#and then BAM busiest week of my life

[raineandsky]

Hi! I absolutely adore your writing!!! Could I please request a sick villain, who went out in the middle of the night just to buy himself some medicine, because fever was getting unbearable. However he underestimated his condition and almost fainted, he had to sit on a ground and lean on the wall to catch his breath and hero found him like this.

I’d love to read a story like this if you’re comfortable writing it ! Thank you in advance 💕🐠

so it turns out i have not looked at my inbox for like a month. oops!! SORRY this is so late!! hope you enjoy :)

-

The last thing the villain remembers is telling some poor cashier to piss off as he stumbled out the pharmacy door. He’s not sure how he ended up here, on the ground, feeling rather worse for wear, with the hero of all people standing over him.

“You looked incredibly dead from a distance,” the hero comments.

“Seeing as you’re here,” the villain snaps weakly, “I wish I was.”

“Well, is there a reason you’re making your grave on the pavement?”

The villain’s head is threatening to explode, his lungs seemingly short on air permanently. He feels as though his entire being is on fire, and admittedly there’s a nice breeze here that’s cooling his burning skin. Not that the hero needs to know any of this.

“Not exactly any of your business.” The villain tries to sound annoyed, but his energy is sapped and it mostly comes out tired. “The sooner you leave me alone, the better.”

The hero is quiet for a moment, and the villain leans his head against the wall to get a glance at him. A frown is forming on his face, his eyes darting back and forth in the way they do when he’s trying to piece things together. Then his gaze snaps back to the villain, and he quickly looks away.

The hero doesn’t seem interested in asking any more questions. He crouches down in front of the villain and, without asking, carefully lays a palm on his forehead.

For a moment the villain basks in the coolness of the hero’s hand against his internal fire. Then he remembers who he is, remembers who the hero is, and makes a weak effort to push him away.

“Touching your enemies usually gets your hand snapped off.”

The hero doesn’t seem to hear him. “You’re running a horrible fever.”

Well, no hiding it now he supposes. “I know, villains are human too. Shocking.”

The hero stays there for a moment, his frown deeper now, his tongue running over his teeth thoughtfully. He turns to glance over his shoulder, and the villain knows he’s looking in the direction of the agency.

He’d like to avoid seeing prison preferably. He’s not exactly in fighting condition, so words will have to do the fighting for him. “I’m contagious.”

“Obviously,” the hero says flatly, but he shuffles back a bit. “I don’t need whatever disease you have.”

“Great. Go away then.”

The hero looks over his other shoulder, and it’s not clear where he’s looking this time. He clicks his tongue, the sound too loud in the villain’s ears. “Where do you live?”

“Absolutely not.”

“It’s this or prison, [Villain]. I’m doing you a favour here.”

Goddamn heroes and their little games. The villain has no doubt this will come back on him somehow in the future. “I’m not far from here.”

-

The hero more or less kicks the front door open, much to the villain’s vocalised dismay. The two of them make an awkward stumble inside, and the hero doesn’t hide his relieved sigh when he gets to dump the villain on the sofa.

“Nice place,” the hero says, although the villain would guess it’s sarcastic. His place doesn’t fit his villainous persona in the slightest. Colourful walls, full of potted plants, his cat weaving a line through the hero’s legs.

“Don’t say a word,” the villains snaps. “Get me some water.”

“A please wouldn’t kill you.” And then, once the hero has disappeared into the kitchen, “Jesus Christ, [Villain], you went out with something on the hob?”

Oh. Maybe this fever is eating away at his brain more than the villain thought. “Ha, totally forgot about that,” he mumbles. “Oops.”

The hero reappears from the kitchen with his deepest frown of the evening, a glass of water in one hand and an electric fan in the other. The glass gets shoved into the villain’s hands before the hero sets the fan on a side table and turns it on.

The breeze is divine. The villain fumbles with his pocket for a moment to grab the medicine he bought, cursing at the fiddly packaging. The box gets plucked from his hands, and the hero snaps it open in one easy move and drops a pair of painkillers into the villain’s palm.

“Good lord,” the hero says faintly as the villain carefully takes the pills, one by one. “You’re a mess.”

The water is smooth on the villain’s sandpaper throat, only ruined slightly by the disgusting rasp of the painkillers. “Thank you for your kind words,” he manages after a moment. “You can go now.”

The hero glances back at the kitchen, then down to the box in his hand, and the villain hates that he can see the train of thought chugging through his nemesis’s head.

“I’d better not,” the hero says eventually. “I’ll stay.”

Goddamn heroes and their weird moral compass. The villain settles down with a sigh—this is going to be a long week.

[firstjustgoin]

Good Advice, Deaf Ears

5. Start with a good piece of advice no one in the rest of the story will ever follow.

My mother was a useless woman, always one lost hairpin or burnt dish of cornbread away from unraveling. I loved her only out of necessity because when you are eight years old you would love a piece of driftwood if someone told you that you were supposed to. Come to think of it, there was nothing much different between my mother and a piece of driftwood –– the woman could tread water for years longer than anyone thought she should, but damned if anyone could track her direction.

My grandmother, on the other hand, was a woman of substance. She loved the weight of words and she held onto them with fervor in moments that no one else in her life could withstand her grasp. Her house stood as a testament to the weight of words, layered like newspaper papier-mâché on every surface.

A wooden sign nailed to the wall next to the front door read, Do what makes you happy. Be with those who make you smile. Laugh as much as you breathe. Love as long as you live.

A crocheted throw pillow that slept next to her for sixty-five years reminded her to Live where your feet are.

A framed photo lived next to her cutting board that I saw every Thanksgiving told her to Do small things with great love.

The words did not just live plastered to her house but within her person. Every weekend I could get up to her house, I sat with grandma on her tattered patchwork couch sipping lukewarm earl grey as she doled out the advice as heartily as she doled out her homemade brownies. Neither could I keep in my system for longer than a few days, but she loved to give it anyways.

“Remember, Fran, life’s going to give you dozens of reasons to trust nobody, to think that your love is a burden. But don’t believe it. Never be too proud to love somebody, to ask for the things you need from the people you love.”

“I won’t, Grandma, I promise.” She reached her hands to cover mine –– every time the movement a little shakier, every time the grasp a little lighter.

I promised Grandma a lot of things, all the way up until the day she died. I wanted to live up to the advice she proffered, to become something more than just the useless offspring of a useless procreator. But maybe, as the embroidered magnet that stuck to Grandma’s refrigerator said, Only He can judge.

I went through a lot of bad living situations after I moved away from grandma: old, drafty houses with seven roommates and spiders that scuttled through the rooms as soon as the lights were turned off; cramped walk-ups with two people to a room and strange clumps of hair stuck to every drain and every cushion; tiny studio apartments with vindictive girlfriends and cruel boyfriends who always would stumble upon perfect excuses to leave me and take our shared goldfish or gerbil with them to their next live-in love affair; suburban split-levels with laminated posters in every common space that whined dirty a dish, clean a dish, for a happier home we wish. I snuck out of apartments and leases in the middle of the night sometimes to escape whatever toxic living environment I had found myself in at that time, only to land somewhere else disturbingly familiar.

Jean was my first roommate after Shiobhan ran out on me (and took my bunny Calvin) and I loved her for it. We lived together in a third floor apartment squeezed between two towering glass developments, with a tiny kitchen really only good for cooking quesadillas and a window seat that looked out on the intersection between the two busiest streets in town. Though the constant honking seeped through the cracks in the windows and floorboards, that space always felt sacred, ignited by something even calmer than a meditation room.

Jean worked in bakery back then, waking up before dawn to knead sourdoughs and thread pie crusts and coming home mid-afternoon, as the sun would begin to set, covered in flour and oil and blackberry jam. She was always baker-slash whatever creative whirlwind was visiting her in her dreams that month.

She was an acrylic painter –– when she would stay up late into the night sipping merlots, staining the floors with red wine and dark, muted paints, painting my portrait again and again but with light bulbs for eyes or salamanders crawling along in the background.

She was a henna artist –– when she would invite friends of friends of friends over to the apartment and decorate their arms and ankles and necks in long black snakes after I had scrubbed off the ink and been painted again one too many times.

She was a spoken word poet –– a weary period where she would drag me to whatever hip neighborhood bar or coffee shop was putting on that week’s open mic night. I never told her was I really thought of most spoken word artists –– how I hated the way the timbre of their voices rose and fell dramatically to convey mundane points, the way they paused for so many excruciating seconds to pull in an audience only to disappoint them with a string of gobbledygook. Lucky for me, she hung up her ironic scarf and poetry passions after just a couple months.

The glass blowing phase was my favorite, after she slept with a guy who owned a studio in the town over. Glass blowing made Jean feel calm and powerful, like she could dominate any element with a precision that yielded such beauty. After a few weeks, her creations grew from palm-sized glass beads with pockets of air burping on the edges to mosaic circles and kaleidoscopic pinwheels. I arranged the bowls and vases on every windowsill so when the sun peaked through the windows, the whole room would dance in blues, oranges, and pinks.

Then there were times when Jean was not visited by any colorful dreams, no spirit pushing her to make, make, make. Those were seasons when I would find the browning apple cores and half-empty bottles of gin growing on the kitchen counter and know that Jean was alone in a place that only I could reach her.

Despite the gray quiet that settled over the apartment during those times, it was then that I found my greatest sense of peace. While I loved Jean and all of her frenetic bursts of creation, I also feared I would never be taken by such a manic energy, never whispered so deep in my unconscious to be anything more than I already was.

“Shut up,” Jean would say, pushing me against the shoulder, “You’re mad brilliant. Something’s gonna come up and it’s gonna hit you like bam, you’re not even gonna know where it’s come from, it’s just be there and you’ll feel it and then you’ll know, ya know?”

I smiled and nodded and said, “I know, I know,” but I didn’t know and I still don’t whether or not anything brilliant is ever going to come from me.

But those hushed moments in our apartment were the only times when I felt like fully myself, no longer giving parts of myself away to whatever brilliance possessed her at the moment. I could float from room to room with my shoulders pushed back, a sense of urgency to my steps. At the grocery store, I looked each passerby square in the eyes and smiled slightly, the smile of a woman who knew that she was needed and she was loved and wanted everyone in the world to know it.

I conjured up my grandmother in these moments, with her unremitting well of advice. I sopped up her warm solemnity, the slight squint of her eyes, the light nod of her chin. This was thirty years of training by being her granddaughter, the one who always listened, never the daughter who couldn’t keep her feet on the same ground long enough to try.

I would knock on Jean’s door and push it open to find her curled up against the wall, her fingers fluttering along the bedspread needing to be put to work.

“Hey,” I would whisper, just loudly enough for her head to jerk in my direction. “I’m here if you need me.” Without waiting for her response, I would lie down beside her, wrapping my arms around her thinning middle and squeeze; this was a long-held maternal inheritance in my family –– the pressuring, the centering, the gut-quieting –– even my mother, in her few moments of presence, knew that this was the only way to pull me back into the world again when I felt so far away.

“It’s going to come back, Jean, I know it will. I know it doesn’t feel like it now and that’s all normal, that’s good, save some brilliance for the rest of us, okay?” I would chuckle a bit and wait for her cheeks to pink up to show that life was still kicking around in her. “The real brilliance is in the struggle anyways, right? Beauty through pain, that’s what makes real art.”

Beauty through pain, that was our mantra in those days. She would tell me that my beauty came from being from having to be my own mom so much of the time and I would remind her in these moments when I could try to be her mom too.

These riven moments always passed, they had to; Jean’s creative force was too tsunamic to be kept at bay for long, the wind always broke through whatever shutters she had built up. And when she did spring back to life, I would slink back into the shadows, sliding sluggishly through the hallway, averting eye contact as I hunted down discounted noodles and red sauce.

[elfroschkoenig]

Don’t tell mum.

Trigger warning: This post might contain traces of nuts, spelling mistakes and my terrible, terrible sense of humour. In case of emergence do not, I repeat, do not return any of the latter to me.

Well, well, well,

I guess it is finally time to really start my blog about my wonderful life in Sweden. You're probably wondering why I am starting a blog for the last six months that I am spending in Sweden. If you have any clues, make sure to inform me too! I guess it could be this weird custom of new year's resolutions. Of course I will write this blog in English. As a consequence two things might happen. First you might come into contact with an exquisite amount of direct translations from German into English. The reasons are quite simple: I am not a native English speaker (Surprise!), so I will unconsciously write Germlish. Or I will consciously translate words, phrases or proverbs from German into English because I like the aforementioned better in German Secondly, it might happen that you live in Lund, have not only to endure me, but also start to read about you in this blog. As my last blog was rather blunt (because it was in German), you (yes, I am talking to you again!) might feel offended. I don't want that. Please do tell me if that happens, so I can delete the specific part and we can still be friends or frenemies. <3 <3 <3 Alternatively always feel free to start your own blog where you write how I am a vampire but I don't sparkle, how bad my German accent is or how I am not a real Swedish guy.

For all people looking forward to gossip, let me tell you this: Based on your previous experiences with me, it might be hard to believe, but I have this thing called common sense that I will apply. So I'll draw some lines you won't know about.

The new year started out well.

Together with some friends from my corridor we were watching the fireworks at Lundagard. Lundagard is the central park in Lund. Lund's cathedral is situated directly south of the park while the main building of the university and some other university buildings are located at the other end of the park. The main difference between Germany and Sweden on New Year's Eve is that private fireworks are not a thing here. So while in Germany the streets might be covered in fireworks' dust like a football stadium after supporters lit some Bengal lights, we enjoyed the public firework at Lundagard and went back to our corridor afterwards. There we played some rather uneventful rounds of "Never have I ever" because some persons had to get more drunk before they could hit the dancefloor at another corridor where we were invited to. The party was really nice although the amount of Swedish songs played exceeded my limit of at some point. Don't get me wrong, the mood will almost always boil over when a Swedish party songs comes up. But even after one and a half years in Sweden I still lack the ability to understand Swedish people drunkenly chanting Swedish songs and if I can't join the drunk chanting, I don't like to dance.

I woke up on the 1st of January and was greeted by some free pizza in the kitchen. Apparently the 1st of January is the busiest day for pizza delivery services and someone's delivery got messed up. I didn't ask for the details, but took the pizza, some coke I had from the night before and enjoyed watching a bit Harry Potter in the common kitchen / living room with my corridor friends. Part of the reason why I celebrated New Year's Eve in Lund this year was that I wanted to start organizing and planning different things before my master thesis term officially started. So after resting on the 1st of January, I decided to go to university on Monday, January the 2nd. (Future Felix is proud, 1st term Felix is ashamed; you, my lovely reader are either in disbelief, secretly admiring me or more probably hating yourself for procrastinating on studying and reading this blog post.) After having spent a productive four hours from 10am to 2pm - read the whole opening hours in the first week - at my faculties library I went home to enjoy the afternoon. I don't know which whim of nature it was but a terrible, excruciating headache kicked in my prefrontal cortex (forehead region) while I was making food. After trying to cope with it four around four hours, I've decided to go to sleep early at 7pm and I slept 14 hours straight through, woke up for one hour and slept another 4 hours, only to wake up with the headache still being present. Fun! I stayed in bed the next three days but I will spare you the details, because telling you about my misery wouldn't be any fun, would it?

Let's skip to the fun part instead.

Thursday, the day whose event gave this blog post its headline. So you have to promise me not to tell your mum (yes, your mum, come on, speed up, you're losing me) about this. It's like a super-secret thing, except I am publishing it on the Internet. But we all know that your mother has a hard time following all these internet related stuff. If she has heard of Tumblr it's probably because of some newspaper articles about Tentacle Porn of Bronies. No srsly, this is a thing and no, look it up yourself - looking especially at you Haggis3. So basically it is a secret until you tell your mum and trust me nobody wants that. Anyways, I got the Victor-Valdes-memory-haircut. In case you don't know who Victor-Valdes-memory-haircut is, you'll find a photo of him here: 

By Mutari 16:09, 5 March 2008 (UTC) - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3664338

Erik, my Finnish corridor mate, was so kind to shave my hair. Of course not without making the obligatory Nazi jokes (You have my permission to think the same now.). Although I will let it grow out again, I am pleased to see that I could rock a bald head in combination with a gigantic beer belly at the age of 27, which is in two years. So I got that going for me, which is nice. Anyways the weekend was quite uneventful, basically because I had to catch up with some work with university. What else to tell, ah yes, I think I could tell about another New Year's resolution. I always forget what it is called. It involves physical activity and starts with a 't'.

Hm…

Ah, yes!

Now I remember again…!

I've started exercising and am currently on a three day streak, counting in the football match yesterday. So you better watch out Tim Wiese! I'm onto you! Bam.

 So, I guess this is it for this week. I guess nobody's expecting me to follow up next week due to broken promises in the past. I urge you to do that, so I can disappoint you again by writing blog post #2.

Yours sincerely, en riktig svensk kille!