apricitous
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“What if,” Aventurine mutters, “it isn’t zero, then? I could bet on it being nonzero. And maybe I’d win.”
“Ha!” Ratio scoffs. “You do not believe that.”
Anger. He can work with anger, he can work with provocation. Manipulation. Ignorance. Anything but the unsteady, trembling emotion that is weakness, that is the one monstrous thing he can never address—
Steady, steady breaths.
“Why,” he returns, “do you even ask, Ratio? Are you here to gloat at my defeat? Ah, yes—finally, a gamble that I will certainly lose. A perfect time to—”
“Is it impossible for your diminutive neurons to connect,” Ratio’s book shuts with a resounding snap. It echoes like a bullet, ricocheting between the walls of Aventurine’s chest, until it descends into the heaviness itself. “And suppose that others do not truly wish for your death?”
Aventurine is stricken by Hanahaki disease. For the first time in years, he finds himself unable to gamble his life.
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these, our bodies, possessed by light by apricitous
Fandoms: 崩坏：星穹铁道 | Honkai: Star Rail (Video Game)
02 Feb 2024
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I’ll see you tomorrow. I love you both. Do you understand?
“I need to,” Dan Heng reaches for the notebook. Ren lets it drop onto his palm; the pages flutter between them, white as bone, the red-ribbon bookmark rippling like a laceration. “We need to find him—”
“—Jing Yuan,” Ren mutters. A hand raised to shield the face, the hint of a snarl curling up against it. Between the cracks, where light shines through, his eyes flash red. Dull, slow, like blood stolen from a dying body. “What did you do?”
Haunted by memories, Jing Yuan meets the ghosts of his past lovers.
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IN WHICH I FORGET WHAT BLOOD BELONGS TO YOU (AND WHAT BELONGS TO ME) by apricitous
Fandoms: 崩坏：星穹铁道 | Honkai: Star Rail (Video Game)
27 Sep 2023
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“Heal yourself,” Ren hisses, flitting wildly from wound to wound.
“I can’t heal,” Dan Heng’s hands are ghosts over his fallen body, fluttering like fallen birds. Blood streams down the planes of his form, flickering between furled and unfurled. Red clawing into newly-uncovered skin, lacerated wounds. “I did not inherit that power. I do not remember it.”
“No,” Ren says. His eyes teeter dangerously into flame, fingers twitching around his shoulders. Battle cuts the edges right back into him, heedless of body, of flesh. “You must. You are not allowed to die.”
While lost in the depths of an overgrown planet, Ren and Dan Heng reach an impasse.
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So he’d known, before he’d seen it—the note, haphazard and ink-stained, on the kitchen counter, the abandoned set of keys. A hasty explanation he could barely care to read. Bear to read.
He doesn’t remember the contents. It must have been meaningless. Perhaps, he thinks, it was simply that they were bad for each other.
But why did it matter? Why did he care? He would bleed out if his lover asked for it. But that sentiment, it seemed, was not shared.
After all these months, Ren still hasn't gotten over their breakup.
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There is a man on the other side of the bridge.
In the emerging darkness, Kaveh’s rational mind hauls the impossible weight of the rest of him. In this way he calls to reason, even as the ground cradles his feet and sways; he carries all of himself, torso over limb over limb, out of the bodies of impulse.
But a siren song rises like smoke from the other bank—thin, brittle, enduring. The vision of this man clings to the edges of his sentimentality, pale clouds cut loose around his form. There is a man on the other side of the bridge, and Kaveh loves to take refuge in beautiful things, so he must be beautiful.
Alhaitham is either a night vision or the centerpiece of a very beautiful dream.
Recent bookmarks
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in my dreams (I see the ghost of our past) by mellllting
Fandoms: 崩坏：星穹铁道 | Honkai: Star Rail (Video Game)
19 Jul 2023
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Dan Heng didn't think much of dreams, yet after being plagued by vivid dreams, he couldn't ignore the possibility that there was more to them than what meets the eye.
Series
- Part 1 of the only thing that doesn't die is love
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Bookmarked by apricitous
24 Jul 2023
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It starts as a pinky promise when they’re eight. Something Alhaitham sincerely doubts Kaveh remembers at all.
Bookmarked by apricitous
26 Mar 2023
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“I’m curious,” Alhaitham continues with a quirk of the brow, “How would you define dreams? Are dreams not abstractions that wisdom rejects?”
“As a child, I was told that I could either go off to become an engineer, or live out in the streets chasing delusions and waste my genius.” Kaveh scoffs in bitter recollection. “I’m used to rejection.”
In which Kaveh spends a lifetime dreaming.
Bookmarked by apricitous
25 Jan 2023
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cut the world to size (to the halcyon days) by birdsofpassage
Fandoms: 原神 | Genshin Impact (Video Game)
13 Jan 2023
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Kaveh blinks again, and then the world falls back into place.
“What’s wrong?” a voice asks him from the side, and when he swivels his head around there stands Alhaitham, in his black turtleneck and chartreuse jacket and quizzical expression, and when Kaveh looks up again he finds that the sky is gone.
Kaveh experiences his very first dream.
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Bookmarked by apricitous
11 Jan 2023
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The difference between a labyrinth and a maze is that a labyrinth has one path but a maze has many.
Alhaitham is lying in front of him, breathing shallowly. Kaveh cannot tell if he is asleep or unconscious, but it probably doesn’t matter. He is lying in their bed or he is sinking into a pond filled with lotuses or he is on display like a statue on a bed of marble or he is trapped in the roots of Irminsul – or he is in all of these places at once because this is in Kaveh’s mind, and his head is bursting with the ways that Alhaitham could be lying before him.
Kaveh touches Alhaitham, not with his hands but with his eyes. He takes in the shape of Alhaitham’s body piece by piece, from the tips of his fingers up the slope of his arm towards the curve of his face. “Vision happens in the brain, not in the eyes,” he remembers Alhaitham telling him at some point in the past. It feels like the words are echoing around him, whispers layering over each other.
The wire that attaches to Alhaitham’s earpiece is pulsating; something fluorescent is flowing out of it. Kaveh is strangely convinced that Alhaitham’s mind is coming out of his head and that substance is full of temptation.
Bookmarked by apricitous
10 Jan 2023