you're an incredibly talented writer. <3 i want you to know that i come back and reread your fics all the time. fuseland doesn't have a lot of writers and your fics are so enjoyable that it kind of feels like reading them for the first time all over again. i hope you're well.
this was such a lovely message to log in to see ! thank you so much for taking the time to send it in. i hope onf will continue to gain fans and we’ll see more writing pop up in the future !! i feel like their mvs could inspire so much it’s a shame there aren’t more writers taking spins on them. that’s a bit of a tangent but anyway -- thanks ! i hope you’re doing alright, too !!
the trust fall posts are giving me a Serious Longing for an update on how they're doing, if you should ever get the inspiration. did they ever tell each other their names? how is seeking shelter different now that they're together? do they sit up late into the night talking about what their lives together could have been before this? what kind of house they'd want, a dog? what kind of dates? these questions keep me up at night
wait… this message made me unreasonably happy. like, the idea that someone would have questions??? about a thing i wrote ???? it made my day without heat feel a little (/lot) better. and i think between freezing and being given these qs is why i went ahead and uh… did a thing
wc: ~ 1200warnings: mentions of apocalyptic-y things; it’s a continuation of the trust fall world so if you wanted it to end where it already did, this isn’t for you
If you close your eyes and focus just on the streams of sunlight on your face, you can forget for a moment that the world is a wasteland. It would be easier still if you could drown out the sound of the yowling dogs pacing on the other side of the glass. At this point, you’re not sure if their madness is from a plague or from hunger and cruelty of what now remains. You keep your hand pressed against the line where the door fits against the paneled wall for good measure.
There’s a rustle behind you, followed by Hoshi beckoning you with a matter of fact, “There’s a back door, Daydream. Let’s get outta here.” You look over your shoulder to him, hesitant to move from your position of reinforcement. “Let’s go home,” he reiterates.
Something in the word home, or in the notion that home can still exist, is the nudge you need to move.
Both of you are quick about it all the same.
The backroom of the store is a mess of long-abandoned crates and knocked over shelving. It’s a maze on its own. But sure enough, on the other side of it is a heavy door leading out to a back alley. With no frantic animals waiting on the other side.
Hoshi’s hand takes yours, as if you might not know the way.
It’s been four and a half weeks – if you’ve been keeping track of days correctly – since the two of you arrived, exhausted, onto these city streets. Over that time, both of you have gotten to know the area you’ve been scavenging and living in well enough that his touch might just be affection rather than a precaution.
Home has two doors before anyone can even get to the stairs. The first one, with its blue paint almost entirely chipped off, leads into what had once been a small lobby of sorts with a wall of mailboxes. It’s only purpose now is to keep the table you push up against the front door once you’ve gotten back. The second door is metal, and used to need a passcode to be unlocked. It took a couple days of work, but Hoshi and you have found a plank of wood slid into brackets on either side of the frame to be effective enough at keeping it shut.
Even so, it feels safer that the apartment you’ve claimed as your own is on the sixth floor.
The way Hoshi sighs upon entering sounds like one of relief.
In another life, it’s a sigh he’d give upon coming home from work. The whole place would be warm, the walls decorated with things that pleased you both, the fridge and cabinets filled with fresh food from the store. Maybe even the same store you had just been inside. Once upon a time, that store was good for far more than just escaping snapping jaws and wild eyes.
You walk across the creaking floor and let yourself collapse onto the mattress. Your gaze lingers on the ceiling for a moment before shifting to the window. In the distance, there’s smoke still wafting out of the sinkhole that had opened up some ways away. No amount of doors and makeshift locks would help in that scenario.
“I need you to check this out,” Hoshi breaks you out of grim thoughts. You turn and sit up at the same time he takes a seat on the mattress beside you. The two of you fit into a familiar formation with your head upon his shoulder and his arm looped through yours.
“What is it?” you ask as he starts to unfold a stiff, water-damaged paper.
“I found it in that pharmacy a couple days ago.” His tone takes on one of an apology. You shift to give him a puzzled look. “I didn’t really know if it was worth keeping. Or mentioning. But I did,” he tries to explain, “And now I am.”
“But what is it?” you repeat yourself.
“I guess I don’t really know. But there was a stack of them. Like someone wanted them to be found.” With that, he runs one hand over the wrinkled surface of the map. On one spot is a circle, and though the ink has bled some the text can still be made out: you are here. Further west someone has drawn an arrow and two stars. There’s a messy caption for this location as well: aliases welcome.
“It could be bad.” Your instinct is certainly not to trust it. “A trap of some kind.”
“I know,” Hoshi agrees. “But it might not be. Maybe it’s been long enough that people are… like… finding a way again.” You hum non-committedly to the idea. Hope hasn’t been entirely absent from your life as of late. But there are limitations all the same. “I could go check it out first, if you wanted.”
That gets a stronger reaction from you. You straighten out of your comfortable position against him to give a serious look. “No way. We go together or not at all.”
Hoshi gives the faintest of laughs. He knows it’s serious. And yet he can’t help such a reaction when your definitiveness serves as a reminder of emotion forged between the two of you. “It was only a suggestion,” he tells you.
“Well, I didn’t like it.”
He smiles this time. Whatever heaviness you’d felt before lifts, at least enough for you to simper back. “Okay. Together or not at all. I love you.” He says it all fluidly, as if each word is as casual as the next. It’s a kind of levity you’re not sure you’ll ever get used to. Not when it feels just as important every time Hoshi says he loves you.
The first time he hadn’t even said it outloud.
He’d woken you up after you’d fallen asleep waiting for a storm to pass inside a turned-over truck on the road. With the clouds dispersed, the abnormal neons of sunset had taken over the sky. It might have been something in the way the colors smeared together that evening that made Hoshi decide he couldn’t hold onto it any longer.
“Hey, Daydream,” he said as a means of getting you to stop just before you stepped out of the box truck. “I want to give you something.”
To this day, you don’t know where he found. It must have been one of the wrecked houses the two of you had sought shelter in between the cafe and here. Sometimes you wonder who this simple locket had once belonged to. Were they still alive out there somewhere? And what had that simple star engraved in the middle of the silver oval meant to them?
You hadn’t known why Hoshi wanted to give it to you. You accepted it all the same, and he didn’t offer any explanation. He didn’t prompt you to do anything with it; though he’d grinned when you’d put it on.
It took three days for you to think to open it.
Nestled within the spot where one could keep a picture was a small piece of paper; a corner torn off from somewhere else. On it, in pencil gray, were the simple words: love, Soonyoung.
just reread "paradigm shift" and it is so so good. There is a charm in rereading because even though I knew how it would end, it was catching from word 1 and I was just as entertained (maybe more?) as the first time. Too bad I'm on my phone but there are a few sentences I wish I could quote because, as usual, it is very well written 😆 hoping your are ok (this is the most we get these days) (also shua in dark aus is just... Idk I'm writing one myself and, to me, it weirdly fits him?)
thanks for sharing your kind thoughts! it always stuns me a little, still, when someone says they actually have reread something of mine. and it’s really nice to hear that you can enjoy it despite knowing how it ends. that’s really is a compliment that means a lot ❤
okay is a relative term nowadays, or moreso than usual. i’ve been trying my best, i guess, is the most i can say.
i don’t think there’s a reasonable explanation for why some members seem to fit with dark aus. but shua has a kind guy-next-door/comforting charm to him, to me, a lot of time. so maybe that’s why it’s easy to imagine turning to him when things go wrong.
i hope you’ll let me know when/if you post your au with him!
💗Random ask game !! share some of your favorite lines you’ve ever written or ones that you’re really proud of, either from your wips or from something you’ve already published!! share entire paragraphs if you want. (don’t feel pressured to answer if you don’t want to) 💗
ahhh this is nice !! thanks for sending it my way! it’s nice to be encouraged to think positively about your own works. i felt like i didn’t quite know how to go about answering it, though, since i feel like i’ve totally forgotten about some things i’ve written lol
there’s a line i’ve written semi-recently in a wip that i enjoy just, like, the sound of it??? it probably sounds like nonsense out of context but:
You wonder if it’s prejudice or reality when his lips taste salty against your own.
also, i guess in terms of being proud i went back to my jihoon fic “are you there?” because i remember spending a lot of time thinking about how to describe consciousness in any way without referencing the body. because of the concept of the fic i found myself super aware of all the times where i usually reference physical sensation, and while i didn’t quite manage to separate things entirely, i’m still happy with this bit:
His laughter comes from nowhere and from all around you at once. And suddenly, you have the privilege of knowing butterflies have never really been in your chest. They must have always really been a fluttering kind of elation inside your head...
can i say, as a writer i really love your passion for writing! you always go above and beyond even if your work doesnt get much attention (seventeen fics in general doesnt get many notes if its not smut :((() and like... god i struggle so much with not giving up because of the lack of attention.. seeing you pull through and share your art nonetheless is honestly inspiring 💗💗
ahh well this message is a dollop of sunshine for the day !! i’m a little flabbergasted to be called inspiring, but i’m glad if i can somehow have that effect.
it’s true that lack of feedback can be discouraging. it’s natural to want positive attention, especially when you feel excited about something you’ve created. and i’ve certainly had my days where i feel like ‘well, if i dont want to write the nsfw stuff that seems garner the most engagement, maybe that’s a sign this isn’t the right forum for my stuff’ – but it’s maybe worth noting there that what when i’m discouraged it’s with the medium of sharing my fics and not the fics themselves (and it’s also not the case that 100% of nsfw stuff takes off, either. but i do understand why it can feel that way to sfw writers).
but i’m genuinely in place where my mindset is essentially ‘writing is my hobby, i do it when and because i want to, and i post things publicly bc why not? in case there’s someone who wants to read something like it’. i’ve been a fic writer on and off over the years in different fandoms. but even when i’ve been ‘off’ - i pretty much always have story ideas floating around my head. so i write because what else am i going to do with those ideas? i could (i have) just enjoy them in my own thoughts and let them drift away, but it is fun and satisfying on its own to create them more fully. even if it’s sometimes only in little snippets. and there’s the added bonus that by throwing them out into the world, sometimes people who enjoy them come across them. and, apparently, even be inspiring on occasion ???
this reply came out way longer than i intended. but my point is really just that it really makes me genuinely smile to hear that my posting the silly stories that cross my mind can be inspiring somehow. and i hope that you’ll carry on with writing. hold on to the things that make you excited to write. don’t try to interpret what silence from the internet means. people are more alike than we think in many ways; if you love what you’re writing, there’s someone else out in this big world who will love it too. and don’t undervalue what your own enjoyment of your work is worth, either!
@inlovewithasa replied to your post: like falling water:
I love this story and I’ve read three times but I don’t exactly understand what the Voyagers and the whole community is and it works? Like is there a movie or book that I should reference to?
aah, that confusion is purely a My Bad tbh. i usually try to have enough in the world for people to be able to have some kind of sense of what the general situation is when i run away with au ideas, but alas, my magic!au is a mess without any kind of movie or book to blame for it lmao. the only other thing you could “reference” would be the other fics i’ve written in the same au. which is not an excuse for world building in like falling water being unclear.
alternatively, i can let you take a peek at my mess of a world building doc for that au --
so maybe that clears uuuuh some things up ???? or maybe not at all, because i am A Mess
paranormal!au Mingyu was soooo perfect. You wrote it so amazingly like it was BEAUTIFUL. Words can't describe how amazed I was. The beginning, the middle and the end! <3 i want to cry. it was just WOW. one of the best ever.
oh wow !!! i’m honestly so surprised by the positive response alien!mingyu has gotten. when i was writing it i kept pausing to just ponder what exactly had possessed me to make me think that it was possibly a good idea. so to go from posting it feeling like people would at most go “well… that’s different” to you saying it’s “one of the best” ????? i ??? i mean – just count me out, i’ll be melting into a happy puddle if you need me !!!!
Hello I wanted to tell you that Sanctuary was incredible I love so much how you write!!! It really makes me want to write but I'm kinda hesitant because english is not my mother tongue, but hey, your writings still give me a lot of inspiration. I definetly think that if you think someone has a talent for something you should tell them and encourage them about it! And keep it up with this au because it's amazing♥
i ??? make you want to write ????
(at the exact moment, veille melted into an incomprehensible mess)
but jokes aside – that really is such an incredible thing to hear. if you do decide to write something, i hope you’ll shoot me a heads up so i can check it out !!! i certainly understand some hesitance, but if you feel inspiration in any way then my advise is always to give it a shot ❤
as for the au, i have a lot of drifting ideas and will probably eventually write more for it when i pin down a solid one, because i really enjoy the trust fall world, which is part of why it’s particularly amazing to get messages like this saying you’ve liked it too (:
