telstradi-council replied to your photoset “¦this is only her humble tenant.” every time I think I’d reached…”
I love this, and all the associated headcanons. … “Poopsie”
// lmao oh my god I’m glad that you enjoy that. Jinah is probably one of the few characters I have that can have a shadow creature living in her and not turn it into angst//
“…this is only her humble tenant.”
every time I think I’d reached my Ultimate Limit in thinking up self-indulgent AUs, I never disappoint myself and end up with yet another bullshit verse that I end up thinking entirely too much about
headcanons and details under readmore
There are flecks of ashes in his hair, and a few cuts adorning his face and hands. His jacket is torn and patched, and when Hui jin sees that his shirt – even this version of him seemed to prefer black shirts – has a slight bump around his chest, he immediately guesses that his missing scarf must be staunching a chest wound. He watches himself leap to dodge a horribly misshapen limb from a horribly misshapen creature, and fire crossbow bolts into its midsection. He watches as he resorts to a dagger and rolls onto the ground as a blow that would have shattered his face whizzes above his head – he then bolts back onto his feet and slashes out with his weapon as he draws near enough to his target.
His right hand was shaking as it clutched at the exact spot the him in the mirror seemed to have tied up with his scarf. “I’ve fought that thing many times.” He said, his voice flat. “I won’t be putting so much energy into it unless I wanted to convince myself that there was something different with this fight.”
He paused. The him in the mirror had wrenched his dagger out of the now unmoving corpse of the creature, and was stabbing it again, although it was, even to the onlooker of the mirror, clearly dead. Hui jin’s hand stayed on his chest, his nails digging into his shirt. “He’s not going to last long unless he finds anyone other than himself.” He said, his voice quiet.
Wendy shrugged at the look Jinah gave her and would make a motion for her to lead the way.
Wendy could identify the trust she’d been given. It honestly meant the world to her.
After a few moments of walking in silence however she’d start singing softly, almost under her breath it seemed.
“Let’s go in the garden
You’ll find something waiting
Right there where you left it
Lying upside down“When you finally find it
You’ll see how it’s faded
The underside is lighter
When you turn it around”Wendy kept her gaze straight ahead as they walked.
“It fits doesn’t it?”
She blinked when she noticed Wendy singing, listening as she walked alongside her. It was hard not to pay attention to her lyrics. Whatever Wendy did seemed to have some kind of core and a meaning to it, even the things that were not meant to have meanings.
She tilted her head as she looked at the girl. “I’d have to agree with you, seeing as it makes me feel nostalgic. And I’m not supposed to be the one feeling that way, am I? I mean, it feels like only months since I last walked with you, and for you…” Her brow furrowed for a moment before it went away. “It feels different, but I don’t need everything to be same to want to be here.”
“No problem. It’s only fair,” they replied, sinking into their ( very, very comfortable ) seat ever so slightly. “I know about your brain things, so you know about mine.” It sort of went without saying that for Bel, that meant they enjoyed Hui jin enough to risk trusting him with that information about them.
They were in the process of undoing their braid for the purpose of deciding whether they wanted to redo it but more tightly or if they wanted to pull it back into a bun when they responded to Hui jin’s question. “I wasn’t doing anything pressing. What about you? Busy day, or no?”
He gave a nod at being told that. He knew that there was a good amount of trust involved when it came to Bel telling him about what they occasionally experienced; it seemed that Bel knew that he knew, too.
He couldn’t help but feel a bit lucky. He had been hoping that he would get to know more about them, somehow – even leaving out the whole not being human part, Bel was enjoyable company as a person. Intelligent and intuitive. If he had managed to gain the trust of someone like that, particularly after having attempted to kill them, then well… all things considered, he was really quite lucky.
He watched as they worked with their hair. It was a lot curlier than he had expected. “Good to know. I don’t think I had anything important either. I mean…” he pulled out his phone from his pocket, pressed the power button to show the lock screen, checked the top of the screen, then put his phone back in his pocket. “It’s hard to keep track of things whenever I get out of it… makes me prepare notifications for everything I do. I guess being double-prepared has its perks, though.”
He grinned. “Well that’s nice. Someone nice choosing to be a night owl like me. Another step closer to my dream of this becoming a trend and everyone else doing the same… having to worry for myself when I just want to take a walk while it’s cooler and well, easier to admire the streets isn’t so nice, y’know? I can’t imagine it’d be good for anyone else, either.”
He paused for a moment. Wind rustled in the branches of the trees planted along the sidewalk. “If you don’t come out too often… I’m guessing that you have a job that involves a lot of work with a desktop?”
Jeong yoon briefly tugged his mask back into place where the eyeholes had started to slip lightly off kilter. “What an agenda.~ Though, if everyone started staying up at night, it’d probably be too crowded.”
In the pause, he was looking down at his shoes to ensure everything was still properly covered. “Hm? Oh, yeah. I do video editing. It’s nice, and I’ve got somewhat flexible hours, but it does kinda keep me chained to one place. What about you? You said you write?”
He hummed in assent when he heard the other mentioning it would likely be too crowded if everyone started walking at night. Couldn’t have everything, he supposed. Get company, then it’s not as fun… enjoy solitude, then it gets dangerous.
He gave Jeong yoon a grin at his question. He enjoyed his job and he enjoyed questions on it. “Oh yeah. Not books though. More like… I read books, watch movies and shows, maybe sometimes play games, then I comment on them on magazines. Well… I’m not supposed to make them sound personal but you’d be surprised how much opinion you can fit in so long as you choose the right words. I’ve got a podcast channel going on so that people can listen to my commentary, but it hasn’t made its breakthrough so far. I don’t know why.” He wrinkled his nose in a good-natured exaggeration of a grimace. In fact, his mouth was still grinning. “My voice is just the right thing to listen complaints to so far as I’m concerned.”
He adjusted the hood hanging at his back as he continued. “Video editing… that sounds like another job you can be creative in. I think I can relate to having flexible hours and having that stability. The time that you do your work might change, but there’s still that surety in what you need to do.”
“Makes sense. I’d probably kill someone if I had to be stuck in an office for so long like that, I dunno how you guys do it.” He wasn’t joking. At all. In fact, now the demon was prying at this human’s mind a little bit, as if to see if he could find some source of ill intent in her head to potentially magnify. Usually humans couldn’t tell when he was doing that, but sometimes it gave them the shivers, and particularly sensitive or stubborn ones could tell that that was their cue to get the hell away. He hoped she wasn’t a sensitive or stubborn one. “This area is pretty nice to wander around in at night, yeah. Very twinkly.~”
She shuddered as she listened to him. She was quite sure that it wasn’t this stranger that had made her do that, no – he wasn’t saying anything to make her react that way and he didn’t look particularly different from the easygoing way with which he had greeted her minutes ago. Perhaps it was time that she started wearing her thicker jacket to work. She had been avoiding doing that because it made her feel stiff and slow, but she could handle that if it helped her avoid getting all shivery out of nowhere while chatting in the streets.
She let out a small huff, smiling despite herself. “Sometimes it feels like I should be getting in that mindset a little more often. Nowadays I don’t feel much other than relief that they’re in there and I’m out here. Not working.” That was a lucky occasion that was harder to enjoy nowadays, and actually, now that she thought about it, she knew exactly why that was. She could handle most types of incompetence; if someone wasn’t good enough at their job merely because they were incompatible with it, that was more than fine. It was fixable. She would offer some words of advice as to which projects they could work on instead, they would be grateful, and she would write a word of recommendation for their transfer. Outright laziness and entitlement, though… it had been long few weeks trying to tolerate that without losing her professional attitude and getting personal.
She was seriously reevaluating her stance on that matter now that she was reminded of it, though.
submitted by thelastknightofbalder.
A small smile of their own tugged at their lips. It was nice to get that little hint of a smile from Hui jin, especially after what he’d apparently been going through when they came across him originally. They pulled their legs up in their seat to cross them, resting their hands in their lap.
“….I can’t say I’ve experienced exactly that, but. Similar things.” Bel seemed to consider what next to say for a moment and ducked their head before continuing. “I’ve definitely had some, ah… hiccups between me and my brain.” And also the separate entity literally attached to their soul. That could also be considered a hiccup. As they thought that, they felt the parasite’s consciousness shift against theirs and that translated to them as almost a huff and a crossing of it’s arms. They gave a soft chuckle at that.
“What tends to happen with me, is… well. Everything is happening, and it’s happening so much, and everything that happened before is happening and it’s my fault and… Yeah. So, I understand some aspects of it, anyway.”
It felt odd to divulge that much information about their mental health, but the idea that Hui jin would understand and, more importantly, not see them as weak because of it, made it easier.
He was watching as Bel spoke, his expression neutral but his gaze focused. He tilted his head in a small nod. “I see. I think I could… imagine what that’s like. Thank you for telling me. You already made it clear that you had an idea of it, but well, this…” He paused, shifting a little where he sat. “I think it’s hard to relate what’s going through in someone else’s head unless you’ve experienced your own thoughts getting the upper hand of you.”
Honestly, he appreciated what he had been told for reasons other than just being told that Bel was relatable to him and vice versa; something about the calmness and the demeanor of an expert he had seen during their first encounter had him feel that their qualities as a resident of the “Underworld” wasn’t the only source of their competency. Judging by the amount of time Bel had lived so far (which he didn’t know the exact number of, but he guessed that it must be centuries at the very least) they must have had a lot of occasions where they had faced enemies like him and beaten them. And knowing that they had survived that long with that long history of experience in battle, while dealing with the thing they just told him to be dealing with… well, that was something that he was happy to know.
After all, it wasn’t such a bad thing to find someone that he could respect in terms of strength.
He leaned back in his chair, feeling much more content than he typically was after one of his bouts of being disconnected from everything. His hands were placed on his laps with his fingers neatly crossed. “If it’s okay to ask… I haven’t pulled you from anything important back there, have I? It’s just a casual day?”