#and this is my first poll that’s gotten more than like ten votes so i’m v happy!!

[certifiedfae]

yes this is what i meant!! i want to know your top tolerance for “a few days a year” weather. i’m always fundamentally a little pissed when it hits 80 and above so 75 is my hard limit for even summertime temps.

saw a poll about dry/humid heat and like OBVIOUSLY everyone preferred dry heat but. would love to know what everyone considers to be “too hot”

me personally it’s a hard cutoff at 75°F. don’t need anything more than that thank you 🫶🫶🫶

[skyeet-the-writer]

The Love Among Us

Chapter 1-- I’d Never Snitch On Daddy

so i haven’t seen many corpse husband x reader stories on here, so i decided to upload one myself. i’ve been watching jacksepticeye’s among us videos and when i heard corpse talk for the first time, i was like, “hol up” and now i’ve been obsessed with him. also, go stream his music on spotify, it’s amazing. enjoy! x. 

 corpse husband x female!reader

summary: while playing among us, y/n watches corpse kill felix in o2. when his body is reported, however, she doesn’t tell who killed him. 

 word count: ~3.6k

warnings: swearing, mentions of death (not real death), mentions of murder (not real murder)

EDIT: before i wrote this and after i published it, i did not know that corpse did not like to be referred to as “daddy”. had i known this, i would have not even thought of posting this. and since i know now, i won’t refer to him as such in the future. thank you. (10/19/2020)

EDIT 2: this is the first part to my corpse x reader series. i will be adding chapters as we go!

next>

4 rounds before the incident

“I was in coms with PJ!” Sean exclaims. 

“He is doing the liar voice!” Felix shouts with a laugh. 

“I’m not,” Sean tries to say, but everyone talks over him and the voting time ends. Everyone left alive, though it was only four people, had all voted for him and he yells at them as he gets ejected. 

stinky was not the imposter

2 imposters remain

The round ends and everyone unmutes themselves. 

“Lizzie, you saw Felix kill me and you did nothing!” Roomie yells as soon as the round ends and the imposters are revealed. 

“Yeah, because I was the other imposter.”

“Oh. Okay, well that makes sense.”

Everyone laughs and Ken starts the round again. 

“Wait, can I invite y/n to play? She’s doing her twenty-four-hour stream and she just finished playing Monopoly with Mark, Bob, and Wade,” says Lizzie, looking down at her phone as they all appear back in the waiting room. 

“Yes,” Corpse blurts out and there are a few laughs and chuckles. 

“You were quick to answer, Corpse,” Sean teases. 

“Shut up,” Corpse mumbles and there are even more laughs. 

Lizzie smiles and taps into her phone. “I’m gonna invite her.”

~

“I can’t believe that you actually made that deal, y/n,” Wade is telling you after ending the second round of Monopoly that you’ve played with them. 

You smile and cross your legs on your chair. “Look, I was going bankrupt and it seemed good at the time. Besides, Mark was going to win anyway, he owned half of the board.” Your phone buzzes beside you on your desk and you pick it up. “Lizzie texted me.” There’s a sound effect that plays in your headset and you look up at your screen and smile. “Thanks to _lorieplays _for donating a hundred dollars, that means a lot. Thank you so much.”

“Do you want to play another round?” Marks asks. 

You shake your head, reading the text from your friend in England. “No, I don’t want to lose to you again.” You laugh. “Nah, Lizzie wants me to play Among Us with her and a few others. It was fun playing with you guys.”

“It was even though you took all of my money,” Bob snaps. 

You laugh. “Yeah, yeah. See you guys later.”

“Bye,” says Mark.

“See y--” Wade begins but you cut him off when you disconnect from the call. 

“Oops.” You put a hand over your mouth and laugh. “Sorry, Wade. Okay.” You straighten up and glance over everything, making sure it’s all working properly. “I have to pee and I think my roommate ordered pizza, so we’ll be back after this short break. Enjoy this live feed of my pet rats.” You giggle and switch the stream over to a view of your two rats in their cage where you have a camera set up. You take your headset off and head out of your recording room. 

Every two months, you have a twenty-four-hour livestream where you play games with your friends from all around the world. Despite being only twenty-five, your Youtube channel had grown exponentially in the past three years and you’ve had the chance to meet lots of other Youtubers like Markiplier, PewDiePie, and your close friend, LDShadowLady. 

Currently, you’re on hour twenty of twenty-four and you’re beginning to feel the effects of not sleeping for a whole day. You had been drinking coffee and energy drinks for the past four hours and that seemed to perk you up for two hours max. But your roommate had ordered pizza and that would hopefully wake you up. 

After going to the bathroom and grabbing an entire box of pizza, you return to your recording room and sit down. You put your headset back on and eat a slice of pizza before switching the views back to you. “And we’re back. I hope you guys enjoyed my rats because I don’t. They keep me up at night.”

You read a comment while loading up Among Us and laugh. “No, they’re not dead. They’re sleeping. They do that a lot when they’re not fighting.” 

When you finally get into the game and entire the code, you spawn in. You also quickly join the Discord chat and wince when nearly ten voices hit you at once. 

“y/n!” exclaims Lizzie and the other voices die down for a moment before rising to greet you. 

You wince again but laugh. “Jesus, you guys are loud. Hey, Lizzie.” You move your character to the customize tab and go to try and switch your color. But then you frown and realize that you’re stuck with being dark blue. “Damn, I wanted to be white.”

“Do you want to switch?” Corpse asks. 

Your eyes widen you your stomach flips. You hadn’t noticed Corpse was in this game. Immediately, your chat became flooded with keyboard smashing and lots of “omg my shipp” and “y/n rlly said ‘anna oop-’” 

“Uh, yeah, if you don’t mind,” you manage to stutter out and take a bite of pizza as Corpse’s player comes over and the white option becomes available. You select it and also select the goggles in the hats menu. 

“How’s your stream going?” asks Sean. 

You shrug. “Pretty good. I’m super tired, though. I literally almost fell asleep while playing Monopoly with Mark, Wade, and Bob.”

“You went to college, right?” You’re pretty sure that’s Roomie. 

“Yep,” you affirm with a nod even though they can’t see you. “You’d think that those all-nighters writing papers and studying for finals would make me able to do this.”

There’s a laugh in the group and the round starts.

3 rounds before the incident

You scratch your eyebrow and sigh in relief when you’re the crewmate. You mute yourself and slide up in your chair. 

“I like being the crewmate,” you say, heading towards admin as a habit. “It’s a lot less stressful than being imposter.”

After doing your tasks in admin and fueling the engines, you stumble across a dead body in the lower engine and a vent closing. 

“Oh,” you say, and press the report button. You unmute yourself and begin with, “So I saw a vent close but I didn’t see who went in.”

“Who died?” asks Lizzie. 

“Felix,” says Sean. 

You smirk. “It’s always yellow that dies first.”

“Where was the body?” Ken asks. 

“Lower engine,” you reply. 

“I was in medbay with Corpse doing the scan so it wasn’t him,” PJ says and Corpse makes a noise of confirmation. 

This makes your cheeks heat up and you smack a hand over your mouth. Your chat explodes again but you decide to ignore it. 

“And I was doing wires in cafeteria,” Lizzie says. 

“Sean, where were you?” 

“I was in reactor doing the simon says thing,” he answers. 

You sigh. “I hate that one. What about you, Ken?”

“I was with Roomie in electrical doing the power thing. You know, the one where you have to divert it somewhere else.”

“So do we skip then?” asks Lizzie. 

“No one is super sus, so I’m going to skip,” you answer. 

When no one is ejected, you mute yourself again. “I dunno why, but Sean seems pretty sus. Because I didn’t see him on the way down from upper engine. But I guess he could have gotten there in time.” You shrug and run over to the trash chute in the cafeteria. “RIP to Felix, though.”

After doing the trash there, you head down to storage, running into Corpse doing the wires in there. You wait there to clear him and once you do, you run a few circles around him to get his attention and he follows you over to the trash in storage and watches you do that. After that, the two of you head over to electric together and do wires there. 

Suddenly, there’s a body reported and you unmute yourself. 

“Sean just killed Lizzie in front of me!” exclaims PJ. 

“PJ killed Lizzie,” Sean retorts, flipping the blame. “I watched it, he didn’t realize I was there and murdered her.”

“I watched PJ do the scan in medbay, he’s cleared,” Corpse says and you find yourself smiling for no reason. “Sean, you killed Lizzie.”

“I knew he was sus,” you say, grabbing another piece of pizza. You look at the box and your eyes widen. Had you really already eaten half of it?

“Wait wait, how am I sus?” Sean asks. 

You take a moment to swallow. “Because when I was doing fuel earlier, I was running down from upper engine and didn’t see you in reactor. Sure, maybe you could have gotten there earlier, but it was super weird.” 

The discussion time ends and PJ immediately goes to vote for Sean as well as you, Corpse, and everyone else still alive. Sean ends up getting ejected. 

stinky was an imposter 

1 imposter remains

“You’re such a detective, y/n,” Sean says when he gets ejected. 

You laugh. “I just play this game too much.” You then mute yourself and smile. “I am a genius.” 

You end up finishing your tasks quickly after that and then stand in the cafeteria and eat another piece of pizza and read some of the chat. 

“’ What am I going to do after this?’ I don’t know. I might play some Minecraft. Should I have a poll on Twitter? I’m stuck between public Among Us games, Minecraft, and taking random quizzes on Buzzfeed.” You smile and hear another sound effect and something pops up on the screen. “Thank you to coochie man for donating a hundred dollars, that means a lot.” You laugh at their name. “I love your name, by the way.” 

There’s some rattling in the cage behind you and you turn around to see one of your rats drinking water. You turn back to the chat and read another comment. “’ Do you have a crush on Corpse?’” You blush and smile, biting your lip. “I mean, his voice is hot. I’ve never met him since he lives in San Diego and I live in h/t, but yeah, I guess I do. I’ve been listening to his music for the past few days and it’s really good, you guys should go check it out.”

You look up and unmute yourself when a body is reported. “Who died?” you ask. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Are you already done with your tasks, y/n?” Corpse asks. 

God, even the way he says your name is making you blush. “Yeah, I get them done quick.”

“She does that,” says Lizzie, “She always gets her tasks done quick.”

“Ken is dead by the way,” says Roomie and your snort, smacking a hand over your mouth. “I found him in the hallway by navigation. Where was everyone else?”

“I was in cafeteria doing nothing,” you say, leaning back in your chair and spinning around just a little. “I think I saw PJ downloading while I was in there, but I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Yeah, I was downloading,” says Ken. 

After more discussion, Corpse points out that Jaiden had been following him and it looked like she had been faking tasks. 

“No I haven’t,” she says. 

“That sounds like something the imposter would say,” you hum with a smirk. “That’s pretty sus, Jaiden.”

Everyone else agrees and you all end up voting Jaiden out. 

jaiden was the imposter

0 imposters remain

You cheer as the round ends and a blue victory screen pops up for the crewmates. “Good game, guys,” you say and play again, waiting for the host. 

~

1 round before the incident 

“Oh my god, I’m imposter again?” you groan and sigh when you spawn back in. “I was just imposter, I don’t want to be it again. I’m so bad at it,”

After another short round of you and Felix losing to the crewmates, you all agreed to play two more rounds before Sean had to leave. So you move your character to admin where PJ is and fake the card swipe before moving over to the admin security thing where you could see who was around where. Luckily, no one appeared to be near admin, so you quickly kill PJ and escape through the vent and come out through medbay. 

“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” you whisper over and over, running down to storage. “That was clean.” You fake getting fuel and go back up to the upper engine. 

When PJ’s body is reported, you see that your fellow imposter, Sean, had reported it. You stay silent for most of the round and only say that you were in the fuel area when it was reported. 

“Yeah, I saw her run past electrical earlier,” Corpse says. You blush and glance at your exploding chat and shake your head. 

After everyone skips the round, you mute yourself once more and head towards navigation. “I hate this.” You drag the last syllable and watch Lizzie enter the room. You wait a moment before walking towards her and killing her, jumping into one of the vents. You let out a sigh and flex your fingers. “I’m so stressed.” You exit out of the vent into shields and your heart stops when you see someone else in there but you realize that it’s the other imposter, Sean, and you relax. 

You run past him and go to the trash compartments and pretend to unload those. And that’s how the rest of the round goes. You kill someone, someone reports it and you vote someone off. Eventually, you and Sean do a double kill and end up winning the round.

You unmute yourself. 

“Let’s go!” Sean exclaims and you smile. 

“I can’t believe you killed me, y/n!” shouts Lizzie. “I thought we were friends.”

You laugh. “There are no friends in this game. I’m not loyal to anyone in this game. You could be my best friend and I would fucking murder you.”

“That’s cold,” says Roomie as everyone else spawns back in. 

“Yeah,” you nod. 

“Wait, PJ disconnected,” says Sean, and you all end up waiting for him to rejoin. 

In that time, you look at your chat and say, “Hey, do you guys have any questions for who I’m playing with. I’m asking you, chat.”

“I swear if someone asks about my hands, I’m leaving,” Corpse says and everyone laughs. 

You laugh louder when you read a comment and read it aloud, “_Ironlady _says that you should be a hand model, Corpse.”

“Okay, I’m leaving,” you hear Corpse say over everyone laughing. 

“No, stay!” you exclaim, trying not to laugh. “C’mon, don’t leave.”

He sighs deeply and your brain goes fuzzy. “Fine. I’ll stay for you.”

You beam and your tummy turns. You ignore the whistles and remarks from everyone else and stand beside Corpse. You suddenly wish that the little bean characters could hold hands. 

When PJ joins the server again, Ken starts the round and you cross your fingers, hoping to get crewmate. 

0 rounds before the incident

You mute yourself and sigh when you’re a crewmate. “Thank god.” You let out a breath and go over to admin with everyone else. You swipe your card and go to the cafeteria to do some wires there. 

The game turns out to be rather uneventful. A few people die and two people are voted off before the game gets truly interesting. And that happens when you walk in on Corpse and Felix. 

“I’ve had this song stuck in my head for days,” you’re saying, walking from electrical over to O2. “And I can’t get it out of my head. Maybe singing it will help.” You hum the first part. “Don't go in there, you'll become one. Freaky creatures, monster party. Eyes of yellow, scales and feathers, tails in tethers. Turn the lights off. Bend the nightmare, you control it. Artful dodger, easy does it. Shut the closet, get under the covers. Snakes and lovers. Turn the lights off.” You do a little dance for a moment and continue hum the song, glancing at the chat as you go towards O2 after doing wires in storage. 

“Like, I know the song, it’s just been stuck in my head,” you explain. “And it kind of annoys me--”

But you stop as you enter O2 and watch Corpse murder Felix. Neither one of you move and you don’t know what to do. “Uhhh.” 

Then, without thinking, you turn straight around and make your way away from the scene of the murder. “I didn’t see anything!” you shout to no one. “I suddenly can’t see who murdered Felix.” You smack a hand over your mouth and stand in the middle of a hallway. “Oh my god, what do I do? I don’t want to snitch on Corpse, he’s hot.” You scratch the back of your neck and shrug, continuing on to reactor. “I didn’t see anything.”

You’re in the middle of doing the simon says in reactor when Felix’s body is reported. You unmute yourself and fidget with the sleeve of your hoodie. You know exactly who killed Felix. 

“--was in O2,” says Jaiden and you focus back into the conversation. “And I didn’t see anyone around.”

“I saw you heading that way, y/n, but I know it wasn’t you because I saw you do the trash in storage.”

You look at the screen when Sean talks to you and you chew your lip. “I know who killed Felix.”

“Who?” asks almost everyone at the same time. 

You close your eyes and swallow. It’s just a game, why are you taking this so seriously? Suddenly, a song lyric pops into your head and your stomach flips. You imagine yourself saying it and no one knows who you mean except for him. 

You open your eyes. “I’d never snitch on daddy.”

There’s a laugh in the chat and you blush fiercely, your livestream chat blowing up once again.

“I think we know who it is, then,” says Sean, laughing. 

“Yeah,” agrees Lizzie and your eyes widen. 

“Wait, what?” you ask, watching everyone vote almost as soon as the discussion time ends. “Wait, hang on, who--”

“We know who you’re talking about, y/n,” PJ tells you. 

You vote for yourself and your brain goes blank as you see that everyone voted for Corpse. He even voted for himself. They knew. They all _knew _about your feelings for Corpse. 

The round ends with Corpse being voted out and the crewmates win. There’s some talking, but you stay on the victory screen. You’re trying to decide if your mad or embarrassed or both. 

“I didn’t know you’d say that, y/n,” Corpse says, effectively breaking you out of your trance. “I thought you were gonna snitch on me.”

“You heard her,” teases Lizzie and you can tell she’s grinning. “She’d never snitch on you, Corpse.”

He laughs and you feel something in a certain place. “Oh my god, I’m gonna die of embarrassment.” You put your face in your hands, listening to your friends tease you in the chat. You suddenly want to jump out your window and run into traffic. 

“Don’t die,” comes Corpse’s voice through the onslaught of teasing. “I’ll be sad.”

“Fuck!” you shout and slam your hand on your desk, shaking your equipment and scaring your rats. “I’m so sorry, Corpse, that was really weird, I--”

“Stop.” He interrupts you and the chat goes silent and you look up at the screen even though you can’t see him. “It’s okay. It was funny.”

Your eyes widen and then narrow. Funny? He thought what you said was funny? How could he think it was funny?

But then he speaks again and he sounds oddly flustered. “Uh, I gotta go. Um, it was fun playing with you guys. Bye, y/n.”

“Bye Cor--” but then he disconnects and you’re left talking to no one. “--pse.”

There’s a long moment of silence until Felix breaks it. “I can’t believe you just watched me die and didn’t do anything about it.”

There are some laughs and you smile faintly, rejoining the game. “Yeah, uh, sorry about that.”

“Are you okay, y/n?” asks Lizzie. 

You blush and swallow. “I don’t know. God, I’m so weird.” You run a hand through your hair and adjust your headphones

“No, you’re not,” Roomie assures you. “He has a crush on you, too.”

Your eyes widen and you scoot up in your chair. “He does?”

“I mean, he called you pretty once during a game and said that he watches your videos a lot, so maybe.”

You groan and sink in your chair. “I’m gonna go, I need to run into traffic now.”

A few people laugh or chuckle and Lizzie asks you if you’re actually going to leave. 

“Yeah,” you tell her. “But not to run into traffic. I’m going to go play Minecraft to soothe myself.”

“Aw.” You can practically hear her frown. “Okay. Bye, y/n.”

“Good luck with your stream,” Ken tells you. 

You grin. “Okay, thanks, bye.”

When you exit the game and leave the chat, you scream. You actually scream and it’s loud. Your roommate even knocks on your door, asking if you’re okay. 

You look at them and nod. “Yeah, totally fine. Probably about to have a mental breakdown, but I’m fine.”

“Okay,” they say and lean on the doorframe. “But I’m not cutting bangs for you again.”

You laugh and nod. “Yeah, okay, fine.” They leave and you turn back to your stream, feeling like you’re about to cry. Corpse knows you have a crush on him. And it seems like he has one on you as well, but now you’re embarrassed because you called him ‘daddy’ on stream.

You rub your eyes. “Well, now I know what’ll be streaming on Twitter tonight,” you tell the chat. 

[makeste]

BnHA 6th Popularity Poll Reaction Post - Risky Spoiler-Dodging Edition

hey guys, so seeing as the results from the 6th popularity poll were leaked today, I figured I would do a separate reaction + analysis post this year, rather than piling it in as an extra on top of the chapter reaction post tomorrow. I figure this makes more sense anyway, since they’re really two completely different things. also this way I can write as much as I want lol.

also, just fyi, I am still completely unspoiled for chapter 293. and probably the smart thing to do to keep it that way would be to log off tumblr and hold off posting this until tomorrow, but I apparently have no impulse control today so oh well. anyway, so I’m hoping you guys will keep this spoiler-free if you don’t mind! as always, I would prefer to just jump right in completely unaware tomorrow like Troy returning to the study room with the pizza boxes lol.

okay so this first part is just going to be my predictions. fyi I am writing this part on Wednesday night, and then I’ll add on the results part on Thursday or Friday (ETA: Thursday, apparently, since I am impatient.)

okay so first of all, just as a refresher, this poll was open to Japanese voters from Aug 3 to Sep 30. meaning chapters 279 through 285. meanwhile last year’s poll took place around the tail end of the MVA arc. so between then and now we had Heroes Rising, the Endeavor Agency arc, and the War arc up to the part where the 1-A kids took on Gigantomachia in Gunga, and started battling Tomura in Jakku. so technically only a couple of arcs, but a LOT of stuff going down in them. oh and season 4 of the anime as well

so! firstly, I predict that my truculent africanized honeybee son will hold on to his crown at #1, coming off a year in which he did some internship-boosted soul searching, borrowed OFA in movie canon, and finished out the voting period as the my-body-moved-on-its-own character development MVP. like CALL ME CRAZY lol, but I’m pretty sure his title is safe. and then after him will be Deku and Shouto as usual

Aizawa should hopefully also have a strong showing because the dude had a banner fucking year. reunited with his old dead friend, took on Tomura with his hopelessly inept hero pals, and then chopped his fucking leg off. he had better be in the top 10. his fucking leg died for this, idk what else he has to do

Endeavor also stands a decent chance of doing well given the internship arc and the final episode of season 4. which I’m sure will go down just swimmingly if that does happen lmao. especially if he somehow manages to rank higher than...

Dabi, which I don’t think he will btw, but you never know. anyways though, but I’m thinking Dabi’s going to have a stronger showing than in past years (in the last poll he only got 367 votes and was ranked 19th). mostly because of his fight in the Gunga mansion, and his cheekily censored name reveal to...

Hawks, who is also going to rank pretty high here, I think. might be he loses some points for killing off Twice, but his back was basically to the wall there. and he has always been very popular, and I think season 4 will also give him a boost, along with his heavy involvement in the first half of the War arc

Tomura was already in 6th place last year and I think he cracks the top 5 this year. he’s gotten exponentially more popular since the MVA arc, and got a boost in the last poll even though his flashback had only just barely happened, and he hadn’t finished Awakening yet and all that stuff. anyway, so he’s only gotten cooler and more tragic since then so I think he makes a big play here

Kirishima, Momo, Tokoyami, and Mina should also hopefully do well, since the poll opened right in the middle of all that Gigantomachia action, and Toko had just got done being an absolute badass and protecting his birb dad. I don’t think he’ll quite make it to the top ten, but he should

and last but not least, I’m hoping that Mirko will come out and take the polls by storm, although I have no clue how popular she is in Japan lol. she’s clearly Horikoshi’s favorite though. she SHOULD be everyone’s favorite, but I mean, we’ll see how it goes

anyway that’s it as far as predictions! and so now, through the magic of writing stuff at different times, we will fast-forward to the part where we actually find out the results!

OH MY GOD YES, STEAMPUNK KHLKSLLKL. HERE FOR IT. JOLLY GOOD SHOW. 5 STARS

Kacchan looks SO COCKY and SO HAPPY and SO ADORABLE, YES I SAID IT. he is adorable as FUCK. I don’t quite know what it is about this particular Kacchan that just screams “LOOK HOW FUCKING CUTE MY STUPID, LOUD SON IS WITH HIS BIZARRE WINDOWPANE-LOOKING CONVERTIBLE SUNGLASS GOGGLES and his POORLY TIED CRAVAT”, but I think it’s because he looks like if a Digimon character and a FMA character had a baby

anyway, so it looks like most of the people present here are more or less who we expected to see. except that I can’t tell for sure if that’s Dabi or Shindou, and if it’s Shindou I’m going to punch somebody in the face so you will have to excuse me

Iida wearing a TRENCHCOAT and a TOP HAT with ENGINE EXHAUST GOGGLE ACCENTS is my new favorite Iida of all time. take note how there is no possible way he can wear those goggles with them sitting on top of his hat like that. plus he’s already got glasses on. these are just purely for aesthetic and IF THAT AIN’T JUST THE STEAMPUNK WAY

Deku out here speaking softly and carrying a lead pipe. Kacchan you best look out. seems like he’s done watching you take first place year after year while he languishes in the number two spot. your only hope is that he trips while attacking you because his boots are unbuckled

Shouto’s standing over there with the rest of the non-first-and-second-place characters, but what are the odds his results are actually within spitting distance of Deku’s same as always. anyway he doesn’t mind, though. also his outfit is by far the most sensible one here, but if you look closely he’s got some sort of fire extinguisher/jet pack thing strapped to his back that’s got a control switch on his belt. Shouto are you jetpacking or putting out fires

Kirishima out here all “I’m not sure what steampunk is so I’m just going to take off my shirt and pose”

AIZAWA WITH THE EYEPATCH SKLKSDLKFJLSKJLDFKJSLDFFJLDKSJFL:KS. SIR. SIR. also, lowkey furious that Horikoshi refuses to show us the automail leg that he is clearly sporting here but which we just can’t see, SHOUTO MOVE GODDAMMIT

Endeavor has TWO fire extinguisher-slash-jetpacks. THE BETTER TO... WHATEVER. look at you here in the top ten again. you really live for that controversy

HAWKS OUT HERE WITH HIS STEAMPUNK BEATS BY DRE AND HIS WEARING A RING ON EVERY FINGER. nice to see you’ve still got your wings there, kiddo. then again Deku still has both of his arms too so who even knows what is going on

BUT SERIOUSLY THOUGH, IS THIS DABI OR SHINDOU. as if I don’t know the truth deep down in my heart. y’all I am gonna flip lmao. it’s not that I dislike Shindou, strictly speaking. but just... I can’t explain what it is, but if you put him and AFO next to each other and told me “you can only punch one”, I would be having a serious crisis. just, THIS FUCKING GUY, idek. STOP SMILING

Tomura looks like he just wandered onto the set here by mistake and has no idea where he is or what is going on. it’s because you’re wearing a bigass severed hand that’s blocking your entire view, Tomura. just take the hand off your face my sweet murder dumpling

anyway! so I managed to also find a link to the full poll results while somehow managing to avoid spoilers, and then I wanted to compare the results to last year’s poll, and so I made... this

hopefully you can all see this. if you’re on desktop you might be screwed, but on mobile you should be able to click and enlarge it. I mean, assuming you actually give a fuck about boring poll analysis spreadsheets lmao

anyway, so there were actually 13k fewer votes cast this year which is a bit of a surprise. is the series not still growing in popularity? do people apparently have better things to do during their quarantine lol

anyways but despite this, and despite getting 8k fewer votes overall, Kacchan still managed almost twice as many as his closest competitor. well fought, Deku. please put down that pipe

I somehow always underestimate the power of ship popularity to influence these things. but for example, it looks like Present Mic got that Vigilantes Trio bump. ride that wave for all it’s worth my man! hell, you got me on board

Iida fucking Tenya somehow got some sort of POWER BOOST out of NOWHERE which I can’t explain at all lmao, but I’m here for it. NOT BAD FOR AN OLD MAN

Sero managed to get the exact same number of votes in both 2019 and 2020. clearly the most loyal fans in the business

Mirko being all the way down at #20 is, of course, a travesty, and I hereby nominate her to be the one to punch Shindou in the face

ngl though, the lack of a single female character in the top ten hurts just a bit. it’s not overly surprising, but still. the worst part of it is that even if you kicked Shindou to the curb and moved everyone else up one slot, it would still be all dudes since Mic beat out Momo by a margin of a little more than a hundred votes. hard to stay mad at Mic for too long, though. ah well

Tomura actually lost a bunch of votes which is a genuine surprise to me. I know the villain standom isn’t as dominant in Japan as it is in Western fandom, but still. you can go ahead and punch Shindou too I guess

Tokoyami lowkey doubled his vote count over the past year while hiding down there at #18. he is slowly becoming more powerful. biding his time

anyway so I think that’s it! I mean not really, but I’m getting kind of tired lol. so just, you know, insert the usual gripes at Overhaul’s ranking here, although we can be happy about Magne making her way onto the list (r.i.p.), and Mineta and AFO taking a very satisfying slide down (all the way out, in AFO’s case; good riddance you bum). Hadou also got a huge boost which is awesome. Mustard’s persistent ownership of the #36 spot will forever remain a mystery to me, but oh well

anyways, this was fun. and I really do feel like everyone is looking away on purpose so that when Deku brains Kacchan with that pipe in about two seconds from now, there will be no witnesses, oh my fucking god

[dreamthinkimagine]

Ugly

Here’s the fic from the Voting Poll. Also apparently Leonard Nimoy lived life thinking he was ugly and in reality he was beautiful.

For @august-anon and whoever left me that very kind anonymous message.

WARNING: sad!spock​

It all started with some simple banter in the break room. Okay, maybe it was more of an “Everyone Roast Bones Hour,” but after ten minutes of continuous jokes, Bones fought back with one of only two safe ways he knew. The other being a gentle hit, but that would probably lead to more commentary since he took an oath to do no harm. So he went with the other.

“Nohohohoho!” screeched Chekov as his ribs were attacked by the vicious doctor; his hands sliding up and down the ladder of bones.

“You shoulda thought about this before saying anything, Chekov,” said McCoy nonchalantly.

“Aye, Lad. You shouldn’t have insulted the hair on his head.”

“Thank you, Scotty.”

“Yeh shoulda gone for the hair on his arms! Thickest I’ve ever seen!”

“That’s it!” McCoy let go of Chekov and tackled Scotty to the floor, digging into his belly. Scotty screamed as laughter bolted out of his mouth. His legs kicked and he tried to roll from side to side to save his sensitive stomach.

“I don’t know why you’d make fun of McCoy’s hair,” said Kirk. “Especially since your getting a little bald spot. Is your head hair going to his arms?” Kirk had been laughing through this whole ordeal, certainly not as hard as Scotty or Chekov, but hard enough not to notice when Spock left the room. As soon as he did notice, however, he stood and left without another word and without Scotty or McCoy even knowing.

***

Spock laid down on his bed staring at the ceiling. Everything rang thorough his head - the insults, the chants, the cruel songs. Everything. The ones that stuck out the most weren’t the insults about him being part human. The ones that he remembered most was when he’d be called ugly.

Due to his human heritage and nose they’d call him, “Elephant seal.”

They’d chant, “Ugly! Ugly! Ugly!” That was a double insult, since “ugly” was a human word.

They’d sing, “Vile profile! Spock has a vile profile!” His human part thought it sounded odd, but his Vulcan part knew what they meant, so his human half hurt. His human half still hurt.

As he stood and looked at his reflection in the mirror on his wall, his fear came true. One of his deepest insecurities had grown - they always did after he had these flashbacks. When he looked in the mirror, he didn’t like what he saw. He saw an ugly crossbreed. His eyes were small, his nose was too big. He had what humans called “laugh lines” - Vulcans didn’t laugh. Or even smile. They were ugly.

He was ugly.

The more he looked at himself, the more disgusting his face became. He wanted to look away, but he couldn’t. It was almost as if he was frozen, left to himself and his thoughts. Humans judged by appearances. If he was ugly on Vulcan, he must look horrendous to the humans. He looked so different from them with his eyebrows and ears. How could they see him as an equal when he was so ugly?

The Vulcans thought he was ugly. The humans thought he was ugly. It had to be true. Perhaps that was why he was often treated as an outsider. Treated like he was different.

His door opened. “I thought you’d be here,” Kirk said stepping into his quarters. “I wanted to check up on you. You left so quickly that...Spock?” The half-Vulcan had turned his back to Jim, sparing him from having to look upon his monstrosity of a face. “Look at me, Spock. What’s going on?”

“Nothing, Captain,” he lied as he slowly turned to face him. “You may depart and resume comradery with the rest of the bridge crew.”

“I make the rules around here, Spock, and  I’m - ”

“Starfleet makes the rules and regulations of each starship, Captain.”

“...And I’m staying. Tell me what’s bothering you.”

“Is that an order, Sir?”

“...Yes.”

“I just thought it most logical to exit before everyone turned their insults toward me.”

“Ah, you mean your being half Vulcan and half human.”

“Somewhat...” Spock said quietly, turning away again. “I thought they might  comment on my appearance. I thought you might.”

“What are you talking about, Spock?”

“You humans call it... ‘ugly’.””

“You are not ugly, Spock. Look at you! How many missions have we gone on where the girls were all over you?”

“Compare that to your number of occasions where females wanted your company.”

“It’s happened to you more than Bones.”

“At least he is treated well. Humans see that I am not one of them. They treat me differently for it. Sometimes they point out my difference I even say anything.”

“Spock, you know that -”

“Of course I know it! Look at me. My nose is massive. My eyes are miniscule. I have wrinkles around my mouth. I was ugly on Vulcan and I’m ugly by human standards. Two planets - two completely different species - two different cultures. Both say it in different ways. I’m ugly, Jim.”

***

“Hey, where are Jim and Spock?” Bones asked as he stood up from the floor, finally letting poor Scotty go.

“I saw ze Captain leave, but Spock was already gone,” Chekov took a sip of the drink he must have gotten while Bones was getting his revenge on Scotty, whose breathless giggles sounded in the background.

“Well I gotta get them too. Jim making fun of my arm hair and Spock is probably trying to protect him. Let’s go, Scotty.”

“’Let’s’?” Scotty asked as he sat up, finally catching his breath.

“Yes, ‘let’s,’ the two of us.”

“Why?”

“Because he made fun of your hair too!” A memory of Kirk mocking his hair played in his head, as vague as it may have been since he was distracted at the time, it still played.

“Aye, he did. Alright, Doctor; let’s go.” As soon as he was alone, Chekov shook his head with a smile.

“Zis is going to be a long night,” and took another sip of his drink.

***

Kirk sat with Spock, flabbergasted over what he just said. How could he repel the words and actions of two planets. Two separate people. Two separate cultures - wait a minute. That was it!

“Spock, I want you to listen to me now.” The Vulcan made a small sound, he was listening, even though he wouldn’t show Jim his face. “You’re part human.”

“Do not remind me.”

“Unlike Vulcans, most humans believe in the phrase ‘beauty comes from within’.”

“I’m not like you within. My heart is where your ribs should be.”

“Most humans believe that physical appearance doesn’t matter. Looks don’t define beauty, but it is how you behave that makes you beautiful. The way you speak, how you treat others, how you treat yourself. I can’t promise you that there won’t be anyone ever again who will treat you different or even say that you’re ugly. But I can promise you that you are one of the most beautiful people inside that I know.”

“What are you implying?”

“I’m saying that the people who bullied you, shouldn’t bother you anymore because they ignore the universal truth - that beauty does not come from the outside; but from inside. They looked over your beauty and proved their own ugliness. Spock, you’re intelligent, kind-hearted, and very loyal. These are three of the many things humanity knows is beautiful. You’re not ugly, Spock. And I’m lucky to have you as my first officer and friend.”

Spock didn’t know what to say, how to react. Thankfully, he didn’t have to because his door suddenly flew open to reveal a smug looking doctor and a proud engineer. Before Kirk could even speak, Bones looked at the Scotsman. “You get Jim. I’ll get Spock.” As the two of them were tickled to pieces, Spock didn’t hold back and let his laugh lines show.

Because he knew now that he was not ugly.

[cheeriecherry]

Birds Of A Feather [2/7]

Hawks x Fem!Reader

Warnings: like, one swear

Part 2/7

It’s been a week since you started your new position at Hawks’ hero agency. It’s a nice workplace, very accommodating for the staff, and the sidekicks and interns you work with are friendly and sociable. But there’s still a little piece of you that’s bitter.

You appreciated the job, especially when you discovered what your monthly paycheck would be, but the whole place was just so damn...busy. If you’d known that you’d maintain your hectic lifestyle after moving to Japan, you never would’ve come in the first place.

On top of that, despite your presence being requested by the man himself, you’d yet to actually meet your new boss. Not a conversation, a text, a simple hello, or even a red feather. At this point, you were wondering if the guy even existed.

You decide to mull it over some more on your afternoon lunch hour. You find your usual seat in the staff lounge, and pull out a container of chicken curry.

“Hey Y/N! Hawks says he wants to see you in his office!”

You pause with a forkful of food halfway to your mouth, glancing over at the young sidekick who’d just bounced in. “Can it wait until after lunch?” you ask, hoping to at least finish your meal before dealing with whatever you were wanted for.

The sidekick looks sympathetic. “Sorry,” she says, “but I don’t think so. He asked me to tell you to bring your food…”

You sigh deeply, but thank her for passing the information on. Don’t shoot the messenger, and all that. You begrudgingly pack your things back up and bid farewell to the few people in the room, all of which are ominously quiet.

That didn’t bode well.

----

A few minutes later finds you outside Hawks’ office, balancing your lunch container in one hand while you knock on his doorframe with the other.

His door is wide open, and you can see him sitting at his desk, facing the window and the view of the city. He probably knew you were there before you knocked, but there was no harm in being polite… though he might appreciate the humour of you walking in like you owned the place.

“You wanted to see me, Boss?”

He spins around in his chair, a charming smile gracing his features. You wonder idly if he’d planned that little spiel, and if so, how long he’d been sitting like that for.

“That I did, chickadee! Pull up a chair, make yourself comfortable, eat with me.”

You do as you’re asked.

“Sorry for not seeing to you sooner. It’s been such a busy week, villains and disasters all over the place. I swear, I’ve been to every end of the country.”

You sit tidily on the chair, legs crossed and wings tucked up neatly behind you.

“I understand,” you tell him, “you’re number two, after all. You’re in high demand.”

Hawks smiles wider, but you get the feeling it’s lacking some genuity. You don’t call him out on it, though.

“That’s a relief,” he sighs, slouching back a little. “I looked into you a bit before I hired you, y’know? Gotta make sure you had a good track record, blah blah, PR crap, blah, anyways. The reports said you were a pretty easygoing person. I’m glad they were right!”

You pray he doesn’t notice the slight ruffle of your feathers. Easygoing? Is that what people thought of you? You supposed there were worse things to be known for, but you? Easygoing? Maybe you’d become an actress if the whole hero gig didn’t work out for you, if you’d fooled that many people.

Easygoing. Yeah right. Burnt out, exhausted, apathetic, those were all accurate descriptors. But fucking easygoing?! Hah.

“Hey, you alright, kid?”

You’re about to ask him what he means, to tell him you’re fine and completely unbothered, but your stomach has other plans. Right when you open your mouth to speak, a loud growl interrupts you, aggressively sounding in the quiet of the room.

His grin softens a bit, a touch more kindness apparent on his face. He’s concerned.

“I didn’t mean to take your lunch hour away,” he apologizes, “I had actually wanted to catch you earlier today, but you were on patrol. I figured it wouldn’t be very cool of me to approach you and get swarmed by fans. Not productive for conversation, that.”

You shrug. “I haven’t taken it personally.” In fact, you hadn’t taken it at all. He could have never spoken to you ever, and it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. You were here to do your job, and anything else was an unguaranteed bonus.

“Anyways,” he pulls out a paper bucket of what looks like KFC, and pops the lid off, “eat up. Don’t need my favourite employee dropping out of the sky from exhaustion.”

He digs into his own food, and you take yours out.

“If exhaustion could do me in, I would have fallen out of the sky a long time ago,” you mumble, immediately afterwards spooning food into your face.

Hawks bites off a small piece of chicken. “Whadya mean?” And you curse yourself for forgetting he’s sensitive to sound.

You chew your food pensively, making sure to swallow before you speak (unlike him…). “It’s like. Okay. Wing quirks are pretty rare where I’m from, yeah? In my old job, I was the only airborne hero for five hundred kilometers. I got called all over the place, back and forth, never in one place for very long, almost never at home in my own bed. I was sort of...uh…”

“Spread thing?” he supplies.

You nod. “Spread thin. It wasn’t healthy for me. Anywhere that makes you grow to hate your own quirk can’t possibly be good for you.”

“Now hold up, chickadee,” he interrupts, leaning forward in his seat to rest his elbows on the desk. His eyes are wide and surprised, like he’s unable to fathom your words. “How could you possibly hate your own quirk?”

You think for a moment. “Hate is maybe a strong word,” you admit, “but there’s definitely some contempt there. Flying used to be my favourite passtime, y’know? The views, the wind, the sun, the silence. And then one day I woke up and thought ‘god, I hope they don’t make me fly today’.”

Hawks picks a little at his lunch, but is far to engrossed in your tale to pay much attention to it.

“Yikes,” he says.

“Yeah.”

You’re both quiet for a moment before you start speaking again.

“Two weeks after that happened, I moved here. Figured a change might be nice, good for my head, or whatever.”

“And how’s that working out?”

“I still hate flying.”

The conversation ebbs and flows after that, with Hawks not supplying much personal insight on the matter, despite you just spilling your guts to him. You don’t mind, though, and he doesn’t strike you as the kind of person to open up very easily. You probably would have been more disgruntled if he’d offered you some kind of similar story.

The two of you talk a little about work, what your old agency was like, where you went to school, and the questions centered around your life, and none prying into his. You make note of that, and file it away for later.

By the end of the hour, you’re sufficiently full of chicken curry, and your boss looks like he’s fairing the same (you’re not sure how he managed to pack away an entire bucket for fried chicken by himself).

“Thanks for lunch, Boss,” you tell him with a smile, an unspoken ‘it was kind of weird’ in your tone. If he picks up on it, he doesn’t say anything.

He does, however, stop you at the door, tugging you back into the room by your collar with a single red feather.

“Say, chickadee,” his voice is coy, “how’s about we make the afternoon more fun?”

You raise an eyebrow.

“Come patrolling with me,” he clarifies.

“Why?”

“Flying’s more fun when you’re not alone!” he says, as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world. You doubt him, thinking back to all the times you’d ever flown with someone else (re: none). You relent, deciding to entertain his plan.

“Fine. But don’t fall behind, okay? I take my patrols seriously.”

The strange smile returns to his face.

----

After packing up your dishes and throwing away your trash, you follow Hawks to the stairwell. He said it was best to take off from the roof, if you didn’t want to get bombarded by fans.

“Ah, but I’m sure your fans would love to see you!” you tease, marching carefully up the steps. “It wouldn’t take too long, surely?”

He glances over his shoulder at you, pausing so suddenly that you almost get a faceful of his feathers.

“Well sure, if they were just my fans. Most people have seen me before, though, flying around, fighting crime. But you? You’re new. Your fans in Japan haven’t gotten to meet you yet.”

You tilt your head. “I...don’t have fans, boss.”

“You’re kidding, right?” He swivels around on the step, wings brushing quietly against the cramped cement walls. His expression is one of exasperation, and a hint of disbelief. Once he sees your genuine confusion, however, he sighs. “You really have no idea, do you?”

You shake your head. “I’ve only been here like two weeks. How could I have any significant following?”

He looks at you with a fondness reserved for naive children, or puppies. It’s a little patronizing, in your opinion.

“International heroes are pretty big here, you know?” he explains, “and you, little chickadee, were voted number four on the overseas popularity poll this year. Your fanbase here is rivaled only by a handful of heroes, most of which are in Japan’s top ten.”

You’re shocked, to say the least, and Hawks takes your silence as cue to continue walking.

You dodge his wings again, and resume following him.

“How could I be popular and not know it?” you ask. “Surely someone would have approached me by now-”

“Chickadee, when was the last time you were on the ground-”

“This morning-”

“-in the daytime?”

“Oh.”

You think back a little. You’ve patrolled in the skies since you started working at the agency, and your shifts started before sunrise. Plus, you usually flew home, well after sunset. It was just easier than trying to fit into a car and deal with traffic.

“I guess...not since the day I arrived.”

“Exactly! No one knew you were here, then. But now?” He pushes hard against the heavy metal door to the roof, taking a deep breath when it opens and a breeze blows through. “Now, all of Japan knows we work together!”

You saunter out into the sunlight, basking for a few seconds in the warmth. But the thought of your fans quickly overtakes your mind again, and the relaxation is lost.

“Are you sure it’s not fame by affiliation,” you wonder, “because seriously, I didn’t have fans back home. I’ve never been stopped for an autograph, or asked for a photo. I’m cool with that. I just don’t want people to like me because I’m near you sometimes.”

Hawks steps up on the lip of the roof, wings spread wide and overlooking the city.

He stays like that for a few seconds, and you note the deep tiredness in his posture, behind his eyes. You’ve seen it in your mirror too many times.

He’s just as exhausted as you are.

“Thus is the way of the world,” he mumbles, and you’re not sure you’re meant to hear it.

But then he perks up, as quickly as a light switch. He turns on his heel to face you, mischief and playfulness glinting in his smile. “I’ll race you to the bank tower? If I win, you gotta go on patrol with me tomorrow, too.”

You shrug, and take off into the sky. It’s not much of a fight, though. He has agility and familiarity on his side, and he’s waiting for you by the time you finally arrive at your destination.

You don’t mind.

[arcticdementor]

My article “Why is Everything Liberal?” has gotten a great deal of attention. See in particular thoughtful commentary from Bryan Caplan and Robby Soave at Reason.

This post is a followup, with two main goals. First, I’ve discovered additional evidence that liberals care more about politics, which I will just add on to what already was an extremely strong case.

Second, some people criticized the piece for not addressing what has changed recently. I think I’ve found the answer to that too, which is that the mobilization gap increased precipitously in 2016. It is at that time that we see Democrats overtake Republicans in fundraising, liberals overtake conservatives in signing petitions, and the left’s already sizable lead in protesting become much larger. While it seems that liberals have always cared more about politics if we are looking at the tail end of the distribution–i.e., those who become activists, journalists, or academics–it is only in 2016 that we see more noticeable and significant gaps open up in the next level down in the pyramid.

Since 2016, liberals have achieved true mass mobilization in a way conservatives never have in the modern era.

…

In 2016, fewer than 1% of conservatives had been to a protest in the last year, compared to 15% of extreme liberals, 10% of regular liberals, and 5% of the slightly liberal. Even moderates, at 2.4%, protested more than conservatives. Remember, this was before the Women’s March and the peak of BLM! The estimates for protest size used in the original post were pretty crude, but it’s nice to see self-reported data match what we see in the real world. Petitions tell the same story, but the differences are not as extreme: 61% of very liberal individuals had signed one in the last year, compared to just 26% of the very conservative.

…

Liberals already tended to protest more in the years leading up to 2012. But conservatives used to at least hold their own. This matches what we know from the real world, as this was the height of the Tea Party. Glenn Beck’s largely forgotten “Restoring Honor Rally” in summer 2010, for example, drew a lot of people, though nobody really knows how many. Wikipedia says “a scientific estimate placed the crowd size around 87,000, while media reports varied wildly from tens of thousands to 500,000.” This was also the time of Occupy Wall Street, so liberals weren’t exactly sitting on their hands, but conservatives at least made a showing. By 2016, conservative protesting had collapsed to practically nothing, while liberal protesting stayed at similar levels or, more likely, increased (hard to know for sure because of the time frame of the 2012 question being different).

…

In 2012, liberals were more likely to sign petitions than conservatives, but the gap was pretty small and there were many more conservatives in the country, which meant the right actually had more total people signing petitions. By 2016, more Americans than before were calling themselves liberals, and liberals were more mobilized, giving the left a substantial advantage.

Another thing we can do to see how relative mobilization has changed over time is to look at campaign donations. In the previous essay, I went all the way back to 2012, and showed that for every recent presidential election cycle Democrats brought in more money. I didn’t go back to 2008, as I was sure Obama outraised McCain, and I was of course right.

However, if you expand the analysis to midterm elections and all federal candidates, we see the Democrat advantage does not open up until 2016. Here are numbers I’ve gathered from Open Secrets for every election from 1990, as far back as data go.

…

In response to my piece, Ezra Klein argued that liberal domination of institutions was better explained by age and education polarization than liberals caring more. This is an argument I’ve seen him make elsewhere before (see also this and this from Josh Barro on Woke Capital).

…

Romney won college educated whites by somewhere between around 5% and 15%, while according to CNN’s 2020 exit polls, Biden won the same demographic by 12%. CNN actually has Trump barely winning college educated whites in 2016 (48%-45%). Education polarization is real, and the fact that college educated whites vote something like 15-30% more Democrat than they did in 2012 should be having some effects on board rooms and the larger mobilization gap. Yet educational differences do not seem nearly massive enough to explain the total liberal domination of institutions, as Republicans hold their own well enough with degree holders.

As far as the age gap, it can cut both ways. When I was growing up in the 1990s, the stereotype was that retirees had a lot of time on their hands and were therefore politically powerful, while young people were largely indifferent. Old people certainly have more money, and so you’d expect age polarization to actually give Republicans an advantage in donations. Yet since 2016 the trend has been the opposite. As parties have polarized more by age, Democrats have started winning the competition over fundraising. Maybe young people are inherently more likely to protest, but wouldn’t you expect old people to be just as capable of signing petitions? Thus, I’m pretty confident that age and education gaps are less important than the simple fact that liberals care more about politics.

…

The left has always had an advantage in committed activists. Yet, no matter whether you look at donations, protests, or signing petitions, the mobilization gap increased in 2016. Liberals had always protested more, but in 2016 the ratio was absolutely massive, being around 3.7x larger than it was around the time of the invasion of Iraq. This was before an upsurge of liberal protest activity that has included BLM, March for Our Lives, and most importantly, the Women’s March. Finally, the parties raised about an equal amount of money from 1990 until 2016, when Democrats took a lead that has now lasted three straight election cycles (2008 was an exception to the rule of parity in the pre-2016 era, when Democrats ran a fresh faced Barack Obama against John McCain, who seemed good at exciting Republican elites and MSNBC pro-war centrist types but not actual voters).

So what about “Woke Capital”? In many ways, business was the last domino to fall. Yes, liberals have always had more noisy activists, and corporations tended to bow to them on some issues when they got really agitated, like MLK day. But big business is more directly answerable to a wider swath of the population than are schools or non-profits, and so held out the longest. Coca-Cola and Walmart care more about what the median citizen thinks than does Harvard, The New York Times, or the ACLU. Yet after 2016, when the mobilization gap exploded, almost nothing in society could remain neutral, and pressure has come from both within and outside corporations for them to take a stand on almost all hot button issues.

Why was 2016 the year everything changed? Take a wild guess.

…

Just as the previous post raised further questions, this one does too. The most interesting thing to me is not simply protests and donations, but why one side has for over half a century now drawn more idealistic people who want to dedicate their lives to changing the world. The journalist-academic-activist complex is ultimately where power lies, and it has grown much stronger in the last 5 years because it has started to engage many more people at the intermediate level in the mobilization pyramid, among those who give money, sign petitions, and go to protests, and who find themselves between true elites on top and the mass of the largely indifferent voting public at the bottom.

If the rise of Trumpism explains the last five years, why did the left begin with such a strong built-in advantage? I hope to explore this question soon.

…

Moreover, right-wing protest culture has collapsed since the time of the Tea Party. It’s hard to know for sure, but other forms of conservative activism may have fallen off too. So even the degree to which Trump has actually mobilized the right must come with a caveat: he has turned out more Republican voters and gotten more people to donate small amounts of money, but few seem to want to make more substantial sacrifices, even compared to 2012.

Overall, the Trump era has provided mixed electoral results for Republicans. They won unified control of government in 2016, lost the House but kept the Senate in 2018, and came extremely close to winning again in 2020. Yet it has been an awful 4 years for conservatives who care about controlling institutions, or at least keeping them neutral, although even here it hasn’t been a complete loss. After all, the Trump era has given conservatives a comfortable majority on the Supreme Court, probably the most important single institution of all.

Federal court appointments last until death, while the widening of the mobilization gap is relatively new. Best case scenario for Republicans is that Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh live for a very long time, while the Trump era ends up being an anomaly in mobilizing the left to an unusual degree, with things going back to something resembling the pre-2016 historical norm. Worst case scenario is that things continue as they have for the last 4 years, with anti-Trump hysteria combining with the Great Awokening having created a class permanently mobilized for confronting racism and other evils, plus Republicans not even getting the mobilization on their own side that Trump gave them. A generation shaped by the experience of Trump and a party currently led by such uninspiring figures as Kevin McCarthy and Liz Cheney may end up giving conservatives the worst of all worlds.

[comicgeekscomicgeek]

Their Hero Academia - Chapter 72: Summer Shorts Part 1

Presenting the next installment of my on-going, nextgen, MHA fic! Earlier chapters can be found here

Shota Shinso in Student-Teacher Conference

At the knocking at his apartment door, Shota Shinso paused the video he’d been watching, a special counting down the top ten most amazing Hero battles from the previous year.  The votes for the battles had come from an online poll, which he’d voted in, so they were probably a little on the biased side rather than being truly objective or anything like that.  But he had to admit that most of the ones which had made the cut were the same ones he would have chosen.  

Unsurprisingly, Uncle Izuku had made the list twice, for his fights against Doom-Fist and the Maximums. Shoto was on the list two times as well; Ingenium and Gale Force had both made it on there once, as had Kestrel and Rodeo.  Red Riot and Real Steel shared a spot on the list.  And then there had been Ground Zero’s battle against Megastorm…

He’d had to fast forward through that.  It had sent his mind flashing back to the day of the Nomu attack.  He’d heard the sounds of tearing flesh and the Nomu’s terrible scream. His hands had felt wet with Ground Zero’s blood as he’d desperately tried to provide what first aid he could.  His nostrils had filled with the coppery smell…

It had taken everything he had not to scream and destroy the apartment. At least with Mom and Dad both at work, there hadn’t been anyone else around to see.

He’d been doing so well.   He’d actually passed his exams at school and made good use of his Quirk during the Heroics final exam.  He was able to be around Kirishima-Bakugo without flinching or expecting her to be mad at him.  He only had nightmares about it every so often.  

He hadn’t counted on what actually seeing Ground Zero would do to him.  Shota had been doing a good job of keeping himself from thinking about him. He’d hidden away his Ground Zero posters, statues, toys, and other merchandise.  He’d set his phone and internet browser to screen any mention of him. If he kept himself from thinking about Ground Zero, then he could keep himself from thinking about what happened.

Shota knew what happened wasn’t his fault.  He’d been told that often enough now, had enough therapy that he could say it without feeling like it was a lie.  But it was still like standing on the edge of a cliff.  Somedays, it didn’t take much to send him over the edge.

Dumb, really.  He should have expected that Ground Zero would have been in such a video.  His fights had always been amazing to watch.  His Quirk, his strength, his skill, all of it was… had been simply amazing.

And maybe he wouldn’t be anymore.

Because of him.

Dang it, he was supposed to be moving past this!

He shut his eyes right for a moment, doing the calming exercises Hound Dog had taught him.  Deep breaths.  Focus his thoughts on where he was, what he could see.  Whoever was at the door knocked again, and his eyes snapped open as he got off the couch.  “Coming!” he called out.

He opened the door before they could knock again.

“Hey, kid.  Can we talk?”

…It was Ground Zero.

***

The park near his apartment was busy today, with lots of kids playing around, happy and carefree. He could see a group of elementary school-age kids using their Quirks to keep a Frisbee up in the air.  One had some kind of wind Quirk, another an arm-stretching Quirk, and the third and fourth, who looked like twins, seemed to have some kind of telekinetic push and pull Quirks.  He smiled, remembering doing the same kinds of games with Toshi, Shinji, Izumi, and the others as a kid.  Of course, there was the time he’d hit the Frisbee with a sonic blast and knocked it out of the park…

Maybe they ought to bring that back.  It’d be a fun game and good Quirk training!

He and Ground Zero sat on a bench, eating the ice cream they’d bought. Though lots of Pro Heroes, especially the Top Ten, went out in some measure of disguise when they were off the clock, Ground Zero didn’t bother.  He was very good at radiating “keep at least three meters away from me if you know what’s good for you vibes.” It was something his daughter was also extremely good at.

Ground Zero clearly wanted to talk, but Shota didn’t have any idea what it was about.  It was all he could do to keep from shaking and panicking. The ice cream gave him something to be present in the moment in, something else Hound Dog had taught him to do when he thought he was going to have a panic attack.  

“So,” he said quietly, “you wanted to talk?”

Ground Zero took a moment, as though sizing him up, then nodded.  “How you doing, kid?  Katsumi says you did pretty good during the exam.”  His voice lacked some of its usual hard edge.  The question sounded sincere.

Kirishima-Bakugo had talked about him?  And said he’d done good?  He wouldn’t have expected that.  Shota nodded. “It was really nuts!  Uncle Shota got actual bad guys to fight us!  Even Shadow-Thief!   Boy though, did Mom and Dad give him an earful about that!  Mom really doesn’t like her for some reason, maybe because Dad says she used to try and flirt with him whenever he’d try and catch her, but that’s silly, because they’ve been married forever now…  But yeah, I was one of the last ones left standing, and we zapped the big guy really good….”

It had made him feel like he could actually do something right.  It was a good feeling.  He’d actually helped his friends when it had really counted.  

“That’s good,” Ground Zero said, more indulgently than most adults did when he went on about something. “Sounds like you really kicked their asses.”

Shota actually laughed a little bit at that.  Ground Zero definitely had a way with words.  “Yeah, I guess we did.”   He frowned a little.  “What… what about you?  Are you doing okay?”

Ground Zero went quiet for a moment, before he went on.  “Getting better every day,” he said.  “Physical therapy three times a week.  Hasn’t been the challenge yet that can beat me.  Glasses and Tintin’s wives are working on a better prosthetic.  I’ll be kicking ass again before you can blink.”

It sounded reassuring. But it was still a challenge he wouldn’t have been facing if it hadn’t been for Shota.  If he hadn’t been trying to keep him safe… Ground Zero looked down for a moment, at his leg, then over at Shota, then sighed.  “You know this isn’t your fault, right, kid?”

Shota frowned.  He closed his eyes.  “Sometimes,” he said after a moment.  “Maybe not all the time.  But it’s hard not to think it was.”

“It wasn’t,” Ground Zero repeated, more forcefully this time.  He tossed the remains of his ice cream in the trash and put a hand on Shota’s shoulder. His grip was firm and strong. “Look at me, kid.”  He didn’t speak again until Shota was looking him in the eyes, something that took more willpower than he thought he had.  

“Listen,” Ground Zero said. “You, Shota Shinso, are not to blame for what happened to me.  Not one damn percent.  You got that?  Whatever sick f—er, bastard made that damn monster is to blame, not you.”

Shota nodded, mutely. He’d been told that so many times, from so many people.  Some days, he believed it.  Ground Zero though, was one of the most direct and honest people he knew.  If he blamed Shota, he’d have no problem letting him know.  If he didn’t blame him, maybe there was some truth to it.

“Good,” Ground Zero told him.  “And anytime that thought starts running through your head, I want you to punch it, hard, for me.  You picture it, shout kill and let it have it.  You got that?”

He nodded again, his head bobbing up and down quickly.  He could do that!

Ground Zero looked him over again.  He let out a puff of breath.  “Look… I ain’t good with words.  So maybe I’m not gonna tell this real well, but… Listen, I have been exactly where you are.”

“You?” Shota asked. “But you’re Ground Zero!  You’re not afraid of anything!  You’re the most confident Hero ever!”

Ground Zero shook his head. “You remember Kamino?  All Might’s last fight with that masked potato-faced freak?”

Who hadn’t heard of that? Uncle Izuku had told the story plenty of times of how he and his friends had gone to rescue Ground Zero from the League of Villains, while All Might had battled his long-time enemy.  It was the climax of all kinds of documentaries about All Might’s career. Everyone who was around and aware then had a story about where they were when they saw it happen.  They studied it in school!  He’d seen the video hundreds of times!  Shota nodded again.  

“I went through the same thing you’re going through,” Ground Zero said.  He gazed off into the distance.  “I blamed myself for causing All Might’s retirement.  I thought if I hadn’t been so weak, hadn’t screwed up and gotten captured, he wouldn’t have had to use up the last of his strength to save me.  I blamed myself, for weeks.  Without even realizing it, it affected everything I did.  I was even nastier and louder and angrier than usual.  I was such a shit, I’m amazed any of my friends stuck around.  But after I failed the Provisional License Exam, well… let’s just say it took Deku beating some sense into me for me to realize what I’d been carrying around.”

“Really?” Shota asked. He’d never heard this one before! “Uncle Izuku never said anything about that! And you always seem so confident! But you… you blamed yourself too?”

He knew Heroes got scared sometimes.  Uncle Izuku had talked about it, so had Uncle Denki, even Uncle Inasa had.  Uncle Shota even said that fear was a logical response sometimes.  And he knew they had doubts and worries.  But of all the Heroes in the world, he never would have expected Ground Zero would!

“Yeah, I did.  And there’s still times where I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t been such an arrogant dumbass back then.”  He looked over and smiled a bittersweet smile, then gave Shota’s hair an affectionate tussle.  “So don’t go letting me hear you needed Toshi or Katsumi or somebody to beat you up, okay?  There’s nothing wrong with needing help.  Hell, you start feeling down, you call me, day or night, okay?”

Shota nodded rapidly again, the bad thoughts banished for the moment.  He knew they’d be back.  “Okay!”

Seemingly satisfied with that, Ground Zero nodded.  “Which is kind of why I wanted to talk to you in the first place, kid.  You know how All Might’s taking over from Nedzu as principal?”

“Oh yeah!” Shota said. “He’s gonna be really awesome at it, I just know it!  He said he might still teach a few classes, but that we’re gonna get a new Heroics’ teacher!  He said they were looking into some people, but he didn’t really know who it was going to be…”

Ground Zero cleared his throat and interrupted him.  “It’s going to be me.”

“Oh, wow!”  Shota said.  It was only then that he realized what Ground Zero had actually said.  “Wait, what?”

A smile passed over the Hero’s face.  “It’s gonna be me.  All Might offered me the job before you all went off to Ponytail’s island.”

“Oooh,” Shota said. “You’d be really good at that!  I learned a whole bunch when I was your Intern! And Kirishima-Bakugo’s really super talented, so you must have taught her a whole lot too, and you’re one of the most awesome Heroes around, with one of the best fight records and…”

Ground Zero held up his hands.  “Breathe, kid.  Breathe. I know I’m pretty awesome.  So you’re damn right I’ll be a damn good teacher. Even if I have to drag some of your classmates forward kicking and screaming.”

Shota didn’t know who that would be.  All his friends and classmates worked so hard and had such amazing Quirks!  “But… why would you want to talk to me about that?” he asked.  He wasn’t family or anything.

Ground Zero gave him a small, sympathetic smile.  “Because I knew you were probably still blaming yourself.  Even though I told you not to.  I didn’t know how you’d take it if you had to see me every day.”

“What?” Shota asked. The question didn’t make any sense.

“Kid,” Ground Zero said patiently, “you practically had a damn panic attack when I showed up at your door.  You’re going to be seeing me every Heroics Class if I take this job.”  He tapped his knuckles against his knee.  It made a small metallic clang. “And you’ll be thinking about this.”

“That’s not,” he started to say, but stopped himself.  He can’t help but stare now, his eyes wide and wet.  What if Ground Zero was right?  “Maybe.”

This got him a nod. “That’s what I thought.  But here’s the deal.  If I’m going to be a teacher, then I’ve gotta look out for my students first.  Which means I have to look out for you, before I even teach a single class.”

Shota felt his eyes growing wet.  “But… but…”

“Aw, for the love of…” Ground Zero started, waving his hands rapidly.  “Don’t cry, kid!  I cannot deal with crying!  You’re worse than Deku, I swear…!”

Shota sucked in a breath and fought back his tears.  He couldn’t just cry like that in front of one of his heroes!  He wasn’t a baby, even if he was a little younger than all his classmates.  He was training to be a Hero.  He had to be strong!  

Ground Zero was being a Hero.  He was thinking of someone else, Shota, putting his needs first, even if it meant he didn’t get to be a teacher.  Shota… Shota couldn’t take that away from him!  And he’d be a good teacher too, he knew it!

And if he knew what to expect… then maybe he could be ready for it!  He could psyche himself up!  Hound Dog said that getting in the right mind space was important!  He’d even know him all kinds of exercises for how to do it.

“A Hero’s got to be brave,” he said finally.  “I can be brave too!”  He was almost sure he meant it.  He could do it!  He could do it!  He was getting better every day!  He had his bad days, but maybe if he really worked on it…

Then Ground Zero held his gaze and if Shota hadn’t known his Quirk was Explosion, he would have been certain he was reading his mind.  “All right,” he said.  “I believe you.  But I’m going to be watching you.  And I’m going to hold you to telling me if you start having trouble, got it?  You’re going to be a damn good Hero someday, kid. Especially with me in your corner.”

***

Chihiro Kaminari in Kiss and Make Up

“Chihiro! Chihiro!  Watch!  Watch me!”

Chihiro looked over to where her eight year old sister, Hikari, was playing on the monkey bars.  The purple-haired girl was hanging on by one hand, her other limbs dangling in the air.   “Okay, okay,” she said, “I’m watching.”

“Okay…  Watch!”  Hikari released all her fingers and Chihiro’s heart lurched.  If her little sister got hurt on her watch, she was going to be in a load of trouble!  She started rushing forward only to realize that Hikari wasn’t falling.  Despite her fingers not touching anything, her palm was still flat against the bar and she wasn’t falling.

Chihiro’s Cords perked up as she got closer, tiny sparks dancing along their tips.  There was enough electricity flying about that she could feel it.  The fact that Hikari’s hair was standing straight up was another clue.  She crossed her arms.  “Let me guess, Spark Plug,” she said.  “You’re using your Quirk?”

“Yep!” Hikari said proudly. “Daddy and I worked real hard on this one!”

Hikari’s Quirk was called Static.  It let her absorb ambient static electricity and release it and apparently also stick to things with it like a balloon.  She had to laugh a little bit though.  She and Dad had certainly driven Mon to yelling at them more times than she could count for doing dumb things with their own Quirks.  Her younger brother Reylo got yelled at less often, but only because his Quirk was sound-based and Dad couldn’t teach him anything dangerous.

Chihiro gave her a thumb’s up.  “Cool trick,” she said.  But she noticed that Hikari’s hair was starting to settle back down.  Her Cords were starting to spark less too.  She took a few steps forward and held out her arms, letting Hikari fall into them.

“Off!” Hikari said, looking surprised and annoyed.  “How come I fell?”

“Ran out of juice,” Chihiro told her.  “You don’t make your own electricity, remember?”

“Oh.  Right!  I knew that.”

Chihiro just laughed again and set Hikari down on the ground, letting her run off to the next piece of playground equipment.  Well, at least her little brother Reylo had half a brain.  One Kaminari ought to have at least half a chance.

“Stay where I can see you!” she called out.  “And that goes for you two too!”

She looked over to where her other charges (Heh.  Charges. Why was she always this funny when no one else was around?), a small brown-haired girl and a blond boy:  Mako Midoriya and Tai Kirishima-Bakugo, both five years old.  When the kids’ regular sitter had bailed, she’d volunteered to watch them.  She was already watching Hikari anyway and didn’t have any plans.  Plus she was getting two thousand yen each for the two of them.  They gave her a friendly wave.

There were also, she would readily admit, advantages to living in a gated community, including a private playground.  Almost all the families that lived here were Pro-Heroes, though there were also a few Support Company officers, and a few other careers, such as Mom’s split career as Hero and musician.  The kids certainly seemed to enjoy it anyway.   She’d already been ten by the time they’d moved in and was starting to get too “cool” for that kind of thing.

Of course, to hear Mom tell it, the reason they bought the house was all Dad’s fault.   Dad had brought home a Great Dane puppy instead of groceries… somehow.  Since Sparky was going to quickly get too big for their apartment, so they’d gone house shopping.  Of course, to hear Dad tell it, Kirishima-Bakugo’s dad had nearly flipped a gasket when he’d found out they were going to be neighbors…

Chihiro let a smile spread across her face as she watched the kids play.  Hikari was making herself dizzy, spinning around on the merry-go-round, while Mako and Tai were playing on the teeter-totter.  It was nice.  Peaceful even.  She could quietly zone out just a little bit.

“Stuck on kid duty too, Kaminari?”

Taken by complete surprise, she let out a cry of alarm as she turned.  Her Cords shot out and unleashed a mild pulse of electricity the second they made contact with… something.

“AAAAGGGGGGGGGGG!””

Shiro Monoma hit the ground with a small thump.

***

“You killed him!” Hikari shouted.  “Mom and Dad are gonna be so mad!”

Chihiro shot her sister a fierce look.  “No, I didn’t!” she protested.  But as she quickly turned her attention back to Monoma, she wasn’t so sure.

“He’s still breathing,” Monoma’s younger sibling said, sounding disinterested.  Takeru, right.  That was their name.  And non-binary too.  Important to remember.  Chihiro thought they were the same age as Tai and Mako, but they sounded like they were going on forty.  They gave him a look which suggested they’d long grown bored with seeing accidental misfortunes befall their older brother.

“She really made him go zap!” Mako said.  “He lifted up and then… Bzzzzt!”  As she talked, her hands copied the motions Monoma had gone through.

“Yeah!” Tai agreed. “I saw sparks!  It was so cool!”

Chihiro gulped and looked down at Monoma.  He was still breathing.  That was good.  She probably hadn’t hit him with that many volts.  He’d just surprised her.

“It’s not my fault!” she said, throwing her hands up in the air as she paced back and forth.  “He snuck up on me!”

“Uhhh.”  A noise from Monoma caught her attention instantly. His eyes fluttered open.  How could someone be electrocuted, fall in the grass, and still be so damn pretty?  Especially while wearing a t-shirt and shorts?  “What hit me?”

“You snuck up on her and she electrocuted you,” Takeru told him flatly.

“I did no such thing!” Monoma protested.  He ignored her hand up in favor of bouncing to his feet under his own power, dusting himself off once he landed.  

“You were doing that thing where you don’t make any noise,” Takeru said.  “No wonder she didn’t hear you coming.”

“Yeah!” Chihiro said, pointing at him.  Maybe she could spin this as his fault after all!  “Why do you gotta ninja around all the time?!”

Monoma seemed offended at that, putting a hand to his chest.  “I did no such thing!  I do not “ninja around!’”  He wilted under her glare ever so slightly, however.  “Well… perhaps I do have a bit of a silent tread.  I can apologize for that, at least.  I’m sorry.”

Great, how was she supposed to be mad at him when he was apologizing?  Completely unfair!  She didn’t want to be thinking about him at all!  “Yeah, well…,” she said, “I probably shouldn’t have zapped you.  You okay?”

He produced a flick comb from his pocket and fixed his hair.  “No harm done, I suppose,” Monoma said.  

Chihiro realized the children were all watching them still.  “Okay kids,” she said, waving her hands vaguely in the direction of the playground.  “Show’s over. Go play!”

Hikari crossed her arms. “Aw, I wanted to see you zap him again!”

“Go!” Chihiro repeated, pointing more dramatically this time.  Her little sister turned tail at that.  Meanwhile, Takeru was being dragged off by Mako and Tai under half-hearted protests.

“So…,” she ventured, looking back at Monoma.  This was definitely awkward.  Why the hell didn’t she keep the kids around?  Now all she could think about was how he’d kissed her and how Mika had said she should date him!  Maybe she should shock him again, run away, move to a new city, start a new life on the run singing for coins on street corners…

Okay, maybe not that bad.

“Um, yes,” Monoma said, and she was somehow glad to see the awkwardness was mutual.  It was so rare to see him as anything less than composed that she considered it a victory even in embarrassment.

And then he said the most dangerous words of all.

“Can we talk?”

***

They were far enough away that they wouldn’t be overheard, but not so far away that they couldn’t keep an eye on the kids.  Hikari had met up with one of her friends and Chihiro gave a wave to the kid’s parents before giving Monoma as much of her attention as she could.

“So,” she said.  Her Cords make small circles through the air, as she crossed her arms.  “You wanted to talk.  Talk. I’m listening.”

“Ah, yes, well,” Monoma began.  Alarm bells were already ringing in her head.  Granted, her guard was always up around him.  Sure, she’d eat lunch with him with Mika, Koda, and Fukidashi or Tetsutetsu.  He was tolerable in small doses.  Especially if he kept his mouth shut.  But she’d never seen him as at a loss for words as this.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have just kissed you like that without asking.  It wasn’t very gentlemanly of me.  I was… overcome with emotion at resolving some of my own issues, and let my exuberance get the better of me.”

Chihiro blinked slowly. She definitely hadn’t been expecting an apology.  Even with the one he’d given a few minutes ago, she wasn’t even sure he really knew how to apologize.  But she looks over and he was so earnestly apologetic that even her background level of irritation at him started to fade.  “It’s, ah, it’s fine,” she said.  “You were excited.  Happens.”

He looked a bit surprised. “That’s happened before?”

She had to laugh at that. “No, that one was definitely a first.” Her left Cord shot out and gave him a soft poke in the chest.  “Definitely wasn’t expecting my first kiss to be you though.”

He looked offended at that. “That was not a first kiss.  All I did was kiss you on the cheek!”

“A kiss is a kiss!” she shouted at him, moving closer.  “Doesn’t matter where it was!”

“You’re out of your mind!”

“I thought you were apologizing!”

“I did!  You were the one who tried to turn it into a semantics argument!”

“It’s not semantics if I’m right!  That! Was!  A!  Kiss!”

Their faces were mere centimeters from each other now.  His eyes were big, blue, and ever so close.  He really was just too ridiculously pretty for his own good. Probably spent more time in front of the mirror than she did.  About the only person who might outdo him in the hair and skin care regime was Aoyama.

“That wasn’t a kiss!” Monoma snapped.  “If I’d really wanted to kiss you, I’d have done it like this!”

Before she could blink, he’d reached out and put his arms around her, spinning her around into a low dip, before planting his lips on hers.  Her eyes went wide as he held the kiss for a long moment, before spinning her back into a standing position.

“What the hell?!”  she snapped.  “What the hell was that?!”  Her Cords flew about her head like angry snakes, sparking with electricity.

“I… I don’t… it just happened!” Monoma said, backing away from her nervously.  He looked ready to run and hide.  Good!  Who did he think he was, kissing her like this was some made for tv romantic movie where they yelled and kissed?!

She pointed her Cords at him aggressively, taking aim, her face flush with anger.  “I oughta just take you out!”

His eyes widened in surprise, but then he smiled that same smug, irritating, and entirely too good looking smile.  “Well.. Why not?” he asked.  “I am finding your company surprisingly enjoyable, even without Mika as a barrier.   Pick me up at seven tomorrow evening then?”

Her mouth dropped open. She could feel her mental footing slipping away as she shifted lanes from furious to baffled in the space of an eye blink.  Mika’s advice to give him a chance came back to her.  And she definitely wasn’t about to admit that she’d really enjoyed that kiss. But the other hand, he was absolutely infuriating. And sure, he’d shown her a more vulnerable side back at school…

Her Cords sagged, the sparks fading.   “…What?”

“That, ah, that is… if you want to,” he said. Awkwardness replaced the smugness.  And now he had his hands up, protecting his face, as he backed up. “We could go on a date.  And I promise no more kissing.”

The words unless you want to hung silently in the air.

“Why me?” she asked, after letting him squirm uncomfortably for a moment.  “I know Mika’s your ex.  Going from her to me has to be a pretty steep downgrade.”

He looked puzzled for a moment, until his eyes widened in realization. He crossed his arms. “You do remember I used to date her before she, ah, blossomed. I’m not so shallow as to be purely attracted to… that.”

Okay, he did have a point there.   “Okay, but the first question still stands.  You’re all fancy pants and I’m… me.  In fact, up until you kissed me, I was pretty sure you didn’t even like me.”

A blush spread across Monoma’s face and he smiled sheepishly.  “Mika insists I have a thing for women who can beat me up.  You do fall into that category, of course, but the fact remains that you are a fascinating and attractive woman.  You’re talented, with varied interests, and you are entirely willing to call me out to my face when I’m being a pretentious asshole. After some rather blunt conversations and realizations… I’m… trying harder not to be that person anymore.”

Okay.  That was… actually pretty respectful sounding.  Which was definitely a first for him when it came to her.  Sounded like somebody had called him out.  Mika, maybe?  Or Tetsutetsu?  Koda was too nice to have done it…

“Okay, fine,” she said.  She tried to project with her tone that she was doing him a favor, not that she was actually possibly maybe kind of interested in him.  “We can go on a date.  On one, no, two conditions.”

He seemed surprised at that.  “All right, I completely understand if you don’t wish to….  Wait, what?”

“One, no more kissing me out of the blue.  You try it, and I’ll shock you so bad you’ll never get your hair to look right again.”

He chuckled. It was actually somewhat pleasant when it wasn’t paired with taunts.  “A tremendous threat.  Very well. And the other?”

“Don’t you dare tell Ojiro about this. Or put it on-line or anything where she can somehow find out about it. I’ll never hear the end of it.”

Monoma nodded.  “I suppose that’s reasonable.  So long as you do the same with regards to Fukadashi.  I don’t need her comparing me to some anime or manga more than she already does.”

He had a point there.  Fukidashi was weird.  And given the company she kept, that was saying something. “Deal.  It’s a date.”

“YAY!”

Chihiro’s head snapped around and she saw that the kids were staring at them. Hikari was the one who’d shouted, but they all looked enthralled.  Well, everyone but Takeru did.

“How long have you been watching?!” she demanded.

“Long enough,” Takeru said.  They looked over at Chihiro.  “You should have shocked him again.  Otherwise he won’t learn anything.”

She had to laugh at that.  “Okay,” she said.  “You, I like.”

“Yay!  A date!” Mako said.  “My big sister went on a date too!  With Haruto Sero!”  She danced about as she talked, kicking up a little bit dust.  “Ah… ah… choooo!”

Chihiro’s eyes went wide as Mako’s Fire-Breath Quirk went active with her sneeze.  Instantly, she tackled Monoma to the ground, as a blast of flame went through where his head had just been.  Her face went flush as she realized how close they were again.  Hastily, she shoved herself up and off him.

She offered Monoma a hand up and this time he took it.  His hands weren’t anywhere near as soft as his pretty boy imagine would have suggested, she realized.  “Sorry about that.  She doesn’t have full control of her Quirk yet.”

“Quite, quite all right,” Monoma said, sounding a bit shook from his near-fire experience.  He was blushing too, she noticed.  He dusted himself off.  “But seven, tomorrow then, if that’s agreeable to you?”

“Yeah, all right,” she said.  

Great.  That gave her more than a day to figure out how to explain to her dad she was dating a Monoma.

One date.  Not dating.

She definitely wasn’t thinking about kissing him.  …Dating him!  And she wasn’t thinking about that either!

…Crap.

[evilisk]

My Favorite Touhou Characters circa 2019

aka Here’s who I voted for this year’s popularity poll would have voted for if the Touhou Popularity Poll actually happened at the beginning of this year when I thought it was going to

= = =

Here are my 7 character picks:

Seiga Kaku

Miko Toyosatomimino

Yoshika Miyako *new*

Okina Matara

Saki Kurokoma *new*

Mamizou Futatsuiwa

Yatsuhashi Tsukumo *new*

Explanations for Each Pick:

Seiga: Surprise surprise, the person with a Seiga avatar is a Seiga stan (is that how you use that word?). Seriously though, I don’t have time to get into it now, but I genuinely love Blue Chinese Necromancer. 

Miko: Still the best Stage 6 boss in the series tbh. The only bad thing you can say about her is that her TD theme is kinda boring, but HM fixes that with its rendition of True Administrator. Otherwise, she’s leader of the best faction (Taoists), has the best extended family (Kokoro, Okina, Saki), has the coolest spellcards and design etc.

Yoshika: It's shocking but yeah, I've never voted for Yoshika until now. Too many characters, not enough voting slots tbh. There's always been one revolving spot in my picks, it just so happens that Yoshika gets her turn this year (just as Futo got hers last year). Jiang-shi are cool yo

Okina: Last time, I voted Okina out of hype for her lore (being a Sage of Gensokyo on par with Kasen and Yukari) but this year, I’m voting for her because I now legit enjoy her character. ZUN revealing that Okina’s intended as a powerful god of the disabled and other discriminated is super cool (so is having her manhandle dumb Hell Gremlin in VFiS)

Saki: Wily Beast and Weakest Creature ended up having the most fun cast in a while, so choosing any character to rep them was hard. I couldn't decide between her, Kutaka and Yachie. Ended up deciding on Saki because a vote for Saki is a tertiary vote for the Taoists / Ten Desires (yeah, I like the Taoists / Ten Desires, sue me)

Mamizou: This is my second consecutive vote for the Tanuki (or it will be, once voting goes up). It’s amazing how much Forbidden Scrollery changed my opinion of Mamizou. She went from being one of my least favorite modern Touhou characters to “favorite Youkai character in the series”. She’s easily one of ZUN’s most well-realized characters, after Reimu, Marisa and Yukari.

Yatsuhashi: Last spot was pretty hard to pick. I ended up going with Yatsy because, dammit, the Tsukumo’s, especially Yatsy, don’t get enough appreciation! I feel like there’s so much missed potential with the Tsukumo’s. I mean, they’re were born because of / for a failed revolution. They’re literal Tools of Revolution. How can you not think up anything interesting with a starting point like that? smh, I really need to get into writing fanfic one of these days. But yeah, they’re getting a vote because the sisters have so much untapped potential.

= = =

 Runner Ups:

Kaguya: Labyrinth of Touhou has slowly been changing my mind on Kaguya. She's too useful, like an easier to use version of Patchouli with more support capabilities. (NOTE: After playing LOT2, where she’s horribly nerfed, I will not be voting for her)

Any other Wily Beast Character: I really think the entire cast of WBaWC is perfect and while I could easily pick Saki for the Miko Connection, you cannot force me to pick between any of the others. I love the entire case.

Benben or Raiko: Already explained my reasoning for voting the Tsukumo’s but I specifically went with Yatsuhashi since she really gets the rough of it. I’ve actually voted Raiko before, so I didn’t feel a pressing need to include her, though I also think her “Horismriver” arc gives her more than the two Tsukumo’s. Benben doesn’t have it as good as Raiko, but Benben isn’t called “not-Yatsuhashi” like Yatsy is called “not-Benben” so yeah, easy vote there.

Marisa: Who the hell doesn't love Marisa? One of these days, we really gotta push for Marisa to reach first place. It is a disgrace that Koishi's managed to overthrow Reimu at least once yet our Ordinary Human Magician has never gotten to do so.

Kasen: This one's shocking to me since, for as long as I've been voting, I've been dedicating one of those votes to the Wild and Horned Hermit herself. I’m still kind of in shock at the idea that Kasen might never appear in a canon work again (as a latecomer to this series, I’ve literally never not known a time before WaHH). The combo of WaHH’s meh ending with Okina becoming more active lead to me not voting Kasen.

And that’s that. I’m not sure I’ll have the same list if / when we actually have a Popularity Poll this year. Labyrinth of Touhou 2 really changed my view of a bunch of characters. 

Here’s a list of other characters I’ve voted / considered voting (more for my own reference than anything else)

List of Previously Voted Characters (By Number of Times I’ve Voted Them)

Kasen Ibaraki

Yuuka Kazami

Aya Shameimaru

Yumemi Okazaki

Tewi Inaba

Ringo

Nemuno Sakata

Futo Mononobeno

Reimu Hakurei

Shorlist of Characters I’ve Always Liked, But Never Got Around to Voting (Because 7 Characters Of A 150 Character Cast Is A Stupidly Small Amount)

Kaguya Houraisan *new*

Yachie Kicchou *new*

Kutaka Niwatari *new*

Hong Meiling

Youmu Konpaku

Kanako Yasaka

Parsee Mizuhashi

Tojiko Sogano

Raiko Horikawa

Benben Tsukumo

Yatsuhashi Tsukumo

Akyuu Hiedano

Kosuzu Motoori

Marisa Kirisame

Elly

[lastbluetardis]

Chemical Potential (6/11)

Summary: Slightly homesick and stressed about her abysmal chemistry grade, Rose Tyler meets quirky James Smith, the boy who sits in front of her in their chemistry class. They become fast friends as James makes it his personal mission to help Rose get through the semester.

Ten x Rose University AU

This chapter: ~6000 words, light teen

Notes: This was written for the lovely @thegreenfairy13 as part of the @dwsecretsanta gift exchange.

AO3 | Ch1 | Ch2 | Ch3 | Ch4 | Ch5 | Ch6 | Ch7 | Ch8 | Ch9 | Ch10 | epilogue

Rose was looking forward to her sleepover with James all day. All of her classes seemed to drag by, impatient as she was for it to be four o’clock, the time James said he would meet her at the library.

Finally, hurrying to the library after her final class of the day ended, Rose spotted James’s figure slouched in a cushy chair near the front doors of the library, an open newspaper in front of him. She took a minute to admire him and the graceful curve of his body as he sat sideways in the chair with his legs slung over the armrest.

He hadn’t spotted her yet, so she snuck up behind him and breathed into his ear, “Guess who?”

He yelped far louder than was appropriate for a library, earning them both a sharp glare from the librarian on duty.

James sprang up from the seat, nearly tripping over his feet in the process. His cheeks were bright red, and Rose felt a little bad for startling him so badly.

“Rose!” he exclaimed, breathless. “Hi!”

“Hi,” she giggled. “Ready to go?”

“Yup, let me just…” He hastily folded up the newspaper, not even following the creases, before he shoved it into his bag.

“You performed your civic duty, I see,” she noted, spying the tiny “I Voted!” sticker on his jumper.

“Yep! Got to the polls right as they opened this morning. I’m glad, because rumor has it the lines are impossibly long now.”

He slung his bag over his shoulder, then touched her wrist briefly before he let his hands drop to his sides. It was an automatic response for Rose to thread their fingers together as they made their way outside.

“Isn’t it supposed to be cold by now?” Rose asked as they walked into the late afternoon sunshine and the unseasonable warmth. Across campus, some students were in t-shirts and shorts, or were carrying around jackets that had become unnecessary as the temperatures approached sixty.

“Well… climate change, y’know. The Earth is dying.”

“Very cheerful,” she muttered, reaching over to pinch his ribs.

He squirmed out of the touch, but didn’t relinquish her hand as they walked to his car.

James remembered the way to her apartment, and fifteen minutes later, he’d pulled up in front of her building.

“D’you… want to come up?” Rose asked awkwardly. “I might be a few minutes. I’m an idiot and didn’t pack an overnight bag yet.”

“You’re not an idiot,” he said softly, and while she’d meant it offhand, a piece of her heart fluttered at his immediate protest. “But sure. I’ll come up.”

He turned off his car and exited. He dug through his pockets for a quarter that he fed into the parking meter.

“Will fifteen minutes be long enough?” he asked, glancing at her.

She nodded, then guided him into her building and up the flights of stairs to her floor.

“It’s a bit small,” she said apologetically when she unlocked her front door. “But make yourself at home.”

She was all too aware of James’s roaming gaze as he drank in her flat. It was small, even for one person. Thankfully she didn’t have much stuff, so it wasn’t cluttered. There was a loveseat sofa and a dining table in the living room, but the table was so covered with her art supplies that she often ate her meals standing over the kitchen counter.

“Help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge,” she said as she made a beeline for her bedroom.

She pulled out a bag and stuffed a change of clothes and pajamas into it, then she moved to the bathroom. Her makeup was spread all across the countertop, and she collected them into her makeup bag, which she stuffed on top of her clothes. She then grabbed her shampoo, conditioner, and body wash, which she rolled into a towel. All of that she placed into her pack as well.

After making sure she had everything she would need for staying overnight somewhere, she joined James in the living room. He was towering over her table, and Rose was mortified to see him looking at the various pages of sketches littered across the surface. She knew there were several portraits of him among the pages.

He jumped when he heard her approaching, and his cheeks flamed red.

“I- I’m sorry,” he squeaked. “It was all right out there in the open. I didn’t mean to snoop. I just… You’re very good, Rose. They’re beautiful.”

Her sharp rebuke about invading her privacy died on her tongue. She knew he hadn’t meant anything by it, and if she hadn’t wanted anybody to see, she should’ve put them away. After all, it wasn’t as though she was unused to sharing her artwork; but she was unused to her artistic muse seeing the final results.

“Thanks,” she mumbled, accepting his compliment.

She decided not to draw any more attention to her drawings, on the off chance he somehow hadn’t seen the ones she’d done of him. Instead, she moved to the fridge for the unopened bottle of wine that had been there since her first week in the flat.

James frowned.

“How the hell…? The drinking age in America is twenty-one,” he blurted. “How did you even buy that?”

Rose raised an eyebrow at him, then said slowly, “Because I am twenty-one?”

He blinked. “What?” His voice went high, and he coughed to clear it.

“Yeah. I turned twenty-one last April,” she said. “I took a few years off school before deciding to try uni.”

James nodded, and his throat bobbed. “Good. That’s… good.”

Rose cocked her head. “Why’s that good?”

His cheeks burned redder and he stammered for a moment before saying, “Well, I wouldn’t want you to get into any trouble here on foreign soil is all.”

A lame excuse, and certainly not what he’d meant, but Rose didn’t push it.

“Shall we?” she said.

He nodded and reached for the wine, then guided her back to his car.

He drove them to the outskirts of town, to a small residential development. Quaint brick houses lined the streets, and a twinge of jealousy flared through Rose. But she pushed it down when she considered where James had gotten the money to afford a house: he’d probably inherited any money his parents had when they died.

“Home sweet home,” he said, pulling into the driveway of one of the smaller houses in the development. “Oh! Er… are you allergic to cats? I completely forgot.”

Rose shook her head. “I had a few cats when I was growing up.”

He looked relieved. “Great.”

She followed him into his house, and was immediately greeted by the happy, screaming meows of a black and gray tabby.

“This one’s Pippin,” he said, bending down to scratch the cat’s chin. “He’s a love bug. If he gets too annoying, I’ll shut him in my room.”

Pippin purred loudly, then turned to Rose and rubbed himself against her calves and feet.

A few moments later, a brown and tan tabby padded over to them. He wasn’t quite as affectionate as Pippin, but he sniffed Rose curiously then bumped his head into her shin before trotting back in the direction he came from.

“That one was Merry,” James said.

Rose stifled a grin. “Are Frodo and Sam in hiding?”

James giggled, looking pleased that she understood the reference.

“They live with my Aunt Sarah,” he said, toeing off his shoes by the front door. Rose followed suit, and was amused to see his socks had chemical structures printed all across them.

She followed James down the hall and to the kitchen, where Merry and Pippin were circling two of three empty bowls.

“Watch out for Gollum,” James warned. “He doesn’t take kindly to strangers. Or even to me, honestly. He’s a grumpy old man. I should’ve let him drown in the storm drain honestly. But I felt too sorry for the bastard.”

Rose turned at a growling meow, and saw a Siamese cat slinking further into his box on the cat tree.

“That whole tree is his,” James said, shaking his head. “He won’t let Merry or Pippin on it. I had to get them their own tree. And Gollum will sometimes even take over that one, the little shit.”

She watched James move around his kitchen, filling the three bowls with food. He gave Merry and Pippin each a full body stroke before letting them eat their dinner in peace.

“I’ll show you where you can put your stuff,” he said, beckoning with a tilt of his head before he strode down the hall.

He guided her to the first door on the right and stepped into the room. There was a large bookshelf completely covered with books, as well as a long bay window with cushions that looked like the perfect place to curl up for a few hours to read. Judging by the distinct scent of James that lingered in the room, she suspected he spent a lot of time reading here.

Against the opposite wall was a full-size bed.

“My aunt stays in this room when she comes to visit,” James said. “I put fresh sheets on. The loo is directly across the hall. And my bedroom is at the very end of the hall, should you need anything in the middle of the night.”

“Thank you,” Rose said, setting her bag onto the bed. “Your house is lovely.”

He smiled a little awkwardly, as though realizing the very different lifestyles they lived.

“Ready for pizza? Results probably won’t start coming in for another couple of hours. But we can put an order in a while and maybe play something? Do you like board games? Or we could play a card game? Whatever you want.”

Rose’s stomach flip-flopped, suddenly nervous that she was alone with James in his home, and that she would be spending the night here. Not nervous for her safety—never that—but nervous about the implications of it all. Did it mean the same thing to James as it did to her? What did it even mean to her? Was this just two mates hanging out together? Or was it… more?

“I’m fine with anything,” Rose said. “And yeah, let’s order the food now.”

James nodded, and together they walked back to the kitchen. Pippin had already finished his food, and was slinking closer to the cat tree and the full food bowl there.

“Oi, you know better,” James warned. “Do you want to get gutted?”

Pippin continued towards the food bowl though, and just when he was about to snitch a piece, Gollum let out a hiss and jumped on top of him.

“Stupid cat,” James grumbled.

Pippin rolled out from underneath Gollum, and trotted towards James, meowing rather pathetically. When James paid him no mind, he turned to Rose and rubbed against her calves.

“Does he like being picked up?” she asked.

“Mhm, oh yeah. I told you, he’s a total attention whore.”

Rose laughed, then she reached down to scoop the cat into her arms. He nuzzled close to her chest and purred loudly.

“Don’t let that mean ol’ kitty boss you around,” she cooed. “You’re an absolute sweetheart. Aren’t you such a beautiful boy?”

“Toppings?” James asked as he held his mobile to his ear.

“Cheese is fine,” Rose said.

He gave her a thumbs-up, then started speaking into the phone, placing an order for a large cheese pizza, a medium supreme pizza, an order of fries, mozzarella sticks, and two dozen chicken wings.

“It’ll get delivered in an hour,” he said, sliding his phone into his pocket.

“Are more people coming?” she asked. At his frown, she said, “You ordered a hell of a lot of food.”

The tips of his ears went pink.

“Er, well, I like a variety. And I’m starved. I haven’t eaten since breakfast.” He shrugged. “And in any case, I’ll have leftovers for dinner for the rest of the week. Mind if I open the wine?”

“That’s why I brought it,” she teased.

He stuck out his tongue, then rummaged through a drawer for a few noisy seconds before procuring a corkscrew.

“So,” James began as he worked on uncorking the wine bottle. “You’re twenty-one? What did you do between finishing up school and coming to uni?”

Rose nuzzled her nose into the soft fur of Pippin’s forehead, then bent down to set him on the floor. “It’s a long story.”

“Oh. Right, yeah, you don’t have to talk about it,” he said softly.

Rose nearly took the out he gave her. But he’d entrusted her with his grief and heartbreak over losing his family. Not that she felt she had to reciprocate and spill her own personal misfortunes, but he made her want to share with him. He made her want to give him every piece of herself, both the light and dark parts of her.

And maybe she was naive to have this much trust in someone she’d only known for a month, but maybe, just maybe, James was worth it.

“I left school when I was sixteen, after I finished my GCSE exams,” Rose said. James paused for just a moment, but then he continued working at the cork. “I was okay at school, in the subjects that interested me at least. But I was young and stupid and fell head-over-heels in love with my boyfriend.” James’s hands spasmed, and he dropped the corkscrew. “Jimmy. He was my first serious boyfriend. He was a year older than me and in a band. The band was decent enough, I suppose. They had a bunch of local gigs and had a self-made album out.

“Anyway, I thought he was the one.” Rose shrugged, her heart aching at how carefree those early days with Jimmy were. “He seemed to love me as much as I loved him. I didn’t hesitate when he asked me to move into a flat with him. It was a small flat, just one bedroom, but it was just the two of us, and it was ours, so it felt perfect.

“And we were happy. We really, really were. I’d quit school to help out with the bills, and I honestly didn’t mind it. School bored me, and I felt a lot better about myself to have a job and get paid and help out with the rent. My job wasn’t exciting—just working in a clothes shop—but it paid well, and I had steady hours.

“Jimmy’s band had been doing well, too. They’d gotten seen by some producer, and long story short, they were asked to sign a contract for their first real studio-produced album. Of course, all the guys jumped on board. I was so proud of them.

“But they began pulling long hours at the studio. Which was fine. They were busy. But there’d be weeks when I saw Jimmy for only an hour or two.” Rose’s voice died as she remembered the nights she’d go to bed alone, only to be woken up a few hours later by Jimmy’s wandering hands and lips. Sometimes she enjoyed their midnight romps, but other times, she wished he would let her sleep. She’d yelled at him the morning after that first night he’d ignored her wishes to keep sleeping. He’d yelled right back, eventually storming off. He’d called her a few hours later, apologizing and begging her to forgive him, promising that he wouldn’t do it again.

James was looking at her curiously, but without an ounce of pity. She could’ve kissed him for that kindness. He’d finished with the cork, which lay in a few mangled pieces on the counter, but his attention was fixed on her.

“We sort of… grew apart,” Rose said softly, skipping over the details of her deteriorating relationship. Living through them had hurt enough; she had no desire to recall them to memory if she could help it. “I was getting restless. I made decent money at my job, but I knew I didn’t want to be folding clothes for the rest of my life. But Jimmy… well, he thought I should be happy with what we had. And that I wouldn’t need to work once the album was finished, because he was gonna be a famous rock star.” Rose snorted and shook her head. “We got into it over me not wanting to be a trophy girl for him to parade around like a prize. And how I wanted to have a partner in a relationship. I didn’t want to be dependent on someone.”

Jimmy hadn’t taken well to that statement. He’d sneered at her that she was damn lucky to have what she did, and any other girl would be grateful to be in her shoes. But if she wasn’t happy, she could damn well leave and see how far she could get in life on her own.

That had been one of the cruelest thing Jimmy had said to her.

“Good for you,” James murmured.

Rose sighed. “Thanks. Jimmy didn’t think so, though.”

“He sounds like a bit of a wanker. Er, no offense.”

Rose snorted out a laugh despite the crack in her chest. “He kinda was. But I still hadn’t realized. I was still in love with him, and blind to anything he said or did. I figured he was stressed because of the album he was making.” She shrugged. “Anyways, he stopped coming home at a reasonable hour, and there’d be days when I didn’t see him. He and his band would go off partying with other up-and-coming musicians. He started drinking. A lot. His half of the rent went to booze and God knows whatever else. I made good money, but not enough to cover the full rent. We got into huge rows about it, but he always said we’d be fine when the album came out.

“This had been going on for a few months. We’d been together for over a year—which to me, seemed like forever. It was proof that he was the one and we’d grow old together and get our happy ending. I figured we were going through a bit of a rough patch, but everything would be fine when the record came out.

“Well, the album was released, and it was a local hit, but that was it.” Rose smiled wryly. “No fame and fortune for Jimmy Stone. But he still partied like a rock star, still spent all our rent money, and still stayed out ungodly late. He was never home on the weekends. And one day, he just never came back.”

Rose’s eyes burned as she remembered the helplessness of sitting around the flat, waiting for word from Jimmy. She didn’t know if he was performing in a nearby city, or dead in a ditch. Her calls and texts had gone largely unanswered.

“After two weeks, he called me to say he was moving in with this other girl.” Rose shook her head and rolled her eyes. “He’d been seeing her on the side for months. They were in love, apparently.”

Devastation pulled at James’s face. “Rose, I’m…”

She shrugged. “I was left with almost six-months back rent, and all the current utility payments. I called my mum, told her what happened, and asked if I could move home. And that was that. I released the flat, chatted with the landlady to explain the situation, and got myself on a payment plan to pay off the debt. She was really, really sweet about it.

“Mum was nice enough to not charge me anything when I first moved back. I chipped in with groceries when I could, but most of my pay went to the rent. I sent Jimmy a courtesy text, telling him I let go of the flat and to pick up his stuff, but other than that, I wanted nothing more to do with him.

“I worked for a year, then got restless, and went back for my A-levels. It took a bit longer than it should’ve but I was working as often as I could. I’d paid all my debts, but was utterly broke. I saved up all the money I could to pad my bank account and chip in with my mum’s bills. When my A-levels were finished, I started entertaining the idea of going to uni. Mum thought I should keep working. I had a good job, made good money, and if I stuck it out for a few more years, she thought I could probably get promoted through the shop.

“But I’d told Mum I didn’t want to work in a shop my whole life. Which she took offense to,” Rose added, pursing her lips at the remembered argument with her mother. “She worked in a shop her whole life, and she didn’t know why I didn’t think it was good enough. I said I wanted something different with my life. She still doesn’t really understand.

“I applied to universities, hoping to get some financial aid. I’d built up my bank account and didn’t want to deplete it, if I could help it. And this uni gave me the best offer, and I’d always wanted to see America, so here I am.”

Rose’s cheeks burned at exactly how much she divulged. Hearing the story aloud, listening to the way Jimmy had treated her… She was mortified and ashamed. What must James think of her? He probably thought she was the most naive, ridiculous girl who was an idiot to stay with someone who had treated her so awfully. Even her mother had been full of ‘I told you so’s when Rose had moved home.

But James… James was looking at her with the softest expression on his face. There was no judgement. No pity. Nothing but acceptance and sympathy.

God above, she loved him for that. For being here and letting her talk, and not sneering at her for her past mistakes.

He took a step towards her and opened his arms to enfold her in a hug. She went gladly and wrapped her arms around his waist, burrowing her nose into the fresh scent of his sweatshirt.

“I’m so sorry,” he murmured, resting his cheek on the top of her head. “I’m sorry Jimmy was a wanker. But you should be proud of yourself, Rose. So proud. Look at what you’ve done, eh? Look at what you’re doing. You pulled yourself out of a shit situation, and made a better life for yourself. You’re amazing, Rose Tyler.”

Rose smiled into his chest, and felt her eyes prickling at the warmth of his words and the utter conviction in his voice.

“Thanks for listening,” she whispered.

“Thank you for trusting me with your story,” he countered, giving her a tight squeeze. She could’ve sworn she felt his lips press against the top of her head, but it was too gentle and quick of a motion. Perhaps it had merely been a bump of his chin.

He released her and smiled softly down at her.

“Wine time?” he asked, jutting his chin to the bottle.

They took the wine to the living room, where a stack of board games and a deck of cards sat on the coffee table.

As they waited for their dinner, they played a few rounds of War.

When the food arrived, James scooped up Merry and Pippin and shut them away in his bedroom.

“They’re obnoxious around food,” he explained. “They’d be walking all over it, and Pippin would eat half of it, no matter if it made him sick for days. I sprinkled some catnip on their beds, so they should be stoned for the rest of the night.”

Rose chuckled and shook her head at him. He sat down on the floor with his back to the sofa, prompting her to sit beside him as he opened up all the bags and boxes of food.

“What do I owe you?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he replied. “I would’ve ordered this much food even if it was only meself tonight.”

Rose nodded. “Thank you for dinner.”

As they dug into the vast amounts of food, James flipped on a news station and taught her a few of his favorite board games.

Rose had never really played board games before, but she found she thoroughly enjoyed it. He introduced her to Risk, Settlers of Catan, and Pandemic, explaining to her his bastardized rules for two people versus the real rules when more players joined in the fun.

“I had game nights with my mum and dad every Friday,” James told her out of the blue when he moved his playing piece across the Pandemic board. “We would stay up ‘til almost midnight, sometimes playing one game for hours, and other times hopping between a few different games. After they died… I refused to play with my Aunt Sarah. It wasn’t the same with two people, y’know. And- and it hurt.

“But then one night, I’d gone to the kitchen and Sarah was playing Solitaire at the table by herself, and she asked if I wanted to play Rummy. Being the sulky fourteen-year-old I was, I grumbled for a few minutes, but eventually gave in. We only played one round, but it was the first time I’d played something in the five months I’d been living with her. We slowly made our own tradition of playing games. Not Friday nights, though. But special occasions, usually. Holidays, nights I couldn’t sleep—” James tilted his head to the TV, where news anchors were debating the odds of Clinton versus Trump winning the election— “election nights. It became a once-in-a-while thing for me and my aunt.”

Rose swallowed though the lump in her throat. Not knowing what to say, she just shifted closer to where he sat on the floor and rested her palm on his thigh. She felt his leg muscles tense, but before she could retract her hand, his covered hers and he said, “S’your turn.”

Even though it made eating and playing their game a bit harder, she kept her fingers twined with his.

As the night wore on and results started coming in, they called game night quits and instead moved to the sofa, where they continued laying into the wine. The bottle was nearly finished, and Rose’s face was hot as she got tipsier.

“How is it still too close to call?” James screeched at the TV. “How has Hillary not completely swept up all of the votes?”

“It’s only nine o’clock,” Rose said soothingly. “The entire west coast hasn’t closed their polls yet.”

“Hmm, true. California alone can probably steal this election for Hillary,” he mused. He reached out for the wine bottle and frowned when he saw it was empty. “Did we spill some?”

Rose giggled. “Nope. We drank the whole thing.”

“So that’s why the room is all wibbly-wobbly.”

“Wibbly-wobbly? Is that a technical term?”

“Oh, definitely,” he said, setting the bottle back on the coffee table. “I think I should switch to water now, though.”

“Yeah, you’re a bit wine-drunk.”

“Wine-drunk?!” he spluttered. “I am not!”

“Yeah you are,” she countered, sticking her tongue out at him.

He blew a raspberry back at her, then shuffled to the kitchen. When he came back, it was with a platter of biscuits and two glasses of water balanced in his hands.

“Found come chocolate chip cookies in my freezer,” he said, passing her a glass. He then carefully plopped back onto the sofa and set the plate of biscuits onto the table before them.

Rose grabbed one and nibbled slowly. They lapsed into an easy silence as they watched the news. She could feel the tension coming off of James as the time grew later and things were still too close to call.

“What if he actually wins?” James murmured quietly, frowning at the television.

Rose shrugged, not knowing what to say. Instead, she scooted nearer to him under the guise of wanting to grab the blanket that was draped behind him.

“Oh, sorry, is it too cold in here?” he asked.

“Nah, I’m fine,” she said. “A blanket will be enough. D’you need it too?”

His mouth worked for a moment, before he nodded slowly. Perhaps it was the alcohol giving her a boost of courage, but she pressed herself into James’s thigh and threw the blanket over their laps. His body was warm beside hers, and it took every ounce of strength to resist resting her head on his shoulder and wrapping her arm around his waist.

Instead, she mangled the blanket in her fingers and sat perfectly still as they watched the news anchor.

After a few minutes, when it was clear that James wasn’t uncomfortable with their close proximity, Rose let her muscles relax bit by bit. She no longer flinched away when their legs brushed against each other, and she stopped caring if she was half-nuzzled into his side.

Her heart thudded hollowly in her chest as she committed the feel of this moment to memory. She remembered when she and Jimmy would cuddle on the couch. Wrapping herself around the person she loved, leaving no space between their bodies, had been one of the best feelings in the world.

It felt even better to be pressed up to James. The smell and feel of him soothed her and left her aching for more.

She glanced up at him through her lashes—he was utterly entranced by the TV and had shoved half a biscuit into his mouth, making his cheeks bulge out. She watched his jaw work as he chewed, then the way his throat bobbed and flexed as he swallowed. He swiped his tongue across his lips and at the corners of his mouth, getting any lingering crumbs, and his bottom lip shined so invitingly. God, she’d never wanted to kiss him more than she did in this moment.

And really, what was the worst that could happen?

He could freak out and get upset or angry and I could ruin the closest friendship I’ve ever had and never see him again and as a result utterly fail chemistry and get kicked out of uni and have to move all the way back to London where I’m sure to never ever see or hear from him for the rest of my life.

Rose deflated at the tiny voice in her mind. Right. Of course. Stupid Rose. James was her friend. He was her friend who was helping her study for a class so she didn’t fail out of uni. That was it. That was all they could be.

Something deep in her chest cracked, cleaving an ache that left her cold and empty.

She let out a soft sigh and returned her attention to the TV rather than the beautiful boy sitting beside her.

Another hour passed, and as the clock neared midnight, the television finally heralded good news.

“Thank God!” James crowed when Hillary Clinton surpassed the necessary 270 electoral votes. “Blimey, there’s no reason this election should’ve been this close.”

Rose beamed, weak with relief at the outcome.

“Oh, Trump’s sure to go on a Twitter tantrum,” James chuckled. “Wanna see?”

He was already reaching for his mobile, and after tapping a few buttons, he leaned into Rose’s side and held the phone out in front of them. There were a series of Tweets proclaiming all sorts of awkward things about “Crooked Hillary” and “voter fraud” and general insults of the nation as a whole, specifically Democrats.

“What an arse,” Rose said, rolling her eyes. “Thank God that man-child isn’t going to be in charge of a nation.”

“Thank God indeed. Hopefully there are no universes where that imbecile got elected.” James scrunched up his face in an expression of disgust, but Rose cocked her head at him.

“No universes?”

“Have you heard of the theory of parallel universes?” he asked.

“No, but I’m pretty sure the name sort of implies what they are,” she teased, poking her tongue out as she grinned. He pouted, and she couldn’t contain her laughter. “Oh, all right. Tell me about parallel universes.”

James sniffed, but quickly got over his feigned offense.

“It’s the idea that there are an infinite number of worlds all stacked around each other, and that every decision we make branches off a new parallel world where maybe we made a different decision. Like maybe rather than eating a burger for dinner one night, you had the salad, but it was contaminated with E. coli and you had to go to the hospital, where you then met a someone who you befriended then fell in love with, and you go on to get married and have kids and you grow old together.” Rose marveled that he was able to say so many words all in one breath. “Well, there would be a parallel you who ate that burger instead of the salad and you didn’t get sick and you didn’t find your future husband and you’re still going on with your life.

“Therefore, there have got to be universes where Trump got elected president, or where the UK left Europe. Or…” He shuddered. “Or both.”

Rose shook her head at his daft, over-the-top reaction. But her heart stuttered and she couldn’t help but beam at him. He was just… so very James-ish in this moment that her whole body thrummed with love for him.

In an attempt to shove that thought to the side, Rose said, “So there’s probably a universe where I decided to not come to uni in the States?”

James went still beside her, but he nodded, a short, quick dip of his head. He looked so sad that she wrapped her arm around his and hugged it.

“For the record,” she whispered, “I’m very glad I’m living in this parallel world.”

His throat bobbed. After a moment, with a raspy voice, he said, “Yeah. Yeah, I’m glad I’m living in this parallel world, too.”

Kiss him kiss him kiss him kiss him. Rose ignored the little voice in her head and instead hugged his arm tighter. That little voice in her head grew louder as she felt his breathing go unsteady, his head ducking down towards hers. She peeked up at him, and saw his eyes were a shade darker than they’d been before. His tongue darted out to wet his lips, and his eyes flashed to her mouth too.

Oh God oh God oh God.

“Well, it’s late,” she blurted, panicking. “We should probably go to bed.”

“Yeah,” he mumbled, his voice flat. “Yeah, you’re right.”

Rose tossed the blankets off of herself and stood up from the sofa. She nearly ran from the room, but didn’t want James to think something was wrong, so she forced herself to move normally as she gathered up some of the dirty dishes and took them to the sink.

After a moment, she heard James following her.

She turned towards him as he walked into the kitchen. His eyes were shuttered, his face wary.

Shit.

“I had a really nice time tonight,” she said, wringing her hands in front of her. “Really. This is the most fun I’ve had in a while.” She chewed on her bottom lip and squeezed her fingers so hard that she popped her knuckles. Then, before she could even think, she skipped up to him, rocked up on her tiptoes, and brushed a kiss to his cheek. His skin was soft and warm, and his day-old stubble tickled deliciously, and god-fucking-dammit she was making it a thousand times harder for herself to not press herself closer and move her face a few inches to the side to catch his lips straight on.

It took everything she had to drop back onto her heels and take a step back.

“Thank you, James,” she said softly, her cheeks burning. “G’night.”

Then she fled the kitchen before he could even reply.

[dontdowhatisayandnobodygetshurt]

this was the winner of a poll I made a few days ago, writing this one first bc Augi and June don’t wanna stop bantering for a while so they can bone X’D

thank you to all the people who voted on the poll!!! I love you so much and I really owe you all!! <3

Jesse and Vrox smut under the cut~

There were very few times Vrox could get revenge on his boyfriend for the many hours Jesse spent teasing and edging him to within an inch of his sanity. In a car with Jesse behind the wheel seemed like as good a time as ever. And it was directly Jesse’s fault - if he hadn’t been winding Vrox up all night at the pack’s bonfire - before Dante sent them home to “get a room” - Vrox wouldn’t have such a raging hard-on that needed attention now.

Vrox leaned his head against the window, closed his eyes, and shoved his hand into his pants. And in case that wasn’t obvious enough, he allowed himself a soft moan as the first touch of his fingers sent a pang of relief and arousal through him.

“Vrox.” Jesse’s voice was soft, beautiful. Dangerous.

Vrox smirked. “Mmhm?”

“What are you doing?” 

“What does it look like?” He ran his fingers down his shaft through his underwear, barely brushing, rubbed his thumb over his head and bit down on his lip. Hell, he was hard. Jesse had gotten him so damn hard ten fucking minutes ago and he still hadn’t softened, even with no extra stimulation. He wasn’t sure if it was because he was a demon or if Jesse was just that good. He couldn’t care about that right now.

“It looks like you’re touching yourself without my permission,” Jesse said steadily.

Vrox turned his head to look at him. Jesse hadn’t taken his eyes off the road yet, but the scent of Vrox’s lust was hard to miss in the small space.

“What if I don’t care about your permission?” Vrox drew out each word, knowing exactly what his defiance would do to Jesse and what Jesse would do to him in turn. He couldn’t wait.

“Do you want me to fuck you till you scream and beg me to forgive you?”

“Fuck yeah.”

Jesse’s lips quirked up and Vrox felt a satisfaction of a different kind. “Well, you’re honest.”

“Does that mean I’m still your good boy?”

“No. You’re not.” Jesse glanced at him, at the hand still working in his pants. “Last chance to stop, baby.”

Vrox settled down in his seat and slipped his hand into his underwear, contentedly rebelling. He knew Jesse did two things when he first touched him bare; gripped him so suddenly he cried out, or left feather-light touches on him till he begged. He went with the former, grabbing his cock without any more build than indirect touching. He gasped from the feeling, bucking his hips up into his own hand. “Shit! Jesse, this feels so fucking good.”

Jesse’s knuckles paled on the wheel. “Tell me.”

“I thought you didn’t want me to.”

“Talk to me,” Jesse growled.

There it was, the guttural shift to his voice that hit Vrox like a punch in the stomach: the difference between Vrox’s gentle boyfriend and the dominant demon who made him scream and writhe underneath him.

Vrox squirmed in his seat, his hand moving more easily now as pre-cum slicked the tip of his cock. “I want your hands all over me, want your mouth, want to taste you, want you to use me. Need you inside me. Fuck, I need you in me so bad.”

“What if I told you I was gonna make you fall asleep like this?” Jesse said, still with that burr of a growl in his voice. “What if I made you eat me out till I came on your pretty face but made sure you didn’t get to cum all night? You’d try to touch yourself, I know you would, but I’d stop you right before you made a mess in the sheets. You’d whine, and cry, and beg, maybe you’d even try to grind on my leg like you do sometimes, but I wouldn’t let you. What’d you think about that plan?”

Vrox’s mouth had gone dry and his cock throbbed almost painfully with every heartbeat. He whined wordlessly.

“Or,” Jesse said, softer now, “I could pull this car over. You could eat me out right now because this is your fault, and maybe, if you’re really good, I’ll let you cum. How about that?”

Vrox nodded quickly.

“Use your words.”

“Yeah. Yes, please.”

“That’s my good boy,” Jesse shot him a grin and flicked on the indicator, pulling into a truck stop. He knew it was there, that’s why he’d asked Vrox when he did. Vrox was mildly annoyed, was he really that predictable? But that annoyance vanished as Jesse said “get in the back” in that tone of voice that set Vrox aching in the best ways and scrambling to obey.

He pulled his shirt off the second he got out of the car, leaving it on his seat and climbing into the back. Jesse was already waiting for him, yanking off his pants; Vrox felt his heart drumming in his chest to see him looking equal parts amused and pissed off. He grabbed Vrox by the nape of his neck, drawing him into a kiss that was more teeth and tongue than lips and Vrox loved every second of it.

“Make it up to me,” Jesse muttered, inches from Vrox’s mouth. His hand groped heavy and possessive down Vrox’s chest, smoothing over the scars, the muscle, before he pulled back and laid down, half propped up against the door. It was awkward but they were too far gone to care.

Vrox settled between his legs, his height meaning he had to leave his legs on the floor, pulled Jesse’s briefs down and threw them in a puddle with his pants. Jesse folded his lanky legs over Vrox’s shoulders, his breathing quickening as Vrox pressed his lips to the inside of Jesse’s thigh. He could smell his arousal, feel the heat pulsing off his core, setting a fire in his veins.

He bit Jesse’s thigh none too gently and heard the other boy curse above him, but before Jesse could reprimand him, he shoved his face between his legs.

Jesse stuttered on the words in his mouth, losing them in a gasp. Vrox was absolutely shameless; his tongue dragged through Jesse’s folds like he was starving and all that could sate him was Jesse’s taste. He grabbed his hips, pulled him closer, and shoved his tongue inside him.

“Vrox! Oh my fucking god, Vrox!”

Vrox grinned into him and slid his tongue out just long enough to gently part his folds with his fingers and push his tongue back inside. Jesse’s legs were trembling against his back, heels digging in below his shoulder blades. He was soaked, so much better than hiding it than Vrox was, but just as turned on. Vrox flicked his tongue in and out of him just shallowly, feeling Jesse try to tighten around him to keep it inside him. He ignored that, grazing his tongue up to Jesse’s dick, red and hard and dripping wet. He let his tongue play with it lightly, twirling circles around it.

“Vrox,” Jesse panted. “Come on.”

Vrox nuzzled his lips against him, looking up at him with his biggest and most innocent eyes.

Jesse laughed even as his legs tensed around Vrox’s shoulders. “Come on, you asshole. You wanna cum? Make me c- Vrox!”

Vrox closed his lips around him and sucked, almost hard enough to hurt. Jesse ground his hips into his face to return the favour, his hand holding Vrox against him, not that Vrox was planning on moving. He was comfortable - more than comfortable as he laved Jesse’s cock with his tongue and felt him twitch.

He let Jesse move, let him fuck his face as much as he wanted. He could tell Jesse wanted to be on top of him right now, thighs caging his head, free to ride his mouth until he came, but the car wasn’t exactly conjunctive to that. So instead Vrox let Jesse grind Vrox’s chin against his entrance and his dick deeper past Vrox’s lips as Vrox suckled diligently. He couldn’t help but move, couldn’t help but thrust up against the seat; even through the layers of his pants and underwear it felt so fucking good, the pleasure only increased by the taste of Jesse’s slick filling his mouth.

“Vrox, so close,” Jesse breathed. His eyes squeezed shut. “God, you’re so good for me, baby. I’m so fucking close.”

Vrox whimpered against him, curling his tongue around him, bobbing his head as best he could. Jesse shuddered and let go, cumming hard and fast as Vrox sucked on him, moaning uncontrollably, himself.

Jesse groaned at the aftershocks and sat up slow and with a wince. “I think I almost broke my neck.”

“I think I just ruined these jeans,” Vrox said.

Jesse frowned. “What? You didn’t...”

“Yeah, I did.” Vrox straightened up smugly so he could see the wet patch showing through his pants.

“Oh, fuck you,” Jesse growled, smacking at him harmlessly. “You smug son of a-”

“Are you still going to fuck me till I beg?”

“You couldn’t get out of it now if you tried.”

[konyah]

Beginnings

Chapter 14 – Determined

Summary: Today, Sarada grew up a bit.

Rating: G

Disclaimer: I don’t own Naruto

Chapter one HERE | Previous Chapter HERE | AO3 | Part of Origins series

A/N: Holy shit I can’t believe this is the last chapter of this segment of my series! Thank you SO MUCH to everyone’s encouraging words! HERE is the link to my twitter poll on what Naruto OTP I should write about next! (I’ll also link it again at the end of the chapter so you don’t have to scroll a bunch.) If you can’t/don’t want to vote via twitter, you can comment on this chapter who you think I should write about. I’ll have the list at the end. Enjoy!

~

They started becoming closer when he started visiting Konoha more often in between bouts of his redemption. At first, it started out with all of team 7 reuniting; then Kakashi became busier with the Chunin exams approaching, then Naruto became busy for unknown reasons (it wasn’t to their knowledge, but Kakashi told him to give the two alone-time for his own meddling). Eventually, Sasuke starting walking her home from work. She’d talk about her day, and he’d listen. When she asked about his most recent mission, his answer was short. She never expected a long answer – just having him back was more than enough. Sakura’s happiness for this was painfully obvious. She would even cancel planned events with her friends for an evening of just chatting with Sasuke… though, none of her friends ever minded. If anything, they encouraged it.

On this particular day; however, Sakura had a newfound confidence. They were sitting on a lone bench, quietly watching the sea as the sun set.

He spoke first this time, “I’m leaving for again in two days.”

“How long?” She frowned a little bit, enjoying how much time they’ve been spending together. It’d been about four weeks since he last left.

“Not sure.” Sasuke shrugged, eyes stuck on slow waves.

“Let me come with you.” Green eyes stared at his expression, trying to read mysterious thoughts.  

He sighed, “This doesn’t involve you.” [You don’t deserve to get tangled up in my sins.]

Normally, Sakura would’ve slumped in defeat, and Sasuke would’ve poked her forehead. Instead, she stood up with a huff, and stormed away. His gaze redirected towards the sea, knowing she would eventually understand.

Two days later, Sasuke was about to leave again. To his surprise, she wasn’t there to see him off. Deciding that he really pissed her off (or maybe she had an emergency at the hospital?), he headed out.

He was stopped the moment he took a step.

“Sasuke-kun! Wait!” Pink hair practically flew in the wind as she raced up to him. He almost frowned when he saw that she had a packed bag, “I’m going with you. I already turned in my resignation at the hospital, and Kakashi-sensei gave me the okay.”

He blinked. Her eyes held a mix of multiple emotions. One being hurt. Was she hurt because he wouldn’t take her with him? No, it was deeper than that. She desperately wanted to rekindle their relationship (what kind of relationship that was? He had no idea). That’s when he realized it – not only did he need to redeem himself with the world, but with Sakura as well. One of the people he hurt the most – one of the people who still stood by him despite that.  

Also, the determination in her eyes let him know she wouldn’t change her mind.

“Tch.” He turned around so she couldn’t see the faint blush on his cheeks, “Fine. It’ll be good to have a medic with me.”

When she didn’t move, he faced her again, knowing his blush would be practically invisible. Her eyes were wide in shock and mouth slightly parted. With a soft smile, he tapped her forehead.

“C’mon, let’s go.”

~

Sakura was having that dream again; the one where their relationship really started to bloom. When they traveled together, loved together, and grew together. To her own frustration, it was abruptly interrupted by her phone ringing.

With a groggy frown, she answered it, expecting it to be the hospital for an emergency surgery. Instead, it was her old friend, “Sakura-chan, can you come to my office?

“Hmmm? Naruto?” She yawned, not amused that it was only 3am. She JUST laid down to sleep about an hour ago. However, since becoming the Hokage, Naruto’s personality shifted to a more serious attitude. He wouldn’t call for no reason, “Is there something wrong?”

“We’ve made new discoveries; I can’t discuss it on the phone.” The young man nodded as if she were in front of him.

Her mind immediately went towards her husband, who left for a mission about five years ago. Is he okay? “I’ll be right over. I just have to take Sarada to my parent’s place.”

“Got it. See you soon.”

Even though Sarada was already seven, and could probably manage on her own for a few hours, Sakura remained a protective mother. She woke up Sarada (who groggily protested; she was so much like her father when it came to being woken up), packed a few things, and then headed towards the Haruno house. Her parents were almost used to this – Sakura brought Sarada over multiple times due to hospital emergencies. Though her parents could see through her obvious anxieties this time.

“What’s wrong?” Her mother furrowed her brows after Sarada was settled into Sakura’s old bed.

“Naruto called me saying he needed me to come to his office right away…” Sakura slipped her shoes back on, ready to leave.

Both of them immediately knew where her mind went, “Keep us updated, sweetie.”

With that, Sakura almost ran to the Hokage’s office, thousands of ways that Sasuke could be dead racing through her thoughts. When she practically burst through the door, her breath caught in her throat.

There he was.

“Sasuke-kun…”

His hair had definitely gotten longer, and he changed his outfit to include a cape and vest. His eyebrows pressed into confusion as he glanced at Naruto.

“I called her to come while you were in the bathroom. She should know about this since she helped us defeat Kaguya during the war.”

It was, quite frankly, a bullshit excuse in Sasuke’s mind. He knew his friend was just plotting for him to meet up with his wife. Sasuke sighed with a nod, glancing at Sakura once before talking to the other gokage (who happened to be visiting for their summit meeting) about his findings with the Otsutsuki clan and other white Zetsu’s.

~

After the meeting was over, one of Naruto’s clones and Sakura walked with Sasuke back to the gate. It was silent, and awkward.

Naruto didn’t like that.

He pulled his phone from his pocket, “Oh, uh, Hinata just texted me. Boruto isn’t feeling well so she asked me to grab some medicine for him. I’m gonna head out, y’know.” The blond smiled somewhat sheepishly, “Be careful out there, Teme. Keep me updated with anymore findings.”

Sasuke nodded as Naruto ran off.

They stood in silence at the front of the gate, crows chirping against the sunrise. Sasuke struggled with what he wanted to say – how he wanted to apologize. He was only against keeping contact with them because he didn’t want to put her or Sarada in danger.

“Sakura, I’m- “

She interrupted him, “Don’t apologize, Sasuke-kun. I know you have to do this to protect us. It’s difficult, because you’re missing so much. She’s growing into such a kind, smart soul. She’s at the top of her class and works incredibly hard. Soon, she’ll be joining the academy; she wants to be a strong ninja. I’ve been training her too with combat and helping with ninja tools. Of course, my shuriken and kunai use isn’t as good as yours, but your natural talent in that shines so brightly through her. Her laugh and smile are so pure and full of joy, I wish I could share it with you, though the others say she gets that from me. While she fights with Boruto a lot, they’re still really close friends and it reminds me of the old Team 7. I think she could even have a crush on him, but she’d give me the silent treatment for a month if I teased her about that. Her personality is really showing and I can’t wait to see what paths in life she takes. But it’s also hard because she’s starting to ask more questions about you. Where you are, what kind of person you’re like. She completely forgets you, and the most recent photo I have of you is over ten years old. She misses you. I miss you, bu-“

Sasuke couldn’t handle the sobs that she let out anymore. Her cheeks were stained with tears, and her chest was heaving. At this point, she could barely breathe. He pulled her into the tightest hug he could manage.

“Sakura, thank you.” His eyes were filled with a feeling she couldn’t describe. Regret? No. Loneliness? Not quite.

Passion.

She only realized this when his lips crashed into hers. It was sloppy at first because she didn’t expect it, but her mouth moved due to muscle memory.

He had almost forgot what she tasted like, her scent. It reminded him of home. Reluctantly, they parted. Her eyes widened when she realized a tear fell from his own eyes.

She gently wiped them away, “I’ll stay strong. For us.”

He sniffled once before kissing her forehead, then gave a weak smile.

“Until next time, my wife.”

“Until next time, my husband.” Her smile was just as uncertain as his.

Once his figure disappeared, she crouched to the ground, unable to keep her sobs quiet. In that moment, Naruto emerged from the wall he was hiding behind. He knelt next to her, resting his hand on her back.

When her sobs slowed, he spoke up and offered his handkerchief, “Sakura-chan, is there anything I can do to help?”

Sakura shakily wiped away her tears with the cloth, “N-No. Just having him see me was good enough.” She looked up at her friend with a wavering smile, “Thank you, Naruto.”

Wanting to provide support so she wouldn’t be alone, Naruto walked Sakura back to her parents’ place.  

“Let me know if you ever need anything, okay?” He smiled. It’s the least I can do for your loneliness. I’m sorry.

“I will.” She nodded. Thank you for being my friend.

Hizashi and Mebuki were anxiously waiting for Sakura to return, sitting in the living room. Upon hearing her return, they practically rushed to the door. The moment she saw her parents; she broke down into silent tears.

They ushered her to the kitchen, where she sat on a barstool.  

“Sakura, dear, I’m so sorry…” Mebuki began, assuming he was dead.

“No, no.” Sakura choked out, “I-I just saw him…”

“What?” Hizashi spoke up this time.

“I can’t explain the details of the mission, but he’ll be gone for longer. I don’t know when he’ll be back. I know he has to do this to protect us, but Sarada is starting to hate him, I can tell. She misses him, hell I miss him. So fucking much.”

Little did they know, Sarada noticed her mom returned. She froze in the hallway when she heard that Sakura saw her father for the first time in five years. Most kids would’ve been jealous. At this point, she didn’t even think of that.

Sasuke was hurting her mother by being gone.

Sarada wanted him back so her mom would stop crying.

She didn’t know how she’d bring him back. With no leads at seven years old, it’d be impossible. So for now, she’d wait. Wait until the time was right.

Sarada was determined.

END.

A/N: I can’t believe this is done. I’ve never been so emotionally invested in a story before… Honestly, I wouldn’t have continued this past the first few chapters if I didn’t receive so many amazing comments, likes/kudos, etc. Thank you so much everyone for being supportive!!!! As I stated above, I’d include the link to vote for who I should write about next! You can find that HERE! Also, if you don’t want to vote via twitter, you can comment here. The options are:

Naruhina (Boruto/Himawari origin story) Shikatema (Shikadai origin story) Saino (Inojin origin story) Nejten/Tenlee (Metal Lee origin story; hard to explain beyond that) Konohana Kakairu

With love, Konyah

[herpronuonsarefemslash]

That Won't Do - TEASER

You've heard of the MCU. You've heard of the DCEU. But have you heard of the DNGAFU? Thrill to a dangerous off-road detour where the only thing crazier than the porn parodies are the women who step in to set them straight.

In a world where retired heroines no longer care what people think, a new villain arises: lazy pornographers threatening to misrepresent their erotic escapades... SEE MORE HERE: https://www.patreon.com/posts/56077671

===== "The Citadel has really changed," Shepard notes, her eyes sweeping the plaza below the restaurant after completing their reflexive check--anyone with guns, then high, then the sides, then anything that could be used for cover--that she's done since Liara met her. Liara shimmies closer, humming happily as the hard metal of Shepard's pistol presses against her ribs. She takes one of Shepard's hands and wraps it around her hip, so that she can feel the far more svelte weapon concealed under her dress and accessible by the same slit in the side that made Shepard's eyes darken when she came out of the bedroom.

"It feels less alive," Liara agrees. "The embassies and offices were re-established but...I don't feel like I'm in a city."

"Two sieges in three years. Can't blame most people for wanting to commute. Rent's cheap and so is land. A few more years and salarians won't have any living memory of the war. Someone will buy it up and build a bunch of silly houses that all look the same and viola! The Citadel rises again, tainted by humanity's worst discovery. Suburbs."

Liara chuckles. "Actually, I believe I bound my wrists to humanity's worst discovery."

Shepard's broad shoulders roll and she tilts her head towards Liara with that sloppy, crooked smile of hers. "Probably."

She chose a table that faces the outside of the presidium's ring. She did it without asking Shepard if she wanted it. It's like how her beloved hates having a door behind her, except now she sees the stars as the gateway through which death might emerge.

"She's late," Shepard mutters, glancing at the chrono that her omnitool projects.

"Ash is a SPECTRE, love. I've never found them to be the reliable sort."

"No?"

"Not about little things. Only reliable when it matters most. Like when they say they'll come back to me."

Liara softens and leans her head on Shepard's shoulder, snuggling her cheek against the cotton and trying to ignore the way it shifts and slides against the armored undershirt. Whatever her bondmate needs to feel safe. The nightmares have been fewer, no longer spilling into her brain across Shepard's sleeping skin. She's not about to complain about paranoia.

Shepard likes to keep tabs in order to rile Ashley, who is so used to the oldest sister role that she bristles at having Shepard check up on her in a way that she instinctively recognizes and resents, but also craves. Ashley can ask someone else for life wisdom rather than being forced to dispense it.

As usual, Shepard found a restaurant that utterly baffles Liara. Edsel, it said on the sign. The theme has something to do with fossil-fuel burning surface vehicles of an era almost three hundred years in the past, to the point where wrecks were recovered, repainted, treated with some alloy called 'chrome' and used to build a maze of booths.

A comedian once said that asari live long enough to do everything once except try every restaurant.

The cuisine at least, is familiar. Greasy. Savory. Meaty. She can smell the oils the cooks use and under the sharp tang of the thresher meat being seared for the pant-suited female krogan at the counter, she can smell cod and potatoes. Fish and chips was the first thing Shepard ever cooked for her. A kindness she did not ask for and would learn only years later was something Shepard liked to do after she'd treated a woman to a wild night and taken her home.

One drunk night, an amused Karin Chakwas explained that digesting fatty food lessens the blow of the hangover, at least in humans.

By using her morning-after routine on Liara before they'd ever even kissed, she was putting the sled before the goat as humans say.

Ashley approaches their table and fires off a salute.

"Commander."

Shepard smiles into her coffee.

"Gunny."

Shepard's hand lands on Liara's thigh and gives a firm squeeze. Her fingers burn where they touch, even through clothing. Whether it's the eezo in Shepard's body that could be debilitating or cancerous in a weaker specimen but she turns it into strength, or the powerful grip of the fingers, or the ten degree spread in temperature between human and asari bodies, it never fails to make Liara pause and suck in a quick breath when her hands make contact the first time in any given encounter.

Scoot," Shepard chuckles, swinging her hips along the bench to bump into Liara's.

"Oh! Of course."

They make way for Ashley on the bench. Sehpard nods to a waiter and the asari scurries over, her eyes carving a hungry path across both the humans present in nearly as lusty a manner as the black flecks growing in her eyes.

She takes beverage orders, cocking an eyebrow at Ashley's request for water. Not since the war, she told them once. Not since her hangover in her quarters after the Citadel coup.

"Never gotten used to that, skip. I don't get hit on by turian women."

"Often."

Ashley sputters into her ice water.

"That was a special circumstance!"

Ashley's nut-brown cheeks darken further.

"It doesn't count if there's burning herbs!"

"And at a fertility festival no less," Shepard chuckles. "Remote colony, good farmland, lots of turian girls who liked hunting..."

"I will pay you 10,000 credits this instant not to finish that daydream out loud, skipper."

=====

"I'll take Harbinger triple burger with the..." She trails off, clicking her tongue as she reads over the menu which was printed on physical paper for some reason. "Why not? Salad."

"Same, gunny?" "Sure," Ashley chokes out.

"One with a Thessian greens side salad, and one with Earth greens. Earth is no-eezo. Fish and chips, pet?"

Liara shivers under the weight of the word.

Is the air thinner, or has the buzzing heat wrapping around her bones from Kate's possessiveness just made breathing harder? She reaches for her neck before realizing she's not wearing a collar. She can't, even in private. Spy drones, planted cameras, any number of things might catch it. Asari audiences wouldn't care their sex is so frequent, so shameless and so often rough, leaving snarled tangles of sheets and Liara's back or her ass outlined in sweat against the windows and slippery smears on walls where the splash of a lover's pleasure was allowed to drizzle down the paint just as it drizzled down the chin. Contrary to Shepard's red-faced vetoes of the idea, surveillance footage of them would massively improve her popularity in those stupid polls amongst maidens, and by extension, Aethyta's clout with matriarchs in the voting forums.

The collar itself would be the fatal mistake.

Human kink communities take a very different view of them. Make believe. Fake danger easily dismissed when removed, or worn throughout the day as proof of a sub's devotion. But humans abolished slavery amongst themselves and have kept to that, neither suffering it nor inflicting it save for a brief encounter with batarian savagery that ended in humanity's victory. Asari have mourned missing kin for centuries. They can't enjoy collars knowing so many of their sisters have suffered under them, or died when their masters flicked a switch. Bondmate necklaces were popular in the earlier periods of the Council era, but only ancient matriarchs who bonded before the batarians were contacted still wear them.

Wearing Shepard's dog tags on Ilium while she mourned and hoped was enough to garner more than a few disgusted glances.

"Yes please," Liara mumbles, lifting her eyes and favoring the waitress with a smile. "We're so close to Earth, after all. Fish and chips sounds lovely."

"It'll be out soon," the waitress promises but not before pausing to use her omnitool's forger to burn her contact information into the side of Ashley's water glass. Ashley stares at it numbly, like it was a grenade and not a proposition.

Kate pats her protege's shoulder.

"There, there. Heard you were doing spot checks on stuff coming in from Omega. Confiscated anything interesting lately?"

=====

Liara has two sorts of anger: fidgety and apocalyptic.

That's day-to-day Liara anger, and Goddess bless but she's getting better at avoiding it. Having lived on a warship or in barracks from birth until retirement a few weeks before their wedding meant she wasn't housebroken.

This is the other sort of anger. The last Prothean nearly turned into a smear of shell and ichor when he derided her after Thessia's fall. A three-jawed skull cracking after a lucky blow with a warp and the Shadow Broker rising with a bellow of agony. Kai Leng's attempted backstab ending with the crack of reinforced arm bones, then his legs, then his spine being broken before Liara's barrier-hardened fists turned his ribs into a lumpy pile of shuddering scraps and she drew a dagger that ate the light around it and slit his throat.

"Love, it's..."

"...it's just a bootleg of some smut. I wouldn't take it seriously."

"Yes, exactly!" Liara cries. "Unreleased. Still time. Still time."

"You're getting a bit krogan-y, love."

"An actress is going to be portraying me. For portraying me making love to you and you think it's nothing?"

"I'll reach out through the network, I'm sure someone can slow them up, or yank a permit they need for the warehouse. And I'm sure no one cares about the porn industry awards."

Liara drops her head into her hands.

"Shepard, have you ever watched asari pornography? And I don't mean that as a trap, love. Yes or no. I won't be angry."

She is tempted to quip that that was more Joker's thing than hers, but she doesn't.

"A few. Back when. I didn't see the point, really. Just felt flat, especially once I knew what the meld was like. After...after our first time, it didn't work. Didn't do a thing for me while you were on Ilium."

Liara's eyes lift from her pacing feet and meet Shepard's. She doesn't seem ready yet to accept assurances that it was all right to pursue the Shadow Broker rather than pull up roots to hunt Collectors.

"Fornax?"

"One of the trendier studios on Earth that was trying to out-lesbian them, actually."

"Goddess."

"Li, what's wrong?"

"Go make popcorn. I'm going to check for listening devices, just in case."

She comes back to find the lights lowered and a naked Liara reclined on a throne made of what might be every pillow they own. She pats the spot beside her.

"Did I miss something?"

Liara laughs in that soft 'you silly human' way that makes warmth and sunlight spill into every crevice of Shepard's being.

"This is how asari couples watch movies together," she explains. "Intimately. So strip."

"Aye-aye, ma'am."

Curling up against Liara is one of the few things that makes organic life worth saving.

=====

"That's Vaenia? It's...it's..."

"A political thriller about the behind the scenes work to integrate humanity into Council Space?" Liara jokes.

"I just wasn't expecting the most talked about erotic film on Ilium to be Citizen Kane, all right?"

"What?"

"Ugh. Bad example."

"Can you see why I want them to get this right, Shepard?"

Her bondmate worries her lip with her teeth and finally nods.

"Yeah. Yeah, I can. I'll make some calls."

=====

Her bondmate spins in place, dropping one of the 'gummy bears' in the process. At least, that's what Shepard calls them. They're actually a mix of thresher maws and kalikosaurs, but apparently the original candies that inspired other races to copy them were shaped like an Earth animal called a bear. Soldier that she is, she lunges and manages to catch it before the syrup-filled atrocity stains anything.

"We're doing what now?"

Liara scrubs her hands across the aching roots of her crests. Kate bats her hands away and digs her strong thumbs in, kneading the muscles until they melt. Overly cautious as she can be when it comes to doors, security VIs and vetting everyone from carpet cleaners to house painters, Liara does love how recklessly she throws herself into giving comfort. Sometimes she slides her shirt off her shoulders and starts working her over before Liara herself is fully aware of the ache.

"You're mad at me," She mumbles, tucking her chin over Liara's shoulder and looking at the comm terminal. "Sorry."

"I wouldn't have expected you to be a prude. We've hosted a Janiris party for our friends. You've fucked me on a dozen battlefields. You fucked me until I melded without askin-"

"Which was hot..."

"Agree to disagree on not-fully-consensual melds."

"Run me through this again. The only Athamic Oaths I'm familiar with are a Justicar's Six Oaths, plus the ones I swore to you."

Liara highlights the text.

"The Oath of Inspiration is what an artist uses to exchange access for information for confidentiality."

"Which is how Vaenia alluded to operations and installations whose very existence was top secret."

"Exactly. It's an oath specifically for artists, those recognized by some guild or institute. And in some cases, portraitists or actresses or writers will swear it just for access. We're expected to behave naturally and let them into our routine and they're expected to avoid embarrassing us and use creative license and common sense about secrecy."

"So you want to invite the actresses who will be portraying us to live with us for a few days."

"It'd take several weeks, Shepard. Any performer on a production like this, asari or human or turian, would have been tutored at the same sorts of universities. Taught to take information in slowly and not to depict our breakfast routine based on one morning, but across many."

"I think I could just explain how you like your pancakes over the vid, T'Soni."

"You could. But I notice you're not complaining about the idea about letting someone watch us 24/7."

Shepard sorts through her handful of candy and picks up one of the maw-shaped ones. It's a sort of blue that shouldn't be allowed to exist, especially since she hasn't been able to find botanical records of any raspberries on Earth that color.

"What's-her-name is cute and I like the blue ones. Council and Allied races have a security review this afternoon, siame. I'll pick up Arty after. Don't wait up."

Her bondmate drops a kiss on her crests, turns on her heel and walks away without further explanation or doing anything about the steady trickle of wet that her tease and that goddess-fucked smirk caused between Liara's thighs.

"Glyph?" The drone boots up and manifests his outer shell from his cradle at her desk.

"Yes, Doctor?"

Kate can't just say something like that and leave her here to drip and shiver for hours on end. Not without consequences.

"Any and all scenes from human actress Emilia Ryder involving romantic partners. Loop. One third volume."

"Stand by."

Liara flops onto the unmade bed, relishing the smell of the both of them that mingles in the silk. She reaches blindly for her nightstand and presses her thumb to the biometrics. A bit more fumbling manages to locate the scarcely used synthcock, which is fully charged, thank the Goddess. Rummaging through the canisters in the bowl, she picks a foam-based ejaculate and presses the nozzle into the hidden inlet.

Kate hasn't used this since her last round of reparative surgery with Miranda. At her request, Miri recreated some hare-brained cybernetic and clone-tissue monstrosity ripped straight from Cerberus's worst ideas in the Lazarus project and then fused it into Shepard's body permanently. Liara argued that it was sheer insanity to implant illegal wetware from a terrorist group's project that proved so morally bankrupt that even the Illusive Man shuttered it.

Then she saw her beloved's smile as she looked at her own outline in the mirror in her slacks and noticed how her posture straightened and broadened to maximize herself in a space. Her shoulders released tensions she'd been carrying for years, so much so that Liara was never aware that the stiffness wasn't natural. She doesn't need to understand human gender to know that Shepard always felt more at ease wearing a synthcock any time she wasn't in armor or about to be, even if sex was nowhere on the horizon. She would sometimes wear one, only to take it out when she bedded Liara. Though the toy served no practical value unless she or Liara touched it, something about it anchored Shepard in her own skin, a precious thing indeed for a woman acutely aware she's wearing a once-dead body around. The permanent addition seems to have an even better effect.

"Film me and in one hour, send it to Shepard's commlink. Blackhole address."

Shepard wants to leave her a lonely, frustrated mess?

Two can play at this game.

=====

"How was school? You still crushing on your math teacher?"

If that whine contained any actual words, she didn't catch them.

"What about that girl who came in last term that runs the student paper?"

Arty's a darker shade of purple than any other asari Shepard's ever known, so when her father embarrasses her, her cheeks and neck flush nearly to black.

"Just remember. Do both your hypos first, make her show you a STD test and wear gloves, don't dive too deep, and remember to help her up because meld or no meld, she might not remember which color her toes are."

"DAD!"

She chuckles. She's seen Arty at student-parent events. She stares at Neema Ullasi's neck like she wants to see if she can suck a hickey into it through her headscarf. Intelligent, poised, kind, fierce activist. Neema grew up on Ilium as an diplobrat whose mother remarried a local matriarch, meaning she's fluent in not only Arabic and Farsi but enough regional asari dialects that her and Arty can have inside jokes around human teachers. What's not to crush on?

Loitering around a coffee shop they have to walk past are the unholy trinity of reporters from Alliance News Network, Westerland News and Stella Incognita Broadcasting. Westerland alone, she could handle. Khalisah Al-Jilani is the second coming as far as the bosses are concerned after being the only one of their wartime correspondents to print anything but racist garbage and she relies on the Shepard-T'Sonis and their friends for that. She can yank a cub reporter's chain so it doesn't need to be swatted on the nose. ANN is a military-funded network without a war to cover, making them a wild card. Stella is trying to become some one-stop shop for all different flavors of sensationalist garbage by employing a diverse workforce of assholes from eight races and using some byzantine corporate structure that probably drove the volus who created it insane.

It's been a while since she punched a journalist. Maybe it's time.

=====

She glances at her daughter.

"That footage uploaded?" Arty looks up at the camera drone's status lights and nods. Shepard pulls her sidearm and puts a round into the drone's thruster pack, making it wobble and smack into the back of Arty's stasis field.

"How dare yo-"

"You ambushed us in a permit-only photography zone. I gave them permission, but not you."

"You said we could!" he sputters.

"I said you two," she reminds him, pointing at the other two reporters. "Not three."

"I don't recall giving verbal approval or signing a release for footage of me or my child. Bill me for the drone."

"What about you?" the reporter demands, pointing at Artemis. "Do you agree with...that?"

"Really?" she scoffs. "After seeing my dad do that, after practically daring her to blackbag you in broad daylight, you're going to come after her daughter?"

Arty flares her barrier so hard Shepard swears she can smell the leathery musk of rachni and the permafrost of Noveria along with the choking ozone of air seared by the sheer intensity of Benezia's biotics.

She levels a volley of profanity at the reporter that would melt Wrex's plates and Kate whistles and offers her fist for a bump.

"Whoa. Learn that one from your grandfather?" Shep aims straight down the drone's lens and pulls the trigger until the pistol's heat vents glow cherry red. Just for the ANN viewers back on Earth, she puckers her lips and blows across the muzzle before holstering it with her best imitation of a cowboy's twirl.

"Mixed and matched between her and Wrex. So. Donuts? I hear there's this place that sells them with ice cream on top."

"My asari and their ice cream. Also, don't tell your mom I filled you with sugar on the way home."

She tosses her arm around Arty's shoulder.

"Glazed donut with rocky road on it?"

"Nah. I'm thinking sprinkles."

[makeste]

KHR 065: Motivational Tomatoes

Before we get back to the action, this chapter featured the first-ever character poll results, and do you know who got first place?

That’s right! This is the one and only time he will ever make it into the top two, let alone beat out his beloved boss (and it wasn’t even close). The rest of the character poll results are here, for anyone who enjoys these things and feels validated (like I do) when other people also like their fave.

Moving on to the chapter!

I can’t believe Gokudera fucking died right when he was voted the most popular character in Japan.

THIS WAS A COMEDY MANGA

Honestly, it’s fascinating to see Tsuna freeze up in a situation like this. I think it might be the only time it ever happens? Before this arc, he had never been in a situation this bad. And after this arc… well, we all know he’s a bit of a changed man after this arc.

But for right now, he’s useless! At least he doesn’t just straight up abandon Gokudera, though.

This would be a great time for a really handsome fellow to make a flashy entrance.

I honestly don’t know how this smiling idiot never made it to #1 on any of the polls. Criminally underappreciated. Who do I have to fight to get him the respect he deserves.

On a side note, Tsuna’s expression when Yamamoto is going “WHE-W” is legendary. It’s such a perfect “Ohmygod what just happened… am I dead??!” look. No, Tsuna, you’re alive! You were saved by this fucking guy who’s got the best timing since the fucking T-rex at the end of the first Jurassic Park.

I can’t really blame the school, given that half its student body is currently laid out missing all their teeth. If anything they should have been closed to begin with.

Those girls from the previous chapter are just walking all over the damn town complaining about this fight. Bless you, girls.

I freaking love how Yamamoto hears “kid in a fight” and immediately thinks, “Gokudera.”

NOOOO MY LITTLE BOY [PETS HIS HEAD] [CALLS 911] [CALLS SOCIAL SERVICES] [ADOPTS!!] [KNITS HIM A WEASLEY FAMILY SWEATER!!!]

DAMN IT LOOK AT HIM JUST LYING THERE QUIETLY WITH HIS WRIST ALL FLOPPY AND HIS HAIR IN FRONT OF HIS EYES FUCK ME

Fortunately, Yamamoto knows how to express this exact same mood, but with like 1000x more aggression.

I’m not sure when exactly I started shipping 8059, but I do know that if I wasn’t already, after this panel I was all aboard that ship ready to never set foot on dry land ever again.

Also, Yamamoto is so fucking awesome Jesus Christ.

WHICH MAKES IT SO MUCH BETTER!!!

Also, later on in this chapter there’s a scene where Yamamoto cheerfully refers to it as “the mafia role-play” yet again, but you are kidding yourself if you think there’s any chance that this little murder butterfly, freshly emerged from his natural born hitman cocoon, actually believes it’s a game after this scene. GOKUDERA DYING IS NOT SPECIAL EFFECTS. I 100% believe he’s only playing along because it’s simpler that way.

Look at this idiot. Word of advice: if Yamamoto ever looks at you with that sort of expression, YOU FUCKING RUN and don’t look back. Better yet, don’t hurt his boyfriend in the first place and it won’t come to this.

ARE YOU WETTING YOUR PANTS YET CHIKUSA??

HE’S SO ANGRY sob I’m living for it so much! Also, of COURSE he’s number two on the list. Of course he is. Second only to Hibari. At least Fuuta fucking appreciates how amazing he is.

Let’s be real, he just knew Yamamoto was ready to kick his ass from here to ten years in the future.

SAVE HIM OH MY GOD!!!

CUT TO NAMIMORI JUNIOR HIGH

This makes me wish we could have gotten some sort of really tense, Godfather-esque hospital fight scene at some point in the series. I would have enjoyed that.

Anyhow, interesting that they have no problem sending the characters to the hospital in later arcs, even when it’s arguably just as dangerous (most notably during the Inheritance Arc, when someone had obviously tried to kill Yamamoto, and was still out there). So clearly, Gokudera only gets sent to the school in this instance so Shamal can be there to remind us all how useless he is. Even though he does save Gokudera’s life by treating the poison. I GUESS.

That’s going to go over real well.

Gokudera’s life in a nutshell.

I freaking love how Bianchi is constantly trying to pick a fight with Yamamoto Takeshi, the world’s nicest human. I like to think it’s because she already knows he’s going to marry her brother one day.

Yamamoto’s Chopper-esque deer-in-headlights look needs to be framed and put on my wall.

“Did you think we were done with the angst?” Amano asks, a sadistic gleam in her eye.

I was actually praying that we weren’t! And my prayers were answered.

YES TSUNA, BEAT YOURSELF UP OVER IT. LET THAT GUILT FLOW THROUGH YOU. LORD PLEASE LET NO ONE COME AND RUIN THIS WONDERFULLY ANGSTY MOMENT.

WHY CAN WE NEVER HAVE NICE THINGS IN THIS MANGA

Is he a lizard? Is he a caterpillar? Where did he come from? Why does he exist?

These are things we don’t question. Just accept and move on.

WE REALLY COULD HAVE USED YOUR HELP WHEN GOKUDERA WAS FUCKING DYING

“The most terrible of mafia criminals”, oh and also, later on, a bunch of (mostly) innocent kids whose ancestors once casually made a deadly and irresponsible bet. (I say ‘mostly’ because Kaoru was guilty of ATTEMPTED MURDER. NEVER FORGET.)

This is officially the first mention of the Vindice, though. Sure would be hilarious if these guys ended up being the final villains or something wild like that.

Yes, of course they’re the same person. Why would Reborn randomly be telling you about two completely unrelated Rokudo Mukuros?

OF COURSE THEY’RE IN THE MAFIA. WHERE ELSE WOULD KAKIPI BE HAILING FROM. THE INTERNATIONAL YO-YO FEDERATION? YOU REALLY THINK THE IYYF HAS IT IN FOR NAMIMORI STUDENTS FOR SOME REASON

Nah it still counts as mafia.

Hey, it’s Mukuro! What an elegant transition.

[INSERT NEYMAR JOKE]

Mukuro goes on to act really callous here, but take note of that “!” bubble above his head when Chikusa flops to the ground. Is he just surprised, or is could it possibly be… concern????? I honestly don’t know, so let’s just say it’s both, with him then proceeding to go all-in on the show of amused apathy right afterwards to hide it.

Oh yeah and he’s also excited because Chikusa’s finally gotten them a lead.

Were you seriously going to eat your friend why are you guys such shitheads in this arc.

I guess… he’s got a lot of faith in Chikusa, at least? Man, compared to this, Gokudera suddenly seems amazingly well off, even with his lack of a hospital, his doctor that doesn’t treat men, and his sister who’s more likely to kill him than cure him.

Reborn, please talk some sense into this spiraling young man who needs to be dragged into his leadership role of destiny by force if need be!

In all fairness, he doesn’t know he’s going to be a fucking superhero by the end of the day.

At any rate, Reborn is not the only one who thinks it’s finally Tsuna’s moment to shine!

I would kill to see one of these reports from Reborn to the Ninth. Tell me someone has written a fic about them. I’m obsessed with this.

Twelve hours?? Geez no pressure.

100 YEARS WORTH OF TOMATOES.

Tsuna. Now you gotta.

Now you really gotta.

Haha. The Ninth is sitting there at his desk like, “What should I say to motivate him? How about tomatoes? Everyone likes tomatoes. But just in case, I’ll also threaten to kill him if he says no.”

As we all know, at this stage of his development, Tsuna is fucking great under pressure, so he immediately pretends he hasn’t heard anything, screams that it has nothing to do with him, and runs off in a panic.

Which is actually exactly what he needs to do to end up getting a reality check!

NO IT’S NOT

This is exactly why Reborn is the tutor and the Ninth is just the old guy with money. “Rather than seducing him with tomatoes, I’ll just remind him that no matter what, he can’t escape this shit anyway, and if he sits around and does nothing he’s fucking screwed.”

Like, it sounds cruel, but it’s exactly what he needs to hear. Along with this.

Things I love:

Reborn’s complete faith that deep down, Tsuna already knows the right thing to do.

Reborn understanding that there’s a layer of fear/panic/anxiety that he has to cut through in order to get to that essential core of Tsuna. (I mean, that’s the very concept of the Dying Will bullet right there.)

Reborn knowing exactly what to say to activate that inner strength.

Tsuna’s scared-but-resolved face when he thinks about Ryohei and Kyoko and Gokudera.

The fact that Kusakabe is included in the montage (s-sob).

One day I will write an essay about how I believe that this single sentence sums up Reborn’s entire endgame for Tsuna in a nutshell. And when I say “endgame”, I mean endgame endgame. As in BOSS endgame.

Seriously, he’s known from the start that this is what propels Tsuna. Not fame or power. Not even “purer” abstract concepts like ~the greater good~ or ~doing the right thing~. It has to be personal; it has to be his friends, his family, someone that he cares about. Because he is thirteen, and still self-centered, and so right now, something like this is the only thing that can break through that layer of teenage apathy and reluctance. The threat has to be real and close and tangible, and it has to be personal.

And even later on, when he’s matured a bit more and is saving the future and junk, this is still the key motivator. Tsuna has so much potential to be a force for good and light and hope in the world. But if you want him to be a damn hero, you have to give him someone to save.

OR JUST GIVE HIM TOMATOES

Look at the gritted teeth. It’s working.

This is Tsuna’s equivalent of that Yamamoto rage face earlier in this chapter. Look how different it is. I love this about Tsuna.

HIBARI WASN’T ACTUALLY THE MAIN CHARACTER, THOUGH

Reborn! Tell him!

MOSTLY DEAD IS SLIGHTLY ALIVE!!!!

Half an hour after being killed, Gokudera returns good as new! Reading this chapter for the first time, ten-years-ago makeste breathes a sigh of relief that her favorite character isn’t going to get left out just when the series is finally having a real fucking arc. We got our angst and the happy ending too! BOOM, did it, had it both ways no regrets.

[INSERT MONTY PYTHON REFERENCE]

YAAAAAAY

YOU KNOW FULL WELL IT’S NOT

AND MY AXE

AND JUST LIKE THAT HE’S FUCKING DEAD AGAIN

This may just be the greatest sequence of entrances in history.

Back when they had so few fighting characters that they needed to toss in Bianchi as a fourth. Those were the days.

You shall be the Fellowship of the Rings… wait, no, that’s next arc.

I don’t know why we needed a fucking roadmap to understand this plan of “we’re going to their hideout”, but okay.

OHO, INTRIGUE

It’s Fuuta!

That’s right, friends! In addition to Hibari Kyoya, Mukuro has also kidnapped an eight-year-old. He’s so evil!

…But redemption is coming for you, you pineapple-shaped kufufuing motherfucker. Just you wait.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Poll of the week

Americans, by a wide margin (56 percent to 37 percent), think Barack Obama was a better president than Donald Trump has been, according to a CNN poll of adults released this week. Americans think Hillary Clinton would have been a better president than Trump has been, but by a much smaller margin (47 percent to 44 percent).

These numbers aren’t that surprising, but they are weird.

First, Clinton and Obama have very similar public policy views. They’re both Democrats, of course, but more than that, they’re the same type of Democrat: left of center but not super liberal.

Maybe Americans think Obama was particularly good as president at, say, giving eulogies, in a way Clinton would not have been. And, sure, at earlier stages in their careers, Clinton and Obama had different views on issues, most notably the Iraq War. But by the end of the 2016 campaign, they were basically aligned on everything. The gap between Obama-Trump (19 percentage points) and Clinton-Trump (3 percentage points) is really large, and I’m not sure it’s based on policy differences.

Second, Obama’s 19-point advantage over Trump is huge. Obama is not some hypothetical figure: He ran for president twice, and 46 percent (2008) and then 47 percent (2012) of the country voted for the other candidate. Trump is not John McCain or Mitt Romney, you might say, and that’s fair. But count me skeptical that an actual Obama-Trump head-to-head race would have produced such a blowout. My bet is that strong support from Republicans and Republican-leaning independents would have gotten Trump into at least the low 40s in such a contest. And, yes, I get that the poll asked who would be a better president, not who people would vote for. But the Clinton-Trump numbers seem much closer to how Americans actually act on their political preferences: On Election Day in 2016, the former secretary of state won 48 percent of the vote nationally, compared with Trump’s 46 percent. That roughly parallels who Americans think would be the better president.

What gives?

For one, U.S. presidents are generally more popular after they leave office. Obama is following that trend. Clinton never made it to the Oval Office, obviously, but Americans don’t seem to be warming to her now that she’s off the partisan battlefield (as happened at earlier points in her career): Gallup found her favorable rating at an all-time low in December of last year.

It’s also plausible that Obama, to poll respondents, is basically “not Trump,” while Clinton is still Clinton, the person lots of Americans remember very recently voting against. The Obama-Trump numbers roughly parallel Trump’s approval ratings — 42 percent approve and 52 percent disapprove. This is a pattern that shows up on a variety of questions from a variety of pollsters: A majority of the public takes the anti-Trump position, while 35 percent to 40 percent of Americans, including the majority of Republicans, align with the president.1

Third, issue positions don’t explain American voter behavior particularly well, so it makes sense that voters imagine that they would like Obama’s policy decisions more than Clinton’s, even if they would largely be the same decisions. Remember that a bloc of Obama voters in 2012 backed Trump in 2016 (about 9 percent, according to one estimate) even though Clinton shared Obama’s policy views more than Trump did. (The 5 percent of Romney voters who backed Clinton makes slightly more sense, as Romney himself said in 2016 that he would not vote for Trump.)

It’s also worth asking whether Obama is viewed more favorably than Clinton in part because of his gender. Research has found that sexism played a significant role in the 2016 election, the U.S. has never elected a female president, and many sectors of American society, including politics, remain disproportionately male. (Of course, race also played a significant role in 2016, many of these sectors are also disproportionately white, and Obama is the only non-white person ever elected president.)

Finally, we’ll give Obama some credit, particularly as he might be smarting from Trump’s reversal of one of his major policy achievements this week (more on that in a bit). Clinton was under investigation by the Justice Department during her campaign. Some of Trump’s closest allies (and perhaps the president himself) are now. If you are judging your presidents or would-be presidents in terms of staying away from major legal controversies, Obama is far ahead of Clinton and Trump.

Other polling nuggets

Before Trump announced his decision to withdraw the U.S. from a nuclear agreement with five other world powers and Iran, 21 percent of American adults said the U.S. should stay in the agreement, 21 percent said the U.S. should leave it, and 57 percent of Americans said they didn’t know enough to have an opinion, according to a CBS News poll. (So at least 57 percent of Americans are honest.)

Republican Rick Scott, currently Florida’s governor, has a 44 percent to 40 percent lead over incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson, a Democrat, in Florida’s Senate race, according to a new poll conducted by the Florida Atlantic University Business and Economics Polling Initiative.

The race to replace Scott as governor, meanwhile, is still fluid, according to the poll. In the Republican primary, U.S. Rep. Ron Desantis (16 percent) and Florida agriculture commissioner Adam Putnam (15 percent) are effectively tied for first in the multi-candidate field, but 43 percent of voters are not sure who they will support. In the Democratic primary, former Miami Beach mayor Philip Levine (16 percent) is basically tied with ex-congresswoman Gwen Graham (15 percent) at the top of the field, but 42 percent of voters are undecided. The Florida primaries are August 28.

The top issues Republicans want 2018 candidates to talk about are the economy and jobs (24 percent), immigration (22 percent) and gun policy (19 percent), according to a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Democrats rank health care first (30 percent), then gun policy (28 percent), then the economy and jobs (23 percent.)

Opinion is split among Americans about whether other world leaders show Trump “a great deal of respect” (13 percent), a “fair amount” (27 percent), “not much” (31 percent) or “no respect” (29 percent), according to an Economist/YouGov poll. Ten percent feel Trump shows a great deal of respect to other world leaders, 31 percent said a fair amount, 32 percent say not much, and 27 percent said the American president shows no respect to other nations’ leaders.2

Trump’s approval rating

Trump’s job approval rating is 42 percent; his disapproval rating is 52 percent. Trump’s net rating (-10 percentage points) is better than this time last month, when it was -13 (40.6 approval, 53.3 disapproval). So he is still quite unpopular, but slightly less so.

The generic ballot

The Democrats hold a 46.7 percent to 40.5 percent advantage on the generic congressional ballot this week. This time last month, the Democrats led by almost 7 percentage points.

[pinksausageduo]

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR 1K+

IM SCREAMING WTF YOU GUYS ARE AMAZING genuinely can’t believe i have more than 1000 of you actually liking my blog to the point of following me??!!! I have really bad updates LIKE REALLY BAD like for 2 and half months i’ve been on tumblr i’ve probably only been posting for 1 month and a bit. AND THE FACT YOU STILL ALL LIKE MY WRITINGS AND FOLLOW ME IS CRAZY!! i seriously mean it when i absolutely adore each and everyone of you following my blog like i love you guys so so much. and please don’t be afraid to ever talk to me whether it’s on anon or message whether it’s about how annoying your life is, ranting, my writing, advice, questions, literally anything. i just love you guys sooooo much like wow i never even expected more than 100 followers like i’m mind blown.

so since it is a milestone and usually most blogs do something, i did prepare a present for my followers and another one for my mutuals because i love you all.

FOR MY FOLLOWERS: A NEW SERIES!!!!!

i know i have still my enemies to lovers series that i need to complete and i will do that but there will be a new series and YOU GUYS GET TO CHOOSE which one I write first either;

Heirs 

located in an expensive private school, wanna one is known as the Heirs. they’re all extremely rich, good looking, talented and basically the kings of the school. each guy will have a girl that catches their eye, those girls will be you! from the quick witted and sassy scholarship student to the extremely rich ice princess who no one wants to even approach to the shy sweet nobody, one member will fall for you. choose to find out!

so will you choose the heirs??

Bodyguards

wanna one is a team of bodyguards assigned to people who need protection. over the years each and every one of them finds themselves falling for someone on the job. but falling in love isn’t part of the job or is it? they’ll fall for you! from the president’s daughter to another intelligence agency’s spy to even a princess, one member will fall for you. choose to find out!

so will you choose the bodyguards??

HOW TO CHOOSE

message me by kkt or tumblr

comment below

reblog with which one

choose in poll : https://goo.gl/forms/G4GrlZEfOPL30jnP2

CHOOSING WILL CLOSE IN AROUND 2 WEEKS ON 11/11/17 

please vote!!! i’ll love you all forever if you do!!!! 

FOR MY MUTUALS/PEOPLE I ADMIRE & FOLLOW: FOLLOW FOREVER/RECS/DESCRIPTION

WANT TO GIVE OUT A HUGE SHOUTOUT TO MY MUTUALS AS WELL AND IT’LL BE KINDA A FOLLOW FOREVER/RECS (it’ll be long asf (like REALLY long) so i’ll put it under keep reading) this will be in all three person sorry :( 

EVERYONG: i love y'all sm we all so so crazy and we occasionally talk about writing but eh it’s really just a mess but making our gc was one of the best decisions i made on tumblr AND IM SO SORRY if i don’t have you down below but i’m giving you all my love and appreciation rn here!!! BUT JUST LOVE YOU ALL!!

FIRST OF ALL SHOUTOUT TO DIAMOND @woojiniee FOR ENCOURAGING ME TO START THIS BLOG I WOULDN’T BE HERE WITHOUT YOU. lol it’s weird how my blog started from helping you w your english homework on harry potter lmao. i genuinely love you so so much and i admire you, your works and your blog and just thank you for everything!

ALSO A HUGE SHOUTOUT TO JAS @perkwoojin!!!! MY ABSOLUTE LOVE AND MY BEST FRIEND!! jas you’ve been here for me whether it’s irl problems or tumblr problems and you’ve never judged me for anything i’ve done. you are so so so special to me and i just love you soooo much i genuinely can’t imagine not meeting you on tumblr. we hit it off right from the start and we’ve only gotten closer. while the time difference may be annoying we still talk often and just thank you so much for always being there for me, love you loads!!!

MY SENPAIS (the people who inspired me to write and start this blog, i would literally check your blog for updates everyday before starting this blog) :

@imagineproduce101 genuinely think carina is the queen of writing in the pd101/wanna one fandom, she’s blessed us with so many fics on such a regular basis i’ve never talked to you personally and you probs have no idea who i am but just want to say thank you so much for inspiring me to write, your fics always made me feel so soft and fluffy i wanted to make other people feel that way so thank you!!! 

fic recs: rivals (pleaseee do pt 2), what are you waiting for, let me love you, banana milk love, red bull, new beginnings, all of mafia aus, all of hp aus, all of vampire aus 

@woojiniee i’ve already mentioned diamond^ but gonna mention her again cause she is one of my senpais LITERALLY SOOOO GOOD WRITING LIKE WTH PLEASE LET ME LIVE she’s less busy now so IM WAITING FOR UPDATES GIRLL but seriously check out all of her fics will not be disappointed

fic recs: alpaca boy saves the day, crushing on you, jaehwan soulmate au, dating a park at a park

@wanna-request-one​ such great paragraph writings mine will never live up to theirs writing is so amazing just so great if you want detailed long writing the best blog to go to all of them are AMAZING WRITERS congrats on 1.8K!!

fic recs: seongwoo soulmate, seongwoo brother’s best friend, jaehwan college, I HATE YOU IM YOUNGMIN (literally so in love w this fic)

@wanna-one-scenarios amazing writer!!! so so so niceeee she’s starting college rn so v busy i miss youuu we never get to chat but its okayyy BUT LIKE SHIT WRITING IS SOOOO ON POINT LIKE WTH just go through her whole master list won’t regret it

fic recs: DANIEL PRINCE AU!!! (like if y’all haven’t read this missing out on sm), jongyun father au, sewoon enemies to lovers au

@wannaonestars love reading her writing such great bullet points and really good ideas ALSO SO JEALOUS that like short bullet points BUT CAN MAKE ME FEEL SO FLUFF like that is a skill ppl 

fic recs: all of boyfriend series (like so fluff) ESPECIALLY SEONGWOO’S, jihoon soulmate, minhyun office au

@jsioos (was heochannies) MEIKE IS SO PRETTY AND NICE AND AN AMAZING WRITER LIKE WHAT HOW CAN YOU BE SO BLESSED has such a diverse range of works from scenarios to mtls to reactions so genuinely impressed with her blog like goals

fic recs: all of boyfriend series FOR EVERY SINGLE GROUP like she’s amazing at those, and movie night with seongwoo

@ukulelewrites ALSO LONG ASS FICS AMAZING BLOG seriously such amazing writing love so many fics of hers DESERVES MORE ATTENTION AND FOLLOWERS and super sweet as well 

fic recs: cherry picker’s club, a fanta-sea, homerun and ephiany (it’s nct ten BUT SUCH AN AMAZING FIC NEED TO PUT IT ON HERE)

@kanggdaniell STEPH IS SO BEAUTIFUL AND SO NICE AND RLY BUSY AS WELL but amazing writer just love her writing so much she isn’t as active as before but still should definitely check out master list cause so many amazing scenarios

fic recs: TSUNDERE (FUCK FUCK READ IT RN BEST SERIES FOR ME ON TUMBLR WOOJIN STANS COLLECT YOUR BOI), always in my heart, all of breakup scenarios, all of bad boy scenarios

ANOTHER SPECIAL SHOUTOUT TO IRIS AKA @alliwannado-w1 LITERALLY RELATES W ALL MY WRITING PROBLEMS ON A PERSONAL LEVEL IS THE ABSOLUTE SWEETEST CARES SO MUCH ABOUT HER WORKS, BLOG AND FOLLOWERS I LOVE HER WRITING AND ADMIRE HOW DEDICATED SHE IS TO POST SO REGULARLY just i rly should stop writing in caps but like just genuinely she is the princess of writing in the pd101/wanna one fandom and she’s just so so amazing and all her writings are always so much fun to read like i love her so much but like no offence iris but you’re fucking crazy in the best way possible like to have so many wips like GIRL YOU NEED A BREAK 

fic recs: FUCKBOY SERIES (iris got all her fame from here lol jk), daniel werewolf au, jihoon soulmate au, jihoon vampire au, woojin youtuber au, woojin policeman au, jinyoung barista au, sewoon soulmate au, youngmin youtuber au gonna stop there cause i’ll be listing her whole master list soon ;)

AMAZING WRITERS (just to give heads up have liked these recommended fics on another private account so if you like look at the likes and i’m not there that’s the reason):

@daehwifi​​ GENUINELY LOVE THESE TWO SO SO MUCH AND THEY’RE BOTH RIDICULOUSLY TALENTED and hella sweet like cutest married couple ik TIFFY thank youuu for always making me smile and MAE for being the sweetest angel but YOUR WRITING IS ALSO HELLA GOOD like great bullet point fics and regular updates 

fic recs: bandaid guanlin scenario, movies ongniel scenario, skype calls jinyoung scenario 

@deepdickdaniel​​ ARIANE EVERYONG GC MOTHER (aurora’s dad now) and the ultimate HOE for daniel but got guys chasing after her constantly SMH and all our gc is beautiful because of your genes ANYWAYS you’re also a good ass writer and if anyone wants bomb ass daniel fics FOLLOW ARIANES BLOG YALL

fic recs: doormat, all her soulmate aus especially taste, hiking w daniel

@dong-hyucks​ oKAY so jade has only like one fic on wanna one BUT SHE’S SUPER TALENTED AND SHE DOES SO MANY GROUPS like mutlifandom ASF AND I LOVE HER ALOT 

fic recs: daniel soulmate au, na jaemin spy au, i’m with you taeyong

@donghyxns​​​ IF YALL WANT MXM SCENARIOS/CONTENT THIS SHIT IS RIGHT HERE also has a lot of wanna one scenarios but maddie is the biggest donghyun fan ik and super sweet even though we haven’t talked much!

fic recs: royalty au donghyun, actually all the royalty aus,  TIC TOK WOOJIN SOULMATE AU, youngmin as your boyfriend

@ennergetics​​ RAE my favourite drunk aunt ever like super funny and nice and talking about bts is always great with you RAE YOU ALSO LIKE AN AMAZING WRITER and make me feel all sorts of stuff when i read your works

edit: fuck me im so sorry rae lmao idk if it was the fact i wrote this at 3am or I'm terrible speller originally or it was auto correct IDEK BUT ILYSM DONT HATE MEEEEE

fic recs: bad first dates, prince aus, woojin college/barista au

@fromwannaone​​ ANNIE A COMPLETE UTTER SWEETHEART WITH WRITING SKILLS which put me to shame and fic ideas are always sooo good too just fuck meeeee i love youuu and your writing 

fic recs: ALL HER SCHOOL SERIES which is like all members basically sooo, on rainy days, sweet like candy

@hiyawoojin​​ RISSAAAA MY BABY MY PRECIOUSSSS I WANT TO PROTECT YOU AND HUG YOU AND LOVE YOU FOREVER but genuinely rissa is the sweetest person ik on tumblr and her sweetness is as equal to her writing BUT SINCE SHE’S A NEWBIE EVERYONE GIVE HER LOVE

fic recs: ALL OF THEM since there’s about 4 but i like the woojin and the minhyun in particular hehehe

@hwinkinghwi​​ XUAN WE BONDED INSTANTLY YOU ALWAYS MAKE ME SMILE AND LAUGH and we talk about the weirdest things but it’s still heaps of fun and xuan has short sweet bullet point fics which will warm your heart

fic series: both baejin fics: chicken first cuddles later, florist jinyoung, baker woojin, ___ as your boyfriend (all of them)

@jeonjeonggukks​​ I LOVE ALEX SM SERIOUSLY SO SO SO FUNNY LIKE WTH and sooooo easy to slander BUT SHE IS MY MOTHER (well one of them) AND I LOVE HER SO SO MUCH AND SHE’S ALSO AN AMAZING ASS WRITER so y’all should read her writings

fic recs: shipped jonghyun scenario, our necklaces sungwoon soulmate au, why her why him woojin

@jihoonslattee​​ AHHH WE JUST STARTED TALKING CHI BUT I ALREADY LOVE YOU AND JUST WOW YOUR WRITING IS INCREDIBLE WISH I COULD BE YOU AND HAS SOOOO MANY FICS DONE LIKE IM SO IMPRESSED wow i did that in all caps but like JIHOON STANS WHO WANT JIHOON FICS like chi’s blog like 100% recommend also does reactions SO CHECK HER OUT 

fic recs: jihoon prince au (this was sooo good), daniel CEO both parts, seongwoo boyfriend au, jihoon soulmate au

@mongniel​​ AURORA OUR SALTY ASS MOTHER/FATHER who leaves us regularly and is a daniel seongwoo stan (she says so at least) BUT LIKE GOTTA APPRECIATE HER ABILITY TO MAKE ME FEEL SO MUCH SHIT WITH HER ANGST also if y'all love angst daniel fics AURORA’S BLOG IS THE ONE FOR YOU

fic recs: BROKEN RECORD (heart BREAKING), no chance no way, in his dreams, no answer

@peachiejihoonie​​ SAYS IN DESCRIPTION SHE’S BAD AT WRITING BUT THAT’S RIDICULOUS her writing is sooooo good like not too many fics up BUT ALL OF THEM ARE AMAZING like what??

fic recs: demigod series, daniel fuckboy 

@perkwoojin​​ IVE ALREADY MENTIONED JAS CAUSE SHES MY ONE ETERNAL LOVE but genuinely wtf so talented I AM SHOOK she does EVERYTHING like gifs, reactions, scenarios AND SHE HAS TWO OTHER BLOGS for the boyz and stray kids fans CHECK THOSE BLOGS OUT TOO

fic recs: basically everything but in particular wanna one as prom dates, wanna one reacting to you how to solve a rubix cube, and all her series which include: boyfriend, fallen angel, AND check out woojin badboy pt 1 & 2 and now ive literally listed her whole master list whoopss

@playfuldisaster​​ CHRISTINE IS SUCH A SWEETHEART LIKE WOW genuinely like an angel AND I LOVE TALKING TO HER but she also has so many works up! WHICH NEED MORE ATTENTION cause they’re so good

fic recs: and i’m here seongwoo, attention baejin, my boy lollipop baejin, sorry kang daniel

@producedwannaone​​ SO UNDERRATED LIKE WHAT HOW EVERYONE WAKE UP also honey I NEED A MASTERLIST like need to stalk your blog easily yooo but seriously such a great writer and a sweetheart x 

fic recs: wanna one seeing their donsaeng in their t shirt, naps with guanlin

@starrywinters​​ SHEENA YOU HAVE SHARED MY PAIN OF HAVING SEONGWOO AS A BIAS WRECKER but like other than that you mean so so much to me you are positively brilliant in every single way AND DON’T TELL YOURSELF OTHERWISE seriously AND IT INCLUDES YOUR WRITING SKILLS 

fic recs: cute bandaids, minhyun college au, 7 minutes in heaven jihoon, hugs woojin, guanlin soulmate/vampire au

@wannabeone​​ just dammnnnn girl your writing is SO GOOD LIKE WHAT?? always makes me feel all nice inside just love reading your works fic recs: all of best friend lovers (like you will not be disappointed), kissing cuddling hugging wanna one

@wannamoon​​ JUJU IK YOU’RE ON HIATUS AND YOU HAVEN’T REPLIED TO MY MESSAGES CRI but i miss your baejin fangirl squealing and your posts which will be filled with sadness cause it’s you lmao BUT COME BACK SOON I MISS YOU AND I LOVE YOU but juju has such a good mix of fluff and angst fics and super unique and heart warming ideas

fic recs: crumble both parts guanlin, ALL HER LIFE AUS LIKE FUCK SUCH GOOD FLUFF, halcyon seongwoo, jihoon soulmate au

@wannaonescenarios​ SERIOUSLY SUCH GREAT SHORT FLUFF WRITINGS LIKE WHAT HOW I WISH and has a long ass masterlist WHICH IS AMAZING TO GO THROUGH just like go right now to her blog amazing writings IS AVAILABLE

fic recs: SOULMATE AU SERIES, dating series, college series (even tho it’s only youngmin), daniel cat cafe owner 

@wannasoftimagine​​ OMG SUCH AMAZING FICS BUT DOES ANYONE KNOW PHI WENT?? like she hasn’t updated in 2 weeks? or replied to messages? like does anyone know?? but if she’s on an hiatus without mentioning well idrk but phi’s works make me feel so so soft like super duper fluffy and always read them for a cheer up 

fic recs: ALL SOULMATE SERIES, classmate woojin, boyfriend woojin, and all of wanna one _____

@wannasseu​​ CYN CYN OMG I LOVE YOU SO MUCH PEOPLE CYN IS THE QUEEN OF ANGST if anyone says otherwise FITE ME drown in my tears whenever i read one of her angsts WHICH IS LIKE ALL THE TIME ugh cyn what are you doing to me BUT CONTRARY TO THE ANGSTY FICS SHE WRITES cyn is such a FLUFFY person 

fic recs: ALL HER EX BOYFRIEND SERIES especially seongwoo’s (i ranted to cyn for a straight hour about that fic lol), custard kisses, arranged marriage 

@wannatales​​ GREAT SHORT FLUFFS THAT YALL WANNA READ RECOMMENDING FOR STANS OF MAKNAE LINE since writings are only maknae line works always makes me feel all fluffy and gooey insideeee

fic recs: JACKET GUANLIN (fuck such a cute scenarios can’t deal), fool woojin, milk jihoon

@wannawrite​​ SO MANY FICS FOR SO MANY FANDOMS but like the wanna one master list IS HELLA LONG haven’t ever talked to admin N BUT I LOVE YOUUUUU LAETITA DATITA RISEEEE (is that how to spell it i can’t even remember) BUT ANYWAYS soooooo good fics like always love reading them just genuinely great writings 100% of the time

fic recs: FLOWER BOY SERIES LIKE YESSS, vamp series, i latte you very much minhyun, bffs to bf daniel, colourless soulmate au woojin, this isn’t part of the plot guanlin

@wanna-17​​ CATH OMG MY OLDER FUTURE TWIN IDEK i love you so so much and chatting you is always fun BUT you have so many mtls like wow I'm mind blown BUT YOUR FICS ARE ALSO SUPER GOOD 

fic recs: wanna one first meeting series, and any of the mtls you want to know about

@whatabrightplace​​ AHHH TINA PLEASE PLEASE WRITE FOR WANNA ONE YOUR WRITING IS ALREADY AMAZING AND DON’T BE SCARED JUST TAKE A LEAP OF FAITH wow I'm being rly dramatic but idc i want to see you produce wanna one writing content (did you see what i did there ;) ) ANYWAYS i also wanted to tell you i love youuuu

fic recs: HER RECENT DANIEL SCENARIO FUCK stars + you for our precious mother ariane and basically everything on her masterlist even tho it isn’t wanna one or pd101

@101scenes​​ JUST CUTE ASF SCENARIOS (at least the ones i’ve read) got me squealing and SOFT like such great writing 

fic recs: LATTE ART daniel scenario, guanlin soulmate au, ceo jihoon

TEXT BLOGS (not gonna do fic recommendations cause they’re texts and it’s harder to choose specific ones):

@laignlin​​ LILY I LOVE YOU AND I WANT TO TALK TO YOU MORE LIKE TIME DIFFERENCE AND SCHOOL SUCKS but our chats are always the best and it’s always hella nice talking to you BUT YOU’RE ALSO A GREAT WRITER AND AMAZING TEXT MAKER so i ended up putting you in text author lol also IM STILL YOUR PROM DATE but everyone just read through all of lily’s texts and scenarios cause they’re all on point asf

@pwjins​ I GENUINELY ADORE ALLISON BUT SHE HATES ME AND WE HAVE THIS BITCH FEUD THING GOING ON BUT WHATEVER I LOVE HER ALOT AND IK YOU GOING THROUGH A TOUGH TIME AND NEED A BREAK BUT LIKE I’M HERE FOR YOU TUMBLR HERE’S FOR YOU but i love allison’s texts they always make me smile and laugh and like my heart literally warms SHE ALSO WRITES occasionally so check those out and i don’t have any in particular but like the gc texts are always good and the CHANGING THE NAME LIKE LMAO that’s also amazing just check it all out BUT I LOVE YOU SO MUCH ALLISON 

@texts101 YOUR TEXTS ARE SOOOO GOOD JUST THANK YOU THANK YOU FOR MAKING THEM like they never disappoint I LOVE the best friend, boyfriend, gc and name switch texts the most BUT LITERALLY ALL OF YOUR TEXTS ARE AMAZING and ik you taking a hiatus now SO PLEASE TAKE A GOOD REST AND FOCUS ON SCHOOL and don’t stress at all cause all your followers will still be here and ready for your return

@w1talks ANGELA IK YOU DO SCENARIOS AND TEXTS but the scenario list was getting WAYYY TOO LONG to put you there anyways I LOVE YOUR TEXTS AND YOUR SCENARIOS your writing is amazing but your texts are also great LIKE MULTI TALENTED MUCH and I ABSOLUTELY ADORED wanna one finding you went on a date with jinyoung BUT I ALSO ABSOLUTELY ADORE YOUUU

INCORRECT QUOTES BLOGS (not gonna do fic recommendations cause they’re quotes and there are hundreds):

@incorrect-produce101-quotes​ SUPER DUPER FUNNY and like totally could imagine your quotes being said by the guys and love how there’s a lot of the pd101 guys as welll 

@incorrect-wanna-one-quotes​ you were one of the first blogs i followed and your quotes NEVER fail to make me at least smile like i have properly cracked up laughing on multiple occasions because of your quotes and i just feel like my day becomes a little brighter when i see you on my dash

TALENTED ASF GIF MAKERS:

@daewi​ just really nice and cute gifs which are soooo aesthetically pleasing together also all your reblogs are just great AND I ADORE YOUR HS YEARBOOK AWARD THEMES 

@defsouldanik​ LITERALLY IM IN SUCH AWE OF YOU LIKE THE GIFS YOU MAKE IS ALWAYS LIKE THE MOMENTS I WANT GIFFED?? and like all your got7 content makes me happy as well and just THE QUALITY IS SOOO GOOD AS WELL

@kimsjaehwan​ ONE OF MY ULT FAV GIF MAKERS always gifs are so nice and the gifs are always hella good quality just always makes me smile when i see them 

@kngniel​ YOU WANT BASICALLY PERFECT GIFS OF DANIEL HERE IS THE BLOG FOR YOU genuinely so many gifs you’ve made of him smiling and just MAKES ME FEEL SOFTTT 

@ongeuigeon​ SUCH AMAZING GIFS WTF like the gifs in a set always match perfectly with each other in every way AND I LOVE IT WHEN YOU ADD YOUR OWN LITTLE COMMENTS IN it always make the gif that much better 

@parkswoojin REALLY NICE GIFS and like you regularly make new ones so thank youuu for that and just really nice quality AND IN GENERAL A GREAT GIF BLOG TO FOLLOW

@park-woojin​ I LOVE YOU JUST FOR EXISTING AND MAKING WOOJIN GIFS LIKE all of your gifs are so nice and clean and great ass quality AND SINCE ITS WOOJIN i always smile my ass off whenever i see any of your gifs 

@rosybaejin AMAZING ASS GIFS LIKE WOWOOWOWOWOW mind fucking blown y'all AND also in general amazing blog to follow great baejin content

@sungwhoon really pretty high quality edits and gifs AND LIKE THE COLOURS ALWAYS LOOK AMAZING just so nice to look at your gifs

@woojinnies WHAT WOULD WE DO WITHOUT YOU IN THIS FANDOM genuinely believe you are a staple piece of creating gifs in this fandom YOUVE MADE SOOOO MANY AND THEY’RE ALL SOOO GOOD like you have A GIFT just thank youuuu for making your gifs 

OTHER GREAT BLOGS:

@boo-jinyoung​​​ summer you’re an amazing ass dancer like woah and totally a baejin stan even tho you deny it CONSTANTLY and you are a  complete sweetheart everyone follow for HELLA GOOD jinyoung and guanlin content 

@crystalkpop​ I LOVE YOUUU THANK YOU SO SO SO MUCH FOR BEING ONE OF MY BIGGEST SUPPORTERS AND LIKING/COMMENTING MY WORKS JUST I APPRECIATE YOU SO MUCH

@dearlydaehwi AMAZING DAEHWI CONTENT LIKE DAMN like i love seeing the smol soft bean and you DELIVER like all daehwi stand should follow you just daehwi overload in the absolute best way possible

@extraongdinary LITERALLY PROVIDES ALL THE SEONGWOO CONTENT I NEED and reblogs good ass content SO HAPPY ASF leah ily even tho we’ve never talked you just ultra great 

@fywannaone​ JUST THANK THE LORDS FOR YOU best updates such great pictures literally don’t need to follow any other blogs cause like SO FAST just constantly blessing me with wanna one content SO THANK YOU 

@ricepot-jisung​ I KNOW YOURE A WRITER BUT I HAVEN’T HAD TIME TO READ YOUR WORKS which i bet are amazing AND TBH JUST FOLLOWED YOU BECAUSE YOU REPOSTED GOOD ASS CONTENT AND SEEMED SUPER NICE AND PERSONAL POSTS WERE RELATABLE ASF (whoops wrote all that in caps) 

@soft-baejin BRI we’ve barely talked since i’m never on the gc but you’re super duper sweet and nice and also have a really nice blog and you reblog really good jinyoung content and great content in general 

@wooh00jin SUPER SWEET and adores woojin great ships and i bet you have so many flooding in when ships are open cause you put so much detail into them and GREAT WOOJIN CONTENT  

@asongofmagicandtime | @sewnho | @lai-panlin | thank you for always being nice to me on the gc and I'm sad its not as active as before but all three of you are SUCH SWEETHEARTS and have GREAT ASS CONTENT on your blogs

MY FAVOURITE MUTUALS/CLOSE FRIENDS (which have not been mentioned above or i just felt like putting you here lmao):

@danielsoftgf​ DIAN YOU WILL BE THE DEATH OF ME NO MORE SENDING GIFS OF KOOKIE TAE N WOOJIN LIKE YOU RLY WANNA KILL ME but you so so soft for daniel it’s sweet but also so easy to exploit hehehe but i can see seongwoo just around the corner ;) but genuinely love your blog it’s so so so nice and chatting with you is the best I LOVE YOUUUU

@hyuckland​ OKAY IK WE JUST STARTED TALKING TINA AND I HAVEN’T GOT THE CHANCE TO STALK YOUR BLOG YET so i can’t really properly comment on anything BUT ONE THING I CAN is that you’re an absolute sweetheart and you made me feel SO MUCH BETTER with your messages BUT IK WE’RE GONNA BECOME HELLA CLOSE 

@jaehwansspookywife LUCY LUCY LUCY you are the funniest person ever you are so nice and sweet and hilarious and conversations never get boring w you we don’t talk THAT often but when we do i always genuinely enjoy it love youuuuu ALSO OBSESSED W JAEHWAN DON’T LET HER i don’t think he’s cute FOOL YOU

@kpopsincejune07​ JEN I LOVE YOU you were one of my first fans and you’ve been a huge supporter ever since AND WE BECAME CLOSER and talk when our stupid time zones all us lol and please don’t stress about work and take care of yourself also thank you for always reposting great fics BUT IM WAITING ON YOURSSS PLEASE PLEASE POST YOUR FIC i am waiting till this day for it ily

@ongsecngwoo​ GINNY MY LOVEEEEE i always love talking with you our conversations are always good and hella fun even tho we end up replying hours/days after EH ITS TIMEZONES but also i love your blog it’s so pretty AND THE CONTENT YOU REBLOG just yes yes yes also DONT STRESS ABOUT SCHOOL TOO MUCH AND YOU BETTER TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF but also you haven’t replied to my messages in ages so i hope everything’s okay?? i just love you loads :)))

@parkkwoojin ace we don’t talk as much as before but I STILL CARE AND LOVE YOU SO SO MUCH you’re soon easy to slander but since i promised to be sweet i’m being sweet hehehe BUT GENUINELY YOU POST BOMB ASS GIFS AND ALWAYS IMPRESSED BY THEM and your gifs of woojin OOFT MY HEART DIESSSS just thank you for existing

@porkjeojang SUMMER OMG SUMMER YOU ARE SUCH A SOFT SWEETHEART WHICH I LOVE SO MUCH but you can also be one HELL OF A BITCH sometimes ya know?? also she says she’s loyal to jihoon but IVE SEEN HER EYEING DANIEL UP but she super multi talented making pixels, gifs, mood boards and writing scenarios LIKE TEACH ME YOUR SECRETS but i love you so much and without you my dashboard wouldn’t be complete

@spooky-jihoon NAIA IK WE AIN’T THAT CLOSE BUT YOU WERE ONE OF MY FIRST MUTUALS I TALKED TO sooo i put you here hope you don’t mind I MISS YOU A LOT you’re a literal angel AND PROBABLY THE MOST DEVOTED JIHOON FAN I KNOW like jihoon content right here ppl right here and ik you won’t see this after your hiatus BUT I LOVE YOUU 

@wannabl​ okay hana we haven’t talked in fucking ages cause i felt like you just didn’t really want to chat ya know? especially cause you’re so so busy w irl stuff but like i do really really miss you and i’ve actually sent a few anons saying that i do miss you and wanting to see how you’ll react never got a reply :( but genuinely in awe of how easily you make friends and that you have so many different types of works and i’m so glad you have so many people that recognise that like your anons (and i’m sorry if i was too overly jokingly bitchy) and everyone just go through her master list or just check out her blog cause genuinely such a funny person and has amazing content on there

@wanna-one MERVE you’re my sister/protecter from all things bad (like makeout scenes lmao) but even though you “hate” daniel you have your sweet ASF moments about him you basically confess you love everything about him AND SO MUCH DANIEL CONTENT ON YOUR BLUG BUT you’re always tired and stressed and i wish you were decently okay and happy but remember you’re so sweet ridiculously smart AND i still need to see a photo of you anyways i love you sooooo much and so does daniel ;)

@woojinstinygf OMG KITTY YOU ARE SUCH A SWEETHEART AND PROBABLY THE MOST DEVOTED WOOJIN FAN IK (sorry all those woojin stans out there but like kitty takes it to ANOTHER LEVEL) i always love chatting w you and you always make feel so soft and happy ANYONE WANTS WOOJIN CONTENT OR SWEET WORDS OR ANYTHING ABOUT WOOJIN OR STRAY KIDS LMAO FOLLOW N MESSAGE KITTY (not actually her irl name but she tells ppl to call her that soooo ya)

IM SORRY IF I MISSED YOU PLEASE PLEASE MESSAGE ME SO I CAN ADD YOU ONTO THE LIST 

I LOVE YOU ALL BUT AGAIN VOTE!!!! MAGU MAGUUUUUU!!!!

[imagines-for-the-fangirls-soul]

Bowling for Votes - Regina Mills

Fic #42 of the Hamilton Prompts Song: The Election of 1800 This may also be based off of the Parks & Rec episode of the same name.

“Can we get back to politics, please?” Regina asked, smiling up at you from her desk. 

“I’m just saying, if you really want to win, you might have to fight a little dirty.”

“If I want to win,” she corrected, “I’m going to have to work as hard as I can to win the people over.”

“Your opponent is a total buffoon. What have you got to worry about?” She smiled at you and then looked back at her computer. You sighed. Ever since your wife had gotten involved in politics, more importantly with the election for mayor, she had barely had time to talk to you, nonetheless do anything else.

You had complete and total faith in her, you only wished that she had complete and total faith in herself. All she could worry about was polling numbers, and what everyone was thinking about her and her opponent.

“He’s very attractive up north, they like his chances.”

“He’s not very forthcoming with any particular stances,” you said. She didn’t seem to hear you. 

“I just don’t see what they could find likable about this guy. He’s so-”

“Approachable. Like you could grab a beer with him. Maybe if you did something fun, instead of being cooped up in your elegantly decorated office, the people would see how cool and amazing and great you are for our city.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Don’t laugh.”

“What is it?” she asked, smiling at you through red lips.

“How about a bowling night?” Regina couldn’t stop herself, and she did laugh. It was nice to see her smile, and not laugh cynically for once in a long while. 

“I’m not the best bowler,” she offered.

“Even better,” you said.

“How is that better?”

“You’ll be more approachable. Nothing makes someone more human than sucking at something so simple.”

“Simple?” she asked with a laugh.

“I’m a great bowler, ask Henry.”

A few nights later, on a Wednesday night, you and Regina pulled up to the bowling alley in Storybrooke. She took a deep breath, and you leaned over to kiss her. 

“Don’t worry. You’ll do great. And if not, even better.”

You walked into the bowling alley, and immediately saw Emma and Henry. You greeted them, as you surveyed the crowd. “We have a good turn out,” you said.

“Yeah. I guess those invitations really worked.” You looked back at the door and saw Regina still standing nervously in the doorway. You rolled your eyes and fetched her, dragging her in.

“Relax, mom, you’ll be great,” Henry said with a smile. Regina relaxed a little and looked at you.

“You know what to do. Just talk to people, and listen to their complaints. Just remember that you need to be as least Evil Queen as possible.” She frowned and nodded. You gave her hand one last reassuring squeeze and sent her off. 

You, additionally, got to work. You started to network with people, promoting Regina’s platform. You grabbed a beer and looked around the room. You spotted Regina chatting with one of the seven dwarfs, smiling nervously, but genuinely. You smiled, too.

“When all is said and done,” you said, talking to Cinderella. “Regina has beliefs, her opponents have none.”

“Yeah, he’s so elitist!” she said with a laugh. You laughed, too and found Regina’s eyes across the room. The thought graced your mind of sneaking off into the bathroom with her, but knew better. You didn’t want to do anything that would ruin Regina’s chances of winning. 

After finishing up with Cinderella, you realized how hungry you are. Making your way over to the concession stand, you wondered what would be a safer bet: bowling alley hotdogs, or bowling alley nachos. However, as you were deciding, you felt Regina grasp your arm. 

“What’s wrong?” you asked.

“Charming.”

“What?”

“He just asked me to bowl with him. He and Snow seem to think I need to play bowling.”

“You don’t play- never mind. So go and bowl with them. I’m sure they’re right.”

“I don’t know how,” she whispered.

“You don’t?” you asked in disbelief. “I though you just said you were bad at it.”

“I am, because I have never tried.” You took a breath and ran your hand through your hair.

“Well it’s just Charming. Bowl with him. Even if you suck.” She looked at you uncomfortably. You knew better than anyone that your wife didn’t like loosing. At anything. 

You followed Regina and helped her pick out a midnight blue ball off of the rack. You gave her one last kiss good luck before she walked towards the lane. Charming allowed her to go first, and you watched her throw her ball, and have it immediately land in the gutter. She flushed red, but everyone watching just gave an encouraging cheer of clapping. 

She looked at you, as the ball came back, and you shot her a thumbs up. This time, when she threw the ball, it only fell into the gutter a few inches from the pins. Although nearly everyone in the bowling alley was watching, no one seemed to mind that she was so bad. 

For the entire game, Regina got progressively better. Although she only knocked down ten pins during the entire game, she was a good sport about it. And although you were maybe projecting, it seemed that everyone was proud of her, too. Once the game was over, she took a comical bow and everyone clapped for her. You hadn’t seen her smile that wide since the campaign started.

“You have the people’s vote,” you said to Regina confidently that night. She laughed and looked over at you in bed.

“I don’t know about that. I for sure have their laughs.”

“One and the same,” you said. “You showed a human side to yourself, today. Something that your opponent can only dream off. Plus, I am really proud of you.”

“Really?” she asked.

“Definitely. You’ve got my vote.”

“You weren’t so sure before?” she asked with a laugh. 

“Nope,” you said, leaning in to kiss her.