Hello! I met you at Otakuthon and just wanted to poke in and say thank you again for the Trans Vanitas content and recommendations you have provided they fill my heart with immense joy. I also hope you are having a good day!
OMG I'M SO HAPPY I'M GOING TO CRY 🥺🥺🥺❤❤❤ I'm so excited to hear you like both my vanitas content and the recommendations, I LOVE SHARING THEM and I love sharing my stuff aND MOST OF ALL I love connecting with people who love trans works too. vanitas is so trans. I'M OVER THE MOON, thank you so much, and thank you for stopping by at otakuthon!!!!!!! 🥺🥺🥺❤❤❤
Five times Rin surprises Maki, and the one time she finally returns the favor.
“Is this... strictly necessary?” Maki says, so blandly the words tilt from her mouth and slap the paving of the roof with a dreary sort of thud.
“Absolutely,” says Rin with the same breathy, serious focus that Maki associates with the height of a crescendo mid-symphony, and Rin performs a gaping pirouette. She leaps dramatically and points inward toward her knee with a skinny, shoeless foot, and whirls in place like the sky’s falling around her. Maki winces in sympathy with the impact.
“Did Eli teach you that?”
“Yeah,” says Rin gleefully, hammers one dusty foot down, and turns again with a lovely imbalance. “Don’t you think it should be in our duet? It’s so fun.”
“Ballet in Beat in Angel?” Maki asks, just to make sure she’s certain that Rin wants to incorporate classical art into the electronic overload of their song.
“A fusion,” Rin purrs. “Old meets new! A modern twist, yeah!” She puts both feet on the ground, finally, and Maki relaxes. She’d been sure an ankle sprain was in the future. Rin has none of the training Eli’d spent years of her life on, just a wiry body and far too much enthusiasm for delicate motions of ballet. Maki blinks away from her stare on Rin’s muscled legs (probably sore from all that running and jumping? Controlled falls in track? The bare skin is a surprisingly pretty color). Focus.
Maki waves her hands down her body, slightly uncomfortable, practicing the smooth movements of her hips and the liquid curls of her wrist while imagining the beat. “Eli sure saddled us with a lot of body rolls in this one,” she says, then turns to see Rin watching her with an unfathomable excitement.
“You look great!”
“Thanks.”
They stay dancing on the roof, dutifully early and exchanging occasional comments - “Isn’t the lighting out here great today, Maki?”; “It’s so bright your hair almost looks pink,” - until Honoka bursts through the doors for official practice, clutching a roll of bread and smiling brighter than the sun. Maki catches the wisp of disappointment in herself when the rest of Muse tromp out from the stairwell.
**
“What do you think?” Rin asks, and leans in very close to Hanayo, grinning impishly.
Hanayo grips the lyric sheet with one hand, the other rooting in her lunchbox for her rice bowl. Her fair brows arch and drop as she reads, then: “Oh, it’s so flirty. It’s like Umi thinks something special about you two, huh.”
Maki feels herself start to protest, but she clamps it down and burns red instead. She takes a surreptitious bite of sandwich and ignores the whole comment with what she considers impressive solemnity. Hanayo and Rin look hard at her, though, like carving meaning out a disastrously malleable marble, and she’s not fooled either of them. Dammit.
“Ah,” says Rin carelessly, “there’s nothing risky or dangerous about me and Maki!” She accompanies this lyrical reference with a hearty slap to Maki’s back, slim arm somehow forceful and embarrassingly strong. “Or our relationship, heh.” Maki coughs over her sandwich, surprised at the blow. Why is Rin so sneakily strong?
Hanayo’s halfway through her lunch already, eating with a single-minded intensity that surfaces only with rice and idol trivia. This means Rin is the one to pat Maki awkwardly until she stops choking. “Sorry,” she says, and bares her little teeth in a grin.
“Are we still on for studying after practice?” Hanayo manages as she scraps her bowl lightly, looking politely puzzled when there isn’t even a single grain left.
“Let’s go to the awesome cafe with the umbrellas outside!” Rin cheers with a bite of cookie mangling the words.
“You only want to go there because it’s down the block from a cat cafe,” Hanayo says clearly. Rin pouts, drooping her lip pathetically like the last line of a tragic play.
“We’ll go to the umbrella place if you get through the first three pages of exercises from trigonometry work,” Maki allows, feeling gracious. She catches herself turning a thin strand of hair in her fist - she stops at once. She doesn’t let the prickling nerves in her spine spill into her voice, imagining Rin cuddling all those happy, fat cats to her near-ecstatic face.
**
The track meet is full of high schoolers bustling back and forth, the gritty sand from the tracks tromped across the tight-kept lawn behind the building. Maki and Hanayo follow the crunching, reddish dirt trail to the bleachers where the athletes are still warming up, high knees and unsettlingly low squats like a badly flaunted limbo. Maki turns her head, eyes glazing past the lines of boys and girls in baggy tracksuits, searching while pretending not to. After a moment, Hanayo nudges her with a soft elbow, like the bunting of a deer.
Rin has both hands stretched over her head, determination and a rare sobriety in her angled face as she bends and flows, careful not to strain herself. Hanayo tries to wave, but Rin’s swallowed by a sea of teammates a moment later as the races gear up.
Maki plants herself and Hanayo in the front row, next to some sports moms and a boy who almost looks like Nico’s little brother. He gazes at her with a plaintive, fathomless stare. She blinks, and Hanayo laughs, the sound like a muffled wind chime.
They have trouble telling the races apart - “Is this the 5k?” Hanayo asks.
“That can’t be right. It’s more likely a, a dash.”
“It’s a relay,” a sports mom informs them from behind.
“Ah! There’s Rin!” Hanayo bounces in her seat, and Maki allows herself to lean forward and squint. Yes, that’s the familiar, blazing bob half-dancing at the starting line beside a trio of other wiry girls in different-colored shorts, like an artist’s palate. Rin is the shortest there. Maki puts her English worksheet down, carefully laying the pen on top so it doesn’t blow away. Hanayo sends furious Snapchats, fingers tapping wildly on her screen like rain. The whistle blows.
Maki is quite fit, but she is always impressed by the speed and power compact in Rin’s body - she fairly erupts from the start, dashing along the dusty white lines of the track like a compressed spring. Maki finds herself biting her lip, drawn in by the cheers and the form of Rin ripping along the ground, slowly edging out ahead of the other runners, baton in one hand and arms swinging like she might launch into the sky, trailed by dust.
Rin’s group doesn’t win. Maki, surprised and a little offended on Rin’s behalf, watches the long legs of the winning team jump and crow, relishing their victory with (in Maki’s humble opinion) excessive elation. Hanayo looks devastated, but Rin shakes all of the opponents’ hands and smiles freely.
By the time they meet up, Nozomi, Eli, and Umi have gathered around Rin, making consoling motions. But Rin gives Hanayo a sweaty hug and turns to Maki, “It’s okay! We all raced our hardest, and Yuri hurt her ankle in the last meet, so it wasn’t her fault she didn’t make speed on the last bend.”
“If it had been just you racing, you would have won. You should have won,” says Maki, who realizes she must be making a face, for Rin to pinpoint exactly what’s troubling her.
“Nah,” says Rin casually. “I like playing as a team, and I don’t mind losing. It’s nice to win, but it’s not everything, you know? It’s more interesting just to play.”
“I like to win,” Maki says. Eli laughs at this.
Nozomi looks at Maki, still scowling, and then looks at Rin, who rocks on her heels like a ship coming into shore while grinning dopily. Nozomi laughs at something she sees, and puts her face into Eli’s shoulder.
**
Maki gets one foot into the music room before she’s tackled. The force of the embrace sets her off balance enough to almost drop her mug of tea, but after a glittering, frozen moment where she’s certain she can control the universe, gravity, and space itself, she realizes it’s just Rin and tilts her wrist accordingly. Her beverage does not spill.
Rin lets off clutching at Maki and hurtles through the room, twirling with a wild urgency on occasion, and does a weird hop around the piano like a rabbit. “You did it, Maki! You and Hanayo did it! I got a perfect on the last math test!” She yells this last part, a staccato singsong with no particular melody. “Ahhh! I’m so excited!”
Pleasantly surprised, Maki gives herself a moment to smile, feeling it slip into place like the last piece of a puzzle. “You see what studying hard can do? I knew that you could do it.”
Rin stops jumping for joy and plops herself at the piano bench with a heavy smack, then digs in her bag. “Look,” she says, almost shyly, then brandishes a sheaf of papers with a 100 marking at Maki. “I couldn’t have done it without your help. Hanayo’s, too, but you’re really quite good at math. You gave me lots of good pointers.”
Maki shrugs, trying to brush this off, but Rin continues with a little more passion, “C’mon! Thank you! It’s been really nice of you to help me out like this!”
“You’re welcome.”
Rin actually sighs. “Always so proper, Maki,” she says cryptically.
**
It’s when they’re running the final practice for Beat in Angel in front of the rest of Muse that Maki gets slapped in the face.
“I’M SO SORRY,” Rin bellows, heartbroken. Eli turns off the music and Kotori tries to pry Maki’s clamped hands off of her nose where she’d been caustically attacked.
It’s an over dramatization, and Maki is embarrassed at the flutterings of Kotori and Honoka, Rin’s anguished apologies while being held awkwardly by Hanayo, and Nico loudly announcing a broken nose is “just edgy enough to draw in new fans.”
“It’s not broken,” Maki tells everybody, mortified, and gently touches the cartilage where Rin’d gotten over-excited with her dancing and pirouette-slapped her. “I’m fine, really. Let’s start again in a few minutes, okay?”
“Eli and I will get you some water, or a Gatorade, or something,” Nozomi says cheerfully, and gives Maki a strange, hard stare as she heads for the stairwell with Eli’s hand in hers. As usual, Maki looks at their PDA and feels a blip of something else, something she can’t quite pin down; she’s throwing javelins at feathers. As she’s struggling with the bog of her feelings, Rin’s face swoops down into her view in all of its harried, guilty sweetness.
“Ah! Maki! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry-” Maki sits perfectly still, one hand still splayed across her face like a mask as a perfect bolt of lightning hits her. It’s Rin. It’s definitely, definitely that sunshine girl that dances like she’s fighting, sings like she’s inviting the world to join her, and runs with a fierce, wild pride.
Maki stands. “I’m fine. Let’s practice the place-swapping bit at the two minute mark.”
Oh no. Now she’s got to say something, doesn’t she, she’s got to ask or confess. The feeling churns in her stomach like a rotten tomato, persistent and churning. She can’t not do anything as the music burbles back up, and she and Rin take their places in front of Muse.
**
Maki keeps them running late, late enough that the second years leave for student council duties, and Hanayo goes off to help Nico with an idol stream. Rin looks a little disappointed as they wave goodbye and promise to save a glowstick for her. But she nods when Maki asks her to keep going, maybe out of guilt for punching her by accident; maybe because she actually wants to stay and make this perfect.
When Eli and Nozomi tire of clapping, they pronounce the rehearsal officially over and depart for home. Maki says her goodbyes and turns back to Rin, who looks tired but hopeful. “Once more?”
As they lip-sync to rest their voices and pose, whirling and shuffling, dancing in tandem like two parts of a whole, Maki feels the embarrassment and the desire to say something rise in her throat like a song she hasn’t written yet. This is ridiculous.
“Hey,” Maki splutters as the music fades out for the final time. Off to a great start. Rin lowers her hands from the end pose and sticks up a questioning eyebrow like a flag.
“I love you, you know,” Maki says in a rush. Her mouth keeps moving, like she’s blowing bubbles underwater. Oh God, why is her breathing so loud? This is incredibly terrible. “I love you. Rin.”
For perhaps the first time in history, Rin freezes in shock, the lining of her face young and so, so cute. Maki squints. If her legs were working, she’d be out of here. Then the tip of Rin’s lips turns up, then breaks into the flashy smile as always, a sunshine-sweet blaze with maybe a new, careful edging of seriousness. “I know!” Without any ado, she hops up to her toes and leans in - Maki thanks the constant pirouetting that has probably given Rin ankles of steel - and then Maki’s brain short-circuits as Rin pecks her once on the lips. They pause, and Maki moves, pulls her in closer and gives her a proper kiss, all sweetness.
Rin drops back down and taps her chin, looking exceptionally tickled as Maki loosens her grip. Her shining eyes narrow, and she slits a grin across the roof at the sky. “You’re so cool, Maki,” she says earnestly. “I got a kiss from Maki!”
“That’s me,” Maki says, and knows she again fails to fool Rin with any presentation of a blase attitude. She feels like she’s flying, wrapped in a warm cloud that flushes her skin a forest-fire red. Thanks, complexion. Maybe the heat is just Rin throwing her arms around Maki and hugging her, cuddling her quick and happy like a kitten.
“Thanks for telling me,” Rin says softly, finally focused, finally stoic. Then her quicksilver, feline smile flares out again, a spotlight blast of excitement that Maki thinks she’s privileged to be lit by. “I love you too!” Maki hesitates, then figures she ought to be done hesitating. She spins Rin in a circle, and her laugh echoes over the rooftop.
Lily White as avian shifters feat. Crowzomi. Teaser segment for a full-fic/art AU collab w/ @luckfoser , who is the triple treat of talented.
**
“Nozomi, we need to do these exercises for science, you can’t just avoid them completely-” Eli’s voice flits through the hallway, and Nozomi’s supposed to be in her club activity but mostly she’s playing the ghost game as cleverly as she knows how, running off from the warning and sticking herself in a spare storage room with the wide windows on third floor. There’s a wind that tugs at her loose hair, ends in all directions like a waving flag. It reminds her of flight: sweeping along the treetops with Umi and Rin, of seeing them (hearing them laugh) every day; taking lazy trips up and down the quieter streets of Tokyo with this same breeze in her feathers, world awash in the faint purple of bird’s vision. The wind reminds her of times when she was not so lonely.
Eli finds her, though, because Eli has that clever gaze and quicksilver mind that maybe understands Nozomi’s thoughts and feelings better than she guesses. Eli knocks at the door, a strict sequence of thumps that betray her impatience. “Are you in here?”
“Yes, Eli,” Nozomi says dutifully, halting halfway through her shift and turning as the handle dips and Eli peers in, squinting into the glare of the sun. There’s a wire-mesh screen on this window, anyway. Besides, she couldn’t soar out into the sunset by herself. What was she thinking?
“Oh,” Eli mutters, and Nozomi looks back to see her almost drop her bundle of papers. “Your wings.”
“Right,” Nozomi says, and lifts her arms up. The sleek, dark feathers layer themselves into wings, intricately flowing over her shoulders and down her forearms, creeping glossy patterns that refract the gold of the sun in startling orange and copper-on-black. She flaps them experimentally, and the shaking of the feathers throw hues of crystalline blue around the shadowed room. “They’re much too small to fly with when I’m in a half-shift like this. I just have wing-arms.” She smiles, feeling ridiculous.
But Eli crosses the room, setting her coursework on a bookshelf and moving closer with the patient tread of a hunter. Nozomi stiffens as Eli’s breath comes sweet on her neck. Smells like mint. Eli’s eyes are wide, entranced like a child, and Nozomi can see the fascination in them, an odd mixture of scientific inquiry and the respectful reverence of something truly beautiful. How strange, to have that look honed on her, Nozomi thinks shallowly as Eli’s fingers reach out, then hesitate.
“May I,” she pauses, “just touch the feathers? For a second? I don’t mean to be rude.”
“Go ahead, Eli,” Nozomi says graciously, and tries to force down the goosebumps that rise on her neck.
Eli starts with one hand as Nozomi stands still, a quick open-palm stroke of the smooth feathers on Nozomi’s left wing. “Ah, so soft,” she says with an astoundingly gleeful tone. She moves to the other wing, running her hand over it, this time digging into the mass of feathers and tugging, ever so gently, with all her fingertips. “Wow, Nozomi, these are beautiful. You’re incredible.”
“Thanks, Eli,” Nozomi says quietly. Eli seems to think she’s been rude - she pulls back and blinks with a flush. “No, it’s okay.”
“You have feathers like a crown on your face,” Eli murmurs, “like a masquerade ball.” Very slowly, her fingers brush the delicate plumes that curve out from Nozomi’s forehead and frill her jawline.
Nozomi thinks about saying, careful, most birds have bristling feathers for protection on their face, or hey, I’m in love you, Eli, but instead she bites her lip and the movement draws Eli’s eyes down to her mouth. There’s a pause.
“Homework?” Nozomi blurts, unable to take the stress of the second or the confessions trapped behind her teeth, and Eli’s eyes - so open and almost confused - clear and fill with a familiar, polite interest.
“Yes, we should get going. It’s getting late.” She retrieves her papers and holds the door for Nozomi, who slips her cardigan back on as the feathers melt back into her skin like ink in water. “Are you going flying tonight with Umi and Rin?” Eli asks, horrendously casual.
“Yep!” says Nozomi brightly, and forces herself to think of the skies.
Dedicated to my hardworking beta @pasdechat who has long suffered over Daemon au but now is Free. Thank you!
Summary: Some truths that Nozomi has always known: The sun rises in the East, the merfolk live alone, and gifts have a price. Enter Eli.
Word Count: 10625
Every night for the week up until Ayase Eli got on the boat, it rained like Heaven was falling and slick, expanding clouds draped the world in a shimmering grey.
The moment she puts her shoe on the gangplank, her first step into her consigned fate, the moon comes out from behind those thunderous clouds with a ghostly blue halo like the touch of worlds above, and there’s a purple shimmer on the horizon; a tiny sunset.
There's a near-tangible expectation in the air, a certain jelly-like thickness that Eli can run her fingers through as she paces the floor of her cabin alone, her path tilting in sync with the ship. The whole place is a primed electrode; a dizzying readiness sizzles the air. Everyone on board has the tense, excited aura of one preparing to dive.
Eli’s been waiting for her turn with the same tightness in her throat and chest area as she once had when standing by for word of her father's injury in the war - a closed off, sinking terror that bubbles up and boils as it gains strength and sears her insides. She doesn’t want to get married. She misses Alisa. Why, oh why, did her stepfather send her away? What does forever mean to someone who wants nothing?
The boat groans, the wooden walls stretching when the waves shove the man-made thing back and forth, hungrily pressing forward and ripping backward. She wanders to her hammock and feels the knotty edges, rough and durable against the smooth whirls of her fingertips. Her lantern swings wildly above as the ship goes angled as it dances the waves, and her fist clenches.
Going above deck takes some time. The floor is rolling like Eli’s drunk, sending her neat ponytail into a disheveled layer of sweaty tendrils. By the time she makes it out into the pouring rain, her pale blue dress is utterly grimy from running into the greasy hallways indoors, and her hair immediately gets coated to her face by the thick water splattering the deck. She doesn’t care.
The only other person in sight is Derek, the ship's signed cook. He was very nice to Eli for the first week, listening intently to her nervous rambles, laughing and smiling. The second week, he changed almost instantaneously, drunkenly demanding to know why she wouldn't be with him when he'd been so attentive (never mind that she’s being sent by her father across the world to get married to some random noble across the world; never mind that she’s practically royalty and Derek is a hired hand, never mind that she doesn’t love like a normal woman…) They haven't talked for several days since.
"What are you doing out in this weather?" he wants to know when he catches sight of Eli. His eyes flick over her dress, pressed to her body by rain. Eli wants to retreat, but instead glides past as well as she can while the deck shakes. She puts her hands on the railing and glances down into the lengthening black waves.
There's something, a glint, a sparkle of errant sunlight far below. Unsure, she squints and looks again, but it's just the darkness of a sea storm.
"Where is the Captain?" she murmurs, and Derek shrugs in the corner of her eye, a slow roll of his broad shoulders as rain rips into them both.
"He's not worried about it. It's just another storm." Derek seems to sense that Eli is going to leave when he offers nothing else, so he rushes in, yelling over the patter of water on the deck. "Everyone else is in the mess hall, talking about the plan for the next few days. We've had all these storms and stuff, so the trek may take longer than expected.”
Eli frowns into the reaching waves. "I'm just a girl crossing the Pearl Sea to get married," she says bitterly, a fresh tang of annoyance in her voice. “I don’t know anything about storms, or traveling, or how long this hell is supposed to be.”
Derek pauses, rain coalescing in droplets on his long nose. He's young, Eli realizes, probably a year of two even younger than her. "Don't be so hard on yourself," he mutters, looking away. "You seem plenty smart to me. But I'm just a cabin boy."
Eli isn't sure if she feels bad for this boy or wary of a new come-on, and she hasn't figured out a response when the entire ship bounces hard and cracks in two. The force sends Eli thrown over the side with a sudden, violent snap. Derek's face, pure white, is the last thing she sees as he slides inexorably backwards, into the twisted wood of the ship's rift. She's falling and screaming and there's rain in her eyes and mouth, or maybe it's seawater, and she can't feel anything because she's icy down to her bones.
The expected trauma of water and skin doesn't smash her body open, though. In some strange twist of fate, she meets the surface of the sea with perverted gentleness, an open whirlpool of feathers and softness. It's the complete antithesis to her rough approximation of a bed on deck.
Eli splutters and struggles to tread as she looks up at the threatening primed wall of the ship. She spits saltwater and blood and tears and rain. She feels, all at once, the deadly whirlpool of the sinking ship. Like she's read, it'll draw her forward with inevitable force and she'll be crushed like the bug she is, spun around a god-sized swirl with innumerable metallic spires and the figures of her crew until she's swallowed by the endless ocean. She lets herself drift forward.
Two rock-solid arms wrap around her chest, just beneath her breasts, and she's positively ripped out of the current and thrown like a pebble, skipping along the writhing waves for what feels like miles, dignity long gone and what seems like every bone in her body cracked.
She sinks with gratitude.
**
The return to consciousness is sudden - Eli’s awake, certainly, but doesn’t comprehend anything but the dense, wet feeling of sand against her back and a heavy humidity that lounges across her chest like a particularly disdainful cat at her stepfather’s castle. She opens her eyes.
Green suns; two two spots of bright, impossibly piercing morning-on-dappled-leaves that lever themselves over her face. They swing over her, a flailing mote; once, twice, and then sweep down toward her cheek, where the scratchiest of kisses is pressed to her skin. Eli closes her eyes and allows her senses to fade.
**
Nozomi has never seen a human so close before. Returned to the sea, she ripples like a heat shadow around the shallows, walking on her hands with claws gently gripped in the crumbly sands to avoid being swept out any further by the lazy morning tide. She shakes back her patchy hair and brings her tail around to examine the damage from the sidesweep against a sinking ship on her lower left - the iridescent scales are matted, twisted from the sharp edge of the wooden ruts. She runs one hand along the oily, sleek surface of her tail and probes the rough break with retracted claws, mer-eyesight easily tracing the scales even in near-darkness . Blots of indigo blood ooze out when she presses, only to dissipate quickly in the clear water. She’ll be fine.
Satisfied with her examination, she shakes back her tail and plunges her full body into the shallows, slithering easily through the misty sand that rises with the eddies of currents she produces as she stealthily advances to the shore. When she’s close enough, she coils her tail under herself and pops the tip of her head above the surface.
As the saltwater lens withdraws from her outer eyes, Nozomi blinks streams of seawater from her hair and licks at her mouth, long tongue moving gingerly between fanged teeth. Her vision clear, she watches the human’s golden head bob along the shoreline, clearly hesitant in the doing but purposeful enough as the human - she? Nozomi’s eyes run down the body - rummages in the sand. Her blurred form is hazy from distance as she notices the wreckage of the ship, the skeleton that has washed up alongside her like an immense treasure. Nozomi isn’t sure how to assist - can she even do anything above water besides drag her bleeding fins along the coarse sand? - and slides back under, thinking. Planning. Hoping.
The human cheek, when Nozomi had kissed it, had tasted of sunlight.
Prompt: NozoEli D.E.B.S. AU :3 Nozomi can be Lucy and Nico can be Scud XD I don't really see Maki as Janet, tho, so feel free to change things around :D
This deserves a full fleshed out AU outline for your brilliant prompt!
DEBS: summary and watch. It’s pretty bad; cheesy and terrible graphics, but definitely one of my favorite movies. Also it’s gay and happy endings so.
Eli: (Amy Bradshaw) graduate-age student in her last year at the Super Spy academy, face of the school, the Perfect Score on the secret spy test hidden in the SAT- known for her cool attitude, ruthless efficiency, and knitting patterns
Nozomi: (Lucy Diamond) the Medium, a young supercriminal, heir to the line of villains known for rigging gambling circles and running an international casino scam spanning years of “lucky” draws, recently returned from Japan after some years in hiding
Nico: (Scud) Proves Herself as the snarky one-liner, an excellent bodyguard, athlete, and kind-of-supportive best friend/right hand man to the Medium empireUmi: (Max) Rigid leader of the team consisting of Eli, Kotori, and Maki, she follows the rules by the books and sometimes lets things slides by accident because she’s afraid to think outside the box. Perfect marksmanKotori: (Dominique LOL) Fancy foreign student with a lot of pillows,very sweet once you get to know her and willing to follow orders. Tiniest bit lazy; makes for mistakesHonoka: (Janet) Newer to the team, idolizes Umi and tries to follow her lead but sees the flaws in being too controlling. Likes Eli a lot and copies her approaches when possible. CHaracter arc requires becoming more independent and trusting herself in the face of already-established powers
Not sure where to place first years yet. Anyway.P1: When news comes to the academy that the Medium is back in town, Top Senior Team KUME is assigned to trail the only known associate of the crime boss, Nico. They give the first shift to Honoka, who loses her around the piers. Kotori finds her later at a jewlery store and that’s when the first Medium sighting occurs. Umi and Eli manage to plant a device on Nico. They evesdrop on a conversation b/w her and Nozomi about how Nontan is lonely, and Eli refuses to feel pity!!Sideplot p1:Honoka is concerned that eating every morning at the cafe before briefing is causing her to gain weight. Kotori slaps some sense into her and they DON’T go into a weird subplot of fatshamingP2 KUME is assigned a sting to capture the Medium as their field experience final. Eli is not about to lose her 4.0 so they arrange an operation involving idk something ridiculous and impractical a la canon DEBS, like luring the Medium into a theme park and posing as ride attendants only for one of the coasters to descend into an arena where Nozomi and Nico fight their way out, disabling everyone but Eli who runs into Nozomi as Nontan is making her way downtown from the trap. Nozomi = interested as soon as she lays eyes on Eli. Eli = FUCK I’M GAYSideplot: Nico attempts to dissuade Nozomi from Getting Gayer and looking up Eli. It doesn’t workP3: Dramatic attempts on Nozomi’s part to draw KUME to her Secret Lair which is a loan shark office. Eli bravely volunteers to be the bait and bring Nozomi out so the team can catch her and receive As on the final. Nozomi ends up convincing her to play mario kart and Eli, bewildered, leaves the base with a borrowed copy of Fun Home.Sideplot: KUME buys Mario kart for their dorm at an awkward suggestion from Eli and umi sucks at it. Honoka wins all the tournamentsP4: Eli refuses to admit she might find Nozomi likeable, silly, and beautiful, so she agrees to meet up with Nozomi on an official date and the team springs on her. Nozomi is captured and promises in jail to repent for her sins. Nobody is interested in what she has to say, only in the media/fame from grabbing her.SIDEPLOT: serious bonding conversation between Eli and Umi about what it means to MAYBE be interested in a criminal. Who is a woman.P5: Eli tells her to PROVE that she’s good. Nozomi starts ratting out really intense, violent criminals and the prisions swell. The Academy lets her go and she immediately takes KUME hostage on her Dramatic Supervillian island.SIDEPLOT: Honoka and Kotori join in the Eli/umi Serious Team bonding and everyone group hugs as they’re being lowered into idk a lava pitP6: Eli escapes, tells her friends to go for help, and confronts Nozomi, who eventually Really Repents and accpets her jail time if it means she’ll be able to be with Eli once she gets out. Eli quits being a spy, goes to law school and Nico takes her place on the team.
slides in WHAT UP i hear u want prompts???? how bout bibi performing psychic fire for nozomi??
“After the speakers fizzle out, they give a halfhearted sort of wheeze and a blip of a spark. Nozomi sympathizes- that was a lot of electronica to pour out. Both Nozomi and the speakers wait in hopefully, borderline silence that they won’t be put through the experience again. The lights rise up.
“Let’s go again,” says Eli decisively. “Nico, I think your footwork on the second chorus needs to be more in line with Maki.” Her prim brows settle, furrowed, and she sets a hand on the delicate gold chains crossing her hips, eyes moving out of focus as she rounds up her critiques of the dress rehearsal. In an effort to forget the mind-wipingly chaotic Mad Beatz, Nozomi graciously grants herself a few moments to stare at Eli’s full leather ensemble. She reminds herself to give Kotori a favorable tarot reading later, in thanks for this opportunity.
“I did it perfectly,” Nico says, and messes a bit with her silver belt. It is, alas, slightly too large on her doll-like hips and tips forward off her body even at the tightest notch. Eli goes over to help, winding the edges and tugging experimentally because she can’t stop herself from parenting all over anyone shorter than her, apparently. Nozomi laughs from the fourth row in the empty auditorium and Maki, checking the cant of the bow in her hair with long fingers, makes a face, like what are you looking at?
Eli, who has jumped at Nozomi’s outburst, gives up with Nico and says, “Perhaps Kotori can take a look at that later tonight before we leave.”
“They’re all at the food court across the street,” complains Nico. “Aren’t we done yet?”
“The debut of this song’s tomorrow, live,” Maki says as they return to their places.
“This can be our last one.” Eli signals the sound booth for a second run, the subtle twitch of her fingers like flagging down waitstaff. Nozomi roots around in her pack for earplugs. She finds one, a startling neon-green, and puts that in her left ear as the opening beat rips through the auditorium in jagged, increasing runs of sharp noise. Quickly growing desperate, she ends up with a switchable pencil eraser in the other. The lights drop.
What was Umi doing when she wrote this? Nozomi listens hard to the lyrics and searches underneath the frantic electronica for meaning, for mystery. Instead she hears “existence unknown” and “Nico!” in the same line, and she can’t help it; she laughs until tears threaten to run down her face, hidden by the pulsating music.
By the time they get to the final rendition of the chorus, and Eli pops up, grinning cheekily as in her stage persona, Nozomi has been able to appreciate the intricacies of the quick-steps and turns, choreographed to look like the constant spinning of fire. The music cuts off, and the speaker whines again. No more.
Bibi breathes heavily, holding their final poses until Eli, in the front, begins to lower her arms with the patience of seasons, clearly imaging the applause. Maki and Nico drop at the same slow rate and take their bows, then everyone looks questioningly at Nozomi.
"I loved it,” Nozomi says, and loves the look on Eli’s face even more.
Nozoeli AU where they're scrolling through tumblr with their ship tag in the clubroom and Nico walks in right when they click on something questionable
“Hanayo always tells us not to look-”
“C’mon, can’t hurt to check it out,” Nozomi says invitingly, coaxing the regretful acceptance from the far corner of Eli’s mind - and she is curious - and the screen comes up a dusk-sky blue. Nozomi’s painted nails flick over the keyboard with a smattering of clicking, every bit as loud and obnoxious as the old typewriters, and she puts [email protected] as her username.
“My password is spiritualhorasho,” she tells Eli as the screen loads.
“Okay,” says Eli, who doesn’t know what to do with this information. Nozomi glances around the clubroom, sees that they’re alone, and gives her a little smooch on the nose. Eli is mollified and brushes her hand along Nozomi’s back.
“No… zo… eli,” Nozomi sounds out as she types into the badly-placed search bar like a strip of deep ocean against the color of blueberries.
“Is that what we are called?” Eli asks, and tries to adjust her tone so it doesn’t sound like she hates it. Nozomi is not fooled and laughs, the sound just a bit spiky with mischievousness and curved with I see right through you.
“It’s not so bad,” she says cheerfully as a cute fanart fills the screen. “I’m a little skinny in that photo, but they got my eye color perfect.”
“I like that one,” Eli says, and points as Nozomi scrolls down slowly. It’s a screencap of one of their live performances. The photographer caught Eli and Nozomi singing together, faces dyed blue-purple from the spotlights, leaning in with eyes fixed on each other and something like love moving between them, frozen in time. She thinks the costumes are from a rendition of Start:Dash!.
“This is goo-” Eli chokes. They stare at the screen. The third hit.
“Wow,” Nozomi manages and Eli struggles to breathe, “My breasts are definitely an asset, but not. That much.” She lowers her voice. “Did you want to try that sometime, Elichi?”
The door opens behind them with a creak - Honoka was going to get that oiled, she declared every time they filed into the clubroom, and it’s been four months - and Nico comes in, slamming back the door with her customary surliness right after math lessons. Nozomi moves faster than Eli has ever seen - the laptop is closed within milliseconds and, as if by magic, Nozomi has an idol magazine in her hands and is perusing it like it’s the holy book.
Eli doesn’t have the reflexes for defense and stands frozen, without the heart to tell Nozomi her magazine is upside down. Nico ignores both of them and reaches for the laptop, muttering, “There’s no way I failed that gateway, I’ve gotta look up that rule again.”
