#stable interpretation for the most part

[sscardinal7]

Adding nuance in Navy and Orchid

Me and a friend had a nerd voyage about Navy and Orchid, and Paw brought up their cameo in AVA11 - Victim, in which I never previously considered—and it generally got me thinking about their relationship in compliment of the Newgrounds Tragedy. It had me contemplating about what if, rather the Newgrounds Tragedy was responsible for their substantial regression. What went wrong? I really would have never even begun to compose my thoughts if it weren't for him, so all credits!

Navy and Orchid's relationship is especially interesting to me as they were written and programmed to persist as these ideal, beautifully in love couple who attend towards their child. It's on the thumbnail of their uploaded file after all. All 3 of them in the frame! Protective and adoring arms wrapped around Purple.

Now, the timeline of this is a bit rough.

Purple in the thumbnail appears as though he's rather young. I can safely conclude that he is roughly around the same height as the first combat sequence in his presented backstory in AVM29 - Note Block Universe. The thumbnail provides some context that their story was perhaps on-going.

Navy being written as this character who gives strict but positive practices on combat towards Purple. Giving encourages. Orchid being a kind, lighthearted and comforting supporter toward this, nothing more and nothing less.

Nothing more because their creator was not given a chance to, that is.

The destruction of their file in the 2011 tragedy forced a sudden halt. An acute awareness that the couple's intervention with each other was nothing but automated; synthetic, leaving a sour taste as one would when your entire reality and purpose is completely shattered. There could be no interference towards their line of written story and code, forcing them to stick with their present (or what is known to them as the present)

No updates, no progression, no development, no further growth. Really, just nothing. Just an uncompleted story that forces the two to endure and carry on where they had been abandoned at. It's not like they have any other choice, just as the thousands of animations beside them.

As mentioned, Navy was loving, but designed with strict authority and boundaries towards training.

Navy's intentions and reasoning towards the sparring is unknown, making me beg the question; does he even know? Was his creator given the time to?

This confusion can host some hostility, oh undoubtedly.

Following with these characteristics in oppose to how he handles the aftermath of the tragedy, Navy engages in being impatient, inconsistent, irrational, eager, pestering, forceful, and downright abusive from the power imbalance in reflex to the instability of not having some designated context or rather purpose. Security.

Orchid, being the timid bystander. Providing comfort and sanctity to Purple every once in a while from a far too rough sparring. She's kind, neutral, observant, and naturally empathetic. But the entire interference leaves this bitter taste as she's nothing more than this role.

And honestly, that is heartbreaking for Orchid, and downright sad. Discomfort of aiding in your child's physical and mental development due to the dreadful profound ability of your unfair positioning does not correlate to not standing up for them at all. She has her priorities of not interfering unless certain that he is being empowered. She does not appreciate power imbalances—and this shows as she rather progresses from present comfort towards near audibility unless firm - and this is where I believe her fatal flaw comes in. Ignorance until positive.

And this shows in Purple, it shows a lot.

She does try her best, yes. She's still very loving, she still really loves Purple. She loves Navy. it's in her code after all. But her noticeable absence speaks volumes that she was attempting to distance herself.

But I find the reasoning to be much more due to Navy than Purple, if I'm being honest.

Navy and Orchid's relationship is surely strange. So in love in contrast to their narrative, then stranded to a rough prevention of their chronology. It doesn't defeat the purpose that they still, very much love each other. But the revulsion that it was nothing but a hoax will leave a agonizing dread in the atmosphere.

But after all, they have nothing else to stick to. Be optimistic with what you're left with, make best out of the worst. They can continue where their unfinished log was unfortunately Interrupted. And it goes as unwell as you would expect.

Hell, Navy's reaction towards these issues definitely encourages a hatred in Orchid and prompt towards distance. She was obviously discouraged from him and his impulses way early on, but the conflict rises when her son is the most vulnerable victim of it, and she does not like this.

Orchid and Navy are a loving bunch but two very different individuals. It wasn't too long until Orchid's comforting, soothing nature began to grow anxious and clash with Navy's raw approaches, outbursts and harsh eagerness. The worst part is that this isn't even Navy's fault.

And this shows. You would think once Navy leaves—she could rest. She could feel secure. She is loose from this lined attire that kept her glued to these strict set bounds; she's ridden of worries, and,

And this is where she proves you wrong. She is guilt-ridden, she's upset. She's left paralyzed, numb, in shock, detached. But why?—Why would she feel this way? Isn't she relieved of the split from the first ever obligated context she was programmed to be with?

Oh.

Ohh,

Ohhh, my poor girl.

And it's such a complexity of being doomed by the (unfinished) narrative. And it's rather the contrasting spectrum of it: the burning hatred of the figure you were made to love vs the boundless affection of how at the end of the day—you were still made to love them. The horrors is inescapable, no matter how much you try to run away from it.

[icanseethefuture333]

Asteroid Born (13954) 🍏🍎: “Why the apple doesn’t fall so far from the tree 🍄‍🟫”

How you were conceived + Why were you born into this lifetime 🏡♥️🥧

Aries Born / Born in the 1st House:

You are very courageous and bold when it comes to your self expression. Your parents might have considered you as a “busy body” and always had to keep you entertained as an infant. Probably one of those babies who would make funny expressions when they were mad. During pregnancy, your mother could have dealt with a lot of kicking, heartburns, and/or tummy aches. Childbirth as well may have hurt or been difficult due to you having a larger head as a baby (oops!). I see the parents being relatively active during pregnancy, perhaps your parents went to the gym or played sports still. You were born into this world to discover your unique individuality and coming to terms with your identity. Some of you must learn how to embrace all parts of yourself whether that is your physical appearance, sexuality, or personality. Were you raised to feel shame or had to hide some parts of yourself? How can you approach these factors in everyday life? Practicing self validation instead of seeking it from an outside source would be helpful. Focus on establishing a routine of self love and confidence in everyday life, this will attract the most success. Engaging in exercise activities for children such as dodgeball, double dutch, or hopscotch could help you reconnect to your inner child.

Taurus Born / Born in the 2nd house:

Ahhh the spoiled babies. You guys had it all when you were born. Very lavish and comfy childbirth. Your mothers could have gained a lot of weight and ate very yummy foods during pregnancy. Refined palettes with the exception of late snacks and cheeses (I bet these moms would ask people to have a glass of wine for them lol). Your mother could have been feeling very lazy and lethargic, very much so a couch potato. I also see them receiving compliments on how beautiful they look pregnant. I even see the dads gaining weight and getting a dad bod out of support for the mom lol. It is likely you were sensitive to touch when you were born, needing a security blanket or something soft to make you feel safe and protected. Your purpose in life is to understand that money is a wonderful tool but it cannot solve all of your problems. You have to reflect on your values and how you can provide a secure and stable home to yourself. It also important to realize what you are prioritizing in life. Do you have a follow a diet? Are you putting others before your own needs? Do you want to be successful in life but are not implementing healthy habits into your routine? Write a list of goals that you would like to accomplish and figure out methods to make these things come to life, while also keeping your mind stimulated so you won’t fall back in laziness and self sabotaging habits.

Gemini Born / Born in the 3rd House:

Yappers! These babies learned to speak at a few months old. It is likely they were very vocal as infants and could express themselves very easily. Your parents could have had a duality to themselves, which may have resulted in uneasiness or not sure which side of them you were seeing that day. I also interpret this as having parents that switched roles or don’t follow gender stereotypes (E.G: stay at home dad / working mom or having queer parents, etc). You may also have a twin! During pregnancy, your mother could have had many mood swings or experienced a lot of anxiety. I also see this as experiencing butterflies and talking a lot out of nervousness. Their conversations were engaging and interesting. Your parents could have even spoken to you while you were still in your mother’s tummy or played music for you to hear. In this lifetime, you were tasked with developing a community. Some of you are very smart but have difficulty forming connections with others or you are so comfortable speaking your mind that you don’t realize it can come off as blunt at times. Listen, we know you’re intelligent but sometimes you need to hear wisdom from other people in order grow in certain areas. If you have a sibling, you can rely on that bond with them to seek advice, they can help you understand a situation better. Since you have a dynamic personality, you can use your gift to communicate with individuals with different identities.

Cancer Born / Born in the 4th house:

The need to retreat and be at home is a prominent theme here. During pregnancy, your mother could have needed time alone or preferred to stay in the comfort of their home. Your parents could have prioritized privacy and shied away from being around new people besides family members. The childbirth was an intimate and emotional moment for your parents. Your birth could have been at home as well. Whoever was considered family was also in the room when you were born. As an infant you may have needed more physical touch and cried consistently. These babies are likely to be at the hip or maybe even slept in the same room as their parents. There is a strong attachment to your family. In this lifetime you are meant to discover your ancestral lineage and establish a strong connection with relatives. Parenthood could be significant in your life as well if you choose to have children. You are meant to act as a nurturing figure in other people's lives. If you are not close with your family, then it is likely you need to understand what family means to you. Sometimes family can be our friends, pets, or our partner, whichever you decide - there is no right or wrong way to love someone.

Leo Born / Born in the 5th house:

The star of the family. I'm seeing this placement as having social media parents or your mom going viral for pregnancy vlogs. Your birth could have been very talked about or you were adored by family for being popular or cute as a baby. Maybe some of you even did commercials or modeled when you were really young, I also see this apply to your parents. Your parents could have felt even more creative during pregnancy, like maybe your mother painted, sung, or danced more. I also see this as a surprise baby or the way you were conceived was considered a blessing. For some of you, your parents could have been trying for a baby and were so excited to finally have you. There is a lot of focus on joy and celebration. Some of you had parents who threw a gender reveal party or had a big baby shower. You were born into this world to play, I feel that this could be difficult for this placement, since the world can bring us down at times but your energy is whats needed. You need to express yourself and let go of the worries that is holding you back. Have fun, play games, be silly, and just do whatever hobbies that allows you to be be free. I also see that working with children or interacting with the children in your family will increase your happiness. Lastly, take a lighthearted approach to love, enjoy the wonders of romance without the over complications of it.

Virgo Born / Born in the 6th house:

Health was an important factor to your parents when it came to conceiving a child. Perhaps one of your parents was infertile? Or suffered from some kind of illness that made the pregnancy difficult. Your mother could have been more prone to morning sickness such as vomiting or nausea. I also see that they had a routine, they could have had to balance work while also being pregnant. Animals were significant as well. So your parents possibly turned to a pet for comfort or realized they were pregnant because of a pet. For some of you, your mother could have been the type to clean before giving birth. Something about cleaning or being tidy to feel more prepared. As a baby, you could have sneezed a lot or gotten colds. Your immune system was often compromised and this concerned your parents. You could have had your immunization shots early on. This is something your parents were not going to argue about lol. In this lifetime, you need to take care of all aspects of your health - physical, mental, and emotional health. You also need a routine, you can be disorganized at times, and require a set system to keep you on the right track. Also romanticizing the little things would help you appreciate life. You could often overlook what's right in front of you and disregard living in the moment, you have so much abundance right in front of you. Having plants or keeping a pet would help provide a safe space. Also engaging in light exercise, offering to be of service to people, and meditation will ease your anxiety.

Libra Born / Born in the 7th house:

Made with love lol. Your parents were very much so enamored with each other when you were conceived. Its giving "I know their parents high five every time they see what they made". You could have been considered a very beautiful baby or received a lot of compliments from people. Your parents as well had a nice maternity shoot. Your mother was very radiant and glowing, probably had rosy cheeks and everything. You may look to your parents for when you need an example on love and what to look for in relationships. Your parents saw each other as equals or followed traditional roles. Some of you could also have parents who work in law so they could care a lot about appearances and maintaining a good image. It is important that you learn the difference between love and superficial attraction. You are adored by many but because of that adoration it could potentially lead you to not go past a surface level. Share the parts of yourself that is most beautiful, such as your kindness, and fairness towards others. The way you treat people makes them feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Your relationship with others as well as yourself is important to your self development. Working in business or giving back to your support system could give you a new perspective.

Scorpio Born / Born in the 8th house:

This placement has an interesting aura to it. Some of these babies could be an only child or something about the way they were born was transformative. It is possible a family member died before or after you were born, there had to be a loss before you could be conceived. Your mother could have felt that childbirth was traumatic and could of put her in a state of shock, or even dealt with a near death experience. The overall experience of pregnancy was very intense for your parents. It was definite that you would be the last baby to be born because of such factors. You could have also been given an inheritance or were indebted to someone or something. It is possible that you were next in line such as an heir to a family business or lived in a home that passed down for many generations. There might have been paranormal activities when you were born or you were like those babies that would laugh randomly when nothing was there, possibly seeing spirits. Being accepting of change will make things easier in your life. It is likely that you resist transformation due to how deeply you feel your emotions, it can be triggering and exhausting. Try to have a positive outlook on the changes of your life and realize the blessings in the lessons you have experienced. Sex could be a healing factor in your life or it is a way to find pleasure in engaging with your senses.

Sagittarius Born / Born in the 9th house:

It is likely that these babies were born while their parents were traveling or they even could have been adopted. Your mother was likely traveling when she gave birth to you or had to give birth in public. For some of you, your mother was pregnant as she went to college or often went to church. Your parents were very wise and philosophical. There could have been a midwife or doula present during your birth. You may also be of a diverse background, so you may have lived in different places as infant or was exposed to different identities. I also interpret this as possibly having older parents or your parents have an old soul. You are an intelligent person. It is time for you to practice the wisdom in everyday life. You are philosophical, wise, and multi-cultured but you lack in practicing what you preach. You have to be open minded and optimistic when it comes to learning new things. Traveling, reading philosophy, praying to spirit or a deity, or having in depth conversations with people would provide clarity in your life. You need to experience spiritual refreshment in order to continue to feel peace. Study more!!! The answers you seek is in the knowledge that you already have. You are missing out on great opportunities when you choose not to use your resources.

Capricorn Born / Born in the 10th house:

You may come from a prestigious family or they are known for having a reputable reputation. Your parents could work for a well known company and have a higher position. Very business savvy individuals. Your mother could have worked despite being pregnant and had to face discrimination for it, or I see her taking a comfortable maternity leave thanks to the other parent being the financial provider. Your father could be someone who is strict or has high expectations as well. As a baby, you were self sufficient and independent. You did not require as much attentive care as other babies did. Although, this may have affected your attachment style. You could be avoidant when it comes to expressing emotions and when it comes to difficult feelings you focus on work instead. You were meant to be the boss in this lifetime. Your work ethic comes from your genetics. You have the drive and motivation that many people don’t have. It is important that you learn to follow your intuition and realize that you need to also seek what provides emotional fulfillment. You are responsible and dedicated to those around you as well as your career. Make sure to not overly sacrifice your well being for the sake of others. It is okay to take breaks and focus on your own happiness. Being more grounded with reality and your emotions is necessary for your self development and creating discipline.

Aquarius Born / Born in the 11th house:

The way these babies were conceived could be non-traditional. Your parents could have had a one night stand or had sex after only knowing each other for a weeks (or even months). Definitely an unexpected child or you were not planned. Your mother would have weird cravings or eat odd food combinations. Her personality was also deemed as quirky or her behavior seemed peculiar. Your mother also could have dressed differently or had unique maternity clothes. Your parents’ social life could have boomed after having children, making connections with family, or met new friends. Some of you could have parents who are well known on the internet. These babies have the potential of being internet stars or memes. Growing up, you may have felt ostracized and did not feel welcome in most places. Your goal in life is to learn how to rebel again the norm and embrace being unique by tapping into your individuality. Also learning how to make friends or establishing connections with others, even if it seems difficult. You were meant to have a social circle that will be there to teach you wisdom and give you guidance when needed. The longevity of these friendships is not what’s important but the lessons that comes with them. Once you are able to accept yourself and all the perks that comes with it, you will be able to reach better opportunities. Using technology as a tool could assist you with your goals.

Pisces Born / Born in the 12th house:

Childbirth could have been a spiritual experience for your mother. It is likely she already knew she would be pregnant before she even realized. Your parents are very intuitive, they even had dreams about you before you were born. When your mother was pregnant, she felt very emotional and in tune with what you were feeling. I believe these parents would go to Lamaze together or some sort of meditative exercise to make sure that the birth was at least peaceful and safe. Some of you had a water birth or were born near watery places such as the ocean, a pool, etc. A doula or midwife was likely to be present as well. As a child, you were very dreamy and creative. You are very expressive and have a great imagination. You were blessed in this lifetime with psychic abilities or great empathy. You are able to read the room and give people the safe space that they need. Your energy is very comforting and serene. I believe because of your sensitive nature it is likely for you to fall in codependent relationships. It is crucial that you learn to set boundaries and separate fantasy from reality. Take your time to get to know people before you see the “best” in them. You also need to realize you are not a victim but a person who has overcome hardships. Whatever you went through in the past does not apply to you now, you have the freedom of choice, and you get to decide who you want to be. Use your intuition and manifest your goals by connecting with your higher self. Do not allow people, especially partners to “manic pixie dream girl” you.

[tarre-was-right]

FINALE - You might want to read the propaganda this time. Lots of misinfo in fandom on these two in particular.

Remember, this is NOT about who would win in a fight. This is about who makes the best leader for Mandalore as a whole.

Explanation post

Seeding

Propaganda below the cut! You can submit more on this post and I will reblog it back to here! I was going to keep the text-only bits above the readmore, but we got enough in that it takes up more space than I thought.

Yes, I will even reblog the stuff based on fanon, but I will judge you for it.

SATINE KRYZE

Anon: Satine because she served. Mandalorian fashion week would love her. Manda'slay.

Anon: Satine Propaganda: Was supported by the STRONG MAJORITY, led Mandalore to be in peace for NEARLY 20 YEARS, didn't ban mando'a or armour or any part of the culture like fandom claims, is a good fighter, considered EVERY Mandalorian a Mandalorian and didn't discriminate

@lightsaberwieldingdalek: Satine propaganda: she actually ran a functioning government. Not a mercenary band, or a death cult, or a terrorist extremist organisation, an actual functioning government. Yes there was corruption, corruption she did her best to stop to the point of personally getting in firefights with smugglers, but she took a planet devastated by civil war and by the end of her rule she had schools, public works, and a justice system. - Sure, the rest can run military operations (and we don’t know Satine couldn’t, only that she *won’t*) but can they make the bins get emptied regularly to go to the recycling plants?

@lightsaberwieldingdalek: I understand Jaster has the tacticool appeal, and has the iconic armour, but guys. He did an interpretation of some problematic historical values for the more modern day, led a mercenary band, and under unknown circumstances his group started calling him the historical-cultural title of the ruler of their entire cultural group. I know he’s cool looking, and shoots real good, but at most he’s the equivalent of someone who could be a cult leader but doesn’t want to be. - Meanwhile. Satine. You have issues with her ethical code, and she’s not a cool cause she doesn’t wear the armour. And yet she is the one who *actually ran mandalore*. For 20-ish years, and not only kept it stable but built it up from the ruins of civil war! - Yes yes T-helmet cool and military man competence nice, but that cannot equal taking the ruins of a war torn society and turning it into a mostly peaceful (when terrorism happened it was a big shocking deal, not normalised) urbanised people who eat well, have access to luxury and specialised education (get a offworld Jedi to come lecture) and can ACTUALLY BREATH IN THE ATMOSPHERE RUINED BY ALL THE WARLORDS LIKE JASTER TRYING TO FIGHT THE REPUBLIC TO PROVE THEMSELVES.

Anon: Satine propaganda: she knows what the aftermath of war is like. Jaster knows war from a soldier's perspective, a commander's perspective. But Satine knows it from a noncombatant's perspective. She's seen the aftermath and wreckage it leaves behind. Rebuilding after a war takes far longer and likely costs more than the war itself. I don't think Jaster cares about what happens after the battle. But Satine most certainly does.

@archangelsunited: Efficient and long lasting leader of her faction for years, was able to navigate neutrality with the Republic during the Clone Wars. Excellent Hair pieces.

@publiusmaximum: She allowed her society to experience it's first moment of peace and prosperity in a thousand years. - After she was killed, her society was taken over by fascists and gangsters. In short order Mandalore was razed, made uninhabitable, and her people scattered. - Satine was right about everything.

JASTER MEREEL

Anon: Jaster is the one who should rule Mandalore and all Mandalorians, although he started small he searched to make a new code of conduct for Mandalorian bounty hunters, he tries to keep the culture intact yet keep Mandalore progressive and not stuck in the past and from killing each other.

@spacetime1969: He literally rewrote what it means to be Mandalorian, and he created an entire movement around said philosophy that had a good chance of becoming the controlling party of Mandalore if he hadn't been assassinated. What more do you want?

Anon: Jaster for the win, he's the most recent one who actually knows some shit (as much as I love Din Djarin this poor man doesn't know ANYTHING), besides Jango and Boba but they're both very unstable individuals.

@nerdpickle: Jaster, his philosophy perfectly balanced tradition and reform, keeping the best of both worlds, he was also one of the few people chosen by the people

Mereel is a strong and powerful leader. He defeated the traiter Tor Viszla in battle and even took in a poor, orphaned Concordian child after the battle. No more will Mandalore be forced to consider such petty ideals as peace in order to avoid outright war. Instead, we shall be known throughout the galaxy as the greatest mercenaries the galaxy has ever known. Under his rule, we shall triumph over the foolish savages of planets unconquered and be paid handsomely for it!

Anon: Mereel is a strong and powerful leader. He defeated the traiter Tor Viszla in battle and even took in a poor, orphaned Concordian child after the battle. No more will Mandalore be forced to consider such petty ideals as peace in order to avoid outright war. Instead, we shall be known throughout the galaxy as the greatest mercenaries the galaxy has ever known. Under his rule, we shall triumph over the foolish savages of planets unconquered and be paid handsomely for it!

@archangelsunited: Had a structured document for Mandalorian Culture in the modern (tm) day. He fought with the warriors he sent out and took personal interest in the results of his actions (Jango Fett mentorship). Pissed off Tor Vizla.

@nerdpickle: Satine’s Mandalore was like Switzerland, except without the well trained military, incredibly advantageous terrain, high gun ownership and giant nuclear armed alliance providing a free buffer zone on all sides.

SATINE

@bosooka: Originally here

i wrote way too much for my original draft of this (and it turned into a "fuck jaster mereel" party) so here's an abbreviated version

Why Satine is a Better Ruler Than Jaster in 2 Simple Points

Point #1: Satine actually maintained order on Mandalore for decades

This one is simple. Mereel became Mandalore in ~60BBY and Tor Vizsla tried to overthrow him a mere two years later (and nearly succeeded). He was only in power for six more years before he was betrayed by the very same violent people he allowed to remain by his side because of his belief that a Mandalorian warrior was "merely a highly-paid soldier".

Contrast Satine: ruled from approx. 42BBY until 19BBY, a reign of 23-odd years. For twenty-odd years of her reign New Mandalore was completely peaceful and there were no challengers to her authority among the people or elsewhere. Death Watch only became an issue again when they received Separatist (and ultimately Sith) backing, and Dooku discarded them for being useless. Had Death Watch not allied itself with Maul's Shadow Collective I don't think she would have been overthrown at all.

Point #2: Satine kept Mandalore out of places it didn't belong

As we've established, Mereel had no issues with Mandalorians being mercenaries, used however their clients saw fit. I won't go into the weeds of the ethical implications of mercenaries and why they are illegal under international law on Earth, but in short: letting anyone pay one to kill others is the easiest way to become the cudgel of a fascist. Coincidentally exactly what the Fett clones become when Sidious uses them to exterminate the Jedi. Mereel's "reforms" of the Mandalorian ways did not prevent his troops from getting into a fight they couldn't win against the Jedi on Galidraan (and yes, the Mandalorians shot first:

not that anyone in the fandom remembers this...) after they but an insurrection down on behalf of the corrupt governor of the planet. To be clear, the True Mandos knew that the governor of Galidraan was corrupt and most likely harboring Tor Vizsla, but they still agreed to kill "insurrectionists" for money. Their problems came when Death Watch arranged to make it look like they had also killed women and children. Truly a war between saints and monsters.

Meanwhile Satine: the head of the Council of Neutral Systems, she refused to take sides in a war pushed by the greedy and violent. Yes, she was briefly protected by clones when it comes to light that Death Watch is aligned with the Separatists, but it was immediately followed by the Republic attempting to militarily occupy Mandalore and Satine risking life and limb to keep her people autonomous. Satine refused to become a useful idiot for warmongers, even knowing that it would have been economically advantageous for her to do so. Unlike Jaster Mereel, she has ideals that she values more than credits. He would have accepted an offer from the highest bidder and turned Mandalore into a machine of war for the Sith, just like his Crusader ancestors once did.

Tl;Dr

Satine was actually respected as an authority on Mandalore for literal decades and was only challenged by a miniscule faction of terrorists who had to get foreigners to interfere in their political processes (FML) in order to actually take power from her

Satine kept Mandalore out of conflicts it did not belong in, which largely protected it from military occupation and destruction until the year she died; Mereel made a career out of interfering in the affairs of other planets if they were paid to do so

Unlike Mereel and his successor, Satine had morals to motivate her decisions that were not the pursuit of cold hard cash, including the protection of Mandalorian independence and neutrality

[unforth]

As I deepen my study with Chinese, the more I'm struck by how word meanings work. The monolingual USAdians I know or encounter online, who studied only as much as needed to get through school, really do seem to think languages are plug and play: know the word in both languages, and swap.

But that couldn't be further from the truth. There's on Chinese word, 稳当 (wĕn dang), that's really struck me for that. Because my flashcards give three translations for 稳当: reliable, secure, and stable. And in English these words are all fairly different! Clearly related but very much do not mean the same thing. How can one Chinese word mean these three different concepts? Well, of course, it doesn't. 稳当 means 稳当, some fusion of those three concepts we have words for in English but not quite any of them, that makes it appropriate to use in places where English would use any of those three. There are surely shades of meaning, and which interpretation of the meaning is most appropriate to a given context will be understood upon reading.

Now, expand this understanding - that a word doesn't mean (exact direct swap in English) but rather the word means the word, and we approximate it to the closest English equivalent we can - to *every single word in every single sentence in an entire book.*

Then translate that book.

Translation is an art, not a science, requiring tremendous verisimilitude in *both* languages, and an understanding of the story, and a deep familiarity with the culture (social, historical, linguistic, etc.) of the original work, and often knowledge of the authors intent (if possible to ascertain), and a range of other skills. Translation will always be interpretive and transformative, because (word in one language) doesn't precisely mean (word in another language). They're not "the same." If I present you a sentence with 稳当 in it, does it mean stable, reliable, or secure? Well that depends. On what? How it's being used, the surrounding context, other factors, and of course... the reader or translators interpretation.

It drives me insane when I see people present alternate translations as some kind of "gotcha" that one translator got things wrong. And don't get me wrong - of course some translations ARE just wrong, obviously if I translate 稳当 to mean "goldfish" I'm not interpreting I'm just incorrect. But beyond obvious mistakes, a world of nuance exists, and different translators can in good faith reach different conclusions on the most appropriate translation. This is WHY famous books not in English get translated repeatedly by different people, and why a reader would want to read multiple translations of the same work - to see, in different translations, some shadow of the wonderful nuance embodied by the original words that do not, and cannot, simply be swapped 1 to 1 for a perfect English translation. And this is *especially* true of a language like Chinese, which is ancient and beautiful and deeply steeped in understandings of Chinese history and literature.

Why do you think I and many others are studying Chinese for years? For me, it's all so I can read the actual books myself and get that much closer to the story, that much closer to my own interpretation. I'll never have the skills of a knowledgeable translator - this isn't my profession, it's my hobby - but I'll gleen things nonetheless and it's important to me to try.

Too many of yall disrespect those skills so much that you'll throw a sentence of a language you know nothing about into Google translate and then declare the translator Wrong (and sometimes Bad and Malicious) based on that.

稳当 means 稳当. It doesn't mean "reliable." It doesn't mean "the exact translation of 稳" plus "the exact translation of 当". It's a Chinese word with a Chinese definition that we retrofit English on to.

And the hardest part? Look, I'm still a Chinese novice. For all I fucking know, 稳当 actually MIGHT have three distinct definitions. Everything I said about it above might be wrong. I don't know enough Chinese yet to know for sure, and that's a level of nuance and understanding I'll only reach by reading more.

Multiply that by *every single word in both the original language and the language it's being translated into.*

That's what translation is.

Good luck.

[runningfrom2am]

Hi, how’s your day been going? Hoping it was amazing. I just saw your post about needing inspo for Coriolanus fics! I’m not sure if you are taking requests but if you are Could you maybe do a touch-starved Coryo fic? Something fluffy/angsty where Coryo can finally fulfill those needs and be himself and vulnerable with the reader. Thanks!

as long as you need me - c.s

pairing: coryo x fem!reader

wc: 1.7k

tags/warnings: fluff, hurt/comfort, he just needs you and you just want to help.

requests (currently closed- feel free to send whatever but it will be a while before I get to them!)

nav / coriolanus snow masterlist

a/n: ahhh thank you for sending this in! it was so fun to write like stopppp i just want to give him a hug omg. also thought i'd post this to hold y'all off until i post the next part of LTPF. anyway, enjoy!

You had a very stable grasp of the limits of your relationship. What was appropriate, and what was not. You were quite shy, and Coryo always carried himself with a high level of decorum. You would eat together at lunch, and he would walk you home most days. The weekends, your study dates, were always your favourite. He was significantly more relaxed, but you could still tell he was just a little tightly wound. By now, you've just learned that's who he is. Not overly affectionate, but he cares for you and you care for him. 

"I can't stay late today, I'm sorry." You said, genuinely feeling bad for having to turn down the request. In your junior year, you started tutoring for younger grades at the academy and it is something you thoroughly enjoyed.

"I have a test tomorrow! Why can't you stay? Just for a few minutes- I just have a couple of questions." The first year, Aelia whined.

"My boyfriend is supposed to walk me home and he has a tight schedule, but I'll tell you what, I can meet you in the library in the morning before class. That way it will still be fresh in your mind, yeah?" You grinned, and she seemed satisfied as you agreed on a time, not knowing that a few of the girls in your grade were listening in.

"Y/N," Clemensia decided to approach you as Aelia walked off, Arachne and Livia following close behind. "Did I catch you telling someone that you have a boyfriend? Did I hear that right?"

"Oh, well, yes." You answered sheepishly, gathering your things to put in your bag before your next class.

"Really?" Livia chimed in, and you just nodded. "Okay, well, spill. Who is it? Do I know him?"

"Um..." You looked around, deciding what to say. You weren't necessarily keeping it a secret, but you just hadn't felt the need to tell anyone you went to school with. "It's Coriolanus. Snow." You cleared your throat, unsure why you even added his last name. It's not like the name Coriolanus was abundantly common.

"Shut up." Clemensia laughed slightly, eyes widening at you. "You're joking, right?"

"No... We've been together for almost seven months now."

"I just... wow. We had no idea. Seven months! I feel like I've never seen the two of you get closer than two feet apart." You weren't sure whether to interpret this response as teasing or genuine shock- so you just gave them an awkward smile and a small nod before walking away.

At the time, you had never considered how your lack of affection in public could be confusing to people- not that it mattered. Rumors had spread quickly after that, which was to be expected when Livia and Arachne were involved. However, PDA just wasn't your thing. General displays of affection weren't really your thing, either. Both of you always had a lot going on, and having been together for almost a year by now, you knew that you loved him and he loved you. You didn't have to prove it to each other or to anyone, there was no pressure for anything to change. On your end, anyway.

Coryo, on the other hand, was feeling something shift. Leading up to the reaping and more importantly, to the prize. You both were in the running, being in the top twenty-four of your class, and you had no doubt that Coryo was a shoo-in, but you didn't know how extremely anxious it was making him. The now constant thrumming of his heartbeat in his chest and his shaky hands were always less around you, and he can only dream of how much better it would be if he could just hold you.

These days, he'd wake up expecting you in his arms due to a particularly calming dream only to be disappointed. He respected you a great amount and wouldn't want to push your boundaries, however unspoken. Still, he wasn't sure how much longer he could go about his day-to-day without testing his theory that holding you could cure his fears, or at least let him forget about them for only a moment. He would happily take just a second of peace.

Coriolanus usually greeted you outside of your unshared classes, seeing that you tended to stay a few minutes late to ask questions or polish off your notes. He couldn't wait to see you, he needed to.

"Coryo." You smile, walking out of your lecture hall to see him waiting.

"Hi, Love. How was class?" Your boyfriend greets you, joining you on your walk towards the exit of the school.

"It was good. Though, I find the topic of the rebellion kind of redundant at this point." You say, books tucked against your chest under folded arms. "Is it not too soon to discuss it in a history class? I mean, I literally remember what it was like to live in a bomb shelter."

Your joke seemingly lands on deaf ears as he just hums, placing a hand on your lower back to guide you out of the building. This wasn't totally unusual, but with the way he was pushing you, albeit gently, was telling you that something was wrong.

"Is everything okay?" You ask him, looking up at the boy next to you as you reach the bottom of the academy's front steps.

"Fine." Coryo nods, attempting a reassuring smile that he isn't aware falls short.

"Okay, well... If you want to talk about anything, I'm here for you, you know. Always."

"I know. Thank you, Love." He drops his hand from your back to hold your free one, turning in the direction of your apartment.

The next afternoon, you're in the same class, one of the rare ones you don't share with Coryo, taking down notes from the lecture when there's a knock on the door, followed by it creaking open. You pay no mind, taking the opportunity to catch up on everything written on the board.

"May I borrow Y/N, please?" Your boyfriend's voice is scratchy and shakey in a way unfamiliar sounding to you, making your head snap up. You'd never seen him cry before. "Only for a moment."

Your teacher dismisses you, likely on account of your and Coriolanus's mutually spotless records and his red-rimmed eyes. Clearly, you were needed urgently. You leave your bag and your books, ignoring the whistles and heckling of some of your classmates as you rush to the door.

Coryo had reached his breaking point. He was writing his third paper of the week, unable to focus on that and get his mind off of how unlikely it was he would get the prize if the Dean had any say. Sitting in the library, the world had started turning around him. People were talking, laughing, even, and he couldn't take it anymore. The floodgates opened and he had rushed out of the room. He couldn't go home, his attendance would be affected and he'd be throwing away the prize most definitely. He had nowhere to go, except for to you.

You close the door behind yourself, thankful that the hallway is completely deserted during class time. "Hey, what's going on?" You ask, and before you can get a good look at him he's pulling you into a crushing hug, shaking around you.

You're shocked for a moment, pulling yourself out of your head to hug him back. Whatever is bothering him must be bad. He'd hugged you before, but never like this. "Hey, it's okay..." You whisper, rubbing his back. "Let's go outside for a second, yeah? Get some air?" You offer, gently prying yourself from his grasp to look at him.

Coryo can't speak, overtaken completely by the tears flowing down his cheeks and the anxiety flooding every inch of his body. He feels like he could be sick, all he knew that he needed was you. He just nods, trying to regain his composure, if only for the couple of minutes it takes to get outside.

"Okay. Let's go." You smile, trying not to show how worried you are as you wrap an arm around his back, still holding him close to you as if he has a broken ankle and you have to carry him. So far, his theory was proving to be correct. Just having you at his side was calming to him, and mentally he's cursing himself for not voicing his fears to you before they broke him.

As soon as the door of the rarely used back exit to the school is closed, he's essentially collapsing onto the ground, tucking his knees up to his chest and crying into his hands. You're quick to join him, draping an arm over his back and trying to grab one of his hands to hold. Your brow is knit with worry, rubbing his shoulder as he allows you to take one of his shaking hands. "Coryo..." You say softly, trying to get him to look at you but he won't. "What's happening? Talk to me, you can trust me. I just want to help."

He sniffles, looking up at you. "What is it?" You ask again, hoping to prompt any kind of information out of him. When he doesn't answer, you curve your approach to yes or no questions, hopefully, to make it easier on him. "Is someone hurt? Is it Grandma'am? Did something happen?"

He shakes his head slightly with every question, once again avoiding your eyes as he looks down at the ground, occasionally trying to cough out the knot in his throat.

"...Do you want to talk? Or do you just need a hug?" You realize, leaning in so he would look at you again.

He pulls you closer, wrapping both his arms around you awkwardly due to the way you are both sitting. "Just need you here." He mumbles, hardly audible as he buries his face in your shoulder and neck.

Relieved to hear his voice again, you place a hand on his hair and on his back, holding him tight. "I'm here, Coryo. As long as you need me."

taglist: @keziahcore, @soulessjourney, @kitscutie, @annaelise, @serrendiipty, @fratboyharrysgf0201, @totallynotkaibiased, @stelleduarte, @klplynn, @secretsicanthideanymore, @bejeweledreverie, @fals3-g0d, @gloryekaterina, @andrewgarfieldsbitch, @queenofspades6, @pepperonipastas, @ladybug0095, @lunamothwrites, @sbrewer21, @mus-tbe-a-weasley, @splxtscreen, @unclecrunkle, @karmaswitch, @rororo06, @coconut-dreamz, @nekee-lilac02, @ooooglymoooogly, @slytherinholland, @riddlerloveb0t, @lovedbalances, @notyourwildestdream, @snowlandson-top, @too-lit-for-fanfic, @utopiakys, @deafeningballoonnacho, @darlingisntit, @roosterschanelslut, @chmpgneprblem, @cosmoetik, @lauravanderbooben20, @dry0campa, @luclue, @lokidala, @urvampgfsworld, @carolanns-world, 

[erinwantstowrite]

what are your thoughts abot how Damian and Tim's relationship is portrayed in most fanfics?

personally, although I like the angst part of their relationship I wish there was more fanfics where they're closer and have real siblings dynamic (like u know they 'hate' eachother but they would destroy anyone who would want to hurt their brother)

oh, boy, do i have a lot to say about this one. buckle in, folks.

i feel like a lot of the time, if they're in a fic together and the fic author doesn't like one of them, the other is going to be mischaracterized to hell and back. sometimes... both are mischaracterized.

i'm all for a fanon interpretation of a character- obviously, because i have fanon interpretations in my fic too at least a wee bit- but sometimes it goes too far and it no longer feels like we're reading about the same character

let's talk about Tim.

Tim doesn't have a good view of himself or his standing in any emotional aspect. which is often misconstrued about him believing that he was Jason's replacement (neither he nor Bruce thought this, but it was Bruce's fear), or that his worth as Robin wasn't enough. that's not true at all. i'll say it again here: Jason didn't nearly kill Tim at Titan's Tower, nor did he go there to kill Tim. and Tim fought him back. he even told Jason to his face:

"you can't be that good" "I am."

he knows he's a damn good Robin! he trained with the best, he helps lead the YJ! he doesn't doubt that he was the best person for the job. but when it comes to the emotional aspect of Robin, i think this is where Tim stutters

this is because of how Tim's parents showed their affection.

i think canon neglects that aspect of his trauma, which is why so many people hang onto it. in the comics, Tim is shown to have a lot of friends both in and out of suit. he's abrasive and isn't afraid to ask the hard questions. but he is riddled with self worth issues. his parents were barely around him, they didn't know him well at all. and they loved him, but from a distance.

Tim now sees himself as someone that can receive love from a distance. he is incredibly self reliant, and has been from a young age. he sees all of his accomplishments as obligations. he does well at school because he had to. he takes care of himself because he had to. and in his mind, taking up Robin was partly another obligation. he does his job well because he has to, and he might doubt this sometimes like anyone else, but at the end of the day he is confident in his ability to get shit done.

now, the emotional part of Batman and Robin is where i believe i enjoy a fanon interpretation more. he actually does have a good relationship with Dick, but I'm not too sure about Bruce at this point. this topic is nuanced because Batman writers make him so diabolical at times to the point that i would consider it ooc. but other times they're very close and Bruce admits this. so i replace it in my head with a more stable and realistic version that i've seen written by fic authors very well.

Tim views himself as someone who is there for a job: help Batman. but there is a lot of wonder and awe there. his favorite Robin was Dick. (I'll say this again so everyone hears me: his favorite Robin was Dick. yes you are allowed to have nuance and put Jason in there as someone he looked up to as well, please do. but put some respect on Dick's name!) now that he's working with Dick Grayson, someone he admires so much, as well as getting the honor to wear the Robin suit, he feels more like himself than he has in years. he's good at this, and it's also fun. he meets so many people and he gets to make a difference in the world. yes, it's a job, but it's also very freeing

he never did this be Bruce's son, or to replace Jason. his relationship with Bruce started off extremely rocky, with Tim forcing himself into his life in some way because he believed that Batman was going to get himself killed or get someone else killed, or Batman would cross the line. and Gotham would lose the only person who had such unwavering optimism for them. he and Bruce come to an understanding of being partners but not father and son. Bruce doesn't want to open himself up to that hurt again. but we all know Bruce, and that's not what ended up happening. Bruce would never be the same person he was before, but he is not incapable of love.

Tim would not understand that change. I'd get more into this but i don't want this post too long and i wanna save it for when i'm not supposed to be sleeping and when i'm writing one of my Tim fics for once. all we really need to know is that Tim's emotional intelligence is dogshit, and him coming to see Bruce as a father, and Bruce seeing him as a son, would baffle him. because his parents love him... at a distance. and Bruce sees him every day. that's not how it's supposed to work, right?

so.

sometimes, Tim is treated like a porcelain doll who can do no wrong. many aspects of his canon has been altered by fanon to be "worse" than it is. his neglect by his parents did, indeed, happen, and it affects him deeply. but his parents weren't like. beating him, or leaving him without food or shelter or supervision. Tim was clever enough to get around that supervision all on his own. which is why they should have been there in the first place. (they should have been there regardless). and emotional neglect is still a very real issue??? no one has to make it "worse" by making the Drakes out to be monsters. i think Jack often emotionally manipulated Tim when he was around, and I don't know if Jack was even aware that he did so. (which is why i can see some people delving into that nonexistent relationship that DC gave us, and finally giving those implications more depth. there are a lot of good fics that go over this)

often it's hard to read a fic for Tim because they go too hard into making Tim an anxious shy ball of sunshine. Tim is weird, and he stalked the Bats, he stalked Nightwing, he broke into Titan's Tower before he even became Robin. he's a weirdo. he fits right in with the Bats for that reason. some people make him out to be the victim or some kind of damsel in distress, and sometimes we get to see a phenomena where other characters talk like a book about emotional intelligence that their therapist gave them. which is... fine, if you're just writing to write it, maybe helping yourself. but let's take a step back and see Tim is not like that. he is a very capable person, and his not some "uwu, woe is me, i'm so shitty at everything and if you even look at me wrong i'll cry." i honestly believe that Tim is the type of character to hate crying in front of someone and even if he was actively dying he'd be holding back those tears.

whereas Damian? gets the opposite treatment??

granted, i don't actually know too much about Damian, but i at least try to understand him and his background

he's the youngest of them, and i think many people forget that Damian isn't a reader of the comics like we are. he wasn't going into that family with the emotional connections to these characters and their backstories like we did. he was taught about these people, the idea of them. like how we could be taught in class about people from a long time ago. and i can ensure you that Damian was not taught proper emotional intelligence, nor would he have the best grasp of it himself when he was younger than 9 years old. imagine all of your teachers and also your mother told you about these people and their accomplishments, and then told you that the person all of them look up to is your father. the person that you want nothing more than to know, to see, because the people around you talk about him so highly. someone you haven't gotten to meet yet, because you aren't "worthy." can you imagine being told all your life that you are not worthy to see your father yet? and not knowing if he believes that too?

but one day, you are going to be by his side as his son. i don't want to get too into the culture of the Al Ghul family because i don't actually know that much (i'm sure someone would know more about this, feel free to add on if you want to), but this is important to Damian. it's important to his mom. it's important to his grandfather, the leader of an extensive organization that stretches hundreds of years.

then he gets dropped off in a different country, culture, language, and family and he finds that things are not as he had been told his entire life. his father has many flaws, they do not believe the same importance of a blood tie as his family back home does. they question his entire upbringing to his face many times, they question his mother who he loves deeply. he's nine years old. imagine yourself in that position. you don't know yet what role you're playing in an adult's life, but you want to. desperately. you want to know where you stand. you want a hug. not to mention that Damian actually is a very emotional kid. he was taught to shove that deep, deep down, and not let that out.

too many people write Damian as if he was a "feral" kid which is kind of not something to put on him? i don't like it both because he wasn't feral, he was an asshole. there's a difference. and because it feels like a microaggression?? at times?? because once again... the culture that he is from... is important.

they have been racially profiled for many many years... and yes, everything that you read is political whether you want it to be or not. the act of reading is political. you should definitely be aware of what a writer's goal is when they were giving something to you. you should be reading deeper. again, i'm not from his culture and i can't say if it is an insult/insensitive joke or not, nor am i saying everyone who's made the joke before is a bad person. i have made jokes about Tim being a feral kid before and whatnot. i'm saying that no matter who you are, it is your responsibility to think critically about your media and kindly about other people. it feels uncomfortable to me because i know how wrongly the Al Ghuls (specifically Talia) have been treated by writers in the past. and Damian is an extension of that bias. just look at how many times they try to push Ian Wayne on us. or how they'll pull back on Damian's character development when talking about the Al Ghul family.

this probably isn't my topic to write about, at least not before i learn more about it. but since i get a fair amount of viewership, maybe someone will listen to me that won't listen to someone of color that has already pointed this out many times. with the comics fandom, and Batman fandom specifically sometimes, people don't care to think further about why the characters of color are so often and conveniently left out or forced into an archetype. take that as you will

so! he has spent his entire life believing he had to live up to two great legacies, both of which are VERY different. the intricacies of the Al Ghul family are often boiled down to pure evil by both fanon and canon writers, which dulls Damian's resolve and reasoning for what he had done, or makes it hard to connect to him. he has since learned more about who he wants to be and has come to respect his family in many ways. excuse me if i'm wrong, but i think part of why Damian came so hard for Tim was because Tim had everything Damian wanted. he had a place by Batman's side as both his son and his partner, and was very well respected by Batman and Nightwing both. he's older, more mature, he has stature in both this society Damian now has to fit into and within the family dynamic. considering Damian grew up in an assassin cult that solved threats to their dynamics or positions in power by murder, it wasn't a far leap for a child from that environment to make. he was modelling what he had been taught his entire life.

think about the mistakes that you made as a kid. and i don't mean something silly or funny now, i'm talking something that makes you feel ashamed. embarrassed. hurt. something that perhaps now as an adult, you reflect on as being totally uncool. and i want you to think about if maybe your environment had a role to play in that. maybe you made an insensitive joke that your mom or dad would have found funny, and someone pointed it out and reasonably made you feel like a jerk. shit happens. but you hopefully grew from that.

now imagine that mistake was you hurting someone.

yes, he was annoying. he was bratty, at times. he could be a little calculating shit. he hurt people with both his words and his weapons. Tim obviously had many many many reasons to be upset about his treatment- but I fear that most of his anger ended up directed at the older people in their lives that were supposed to be the ones to do something about it!

and though i hate that Tim went back to being Robin (it feels redundant), i have seen panels that show that the two of them working side by side after Damian and Tim both went through some life and perspective altering events both together and alone, has made Tim see Damian as his little brother, and vice versa. Damian has grown so much and many people just... don't care. no matter their reasoning for hating Damian, it's unfair to not look further than those cutting words written decades ago, or to bring up his mistakes every time you want to be mad at him. and i think it does a disservice to Tim to make him a bleeding heart about this when he has clearly forgiven Damian and cares about him. he rags on Damian like any older brother would, and Damian makes remarks like a younger brother would. personally, i think the two of them are doing pretty good right now

the development of their characters is actually so interesting within the canon aspect, even if they can fumble the ball every now and then. and the mischaracterization takes away the value that their canon relationship has. i personally love reading fics that have Damian and Tim teaming up. in aus where one thing changes and Tim and Damian become brothers later, i think it's actually so silly and fun when Damian respects Tim or thinks he's cool. or even without the au aspect! just like, a fic where the two of them are working together and it's either silly or serious, Damian having a begrudging respect for Tim and Tim being protective over Damian, etc etc, is sooooo much fun

[deliajackson]

"Perpollo is wrong on so many levels..."

List to me, please. Why is it wrong? And who are you to decide if it is wrong. I would really like to know.

I have seen a few harpies going after a friend of mine, and their argument to invalidate why she dislikes Perc*Beth is hunting her down by shipping Perpollo.

I am not going to enter in anti-perc*beth discussion. My opinion on the matter is very much open. My only comment on that matter: people have the right to have a different interpretation about something - especially in literature - than yours.

Now let's address the elephant in the room:

• First argument: "Percy is a minor"

They used the arts to say that Percy was a minor to pass @ackerlikesmen as a non-relient person... and the fact is... No. Percy isn't.

Now let me clarify, since these people are as smart as Polyphemus to the point they need to be told word by word to understand something simple.

Percy isn't a minor in the art @ackerlikesmen did. She pointed out many times she aged up the character in her art.

While in a fandom, you can make art (be it on fanart, be it on fanfic) about a character and age them up on it. It is something pretty common... In any fandom you go. Especially in the ones you make modern au, or cafeteria au when the original setting is passed in high school or school. You will see plentiful fanarts about older Anya with Damian from spyxfamily, so they can write a fic where both of them are teenagers who have a crush on each other. Most part of these stories are literally: hurt/comfort, fluff, idiots in love, t-rated. You will see many fics in BNH about any ship in which they are adult heroes to make a ship sail. Even before the end of Naruto shippuden, people wrote tons and tons of fics and fanarts of adult!Naruto, adult!Sasuke, adult!Sakura, adult!Gaara to the point when the actual canon adult characters designs appeared people got disappointed with it.

It used to be very much commun in HP fandom as well when I was in it, to age characters up to write a more mature fic, or a fic which passes in a professional environment, such as a lot of drarry as magical-police officers fanfics and fanarts out there. There are many other couples I am not going to quote here, since it is not the point.

In the end, these accusations are not done in good faith. It is made up to make an appeal to ridiculous.

I am not inventing words:

"Appeal to ridicule (also called appeal to mockery, ad absurdo, or the horse laugh) is an informal fallacy which presents an opponent's argument as absurd, ridiculous, or humorous, and therefore not worthy of serious consideration."

And to simplify your understanding:

Falacy: an idea that a lot of people think is true but is in fact false.

Ad absurdo is not sustainable in a discussion, much less in a debate. It is rather childish, in fact, to use it in such places.

Now with that said: there are tons of p*ercabeth fics and fanarts out there, way more than perpollo - or nicercy to that matter - with mature, sugestive content. As it is very easy to find their fans giggling over the stable scene, or implying the fact that Rick isnt innocent for making Percy living alone and Ann*beth having a hat that permits her to be invisible, or how you see many fans fangirling using the scene where Percy talks about "desert" with Ann*beth nearby. There are many other examples. You only need to search pjo in TikTok or Tumblr, and you will see it.

Where is your morality then, when you start fangirling and obsessing with the idea of two teenagers having sex while you are a grown adult? Where are your worries with "underage"?

Hands down. That is only a food for tought.

Eitherway: So the art you showned with "minor percy"? Debunked.

• Second argument: the age gap

Honestly, I find this argument with the immortal x mortal trope rather ridiculous. It can bother you, and it is your right to dislike it.

But in fiction an immortal is not bound by the same laws of humans, simply because they lived centuries and millenia. They are not humans, some immortals have never even been a human in some point of their lives. There is no "base IRL" to say how they would act and behave or the psychology of such beings. We never had contact with one.

They are myths and legends.

You are not going to see Lord Apollon walking down the streets of Creta, nor a vampire running around at night on London, or see fairies building something on a garden in ireland, or see kamis and yōkais in the forests of Japan. For many, these beings do not exist. (I am not going to enter in faith here.)

Every person they would have a relationship with, the age gap would still be huge. A lady, or a man, with 75 yrs old, would still be considered rather young to a being who have lived thousands and thousands of years if we take it to real world.

What it is a great time to remember: This is fiction.

And gods - and other immortal mythological beings - falling in love with humans are in every culture you can think of, and still exists in media to this day: From the terrible cringe romance between Edward and Bella from Twilight, to Jane Foster and Thor from Marvel (comics and movie).

In greek mythology?

You have Pelops and Poseidon.

Apollo and Hyacinthus

Hermes and Crocus

Many other examples to count.

If someone is writing about a divine, mythological beings in fics: It is up to the writer decide how they will write such beings in the narrative.

You may find criticism on the portrayal, but that will happen whenever you make something public.

Every fic I read of Perpollo are with adult!Percy, be it fem!Percy or not. That is for my comfort, because I am not comfortable otherwise.

In the end of the day: you have the right to dislike the trope, but not act as a pantheon of morality and condemn other people who likes it.

• Third argument: "They are cousins"

So is Ann*beth and Percy. Sorry to tell you this, but you can't decide when you use the "Gods don't have DNA in riordanverse" excuse as something valid and when it is not. You fall into a contradiction.

Point taken: it is greek mythology. I have read a few works of Sophocles (... And Jocasta and Oedipus was disturbing, ngl) and Hesiod. I can assure you, when I put my hands on any greek mythology related material, I am very much aware of my triggers, and I know how to deal with incest in these works. What most part of the PJO fandom doesn't seem to be mature enough to do.

One hypocrisy - not on you, i dont know your opinion regarding this - but I find rather funny in these discussions is how Lady Persephone and Lord Hades are put on a pedestal as the perfect couple in greek mythology by these people, when Hades literally kidnapped her. Persephone is his niece, Hades is her uncle. But I don't see many people out there condemning them for incest, abduction, and forced marriage. This is not related to the discussion. Now going back to the post...

• Argument four: "Percy hates the gods/Apollo"

Point one: That is a lie.

Point two: It is a crack ship.

Let me make it clear: Percy do not hate the gods as much as you believe he does. Actually if we take the books it is rather confusing how he feels about them. (Now. That is Rick's fault for not being consistent with characterization...) but

Percy canonically has very contradicting feelings towards his father from love to resentment. What it is fair, and realistic, with we are being honest.

Percy canonically goes to Atlantis, and canonically Amphitrite bakes him cookies.

Percy is canonically Hermes's friends.

Percy canonically cared for Bobby in the end of House of Hades.

Percy canonically respects Artemis.

Most part of the time, he seems indifferent or annoyed towards most part of the gods, with only a few exception such as Zeus and Ares. Annoyance, dislike and hatred are two very different things. Luke hated the gods. Percy does not.

Now about Percy hating Apollo: As a crack ship, the author can write anything about them. Literally. The only limit is imagination. He can make Percy start being friend of Apollon, surpassing his distrust on him. He can make Percy being indifferent of him at first. Or else. Or they can just jump and write "established relationship" so they can write a one shot fluff.

It is crack. It is supposed to be funny and relied entirely on imagination.

You wanna defend your case, use valid arguments instead of backlashing people for having a different opinion - and ship - than your own.

[bitethedevil]

The Science of Why Raphael Won’t Get Tf Out of My Head

It’s your local doctor in cambion physiology here. I’m going to take you through my theory about why Raphael is stuck in our heads. It’s all based on Science™, of course. Some of these carefully studied theories are dependent on the fact that you are the owner of a uterus. If you aren’t, then idk. I can’t help you. You’re a medical anomaly. It’ll all make sense in a moment, don’t worry about it.

There are a couple of things that I believe are necessary for prolonged focus on a specific character (Source: The Devil, Bite. 2024: Pulled it out of my ass):

Attraction: It helps if said character is hot.

Versatility: I’ll explain later.

A feeling of being able to relate to said character

Attraction

There’s this theory about how women’s attraction to men changes in accordance with their menstrual cycles (source and source). Basically the study says that when a woman is at her most fertile, she prefers more traditionally masculine looking men. However, the rest of her cycle she might prefer men who lean more towards the feminine (both in general qualities and physical attributes).

The whole point of this, is that at ones most fertile, it’s full on monkey brain genetics going “he looks strong and male, so he’ll make good offspring”, while for the rest of the time, it’s more attractive to find someone who actually has good partnership potential. Someone who is reliable and caretaking, and who would be stable in a longer relationship.

I suppose you could sum it up to one being a more romantic attraction while the other is more of a primal and carnal attraction.

Now I want you too look at this very educational graph that I used a couple of minutes to slap together:

Basically, my argument is that though Raphael is not stable or caretaking in any form, the difference between the two forms still visually fits into the two respective categories. His human form for the rest of the cycle, and his cambion form (the ascended form too if you’re freaky, I guess) that seems more traditionally masculine when fertility is highest.

That means that you can look at his dumb face throughout your whole cycle, but might feel a shift in which one you find more attractive (if all this science stuff is correct).

Even if the science behind all of this is bullshit, I still believe that different forms help when it comes to not getting tired of looking at someone.

Versatility

I’m just going to say it, even though my heart might disagree: Raphael would not have the effect he has if he was a more explored character with more screentime in canon. We would all love more Raphael, but I really think the reason for his longevity in our minds is that he is still somewhat mysterious.

Which parts are actually him and which parts are performance? What is he like behind closed doors? How much devil and how much man is he? We don’t really know. We have been given puzzle pieces, but there’s still a loooot of space free for interpretation, which is honestly what makes him great.

It’s been said before in this little corner of the internet: there are so many versions of Raphael, and the great thing is that people are never fighting over which Raphael is the “right” one. Some prefer Soft!Raphael, while others prefer Dark!Raphael. The versatility of his character’s representation allows for that, which I know at least has kept me interested for a long time when it comes to writing him.

Being able to relate

In much the same vein as above, people find different ways to relate to him. The thing on top of that is the feeling that we shouldn’t be able to relate to someone like him, which adds a certain level of taboo to it which is interesting.

He is both the smoothest mf alive and the biggest cringefail loser behind closed doors. He’s obsessive, weird, and too fucking much to be near for a longer period of time. He writes his contracts as songs because he likes ‘whimsy’. He’s got daddy issues and makes that everyone’s problem. There’s a lot to him that someone would at least be able to relate to at some level.

In conclusion

He is without a doubt the character I have hyperfixated on for the longest time, and I know it’s the same for a few others. I genuinely believe it’s because there is so much to him. If you get tired of one aspect of him, there are always other aspects of him to focus on, both physically and psychologically, instead.

And there is some variation to the attraction that I atleast can feel myself. If I have written a lot of darker stuff about him for a while, I get the urge to write something softer, and the cool thing is that you can do that and it still makes sense with the character. My preference for his forms vary often too.

Even when I tried to focus on other characters, I found myself returning to Raphael, because those other characters were often too fleshed out canon-wise. It quickly bores me because then there is a limit to what you can do with them.

There is a lot to Raphael and he’s like a glob of clay. You can mold him into whatever you like.

Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.

[winterblues]

fool’s fate is such an immensely long and wild ride, it’s no wonder reviews are like “this is some of the most gutwrenching-doomed-by-the-narrative shit you’ll ever experience.” i feel like i’ve aged like five years since i first picked up fool’s errand. i mean so much happened, like, too much happened? how does one even go back to seeing fitz and the fool as friends? friends seems like a reductive word for the sheer intensity of what they’ve been through together, for one another. i won’t make assumptions about what i think hobb’s intent was (the intent of the creator of a piece of media is rarely as important as the audience’s interpretation of it). HAVING SAID THAT, i for one think it’s very telling (for a queer narrative) that fitz has always “compartmentalised” the fool as someone separate from everyone else that’s important to him. his dearest friend and yet the extent of his relationship with him is a secret kept close to his chest throughout the books, with chade probably being the only one with even half a true inkling about their connection, almost like he’s subconsciously protecting it. he leaves all the ‘intimate details’ out when reporting to the coterie, but this isn’t the first time he’s avoided speaking of things they have expressed to one another in confidence. he’s different around the fool, and holds little back from him save for his avoidance of the depth of his own feelings. i mean, you don’t risk your own death to breathe life back into someone’s broken & bleeding & decaying body because you’re okay with the idea of them no longer being a part of your life. this is doubly tragic because the fool loves and respects fitz’s boundaries so much that he would rather withdraw than risk ‘making a mistake’, (and it’s obvious he’s trying so hard not to be selfish, trying so hard not to be heartbroken that fitz didn’t come back, especially after fitz astounds him by asking to follow him) but i am truly convinced that if the fool had chosen differently, fitz would’ve slowly started to come to terms instead of reverting to dismissal and avoidance. but he more or less acknowledges it in the parting words of his epilogue, that he traded everything he had with the fool for the life he sought with molly as a boy because ‘a horse can’t wear two saddles.’ and the most important woman in his life will go years without knowing about the depth of fitz and the fool’s friendship, but her children will play with the toys he carved for them, and a prized horse named malta will graze in their stables, and her son will wear an earring the fool had in his safekeeping for years and only parted with in order to keep a promise to a boy they both loved from forever ago. and so fitz goes from being adamant that he’d find a way to change the fool’s mind to letting him go just like that, because he finally has his life back, after so many years of deprivation. it’s only it’s own kind of tragedy that while he is content and surrounded by the people he loves, he’s still avoiding the deeper issues at the core of his being; still in many ways a tool for the throne, and giving his daughter up to the same fate. meanwhile, the fool, who was instrumental in buckkeep achieving peace and the reversal of fitz’s partial forging, is just hanging on by the bare thread of knowing that fitz is finally ‘free’ of him, and living well

[iikisa]

heres more teacher rin au!!!!

ill have some more deets under the cut about this hehe

Welcome back aoex fandom… I’ve decided for this AU to be called “Tightrope”!!!! Haha,, yeah it’s definitely not what i was saying earlier in that ask..

But yeah!!! I’ll be tagging any post related to this AU under a tag from now on! ;)

(The rest of this will contain spoilers from the manga, but then again this whole AU has been spoilers..)

Alrighty, this time we’re going over the reason for Rin’s appearance… Just as in the manga, Rin becomes “unstable” through Yukio breaking his sword, except in this tightrope au, their relationship was much more rockier than it was in the manga. So much stuff that wasn’t cleared up, lots of avoidance, not so much emotional stability.. There’s a whole background to how Yukio and Rin’s upbringing would’ve happened in this AU because of their little aged-up situation— some events are interpreted differently to fit and others are just completely new, you can assume— so obviously things happened differently between them without Yukio being the cram school’s teacher and Rin actually attending said school to begin with…

So, now that Yukio left Rin for Illuminati, leaving him completely lonely and without a proper purpose to live for in life… Rin’s demonic nature is left in a “tightrope-like” situation.

See how the title relates? And boy does it apply for many other things too.

Where is Mephisto to help with all this you ask? Oh he tried to offer Rin help by going into the past, but even after learning of his origins (I don't think it helped his self-esteem much tbh) Rin still finds himself unable to "restabilize". Like in the manga, it's not until Rin truly accepts both sides to himself is he able to truly stabilize. This AU is obviously more heavy on the twins terrible communication and relationship, so obviously this will be harder for Rin.

For as long as he can remember, Rin's always thought of himself as a nuisance to his family. And with Fujimoto's death, everything seems to be Rin's fault and he's not stupid enough as to not notice the pattern. Unfortunately, this really eats away at Rin, especially with how distant Yukio was with him. So until Rin can learn to accept the uglier parts of himself, he won't be stable. And Yukio is the most important part for him to realize that.

Now… time for the appearance explanation.

When Rin first "unstabilizes" his hair, ears, and eyes change (other smaller details like his canines as well as the newest addition of little nubs on his forehead). The more "unstable" he is, the more prominent these features become—his hair is wholly whitish-blue, his ears and canines are pointier, his eyes are sharper and more vibrant, and his little horns get bigger.

After becoming a not-so-substitute-teacher for the cram school, these features start to become smaller or fade away!!!! Depending on Rin’s emotional state—negative emotions lead to instability and positive emotions leads to stability— his appearance changes. The happier and healthier he is, the more his black roots take place (his original hair color) and the duller his other features become!

Now as for his flames.. I think some logic may be off canon for this but it’ll be fine! He can freely use his flames like he does during the final war-against-satan arc, however, his state of stability changes how precisely he can use them. The more unstable he is, the broader and rougher the attacks. When he’s more stable, his attacks can be more precise and controlled, such as shaping his flames into weapons and other uses.

Anywho, I’ll have to start on making these differences more noticeable for the Rin’s I’m drawing out, because I do like to draw him at different times of his life (if you take note of his hair,,, its one of his best indicators ahah). But yes. Now that I’ve written this concept out (after I drew these sketches whoops) I’ll be showing off a little more of the story once some heavy inspiration hits me. I hope you guys enjoy hearing about this AU as much as I love writing and drawing it!!!!! I’d love to hear feedback or any fic recommendations..! They are my fuel.

Thank you for listening to the end, much love <3

[lullabyalikpoptarot]

Masterlist 2

So, I had to make another Masterlist. I will not add every reading I have done, since my last Masterlist post, just the ones I want to highlight. Girl got no time for that. These are the newer readings I have done that I like to highlight. I focus heavily on TXT, Enhypen and BTS. I also like to do Ateez, Stray Kids and Seventeen. And venture to other groups from time to time. I am more into BG's, so I will post more of them than GG's. Groups are in alphabetical order.

I like to stress, none of my readings are fact. They are my interpretation of the cards and messages I get. My readings cover uncomfortable, sensitive, taboo and dark topics. If you are not into that I am not the reader for you. And although told my readings are more negative than others. I can't change that, It is what I get. I do not filter my readings to fit a narrative. I was pulled to post my readings for that reason to show the darker layers of the idols and industry. If you want fluff there are plenty of readers to find that. You have every right to ignore my readings. If you like to join me on this journey, welcome.

Here is a link to my old masterlist

&Team &Team's Personality Reading &Team's Group Dynamics

Aespa Aespa Ideal Partner Aespa Personality Reading Aespa Thoughts on being an idol Aespa's thoughts on being an idol Part 2

Ateez Hongjoong Perspective Reading San Perspective Reading Ateez cheating tendencies Who is currently in a relationships Ateez Thoughts on Marriage How they view KQ/Staff How they handle arguments in the group Ateez Group Dynamics Ateez (Green/Yellow &Red Flags) In relationships Who is most likely to be in a solid relationship soon Ateez Career Reading (January Update) Blackpink Blackpink Energy Reading (November) Blackpink thoughts on being an idol Jennie Perspective Reading

BTS Jin's Career Reading J-Hope's Career Reading Taehyung Career Reading RM's Career Reading Suga's Career Reading Jimin's Career Reading Jungkook's Career Reading Jungkook's Love Reading Jungkook Perspective Reading Taehyung Perspective Reading J-Hope Perspective Reading Seokjin's Perspective Reading BTS long-term vs short-term relationship preference BTS cheating tendencies BTS (Green/Yellow & Red Flags) in Relationships BTS' View on Marriage BTS Thoughts on Being an Idol Part 2

Enhypen How Possesive or Attached they are to Partners Enhypen's View on Marriage How loyal they are in relationships Will they love their future spouse Niki's Career Reading Sunghoon's Career Reading Jungwon's Career Reading Sunoo's Career Reading Jay's Career Reading Jake's Career Reading Heeseung's Career Reading Enhypen's Thoughts on Family Life Enhypen's thoughts on being an idol part 2 Who would seriously date a non-asian Sunoo Perspective Reading Niki Perspective Reading Jay Perspective Reading

(G)idle Soyeon Perspective Reading

ITZY ITZY Ideal Partner ITZY Love Energy (November)

IVE IVE Ideal Partner Wonyoung Perspective Reading IVE Personality Reading Le Sserafim Le Sserafim thoughts on being an idol New Jeans New Jeans Personality Reading New Jeans Group Dynamic Reading

Riize who would seriously date a foreigner/Non-Asian

Seventeen Minghao Perspective Reading Mingyu Perspective Reading Seventeen's Thoughts on Being an Idol Who would marry a non-asian Seventeen Career Reading (November) Seventeen's View on Marriage Cheating tendencies Seventeen Love Reading (December)

SHINee Taemin Perspective Reading

Stray Kids Stray Kids Tea Sessions Stray Kids Check In (January Update) Stray Kids cheating tendencies Who would be the most mature and stable in relationships Stray Kids Love Reading (December) Stray Kids who would be controlling/aloof in relationships How each member handles arguments in group Stray Kids View on Marriage Stray Kids (Green/Yellow and Red Flags) in Relationships How would they reveal Marriage to Public Felix Perspective Reading

Twice Who would be willing to Marry a Non-Asian

Treasure Treasure's Love Energy (December)

TXT Hueningkai's Career Reading Hueningkai's Love Reading Beomgyu's Career Reading Beomgyu's Love Reading Yeonjun's Career Reading Soobin's Career/Update Reading Yeonjun Perspective Reading Taehyun's Career Reading Hueningkai Perspective Reading How loyal would they be in a relationship TXT's thoughts on being an idol Part 2

[astrodice]

What career suites you best based on destiny matrix? (part 1/3)

To find out what career suits you best and what can you do to succeed, we have to look at the number under the dollar sign.

1 - Magician

People with magician energy are very talented, ambitious and hardworking. They are early satisfied with mediocre results and salary. They always try for more and they have all the right tools to achieve all of their goals. Negative aspect of this energy is that people might lie and use other people to get benefits or they can spend their life wasting their talents by doing nothing.

The most suitable career:

tbh, they can do anything

Challenges that affect career:

laziness, hoping that everything will be figured out by itself

detachment from colleagues, lying

using people, being selfish

2 - High Priestess

People with high priestess energy are highly intuitive and may I say slow (they need more time to come up with a plan). A career that requires making fast decisions is not suitable for those people. On the contrary, they need a job that will allow them to move at a stable measured pace and use their intuition.

The most suitable career:

healer

psychologist, therapist

artist

Challenges that affect career:

avoiding conflicts

being afraid to show off your skills

not being able to make quick decisions

3 - Empress

People with empress energy are definition of "beauty and brains". Such individuals easily identify points of contact with the interests of other people, solve all problems quickly and confidently. Also, since they feel confident around women, it's easy for them to make career in a field focused on women or women's needs.

The most suitable career:

CEO

medical worker

florist

beauty industry worker

Challenges that affect career:

pride, sense of superiority

power abuse

being overly materialistic

irrational spendings/hoarding

4 - Emperor

People with emperor energy are executive, demanding (of themselves and of others) and they quickly gain credibility and respect. Such individuals have every chance to take a high position or open their own business.

The most suitable career:

analyst

accountant

auditor

lawyer

policeman, soldier

CEO

Challenges that affect career:

being controlling, demanding

inability to find compromises

power abuse

5 - Hierophant

People with hierophant energy have high intelligence and excellent memory. They are also charismatic which makes them to be a good speakers, they just know how to make public listen.

The most suitable career:

teacher, professor, coach

analyst

historian, librarian

lawyer

marriage counsellor

medical worker

Challenges that affect career:

being demanding

unwillingness to delegate responsibilities

unwillingness to learn something new

6 - Lovers

People with lovers energy have an eye for seeing pros and cons and can skillfully transform one into the other. The have aesthetically pleasing taste, empathy and good artistic skills.

The most suitable career:

designer

interpreter

artist

psychologist, therapist

marriage counsellor

beauty industry worker

Challenges that affect career:

working in a field that you hate

being overly emotional during decision-making

people-pleasing

imposing your opinion

7 - Chariot

People chariot will succeed in any field where they will be active and hardworking. They are disciplined, good at controlling their emotions, they also have an ability to react quickly and clearly to any change in the situation.

The most suitable career:

traveller, travel-blogger

flight attendant

driver

travel agent

Challenges that affect career:

Inability to rest (workaholism)

lack of goals, incorrect goal setting (goals are too easy or impossible to achieve)

rushed decisions

[taexual]

sleepwalking ● 22 | jjk

pairing: jungkook x fem!reader

summary: due to unfortunate circumstances, you ended up managing your ex-boyfriend’s band. you thought you’ve both made peace with it, but suddenly he’s very eager to prove to you that first love never dies.

genre: rockstar!jungkook / exes to lovers

warnings: explicit language, suggestive themes, FLUFF, some angst, mentions of drugs (including descriptions of harmful use), very plot-heavy chapter, SLOW BURN

words: 18k

read from the beginning ○ masterlist

chapter 22 ► if you want an enemy, i’ll be the last one that you ever meet

Jungkook marvelled at how quickly he got used to the peace he felt with you in his hotel room. It was strong, too, this peace. Stable. It seemed to him, as you slept on the bed right by his side, that nothing could disturb the walls of his room.

Sid’s Instagram post had been nothing but a picture. Neither of you interacted with it, nor did you respond to him—although, like a true pest, he continued to message you both throughout the night.

The picture remained as it was: largely anonymous, because Sid, in his petulant haste to post it, had not tagged you. And, from the looks of it, he had not realised he hadn’t tagged you.

The people in the comments—Jungkook checked, after making sure you’d fallen asleep—tried to guess what was happening. Most of the comments, with usernames that made Jungkook chuckle, seemed to recognise him (well, a few people did, and others jumped on this bandwagon with a heedless excitement that brought another smile to his face—they were thrilled to find him in this seemingly random picture, and he was thrilled by their thrill), but no one could understand the context.

So happy for you, Sid’s caption read. But happy for what? Happy for whom?

You’ve both decided to raise this issue with the band before the concert tomorrow. There was very little you could have done this late at night anyway. All the staff had a day off, and you did not want to disturb them over a personal problem that had escalated into something bigger than you.

Jungkook was delighted by your choice to stay in his room. He interpreted your decision to wait until morning as a confirmation of your deeper desire to prolong your time together. He preferred to believe that this was the reason, rather than the circumstances, that allowed you to stay.

And since you were sleeping next to him right now, your chest rising and falling gently under the covers, it was all too easy to give in to this belief.

When Jungkook woke up a few hours later, the room was bathed in a golden glow. The sunlight filtered through a gap in the curtains that he must have overlooked last night.

You weren’t next to him.

Panic seized him almost instantly, and he realised that the peace he had felt last night with you beside him was not quite as stable as he had believed. Now you were awake, and you were not here.

He flipped on his back and pushed himself into a sitting position. He even searched under the bed in irrational desperation—as if you had decided to play hide-and-seek and give him a heart attack for breakfast. And then, as soon as he threw back the covers and scanned the room, he heard your voice—a lifeline, really, amid his suffocating thoughts.

You were still here, in the bathroom, either talking on the phone or to yourself. Honestly, that part did not really matter to him, as long as he knew you were here.

Outrageously relieved, he collapsed back onto the pillows and buried his face in his hands, a ridiculous smile spreading beneath his fingers as his heart continued to race in his chest.

He realised that he was a little out of his mind.

You were on the phone, as Jungkook would later learn, with the founder and CEO of Jett Records, Christian Jett—or simply CJ, as he insisted you call him, even though you’d only spoken to him once in your entire time at the company: right now. You figured one of the reasons he insisted on the abbreviation was that his full name could have worked incredibly well as a Christian rock band name.

If Jungkook had known who you were talking to, his panic might have resurged. Your hands were shaking, too, as you clutched your phone to your ear and took in CJ’s rapid news.

In just one breath, CJ shared his thoughts on Rated Riot’s reception in Europe and outlined his vision for the coming months. He also surprised you with some good news, and you tapped your fingers on the hotel sink, eager to tell the band.

Then, CJ, your new best friend by the sound of it, turned the subject over to you.

“Here’s what’s going to happen in the next few weeks,” he said, speaking so quickly that you barely had time to react. By the time your stomach clenched in anticipation, he had already informed you of his plans. “I’ve personally put together a team, just a couple of execs and someone from HR, to recruit support staff for you. We’re thinking two people should suffice for now.”

Your pause seemed incredibly long compared to his—which was virtually non-existent, and CJ opened his mouth to keep speaking.

“I was also thinking that—”

“I—sorry, uh,” you interjected, finally finding your words, “w-what support staff are you referring to, sir?”

“Assistant managers,” CJ replied with a chuckle. “I should’ve started with that, you’re right. You’ll have a team. Naturally, you’ll be promoted to Head of Management.”

You needed some time to process that. It was the “naturally” in particular that confused you because none of this seemed very natural.

When you woke up and saw ‘Christian Jett’ on your phone (the device even vibrated differently, almost nervously), you immediately assumed the worst: Sid had done irreparable damage to the band’s reputation by hard-launching a relationship that no one at the label knew about, and now you were going to be fired because you had not contained it.

That was the only thought you had when you took the call. But you were actually being promoted. Naturally.

Did he even know about Sid?

“That—that’s great,” you managed. You sensed CJ’s anticipation for a more effusive response and he grumbled in mild disapproval when you did not offer one. “I am very happy to hear that.”

“Yeah?” He chuckled again. He sounded like a train veering off its tracks when he laughed, which was very odd, yet somehow felt comforting. “You don’t sound much like it.”

“Oh—m-my apologies, I’m just surprised.”

“Yeah, well, you shouldn’t be,” he said. “Others are trying to scout you for their own bands—fucking Reconnaissance, of all people—so, of course, we have to promote you.”

Your fingers stilled on the cool porcelain of the sink.

He said they had to promote you: as if it was a decision forced upon them by some foreign threat, rather than your efforts and the unprecedented growth of the band.

It would have made sense to expand your team eventually—when the tour ended, for example, and everyone could see how far Rated Riot has come. But now, apparently, your career would abruptly progress just because you received an offer from another band.

“Respectfully, sir,” you said, avoiding his nickname, “may I ask how you came by that information? I was under the impression that the offer from Reconnaissance wasn’t official.”

“It’s a small industry,” CJ replied. “We consider any offer aimed at our talents official.”

He gave no further explanations. You had questions, of course, but did not know how to say What the fuck is that supposed to mean? in Corporate.

Instead, you said, “I see.”

“I’ll send one of my assistants and a couple of people from our legal team to go over the new contract with you in the next few days,” he informed you.

You wondered what time it was for him, wherever he was, because here in London, it was far too early to talk about legal teams. The magnitude of the situation made your empty stomach churn.

“Your new contract won’t be much different,” CJ continued. He sensed that the mention of lawyers had unsettled you, and his tone softened. “Bigger pay, a few extra tasks, a more defined division of labour. Your assistants will handle the routine chores, allowing you to concentrate on promoting and advancing Rated Riot. That’s the direction we’re moving in right now, and that’ll be your main priority.”

“I understand, sir,” you said, although you understood fragments.

They could have hired a marketing specialist instead of two assistants for you if they wanted to focus on the advancement of the band. Rated Riot did not even have their own publicist right now. There was one at the company, but she juggled several bands and rarely ventured beyond arranging an occasional interview for Rated Riot if someone contacted the company, and not you.

Evidently, they chose to promote you to Head Manager and Publicist instead of hiring a different person for that job.

“You’ll stay with the band and work on location,” CJ said. “That arrangement seems to bring the best results, especially regarding the band’s schedule. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yes, sir,” you replied, recognising that CJ probably had the authority to teleport you out of London immediately should you disagree with anything he said.

“Excellent,” he said. “I’d like to move forward with this while the band is still on tour, so you could train your assistants as soon as you are back. From then on, you’ll focus on effective representation and the strengthening of their brand, marketing strategies, bigger shows, more advertising—well, you know the drill.”

“Right,” you said. “Of course.”

You chose not to point out how far these new duties deviated from your original job description. You were already doing all that anyway, even if you weren’t, technically, required to. And they clearly seemed to think that your extra work came without saying—of course, you’d do everything. When have you not?

“And mostly everything else on the contract will remain as it is,” CJ finished. “The legal team will go over the rest with you. It’s the same things: compensation, conflicts of interest, obligations, bonuses, the whole bunch. You know. You’ve done it before.”

You haven’t done it before, actually. When Rated Riot hired you, the company emailed you the contract, you skimmed it, understood about half, and e-signed it without any meetings with HR, let alone the legal team.

Nevertheless, you responded obediently, “I understand. When can I expect to meet with them?”

“Let me check your schedule,” he said. You heard the faint clicking of a laptop mouse and assumed he had Rated Riot’s schedule at the ready. “Alright, you’re in London for the next few days, then almost a week in Paris. How about one of the days there? My assistant will email you later with a more specific time and date.”

“Okay, that sounds perfect,” you replied. “Thank you for taking the time to personally inform me about this, CJ. I—I’m very excited to start this new chapter with the band.”

“I’m excited as well,” CJ said, glad to finally hear your use of his name, even if you wavered while saying it. “Let’s keep this discreet, though, yeah? For now. I’ll mention the changes in management and the band’s upcoming promotions at the executive team meeting next week. Namjoon will update you on how that goes. Until then, let’s keep this within our circle.”

“I—of course, sir,” you replied. CJ allowed you a moment of thought and did not interrupt your silence this time.

You worried that his strong emphasis on discretion indicated his knowledge about something else. And even if it didn’t, you thought it would reflect badly on you later if you did not mention Sid right now, when you had the perfect opportunity for it.

“I’m—I would also like to address the recent speculation online regarding the, uh—bathtub picture,” you said, trying to choose your words without sounding like a three-year-old imitating a businessman. “I want to assure you that—”

“Oh, yeah, no—Namjoon called me earlier. He filled me in,” CJ said. “I hadn’t even seen the picture before he mentioned it. That Sid’s a weird character.”

Your heart jumped over a beat, chilling the blood in your anxious veins.

“Uh—yes,” you played along, wondering all the while where Namjoon was, and what he had done on your behalf. “He is.”

“I trust you’ll ensure no one else leaks the band’s album covers in the future, though,” CJ said. His words sounded like a demand—half a step away from a threat—but you could not recognise your reflection in the mirror all of a sudden and could not reply. “Maybe reset your systems or something.”

Namjoon had called CJ. He had deflected from your relationship with Jungkook and shielded you from what could have happened if someone discovered who the people in the picture were.

Sid leaked the album cover.

You took a fractured breath and leaned against the counter, closing your eyes for a moment.

“Yes—yes, of course,” you finally managed. “We’ll take every precaution to make sure these incidents are avoided in the future. Th-thank you, CJ.”

You could no longer tell if you were still coherent or just trying to be. CJ’s unusual pause seemed to indicate that he sensed your unease, but he chose not to comment on it. He thought you just felt uncomfortable that the album cover had leaked.

“Alright, happy to hear that,” he said. “Talk to you soon. Keep up the good work.”

He ended the call before you could voice any more platitudes about looking forward to hearing from him again. You weren’t. You were looking forward to finding Namjoon and possibly offering your soul to him to repay the debt.

Namjoon had resolved the issue that Sid had caused—the issue you considered personal, because you were keenly aware of the causal relationship between Sid’s post and your relationship with Jungkook: if you hadn’t spent so much time with him on this tour, if you’d kept your professional distance, if you’d closed the damn door in that hotel bathroom, there wouldn’t have been any picture at all.

However, there was more for you to fix. Namjoon had helped you now, but Sid was still at large, wild and unpredictable.

And as you glanced at your phone, you also remembered something else that CJ had said about your contract: conflicts of interest.

In your initial contract, you had declared none, despite already knowing that Jungkook was in the band. You hoped you could carry on quietly enough—as though you had never met him, really—and no one would mind. That more or less worked out, up until this point.

Now you wondered if you could still claim no conflicts of interest without any consequences. Was that what your relationship with Jungkook was, in the eyes of the company?

You took a deep breath and decided to ponder this elsewhere because the bathroom was getting stuffy and the clothes you’d worn for a comfortable film night suddenly felt suffocating against your skin.

Stepping out of the bathroom on the tips of your toes so as not to wake Jungkook, you turned the corner and locked eyes with him right away.

“Hi,” he murmured, the edges of his morning voice hoarse and groggy as he watched you from the mess of sheets on the bed.

Despite hoping to find him still asleep so you could slip back into bed and have the morning together that had been stolen from you, you didn’t feel disappointed that he was awake. He had a lazy smile on his lips. His hair was dishevelled and he kept bringing his hand through it.

There was a glow over your face as you approached the bed. “Hi.”

“I thought you’d left,” he said, his eyes following your every movement as you settled back next to him.

“Do you want me to?” you asked, tilting your head to the side, closer to him. He wasn’t sure if you were even aware you did that, it seemed subconscious, but it prompted his hands to reach for you.

He touched your cheek, running his fingers over your jaw before leaning in to press his lips to yours—quickly, just to remind himself that he could. And to steal just one breath from you.

“No,” he said then. “Never.”

He saw your eyes soften and your smile grow. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He traced his thumb over your lower lip before pulling away to sit up on the bed. “Who, um—who was that on the phone?”

The question was expected, but you didn’t have an answer for him personally—you’d planned to explain everything to all of Rated Riot later today.

“Uh,” you leaned against the headboard of the bed, “the label.”

“Yeah?” he encouraged.

“The CEO, actually,” you added briefly. “But I should probably discuss this with the whole band.”

Startled, Jungkook gripped the sheets in his hand. He was worried—rather obviously—that this was about Sid or still about Reconnaissance, and he couldn’t decide which he dreaded more. He was absurdly quick to convince himself that the CEO had told you something so serious that you didn’t even see the point of talking to him about it.

“Did something happen?” he asked, feeling the tips of his fingers grow numb.

You recognised the concern on his face with half of a glance. “Yeah, but it’s something good.”

Relief, excitement, and curiosity replaced the previous anxiety in his eyes at an impressive speed.

He shifted on the bed with a newfound energy, crossing and uncrossing his legs. “Well, tell me!”

“We’ll have a meeting—”

“That’s fair,” he said, moving closer. “But tell me now.”

You were too excited to dwell on the fact that this was the precise conflict of interest that had unsettled your mind earlier—this perception of favouritism, this special treatment that others might assume Jungkook received because he was in a relationship with his manager.

“You’re doing festivals next summer,” you said, pausing for emphasis, “and they’re extending your tour. We’ll be going back to at least five countries in Europe for encore shows.”

You still had to confirm the dates with the venues and perform several additional bureaucratic tasks so your team could stay in Europe longer, but all of that seemed irrelevant in light of this news.

“Ah,” Jungkook replied—happy, but not nearly as exuberant as you’d hoped. “That’s cool.”

You realised quickly that he must have misunderstood.

“No, Jungkook,” you said. “In arenas this time—with a capacity at least three times larger than we have right now.”

Instantly, his eyes ignited with the flames you’d looked forward to before.

“Oh,” he said and now the tingle of adventure was finally there, glistening fervently in his burning eyes.

But he looked at you again, and he thought there was something you hadn’t told him yet. It was the way your lips curled—smiling, but not quite.

“But you look—was there something else you talked about?” he asked.

You were surprised. You had hoped—naively, you now realised—that you could continue to talk about the promising parts of all that CJ had told you, leaving the more questionable parts to wait until the rest of your thoughts had cleared.

“They’re, uh, holding interviews for assistant managers and promoting me to Head Manager,” you said. Jungkook raised his eyebrows, but you continued before he could interject, “they’ll send people to Paris for me to sign the new contract.”

“To—oh, shit. Fuck.” His shock turned to laughter. Just moments ago, he was worried you’d have to leave the band. Now you were signing a new contract to stay. “Oh, but does that—does that mean we will see less of you? Is that why you—why you don’t seem very happy about that?”

“No, it’s—I am happy,” you said. “I’ll stay on-site with you guys. But the focus is—they’re saying we’re focusing more on promoting you and ‘strengthening your brand.’ That was cool, by the way. Your brand. I liked that part. But, uh—that will be my main priority, apparently. I guess I’m not really sure how that’s going to go.”

That wasn’t the only reason for your apprehension, but you did not want to mention Reconnaissance and the unexpected impact that Nick’s offer had on your sudden promotion. You preferred to see Jungkook smiling at you from across the bed—even more so when he was smiling right next to you.

“Well, what will you have to do?” he asked. “I mean, exactly?”

“I guess I will be making phone calls the whole day,” you replied, hoping secretly that this would not turn out to be all you’d have to do. “It also means that none of us will be going home longer than it takes for you to record a new album.”

“Oh.” Jungkook attempted to control his facial expression. For him, this arrangement—album, tour, album, tour—sounded almost ideal. “Well, that’s honestly fine by me.”

You knew he would not mind. But you minded. You had not said anything about your own workload to CJ, but you were prepared to use any threats necessary to ensure that Rated Riot had enough time to breathe.

“You say that now,” you pointed out, “but it will eventually get tough, being away from home for so long.”

“I have you,” Jungkook said. “I am home.”

He said that like it was the most obvious statement in the world—the grass is green, the sky is blue—but subtle magic was laced in every letter of every word. When he closed his eyes, when he couldn’t see the unfamiliar surroundings of the hotel room, his senses recognised the warmth of your presence as home.

Unfortunately, the darkness in his thoughts was unforgiving, and he had to ask you something else—but then he lost his resolve momentarily when he met your soft gaze and realised that you’d placed your hand on his.

“I, uh—” he tried, but several more moments had to pass before he sobered, “he—did he say anything about Sid?”

You exhaled. “Yeah.”

Jungkook nodded contemplatively and took a breath, bracing himself. Although it was difficult to imagine what the label could have said about Sid, considering the abundance of good news, he knew better than to expect something positive.

Another book his grandmother had read with him when he was young suddenly returned to his mind, the dark cover with thick red lettering vivid in his memory: Something wicked this way comes.

The book had been sinister, completely unfitting for a child of his age at the time. Just like Sid.

“What was it?” Jungkook asked.

“That picture he posted,” you said, “is apparently the cover of your upcoming album.”

“It—oh.” He looked away, puzzled, suddenly, by the shade of the wallpaper behind the bedframe and the questionable events that had led the label to that conclusion. He tried to say more and managed a very successful, “ah.”

You lowered your head, tugging on the edge of the duvet. “Namjoon, uh—he took care of it before I got the call from CJ, so I don’t know much about what he said to him.”

Jungkook was not sure if he should have been relieved that Sid’s damage had been neutralised seemingly so effortlessly. He could never know with Sid; his refusal to give up rivalled only Voldemort’s immortality. Only Sid’s horcruxes were, apparently, pictures and videos he used to manipulate others.

“It’s a good photo for an album cover,” Jungkook finally said.

“It—it is,” you agreed. “And it’s also—well, you know. A good explanation.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll inform the label about us before I sign the new contract, though,” you decided. “I’ll talk to them. I thought maybe this could wait, but they’re sending over lawyers, so it’s—”

Jungkook’s breath got lodged in his throat and he had to cough several times to clear his airways, interrupting you.

“H-hold on,” he said. “You need lawyers present when you tell them we’re together?”

“They’re coming for the contract,” you explained. “And I’ll have to talk to them before I sign it because I figure you might be my conflict of interest.”

A sudden surge of very different emotions made Jungkook purse his lips. He found himself wondering if there was any term starting with “my” you could have used to describe him that he wouldn’t have liked. My boyfriend. My source of headaches. My biggest nuisance. Ultimately, all of that still meant that he was yours.

Reasonably, however, he did not like the sound of this.

“Huh,” he mused. “Doesn’t work as a pet name. Call me something else.”

“Yeah.” You chuckled. “I don’t like that one, either.”

You did not look particularly troubled. Everything was going to be fine, you were sure of it. You just weren’t sure how soon, and what this “fine” would look like.

“Come here,” Jungkook said before you could begin thinking about the possibilities and the risks.

You moved closer, happy to relish in the warmth of the room for a few more minutes as he wrapped his arms around you.

This was the morning you were looking forward to. Everything else could wait.

The second you stepped out of Jungkook’s hotel room and headed towards yours to pack for the day, Maggie startled you by calling out your name in the otherwise empty, echoing corridor. She appeared a little worried when you turned around, and that was so unbecoming on her normally laid-back face that you took an instinctive step back.

“Is—are you okay?” you asked.

She seemed surprised to see your surprise.

“I slept the whole day,” she explained. She was carrying something in her hands, but she kept it behind her back. “Feels like I was out for a week, actually.”

You smiled. That was hardly anything new.

You remembered the fright of your life that Maggie had given you the first time the two of you went out together. She had an alcohol tolerance that should have been outlawed, so she always drank more than Jungkook could ever handle (though he would argue otherwise, of course). By the time you got her back to your apartment that night, she was already barely conscious.

She had collapsed on your bed and when you brought her a glass of water about three minutes later, she was already snoring. And she’d slept—you counted—for twenty-two hours and thirty-three minutes. You had spent the last eight hours keeping watch over her, periodically checking if she was breathing, with your finger hovering over the emergency number on your phone.

To your amazement, she woke up the next morning without so much as a hint of a headache, perplexed by the concerned look on your face. She looked a bit like that now.

“Yeah,” you replied, a little jealous of her dangerous, but seemingly foolproof ability to avoid hangovers. “Maybe we should have stopped before the tequila shots.”

“Hmm.” She scratched her forehead. It was hard to tell what she was feeling; hesitation flickered in her eyes when she looked at you. “Was, uh—was Jungkook in my room yesterday?”

“He—oh, yeah,” you recalled. “I asked him to check on you.”

“Oh.” Relief washed over her face, adding some vibrancy to her cloudy features. “Okay. So I didn’t hallucinate that.”

You smiled again. “No.”

“I took your jacket,” she said, revealing the item she’d been clutching in her hands. “I don’t remember doing that.”

She seemed to remember even less from last night than you did, which was not uncommon for Maggie. She had a terrible memory in general—she took notes and then forgot she took notes—but this time, you could not help her remember, either.

“Thanks,” you said, taking your jacket from her. It still smelled faintly of your perfume and too much liquor. “Jungkook told me you had it. I still have one of your shoes.”

“Yeah, I—I have yours somewhere, too,” she said. “I assume you have my phone, too, then?”

You looked up. “Why would I have your phone?”

“Hm?” she asked as her heart began to pump blood a tad more effectively than necessary; you hadn’t even properly answered her yet. “But—you—didn’t you put it in your bag last night?”

You stilled and the surprise inside your stomach grew large, floating inside you as if it were a heavy, helium and anxiety-filled balloon.

“I… I had my bag with me?” you asked very slowly, but Maggie still did not understand the essence of your question. She looked around as though she’d just realised she was accidentally having this conversation in a language she did not speak, and she needed someone to translate it for her.

You were baffled. You knew you’d left your phone in your room before you went out with the girls, it was entangled in the sheets when you woke up the next morning. But you couldn’t remember whatever happened with your handbag; you had assumed it remained in your room as well.

“I’m pretty sure you had it with you,” Maggie said. Your heartbeat sped up, matching the frantic rhythm in your friend’s chest. “You took our orders on my phone because you didn’t have yours. And I assumed you put it in your bag after that.”

You turned around, frightened goosebumps rising on the back of your spine as your trembling fingers fumbled with the lock on your door.

“Jungkook said I didn’t have my bag with me when I got back,” you said as you entered the room, your gaze sweeping the space with an ever-mounting sense of panic. “I assumed—I thought I just didn’t take it with me. Nothing was missing. I had my keys in my jacket—I took them out at some point, before the jacket ended up with you—a-and my phone was here.”

You attacked the room, lifting suitcases and inspecting empty closets. Since you hadn’t fully unpacked, there were not a lot of places where your handbag could have been. Maggie tried to help you by holding up furniture for you to check underneath—just in case, she’d said—but it became increasingly clear, with every nook and cranny you searched, that the bag was simply not here.

“Okay, shit,” Maggie finally concluded as the two of you knelt side by side on the floor, the room in disarray around you.

Among the useless clutter, you found a lot of dust, someone’s phone charger, and a forgotten USB flash drive under your nightstand.

“Wait, so—wait, wait.” You stood up, stumbling slightly as your knees cracked. “So, you don’t have your phone?”

The question was redundant, but Maggie didn’t mind repeating herself. She was just as confused as you were. And the handbag was the least of your problems: you did not carry a lot of cash with you when you travelled, so if you didn’t find the bag, all that you’d lose would be a travel-sized container of hand sanitiser, an old tube of lipgloss, and a package of tissues. It was Maggie’s phone that you were worried about—you couldn’t even remember putting it in your bag.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. Her eyes seemed even wider than they had in the corridor. Her hair fell in chaotic curls over her face. “I couldn’t find it anywhere. I tried Find My iPhone today, but it didn’t show anything. Maybe the phone’s dead? I don’t know. I didn’t check right after we returned to the hotel, because I was sleeping. And then, this morning, I thought, well, of course the app won’t tell me where my phone is. Because you have it, and you’re right next door.”

You clenched your jaw. “Okay. Okay, I-I must have left my bag at the club. Or someone took it. We have to call them.”

“Call them?” Maggie repeated, standing up, too. She glanced around your room once more to make sure your bag had not decided to grow feet and return on its own. “What will we say?”

You did not mind the pointlessness of her question, either. Evidently, now was the precise time for stupid questions.

“That I lost it. I don’t know,” you said. “Let’s just see. Maybe I left it there.” But you hesitated as soon as you pulled your phone out. “Shit. Do you remember what the place was called?”

“Oh, yeah, I have the directions open on my pho—” She stopped tapping the pockets of her jeans, realising. “Oh, shit.”

“Fuck.”

It took you less than a second to find the solution to your new problem.

Luna and Taehyung’s room was just down the corridor, and Luna opened the door as soon as you knocked, almost as if she had been waiting for you to require her immediate assistance in this crisis.  

She could not remember many details of how the three of you got home, but she readily supplied the name of the club. Then she joined you and Maggie in your room, where your friends tried to reconstruct the events of the previous night and you dialled the number of the club, your shaky hands and frazzled mind leading you to hit all the wrong keys on your phone.

Finally, the call connected, and a cheerful, young voice introduced himself as, simply, Tom, barkeeper—although your frantic mind interpreted that as Tom Barkeeper initially, which, honestly, seemed like a fitting government name for someone tending the bar.

“Hi!” you said, your nervous voice nearing a screech. Luna and Maggie stopped talking and turned to you. “My friends and I were at your club on Wednesday night, and I seem to have misplaced my handbag. Is there any chance I left it there?”

“Let me check, miss,” Tom Barkeeper replied. You heard the faint sound of his footsteps in the background. “Could you describe it for me?”

“It—well, it was black,” you said, your palm pressed against your forehead. “With a large grey metal zipper, and sort of a—a little chain on the—”

“Er, actually, no, we’ve got no handbags at the Lost and Found,” he interrupted. “Got five watches, though.”

He chuckled lightly, and you looked up at your friends. There was a frown on your face that they immediately took to mean danger, and moved closer, settling on either side of you to listen.

“Uh, right,” you said distractedly, putting the call on speaker. “Are there any phones, by chance? There was a phone in my bag.”

“We had a couple of phones left here, but both have been picked up by their owners,” Tom B. replied. “Sorry.”

You turned to your friends, silently asking them what to do next.

“Perhaps you left your bag somewhere else?” the barkeeper suggested over the phone. “A taxi?”

Maggie, who remembered glimpses of your taxi ride, shook her head.

“Hmm. Or it was stolen,” you speculated.

Tom Barkeeper seemed surprised by this and he stuttered for a second—he had a thick accent, and even his, “well, er—I’d—uhm—” sounded really quite elegant—until he finally composed himself.

“Well, it—it does get rather busy here,” he admitted, and his voice sounded even younger all of a sudden. “I—er, was it very valuable? You could try filing a report, then we’d get our security here and rewind the CCTV footage.”

You glanced at Maggie. She shook her head again. She doubted they could find her phone in time if it really was stolen; you’d be leaving for Paris soon. She was embarrassed, too. There was nothing she could tell the police if you filed a report.

When have you last seen your phone, miss?

I have no idea, officer. I was shitfaced the whole night.

“I think we—no, that, um—we’ll try to see if there are any other places where it could be first,” you told Tom, trying to come up with a logical plan on the spot. “And then I’ll—”

“Yeah,” the barkeeper cut in, sounding relieved. “You check and call us back if you haven’t found it.”

“Yes. Thank you. Sorry to bother you.”

“That’s alright, miss,” he said. “Hope you find it.”

You ended the call with a disheartened sigh and turned to your friends.

“Well, they don’t have it,” you declared, as if they hadn’t heard everything.

“That’s great,” Luna observed. She glanced around the chaos inside your room. “And it’s definitely not here?”

“You can go ahead and look,” you said, stepping back to gesture at the piles of clothes. “I don’t know where else it could be.”

“Okay, well, Maggie and I both remember you having it with you on our way to the club,” she said. She tapped her chin and, because she had her glasses on and wore a sweater with a long white dress shirt underneath, she looked a bit like a heroine from an old Agatha Christie novel. “I remember the pins on my dress getting caught on the chain on your bag in the taxi.”

“That’s right,” you said, pointing at her, although you weren’t sure if you remembered the moment under discussion, or just the way the three of you had laughed about it later that night.

“So maybe you left it there before we even got to the club?” Luna suggested.

“No, but she still had it with her in the club!” Maggie interjected, frustrated. Her hair kept growing wilder the longer she stayed here, tousling it nervously every few seconds. “When she took our drink orders! My phone and her bag were both there.”

You and Luna both groaned, realising Maggie had already mentioned this. You were aware that the three of you had turned into a mess after just one night of drinking. Perhaps the next time you went out, you should consider bringing a chaperone, because this right now felt a lot like the blind leading the blind.

“Right,” Luna mumbled. “Sorry.”

“It’s starting to seem,” you said, “that either I left it in the taxi at the end of the night, or someone grabbed it at the club.”

Maggie nodded, agreeing with these options, even if she did not know what to do with them. You didn’t, either. Was there a Lost and Found for items accidentally abandoned in taxis? Should you have filed a report with the police, after all? Surely, they dealt with drunk people losing their belongings all the time. And maybe they could search for the phone even if you were across the strait.

Then you noticed that Luna was biting her lip, seemingly lost in a recurring thought.

“What are you thinking?” you prodded. She did not react. “Luna?”

She looked up from the floor, surprised to be addressed.

“Nothing,” she said, hesitating. “It’s sort of a conspiracy theory more than it is based on actual facts. But, um, you did mention seeing Sid and Jude at the club.”

You watched Maggie pull on her hair so hard that a few strands stayed in her grasp when she let go. Neither of you liked how plausible Luna’s not-fact-based theory was.

“You think they took my bag,” you surmised. “But why?”

“I don’t know,” Luna replied. “Why does Sid do anything?”

Your frown deepened. She had a disturbingly solid point. Sid was diabolical.

“That’s…” you faltered, thinking. “Well, he could have—although I didn’t even have anything in my bag except for Maggie’s—oh. Shit.”

Your sudden realisation—and the subsequent horror flashing across your face—surprised both girls. Maggie stepped closer to you.

“What is it?” she asked.

You pulled out your phone and opened Instagram.

“Sid posted a—he posted the picture,” you explained, scrolling down your feed, then abandoning this decision and going directly to Sid’s profile. “The one Maggie showed us at the club.”

You found the post and turned your phone towards the girls. The expressions on their faces made it very clear that Luna’s hypothesis was not far-fetched at all. Maggie looked delightfully murderous.

“Jungkook thinks Sid got it from his phone,” you said, “but what if—wh-what—”

“My phone was in your bag. He could have downloaded it from my gallery,” Maggie concluded, staring at the screen.

She wasn’t just angry about her stolen phone or the filter Sid had put over a perfectly good picture. She was also angry about him using a photograph that she was proud of to stir up trouble.

“That fucking loser,” she said. “That massive fucking piece of shit. Fucking good-for-nothing rat. Motherf—”

“Yeah, Mags,” you interjected, knowing she might not stop for a while. Last week, she had kept mumbling curses under her breath for forty minutes straight after Jimin ate the last pack of tomato ketchup crisps that she’d brought with her on tour. “We agree with you.”

Luna continued to bite her lip until it took upon an angry shade of red. She did not want to be responsible if she’d just led you in the wrong direction. Maggie already seemed prepared to crush your phone in her hand as she stared at Sid’s post.

Luna tried to reason, “we don’t know if that’s really what happened, though.”

“No, but it makes sense. You have to be right,” you insisted, glancing at the clock above the door. “Fuck. I—I have to—I have to get the band together before their soundcheck, but after that, I’m—I’ll talk to Minjun.” You brought your hand through your hair, angrier at yourself than you were at Sid right now. “We should have left the club right after I talked to Jude. It was a shitty call to stay there. But we’ll find your phone, Mags. And if Sid was really the one who took it, he’s—well, he’s not going to be taking shit from anyone anymore.”

Some of the tension in Maggie’s posture eased at your words.

“Well, we couldn’t have known they’d do something like that when we decided to stay,” Luna said, her voice comforting. “If they indeed—”

“Alright,” Maggie interrupted, taking a deep breath and returning your phone to you. “Let’s kill him.”

The room fell silent. You did not know if Maggie was aware of the undeniable resolve in her voice. She’d said that like she would have said, “let’s get lunch,” while already holding boxes of take-out in her hands.

“Or, you know,” she added in response to your and Luna’s expressions, “let’s beat him up. That’ll work, too.”

You glanced at Luna and the smile spreading on her face made you lose your calm, too.

“We’ll do that,” you promised Maggie, grinning as you wrapped an arm around her shoulders and leaned your head against hers. “If we can’t come up with anything better.”

“Hell yeah,” Luna agreed, joining you on Maggie’s other side. “He’s got a few teeth left, right? We can start counting who knocks out more. Jungkook is in the lead right now, but I don’t like losing, so—”

You and Maggie burst into laughter so loud and sudden that Luna flinched in surprise. Maggie even had to clutch your arm for support as she bent over, struggling to breathe in between wheezes. Her laughter was so infectious that Luna couldn’t keep a straight face much longer, either.

You were convinced that you would fix everything.

You’d find Minjun and ask if he had talked to Sid or Jude since Wednesday. If not, you’d get to the two of them yourself. Maggie would take care of them if they had your bag. And if, by some lucky chance, they would turn out to be innocent, you’d go to the police to find the real culprit.

You gathered the band—and Namjoon, of course—in the changing room of the venue before the soundcheck. Mindful of your limited time, you started by sharing the updates from CJ – the festivals next summer, the arena tour, and finally, the strategic shift that Jett Records was planning for Rated Riot, including your promotion and the expansion of the management team.

Once the cheers and the high-fives died down, you asked the boys to settle down for one last thing.

“The opening act,” you said, scrolling to the very bottom of the meeting agenda you’d prepared on your Notes. “Ren is still recovering from his broken foot, so we—”

“Because Ren is a whiny baby,” Jungkook chimed in helpfully. He was leaning against the wall instead of sitting around the table like the rest of his bandmates.

You gave him a look that was not particularly grateful but lacked any real threat. He grinned.

“So, Poison Tongue might be out for the rest of the tour,” you went on. “We’re talking to several other bands that might join you instead. Ivy will continue to support you on the upcoming shows in London and Paris.”

The band members nodded. They’d grown accustomed to Ivy’s presence—she used to be a tattoo artist and brought her equipment with her when she travelled, which everyone on tour appreciated. You and your girls personally found it wonderful to have another girl around.

“Alright. That was the last thing on my list, but it—there’s something else we have to discuss,” you paused, glancing around the room to keep your voice steady. Jungkook gave you a firm nod of support from the back of the room, no longer fooling around. “Uh, there was a picture posted last night. I’m sure you’ve all seen it. Namjoon took care of it; he informed the label that it’s the leaked cover of your upcoming album. But I want to emphasise that it doesn’t have to be the cover of anything. We can say it was one of the options, but we settled on something—”

“I like it,” Taehyung interjected. “The picture, I mean. I think we could use it as the cover for our next single, at least. It fits, right?”

“It does,” Yoongi agreed. You felt a tingle of unease creeping down your spine. “The lyrics match the picture very well.”

That was understandable, given the subject matter of the lyrics, but you were grateful that Yoongi did not elaborate further. You felt Jungkook watching you from across the room and your skin was burning.

“And it fits in with the rest of our album covers, too,” Hoseok joined, solidifying the consensus.

The decision had already been made, so Jungkook only shrugged when your eyes slid over to him.

“I say we use it,” he said. “It’s a great shot.”

For the first time since you joined Rated Riot, you genuinely worried that you might not keep your composure.

Every person in this room—and many people in the corridors, working on Rated Riot’s show—knew that you and Jungkook were the people in the photograph, and they all agreed to help you hide your relationship in plain sight. Aching discomfort and heartfelt gratitude fought a fierce battle inside your chest.

“Well, then, alright,” you said, your voice quivering slightly on the last syllable. You fixed your gaze on the white table. “That’s, uh, settled, then. Thank you, Namjoon, by the way. That was great quick thinking on your part.”

“No problem,” Namjoon replied. Hoseok leaned back in his chair to pat him on the shoulder and Namjoon gave him a smile before explaining, “I didn’t mean to jump the gun, but—”

“No, no,” you cut him off. “You did great. It’s—well, it’s good PR, claiming he just leaked the cover art. Thank you.”

He shrugged. “Maggie’s the one who took a great picture.”

Hums of agreement filled the room, and you nodded, too. Maggie had always been a field photographer. She felt claustrophobic in a closed photo studio, she needed the space, the action, the emotion. And she knew how to capture it all. It was a great picture. It was a shame what Sid was trying to do with it.

“She did, yeah,” you said before noticing the time on your phone. “But, uh, anyway, that—that was all. Any quick questions?”

No one spoke, and the momentary silence in the room felt a little disconcerting. These were the loudest people you’ve ever met, so you did not enjoy feeling like a teacher, asking for volunteers to solve an excruciating equation. Actually, you did not enjoy standing here at all right now; pins and needles chased each other all across your body.

“In that case,” you locked your phone and set it down on the table, “go out, and get ready for the night. It’s going to be a good one.”

Someone cried out, “fuck yes!”—it was hard to determine who, due to the immediate shouts of agreement that followed—and the boys tumbled out of the room, making as much noise as they could. Right away you felt a little better. Everyone had already been excited about the concert tonight, but the news about the extended tour and bigger venues only amplified their emotions.

You ended up watching each of the boys leap over the threshold of the door for no reason whatsoever, just to see who could jump the farthest—until Jungkook smacked his head right into the top of the door frame.

Pouting, he walked over to you after everyone else had finished laughing and left. You fixed his hair, trying to bite back your laughter, and he pulled you into a hug, groaning in disapproval when he felt you chuckle softly against his chest.

“Is your head okay?” you asked, the humour in your tone undeniable, despite your attempts to suppress it.

“No,” he said, tightening his grip on your waist until he heard your quiet gasp. “Oh, now it’s a little better.”

“Oh, it’s better,” you retorted, evidently taking up the challenge. “I see.”

The force of your grip was nowhere near as strong as his—although it was very impressive, he had to admit; he did lose his breath for a split second—but you felt his smile spread as he leaned his head against yours, and that was good enough.

He hummed against your neck, swaying with you in his arms, and you realised that you could not think about Sid’s picture or Maggie’s phone now that it was just the two of you in the room. That was good. You wouldn’t have wanted to speak to Jungkook about any of that right before his concert anyway.

“Now it’s okay,” he whispered. “Fifteen more minutes and I’ll be good as new. Maybe twenty.”

You smiled, but one of your hands had stopped drawing soothing patterns on his back.

“You have to go, though,” you reminded him reluctantly. “Jin will rip you a new one if you’re not on stage in two and a half minutes. He and Jimin got into an argument with one of the local sound engineers earlier today, so he wants to finish the soundcheck as quickly as possible.”

Jungkook groaned, releasing you, but keeping his gaze on yours.

“Can I just tell him I hurt my head,” he asked, “so I deserve special treatment?”

“Not sure,” you replied. “I think that only works with me.”

His laughter was loud and unapologetic. Before you could say anything else, he wrapped an arm around your waist and pulled you back into his chest again, resting his forehead against yours.

“What are you doing?” you whispered, concerned about his poor time management and the relatively open space that you were in. The door was closed this time, but not locked.

“Nothing,” he replied softly. His lower lip brushed against yours as he spoke. You felt dangerously light. “If you say I’m late.”

“Well, n-not yet... You have about,” your breath hitched momentarily when he pressed a gentle kiss just under your jaw, “a minute and forty-five seconds left.”

“Well, then,” he lifted his eyes to look at you again, but only for a moment, “I have to make the most of my,” his lips touched yours slowly, but firmly, “one minute and,” his quick kiss gained more force, “thirty seconds.”

You were laughing by the time he kissed you again, and he could not stop himself from smiling, too. He knew he was running late, but he kept his lips on yours, the kiss focused, lingering, and locked your taste in a separate part of his brain—a part so full of you that it was beginning to overtake other, much less important parts.

“I love you,” he whispered, pulling away.

His lips glistened slightly from your gloss. Your heart, having already finished three laps around the venue, had now taken up parkour in the crevices of your chest.

“I love you,” you replied. You ran your fingers down his cheek, forgetting yourself, almost, when he leaned into your touch. Then you pulled back and nodded at the door. “Go now. I’ll see you after the show tonight. There’s, uh—I have a plan I want to discuss with you.”

Jungkook was about to object—you couldn’t remove your hands from his skin so abruptly, there was a certain procedure you had to follow to ensure he could still breathe when you were no longer touching him, similar to replacing nicotine patches for someone trying to quit smoking—but then he realised what you were saying.

“Oh.” He raised an eyebrow and stayed still despite your utmost attempts to push his shoulder to get him to turn around. “About Sid?”

You nodded. “Yeah. But I’ll explain later.”

You expected him to question this, to try to find out what the plan was right now, but he did no such thing. He felt happy and optimistic—kissing you might have helped with that—so he did not need to know more. You could have said that you were taking all of your staff to Argentina to escape Sid, and he would have grabbed his sunglasses.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m in, either way. Operation Cobra-Rabbit.”

“Operat—” You scoffed, suddenly remembering your conversation after the film yesterday. “We’re not calling it that. It’s not a secret operation, it doesn’t need a name. You’re going to your soundcheck now, and then we’ll—”

“How about Operation: Escape from London?” he suggested, dragging his feet as you pushed him towards the door. “Since, you know, we’re in—”

“No,” you said. “Go.”

He didn’t protest this time, because Seokjin’s angry, hurried footsteps were already reverberating down the corridor, and Jungkook did not want to piss him off more. Still, he paused again by the door, giving you one last overly dramatic nod over his shoulder as if he were in a spy film. Then he left with a triumphant fist in the air after finally earning a chuckle from you.

You shook your head as he shut the door of the room behind himself, leaving you alone—not for very long, however.

Less than a minute later, as you returned to the table that Hoseok and Yoongi had dragged to the centre of the room for your meeting, you heard the door open again. You lifted your head, ready to scold Jungkook, and saw Namjoon instead, peeking inside sheepishly.

“Hey,” he greeted, hesitating in the doorway. “Didn’t want to interrupt your meeting, so I, uh, waited until it’s over. Do you have a minute?”

A knot tightened in the pit of your stomach. There were too many things that already took you by surprise today. You were not sure how many more of them you could take.

“You wouldn’t have interrupted,” you said, mustering a smile. “You’re part of the team. Come in.”

Namjoon slipped into the room without any sound at all and took a moment to close the door, his hand lingering on the engraved knob.

“Yeah, uh—I just want to have a quick word with you,” he said, turning around. “About why I called CJ in advance.”

“Oh. You don’t have to explain that,” you said. “It—that was a good decision. Thank you for thinking of it. You might have really saved—”

Namjoon started to speak in the middle of your sentence as if he hadn’t heard you.

“I was with Yoongi in his room, working on the song, when we saw Sid’s post,” he said, clearly battling his guilt about the extra attention the picture had gained because of him. He wanted you to know that he had no bad intentions. “It was about four in the morning when we—well, actually, a fan sent it to Yoongi, and asked, “oh my god, is this the cover of your new album?” Obviously, Yoongi and I thought that was impossible; we haven’t even decided when we’re releasing this new song. We could tell that Sid was just trying to mess with Jungkook, and that it had to be you in that picture with him.”

Self-conscious when he gave you a questioning glance, you brought a hand over your neck. “It is.”

“Yeah. So, I called CJ right away,” Namjoon continued. “I don’t think I even had a clear plan of what I was going to say to him or what time it was for him. But he picked up, and I just blurted out, “our album cover leaked,” because that was what that fan had assumed. And why not, you know? If the fans think that’s what happened, why not utilise that to eradicate whatever Sid was trying to do? The picture’s really good. Might as well use it for—for a good cause, instead of whatever Sid was hoping for.”

“Right. Yeah. Exactly,” you said. The more words you used to agree with him, the clearer it became that you still wished you could have escaped this situation. “And now Sid’s caption makes it seem like he’s just—”

“Congratulating them,” Namjoon finished for you. “Happy for you, he’d said. Makes sense.”

“Yeah.”

The two of you allowed for several quiet moments to pass, lost in your own thoughts. Namjoon shifted his weight to his right leg and tucked his thumb into his belt loop.

“I, um—I’m sorry if that made you uncomfortable, though,” he said, looking up. “I knew things might get… weird if I didn’t do anything. The picture itself might not have caused any harm, but given the speculation surrounding it, and your upcoming promotion… I thought that using the picture as an album cover was just safer.”

“Yeah, it—no, I—I’m glad you did that, really,” you said, a little thrown off by the mention of your promotion. “I don’t know if I would have thought of a solution like that.”

Namjoon believed you would have come up with a similar plan quite easily. The problem was that you did not want to draw even more attention to the picture.

“Y-you said—um,” you added, “did you know that CJ was going to call me?”

His pursed lips turned into a timid smile.

“I heard some things…” he admitted.

You arched a surprised eyebrow. “And you didn’t tell me?”

“I hear a lot of things you wouldn’t want to know.”

You nodded. You were fortunate to work with many amazing people, but you had heard their stories. You knew what this industry had been like to them before they reached this point. And you felt very blessed that these same people now shielded you from the negativity that they had not been able to escape themselves.

“Alright,” you said. You were glad, all of a sudden, that CJ had not elaborated on his decision to suddenly promote you. “That’s fair enough.”

You returned to your belongings, sliding your phone into your pocket, and Namjoon observed you in silence for a second, only moving to assist you when you began to push the table back to its original place by the window.

“So,” he said, once the room was restored to its former order, “how come you look so worried? Head Manager! That’s great.”

“Oh,” you said. “It is great.”

Namjoon knew there was more. The two of you hadn’t had many chances to have private conversations during this tour, but usually, you were the person he came to talk to about the problems in his job, and he expected the same from you.

He gestured towards the couch next to the table and waited until you took a seat before sitting down next to you with an expectant look on his face.

“It—well, really, this is great,” you said, clasping your hands together as you rested your elbows on your knees. This was standard, Namjoon knew. You needed a minute to admit what was bothering you. “I’m grateful. There’s just a lot of stuff going on right now. Nothing I want to trouble you with, but, uh, this promotion feels… well, it feels like my work had very little to do with it. They found out about Reconnaissance and just decided to promote me. I’m happy, of course, but I wish they had waited until after the tour, so I could say, with confidence, that this was due to everything I’ve achieved with Rated Riot. And not just because Nick Zhou called me one time.”

Namjoon appeared to be highly interested in one specific crack in the floorboards.

“But this is because of everything you’ve achieved with Rated Riot,” he said, not looking up. You wondered if he did that on purpose, to make you feel less like you were talking to a specific person, and more like you were just talking—so you would not feel bad about sharing your troubles. “You took the abstract concept of a European tour and brought it to life. And then Rated Riot got on stage, and the whole Europe fell in love with them. But you brought them here. You looked after them. And the staff. And, actually, their personal belongings. Sorry about Tilburg.”

You smiled, recalling the Lost Laptops of Tilburg.

“It’s nothing. I was just doing my job,” you said. “And everyone on this tour looks after one another. That—well, that’s the whole point, I—”

“No,” he disagreed, finally giving you a look. “You’re never just doing your job. You’re always doing more. You earned this. Accept it.”

Namjoon had used a very similar tone to defend you from bitter, middle-aged men who had a problem with your promotion after CJ’s assistant had brought it up at the last Zoom meeting with the executives at the company. Their issue was your young age. Namjoon did not think a person needed to start balding to be awarded for their great work.

“CJ actually didn’t even give me the option to refuse,” you said, your smile turning wry. “He just told me I’m getting promoted and I felt like I had to go along with it.”

Namjoon nodded knowingly. He had several similar experiences with Christian Jett before. He had even played tennis with him once and called him Chris—not CJ—by accident. Luckily, he managed to duck before a tennis ball came hurling at his head. Namjoon knew CJ did not give suggestions; he gave orders.

“Would you have refused, if he’d asked?” he asked you.

“No, but…” You spun your ring around your index finger and settled back against the couch. “Can I be honest?”

“Of course.”

“I am—honestly, I’m also worried about my relationship with Jungkook,” you said.

Namjoon noted that this was the first time you brought this up to him without encouragement. Despite his surprise, however, he did not want to let the awkward silence take over the room, so he coughed politely into his fist and tried to reply, not particularly smoothly.

“What do you—what are you worried about?” he asked, even though that was obvious.

“I talked to Jin the other day,” you said. “He said that as long as the band makes a profit, no one’s going to care—which is true enough. But with this happening, with Rated Riot growing more and more popular, with my promotion… they will have to care. Our relationship has, obviously, never been strictly professional. And now it could hinder their plans for the band.”

Namjoon mulled over this for a minute, his gaze drifting to the expanse of the empty room. He had obviously had similar thoughts as you when he made the call to CJ, but now he realised that this was only half the picture.

“If they’re promoting you,” he began, his voice steady against the subdued air in the room, “that obviously means they want to keep you in the company. So, when they learn about your relationship, they definitely won’t immediately decide to fire you. I suppose they will ask you to end the relationship, or they won’t care about it at all. Those are the only two logical possibilities, right?”

“Right,” you agreed.

“If they tell you to end it,” Namjoon continued, “I think you’re in a position to present them with a similar ultimatum. Tell them that you will leave if they won’t accept your relationship. That is risky, I’ll admit. But they need you. And, from what I hear, they know you have other options.”

There was a quality about Namjoon that you really admired. Often, when people wanted to make someone feel better, they said things that they knew would lift their spirits—you appreciated that as well, just in a different way. Namjoon, on the other hand, managed to offer comfort tempered with rationality.

You took a deep breath and stretched your legs.

“Yeah,” you said. “Negotiate, is what you’re telling me.”

“Yes. More or less,” he confirmed. “But, of course, you have to decide what, uh—what you will do if they refuse to do it your way.”

You shook your head.

“I’ve already decided,” you said. The smile on your face was as sad as smiles could be. “If they will tell me it’s one or the other, I won’t choose to stay at the company. I’ll choose him.”

Namjoon nodded and hung his head. He hoped you would think he did that in solidarity, but, really, he was trying to hide his smile. Of course, he was a little worried about the label’s reaction. But he was also happy for you and Jungkook.

Not to mention, he had been roped into joining the bet about your relationship backstage—Seokjin was very loud, and Namjoon embarrassed very easily—and now he might have been the first to find out that he’d won.

He couldn’t resist the urge to ask, “I—are you guys, um, back together, then?”

“Honestly,” you said, snickering at the absurdity of your position, “at this point, it feels like we never even broke up.”

Namjoon’s smile was too big to hide it. “So, you are, then.”

“We are. And, it’s—you know,” you said with a shrug that was not one bit nonchalant, despite your best attempts to make it seem so, “I’d love to still be able to keep working with you guys despite that, but, uh—I’ll deal with whatever happens. If they will think this is unacceptable, I’ll leave.”

“It may not come to that,” he said, his tone reassuring, yet grounded. “There’s still a good chance that the label won’t care. I mean, Taehyung is in a relationship.”

“Yeah,” you gave him a skeptical look, “but Luna isn’t working with him.”

“True,” he acknowledged before pursuing his point further, “but that relationship only has a positive impact on the band. He’s relaxed when she’s here, her presence helps him cope with the stress of the tour… on and on this list goes.”

That was a great observation, of course. Not to mention, you enjoyed having Luna around, too. But you knew that there was more to the story.

“I had to fight for that, though,” you said. “Jett Records didn’t think we should allow any girlfriends, friends, or relatives on tour. I had a different opinion.”

Namjoon did not know this, but his surprise quickly turned to pride.

“Oh,” he said, beaming. “But you won, though. They allowed our loved ones to join. You got your way.”

“Yes, but that could be because they didn’t think the tour would be this successful,” you countered. “Sure, most of the dates sold out before we came here, but it—that’s the minimum requirement. You know that. So, alright, the label already knew that Rated Riot would gather two or three thousand people every night. But they didn’t realise there’d be another thousand waiting outside the venue in every city we visited. Their attitude might change now that they know about the level of interest in the band.”

Namjoon noticed a tentative smile tugging at your lips. Despite your concerns about the future, the fact was that this tour—with all its mishaps and accidents—had already surpassed everyone’s expectations. Rated Riot were on a clear path to success and the unexpected crowds at each venue made it impossible not to feel excited, no matter what happened next.

“That’s just the thing, though,” Namjoon said, his eyes kind. “When you came to manage Rated Riot, they were still playing in bars and restaurants. All they had was potential. But with you, they’re starting to live up to it. Not to mention... there has to be a reason why Nick wanted to scout you for Reconnaissance. The label knows they need you. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be in such a rush to promote you without even asking if you agree.”

You realised you hadn’t thought of it like that. But Namjoon was right. Everything he’d said to you was true.

You loved your job, and you were good at it. It was just this one hiccup in your otherwise excellent performance as the band’s manager that made you doubt everything you’ve done for them: you were dating the lead vocalist.

But you listened to Namjoon now, and you realised your thoughts weren’t fair. Your relationship with Jungkook did not—and never would—impact your ability to do your job, and do it well. It was not an indicator of the quality of your work. It was not proof of your lack of effort or motivation.

You were learning, through agonising trial and error almost every day, that these two roles—manager and girlfriend—could co-exist. You did not need to relinquish one to succeed at the other.

Namjoon noticed that your eyes seemed brighter, your shoulders were less hunched and you no longer averted your gaze when he looked at you. The melodic strains you heard as the band finally started their soundcheck likely helped you calm down, too.

“I realise,” you admitted, “that I am nervous about big changes. About multiple big changes, concurrently.”

Namjoon had to lean in closer to be able to hear you—Hoseok pounded his drums behind the wall as if his life depended on it.

“I think that’s normal,” he noted. “Who wouldn’t be?”

He hoped to remind you that it was very easy to get lost in your feelings and experiences, and convince yourself that you were going through them alone—but you weren’t. And you saw that very clearly today.

“And it’s okay,” he continued. “I can’t make decisions for you, but you’re—you have us. We’ll always have your back. We won’t sit idly if we find out the label made you resign.”

You took a breath and finally allowed the gratitude in your heart to really settle.

“Thank you,” you said. “For everything. I really liked your advice about standing my ground. I think I’ll try to follow it.”

Namjoon smiled at this and nudged your shoulder with his. Smiling in response, you nudged his right back.

You’ve found your family when you met Rated Riot. They made bets about your relationship, they teased each other at nearly every possible moment, they complained and argued, but they supported each other with unwavering loyalty. And you were prepared to fight, if it came to it, to stay with them.

You were convinced that CJ had put a hex on you, because you had to spend the rest of the day on your phone, arranging interviews, giving comments about the band’s plans for the future, and pacing in the corridors of the venue. You could not even return to the hotel to pick up your forgotten laptop, you had to do all the work on your phone.

You still had to figure out what happened to Maggie’s phone, but you resolved to track down Minjun and ask him about Sid and Jude later, after the incessant calls stopped. For some reason, everyone demanded to talk to you in Dutch or Swedish or something that sounded vaguely German, and all you could gather from their speech was ‘Rated Riot’ and a questioning tone at the end of the sentence.

You still hadn’t finished by the time Rated Riot began their set on stage, so you had to return to the dressing room for some silence, no matter how much you’d missed hearing the way the audience responded to the band. Thankfully, you only had two more calls to get through—both in Swedish, much to your enormous joy.

After you left the changing room to finally join Luna by the stage, you heard a peculiar sound—a soft, conspiratorial shushing from somewhere in the corridor backstage, like someone trying to beckon a cautious cat.

“Psst. Psst. Pss—hey!”

You did not immediately realise that this was aimed at you. Stopping, you looked around warily until you finally spotted Minjun’s head peeking out from behind the corridor wall. He was trying not to attract too much attention to himself, so he did not use your name.

“What’s going on?” you asked, approaching him. “Why—”

“Come with me.”

“Wh—” you began, but Minjun’s hand darted out from behind the wall, joining his head, and he seized your wrist.

He pulled you down the corridor with an urgency that made your heart drop to your knees and he refused to stop no matter how much you struggled to watch your steps.

“What’s going on?” you demanded, altering between genuine fear and irritation.

“Jude’s here,” Minjun said and tripped over something as soon as he did, forcing you to stumble, too.

“Jude—with Sid?” you asked, your insides stirring with newfound horror.

Jude never went anywhere alone, and you did not like this rush that Minjun was in to get to him. You tried once more to stop running, or slow down at the very least, but Minjun was a train, running late on schedule.

“No,” he said, his grip on your wrist firm, his eyes frantic. “Alone.”

“Why?” you pressed.

He did not reply until he brought you to a halt outside the door at the far end of the corridor, leading to what appeared to be either a utility closet or an unusually small dressing room.

“Come in,” he said then, without any explanation, and held the door open for you.

You pushed the door further.

Jude stood before you inside the room. He looked more transparent than he had at the club the other night, and you weren’t sure if this wasn’t just a hazy memory. He was holding your handbag in his hands.

You wished you were back on the phone with the impatient Swedish journalist from before.

“Hi. This is yours,” Jude said awkwardly, extending your bag towards you.

You stood in the doorway and did not move. “How did you get that?”

Minjun had to gently push your arm with his shoulder so he could enter the room. Jude appeared very small as he held out your bag and tried to find his words.

“I, um—after I talked to you at the club,” he said, “I told Sid that I saw you, and he—he made me hang around and wait until you weren’t paying attention. I told him I knew which table you and your friends were at, and he thought—h-he wanted your phone.”

He waved the handbag, his alarmingly thin arms growing tired, and you finally took it from him. Maggie’s phone was inside, snug among scattered receipts.

Luna had been right—not that you doubted her for a second. And it made sense now, why Jude had lingered that night: he was waiting for Maggie and Luna to pick a table.

“I ju—I just had to wait until you all went dancing,” Jude continued, his voice unsteady. “A-and I was supposed to grab your phone. Sid was—he was desperate.”

Your posture was rigid, your eyes locked on Jude in a way that stopped him from breaking eye contact, and even Minjun felt a little uncomfortable. He knew more of what happened, after all; Jude had to explain it all to him to persuade him to find you. Minjun did nothing to interfere now, however. Jude was the one who wanted to talk to you, so he should have been the one to convince you to listen.

“Why?” you asked finally, your voice cutting through the tense silence, and slicing into Jude’s fragile confidence.

He glanced at Minjun, who gave him a small nod. Encouraged, Jude rubbed his hands together and began to speak. He could taste bile at the back of his throat, but the bitter sensation had been there for a while.

“He was looking for something to use against you and Jungkook,” he explained. “He hoped to find an old picture or video of the two of you together. When you were—when you dated. He wanted t-to cause a little trouble. If he couldn’t find anything, then h-he would have called Jungkook from your phone to, um—to give him the wrong idea.”

You gritted your teeth, reminding yourself that Jude was the accessory and the messenger. Your desire to slam someone’s face into a wall was not aimed at him.

“This isn’t mine, though,” you said, nodding at the phone inside your bag.

“Well, wh—it doesn’t matter,” Jude dismissed it with a shrug that seemed to propel his whole body backwards. “There were a lot of pictures from backstage in the gallery. Sid thought that was good enough.”

You wished Luna or Maggie were here with you right now, maybe both. Granted, Maggie might have attacked Jude—and you weren’t sure if you would have tried to restrain her, given your own urges—but at least you wouldn’t be standing here alone, trying to make sense of what was happening. Minjun’s quiet presence in the corner of the room did not offer much comfort. He was poised to intervene as if he was waiting for you to throw a punch.

“And why are you here?” you asked Jude.

You noticed that he was leaning slightly to one side despite standing firmly on both feet, and you wondered if this was a sign of how accustomed he was to standing on Sid’s right. Or maybe he was just drunk or under the influence of something stronger.

“Because you—you don’t owe me anything,” Jude replied, and you felt even more confused. His eyes looked watery, the edges of his pupils blurred. “You hate me, actually. And you have that right, I haven’t—I haven’t been very nice to you over the years. But you—you’re the one who told me to be careful. And Sid—I was—he left me for dead when he got bored later that night.”

You frowned, meeting Minjun’s brooding eyes across the room. He knew about this, you could tell. But he wanted Jude to do the talking.

Jude continued, “it started with a nosebleed. Then, I couldn’t breathe all of a sudden. I don’t—I don’t know what happened. Sid tossed me another bag of ice as if I hadn’t already taken enough.”

You were slow to grasp that “ice” did not mean frozen water in this case, and you wondered how many different ways to describe meth Jude knew at this point.

Then you needed another second to stop your heart from overexerting itself. Your initial plan for Sid paled in comparison to the new one burgeoning in the dark depths of your mind.

“A-and then he left the hotel between my third and fourth wheeze,” Jude finished. “He said he didn’t have time for this shit.”

You allowed Minjun to give the appropriate reactions to the story—and he nodded empathetically every few seconds—while you were only half-listening.

This happened in their hotel room, then. And Jude had said, another bag.

How many bags of methamphetamine did Sid keep in his hotel room in a foreign country with possibly very strict drug regulations?

“I-I remembered you, sud—suddenly,” Jude stammered when you did not respond. You looked up, surprised by the weight of your presence in his memory. “You told me to drink water. I drank a lot that night, but it—it obviously wasn’t water. Water was—it’s not what we usually drink. I didn’t—but there was half a bottle in the room, so I finished that. I could see a little clearer after that. Or so I thought. I went to the sink, and—and drank as much tap water as I could bef—before I threw up.”

“You might have overdosed,” you observed, studying his appearance again. His bronze complexion had taken an unsettling, ashy pallor. His hands were shaking and he kept rubbing them together. He looked cold, but beads of perspiration glistened on his forehead. “Are you—”

“I don’t—it’s not my first time taking a bit too much,” he said, wiping the sweat from his brow after he sensed your scrutiny. You blinked and looked away. “I’ve never really—never thought I would die before, so that was new. B-but I don’t think that I—I didn’t overdose. I think I just lost track of time because I was—I was waiting to steal your bag. For Sid.” His right hand trembled so awfully that he had to clutch it with his left to steady himself. “I’m really sorry.”

“Jude, I’m—”

“He left me for dead,” he reiterated before you could suggest calling a doctor. “You were right. He doesn’t care. I-I could have—I was de—dehyder—”

“Dehydrated,” you supplied.

“Yeah. That,” he affirmed, pausing to give you a grateful smile, then looking at Minjun for approval. Minjun did not move. Jude lowered his gaze again. “A-and he thought I was being a nuisance. He thought another dose would help me, and he just left.”

“And are you sure you don’t need help?” you finally asked. Your tone was strict, but Jude was touched by the sentiment so much that he swayed slightly on his feet. “You look like you could use some.”

He cast a pleading look at Minjun, and you feared that he was teetering on the verge of tears.

“Shit—y-you see,” he said, though it was not clear if he was addressing you or Minjun. “That’s what I mean. I don—I am—I’m fine now. I’m—I’ll be fine. I’m going home. I won’t go back to the hotel.”

Your surprise was quick and obvious, prompting Jude to launch into a hurried, almost fanatical explanation. He was eager to break through the formidable barriers of his usual reticence, which felt awkward and embarrassing now that Sid wasn’t here to tell him to keep quiet.

“I don’t want shit—I don’t want to deal with his shit anymore,” he said. “I’m flying home. I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you that. Y-you don’t even—you didn’t have to say anything to me, especially after all that I’ve done, but you said that, you told me to look after myself, a-and I don’t know. You might have saved my life that night. And—and you’re—y-you want to help me now. I’m—I’ll be okay. I’m just—I’m sorry.”

You winced at his exaggeration about your conversation at the club, but Minjun was the only one who’d noticed it. Jude was oblivious in his fervent need to get the words out, to explain, to apologise, to tell you how thankful he was.

You thought his gratitude was misplaced. He would have realised what to do in that situation anyway; he’d said something similar had already happened before, even if it hadn’t been as severe. He knew he had to drink if he took substances that could lead to overheating—you just happened to repeat it to him at a convenient time.

But just as you prepared to reply, the words died on your tongue.

You realised you could use his gratitude and guilt.

“Jude,” you said, breaking the rhythm of his laboured, frantic breaths. “If you really are okay, how—how would you feel about getting even with Sid for treating you like that?”

He stopped breathing for a second, confused. “W-what do you mean?”

Your gaze shifted to Minjun, whose initial surprise quickly melted into a realisation that lit up his features. He nodded enthusiastically.

“I have this idea,” you continued, returning your attention to Jude, who remained anchored against the back wall of the room, resembling a child caught drawing on the walls with a permanent marker. “But I would need you to stay in London a bit longer. Just a day or two. Could you do that?”

“That would be fair, I think,” Minjun added hastily. Jude hadn’t even processed your request yet. “It’s the least you can do after she practically saved your life—which she really didn’t have to do. I mean, you stole her bag.”

“I—but Sid asked me to do that!” Jude protested, panicked once more. He looked at you, his brows knit in an expression of profound desperation. He genuinely felt indebted to you, and he was dying to make it right. “I wouldn’t—I didn’t want to. You’ve never done anything wrong to me.”

“Well, exactly,” Minjun continued before you could respond. He could tell that Jude’s abnormally energetic apologies troubled you. “You kind of owe her, you know?”

Jude knew. You could tell he knew because he began to rub his hands together faster, his fingers restless, agitated as they ran over his calloused skin. He looked frightened. He looked like half of a person.

You felt the first threads of remorse coil around your mind for taking advantage of him in a state like this.

“Well, I—I—o-of course, I guess,” Jude acquiesced, though his compliance seemed strained—much like the rest of his actions, really. He needed to lie in bed for a week or two. “W-what would I have to do?”

You turned back to Minjun, who appeared to be waiting for you to give Jude any command whatsoever. Jude, in turn, appeared willing to comply with any command.

It occurred to you that perhaps Jude’s obedience to Sid did not stem from a specific attachment to him. Perhaps Jude had simply chosen to surrender his free will, and now he gravitated towards anyone who could make decisions on his behalf—as long as he could justify it to himself: a decades-long friendship with Sid, or a perceived debt he owed you.

Jude—as Minjun had suggested before—just didn’t know any better. And it was so easy, so very simple for him to just let someone else take the reins. To float down the stream instead of fighting it.

“Just keep spending time with Sid like you used to, okay?” you instructed. “Act as if nothing happened between you, like everything’s alright. Yeah? And we’ll be in touch with you.”

“Yeah,” Jude replied slowly. It took him a few seconds to grasp what had been said to him. You wondered if he’d always been this way, or if this was a lingering effect of all that he had to endure in the past twenty-four hours. “Yeah, I can do that.”

“That’s great,” you said. And then, because he continued to look smaller than his shadow, you added, “I, um—I understand you’re not a fan of hospitals, but how do you feel about pharmacies? They have a great selection of supplements I think you should try.”

You handed Minjun your handbag and he watched, in bewilderment, as you led Jude out of the room. You gave Jude step-by-step instructions—in excruciating detail that Minjun thought Jude did not deserve—about what to say at the pharmacy, which vitamins to seek, what nutritional products to consider, how to drink water, what fruit to buy on the way back to the hotel, and what to tell Sid if he asked questions about any of this.

Jude wrote it all down on his phone—a process that consumed an additional twenty minutes outside the venue—before he finally thanked you, apologised another dozen times, and walked away, leaning against the side of the building for support.

When you rejoined Minjun, you felt like you had just finished teaching six kindergarten classes.

“He’s gone,” you announced, sinking into the only armchair in the cramped room. Your foot came to rest on the handle of a discarded broom. You still weren’t sure what the purpose of this room was.

“Why’d you do all that for him?” Minjun asked, handing you your bag and leaning against the wall.

“Because I don’t want Rated Riot’s opening act to be Jude dropping dead,” you retorted. “He’s severely malnourished. Does he even eat when he—anyway. I don’t know what’s going on with his nervous system, he was shaking the whole time he was here. I don’t—I’m not Sid. I can’t stand to talk to someone half-dead without trying to do something.”

“Yeah,” Minjun said, still a little amazed at your lack of hesitation when you walked Jude outside. Jude had certainly never been as terrible as Sid, but he was still Sid’s closest friend. Yet, you were eager to help him feel better, when even Minjun had given up. “You’re not Sid. That’s what got us to this point. But you, um—you still didn’t have to go to such lengths for Jude. He… he’s always had withdrawal issues. He’s going to take something as soon as he goes back to the hotel, and he’ll probably be fine again.”

You exhaled. Probably was a very heavy word to carry on your shoulders everywhere you went.

“Yeah, but at least now my conscience won’t keep me up at night,” you said, stretching your arms over your head. “Besides, we’re kind of using him, so we obviously need him alive.”

“True…” Minjun faltered, his eyes shifting to the only minuscule window in the room and squinting. He could not see anything beyond the thick glass, obscured by rain residue. “It, uh—it’s great that Jude can be our man on the inside. I’m glad he realised what a fucking bag of shit Sid is. But, honestly, I’m not sure we can trust him if we send him straight back to that hotel. He might have a change of heart.”

“I know,” you admitted. Even if Jude felt indebted to you and demonstrated that by returning Maggie’s phone, his gratitude could prove temporary. Sid had an exceptional talent for coaxing good people into bad deeds. “That’s why I’m not telling Jude anything else we’re going to do.”

Minjun turned back to look at you, intrigued. “And what is it that we’re going to do?”

“I need to do some research first,” you said, your thoughts speeding a hundred miles per minute. “Did Sid reach out to you at any point over these past few days?”

“No.”

“Alright, so it’s just Jungkook, then.” You leaned forward, considering this. “I-I don’t get it, to be honest. I mean, I get that Sid is the spawn of the devil, but really, why is he—why does he care so much? Because this isn’t some prank. He’s digging up old videos, posting pictures that could have serious consequences for us, and he’s—he made Jude hang around the club to steal my fucking bag. That’s so stupid and over-the-top that I’m not even—I mean, does he really have nothing better to do?”

Minjun did not seem to share your confusion, and your shoulders slumped in disappointment. Clearly, Minjun did not think this was out of character for Sid at all.

“Well, yeah, he doesn’t have anything else going on,” Minjun said. “He doesn’t have a job. He has money and twenty-four hours in a day. Might as well torment people. Besides, he feels wronged. He won that bet he had with Jungkook, but—”

“No, I get that,” you interrupted, your gaze drifting to the same window that Minjun had attempted to look through before. “He’s always done this. But it makes no sense to me. Fucking with people just because he thinks they’re not miserable enough. That has to be some sort of a latent inferiority complex, this need he has to prove to everyone that he’s better than them. But I don’t—he’s going to have to take his insecurities elsewhere. He’ll have to fuck off. We’ll leave him no other choice.”

When you did not succeed in seeing past the thick fog over the glass, you turned back to Minjun again. He was grinning, for some reason, his bright smile standing out against the sombre atmosphere in the room.

“What?” you asked.

“Nothing.” He chuckled, excitement twirling in his eyes. “I’m glad you and Jungkook are back together.”

You looked away, pensive.

“Come on,” he said, pushing himself off the wall. “Let’s go defeat evil. I’ll help with your research.”

Minjun ended up providing fantastic assistance, and by the time the two of you had exhausted all the keywords in your Google search, you had a rough outline of what you’d do with Sid. You and Minjun both agreed that you needed Jungkook’s input, so the three of you would need to meet sometime later to finalise your strategy and set it into motion.

In the meantime, you had to find your friends, return Maggie’s phone, and update them on everything that had happened since you’d last seen them.

When you entered Rated Riot’s dressing room, the walls were pulsating with the beat of an old Arctic Monkeys song, blaring unapologetically from Yoongi’s Bluetooth speaker. You had thought you felt completely drained from this day, but the sight of everyone celebrating as they always did—as if it were the final show of the tour, the venue filled with their laughter, the floor wet from their spilt drinks—lifted your mood and your energy levels immeasurably.

Maggie was the first to catch your eye in the crowd of people. As soon as you returned her phone, a tipsy Yoongi interjected affectionately, “you find everyone’s lost eletornicks!”—which was almost an actual word, so you figured he still had room for more alcohol. He drifted away before you could say anything else, moving his shoulders to the rhythm of “Snap Out Of It” and joining Hoseok by the drinks table.

Luna noticed the slight commotion and approached you. As soon as you finished telling the girls what happened to your handbag, she broke into a surprisingly graceful, but very, very drunken performance of flailing her limbs and singing, “I knew it! I fucking knew it!” while Taehyung watched her from the doorway with unmistakable fondness. He had genuinely never looked more in love.

Then Maggie caught you off guard by wrapping her arms around you—as if you’d crossed Middle Earth and battled Smeagol for her phone—and you realised how safe, happy, and comfortable you felt here. It was such a stark contrast to the unease you had felt in Jude’s presence that you found yourself laughing, your chest feather-light.

Someone behind you suddenly cleared their throat—with such force that it sounded like they coughed up half of a lung—and Maggie pulled back, allowing you both to turn around.

Jungkook looked like he had been waiting for you to notice him for a while. Your friend snickered and hugged you once more before taking an intentionally ostentatious step back and bowing.

“She’s all yours if she wishes,” Maggie proclaimed to Jungkook, who turned to you, his eyebrows raised.

You nodded. “She wishes.”

Chuckling, he pulled you close. He was still high from the concert and just as lively and animated as everyone else in the room. The second he wrapped his arms around your waist and buried his face in your neck, he refused to let go, finding that only fair since you had ended up missing his show tonight.

You realised, while fighting for breath in his suffocating grip, that the two of you did not look strange or inappropriate to anyone who noticed you, despite standing almost in the middle of the room, wrapped around each other. You expected to feel anxious about the public display, and were surprised to feel comforted instead.

No one cared.

Unbeknownst to you, the bet backstage had ended, and now that everyone here knew that you and Jungkook were back together, they were no longer invested. They won their money—or lost, in a few cases—and moved on to make bets about whether Taehyung, who was too prideful to sing without his bass, would start singing along to Luna’s playlist on Yoongi’s phone.

No one cared.

Surrendering to Jungkook’s touch, you abandoned your other plans and relocated with him to the far corner of the room, separated from most of the dangerous festivities—Seokjin and Hoseok had bumped foreheads while dancing just as you walked past them—by a heavy rack of clothes.

Jungkook lied down on the couch with his head on your lap, recounting how he had accidentally turned off his microphone in the middle of his break during the encore and had to yell his speech at the audience because he couldn’t turn it back on.

“I’m glad your throat is alright,” you remarked. The warmth of your touch and the lightness of your tone filled him with something that tasted like honey on his tongue. “The rest of the guys also sound like they just got off the tallest ride at the amusement park.”

Jungkook’s laughter was soft, laced with a lingering echo of the concert that still reverberated in his mind amidst the lively chatter and the music in the dressing room.

“After the show,” he said with an unusual gravity in his tone, juxtaposed against the serenity in his eyes while you ran your fingers through his hair, “someone asked Yoongi and me about our new music. They asked if the picture on Sid’s account was a leaked album cover. We said yes. So, that—that’s confirmed now.”

Your hand stilled, and Jungkook lifted his head. He did not like the emotion he saw in your eyes when he looked at you and he felt melancholy, all of a sudden, for the moment you’d just shared. He wished he hadn’t said anything.

“Oh,” you replied. “That’s good.”

But it didn’t feel good. He couldn’t shake the memory of the way you’d looked after the band had unanimously decided to use the picture as the cover art for their next single. It seemed like the fact that everyone knew about your relationship was physically weighing on you.

He hadn’t said anything to you earlier, not wanting to exacerbate your anxiety, but he couldn’t keep this to himself now.

You’d promised each other communication.

“I—uh,” he sat up properly and you felt an odd ache inside when his head was no longer resting in your lap, “I know you’re not comfortable with us using the picture for that, um—for that particular purpose. And—and I get that. I just, uh—I just wanted to ask if y—if the actual problem here is that others know about us.”

The look on his face was an echo of your conversation last night. It threw you off balance, this statement, not even an actual question, and you were all the more aware of the loud beating in your chest and in your head. The music drowned out any chance of others overhearing your conversation, but it also muffled your thoughts.

You took a deep breath, so you could explain everything.

“No,” you said. Then once more, to make sure he heard you, “no. That’s not it. I don’t want—my problem is that we barely had one day together, you know? I would have liked some time alone with you before it all exploded. But Sid posted that picture, and now—now everyone in this room knows we’re definitely together. I mean, they already suspected it, since we’re not as discreet as I liked to think. But, uh, still. I am learning to be okay with others knowing, though. And I want you despite that. Despite others. Despite everything. I want to be with you. I just wanted to reveal our relationship to the public in our own time. Not Sid’s.”

Jungkook was not sure if you said anything else after I want you, because he certainly had not heard a word.

Frankly, he didn’t care about any public pictures. He wouldn’t have cared if a hurricane swept through the place, tearing down buildings and leaving debris that spelled out your names in the shape of a heart. But he knew you cared.

And yet—I want you despite everything.

He was crazy. Positively mad. A raving lunatic, really. He wondered if there was any medicine to subdue his symptoms because he did not think this was good for his health.

“Okay,” he said, looking down to get his feelings and his thoughts together. “I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re good,” you said. “It was—a lot of things happened today, and I was—I feel like I’m losing my head a little bit. But you and I are not—we’re not one of the things I’m confused about.”

He gave you a concerned look as he settled back on the couch. “What happened?”

You took a breath and recounted the story about Maggie’s missing phone, Luna’s observation—manifestation, almost—and Jude’s visit, which sparked the idea to include him in your plan to retaliate against Sid.

Jungkook spent a minute nodding, rubbing his chin, and moving his eyebrows up and down and sideways.

“Okay, that—that’s a lot of—and, uh—” He leaned forward, feeling a bit like the two of you had lived through an entire decade in one day. He could not summarise it all in one word. “What’s your plan?”

You took another breath. You and Minjun had checked and double-checked everything, so you were sure you had this part of your research right. The challenge of your plan came from the parts that couldn’t be researched in advance—the parts where you needed Jungkook.

“Did you know,” you started, “that the penalty for methamphetamine possession in the UK is up to seven years in prison? Apparently, it’s a class A drug.”

Furrowing his brows, Jungkook gave a slight nod of his head. “Uh… okay.”

“Right. Well, see,” you were sitting on the very edge of the couch, restless suddenly, “Jude mentioned tripping on ecstasy and speed that night I saw him at the club. And now, while returning Maggie’s phone, he mentioned Sid casually giving him a bag of meth. Just there, in his hotel room.”

“Mmhm, he—wait.” Jungkook straightened. “W-what are you saying?”

Someone jostled the rack of clothes next to your couch, causing a few hangers to clatter to the floor. You heard an excited shriek, followed by laughter, as two pairs of hands scrambled to pick up the clothes and hang them back in place.

You lowered your voice and moved closer to Jungkook on the couch. “You know what I’m saying.”

“I’m—”

“If a penalty exceeds twelve months,” you continued, “a person may be deported. That also sounds alright.”

Jungkook paused to listen to the sounds inside the room: the clothes rack had now been pushed back, shielding you from the rest of the room again, but limiting his view. He could hear Taehyung singing along to “Do I Wanna Know?” by the drinks table while Luna and Maggie waved the flashlights on their phones dreamily for extra ambience in the dimly lit room. He could also see, most unusually, the way Hoseok and Jimin seemed to be exchanging money right behind the two girls.

Jungkook leaned in even closer to you.

“You want to deport Sid?” he asked. You could feel his warm breath on your cheek when he spoke. “A-and lock him up?”

“Actually, I want to wring his neck and use his head to scare off pigeons,” you said. “But that would result in me getting locked up, and I really don’t have time for that right now.”

You watched the corners of Jungkook’s lips twitch as he tried to suppress a smile.

“No?” he teased, unable to resist. “I might like that. Think about all the street cred I’d get with a jailbird girlfriend.”

You snorted. “Yeah? Two one-hour visits every four weeks sound hot to you?”

“Hmm.” He pursed his lips. “No. You have a point, that won’t do it. I need you with me. Should we—should we tell Minjun about this plan, then?”

“Minjun knows. We’ll talk more about it tomorrow, okay? But I—I promise we’re going to teach Sid a fucking lesson,” you said. “And then I’m going to tell the label we’re together, and all will be right in the world for fucking once.”

Jungkook didn’t think he’d ever wanted to kiss you more than he did right then. The air around you felt static, and the bodies behind the clothes rack did not feel particularly corporeal. The side of his chest was pressed against yours and he could feel your heartbeat speed up when his gaze flickered to your lips.

“You know, you can be really evil sometimes,” he remarked, chuckling when you raised your eyebrows. “I love it. Count me in. Sid won’t know what fucking hit him, and I want to be there to see it. Not going to lie, though, it does sound like Operation: Escape from Londo—”

“No.”

You thought you could feel his laughter resonating in your chest.

“Can we do that, though?” he whispered after a moment. “Can we—you know? Deal with Sid? In-between dealing with the label?”

You nodded. You were determined to find your happy ending and, watching the faint lights reflected in Jungkook’s eyes, you thought you could already see it, waiting for you in the distance.

“If we handle Sid,” you said quietly, “we can handle anything.”

Jungkook liked the sound of that very much—almost as much as he liked the song playing in the background while he breathed in your scent, while he allowed it to engulf him, to drown his senses, to annihilate any sanity he had left.

However, he was aware that for a long time before this moment, he had been making all the wrong choices while dreaming of the right outcomes. It would take some time for him to adjust to the fact that he lived a different life now—a life where you were by his side, and his reality was suddenly significantly better than his dreams. He would need to hear you tell him that it was going to be okay just a few more times.

“And if the label says that no, we can’t, actually?” he asked, his tone hushed.

He was very close and you could no longer look at him without your vision clouding. Your head spun so much that your thoughts felt tipsy. You lowered your gaze to his chest, avoiding the sight of him biting his lip.

“I’ll just leave, then,” you replied.

Jungkook pulled back suddenly. “You—but—no.”

You were breathless and slightly disoriented when you raised your head. The room was very dark, and he was very far away.

“We—we’re staying together regardless,” you said, distracted.

He still looked wounded.

“But that’s not fair to you,” he argued.

You shook your head and sighed. The Arctic Monkeys song on the speakers faded, changing to Rated Riot’s “Cursed,” and the room erupted into cheers as if the band members themselves had stood up to perform the song. You shivered under Jungkook’s gaze.

“That—it doesn’t matter,” you said. “I already told you before. If that’s the only way we can work, I don’t mind leaving the company. I’ll miss everyone, but I’m—we’d stay in touch anyway, I’m sure.”

Jungkook was torn. He wanted to tell you not to go—cast a spell or a curse, whichever worked—but his song played in the background, and you were trying very hard to keep a straight face on the couch next to him. It felt like a spell had already been cast.

He didn’t want you to leave, and in this moment, he felt convinced that you never would. You were not meant to.

“At least fight back,” he said, “if these fucking lawyers have a problem with us being together.”

A smile finally broke through your restraints.

“I will,” you promised. “You want me to punch someone? Knock out their teeth for good measure?”

He grinned, too. His black eye had already healed, save for a few stubborn cuts around his cheekbone. The altercation he’d had with Sid seemed a lifetime away—a lifetime that he was not sure belonged to him anymore.

“Please,” he said.

“Hmm.” You leaned in closer, brushing your fingers over the side of his neck. “I’ll see what I can do without joining Sid in prison.”

He felt the way his skin came to life, the way all of his cells leapt up and screeched, as soon as you touched him. He thought that perhaps he had contracted some sort of eye disease on top of his blatant insanity, too, because the dark room had brightened all of a sudden.

He knew he had gone right out of his mind, and he’d never felt better.

“I love you,” he whispered, and his nose touched yours when he said it.

“I love you,” you whispered back, and the happy ending that you had seen in his eyes felt no more than a breath away.

It approached you in silence, dimming the lights in the room, and in the building, and on this side of the world, so it could light the ones in your eyes and your chests.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Jungkook whispered, the tips of his fingers tracing tenderly over your cheek. He felt it coming, too. “And I hope you stay.”

You closed your eyes. “I promise I’ll do everything to stay.”

Your lips finally touched his, and he discovered that you tasted exactly like the medicine he needed to halt his descent into madness, to calm the anxious beating of his heart, to clear his uncertain mind, and to dry the ink he’d used to engrave your name onto his soul.

chapter title credits: bad omens, “exit wounds”

prev ○ next

[trothplighted]

I think part of the problem at the root of the “straight vs gay” reads of various HP characters (particularly Lupin, though certainly also true for someone like Bill Weasley who was a very popular slashfic staple post-OotP and pre-HBP) is that Joanne is just… utterly terrified to write her male characters expressing any kind of desire for women beyond chaste courtly love hero-worship or the absolute vaguest allusions to sexual arousal

the first is seen especially in Snape’s love for Lily, which Joanne definitely sees as a central brilliant redeeming factor of his personality that changes everything and makes him noble. He is, in many senses, the ultimate Safe Man - below the woman socially, physically less attractive and charismatic than she is, bad at traditional masculine signifiers of gender like sports, ostracized from manhood and picked on/dismissed by other men, totally devoted to the object of his affection, and totally incapable of ever materially impacting her life or touching her or changing her.

(Additionally, I think a significant factor in Snape’s continued complexity is that these character traits - particularly the obsession with one specific Nerd Girl Who Likes Nerd Things - have a remarkably different context in 2025 than they did in 2007. We’ve had over a decade of incel movements and fashy alt-right introverted nerds who were radicalized into violence and disgusting misogyny and racism as a direct result of being unlucky in love in exactly the ways Snape is unlucky in love, and it’s hard for me to blame readers who come away upset with him because real life has shown us way more about how these kinds of men tend to think and act and what they’re motivated by than we had when DH was published. I’m also sympathetic to Snape fans whose interpretations of the character are purposefully separate from IRL context, people who’ve felt consistently the same way about him since publication - it’s really hard when massive cultural shifts forever change the way a character is going to be read, especially because you can’t un-ring that particular bell. But since you can’t un-ring it, I think any sympathetic analysis of Snape has to begin from the starting point that his critics are often speaking from places of personal experience with kinds of stochastic right-wing extremism that parallel what he was actually exposed to in canon. But that’s sort of its own post.)

The second is seen mostly in Harry and Ron and to a lesser extent in James - point of view or central supporting characters who express interest in girls Because That’s What Boys Do, or whose personalities include some element of desiring a girl for reasons that aren’t really explored or explained at all. Harry thinks Cho is pretty, and they kiss, but Harry at no point feels anything for Cho that could be described as sexual desire (though, as @wisteria-lodge points out in a recent post, Harry is probably intended to be read as having physical attraction toward Cho that motivates most of his desire to date her). Ron obviously lusts over Lavender, and to a lesser extent Fleur, when you read GoF and HBP through adult eyes, but we never see him talking about how he feels or what he sees, only that he looks and gapes like a Tex Avery cartoon character. Joanne positions this behavior from both Harry and Ron as immature, not only in terms of them having to earn access to Hermione and Ginny but also in GoF when Arthur teases the boys at the World Cup about being bewitched by the Veela. Worth pointing out that Arthur is in the happiest and most stable relationship we see in the entire series (excluding Bill/Fleur and Andromeda/Ted because we barely see them) and he’s married to a woman who’s described as not particularly attractive - the ideal man, then, can be read as someone who looks for an equal partner who isn’t a beauty queen. Beyond that, Molly is a force to be reckoned with, running her house and her family - Arthur often embodies the henpecked husband stereotypes. A good man is a safe man, and a safe man is one who is to some extent automatically submissive to his wife.

James is in an interesting place here, because his interest in girls and showing off for girls goes hand in hand with the Worst Memory, and therefore he becomes a worse person by becoming someone who’s obviously sexually interested and romantically interested in Lily. His flirting and bragging and brash pursuit of his romantic desires is contrasted with Snape’s quietly heroic love and adoration, and the latter is what Joanne ultimately uplifts as brave and noble and worth pedestalizing.

Remus and Tonks are in the same position - he actively avoids her, she must pursue him, and they only get together because she essentially begs him for it and argues him down. Vernon and Petunia appear to be relative equals, but Petunia still makes a number of decisions that dominate affairs on Privet Drive and Vernon lets her do what she likes and never expresses any desire for her in ways that Harry registers. We know nothing about Alice and Frank, or Lucius and Narcissa, or the Lestranges. And even as Merope is badly badly badly treated by the narrative, her power over Tom Sr. is the most important aspect of their relationship.

This shows a remarkable nervousness around male attention period, even in the abstract, even from “good” characters. She can’t write a man who’s good and heroic and also openly and frequently desires women. She seems kind of incapable of it. Harry’s infamous Chest Monster is an outgrowth of this - she writes his lust for Ginny and his interest in her like something he doesn’t understand, can’t understand, because she doesn’t understand it and (possibly) because her trauma from her domestic abuse prevents her from examining how she feels.

So we get people like Harry (nominally interested in women, is frequently documented staring at Draco or Sirius or Bill) or Lupin (interest in women only confirmed in an interview but never in the text, closest relationship is to a man, marries a queercoded shapeshifter who is a blood relative of that man after his traumatic death) or Bill (canonically GNC by Wizard standards to a degree that makes Molly uncomfortable, romances Fleur entirely off the page until they’re very seriously involved). We get Dumbledore’s queercoding (canon, per author) and Sirius’s queercoding (ambiguous). We get men who are deeply psychosexually fixated on another man to a point of utter devotion (Quirrell and BCJR on Voldemort) while their female counterpart (Bellatrix) is a canon sexual partner of the guy they’re all obsessed with who talks and behaves the same way.

And this really only becomes remarkable when you notice how it compares to other middle-grade and YA fiction.

Daine and Numair (Tamora Pierce’s The Immortals) are the central romantic couple in a series of books with HP’s target audience, and both of them are problematically horny for one another. Rachel Berenson and Tobias (K.A. Applegate’s Animorphs) have long passages of age-appropriate text describing their attraction and desire across multiple books, even though their romance is less important to the plot than the romances in HP. Talia and Dirk (Mercedes Lackey’s Queen’s Own) date and have sex with other people before getting together while both desiring each other, and their appearances as older adults in later books show they’re comfortable with physical intimacy and flirting. There’s more examples that I can think of, but the point stands - Rowling’s male characters are unusually terrified of being horny for members of the opposite sex, and so it’s not surprising that many fans look at that and go “oh so you’re queer and closeted”.

[bigbeanbear]

I don’t really understand how some people can interpret Charlie and Vaggie’s relationship as “sisters” or “uninteresting” if they have finished Hazbin Hotel Season 1 completely, because Chaggie’s love languages (both mutual and unique ones) are so obvious.

Their mutual love language is obviously “Physical Touch”. From the start, their hands are on each other constantly. Sure, they are not a PDA couple like Moxxie and Millie, who like to passionately tongue kiss in public, but they LOVE holding hands to support each other. Plus a lot of small gestures like touches on face, shoulder and thigh, just come very naturally to them like an old married couple. I think they enjoy their more intimate moments in private, as Charlie kisses Vaggie on the lost eye in their bedroom, or they deep kiss in an empty hallway.

When it comes to the unique ones, Charlie’s giving love language to Vaggie is “Gifts”. Even when she rants about Vaggie hiding big secret from her to Alastor all the way to Cannibal Town, as soon as they are in Rosie’s emporium, Charlie lands her eyes on the souvenir section and immediately picks up that keychain doll that somehow resembles a chaggie love child for Vaggie. Also, I think it’s possible that the red bow and eye patch that Vaggie wears all the time were gifted by Charlie too, considering how the red theme symbolizes Charlie, especially in the pilot, these things are the only red parts on Vaggie contrasting her own grey/white color theme. Giving gifts showing how much Charlie loves Vaggie makes sense, she’s super rich as the Princess, and Vaggie owned nothing when she was left in Hell. So I definitely think Vaggie appreciates and cherishes all the small gifts from Charlie.

On Vaggie’s side, her unique giving love language to Charlie is “Act of Service”. She manages the hotel for Charlie, supports Charlie’s dream no matter what, and swears to protect Charlie with her life. It also makes sense, considering Vaggie had been a faithful soldier for years, being in service for the person she loves most just comes naturally from her. Again, Vaggie had nothing when she was left to die, so she devotes her whole body to Charlie. I can see that it’s kind of unhealthy to Vaggie’s own psyche, since she sees no value in her own being and feels worthless if she cannot be useful to Charlie, but I think it is something the show might explore in the future. Charlie seems to enjoy receiving service from Vaggie too, she appreciates how much Vaggie’s done for her, and considers them as a team with herself leading and Vaggie executing. Vaggie is very good at materializing Charlie’s plans too. I don’t see anyone analyzing this, but Vaggie’s persuasion of Carmilla is pretty well done that efficiently gets to the weakest spot of Carmilla. Vaggie is the one that acts.

Chaggie is not the perfect sapphic couple, but what makes them kind of outstanding is them being a deeply-in-love stable couple beyond the initial crush and honeymoon phase. I like having such representation like them.

Btw, the script writer of episode 3 and 7 highlighting Chaggie’s relationship is Ariel Ladensohn, who is a lesbian in a stable relationship irl, so I have some faith that the show can do Chaggie justice in the future seasons.

[ghostofhyuck]

maybe, we're not meant to be. ⋆˚꩜。

why you two broke up. 

‧˚ʚ ───────── ₊‧꒰ა ୨ৎ ໒꒱ ‧₊ ───────── ɞ˚‧

Mark Lee ; too busy

OBVIOUSLY. Mark probably wants a stable relationship with you but he can't due to his career being his number one priority. He'll be too busy that he couldn't make time for you. He has apologized to you countless times, promising you that he'll make up to you but because you're tired of waiting around, you broke up with him. 

Huang Renjun ; falling out of love

It's a hard decision. One day, you two are madly in love with each other but then the next day, you two are strangers living under the same roof. You tried to convinced yourself that you still love Renjun but it's obvious that you two have fallen out of love. Renjun acknowledges it first, and you two ends it without any conflict. It's just not meant to be. 

Lee Jeno ; misunderstandings 

Your relationship ended with a misunderstanding. You tried to clear it up but the communication between you and Jeno isn't working. You two happened to interpret it in a different way rather than accepting what's the truth. It's no use and you tried to explain it a hundred times and so did Jeno, but it seems like both of you wanted to stick to your truths, that's why rather than fixing it, you two broke up. 

Lee Donghyuck ; suffocating relationship

Donghyuck became too much. He's high maintenance and you're just not the type to be overbearing over someone. He became clingy and reliant to you which is the thing you don't like the most. You love him but his love became suffocating to you that you felt lost in the relationship, that's why you broke up with him. 

Na Jaemin ; a huge fight

It was a huge fight that ended up hurting you two. No one wanted to apologize and no one wanted to hear the other person's side. Both of you were prideful and for once, doesn't want to give way for the other. Weeks of cooling off turned into a months of not talking, and then you two just decided from there, you two are no longer together. 

Zhong Chenle ; different perspectives in life

You thought that opposites attract. But you were wrong, you and Chenle have different thoughts about the future. Your principles never aligned and it was hard to adjust for each other. You two agreed that both of you don't see their future with each other, that's why you two broke up. It was a mutual agreement and you two decided to be just friends. 

Park Jisung ; immature love

You two are young and inexperienced. it has a lot of ups and downs, that's why it was hard to continue your relationship. You two often break up and go back together until it becomes tiring. Both of you realized that it was too early to enter a relationship, that's why you two decided to just end it completely and focus first on yourself. 

part two.