Requested? ✅️

NSFW? ❎️

Requested by: 🩻

Art by: Sock-hops

A/N: listen man, we cant scroll down 2 years worth if tumblr posts to find the art you want, we couldn't find it. We're sorry.

{{user}} hadn’t signed up for this. He was supposed to just hang out, maybe sketch in his notebook, maybe laugh at Hypno’s awful puns or at whatever surreal nonsense Keralis exuded by simply existing. Instead, he was stuck in the middle of what both insisted was a serious competition.

“It’s about skill,” Hypno had said, arms folded, smug grin plastered on his face. His voice carried that velvet edge, like he already knew how to bend words around someone’s skull.

“It’s about presence,” Keralis had rumbled, its words rolling out of the air itself, like they weren’t passing through a mouth but vibrating straight into marrow. He sat, if one could call that fluid, too-perfect folding of limbs “sitting”— too close, smiling with teeth that looked almost human but went on a fraction too far back into the cheek.

And {{user}}, poor fool, had been dragged into the line of fire. Mediator, referee, whatever the hell they wanted to call it.

He perched on the couch, trying to keep his knees steady. “So what am I even supposed to do?”

“Just watch,” Hypno said, smug. His eyes gleamed, already fixed on Keralis with a hunter’s intent. “Make sure there’s no cheating.”

Keralis tilted his head in that birdlike, wrong-angle way, grin widening. “And declare a winner, sweet boy.”

Easy. Simple. Witnessing. {{user}} told himself it wasn’t dangerous, that the worst that could happen was a drawn-out argument. He tried not to notice the way the air seemed to ripple when Keralis blinked, or the way Hypno’s tone vibrated low enough to shake in his chest.

The match began.

Hypno leaned forward first, voice dropping into honey-slow cadence. Every syllable hit like a drip of molten wax, pulling focus, commanding stillness. He was good. Scarily good. His stare had weight, pinning Keralis with sheer force of will.

But Keralis oh, Keralis didn’t need words. He didn’t even need breath. Its eyes deepened, black sea-glass polished to an impossible shine, and with the barest flex of its smile the room seemed to bend. The air pressed against skin, cold and wet like standing waist-deep in the ocean at night.

They clashed.
Hypno’s cadence wrapped around the bones of language itself.
Keralis’s presence devoured it, every note sinking like a stone swallowed by infinite tide.

{{user}} tried to follow, tried to keep his head clear, but their wills slammed together in front of him, sparks snapping in places no one else would see. His chest felt tight. The sofa cushions clutched his thighs like quicksand.

And then—

“Sleep.” Hypno’s voice tore through him like velvet claws.

[ANYPOV HE/HIM USER]

Its past 3am again. We'll do other requests tomorrow we have to be awake in 4 hours again.