How I Explained G'raha Tia To A Friend The Other Day

How I explained G'raha Tia to a friend the other day

"His backstory is. ...convoluted.

Like. Imagine if Kingdom Hearts made sense.

That level of convoluted.

It's all like. Very logical given the established lore and how shit works. But the place you get to is "my boyfriend has super trauma because he put himself into stasis, woke up in the apocalypse timeline, merged his essence with a magic supercomputer, traveled to an alternate dimension 100 years in the past, and became an immortal but benevolent king so he could prevent the timeline where I died'

Primary side effect of merging his essence with the magic super computer that is made of crystal? He's fucking turning into crystal. And then he sacrifices himself and FULLY CRYSTALIZES.

So then you do some soul magic, go back to your world where he's still in stasis because the apocalypse that woke him up hasn't happened yet, and are like - here have this other version of your soul where you were half crystal and lived a hundred years and experienced the end of the world twice.

And he's like whoa okay. That's fucked up. Not super sure who I am anymore, this is kinda wild. But you don't find out that's what he's thinking until subsequently when you travel to the literal edge of existence and he TRANSFORMS HIMSELF INTO CRYSTAL AGAIN TO SAVE YOU.

And it's just like. G'raha. My guy. I get that you're having a hard time but fucking stop it.

AND ON TOP OF ALL THAT god dammit he's just the fucking most wholesome nerd. Like "I got too excited about books and forgot to eat or sleep for 3 days" nerd.

And there's this WHOLE SPEECH he does when he's still the Crystal Exarch right at the end of Shadowbringers where he's like, what are you going to do when this is all over? And I'm like rest lol. (Yeah right) And he's like - so I've got this friend, and I'm keeping secrets from [insert your pronoun here], but they're fucking rad and I'm hoping sempai will notice me and maybe we could go on an adventure together? And it's SO FUCKING OBVIOUS he's talking ABOUT YOU in an "all right, keep your secrets" kind of way.

EXCEPT THEN YOU FIND OUT THAT HIS BIG MASTER PLAN WAS: get the WoL to kill all the Lightwardens and absorb their light which will save both worlds, but no one person can hold that much light and live, so I'm going to take it from them and then teleport myself INTO THE RIFT BETWEEN WORLDS AND DIE.

And the only reason he doesn't succeed is because HE GETS FUCKING SHOT

So. [ahem] Yes. I think it says a lot about me that I am like. Yes. The nerdy twunk with super trauma who is OBSESSED WITH ME is my boyfriend.

I took GREAT SATISFACTION in dying for him for a hot minute at the end of Endwalker.

New FFXIV fic: Finding G'raha

We sat in silence for a minute, enjoying the view together, before he cleared his throat. "What will you do when this is over?"

"Rest," I said instantly. "I hope," I added much more quietly.

There was a soft, sympathetic snort from beside me.

I decided to turn the question back on him. "What will you do when this is over?"

"When this is over? Indeed." The Exarch repeated, seeming genuinely surprised to be asked such a question. "I once told you there are things we can ill afford to lose. 'Things', I said, though in truth I spoke of a person. One who is unaware of the full extent of my plans. Though they deserve to know, I have good reason to keep my council. I have come to terms with this in my mind, but my heart yearns to lay everything bare. For they are my inspiration, and I would give much and more for the chance to speak with them as friends, with no thought of concealment."

He looked out over the water as he spoke, not meeting my gaze, which was just as well. Because with each word he spoke, I became more certain that my suspicion had been correct. G'raha Tia was the Exarch. 

I didn't know how he'd done it, how he'd even conceived of such a mad plan, but somehow the brilliant and brashly reckless researcher I'd met in Mor Dhona had accomplished a feat far beyond the scope of my wildest imaginings. My chest was suddenly far too small to contain my welter of feelings. Relief that he'd survived. Joy that we'd met again.

"Then, I would ask them about their next adventure," he continued, oblivious to the storm of emotion he'd sparked in me. "And if they should wish me to be a part of it, oh... how happy it would make me. Together, we would travel the lands and cross the seas and take to the skies upon the eternal wind... My heart swells simply to imagine it."

I stared at him, drinking in the sound of his voice like I was hearing it for the first time.

It had taken me so long to see past the devil-may-care attitude he'd cultivated when we met, to recognize him as a kindred spirit that I wanted a deeper connection with, and by then, we were busy preparing our assault on the World of Darkness. I'd naively planned on asking him how he felt when it was all over, only for G'raha to seal himself in the Tower before I thought to say anything.

I'd regretted it ever since. And yet, the Gods had granted me a second chance, because here he was, spilling his heart out to me, clearly feeling the same regret.

Read the whole thing on AO3

Working on a fic about G'raha and Alisaie falling in lust with each other after G'raha's return from the First, and am amused by where a chain of logic took me. First, my headcanon is that G'raha is trans, as is Alisaie, because if NO ONE is explicitly gay or trans, then anyone can be. No I will not take questions on this point. Second. Transition would have been pretty easy at the Studium. None of the professors give a fuck about your gender as long as your assignments are on time and your research is sourced correctly. So G'raha transitions quickly and seamlessly after arriving in Sharlyan because less time lost to dysphoria = more time for books.

Third. For most trans mascs, T horniness is A Fucking Thing[1]. Unlike Alisaie, who who sucked lots of dick[2] because she liked it, G'raha would have seen this horniness as an imposition. He transitioned so he'd have more time to read, after all.

Fourth. because he's far from the only nerd whose sexuality is "books" at the Studium, G'raha would have ended up with a circle of acquaintances who were willing to discreetly give each other "relief" in the library so they didn't have to interrupt their research.

CONCLUSION. Because G'raha is both a massive overachiever AND a people-pleaser AND a messy bottom, he got really good at letting people fuck his throat.

- - -

[1] I mean, I'm 95% asexual and the T horniness is hitting HARD, which is why I've spent all my time for the past week thinking about G'raha and Alisaie sucking my WoL's dick.

[2] See previous fic: "Shut up and let me suck your dick, already"

What If... Part 2 (blatant Trans Wish Fulfilment Smut)

Working through Personal Trans Shit with fanfic of my own characters from a project I haven't published yet. Smutty smut under the cut. Content note for bottom dysphoria.

Kissing, as it usually did, led to other things. (Even after more than two years together Corey and Dee still struggled to keep their hands off one another when given the opportunity.) Corey was almost unbearably sweet as he undressed Dee, asking if they'd wanted to leave their binder on (they didn't) and urging them to tell him if something felt wrong.

However, while Dee wouldn't have said that anything felt wrong, exactly, neither did it feel right. Corey was doing all the things that used to drive them wild, but the physical sensations felt as if they were coming from a million miles away. As if they were happening to someone else. Their body gasped and moaned at his touch, but it didn't feel like it meant anything.

Corey's tongue was warm and wet as he lapped at their clit, but Dee found themself reaching for their bond, for the feeling of Corey's cock, which was hard, throbbing, and entirely too untouched for Dee's liking, as he was entirely focused on them at the moment.

What was wrong with them? Why couldn't they just enjoy this?

When the answer hit a moment later, Dee felt as if all the air had been knocked from their body. They weren't enjoying it because they... didn't want to be doing it. This. Because what they wanted...

Their brain struggled to complete the sentence as Corey's hand teasingly brushed the inside of their thigh, then slowly traveled upward.

What they wanted--

...his fingers gently stroked the outer edge of their labia, before...

What they really wanted--

...he slid two fingers into them, and--

And they couldn't bear it, couldn't stand the way it took them out of focusing on what he felt and how it reminded them of what they didn't have. Because what they wanted was for Corey to touch himself, to feel second-hand through their bond what he felt with a hand wrapped around his dick. They wanted to come from feeling his pleasure, because they couldn't feel their own anymore.

"Stop," Dee gasped, bursting into tears.

Corey stopped immediately, and the sense of shared awareness faded as Corey lost his concentration. Dee felt that loss of sensation almost as keenly as they felt the pain of realizing that they didn't want to be touched - all of which was wrapped up with intense self-disgust. They curled into a tiny ball of shame and sobbed, feeling as if their world was coming apart at the seams.

"Hey. Hey, now." Corey's voice was soft and low as he wrapped himself around them. "You didn't do anything wrong, okay? So just breathe."

Dee tried to do as he said, but they were powerless against the tremors wracking them. "I wanted to like it. I used to like it so much."

"You can't force yourself to like something," Corey said firmly. "And you shouldn't try."

"But I don't want to hate having sex with you," Dee all but wailed.

Corey hesitated. "I... Obviously I can't know what you're feeling. But I promise you that we'll get through this, okay? However you feel right now isn't the way it's going to be forever."

Dee laughed despite themself. "You can't know that," they hiccuped.

"Yes I can," Corey shot back, a smile audible in his voice. "You know how stubborn I can be about pointless stuff. Imagine how much more stubborn I can be about something that really matters to me."

Again, Dee laughed, then shuddered as they were able to take one shaky breath. Then another.

"Good." Corey kissed the back of their neck. "Now. Talk to me?"

"It's probably weird, but it's like... my body is reacting like I'm enjoying myself, but I can't connect with it, because I..." Dee had to struggle to force the next word out. "Hate. Not having a dick. And when you touch me like that, I can't... I can't not think about how much I hate it."

Corey was quiet for a long moment, and Dee could feel him probing tentatively at the edge of their feelings. "You've been having these feelings for a long time, haven't you?" He finally asked. When Dee nodded miserably and tried to curl up even more, he wrapped his arms tightly around their waist. "You're okay. I'm not upset."

"It's not you! It's me! It's everything I grew up with telling me that I'm gross, and awful, and disgusting. And the Pope saying I'm a fucking war crime for having those feelings."

"Okay. Well. Can you turn and look at me here?"

Grudgingly, Dee uncurled and turned over so they could see Corey's face.

"You're not a war crime," he said sternly. "And I don't think you're gross and disgusting. Obviously. So. Set those feelings to the side for now and talk to me about this dysphoria. How did all this start, and where are you now? I want to understand so I can help you better."

Dee nodded and wiped their eyes as they consulted their feelings and tried to put them into something resembling a logical order. "I didn't realize until... pretty recently that what I was feeling was dysphoria," they said slowly. "Because it just started as thinking. You know. Wouldn't it be hot to have a dick? When you do that thing where you turn on Feelings Sharing, I liked feeling how you felt when I touched your dick. And, God, I liked feeling what it felt like when you fucked me. And for a long time that's all it was. Thinking about what it would be like to have a dick, but being fine with not having one.

"Until it started becoming... not fine. So I just... started focusing more on you and less on me when we had sex. And then finally, a couple days ago, I realized that I couldn't come at all anymore unless I was focusing on what you felt and pretending that you were me. And that's when the wheels started coming off the bus."

Corey's expression was gentle as he tangled his fingers through Dee's hair. "That's why you've been mostly wanting me to fuck you these last few months?"

Dee cringed. "I could tell you liked feeling what I felt, and I told myself what I was doing wasn't any different. Because acknowledging how I felt would have meant doing something about it, and I was scared. And ashamed."

"Okay. Well. Tomorrow I'm going to talk to Barnabus. Because honestly, that sounds pretty bad, and like something we should take really seriously. And no, I won't mention anything embarrassing. All right?"

Dee nodded, hating the way their lower lip wobbled as they did so.

"Great. In the meantime... what do you want to do right now? Do you want to stop?"

"No," Dee grumped, which earned a confused look from Corey. "I'm just mad that you eating me out is off the table because you're really good at it."

Corey's lusciously thick lips curved into a smile. "Okay, well. Why don't you use our magic while I fuck you, since you said that helps your dysphoria?"

"I mean." Dee bit their lip anxiously. "You're sure it's okay for me to use you like that?"

"Put it this way," Corey said, the love in his big, beautiful brown eyes so intense that Dee wanted to melt right into them. "Your dysphoria is clearly causing you a lot of pain. So given a choice between 'not having sex because it's painful and distressing for you' and 'using our magic to make sex enjoyable and non-dyphoric for you', which do you think I'm going to go with?"

Dee's throat closed again and they had to breathe deeply to fight off yet another wave of tears. "That makes sense," they managed.

"In fact, let's try this. Lie on your back and close your eyes."

Curious to see where he was going with this, Dee complied, and a moment later felt it as Corey invoked the bond between them. (He'd tried before to explain how he'd did it, but his explanations had never made any sense to Dee.)

Corey's voice was low and soothing as he spoke. "You don't have to touch me, okay? And you don't have to think about you. Forget the sheets, forget the pillows, and just focus on what I'm feeling."

Dee breathed slowly as they cataloged the sensations of their own body before setting them aside. They could feel Corey stretched out on the bed next to them, all of his weight on one elbow. His cock was mostly soft, but they could feel his warm rush of arousal as he began to harden again.

"You with me?" he asked quietly as he placed a hand on his cock.

"Yes," Dee groaned.

Corey's rich baritone was playing arpeggios on their spine, even as they could feel his cock hardening further. "There's no you and me like this. We're both me right now, and that's okay, because I want to share this with you. Understand?"

Dee shivered as Corey ran a thumb over the tip of his cock. "Yes."

"Good." Corey took himself in hand. "Now feel your hand wrapped around your cock," he instructed, with only a faint emphasis on the pronouns.

Dee's eyes prickled with unshed tears as the power of that phrase - your cock - sparked something big and powerful and inside them.

"Now feel yourself stroking your cock," Corey continued as he started to do so. Dee focused on the feeling of delicious opposites - the soft skin of his cock against his lightly callused palm, the hardness of it against the fleshy base of his thumb. It was easier like this, they discovered, to feel their own arousal, even as they were focusing on his.

"Do you still want me to fuck you?"

"Yes," Dee gasped.

Corey chuckled as he leaned over to get the lube from the bedside table. A moment later, there was the strangely appealing sensation of Corey applying lube to himself, and then he was on top of them, his weight carefully on his knees and elbows as he gently kissed their forehead. "Do what you need to do," he reminded them. "If that means lying still, then lie still. Whatever you need."

Dee nodded, not trusting their voice.

Corey carefully positioned the head of his cock at their entrance before slowly sliding into them, taking several second to bury himself to the hilt.

Frustratingly, Dee found it difficult to hold onto the idea that they were Corey now that he was inside them. How could they be fucking themself? But somehow, Corey divined the source of their difficulty, and said just the right thing. "You're not fucking you, right now. You're fucking me, because we switched." Slowly, so very fucking slowly he began to withdraw from them. "And I said that was okay. So that makes this your dick, that you're using to fuck me."

That did the trick.

Dee moaned as Corey... as they reversed course and slowly fucked back into Corey. And sure, the analogy didn't totally make sense, but it didn't need to as long as they focused on the feeling of their dick and how incredible it felt thrusting into Corey's wet velvet heat.

"Yes," they whispered. "More. I want to fuck you harder."

Corey groaned, the rush of arousal he felt as he obliged spilling over into Dee, who reveled in the feeling of blood rushing to their already achingly-hard cock. And suddenly, after months of increasingly-maddening struggles to connect their body to their feelings, Dee had what they needed to get out of their own way.

They moaned, and Corey moaned, and they both moaned as Dee fucked Corey. Distantly, somewhere far away, they knew they were crying, their tears leaking down the sides of their face and into their hair, but that was something they could deal with later. Right now all that mattered was the feeling of Corey wrapped around their cock and the slick, incredible friction as they fucked him. They weren't able to last long at all before Corey clenched around them... or they clenched around Corey... it was hard to hold onto the metaphor as their, his cock twitched and spilled into them, and their body writhed underneath him with the power of his, of their mutual, utterly shattering release.

(Read Part 1 on AO3 here)

New non-binary junk options just dropped. Eldritch horror concrete bench is weirdly aspirational tbh

YOUR NSFW MC

Tag #dereliction_nsfw or @dereliction-if to get reblogged

Part 3 of What If... is up

In which I write fic of my own characters before the actual project they come from is published... Partly because I want to work through some Personal Trans Shit, but partly because I want to write wish fulfilment fantasy about magical HRT and trans enby porn.

From Chapter 3:

Unsure of the etiquette, Dee swept into a low bow. "Lady Eachna, I presume."

"No need for that," she said, rising gracefully from the desk. Eachna gestured toward a pair of chairs in the corner, taking one for herself while Dee awkwardly took the other. "Any friend of Sebastian's is a friend of mine. Now. I understand you're having trouble with options for gender transition that are being compounded by the human world's strict gender binary?"

Dee blinked, surprised to hear their problem so accurately summarized by a stranger. "I mean. Yeah. That's... yeah."

"So. Tell me more about that. What are you looking for, specifically?"

When Dee blushed and looked at their feet, Eachna smiled reassuringly. "I promise, whatever you may think, nothing you say could shock or disgust me. For one, I'm old. Far, far older than I look. Certainly old enough to have seen pretty much everything.

"For another, most fae see gender as a game that you play, not a thing that you are. Not having a binary gender, or having a gender that changes over time is extremely common here, and as a healer, I see those seeking changes that go deeper than mere illusion all the time.

"Lastly, I want to help because I owe your partner a debt. I don't like debts, so helping you is something that benefits both of us. So feel free to be brutally frank about what you need."

Part 1 here

Part 2, with that Good Trans Wish Fulfilment Smut here