling at his shins. Together, the pair moves soundlessly out of the station and disappears into the lonely night beyond.
The sky rumbles with distant thunder when Emmet finally follows suit, and the whole walk home he can taste the oncoming rain like blood in the back of his throat.
No one asked for this, but have some more self-indulgent D&D stuff!
Once again from @psidontknow and I’s “Hound of the Emperor” au - featuring the bad end versions of my OCs Gibrahltar (”Lysiri”) and Cockerime, and my bro’s OC, Xikist, God of Knowledge.
Directly continues from The Serpent and The Hound.
Title taken from ‘Oh Lord,’ by In This Moment.
(CW: very brief and very vague mention of sex right at the start. death, violence, blood, non-graphic mutilation. body horror? character eats part of a god and gets transmogrified. hurt-no-comfort. Daddy Issues™️. ambiguous ending.)
===
Cockerime invites her to bed with him that night.
She agrees - something she only ever does when the gnawing emptiness inside her grows all-consuming, leaving her numb enough to sink to rock bottom just to feel again.
He is elated, of course; he has never made a secret of his attraction to her, his bizarre form of affection. She tolerates it, has never truly reciprocated his advances, let alone his feelings, but it's better than being alone and at least with him and the distance she keeps between them she doesn't have to worry about her heart being wounded should he leave her. It's as he lies asleep that she makes her move.
Centuries of hollowing herself out, over and over again, have left her as a shell of a person. No god will ever accept her soul now, not as stained as it is with their fellows' blood - nor will any mortal, ageless or not, claim her as one of their people. She had once been hurt and angry enough to think that was what she wanted - to have no one and no god hold sway over her ever again. But it is far lonelier to hide and live only to murder at Emperor Cockerime’s behest than it had ever been by herself when her soul had still existed. Now, there is nothing to cling to but the emperor, her sword, and the city of Kadessa.
She just wants to sleep.
As Cockerime silently breathes on the other side of the bed, she slips out from the sheets and into her clothes, grimacing in distaste at the sweat in her hair. (Silver again at the roots; she'd stopped pouring black stain into it months ago.) She quietly sneaks into the adjoining room and gently takes the milky, blue-white marble from its protective box. The magical barrier does not stop her; she's one of only two people allowed to touch the Royal Treasures, and the other is still asleep in the other room.
She sneaks back into the bedroom, and pulls out the sword hilt she'd stashed beneath his bed. He doesn't wake until the blade is already swinging down against his naked back.
She runs then.
With neither care nor plan of action, she dashes through the corridors, slashing at anyone who gets in her path. She is the Hound of the Emperor, a feral beast in Wingly form, the sword arm of the Archangel; most fall before they have a chance to react, and the ones that do, pause as they see her, unsure if they should raise arms against the Hound. Their hesitation renders them actionless just long enough for her to cut them down. As arrogant as the budding New Empire is as a whole, it takes almost no effort to topple the entire palace guard in less than an hour.
It takes even less to destroy the signet sphere holding the city aloft.
Cockerime finds her just as she smashes the magical orb keeping Kadessa from falling to Endiness below. Pity, she thinks, I should have stabbed harder. The New Emperor is not nearly as inclined to die as his subordinates - he charges at her with all the rage and betrayal his mortal body can possibly hold and more. She knows what he must be feeling, knows because she recognizes it, has felt it before, though not from someone that could be considered (however barely,) a lover. It's what she had felt when she'd still been young, barely a teenager, when she'd overheard (her father) Xikist in his office telling Sister how much time and effort he'd invested in her. She doesn't blame Cockerime, and so does not stop him from slicing at her face with a sword of his own.
Her left eye goes dark as his blade comes down, her lip and cheek rent and burning with white-hot pain.
She smiles at him with a shredded face and bloody teeth as he steps back to snarl at her. The Jewel rests heavy in her palm, and she opens her fist to look at it, holding it out for him to see as well. He demands it back, demands to know what she's doing, how she could betray him and why. She just smiles harder, grins, peeling her lips back over her canine teeth, red pooling between them, until it becomes anything, everything but a smile.
They fight - him for vengeance, for retribution for his pain, and her because he, like she, has far outlived his own rotten end. (She will follow him into oblivion soon enough, whether by his hand or her own. It will still be more than either of them deserve.)
Her Dragon Buster takes his arm, and his magic scorches her body. All down her front and side, up her neck and creeping into her one unbloodied cheek, Holy Fire ravages her skin and muscle, searing the ends of her hair. The Dragon Buster pierces his torso; the Harm Touch erodes hers.
Father would be proud, she thinks sardonically, and swallows the Moon Jewel whole, watching as the light leaves Emperor Cockerime's eyes.
(Kadessa falls to the might of the Archangel, the Goddess of Judgement made flesh within her body, her six new wings and four new arms grasping at magic no person should wield, twisting it until the capital is crushed and falling to the ground.)
She doesn't remember anything after that.
When next she opens her remaining eye, there is sand below her. Miles and miles of dry, dusty earth, a familiar desert wind sifting through her hair and the feathers of her stolen Archangel wings. One of her new arms hangs limp at her side; she reaches up and tears it off without a second thought and drops it to the hungry, shadowy Hasera beasts in the dark below.
Her wings continue to beat, though she cannot recall bidding them to, propelling her towards the only place she could think to go, could ever possibly hope to return to. She knows she likely won't be welcome, and she hopes she isn't, knows she doesn't deserve to be after everything she's done, after threatening to carve Xikist's tongue from his mouth that last time she'd seen him over two thousand years ago. (But even knowing all of this, she still yearns, like a lost and wounded child, for the once-familiar feeling of the place she'd once called home.)
Another arm is lost to the waning magic keeping her body alive, the Jewel that sits heavy in her opened stomach barely stopping the spread of death. She tosses the arm aside, same as before; by the time the tower is in sight, the only limbs intact are her own and one ragged pair of feathered, stolen wings.
She knows his window by heart, from inside the tower and out, and it's this muscle memory that carries her to it, even as her vision starts to fail completely. She lands heavily on the sill, her body weight and momentum just enough to send her crashing through the window and onto the floor of the office in a heap of blood, feathers, and broken glass. There are voices in the hallway, possibly a scream; she cannot tell.
She pushes herself up on arms that barely work, even still attached as they are. Her vision is a mess of viscous red and blinded black and she gropes blindly along the glass-strewn floor to pull herself forward, legs refusing to function. She manages to turn herself over before she vomits up what tastes like blood and bile, with the heavy, muted thump of the Jewel finally rejecting from her body.
The last of the wings rot and slough off her tattered back. She tries to sob but nothing comes out.
There is the sound of the door crashing open followed by rushing, frantic footsteps. She thinks she hears Sister telling someone not to look, to go to their room; she thinks she hears her first Brother yelling at someone to fetch a healer. (But that can't be right, she thinks, Brother has gone away, just like her Nameless Sibling.)
She is wrapped in warmth, two solid arms encircling her as a familiar voice calls to her, calls her by a name she thought she'd forgotten.
"Lysiri? Lysiri!"
(Yes, I'm here, she tries to say. And why does Father sound so worried?)
She is pulled into a lap, cradled, surrounded by a faint scent of ink and parchment, of snake scales and desert flowers. She tries to turn her head and bury her face in her father's dress, but her body is too weighed down with sleep. She must be more tired than she thought.
A hand pets through her hair, gentle; down her ruined cheeks. She can feel something warm, like gold and glitter, trying to knit her skin back together. But it's far away, so far away that it feels like only an echo of a spell.
The hand moves, leaves her face and hair and slips into hers; she weakly grasps it with numbing fingers. "...Eniri?"
Father gasps softly above her, saying something she cannot hear.
She squeezes his hand, tries to, tries to comfort him. "I think I had… a nightmare…"
(Her chest hurts, why is it so hard to breathe?)
Father says something else, but she doesn't know what. She clenches her hand in his. "Eniri… can I stay… with you… tonight…?"
The hand is pulled from her own and she makes a soft sound of protest, twitching her fingers at its loss, even as his hand returns to her hair to pet it. The golden, glittery feeling is back, but now it's only like a glint of light from far across the desert sands.
Her fingers twitch again. "I don't… want to be… alone…"
(She falls asleep to the feeling of a desperate kiss being pressed against her forehead.)
Some purely self-indulgent OC stuff this time, set in the D&D world @psidontknow have going on together. (Technically this is an AU of an AU, but ehhhhh, I don’t feel like boring anybody with specifics. XD)
The Hound of the Emperor is the bad-end au version of my D&D character, Gibrahltar (”Lysiri”) Seventh-Star.
Xikist is the Snake God of Knowledge; he and ‘Sister,” “Brother,” and the “Nameless Sibling” belong to my bro-bro and are borrowed with love~
(CW: Hella Daddy Issues™️, regret, anger, emotional hurt-no-comfort. heavy/dark themes. references to past god murder. Snake Dad fucked up and now they’re both paying for it.)
===
She sits, arms folded, staring daggers like the ones she used to carry at his back. He knows she's there, she knows he knows; he just won't turn around. She'd landed on his windowsill, in the office she can remember from her childhood - napping in his coils on the soft, soft carpet, stealing snacks with one brother to sneakily give to another, feeling loved and happy before it all went to shit and she closed her heart against the family that had apparently never let her into theirs. (And if they had, well, then they had a funny fucking way of showing it.) She'd landed, and she'd broken the lock with her bare hands and a spark of magic, pushed open the panes to climb inside. She'd stayed there then, cloaked in her spell of invisibility, not sure why she'd bothered in the first place when he'd know immediately where she was.
But she'd wanted to see what he'd do.
(Did she still mean nothing to him? Had she ever meant anything to begin with? Turn around, turn around, turn around, Father, turn around and LOOK AT ME.)
She'd kept the shield, the invisibility, up like a cover over a frightened child's head - though her heart was filled with anything but - until the sun had started its descent and the air had begun to cool.
And now, even as she drops it, he still doesn't turn.
Why had she even come here in the first place? She'd had no clue, still doesn't; maybe it was a kind of bitter nostalgia, a foolish wish to appease the rotting part of herself that longed for all of the pain of betrayal to have been nothing but a bad dream. To sever loose ends, maybe. She doesn't know.
She steps closer, footfalls muffled by the second spell enveloping her, the one she hasn't yet dropped, and comes to stand directly at his back, so close that should he turn his head he will touch her with his braid.
"Rancid viper," she hisses, a habit adopted as a child that she still cannot shake, a daughter wishing to emulate her Eniri, now a soulless Hound staked through with memories of a life that never truly existed. "Turn. Around." Her lips curl over her teeth. "Face your mistakes for once in your life."
He sighs, his shoulders slumping. He still doesn't turn, though his head tilts to the side, ear positioned now in her direction. "...I've made many mistakes in my lifetime," he says, and his voice fills her heart with both anger and childlike misery, pain and longing, until it overflows to fill her eyes with scalding tears. "You were never one of them."
"Liar," she rasps. She holds her volume low and it scratches at her throat on its way out, trying to be bigger than she allows it to be. "What was it you said to Sister after my second brother left? That you'd put too much time and effort into me to let me die just yet?" She spits to the side, onto one of his open journals resting beside the desk.
He glances at it, and she can see the frown tugging at the side of his face in profile. Regret, her heart wishes; distaste, her head rebuffs.
Ignorant of her thoughts, (though she wouldn't put it past him,) he lowers his head. His hands fold overtop the ledger in front of him, closing it and coming to rest daintily atop its leather cover. "...Words cannot express how many times I've wished I could undo having ever said that."
She laughs; a bark, mirthless, incredulous. "So that your experiment would have stayed where you could see it?"
"No."
Finally, he turns.
He pivots slowly in his chair, head lifting only after the rest of him has shifted in her direction. His eyes are the last thing to reach her, and even then do not fully meet her own.
His expression is slack, closed off as she'd expected, emotionless, with lips down turned at the corners and lids heavy. Gone is his usual smugness, the smirk that has fueled her anger for centuries, and in its place is… nothing. He is as hollow as she remembers him, and yet. He is not. The lines around his eyes are sad, tired, giving him the look of someone who is lost, resigned.
Sorrow, her heart wishes again; apathy, her head once again replies.
"No?" she prompts, demands, when he does not continue. Her eyes burn directly into his own, daring (beseeching) him to look at her properly.
He shakes his head. "No."
Her lips curl further, a bestial, canine snarl. The Hound growls. "Then why?"
His voice is an uncharacteristic whisper when he finally says, "Because it hurt you." He breathes. "Because it cost me my daughter."
She reels back as if struck, a cry of rage and anguish tearing from her throat. Instinctively, a knee-jerk reaction to pain, a substitution of violence so that nothing can touch her long enough to hurt, she reaches for the dragon-headed hilt at her side. With a fluid slice of her hand through the air she draws her sword and lets its tendrils dig into the flesh of her arm. Flames erupt from the mouth of the hilt, forming the blade of the ancient Dragon Buster Sword.
She holds it to his face, now a barrier, an extension of an arm's distance between them. "Fuck you," she hisses again, ignoring the way her voice and breath both catch. "Fuck you, fuck you. Call me that again and I'll take your venomous tongue."
The flames singe at the edges of his hair. He does not try to move away.
A horrible sound crawls its way up and out through her mouth, and it's impossible for her to tell through the ringing in her ears whether it's a sob or a strangled scream - a cry for blood or a plea for help. "Your daughter is downstairs," she accuses, tries and tries and tries not to think of the twisting feeling in her gut that she'd felt upon seeing the little fiendkind girl playing among the books - the feeling that persists as she pointedly does not look at the girl's drawings on the snake god's office walls. "I saw how easily you replaced me."
He sighs, shifting his gaze to finally see her, and for a moment she is thrown for a loop by the utter sadness with which he looks at her.
(She has the sudden, powerful urge to throw herself into his arms and sob, to cry into her father's dress like she did over a dozen lifetimes ago, and to beg every god that remains, every one she hasn’t hunted and slain as the Emperor's Hound, for a path back from the darkness she's allowed to swallow her up.)
She feels a single traitorous tear slip free, sliding down her cheek. She hides it behind another hateful snarl. Call the Hound and it shall come.
"Say something!"
He simply looks at her. "...What is there that I can?" he whispers. "The damage is already done." His gaze lowers to the sword fused into her arm. "...I'm so sorry, Lysiri."
She screams.
It is an ugly sound, one of torment and grief and years and years of both missing and hating her father; it rakes her voice raw and steals the warmth from her blood.
Xikist's desk smolders as the Dragon Buster slices it neatly in twain with a single, mournful swing.
She stands there, chest and shoulders heaving as she fights for control of herself. Her teeth are bared, a hunter's fangs, and her eyes clenched so tightly that behind her lids there are spots of light. Without looking at him - because she can't, not now, not right after her heart has overridden her hate - she pulls the sword free from the smoking wooden remains of the desk and summons the fire back into its hilt. The tendrils retract from her arm, but she keeps her hand gripped tightly inside. She turns her back to him then, and steps back towards the open window.
She pauses, just for a moment, with her hand on the windowpane. She doesn't look back at him as she spits a bile-flavored lie.
"The only reason you still breathe is because of your blood-tie with Sister," she tells him, and even to her own ears it sounds thin. "I will not take her life by taking yours." Her hand tightens on the windowpane. "Be grateful."
And before he can (or doesn't) respond, she leaps out the window into the desert air beyond.
She almost lets herself hit the ground before she bothers to open her wings.
I'm sorry for the random message, but I had a thought before bed the other night and I have no use for it, but it might be something cool for your Trigun TTRPG. So like - a chimera, man made. Human and bug and plant, all grafted together into one creature, perhaps even some cat or dog in there. Could be another Conrad experiment, could be some other fucko's pet science project. Just a beast that's an amalgamate of everything to the point it's become nothing.
🕯️ ⇢ on a scale from 1 to 10, how much do you enjoy editing? why is that?
💌 ⇢ how many unread emails do you have right now
🍦 ⇢ name three good things about a character you hate
🪲 ⇢ add 50 words to your current wip and share the paragraph here
🥤 ⇢ recommend an author or fanfic you love
Observe When I Am Dead by Augment on AO3
It's one piece fanfic but god. It's so genuinely beautiful to me. Something about sacrificing yourself despite the pain, trying to keep it from the one you adore, the one you want to protect. Luffy waking up and finding Zoro at the end... I have read it many nights when I want a solid finisher to my AO3 browsing. I can never follow it up with anything.
🕯️ ⇢ on a scale from 1 to 10, how much do you enjoy editing? why is that?
I edit as I write so I guess 5? I don't mind it, but I'm definitely not the person who finishes their writing and then goes through and re-edits. I don't have the attention span for that. The only time I went through and re-editing anything was for the original ending of Lifetime Guarantee, but that was a full-on rewrite because I didn't like the ending.
💌 ⇢ how many unread emails do you have right now
Entirely too many over 4 different email addresses. A few thousand, mostly spam.
🍦 ⇢ name three good things about a character you hate
I feel put on the spot. I can't think of any characters I hate off the top of my head. If someone can point out a character I've said I've hated please do and I'll try to list 3 things about them?
🪲 ⇢ add 50 words to your current wip and share the paragraph here
I have two wips I'm working concurrently on right now so-
AO - Ch 3
"While Dawn and Johanna’s home remained firmly in Twinleaf Town, Cynthia’s family home - and most of her research - was settled in Celestic Town. Cynthia spent most of her time with her wife and stepdaughter, but upon learning that they were researching the Lake Trio she had offered to meet them at her old home instead. There had been a discussion on which lake to visit first before they decided to hit Lake Acuity, as it was out of the way, before traveling down to Lake Valor, and then heading back to Twinleaf Town and Lake Verity. Dawn would be able to visit her home and, if all went well, they would have a safe place to regroup and discuss their findings."
PiaP Series - "Twins"
"“My daughter? She’s four. She’s lovely. Someone… well. She’s adopted. But I adore her, I love my daughter immensely. She’s brave and has always known what she wants; maybe I spoil her a bit too much, but there isn’t much I can offer her… she seems to prefer my company to anyone else’s, apart from perhaps my pokemon, and trying to convince her to go on her first sleepover was a challenge. She had thought I would be coming with her. Ah, do you know what a sleepover is? It’s an activity where you-” Glancing up and finding that the Sneasel was still looking at him with interest, and therefore sufficiently distracted from her leg, Ingo quickly twisted and pushed the limb back into its correct position and placement. The Sneasel shrieked in surprise and, just in case, Ingo braced himself for the sting of claws cutting into him. Instead he received what could only be described as scolding chatter. He leaned back and raised his hands."