royai ceo

Another twitter redraw

Adams, but he looks different everytime because I’m inconsistent

now listen to me young man, i am talking directly into your ear now. i need you to do me a favor. you will do this for me. i need you to go to an anime piracy website, and i need you to watch fullmetal alchemist (2003). if you come back and tell me you;ve only watched brotherhood youll be in big trouble mister. you will never see the light of day.

ARCANE (2024)

i loooove toxic and codependent relationships in fiction. they are so narratively juicy. if they don’t even warp and mangle each other to the point they create a single, fucked up entity then what’s the point.

okay. okay. okay.

three times. riza’s had three seconds to rest. she counts the granules of sand on her cheeks, what she can feel nestled into her pores, the ardent chafe of sand over skin. she’s become used to it by now. one, two, okay, okay, okay...

she fires three shots to fill the next three seconds.

his hands are sandpaper wrapped around her nape. his ring fingernail is chipped and it catches her hair, tugs, comes free again, and the sand in her teeth mingles with the sand on his tongue.

he shoves her jacket out of the way. hand spreads over her midsection. okay. okay. okay.

three seconds. she breaks free from his mouth, huffs in gulps of hot air, spreads her legs for him, the officer’s desk shifting under her weight. the sand’s a cockeyed surface, and it’s his arms that keep her upright.

“mr. mustang,” she starts. but what could she say?

**

the bell tower without a bell.

she can see everything from this vantage. that’s why she was placed here. her hawk’s eyes are better than binoculars, more adept, the perfect machine.

major mustang’s hands are still on her in the tower. she attempts to count her seconds — okay, okay — and the shame fills her, guilt down in her toes, and the next three seconds are filled with a quiet only she can provide. all around her are the sounds of hectic soldiers, some with red eyes, most without, and it’s her small gift to the world (not to herself, because that is selfish. because thinking of the major’s hands is selfish. because even counting is selfish.) that she keep her trigger finger-free for six seconds.

okay.

she rests the nose on the busted stone sill.

okay.

she finds her sights.

okay.

she wandered my hallways in the night, feet bare, quiet as a fog. i took her weight and held it there in my bones. the paneling, the floorboards her mother carved, her father broke apart — they held histories in them. some whole, most fractured. i held her there.

she danced around in the foyer and chipped paint off the windowsills. she drew shapes in the condensation on the windows, humidity wrapped around me like a sleeve. we sweat together next to the fire no one needed to fan but did anyway, because she liked the smell of things burning, because she had always been careless, because life was an ouroboros.

pancakes bubbled on the stove. gummed up between her fingers. she smeared it over the countertops, her mother wetting her lips with it.

she rattled my insides with her screams. clawed up my walls. left marks in them. in the night, in the dark, i could pretend to wrap her in arms i didn’t have, tuck her in, be every star that shimmered overhead. she would not for several years understand.

until the fire, the hearth flooded, and that cyclical destiny, and all the years pounded into floorboards through a girl’s small feet. until the stench of gunpowder and that pungent sulfur and the fear it would conjure. and the shame.

and the shapes in the windows would be there still, every time, every morning, the grass dewy and the hallways empty, empty...

She breaks ground at noon.

Sunlight catches in globules of blood. The sand is thick with it. She is walking on baked remains, and she does not forget.

In her nostrils is the smell of fire mixed with dry, ever-present iron. She’s learned to recognize the two as a name — Roy.

She hasn’t seen him yet and hasn’t had the presence of mind to know whether she wants to or not. Time spent thinking is not free time. And anyway, the heat was too oppressive. It pushed its way through her boots and stained the back of her neck red.

Camp is not far from the turret. She takes several shortcuts, crawling on her belly in places where the ground is too level for comfort, and sits behind an abandoned M.P. vehicle to have some water and dehydrated jerky. She swishes the jerky in her mouth a bit but it makes no difference. The texture is that of flavored plastic.

There is coffee waiting for her in the canister when she returns. She pours a cup and sips. It’s bitter and gritty with sand, as most everything here is.

She shucks off her coat, lets it fan out in a loose, wing-shaped heap behind her. Her eyes tighten on the tents blotting the sands. They, like her coat, are a neutral tan. She takes a seat on a blown tire. It’s searing hot, but so is the air, so is the sand, so is, so is.

She can smell Roy even from here.

Although, she thinks idly that she must start referring to him as Major now, even in the privacy of her thoughts.

Major Roy

Major Mustang

Or just Major

She searches for any way that they may all be separate — but fears that the boy from her past has become like the blood coagulating in the sands.

The coffee is gone before she’s even had a chance to taste it.

and it made sense, then, that the wiles of the world would converge upon her like lightning to steel rods.

she would never be free. this would never be her penance. she could not stand to see the resurgence of a country that had so little empathy. she could never be their puppet, or his, or his, or his.

taking the red waters in her hands, cradling it there, her palms a universe and a biome, the life seeded into her pores. she would plant it, maybe — she would nurture it. but she would never win.

this was not her penance.

bad news babe

do you think i'm spooky?