a lesson in fluidity.

[uphollows]

#uphollows. indie, low stakes/low activity multi muse, written by isaac. 21+ sideblog to @rassvetiye. i will follow from there.

click here for guidelines and roster.

[geniusoflove]

im demiplatonic ill only be friends w ppl im friends with

[geniusoflove]

but ill fuck anything

[vitalphenomena]

THE EVER-PRESENT IRONY OF PYOTR BEING KNOWN AS THE WOLF IS THAT HE IS, AT TIMES, MORE LIKE KAZIMIR'S DOMESTICATED MUTT. There's something liberating about submission. For Pyotr, it does remove some sense of accountability or responsibility. If he's doing what he's told, you can really only place blame on the man—the immortal demon—who told him what to do to begin with.

Maverick is built like Kazimir, but they move differently. Pyotr has always considered Kazimir a polite and refined individual. Maverick carries his body like a threat.

Pyotr is big, too. Taller than he is buff, sure, but big all the same. He puffs his chest up without having to think about it. This is just what you do when someone approaches you like Maverick has. It doesn't matter how long you've been amicable.

"I never said I was a victim."

"But you know I have a really great sense of humor." So if this all seems like a joke to Maverick, maybe that's by design. Pyotr laughs. It is frigid, bitter—not his usual boisterous display.

[uphollows]

maverick chooses to laugh with pyotr despite how it enrages him. the humor of it is as hollow as a dead tree. privately, he reminds himself that he didn't come to la with the strict presumption of it being any different from all other corners of the world. the worst of its offerings always try to inflict themselves upon him, wherever he is. if he had, he might've forgotten his favorite ways of handling them when they show up.

it is interesting, though. obnoxious, actually, how quickly everything has become so transparent. like pyotr and his ilk cant help themselves.

as the laugh lays itself down in the back of maverick's throat, he folds his lips under his teeth. his chest expands with a preparative swell, like it wants to laugh again. the stillness it creates, some parody of calculation, is what pyotr gets as far as warnings go before maverick has thrown him across the room by his jaw.

motivated too much by the suddenness of his contempt, maverick hardly thinks about what he wants out of this. he stalks forward to close the distance again, idly adjusting the sleeve of his shirt.

[mcflymemes]

PROMPTS FROM NORMAL PEOPLE *  assorted dialogue from the book by sally rooney, some lines slightly changed to suit a roleplay format, adjust as necessary

i'm not a religious person, but i do sometimes think god made you from me.

i have a sense that real life is happening somewhere far away, happening without me, and i don't know if i will ever found out where it is or become part of it.

no one can be independent of other people completely.

life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.

he probably won't come back.

what we have now, we can never have back again.

for me, the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain i used to feel, of being unworthy.

we've done a lot of good for each other.

people can really change one another.

you should go. i'll always be here. you know that.

generally i find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves.

most people go through their whole lives without ever really feeling that close with anyone.

life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.

even in memory, i will always find that moment unbearably intense.

i have never believed i'm fit to be loved by any person.

yes. that was it. the beginning of my life.

it's funny the decisions you make because you like someone.

your whole life is different.

i think we're at that weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions.

if people appear to behave pointlessly in grief, it's only because human life is pointless, and this is the truth that grief revealed.

i don't know what's wrong with me.

i don't know why i can't be like normal people.

it feels powerful to put an experience down in words.

people are a lot more knowable than they think they are.

there's always been something inside me that men have wanted to dominate.

i want my life to mean something.

a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured.

that's the only part of myself i want to protect, the part that exists inside you.

there's something so corrupt and sexy about it.

i wish you didn't have to go.

i wish you could stay the night.

life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.

literature moves me.

it almost sounds sexual.

you learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied.

it's time you'll never get back.

time is real. the money is also real.

we've done a lot of good for each other.

the snow keeps falling.

hopefully i have changed, you know, as a person. but honestly, if i have, it's because of you.

he does have immaculate taste.

it's not like this with other people.

[name], would you ever fuck off?

you lean in expecting resistance, and everything just falls away in front of you.

i would lie down and die for you at any minute.

sometimes, someone will make eye contact with me, like a bus conductor or a person looking for change, and i'll feel shocked that anyone can actually see me.

we could be in a room full of people and my eyes would always meet yours, just to find that you had already been looking.

there's something comforting about it, something good about feeling sort of numb, detached from it all.

it was different with you, didn't have to play any games with you. it was just real.

no one is ever gonna hurt you like that again. everything's gonna be all right. trust me.

i love you, and i'm not gonna let anything like that happen to you again.

we have done so much good for one another.

[uphollows]

happy selfie saturday from me and all the turtles at the botanic garden.

[cheaphalloweencostume]

god give me a sign but not that one i just saw

[vitalphenomena]

PYOTR KNOWS THE FEELING WELL. If you accused him of evoking it in Maverick purposefully, you wouldn't be wrong. It'd be fucked up if Maverick did that to him, of course—but Pyotr is desperate, generally speaking, but also in the specific sense that he wants to remind himself that he and Maverick still have something in common.

Maybe.

He doesn't know the succinct, pithy answer to that question. It's not like he's never thought about it—the last ten years in particular have included many sleepless days pacing grimy basements, or the confines of his bedroom, with its blackout curtains. He tells himself he has always done what he is doing for Kazimir. If not him, it would be some other brute.

The reality is that he is a frog boiling alive. What started with petty shakedowns and low-volume drug trafficking brought him to Kazimir's vast, nefarious empire. Basic survival became providing a certain high quality of life for his daughter. (Maybe for himself, too.)

"It's too late to ask me that. This is the way things are. They were like this before me. They will always be like this. Don't you worry you're really out of your depth?"

[uphollows]

the majority of what maverick hears is that he is expected to roll over and take it, which is an expectation that he has grown less and less suited to meeting. this is the way things are. it just about turns his stomach, wondering if pyotr simply submitted to such an idea out of fear, or if there's something about it that satisfies him despite the growing expense.

it makes him think what those decades living with nik were like. being able to feel the degradation of his soul every time the sharp end of nik's affection made maverick complicit in his cruelty, endlessly shaving at the line between what maverick would and would not accept. by the time he decided it was worth preserving, there was hardly anything of it left. if he doesn't use it, it'll atrophy.

as pyotr speaks, maverick closes some of the distance between them. with each heavy step the air seems to pressurize in the room.

" they will always be like this. " maverick narrates back to pyotr. " that must be so comforting to you. getting to just be a victim of the circumstances instead of being accountable for any of them. " he shakes his head. " what a fucking joke. "

[horrorcontentdaily]

LORNA SHORE Prison of Flesh (2025)

[vitalphenomena]

THE PROBLEM IS THAT KAZIMIR WOULDN'T SPEAK TO MAVERICK AT ALL. If—if!—Kazimir deigned to give Pyotr's friend and his own new competitor an audience, it would probably be to inflect torturous hellfire on Maverick's children while Maverick, beaten, was forced to watched. Then again. Kazimir has people for that, too.

People like Pyotr.

For once, "I'm not playing a game. Any kind of game. He will find you, and your family, and he will make you beg for it to stop, and it never will. He's brought hell with him. Don't you get that?"

[uphollows]

like always, when his family is mentioned he doesn't first think of the twins as they are: both of them grown and strong in their own right, fully capable like he raised them to be. they're still little children in his memories first glance, calling upon a kind of savage protectiveness that only a father knows.

but you have to think of what it's like for a creature like maverick to hear such a thing as hell, after everything he's seen rise and fall. everything he's done to live this long, and to protect those kids.

" what're you doing working for a man like that, pyotr? "

[uphollows]

need y’all to know that maverick knows how to do vocal fry screams and death growls really well and unironically flexes that on black veil brides in the car. like, 2010’s black veil brides.

[id1eyouth]

A quiet hum of approval slips from him at that, the sound low in his throat like he's just been handed exactly the right answer. A finger runs around the crystal of his glass.

"Trouble for the sake of it?" His gaze drags—not rudely, but certainly not innocently—before settling back on Jayne's eyes. "That sounds reckless."

[uphollows]

" at a certain point, a word like reckless starts to lose meaning to me. unless i give it some. " as we've said, jayne is sensitive to the feeling of attention. all the shapes it takes, to include the feeling of someones eyes on him.

his posture opens, his arm draping on the back of his chair, willing to be looked at like a painting on display. " you seem ... well behaved. what's the most reckless thing you've ever done? "

[vitalphenomena]

BORING? Boring? Him? Really? Does Maverick actually want to stay friends after this little standoff? If he's going to imply Pyotr Andreyev Kumarin is a boring individual, Pyotr can only assume Maverick is trying to burn bridges.

"It's easy for you to talk to me like this," Pyotr observes, "Because I am really friendly."

"But this isn't how things go when you're speaking to him."

[uphollows]

give me a break. maverick's eyes roll skyward. he sighs like a punctured tire until it becomes a chest born laugh.

he feels like he is having to fight too hard to get pyotr to respect what he says, which makes his fingers want to twitch into fists; if pyotr was not his friend, the buck would not have stopped at some arrogant foot soldiers. this is maverick being friendly.

" talk to me how he would, then. make me want to play this game with you. "

[vitalphenomena]

PYOTR DOESN'T REALLY HAVE A CHOICE, HERE. Maybe those men, those reckless and surely supernaturally-inclined footsoldiers, mean—meant—nothing to Kazimir Volkov. But Pyotr can't help it. He struggles with the guilt. The absence of them, an absence that slots neatly alongside the hundreds of losses before theirs.

"We had rules here before you got bored in the French fucking Quarter."

So why should Maverick's way of life prevail?

"I am trying. To help you."

[uphollows]

" this is boring me. " all of this, frankly, feels very beneath him. turf wars, the schemes. not that maverick didn't have his own hand in it at one point, in some past life. with several centuries under his belt, it all just starts to feel like playground games for people who can't stomach themselves enough to sit still.

" your rules bore me. i've already told you how you can help me. i don't know how much more direct i can be, but you won't like it if i have to get creative. i'd rather stay friends. "

[vitalphenomena]

MAVERICK IS ONE OF THE FEW INDIVIDUALS WHO CAN LOOK PYOTR UP AND DOWN WITHOUT HAVING TO GIVE THEMSELVES A CRICK IN THE NECK. This in and of itself is infuriating.

"In this country, we are innocent until proven guilty."

"Their affiliation with me, or my employer, is not a death sentence because—what? What? You're cross with me? You're cross with me, and you're taking it out on them?"

[uphollows]

the conflict here is all starting to feel as real as stage combat to him, and he struggles to take it seriously.

" i'm not stupid, pytor. i know what they were doing. if i can't trust you to keep your business out of my establishment, when you know my rules, then yes. that makes me very cross with you. "

" that also makes this your fault for sending your little boys out where you knew they would get hurt. don't forget to mention that part to your employer. "

[id1eyouth]

" well, i like attention. i always have. " / @uphollows

"Sure." Zachary's smile tilts, one corner of his mouth lifting just a little higher than the other. "I think most people do, right? It's a hard thing to turn down." His gaze lingers a moment. "...does it get you into trouble?"

[uphollows]

jayne chews an interesting taste out of the question. " oh, sure. i don't see the point to attention if it doesn't get me into at least a little bit of trouble. what else is there? "

[vitalphenomena]

"Loser? Lose? Lose what? What am I losing, here? What have I lost at? Tell me."

[uphollows]

" so far? two. " maverick scans pyotr, measuring him from tip to tail, then looks away.

" and any other ones of yours that i keep finding doing weird shit with my bottle girls in the liquor storage. you don't want dead touts, then tell them they should stop coming to my club. or don't. they'll learn eventually. "

[vitalphenomena]

STELLA WON'T SAY THIS OUT LOUD, OF COURSE SHE WON'T, BUT WHEN YOU CONSIDER HER CIRCUMSTANCES, AND WHAT SHE'S CURRENTLY BEING PRESENTED WITH, WOULDN'T YOU AGREE THAT SHE HAS THE PATIENCE OF A SAINT?

"Lying to yourself," she's going to regret this, "Is still lying. You're not being fair to me."

[uphollows]

you should imagine what he was like as a young boy, unseasoned, and first learning the lengths he would go to in testing a moral authority for its fallibility. described by many former teachers as the most effective form of birth control on the market.

" grow up. " he sneers. stella's entitlement has surfaced a rotten taste in his mouth. " why do you think i owe you fairness? who taught you that? "