#xiaohu

[pin-yao]

[jackeylover]

✫ WEIBO GAMING ✫

SEMIFINALISTS WORLDS 2023

WeiWei - TheShy - Crisp - Light - XIaohu

bonus TheShy:

[jennylosesthejiggle]

I’m sorry tumblrverse for abandoning you for so long. But look what I made (granted he’s almost 5 months old now)

[shysheeperz]

[alexmey-does-an-arts]

more of these guys (english translation under cut)

[thanidiel]

Prompt Eighteen: "Turn a Blind Eye"

Put yourself to work making beautiful things, and that is all the world cares to concern itself with.

If you paint, no one cares when your spittle lands on their faces.

If you sing, then no one is really listening to how you talk to them.

If you write, no one thinks that it’s wrong to have to mind your every base needs.

If you carve, and you polish, the maid walks around with teeth pushed a half-ilm too high into those flushed gums and no one says anything. 

Sew, and sew gorgeously, and sew in gold and lace, then no one complains and everyone bites their lip when you prick them like dolls for display.

Love, and love fully, and love with the right words and the tender moments, and no one can bear to weigh your personhood against that love. No gravity and its hungry fangs; no spectre with a mother’s eyes; no red-twined pool of life; no love to the end of all loves. No one. 

To be an artist means that no one minds the dirty little pacts they sign with you. Anything to be closer to you, the privilege of seeing that dazzle light up from the source. A morbid affair where they walk out a little more used, a little more hesitant on the step, and a little more loose on the bargains they’ll make with you, over and over again.

And they walk out that door, and they fasten their clothes, and they wipe away the pretty smears and they’ll lie to people later about those wounds. And when others ask of the time spent with you, they’ll tell them that the experience was transcendent, and profound. To be touched by you was a trigger of metamorphosis. An intimacy inaccessible by any other soul; you, a creature of niche and hook. 

Of course others would never understand the sheer humanness of it all; that celebration of everything so much more meaningful than life at its manifest, somehow able to be narrowed down to your inked skin and the picture-perfect part to how you hold your lip. An intoxication that bears down like ill-fit skin in that moment, but they’ll always speak of fondly.

You cannot tell me that any mechanism throbs stronger.

You cannot tell me that their blood sings free.

You are a lantern, and the bugs buzz.

The bugs are looking at you. 

You cannot.

You.

Every pleasure has been born of this.

Love is an art, and you, an artist.

That brush begs for you.

They beg for you.

“Encore.”

You.

And that’s where you give them it.

Here, is where the world begins.

Where the dazzle comes from.

Where it all lights up.

You always do.

Showtime.

You.

[snakemoltsiren]

2. Aberrant

Severine sat on a tufted leather couch, leaning back into the corner with her booted feet sticking out into the air. Soon she would get up and dance as performers came and went off of the stage, but for now she sat, flanked by familiar bodies. Otolin on one side, his hand lightly grasping her ankle and Rose on the other, elbow to elbow. The drink that Xiaohu had mixed and Breandan had delivered with a smile was sweating condensation across her palm and she sipped it occasionally, waiting for the alcohol to slide into her limbs.

After she performed she would joke about being nervous. About needing another drink.

The truth was that she was never nervous. Walking out on stage with a folksy smile, with a wink to Egrine and a flip of her hair was as much a part of the costume as the wardrobe she’d carefully picked. When she was on that stage she wasn’t afraid of flubbing, or the audience, or tripping over her feet.

The only thing she feared when she was up on that stage, was the thing she had taken up there with herself.

A bolus of notes sat in the back of her throat like a bite of food too big to swallow. Meant to be spat out or choked on. When she took a breath and sang it out, she held back the melody that wanted to spill forth and instead sang what she wanted people to hear.

A song lodged itself in her mind and she hummed it when she wasn’t thinking. She only realized what she sang when she saw strangers' faces turning towards her. When hands went slack. When bodies swayed in. She bit her tongue swollen, chewed her cheeks and lips bloody and kept quiet. Only spoke.

Her lazy way of speaking was a curb to hold back the refrain that kept her up at night. That had to be silenced by drowning it in alcohol or starving it without nourishment for as long as her body could stand it.

It tripped out with each laugh.

It crescendoed through each sighing reassurance.

She knew Breandan always listened for it. The only other person who had any idea. What would he do, she wondered, if it slipped through the gaps in her teeth. If one day every head in the club lifted and began to sway in turn. Did he see the dancing bodies the same way she did?

Did he believe her at all when she said there was no problem? That every thing was fine?

Did she believe it either?

white dove - koda

[vermilionwinds]

18. Devil’s Advocate

[CW: Alcoholism]

Just one for the road. It made everything warmer, right? (She so hated the cold) Stop the shivering Keep the bones right where they belong Let them swim and sway The closest she can still get to the ocean.

What was a good memory without a drink? She raises a glass. “Ta our arrangemen’, then.” She raises a glass. “To friendship, and looking forward.” She raises a glass. “T’ new friends, an’ new business associates!” She raises a glass. “Ta chance encounters, an’ wherever the hells you got those sunglasses.”

And so many glasses are pressed into her hand blackberry sour fine Malbec whiskey and pomegranate double of rye, cherry bourbon and cold brew on the side grapefruit and tequila watery ale with grain like sawdust

This was right. It was a pairing, a cocktail with two notes. drink and company, company and drink

Words as soft as silk that say “I’ll tell you when you’re drunker,” “Talk like this is better in person over a big bottle of something,” “Is that still your first glass?”

She never needs convincing, but she’d trust every word from those blue-tinged lips Thrills every time their fingers brush against each other at the neck of a whiskey bottle Everything made sense if she said so Pour herself into her schema What did a bottle do but give liquid shape And what shape did she have without

And it lets her feel without breaking Cry without shaking Numbness then catharsis Unlocking doors that she keeps closed In front of people she hardly knows- Halls gathering dust that beg for company Vulnerability with plausible deniability The escape hatch of “sorry, I was in my cups.”

So she washes herself away Lets the waves crash against the shore Wearing rock to sand

But as she sits at the thousandth thousandth bar To order her third drink of the night And thrils at the prospect of a friend Opening a new keg for her nameday tomorrow night A voice at her shoulder says something new,

“Going to nurse that problem of yours?”

“...It’s less of a problem, an’ more of a talent.”

“Yeah, whatever gives you your fun with easing the shake in your hands.”

and that for once gives her pause.