KOTLC One-shots

Reading The Heart- Ambiguous Kam (OUMH(ALMFFF))

Word count: ~22500 words

Aka: Part 1 of Open Up My Heart (And Let My Feelings Fly Free)- a (potential) series (Series title comes from the opening to Revolutionary Girl Utena (full version))

Been a bit since my last kotlc oneshot, huh? (Dw, this one's a long one). Well, Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint has taken my brain hostage and broken my heart, so I've been distracted

Speaking of ORV, this one-shot is an ORV au. You can feel free to skip the rest of the long a/n if you wish to jump to the story (don't skip the warnings though). But if you'd like a description of orv's plot and mechanics, read the a/n

ORV is a korean webnovel about a guy who was the only reader of this novel about an apocalypse. Then the events of the novel actually starts happening irl, so only he knows how everything goes. So now he's gotta survive and make it to the end.

Secondly, there's this thing called the Star Stream, where beings called dokkaebi are streamers who stream the apocalypse, and beings known as constellations watch said streams. They can donate coins or sponsor an incarnation (people within the stream)

The entire world is video-game like. There's stats, skills, stigmas (special skills granted to an incarnation, by a constellation), and coins that are used to clear scenarios. (Lots of [messages like this] are used in this fic)

In this au: Keefe is the reader, Tam is the protagonist of the webcomic he read, and as mentioned in the title, the relationship is ambiguous (romantic, platonic, or queerplatonic)

There is a 90% chance that this oneshot is incomprehensible due to the fact that this is 23 freaking thousand words long written within 2 weeks, and also the fact that most of these scenes are what I picked and chose from orv, so the meshing of it all might be incoherent to everybody but me but I've had a great time writing it, so I hope you enjoy it too!

Warnings: Including but not limited to: violence, trauma, background character death, temporary main character death, kinda vague suicidal thoughts. (It's not a sad ending, dw)

Keefe sat down on the subway, and loaded up the app he read comics on. As he did so, he received a notification that Knowledge Of Techniques to Live in a Calamity (or, KOTLC, for short) had updated. With a grin, he opened up the latest chapter, and read through it.

He read a little slower than he normally would, wanting to savour every little detail. After all, this was going to be the second last chapter, and the protagonist was going to finally have an ending to his decade long story.

(Whether that ending was going to be happy or not, he wasn't sure, but what he did know was that he was going to feel empty once the story was over. After all, he'd been there since the first chapter, and had been the only reader for eight years.)

The chapter ended right before the final(?) confrontation, but there were still a few panels left of the chapter. As he scrolled down, he read.

"There are three known ways to live in a calamity. I've forgotten some of them now. However, one thing is certain: if you're reading this, you will survive."