#which. she then goes on to explain the most confusing late work policy ever. already dreading this prof and it's day 1 fkjsdnfks

[thekidsarentalright]

i wish i could blow up all professors that say shit like this abt late work in their syllabi like 😭 shut up and just say if u accept it or not fkjdsnkfs

[aknosde]

Omnes Una Manet Nox

The chronologically first installment of my Reyna Swap AU, Alea Iacta Est // Reyna Avilla Ramírez-Arellano // Fluff & Angst, but minor on the angst // the night before Reyna disappears //  tw: mentions past minor character death // light swearing // 4.4k

ao3

—————

“That went well, didn’t it?” Jason asks with that familiar, absently intense energy. They’ve just descended the steps of the Senate after their monthly meeting with the consuls.

The two consuls, in their late thirties, oversee all of Camp Jupiter. Of course, the legion manages their own grounds and budget, under Jason and Reyna’s command, but the little oversight they do get is from the consuls.

Johnson was one of New Rome’s praetors, a few years back. He doesn’t care much about the legion, being from a legacy family and largely skirting his training and service, and he never ceases to make that known. Malhill is the one that always gets under Jason’s defenses. He’s good on policy, good on veterans, good on kids, everything that they could want. But he was the legion’s champion only ten years ago. A direct son of Apollo, a talented archer but an even better bender of light, a legion praetor, and he’s had his eyes on Jason’s career since day one. Reyna’s seen the way he eyes Jason whenever she and Jason are in New Rome, already pegging him for a consul position once Jason’s old enough.

“It went well, Jace,” she says. “Your mission plan is flawless, the only thing that could make them happier is if you’d go on it.” She regrets the words as soon as they’re out of her mouth.

Her remorse is tangible, visible in the line of his spine, the way he taps the place in his pocket where Ivlivs would sit if they were not inside the Pomerian Line, the subtle flick of his wrist.

Not for the first time, she thinks about Mount Othrys. Everything it took from her. Sometimes when she sleeps–not often, but enough–it plays over in her head. But something is always wrong.

She’s leading the charge, but suddenly it’s Jason next to her instead of Michelle. Or Jason and Michelle run into the throne room, but when she closes the door behind them it locks. She makes it into the throne room, slaying all of the Dracaena, but when she enters Atlas is holding Jason over his head, instead of fighting him hand to hand. On the good nights, Michelle isn’t dead when she bursts through the door, on the bad, she watches Michelle die. The one constant is Jason, gold ichor dripping down his face in a horrific mask. When she and Jason land the killing blow, together, she can always see it.

He doesn’t talk about it, of course. Not about Michelle, not about his election, not about the mountain. But she can see it weighing on him through the big things, like how he hasn’t been out of camp borders since the battle, and the small things, like how he glances up at the stars, as if one will come down and crush him any moment.

She rolls her right shoulder, feeling the ligaments shift, as if it will rid her of the thoughts, prepare her for a topic of conversation that often hits a little too close to home.

“Did you hear how Johnson pronounced my name? He’s even worse than you.” Maybe the small huff of a laugh Jason expels is worth it. “‘Miss Ramírez-Arellano,’” she continues, in a nasally imitation of the consul.

“I don’t say it that badly.”

“You say it like a white boy who didn’t know Spanish was a language until two seconds ago.”

“Ramírez-Arellano,” he says, better than consul Johnson, but she still hates hearing it. That girl is long gone, the only thing connecting her to Reyna is Hylla, and although Reyna loves her sister, she’s grateful for the distance that keeps Hylla from being a constant reminder.

“‘We were– were very, erm, dazzled, by your most recent proposition.’” She continues the impression until they are walking through the Praetorian Gate, Jason half hanging off her shoulder and giggling like they’re thirteen again.

He has a nice laugh. A friendly one. It seems to feed off of her volume, her effort, fluctuating the longer he goes. He shouts at her to stop several times, but he’s doubled over in armor, snorting, and all she wants to do is make him laugh like this forever.

It only gets worse on the steps of the Principa, when he decides a good revenge plan is to trip her. The building is dark like the rest of the legion. Two lamps, invisible under the light of day, flank the double doors, but the light is faint and barely makes its way to the stairs, washing everything in a pale yellow. She side steps his foot–his sneakers have reflective decals on them for the sake of the gods, he’s an idiot–but he’s shifted his weight so much that he ends up tripping himself.

They stumble through the doors, still chuckling, and make their way across the great hall as quickly as possible. They must have gotten a new tender for the Principa, because the lights are off like they forgot that people actually live here. Only two people, but still. The darkness makes the place unsettling, and now she’s counting on Jason to keep her occupied. A job he seems all too willing to fulfill as he runs through the next set of doors, still in full armor, clashing against the wood.

Upstairs is worse, she decides. The abandoned lounge reminds her of her childhood living room. Any moment her father could rise from one of the low couches, ready to scoop her up and throw her in her room, that crazed look in his eye.

Something clangs and she jumps.

“What the heck is this?” Jason’s whisper-shouting when she catches up with him in the hallway outside their rooms. He’s partially on the floor–hands keeping him from being face flat–and something is crinkling under his knee.

For some reason all Reyna can say is: “Did you just say ‘heck?’”

“Shut up,” he whines, and she wishes the lights were on just so she could see his ears turning red.

“Of course, farm-boy.”

He’s sitting back on his heels now, she can see the object’s dark outline as he holds it up, rustling in his hands.

“Seriously, what is this thing?” he asks, looking up at her.

“A bag with my old clothes,” she says, squinting. “I was going to see if any legionnaires need some.”

“And you have it by your door so you don’t forget,” he says, explaining for her. In the stress of running for office, of war, she forgot the ways in which they are attuned to each other. She forgot that she doesn’t have to explain and defend her every little action to him. It’s sad that it’s taken her almost two months to remember.

He sets the bag back down, nudging it into almost its exact spot, and hefts himself to his feet with a sigh. His brow furrows once he’s standing, looking out into the middle distance, but he sees the quirk of her brow and quickly explains himself, “We have that meeting with the centurions tomorrow after breakfast.”

Jason is a social person. A true extrovert. He hates being alone, working alone, and the quiet that comes with both. So what he’s really saying is that he has work left to do and wants some company. And who is she to deny him that? “Do you want to work in the main hall, office, or my room?”

He grins, clapping his hands and then raises his palms to the sky. “Bedroom, praise Fortuna.”

“Five minutes, Sparkplug,” she says, bumping her shoulder into his own as she sidesteps him into her room. His eyes follow her as she goes, like she’s his North Star, and damn him for making her heart skip a beat, because in the empty space Venus’ words always echo. She stomps them down, before her face can fall, before the hollow silence can fill the hallway, and in their place she jams a smirk. “If you’re lucky I’ll even edit your speech.”

As her door clicks behind her she can hear him groan, “I just prayed to Fortuna.”

She stands with her hands on her hips, briefly surveying her room to decide what to do first.

Being praetor has its perks, like private bath and bedrooms across the hall from her best friend and king sized beds, but it also means she is no longer in the practice of keeping her space ready for inspections. Her comforter is pulled up, but her bed isn’t made, files are scattered across her desk and on her dresser, and her wardrobe is wide open.

She decides on doing everything at once, which involves a crooked path across her room as she shucks off armor, not bothering with her armor stand, and changes out of the nice clothes she wore to meet the consuls. All the while she turns on lights, puts on sweats, makes her bed, and tucks away files.

Jason knocks on her door five minutes later, that ever punctual bastard, just as she’s zipping her hoodie over her tank top.

“Help me, Reyna,” he says, holding a typed copy of his speech out to her in both hands like some sort of trophy. “You’re my only hope.”

She snorts, snatching the pages out of his hands. “Nice reference.”

He cocks his head to the side, brow furrowed, and she bets if he were actually a wolf one of his ears would be turned as well.

“You just made a Star Wars reference,” she says, but he looks just as confused.

“What’s Star Wars?” He asks warily.

She swears to herself in Spanish, because otherwise he’ll tease her about the legion’s anti-swearing policies, collapsing dramatically back on her bed, and sighs. “It’s a movie trilogy, wolf boy.”

“Ah.”

Another thing she forgot, apparently, is how little Jason knows about basically anything outside of camp. He says he arrived when he was three, and wasn’t even allowed into the city until he was eight, which apparently means he’s never been to a movie theater.

By now he seems used to her telling him about the more innocent aspects of the mortal world, and at the very least takes his lack of knowledge in stride. If only he would watch the movies and shows she’s downloaded on his laptop for him.

When she looks up after reading his introduction he is sitting at her desk, picking at some invisible blemish while subtly putting highlighters away, and looking around her room.

“If you start cleaning I’m throwing you out.”

He grumbles to himself, but she makes out a yes ma’am somewhere in the mix, so she decides to throw him a bone.

“If you want to occupy yourself I have a speech about legion veterans you can fact check,” she says, faux casual, not that he can tell. He needs to do something before he starts picking at his nails instead of the wood.

“Sure.”

“It’s in one of the red folders.”

“Would that be the one on the floor under your desk or the one on your dresser,” he says, sounding far too cheeky.

“The one on my dresser, and stop pretending you’re better than me, asshole.”

He clutches his chest dramatically, walking to her dresser. “Better than the best? How could I be?”

“Mmmhmm,” she responds, half ignoring him in favor of his speech, aware of the ticking clock.

It’s truly impossible for him to stay awake past ten, a fact that is only proven the next time she looks up and he’s asleep at her desk, pen still in hand and a research paper opened on her laptop. No matter how often she reminds him that the regimented lights out of the legion no longer applies to them, he just can’t seem to break the habit.

“Jason.” She nudges his shoulder, extracting the pen at the same moment so he can’t smudge her speech.

His head jerks, eyes alert, but voice groggy when he says, “What’s going on?” All legionnaires wake up in a similar manner, but for some reason it only strikes her as amusing when he does it.

She hadn’t thought of what she was waking him up for, besides a need to do it, and her mind wanders to the Forum, wondering if her favorite café would still be open at this hour. She’s starving, she realizes. Their meeting with the consuls had been pushed back and they had had to skip dinner to make it.

She grins. “Are you hungry?”

“Uh, yeah. How did you know?”

“Roof s’mores?”

“Reyna,” he drags out the last syllable, fading it into a sigh. “That takes energy.”

“Okay, but–” She holds her hands out, weighing them. “Would you rather spend the energy to just walk across the hall and go to sleep, or climb up to the roof with me and roast us a couple marshmallows?”

Jason looks at her like is that a real question? which had been her intention. She folds her hands into a pleading gesture and pouts emphatically–he’s always more flexible when she acts a little silly. “Please, Jace. I got that cheap chocolate you like. I’ll even get the stuff myself, you can go straight up.”

“Fine.” He rolls his eyes and she smiles, satisfied, and already on her way out the door.

The praetorian kitchen reminds her of office break rooms on television, besides the fact that it looks perpetually unnatural, mostly due to the fact that only three people go inside–her, Jason, and the Principa tender–and it’s always pristine. The only things actually kept in there are coffee, tea, and of course: her and Jason’s secret stash of s’more supplies, buried in the back of the cabinet with the untouched bowls.

By the time she’s through the roof access door, conveniently placed to hide it from the view of anyone on the ground, Jason is already sitting by the dark spot of ash that signifies their pastime. Because, yes, they started coming up here long before either of them were elected Praetor.

He’s a dark outline against the night sky, sitting criss-crossed and looking down at the façades of the other legion buildings, and briefly she has the thought that somebody could make a painting out of this. She slides her old Camp Jupiter ID back between the lock and door jamb, willing the thought to disappear with the potential of the fire alarm going off.

She shivers as she sits next to him, nose wrinkling with the cold now that she’s fully vulnerable to the elements. Without a word Jason removes his sweatshirt and passes it to her.

“I’m already wearing one.”

“Mine is thicker, trade me.”

And because he’s Jason, she does.

It’s slightly big on her, his shoulders just a few inches broader than her own, and a forest green. On the back is a printed vine of purple flowers and a date. She recognizes it as one of the prizes of the Ludi Florae, or Games of Flora, from Floralia last year. The festival sits right between April and May, and last year’s was the grandest of all. Or so Jason says. Everyone had been anxious about Mount Othrys, and apparently all of that energy had been funnelled into the events.

Reyna herself had been busy running for praetor. All she remembers from the festival is campaigning. And Jason, running up to her looking flushed, this sweatshirt thrown over one shoulder.

“Remember when I told you that you were the best, Jace,” she says sweetly once she is safely swaddled in his hoodie. He’s right–it is thicker.

Jason grins up at her, wrapping his hands around two marshmallows. “I may recall something along those lines having been said a long, long time ago.”

“Well, I just want to inform you that I retract that statement, because this sweatshirt is ugly and the cuffs are burnt.”

The electricity that had been slowly coursing over the ridges of his fingers flares for a second, and his hands fly open as if he was handed metal straight from the forges. “Oops.” Both of the marshmallows are burnt, but his lips are turned up in a poorly concealed smirk.

“I forget you’re a heathen,” she says primly, sticking her nose in the air instead of saying any of the less wholesome options at the back of her throat.

“Does liking burnt marshmallows make me a heathen?”

She pretends to mull it over for a second, extracting the rest of their supplies. “Yes. You have to buy the next bag because you’re mean and I say so.”

She takes the burnt marshmallow regardless, sandwiching it between her own chocolate and graham crackers. Jason takes three squares of the Hershey bar he likes for absolutely no good reason, and does the same. She shakes her head. He’s the fucking all American boy who sticks with the classics even when he doesn’t know they’re the classics. She has no idea how he does it.

They don’t talk while they eat, regrettably the silence reminding her of her childhood, no matter how hard she pushes against it. She looks up at the stars, trying to forget the cold kitchen, cold house, even in hundred degree heat. It’s times like this when the ring, and the chain she wears it on, weigh heavy on her neck.

It feels like a noose right now, just as much as it feels like freedom, like power, every other second of her life. Like a sentence, compelling her to pay for her crimes, to confess to them, to wreck her world so terribly that she would lose up from down and die. A fair punishment.

“What are you thinking about,” Jason asks a while after they’ve finished. She looks at him, sitting back on his hands, looking at her, not the sky. It’s dark on the roof, but the light from the street lamps seems to center around him. It glints off his hair, visibly blond even in the night, and pours into his eyes. They’re always so blue. So blue it looks fake. But they never cease to pull Reyna in. Sometimes she swears she can see lightning arc across his irises.

He’s always asking her questions like this. Innocent and curious, no ulterior motives, no goals. He genuinely wants to know. And if she doesn’t answer, he’ll drop it, because he always does. It’s not something she’s used to, even after all these years; this place she has in his mind, if not his heart. A place of utter respect. He doesn’t question her because he knows what she is thinking, and when he doesn’t, he accepts her. Would he still, if he knew what she did to her father?

She breaks his gaze with that thought. It’s too much. “My sister,” she says instead, and it doesn’t feel right to look back. Under oath, Reyna would say that Jason is the most important person in her life. Her best friend; the person she sees every day, talks to every day, eats with and works with. He is the closest thing she has to a family here. And she– And she loves him. Maybe as a little more than a friend. But talking about her sister while looking him in the eye feels too intimate, too intense. “She would like you.”

It is something to say, simply to say something, but maybe she isn’t wrong. There is something in Jason that reminds her of the Queen Anne’s Revenge, and not in the way that haunts her nightmares and twists her sheets around her until they become bonds she can’t quite break free of. Being on Blackbeard’s crew, that’s how Reyna learned hard work, in a way she never had before. It had instilled a drive in her, to change everything, to rewrite systems, to make something so beautiful it was unrecognizable. And perhaps Jason doesn’t have that same drive, but he knows the work. He goes out of his way to do it dirty and hard and long. He refuses to take the thousands of shortcuts he’s offered. And Hylla would admire that, she thinks.

“I had a sister,” he whispers.

For a second–just a second–she’s stuck. “What?”

“I had a sister.” He picks at a loose thread on his jeans for a moment, and that’s how she knows he’s serious, because he hates ripping his jeans more than almost anything else. He’s refusing to meet her gaze. “Thalia Grace.”

He says her name soft and tender. She can imagine him, standing over a hearth, cradling the name between his palms and looking at it the same way he first looked when he was gifted Ivlivs. Big, round eyes.

“That’s really nice, Jace,” she says, because he rarely surprises her, and for once she doesn’t know what to say.

He looks up at her, smiling tightly. His eyes are sad. Is that how she looks when she thinks about Hylla?

“You can tell me about her, if you want,” Reyna says when the moment becomes two, and then three, because Jason doesn’t bring up things he doesn’t want to talk about. But Jason also has his own ideas about debt, about worthiness, and it is clear to her that he told her about his sister in exchange for Reyna talking about her own.

He smiles at her. A real smile, if small. She feels warm, and it’s not from his extra thick sweatshirt.

“I don’t remember a lot about her, but… She had black hair. So dark, like the night. And her eyes, they were amazing. Bright blue, like a perfect sky. Sometimes I can see them, in this half-memory half-dream, and they’re so strong they look like how an electric shock feels.”

“Like yours,” she whispers, and Jason hums in a way that makes it frustratingly unclear if he heard her or not. She hopes not.

“When I was little,” he continues, after another moment of staring wistfully over the Twelfth Legion, “I used to imagine she was looking for me. That one day she would find me, here, be proud of me for– I don’t know what. Love me, or something. All that stupid shit.” He trails off again, picking at his nails, but she can’t bring herself to chide him.

There are things that she knows about Jason, true as the sun rising in the east and the pull of the moon on the tides and the sound of imperial gold on whetstone. She knows that he works hard, works with the public, flushes under the compliments of people older than him because he has never had a concrete parental figure. Not even one to hate, to fear, to mourn. She knows that he never trusts praise from these people because he knows his parentage, knows they know, knows that he is connected to his father in the eyes of these people in a way he doesn’t feel himself, and never will.

Truths of Jason that are pillars in her understanding of him, that were pivotal in their relationship. But like so many supports, they were never acknowledged. Truth has no need to be stated, and she has no compellence to state that which is unnecessary. He talks of Thalia, telling Reyna that he wants his sister to want him, to find him, and to love him not because he is a son of Jupiter, but because he’s him.

She doesn’t say, I don’t care about you because you’re the son of Jupiter, I care about you because you are my best friend. And she doesn’t say, I care about you because you listen to people, because you care about them and what happens to them so instinctively that I cannot understand it. She doesn’t say, I’m proud of you, and you should be proud of yourself.

She doesn’t say those things because he knows them, because they are truths, and truths do not need to be said.

But still, something must be done.

She– She’s always been bad at the physical things. She can do a handshake, a fist bump, but she has never been a hugger, no matter that Jason is. She’s never managed a hip-check, or a shoulder pat, or ruffled his hair in any way that wasn’t rough and meant to hurt.

But that doesn’t mean she can’t try.

She goes slow, leaning over slightly, feels the cool breeze breaking on her knuckles. Gently, perhaps more gently than she has done anything in her life, she takes his hands, detangles them, presses her finger pads against the bleeding bits where he’s torn his skin away. She closes her hands around his own, cups them in her palms.

He looks up at her, tears welled on his water line but nothing has spilled, and she feels his hands move in her own, feels him latch on, like when they were young and late for assignments, running across the grounds and refusing to leave each other behind. She looks into his eyes, wide. Electrifying. Just like she knew they were.

She waits for the moment to stretch and break, like moments oft do. Her last move is to give his hands a squeeze, hopefully reassuring, and he gives her another small smile and moves to wipe his eyes with the sleeves of her sweatshirt, the one he’s still wearing.

“We should probably be going to bed,” she says, because she doesn’t have anything else to say. He laughs, wetly, but in that way everybody laughs when they’re told something they already know. It makes her smile; it’s special when he does it.

Everybody isn’t wrong, she thinks as she and Jason part ways outside their rooms, Jason Grace is special. But not because he is the son of Jupiter. He’s special because Reyna had never wanted friends, and here he is, her best. He’s special because he does things, normal things, and they make her smile. He’s special because he does everything in his power to ensure he deserves the love he receives. And gods, she thinks, does he deserve it.

She slips off her necklace and gets under her duvet cover, curling up and fiddling with the cuffs of his sweatshirt. Chunks of the polyester-wool fabric are hard and melted from undoubtedly unfortunate rendezvous with electricity. She finds one, right where his thumb would rest, and rubs it between her own thumb and index finger as she falls asleep.

When she wakes up, she’s on a school bus.

—————

Others in this series: Amicus Certus in re Incerta Cernitur

[sor-vette]

four, circus!! (index/description)

☜ three, an all-out fight club!!

☞ five, dots!!

t/w: dead bodies, mention of overdose

"This has got to be the dumbest thing I've ever seen," Yoongi thinks to himself as he blankly stares at Jimin, transferring the PPT file to the projector.

123 slides in "Reasonable arguments as to why we should date, _̵͚̾͌_̶̢̛̘̅͛̕_̶̡̧̝͗̒̋̌̚_̴̮̒̍̿̃͠ .

"Wrong PowerPoint bro," Jungkook grunts with closed eyes. No doubt the idiot had tried to stalk you throughout the night. It's been three days since Erik had officially enrolled.

Namjoon also has his eyes fixed on the projector, his expression giving nothing away.

"Resigned to death, poor bastard, as you should."

Jimin momentarily looks behind him to see why Jin had started to snort in laughter before scrambling to choose another file.

56 slides in "What do we know about Erik and what to do about it?"

"The title could be less verbose," Jin remarks, spinning his chair around the room.

"You're one to talk, literally," Jimin sneers but, there is very little malice in his voice if any. Besides Namjoon, V and Hope, who actually stuck to his word of minding his business, Yoongi didn't know anyone personally in the room. Though he sure has heard of the connections they had with you. Each weirder than the other.

Namjoon, the CEO, the one who went overboard in commitment and scared you off. Rumour was he offered marriage before the first "I like you." But that as well could be bullshit.

Hope, with the most cordial contact out of all. And also the most distant. You two had fundamentally different perceptions of how the world worked. Incompatible match, as the saying goes.

Jin. Despite the grandeur of his character, Yoongi knew very little of him. Even less as to why you left. He presumed the lack of commitment on both sides.

Jimin, the almost. For five months Yoongi had to hear nothing but coy whispers of just what good friends you two were. What good time you both had jumping back and forth from Paris and home. And then with zero explanation, you weren't. Every once in a while, he'd see the two of you in the hallway. Working hard to suffer through an exchange of pleasantries between long awkward pauses. The whispers had been effectively stomped to death, with no one the wiser as to what the hell had happened.

V, the one you hated and the one who hated you. How the two of you even met was beyond anyone's understanding. How you didn't rip each other's throat out even more so. Why he was here? God only knew.

And the last one, JK. Your trainee before Erik. The one who'd shamelessly bounced, leaving you in the dust when the enrollment came with a nary of thank you. After that, you officially joined the cleaner department and largely went missing from the public eye.

And, of course, Yoongi himself. The only official boyfriend. The one who officially broke both of your hearts.

"If all of you could please focus!" Jimin snapped, standing with a wad of paper in hand, waving it like a teacher in front of particularly annoying group of students.

"He even made notes," Namjoon whispered faintly.

"More like a manifesto," Yoongi snickered, letting his eyes wander over the sheer thickness of the file.

"Silence!" For a split second, Yoongi wanted to make a jab about a chihuahua being able to bark, but having considered his own height, he chose to be silent.

"So, let's start with basics. Erik Genyer. Joined two and a half years ago through a recruitment agent. He's 24, lived in Seattle before moving here. No known parents or siblings." Jimin recounted with ease.

"I hope you didn't look through his records," Namjoon frowned at the screen. "Because I did not authorize that."

"Does it count as looking if it's a brief glance?"

"Yes."

"And yet here you are benefitting from it." Namjoon could only breathe through his nose a tad harder.

"Why are you telling us this?" Jin interjected. "Mr CEO here could just give us his file - we'd read for ourselves."

"I will not. That's against company policy."

"And what you're doing here is completely legal and non - invasive." Jin raised his eyebrows, not phased even in the slightest that he was much below Namjoon's position.

"Silence!" Jimin yelped again at the front. "Has anyone here worked with Erik?"

"Hope definitely has," V piped up from his seat, looking as uninterested as one could. Yoongi narrowed his eyes at him. V took the piercing glare in stride, haughtily turning away.

"Well, yes but..." Jimin shuffled on the stage almost awkwardly. "He has strictly declined the invitation to our little... boy band."

"Wait does that mean he could tell _̸̢͉̦͔̣͈̱̅́́̓͊̇̂̓́̕͝ͅ_̸̨̙͚̻̬͖͉̻͔̑̓͐͜ - I mean R.D.?" Jungkook suddenly asks, eyes wide. Even Yoongi blanched at the thought. Everyone straightened in their seats. This was all fun and games until the moment you knew. Oh, you'd rip each and every one of them a new asshole. All of them could kiss goodbye to any attempt of trying to mend bridges. By that point, there wouldn't even be a river stretching underneath.

"I sincerely hope not." Jimin whispers and they sit in a moment of silence, weighing the risks.

"Heh, hope not." Jin suddenly gives a breathy laugh solely to be met by a general aura of disapproval.

"It's not funny." Namjoon scolds slightly but, Jin being Jin, openly looks him into eyes and goes -

"I know."

Amidst the banter, JK raises his hand shyly.

"I trained with him for a short while."

"And what is he like?" Jimin's eyes almost sparkled at anyone giving an actual insight.

"He must be wearing contacts or something," Yoongi mused, pushing the cap of his water bottle around the table. He knew Jimin to be attractive. No one in the entire company would shut up about it, nevertheless, something about him seemed almost supernatural.

JK shrugged in response.

"A bit rude and careless but talented. He finished training early."

"Did it seem like he was particularly going after her?" Namjoon interrogated further. There was a deep scowl of resentment on his face.

"Uhh, no. I think he was interested in the cleaner department in general. Apparently, he spent most of his orientation there."

"He also spent a month in surveillance. Did you speak with him...V?" If V was surprised by Jimin addressing him personally, he didn't show it as he continued to inspect his nails.

"Didn't even know he was there."

"Why did he stay so long in the cleaner department?" Yoongi asked as he ran over the information on the screen. Besides the already mentioned month in surveillance and a week in networking and relations, this Erik hadn't even tried to apply anywhere else.

"Poor communication skills. I had to throw him out. That's why he was only there a week." Jin explained.

"So you spoke to him?"

"Well, no, Irina," he was interrupted by a hollow thud. Without prompt V had dropped his steel thermos onto the desk, tea splattering everywhere and staining JK's jacket in the process. Both of them fumbled to clean it up with anything they could. V dabbed the desk harshly, the wood creeking at every aggressive wipe. Yoongi saw Jin looking sideways, the same confused expression echoed on his face.

"Well, as I was saying, Irina, R.D.'s friend, I'm sure you're familiar, came to me, said he was causing trouble and asked to refer him."

"And you sent him to R.D.?"

Jin gave a deeply suffering sigh.

"No, I did not send him. I referred him to general management and they gave him to the cleaners ."

"Ok, I get all of this. But what are we supposed to do about him?" Namjoon interrupted, jaw set in a tight grip.

Jimin fell silent at the front of the room.

"Yeah, this was the main question." Yoongi thought bitterly.

It was all a question of ethics, wasn't it? JK could pretend all he wanted to be above it all, to be respectful but then he trailed secret circles around you. Whether from guilt or perhaps a sense of entitlement. Yoongi didn't know or really care. Nevertheless the kid clearly had a hard time differentiating between what he said and what he did. Yoongi was however surprised to see Namjoon be so eager. He quite fancied making himself bald from worrying about the nature of evil. Just how easy it was to hide it behind big aspirations of providing aid. But it seemed as of late all of that was tossed aside.

Jimin was the one who orchestrated this in the first place, and so naturally, everyone looked at him for guidance. He was still shuffling around, nervously fiddling the blue pen.

"Well, first of all, I think we should talk more to R.D." A huff passed around the room.

"Talk to her?" V asked sceptically, mouth set in a straight line and heavy wrinkles carved between brows.

"Do you have any idea how difficult that would be?"

"Certainly it would be for you," Yoongi snarled, earning a harsh glare.

"Listen, at the end of the day, it's not really about us trying to force her into something. It's just to make sure... she's living a safe life. Well, the safest that's possible." Jimin said with enough sincerity to trigger certain insecurities within Yoongi and by the look of it also Namjoon.

It was no secret that between the seven, they were the most possessive over you. Both having the wrong idea that you were theirs. Which is why you left and why you probably were so caught up in Jimin. The purity and sheer selflessness of his sentiments acted like a punch to the gut. The genuine care that he reflected like a sun made the raw wound in Yoongi's chest seep even more. To be loved like that would be a dream come true. Yoongi shifted his attention to the laminated floor.

"We talk to her, find out what her life is like, keep a close eye on what Erik does. Talk to other cleaners about him, and once we find out, she's happy. That's. The. End. Of. That." There was no uncertainty. Jimin was dead serious.

The meeting was adjourned, quite amicably actually, but Yoongi knew that the rest of them had ulterior motives and plans. He had them too.

Jin and JK were no threat. Both were too uncertain of what to do with you.

Jimin had some deep-seated self esteem issues. Despite his 123 slide presentation, the way he spoke made it clear. That's probably why the abrupt parting, Yoongi mused. Both of you most likely shared the same anxiety about not being good enough for the other.

V was just V.

Namjoon was the only one Yoongi was truly worried about. Even from looking at his back, walking headstrong up the stairs, Yoongi could see how stubborn Namjoon was. In a way, it was like looking in a mirror. The possessiveness, the mulish mindset. They'd saw you, all of you and had decided that this was it. Yes, Namjoon would certainly be the toughest rival. However, Yoongi was very good at playing the long game. Especially if he wanted something so bad it felt like his thorax slowly being ripped out.

All that was left was Hope. But he wasn't even a viable player. After all, he hadn't even shown up.

***

"Why the fuck is he so heavy?" Erik grunted, swaying left and right and holding onto his dear life to the bagged pair of legs.

"Rigor mortis...set in," you huffed in answer, from the upfront of the body. "At least he wasn't rotting already. That's just nasty. 1, 2, 3."

Both of you lift the body into the van and let the poor bastard drop with a soft thud. Sweat pooled underneath your white hazmat suit with plastic glasses digging straight into your brain. You banged hard against the "EMT" van, and it drove away, carrying Dr. Martin Leyster to the morgue.

Should the neighbours see anything, it was a sad story of a depressed psychiatrist accidentally overdosing on his own meds. The evidence of him manipulating his most vulnerable patients into bankruptcy erased in you any stray feelings of sympathy though.

"You have the peroxide?" You rifled through the cleanup bag, but instead of answering, Erik began to actively point somewhere behind your back. A cold chill ran up your spine as you realize someone has been watching you stuff the body in the trunk. It quickly dissipates when you see a familiar smile.

"Hard at work, I see," Hope whistled, bounding towards you more like a kid on a school trip, rather than what the reality was.

"May I borrow your mentor for a bit?" He asked politely, still smiling up at Erik. There was no warmth in his expression.

"You are after all now an official member of the cleaner crew. Surely you can handle this on your own."

Erik looks at you for a moment before giving a loud sigh and trudging back to Leyster's office, the white toolbox angrily swishing back and forth in his hand.

Without hesitation, you remove the glasses from your head, revelling in the ease of pressure. Hope had stopped smiling altogether, looking quite pensive.

"What brings you here?" You ask lightly. To see him here is not worrying per se, but certainly interesting. He gives a quick shrug.

"Nothing much. Wanted to see how you were doing after that runt's little stunt." You only laugh at the shallow animosity. Erik's talent to drive people out of their patience was truly remarkable.

"I'm doing fine. You know... working. What about you?"

"I've been working as well."

You both fall silent.

"You ever thought about leaving the BH?" He suddenly asked, and you quirk a brow at the question.

"Not particularly. Have you?" Hope focuses a blank gaze at the grey walls of the multi-story apartment complex.

"A little bit. Last few days especially." You stand in muted shock. Hope was the last person you thought would quit. He was, without doubt, the most devoted, the most passionate out of all the hundreds of employees. He lived for the cause, he himself said so. And yet now he stood uncertain in front of you. Not really the bright and friendly Hope everyone knew, not really the strict and somewhat terrifying training teacher. He was just...quiet. It was an upsetting scene.

"Do you want to go for a drink or a lunch, maybe?" You offer, reaching for the zipper of the white suit. Yes, Erik could handle this on his own. He was a big boy. Hope hastily placed his hand atop of yours, pausing the movement. Even through the fabric, it radiated warmth. No wonder people called him sun. He frowned at the conjoined hands, lightly stroking his thumb over your knuckles before lighting up like a Christmas tree.

"No, no. I don't want to burden you with my problems." You didn't believe his smile for a second.

"Well, I won't steal you away for much longer, the pup might get anxious." He turned around, by the looks of ready to sprint off.

"Hey, wait!" He paused, not looking back.

"Do you why JK has been stalking me?"

"He has?"

He had. The first time you noticed a shifting figure in the background, you wrote it off to the combination of hangover and exhaustion. The second time he'd run off into the night faster than you could catch up. The third time you nearly flung yourself off the roof when seeing a pair of doe eyes staring back at you from an empty apartment building.

"There isn't like an alliance going around between some of my... acquaintances?" Truth be told, you found the very idea ridiculous, but it had wormed its ugly way into your brain and was now near impossible to get out. JK, Jimin, Yoongi and Namjoon wouldn't even get along with each other. Even though those four were most likely to meddle in your business. However, if looking realistically, it was probably just your paranoia taking an intensive round. Seeing suspicious cars, watchful eyes and snooping noses where there were none. Hope threw you a sardonic smile.

"That would just be stupid."

(a/n)

In this story people have their names and codenames and will be often used interchangeably. It all depends whether in the story the POV character knows the names of others or not.

[ghostofbambifanfiction]

I found a piece of fic that I wrote ages ago and decided never to post and miraculously did not delete! Which is rare for me! I delete too much! I think it’s pretty crap but I promised an anon a while ago that if I found something like this I’d share it (and apologies if there are errors this is a completely unedited first draft of something that I never finished).

Lily Evans is thirteen-years-old when her mother sits her down and explains that her body is about to "undergo some changes."

Her active participation in such a conversation is not how Lily pictured kicking off the summer holidays, but after two years at a boarding school that keeps her apart from her family from September 'til July, her mum is chomping at the bit to delve right into the Talk, lest her daughter learn about menstruation elsewhere—or god forbid, wake up covered in blood one morning and assume that she is shortly about to die.

Of course, Lily knows what to expect from her period. She can read, for one thing, and has numerous female friends. Beatrice got her first ever period at the start of second year, and on the train to school, of all places. Lily will be fine if left to her own devices, but her mother is so excited to talk about Puberty and Buying Bras and Now You're Becoming a Woman, and Lily doesn't have the heart to tell her that she's already quite clued in, thank you very much. She doesn't think she could live with inflicting such disappointment.

There's even a shoebox of props to hand, for Grace Evans is a nurse, and she wants her daughters to have all the information that she was denied at school.

Menstruation education station, she calls it.

"Tampons," her mother tells her, slapping the tiny, lipstick shaped contraption down on the kitchen table like she's preparing to place it as a wager in a high-stakes poker game. Her hand returns to the box and draws out yet another item. "Or pads. They're your two main choices. I'll give you a good supply of both before you go back, just in case, unless—do they have some other method, at Hogwarts? Some sort of magic potion? It's a very difficult subject to research, in my position."

Lily's father walks into the room—newspaper in hand, lips pursed as if preparing to whistle—catches sight of them both, then turns and walks right out again.

"What's wrong with Dad?" says Lily to her mother.

"Men are afraid of menstruation, sweetheart," Grace tells her, with a baleful glance at the door through which her husband has just exited, "because they're weak and silly, and can't be bothered to learn."

"Oh," Lily says, then lets out a laugh. "I suppose I won't ask Professor Slughorn how witches deal with periods."

"Heavens, no, he'll faint dead away."

Lily does not add that it would be rather funny to watch Slughorn faint to get out of an awkward conversation about the miracles of puberty. She doubts that he would feel comfortable talking to the boys about such a thing, let alone a member of the opposite sex.

Puberty is so much easier for boys, she reflects, and that's dead unfair. She may be but a girl and ignorant to the inner workings of the male body, but the only visible change she ever noticed in any of the boys in her year—specifically, in her house—was a sudden onslaught of squeaky voices. To make things more unfair, that phase didn't even last very long, except for poor Peter Pettigrew, who seems to be a squeaker by default.

Now she has to deal with people like Potter—to pick a name completely at random—acting like puffed-up, macho twits because their voices have finally broken.  

"I don't know what witches do normally," she says, "but I can always ask Madam Pomfrey. She's the matron at school. My friend Beatrice started hers last year but she's Muggle-born too, so she never thought to ask. Her mum just sends her pads."

"Make sure you do," says her mum, her tone almost warning. "I can send you whatever you need, but it'll be easier for you if there's some magical method you can access, especially for the cramps." She pauses, looking thoughtful. "And the mood swings. And the sore boobs—" Her eyes light up. "—which reminds me..."

Lily groans as Grace delves into the box again and extracts a small measuring tape, such as a tailor might use.

"I don't have boobs to measure," she reminds her mother, clasping both hands to her chest.

"Yet," says Grace, brandishing the rolled-up tape like a particularly tempting treat. "You don't have boobs to measure yet, but that doesn't mean you'll never have boobs." She nods down at her own chest. "I was your classic late bloomer—not so much as an insect bite until I was sixteen, then I ballooned out. Same with your sister. In any case, you've got at least enough to fill an A-cup, and you need to start wearing bras."

"I don't need a bra."

"Well, you're getting one. As soon as I've got you measured up, I'll take you to M&S and get you sorted."

"What else have you got in there?" says Lily, eyeing the battered blue box with a wary eye while her mother unfurls the tape.

"Just the essentials," says Grace airily. "Some leaflets from the hospital, panty liners, condoms—"

As if her mother has cranked up the dial on an embarrassment meter that only a parent has the necessary skills to operate, Lily immediately turns as red as her own hair. "Mum!"

"I'm not saying you need to use them—"

"I'm thirteen!"

"—but it won't hurt you to know how, for future reference!"

"Mum, no," says Lily, as firmly as she can, in her best attempt to sound as if she's taking a mature line on this, "I don't have any reason to want to know how to—how to use—honestly, no." She can't pretend. Her face feels all hot, as if it has been set aflame. Even the thought of what her mother is referring to makes her feel slightly sick. "Seriously, no, I don't want to learn—"

"You don't have to take them with you in September, of course, you're still only thirteen," Grace continues, completely undaunted by her daughter's mortification, "but it seems like you were just a baby five minutes ago, sweetheart. The time goes so fast, honestly, and it won't be long before you start to experience your own sexual awakening—"

"I'm going to my room," says Lily desperately, and shoots out of her chair.

"It's really not that bad—"

"I am grounded. I am grounding myself."

"Really, Lily, I'm just trying to help." Her mother lets out a hefty sigh. "Once we've measured you for a bra, I'll show you how it works on a banana, and you'll see that it's really not that complicated."

Lily Evans decides that she will never eat a banana split again.

***

The inconvenient, unwanted, and oft warned-of sexual awakening comes to hammer down Lily's door when she is fifteen-years-old, by which time her boobs have most certainly come in.

Despite a multitude of painfully awkward conversations with her mother—who doesn't say it, but seems desperate for Lily to fancy someone, anyone, so that they can gossip about it together—on the topic, she finds herself entirely unprepared for it.

She's unprepared because it's… weird.

Lily has had crushes before—sort of—fleeting things that seemed to exist because she thought they were supposed to, rather than stemming from any particular stirrings on her part. She's a late bloomer, just like her mum, and she knows as much. Bea and Mary have both been snogged, and Lily knew that she was trailing a little behind, but she never cared. It was fine and dandy and totally normal. She might even say that she's been lucky to escape it for this long.

It doesn't happen in the way she was expecting, not that Lily had any particular expectations, but had she ever, they would not have formed along these particular lines. It wouldn't be so embarrassing, or confusing—not the how or the why or the when or the where, but the what. The what, of all things. 

The what is the thing that baffles her most, because Lily always figured that it would be some transformative, meaningful thing, like an effortlessly witty conversation with a mature intellectual—tall, dark, and a little bit older than she, a boy with soulful blue eyes and scholarly interests.

The what should not be James Potter's arse in a pair of jeans.

But it is.

The thing about the magical world at large is that the robes are basically formless—loose, large, flapping things that hide the body away and become quite annoying during hotter months—but younger witches and wizards will opt not to wear them when it isn't strictly required. Throw Hogwarts, where robes are the mandatory default, into the mix, and something as unexpectedly disarming as a structurally spectacular derriere may spend a vast amount of time being cunningly hidden.

It's the last Hogsmeade trip of fourth year—with summer looming tantalisingly ahead like a ripe apple dangling from a tree—when Lily steps out of Scrivenshaft's and finds herself perfectly positioned to spy James Potter's denim-clad backside as he walks past with his mates.

Her eyes flick over his form as she scans the general area, then Lily finds her gaze dragged abruptly back, as if she's snagged her sleeve on a nail whilst passing through a doorway.

And now she's staring.

At an arse.

At James Potter's arse, which is the worst of it. If Lily has just discovered that she is, in fact, a person with a thing for bums, James Potter's bum—a neat, compact, beautifully fashioned marvel that looks like a peach in those bloody jeans (what monster let him go out in public wearing those things?)—should not have been the catalyst for this discovery, because James Potter is an immature sod, a walking headache, and a bloody annoying git. He and his gang of mates are childish boors, and Lily considers herself to be quite above their general tomfoolery.

She doesn't want to stare, but her eyes won't cooperate.

She likes it, and as she's quite certain that she doesn't much like James Potter, that makes even less sense than the school’s policy on using quills in a world where ballpoint pens exist. Would that she could deny it to herself… but Lily is not deluded. She can recognise the pleasure she's deriving for exactly what it is.

And that is just… not acceptable.

And how dare he, really?

"James Potter," she says hotly, finding herself suddenly and inexplicably compelled to acknowledge his existence, point him out, say his name, anything, "is a complete and utter toerag."

"What?" says Beatrice, who has been counting coins in the palm of her hand.

"Potter is a toerag," Lily repeats, even as she's telling herself to stop, shut up, why are you letting these words come out of your mouth? "I can't believe McGonagall even let him come here after the prank he pulled the other day."

"He got a bunch of detentions," says Mary, eyeing Lily curiously.

"Isn't that enough?" seconds Bea. 

"Why are you so angry?" Mary adds. "What's he done to you?"

"Nothing, he's just an arse." 

That's an unfortunate choice of words, Lily thinks, colouring nicely.

"Right, but he's always an arse," Mary presses on. "Why are you so angry about it now?"

"Nothing," Lily repeats, "but he just walked by and it reminded me that he's been pissing me off lately."

"If you say so, I suppose," says Mary, looking nonplussed, but a giggling Beatrice sticks her free hand in the air, waving as if to signal a rescue ship.

"Oi, Potter!" she bellows.

Several heads, including James Potter's, turn in their direction.

"Potter!" Beatrice repeats, waving him over.

Lily's heart leaps into her throat, gets stuck, and slides sheepishly back down to her chest.

"What are you doing?" she hisses, taking a swipe at Beatrice's arm.

"If you're pissed off with him, you should tell him to his face," says Bea, dodging out of Lily's grasp to beckon Potter over. "More fun for me that way."

Mary snorts, while Beatrice grins like a cunning fox. Meanwhile, Potter has left his friends to wait for him outside the Three Broomsticks, and is sauntering over with his hands in his pockets.

"I hate you," Lily mutters to Bea.

"That's right," says Bea, smiling broadly, "get it all out of your system."

"I don't want to talk to Potter."

"Then you shouldn't have been mouthing off abo—hey!" says Beatrice brightly, as Potter draws level with their group. "Look who it is!"

"Hello to my adoring fans," he says, with a grin that would be charming, if only it were spread across any other face, and widens considerably when his gaze lands on Lily. "Alright, Evans?"

Potter has been doing this lately, offering bog-standard greetings to the masses, then following them up with, "Alright, Evans?" as if he’s been compelled to single Lily out.

Knowing him, there's some wildly nefarious reason behind it, and Lily persists in believing that despite Bea's insane theories pertaining to thoughts and feelings of the romantic persuasion.

"It means a lot that you don't consider me a fan," she says coolly.

"It's not my place to tell all your secrets," Potter replies. "What did you buy?"

She frowns. "What?"

"In Scrivenshaft's." He nods to the shop behind her. "What did you buy?"

"That's none of your business."

"Oh, right, because Scrivenshaft's is known for selling top secret wizarding spy equipment, and the world as we know it will end if you tell me," he says, sending her a flat look. "Why'd you call me over?"

Lily has to force the corners of her mouth to stay determinedly downturned, rather than laugh, which she really wants to do. "I didn't call you over."

"Didn't you?"

"No, you idiot. Beatrice did."

"That's strange. Could've sworn it was you." His eyes haven't budged from her face for a second, and Lily is beginning to feel irrationally fearful that he's seen her ogling his arse. "Why'd Beatrice call me over?"

"Because Lily wants to talk to you," says Beatrice.

Lily wants to die on the spot.

[aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaoldretired]

I would like to hear about the punny girl

hnng thank you

i present you: kanon fukuda the ultimate filmmaker. do you get the pun?

kanon is my best girl. her backstory isn’t anything too like. angsty bc i know some can be angsty but her’s isn’t supposed to be about that. she grew up as the only child in a middle-class family with two parents who were confused by her hobbies and love of film but very supportive. also they grow to feel bad they gave her the name kanon bc all the jokes but it’s ok she kinda likes it kinda hates it. she actually got into filmmaking because she had an older cousin who acted as a sibling figure, and they would make home movies together. kanon would throw herself into her movies and kept producing and producing as fast as she could. eventually, she started entering them in both national and international youth film competitions and began winning titles. it’s at this point when she was scouted and started making professional short films. she had just finished working on her first feature-length film, which early reviews were calling her magnum opus to date, and exciting work from an up-and-coming filmmaker. 

the reason why kanon chose to attend hopes peak is that her older cousin died in the tragedy. she doesn’t know they died. she just knows they went to school and never came back, and the family keeps it hush-hush. besides the promise of success, she mostly wants to find out what happened - she assumes it was a bad accent or suicide but oop! additionally, kanon chose to attend because her feature film is to release to the public soon, and she wants to be occupied during this time to take her mind off of the reception. 

while kanon’s family backstory is pretty angst-free besides the missing cousin, kanon is still suffering p bad. she is diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety. but! (unlike p much every other character in the series, it seems) she treats her mental health through medication and regular therapy (until she’s trapped at school). she’s very open about her struggle with mental health and enthusiastically tries to get better. 

as a director, she specializes in dark comedy, parody, and farce. she likes irony, and can always see the twisted humor in a situation, no matter how dire. this issss about where you might start seeing her fatal flaw. 

kanon thoroughly subscribes to the idea that comedy is born from tragedy, and that the rawest types of humor come from pain. she is known for going off her medication during the production of films and making a martyr of herself, taking pride in her horrible sleeping and eating schedule for her art. basically, every film student i’ve ever met. 

she enters the killing game very upbeat. when she finds out the truth, she is very defiant, confident in their ability to escape. she is constantly cracking jokes about the situation and observational humor, and her ideas during the trial are generally very….original. she is known for monologuing and speaking in paragraphs. during trials, she creates elaborate example situations that might seem like they’re unrelated or inconsequential but morally always tie back in. queen of the non-sequitur. early game free time events/island mode would mostly be about movies and genre, with the occasional mention about working hard to be healthy again.

she’s pretty friendly with monokume, subscribing to the philosophy that if you’re kind to him, he’s more likely to do what she wants. she’s often the student who will ask monokume clarifying questions on school policy or for access to supplies. for example, i like to think she asks monokume to provide another student needed insulin. when monokume initially refuses, she goes into a tangential scenario where if this student dies, then isn’t monokume the culprit? he’d have to be executed for harming a student. and what’s this? monokume has been harmed? the person who harmed monokume must be punished. and go round and round in a helpless circle while the students figure out a way to escape. at this point, monokume provides the insulin.

 however, after watching the first punishment, she begins to be filled with a deep despair. she is already dispositioned for despair, given her incredibly unhealthy habits regarding her mental illness and success, but she tries to resist. she remains upbeat, but after the first punishment, her dialogue takes a sharp turn towards dark comedy and macabre. from this moment on, she’s also a lot more skittish and easily startled.

after the first trial on, she will always make a point for thanking the group for being a good group of friends and making the time in hopes peak as tolerable as possible, in case they end up choosing the wrong blackened and all get executed. at the third trial, she follows this speech up with, “but if i die, you are all fucking idiots, way to let me down.”

most of her dialogue is biting, and despite the horror and despair she is filled with after every murder and execution, she can still find ways to crack a twisted joke. occasionally she will have a moment of clarity where she is candid about her feelings. 

- one free time event could feature her talking about her feelings towards actions speak louder than words. her example is couples who say they’re dark and twisted like bonnie and clyde, but really they’re two losers into bdsm. if they’d just say they’re two losers into bdsm, she could respect them. she then explains how the statements of personality are more to convince themselves than anyone else. towards the end, she laughs to herself and explains how she totally screwed herself over because Kanon prides herself in her sense of humor, but if she ever says it aloud, she’s not funny.

- another free time event could be explaining her relationship with death. she’s not afraid of it, but she wants to die on her own terms. she admits to never seeing herself growing old, and that’s she’ll probably be a part of the 27 club if she keeps on the path of a celebrity. 

her condition keeps devolving as the game progresses. more dialogue can include wondering why she is still alive and trying to cover it as a twisted sick joke. she stays upbeat, but as time goes on, you can see she’s slowly getting tired and beaten down. she’s also starting to take pride in her unhealthy lack of sleep, eating, or bathing. 

it’s after the third execution does she actually show a true moment of despair. after the execution and the classmates are silently riding in the elevator back, she announces how she does not plan to live through the game. she does not see any possible reality where she will escape hopes peak. she does, however, make it clear that she will be dying on her own terms. she gives her blessing to the group that anyone can try to kill her, but be aware she won’t go down without a fight.

her free time events are filled with more raw emotion and despair with tinges of humor instead of humor with tinges of despair. 

- she elaborates on what she meant in the elevator as to die by her own hands. she does not want to kill a classmate because she knows her disposition could never handle the trial, let alone the killing part. but she also doesn’t want to die by her classmates without a fight. and she doesn’t want to commit suicide because she has too much pride while also being too much of a coward…

- she explains how this story could be a great script, really, if it weren’t all so real. this generation’s battle royale. she actually gives kudos to the design of each punishment and admits they are inspiring if she ever wanted to do a genre flip and become a psych thriller director.

- just. asking why she isn’t dead yet. why not her? why not?

i want her to be a pretty late game survivor because i think it’s impactful to show her fall into despair, which she uses to harm herself instead of others mostly. it is also after chapter three you truly get to see her martyrdom come out. she has slowly shifted from less of a friend and more towards an antagonistic role, not because she’s a threat, but because she’s literally so full of despair.

anyways. you see her talking to monokume while the rest of the group arrives. before the fourth trial, she does her normal thanking of her classmates and pulls the protag over to thank them personally for the good times and making it the best they could. the protagonist is suspicious of this behavior and wonders if she might be guilty, but the evidence points she is not. the class correctly votes for the blackened. while everyone is waiting for monokume to go forward in the punishment, they’re confused by the delay. monokume is fuming, and it’s revealed. there’s a miscount. one student purposefully chose not to vote, which is a punishable act. the student? kanon.

she always insisted she would die, and she would die on her own terms. she had created a narrative in her head where if she dies a martyr, she will always be remembered lovingly by her fans before any unfortunate career downfall. the director ahead of her time, and gone too soon. she became obsessed with this narrative around chapter three, and the third execution sealed the deal. by the time of the trial, she figured out she could die a death fit for a star while also dying on her terms if she willingly triggered a punishment. 

ive kind offfffff figured out what her last speech could be before her punishment? she explains how “comedy is derived from pain, right? and if i intend on being the greatest director of my time, i need to go through the most suffering. i was born to die a martyr, i was just hoping one of you would do the hard part. but since no one has the balls, you can all suffer with me. see you in hell shitheads” she then asks monokume if her cousin who attended here, were they killed or executed? (was it kill or be killed?) monokume thinks for a second and responds. she smiles and says, that’s all she needed to know. gives a wink to the protag and flicks everyone off as the collar yoinks her off to her death. 

punishment would probably be something with “light camera action” or “ready steady shoot” and be a LITERAL pun on the camera shoot. bc, she’s shot. alternatively, if i were to decide that instead of a generic dead body in the tragedy, she could be related to an actual main game character pref someone who was executed, she could have to play that part in the execution and die the same death, but this time with like. monokume film crew everywhere and actual monokume in the director’s chair with a beret. either is a fun idea.

____________________________________________________________________

i’m a film major, and her character is heavily based on the kind of students and filmmakers i see and work with. there really are people like this who believe suffering for art truly makes them better than others and will purposefully put themselves through psychological torment. additionally, i wanted to see a more realistic portrayal of mental illness and show a character who (at one point at least) treats and is trying to maintain health. in the end, kanon is a narcist who lets her ego get in the way of her wellbeing and success. 

also, kanon’s outfit is so stupid she has strawberry blond hair in a bob with like a widow’s peak, silvery-blue eyes, and wears a big flowy short sleeved button-up shirt, and olive-colored shorts. she has a big pair of aviators she wears tucked in the collar of her shirt, statement earrings, a pop watch, and lots of rings. and she is def not straight ut it’s not like she’s pursuing romance she’s pursuing death

[chiseler]

Psychiatric Filmmaking 1: UCLA & the Aesthetic-Industrial Dimension

Is there such a thing as a ‘psychiatric cinema’?

There is certainly a psychotic one, but ‘psychotic’ is not an official diagnosis—and even if it was, we know the word through crimson pulpy images and not textbooks. Norman Bates’ shower is more famous than Freud’s Wolf Man; the image of Lon Chaney Jr’s makeup comes to mind whenever Sergei Pankejeff is mentioned—who is usually called the ‘Wolf Man’ and not Sergei Pankejeff. Common parlance leads diagnostic recognition, which also draws from it. And despite its long and strange relationship with the Scientific, psychiatry is primarily an aesthetic study. Freud’s most revolutionary conclusions placed it among the arts, as a continuous working hypothesis dependent on what can never be verified. Films, bestsellers, the fashion world, even military theory and economics are full of the language and romance of psychiatry. The greater the hold of the sciences of the uncertain, the more and more certain the world was forced to become. We remain stable, cautious. Trump is definitely ‘psychotic’. Stalin and Mao were psychotic, too. These three men have a close relationship with the art world.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, corresponding to the psychiatric boom in modern mass advertising, a modish filmmaking appeared which combined a cramped and stark television-style frame with an interior ‘character’ development moving along the lines of case studies and group informants who acted as both individuals and as psychic types. Who watched these little films? Experts, students, doctors, perhaps certain policy makers or financial intermediaries. The audience is small, insular, so why should the filmmakers be concerned with way the action conveys the evidence? Because there is a certain logic in photographic history which must, like psychiatry and language, ‘make sense’ according to its own properties and its own grammatical rules (editing is also a part of this complex). These interviews must not fall under the spell of their subjective madmen, so they must employ fictional techniques—framing techniques that have seeped into our brains since the first photograph was taken, maybe ever since the Renaissance. And remember that Wiene’s Caligari used a deliberately static camera, an unnerving and obsolete choice by 1920, which, combined with the painted sets, made the film consciously archaic and thus, Modernist.

Our subject here, taken from what we could call an industrial psychiatric trade cinema, comes from a period when ethnography was informed by the already ancient pleasures of Black and White and the ‘reality’ of vibrant color motion picture images. The first film, part of the ‘Psychiatric Interview Series’ franchise, is subtitled ‘Patient No. 1: Evaluation for Diagnosis.’ It was produced for the Department of Psychiatry by the UCLA Motion Picture Division of the Theatre Arts Dept in 1959. It uses two cameras with two standard positions (the establishing moments show the two participants already seating themselves, making the ‘reality’ of the examination a cut into unfilmed time). The initial camera position is over the shoulder of the ‘psychiatrist’ (?), showing the patient at a left angle, medium close. The second position is the patient only, closer medium shot (head, shoulders and chest), in three-quarter profile with a slight shadow. There is no shot-reverse-shot, which maintains the total anonymity of the physician figure, as well as his power. The audience is the third presence, watching it unfold passively. The filmmaking is entirely ‘unreal’, or rather studied documentary, and resembles a sequence from Perry Mason, emphasizing the ‘perp’ before the law, in Black and White. The sound is clear throughout, which might indicate post production clean up or a separate sync recording which was then added onto a strip to the silent film (the sync is badly off, perhaps due to the transfer to video or the youtube uploader; such carelessness seems at odds with the professional lighting and simple but deft use of cinema language used by the UCLA filmmakers).

The unnamed patient is that old city nightmare, the runaway, a graduate from all the major schools in America: reform school, Juvie Hall and jail, as well some actual prison time (under a year). She tells the talking head to her right that she’s had four pregnancies, but relates six (he corrects her, but does not seem to notice that she might be counting twins as a single ordeal, as well as confusing the living and the dead—two stillborn and two deaths right after birth). Car theft, truancy, passing bad checks, traffic violations and dope: all of these are de rigueur in a dirty little city kid, but they indicate an unbridled criminal apprenticeship if one is a servant of middle class morality (that is, if one is a psychiatrist). She speaks of the hallucinations of amphetamines, of the outlines of figures in smoke, while she chain smokes herself, the curls and eddies moving pleasantly at the side of the frame like one of Fu Manchu’s altars or Cagney waiting for his parole officer. There are several good dialogue exchanges, which seem scripted in that uncanny sense which now governs our too educated, suspicious minds:

Her: I was seeing things.

Him: What did you see?

Her: Mostly people.

What else is there to see? But she sees only their shadows (in the sequel, the interviewer has become a flat shadow darker than any shadow, his grey details consumed by pure black to differentiate him from the colorful patient who now sits on the right side of the frame). She is seventeen years old, pleasingly dykey, almost like the singer kd laing, and has had ten to fifteen rounds of shock treatment by her own request. The doctor notes her androgyny by asking her if she looks like her father, especially the hair, which is curly and short and clearly a dead giveaway. Her dad was in army, he comes and goes but her problems, like many daughters, are with her mother. And everyone has called her crazy since she was a kid:

Her: They’ve been saying it since I was little.

Him: So I guess you’re kind of used to it …

Time in Modesto State Hospital, time and bikers, time with lousy boyfriends and cigarette time, dope times, some fun times too: the kind of girl you might get arrested with, that stares too long at the cheerleaders she despises but has no trouble with hypocrisy because it is alluringly perverse. She seems drugged in conversation, or perhaps she is indifferent after a thousand interviews and this is way purely to get by. Her indifference is noted repeatedly by the doctor. She is indifferent to that, too. The even tone of his voice is matched by her own distant, even tone. Neither one pleads for a disastrous warmth; both know too much to accept the trappings of intimacy in a situation under the control of a properly conducted cinematic procedure.

The color sequel was made two years later to show the dramatically improved situation of the girl, though the interviewer remains suitably agnostic (I cannot tell whether it is same voice, or merely another example of the same detached tone, coming from this single dimensional shadow that may or may not be a different man). This film is subtitled ‘Patient No 9 Follow Up Treatment’ and is part of the same series (the change in patient number is not explained). It also consists of two shots and two cameras, similar to the first set up, but now the participants occupy the right of the frame. The room resembles a rec room, whereas the earlier room looked like the corner of a classroom; neither space seems to be a functional office. The girl is now an outpatient, dressed in a skirt with her purse on an end table and her hair slightly done. She still chain smokes and asks, as she did in the first film, if smoking is permitted half way through the interview and several cigarettes in (this may indicate that the film was reedited within the scene and not just for length or simple content). She is now married to a nice guy, still feels the allure of trouble, recounts shooting someone who menaced her kids back in the day at a drug party (not fatal), and lives healthily but not comfortably in the doldrums of ultra square Michigan, where she is in therapy at the Traverse City Asylum. She smiles and laughs more than before, shows the same cheeky grin and intelligently ironic way of commenting on her exploits.

This sequel promises redemption and can be seen as a show of triumph of psychiatric care over the institutional vices of the street. Patient 9 takes most of the credit herself, which irks the doctor— according to his practice, the nature of the addled mind demands that the patient assume responsibility, while treatment guides progress. You can’t do it by yourself. A short discussion of the future ends the clip, with more than a hint of a prophecy of recidivism and inescapable destiny creeping into the doctor’s measured tone, while unreflected life flows through the anonymous girl in her twenties, who says with a grin:

Her: I think in time I’ll be just another little old lady, just like everybody else.

Psychiatric experiments were conducted by the intelligence services with the cooperation of all the major educational institutions in North America, a fact long known to the general public via various official disclosures and pulpy films based on these revelations. The UCLA claims a number of famous alumni, in varying degrees of talent and sadism, such as Francis Ford Coppola, James Dean, Jim Morrison, and Paul Schrader—as well as at least one utter genius, Mr. Charles Burnett. Like the UCLA, the University of Chicago has some smart kids and maybe even a genius or two, but it shines brighter and darker by the hosts of Milton Freidman, Leopold and Loeb and the Bomb. The education industry does not even seek to deny its corruption these days, which shows the cheep cynicism of men who will do anything to inflate property values, collected debt-producing tuition rents, and plead for endowments from outright fascists. This is also part of the aesthetics of University-produced cinema, just as MK Ultra is a both part of real history in the Church Commission and part of its own propaganda in the fringe exposes of mind control victims and late night radio palaver. Successes need to shine brightly and darkly, while failures—and these operations are always near total failures—remain below, drab as the truth.

The outer edges inform the center, just as the rimland feeds the empire. The center is liberal humanism, which asserts its historical right over a subject whose final salvation it has undertaken and whose transformations it oversees in the heart of civil society. And it does so in the sphere of foreign policy, as well (Let us leave foreign policy at Kim Jong Un being insane and the United States being quite sane when it annihilated 75% of Pyongyang). Experts marshal testimony and documentary to prove their points, which then lead to logical conclusions and hopefully—to action, to a Responsibility to Protect. The interview is a valuable form of testimony because of the ambiguities it lays bare in the reactions of the interviewee and in the conduct of the interviewer. A good psychiatric reading takes stock of both, and goes some distance toward the holy state of observing ‘without bias’.

It would be curious to know who worked on these films. I imagine few could resist the offer— nor should they have done. Psychiatric cinema offers a trite but distilled series of plays copped from many different fields and used, not without irony, to ends so mysterious they are not even worth following up. How much were these films studied by the department? Where are they stored now? How many were simply destroyed or never even viewed? Were some of them just editing exercises for the film classes? That they have wound up on youtube as curiosities, along with military drug test footage and autopsies, indicates that this invisible school of UCLA films-as-yellow-wallpaper has now entered an abandoned Yankee territory once ruled by Brakhage and Warhol—the avant garde. But perhaps influencing agents have always arrived there from municipal areas: police procedural, psychiatry and therapeutics, the educational system, the postal service. And vice versa, which is more curious.

There is another kind of psychiatric filmmaking which loses the powerful Doctor-Father figure all together and loops back directly to Gericault, making moving portraits of subjects who grin, mug, stare blankly at the camera, comic and self consciously so, as if the lens were truly a mirror. These less polished films resemble Warhol’s screen tests and were even made at roughly the same time, in the early to mid 1960s. The camera is far more clandestine in the psychiatric films though, and while it covers the same territory of the human face that the Factory did in its louche lofts, its operation is part of a completely different history. The close-up frame common to both kinds of filmmaking is deceptive. This similarity is dissimilar, and is a product—to borrow an expression from language learning—of the association of false friends.

by Martin Billheimer

The films:

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=kVeBr51NITE

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=C92TGV-hHug&t=316s

[1] There is a curious overlap with the popularity of the Adler/Strasberg school of Method acting in the US, which claimed a Russian patrimony yet was riddled with a stagey Old World conservatism decried by Hitchcock and other Modernists.

[jouissezduprintemps]

Something to Prove, Chapter Four: Gossip

Rating: T Warnings: Swearing Words: 3014 Fandom: Naruto Summary: As Suna prepares for its first independently-held chunin exam since Gaara became kazekage, the sand siblings must make sure that everything goes off without a hitch.

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Hinata gently shifted the bag of ice she held against Naruto’s face, hesitating when he hissed through his teeth. He’d gone for help from Lady Tsunade, but he was swiftly turned away. He wouldn’t say why, and that didn’t sit well with her. The fifth hokage was a healer; his injuries were mild and shouldn’t have been a problem for her. “Stay still,” she cautioned, moving the ice nearer to his nose. Her worry was getting the best of her, and she only wanted to help. Her concern took over her usual embarrassment.

“Yeah, yeah.” Naruto grumbled, but he did as he was told. Hinata was the only person to take pity on him. As grateful as he was, he was still fuming from last night’s incident. “Damn it, the next time I see Shikamaru, I’m gonna kick is ass!”

Hinata lifted the bag of ice so she could study the bruise on his face. “Shikamaru hit you?” She couldn’t believe it. He was the last one to get involved in anything rambunctious. It just wasn’t like him. “What happened?”

“I don’t wanna talk about it.” Naruto took the ice pack from her and held it against his eye.

“Naruto…” Hinata sighed in disappointment. She could understand if he and Kiba got into a fight, or even he and Neji. But Shikamaru was the most level-headed out of the rookie nine. As much as she hated to admit it, she had a feeling that, whatever went down, this was somehow Naruto’s fault.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She took the ice pack from him and shifted it gently. I worry about you, she admitted mentally. “I need to get you some more ice.”

Three knocks in rapid succession sounded on the door to Temari’s small apartment. Even though it was almost noon, Temari had yet to spur herself to get dressed. She and Shikamaru had stayed up far too late the night before. In their defense, the pile of papers on her kitchen table held all their preparations for the chunin exam. All the numbers were run and contingency plans had been made, just like Gaara had asked. She knew that, if they’d taken care of the minute details the first day, they wouldn’t have stayed up until the early hours of the morning just to make sure it was done before she left. He seemed to have that effect on her, though. As far as she was concerned, if they met the deadline, they were in the clear.

However, this meant that she hadn’t fallen asleep until just before sunrise. Five hours was enough sleep, but she would have preferred to err closer to eight before having to spend time with the rambunctious ninja of Konoha. Reluctantly, she climbed out of bed and shuffled to the door. Rather than look through the peep hole, she opened it, surprised to see a well-groomed, bright-eyed Sakura on her doorstep. Temari stifled a yawn, covering her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Oh,” Sakura was taken by surprise. “Did I wake you?”

Temari shook her head. “It’s fine. What do you need?”

“I just wanted to apologize again for Naruto’s behavior. He can be a real ass.” She held up the basket she’d been carrying and peeled back a corner of the flower-printed cloth. “I made you some muffins.”

“Why are you apologizing for him?” Temari asked bluntly, catching her off guard. “He’s your teammate, not your son. You don’t have to do any of this.”

“I insist,” Sakura pressed, giving Temari no choice but to take the basket. When the sand ninja went to set the basket on the table, she decided that it would be alright to invite herself inside. “Someone has to. He doesn’t have family, after all.”

Caught off guard by her uninvited guest, Temari didn’t really know what to say. There wasn’t exactly a polite way to tell her to leave, especially after she went through the trouble to bring a gift that was fresh out of the oven. She may have gotten closer to Ino during her visit, but she still hadn’t had much interaction with Sakura. Before she could find the right words, Sakura had taken a seat at her kitchen table, brazenly thumbing through the documents that she and Shikamaru had written the night before.

“It looks like you’ve thought of everything,” Sakura commented.

If this is how leaf ninja showed friendship, it was completely alien to Temari. The more she visited, the bolder they seemed to get. She’d always preferred her privacy, but it seemed like Konoha had an open-door policy. To that extent, Sakura hadn’t bothered to shut the front door when she entered, creating a bizarre uncertainty about whether she was staying or leaving. “I-”

“Damn, something smells good.”

Sakura looked past Temari and saw a sleepy-eyed Shikamaru standing in a doorway, already inside the apartment. His black hair was loose, falling down to his shoulders. He was wearing the same clothes that she had seen him in the day before. Obliviously, he yawned and stretched his arms over his head. When he opened his eyes, he found himself in a deadlock with Sakura. Both their faces were expressionless, like they’d stopped being able to think for the moment. Temari looked over Sakura’s head at Shikamaru, trying to keep from panicking. Sakura was smart; she probably wouldn’t rush to any conclusions.

“Oh, my god, I’m so sorry!” The kunoichi practically flew up out of her chair.

Fuck! Temari swore before attempting damage control. “Sakura!”

“I’m so sorry!” she repeated, grabbing the knob to the front door. “I’ll just come back later!” She shut the door with more force than she intended.

Temari’s face was bright-red as she stood by the kitchen table, in complete disbelief at what just happened. Shikamaru groaned, looking skyward as if for guidance.

“Great. She’s probably on her way to see Ino right now.” He searched his person for his cigarettes, frustrated when he couldn’t find them. They had to be here somewhere…

“But-” Temari stammered, “It’s not like anything happened. We worked late, that’s all!”

Shikamaru lowered himself to the ground to look under the couch. “Tema,” he caught her off guard by abbreviating her name, “she saw me come out of your room.”

“You slept on the floor!”

“She doesn’t know that.” He sighed and scratched the back of his head. He began to retrace his steps.

“Oh, god,” Temari groaned as she sank down onto one of the kitchen chairs.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. The entire village is gonna know about this before lunch. And after I punched Naruto yesterday…”

This was exactly the type of scandal that they’d needed to avoid. She could hear it now: Suna’s princess sleeping with head of prominent Konoha clan. This could be the chance the Suna elders had been waiting for; what better proof could they have to question not only her loyalty to the village, but Gaara’s?

Shikamaru spotted his cigarettes on the kitchen counter, much to his relief. He drew one out of the pack and lit it, inhaling to steady his nerves.

“How are you not freaking out about this?!” Temari snapped, irritated by his calm demeanor. “You’re the genius, figure something out!”

Shikamaru grimaced. “You don’t need to yell. Besides, there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s up to Ino.”

The way Temari looked at him prompted him to explain.

“If Ino doesn’t believe Sakura, it stops right there. If she does… there’s no point in trying to stop it.”

“You’re telling me we’re at the mercy of Ino Yamanaka.”

“Pretty much.”

“Fuck me,” Temari rested her head on the table.

“I think that would just cause more problems,” Shikamaru remarked snidely, trying to cheer her up. He usually would never make a joke like that, but, at this point, he was desperate. “Dammit, I was kidding!” he tried to defend himself, using his arms to deflect the muffin speeding toward his face.

“It’s not funny!”

“What?” Ino cried, incredulous. “No way.”

Sakura nodded, panting too hard to articulate a response.

“But it’s Shikamaru. Shikamaru!”

“You think I’d run here if I was lying?” Sakura insisted before grabbing her friend by the wrist. She pulled Ino into the back of the flower shop, where they could talk more freely. “I’m telling you what I saw!”

“Noooo,” Ino shook her head, not able to believe her best friend. “I mean… Shikamaru!”

“I know! Why would I make this up? And I haven’t even told you that Naruto said it was Shikamaru who gave him that black eye!”

“He what?!”

“Apparently Naruto said something stupid when they were inside. He wouldn’t tell me what; he was trying to save his ass. But, whatever it was, it made Shikamaru walk up to him and punch him -bam!- right in the face!”

“No.”

“Yes!”

“Oh, my god.” Ino had never seen Shikamaru have an impulsive reaction, and she’d known him since they were kids. “Did he really?”

“Dumb as he is, I don’t think Naruto was lying. He was too confused to be angry, which is saying something. I don’t think he’d have been that way if it was anyone else, even Gaara. No one’s ever made Shikamaru that mad before.”

“If anyone could do it, it’s Naruto.” Ino crossed her arms over her apron. “I don’t know, Sakura.”

“Why would I make this up?” Sakura countered. “Starting a rumor about Shikamaru is like starting one about Shino. There would be no point!”

Ino clicked her tongue and began to think. “Temari was pretty pissed when Shikamaru didn’t show up when they got here… But then why would they invite all of us to the hot spring?”

“Cover?” Sakura suggested. “I’m serious. Yesterday’s clothes and everything.”

“But it’s Shikamaru! There’s no way Temari’d go for him! She’s got, like, three points on him, easy! And there’s no way it’s his personality.”

“We still don’t really know her that well. Maybe she’s got a type?”

“But it’s not fair! How come Shikamaru gets someone before we do?!”

The bell that hung over the door rang, signaling that a customer had either entered or left. Ino composed herself and glided back out into the shopfront, putting on her best smile. Sakura followed close behind her, still not finished with their conversation.

“Oh, hey, Choji,” Ino greeted her teammate. He didn’t seem to be very interested in the flowers, and she followed, “What’s up?”

“Hey, guys,” Choji offered them a good-natured smile. “Ino, have you seen Shikamaru? Yoshino came over this morning to see if he crashed at my place. She’s pretty pissed.”

Ino looked over at Sakura. They shared a brief glance before she turned back to Choji. “No, I haven’t.”

“He stayed the night at Temari’s!” Sakura blurted out. Her hands flew up to cover her mouth, and Ino smacked her best friend on top of her head.

“Idiot!”

“He did?” Choji asked, more surprised than anything else.

Sakura nodded, flinching away from Ino’s fist.

Choji frowned and leaned forward onto the counter, bringing his face level with Ino’s and Sakura’s. “Does anyone else know about this?”

“No,” Sakura admitted.

“Don’t say anything to anyone, okay? This doesn’t leave the three of us.”

“Why, Choji?” Ino asked.

“Really? We’re talking about the daughter of the fourth kazekage and the sister of the fifth. Shikamaru’s the advisor to the fifth hokage. How do you think people would react? Besides, until I hear it from Shikamaru himself, I can’t really know if that’s what’s going on.”

“I didn’t think about that,” Sakura admitted.

“Just swear to me that you two won’t say anything.”

Ino and Sakura nodded in unison.

“Oh, and Ino,” Choji added, “do me a favor. If Yashino or Shikaku stops by, and they ask, tell ‘em Shikamaru fell asleep outside again.”

Shikamaru was on his third cigarette in a row. Once Temari had decided to stop using their breakfast as projectiles, things had calmed down to an uneasy silence. There was no way to tell what Sakura and Ino would do. Even though he considered Ino one of his closest friends, she had an urge to gossip, and he wasn’t sure if that side of her would win.

Troublesome women aside, he’d been seen by too many people the day before to just walk out into broad daylight wearing yesterday’s clothes. He was probably in enough trouble for not coming home last night; he didn’t need to deal with his mother’s rage or his father’s assumptions.

Out of a mutual desire for space, Temari had gone to take a shower, granting them both several minutes of silence. They needed to think.

He’d groomed himself as best he could by using the small, living room mirror, managing to at least pull his hair back up. His clothes smelled like the onsen and cigarette smoke, but there was nothing he could do about that one.

It was late enough in the afternoon that, if he was lucky, he might be able to slip out unnoticed. If Gaara and Kankuro were where they were supposed to be, he could make it onto the street. Getting home, well, that was another challenge.

Best case scenario, he would have to avoid being seen by Ino or Sakura, or anyone else who he’d been with the day before. Then, he would have to make it to his room without either of his parents noticing. A quick change of clothes, and maybe he could save his ass.

But in the worst case scenario, Sakura and Ino could have gossiped to most of the village by now.

He flicked his ashes into the tray he held in his left hand. How did this turn into such a drag? They’d gotten ahead in their work, and all it did was bite them.

He heard Temari approaching before he saw her. She was dressed in her usual clothing, but her wet hair hung down over her shoulders, which she had draped in a towel to keep her clothes dry. She stood beside him at the window, following his gaze. Wordlessly, she picked up the pack of cigarettes from the windowsill and pulled one out. In a brazen move, she took the liberty of pulling his lighter from his pocket and flicked it open.

Shikamaru looked at her in utter surprise. She set Asuma’s lighter down beside his pack and took the cigarette between her fingers, removing it from her mouth. In a cloud of smoke, she challenged, “I don’t want to hear it.”

Fair enough, he supposed. They hadn’t been awake for more than four hours, but today was already more stressful than any other day either of them had passed that year. The pair resumed their silence, and Shikamaru couldn’t help feeling like they were staged in some black-and-white noir movie.

Temari steeled herself when she heard a knock on the front door. “Hide,” she told Shikamaru, unwilling to make the same mistake twice. He did as he was told, slipping into the bedroom and out of sight. This time, Temari made sure to look through the lens before opening the door. The fish-eye lens distorted Choji’s round face as he tried to look into the apartment through the peephole. There was no telling how this was going to go.

Temari opened the front door, this time placing herself between it and the rest of her apartment. “Choji,” she feigned surprise. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for Shikamaru.”

Well, he didn’t beat around the bush. Wary of what he’d been told, she lied “He isn’t here.”

Choji looked at her in disappointment before his eyes darted pointedly to the cigarette between the fingers of her right hand, which rested on her hip in plain sight. “I’m chubby, not stupid. Look, I brought him a change of clothes.”

“Man, you’re a lifesaver!” Shikamaru exclaimed as he walked out into the kitchen.

Temari ushered Choji into the apartment and shut the door behind him. Shikamaru gratefully took the bundle of clothes from his friend.

“Your mom’s pissed,” Choji informed him. “She came over to my place looking for you.”

“Dammit,” Shikamaru swore. “How’d you know I was here?”

“Ino-”

“Son of a bitch.”

“You’re lucky I found her when I did. I swore her and Sakura to secrecy. You’re welcome, by the way.”

“Man, I owe you one.” Shikamaru tugged the clean shirt down over his head.

“Anything for you. You know that.”

Temari let out an audible sigh of relief and let herself fall onto the couch. “Choji-”

“No need to thank me,” Choji interrupted. “I get it, so I didn’t let things get out of control. Consider this a payback for Gaara covering our barbecue tab.”

“You’re a good man, Choji.” Shikamaru clapped his best friend on the shoulder. He turned to Temari, who waved her hand.

“Go. You’ve got damage control to do, and it’s probably better if I’m not there.”

“Everyone was planning to get together for dinner to send you and your brothers off,” Choji mentioned. “You wanna come?”

Temari smiled to herself before telling him “Sure. When?”

“I’ll come get you,” Shikamaru offered, earning him a sly look from his teammate. “It wouldn’t look right if I didn’t, being your escort and all.” He reached for his lighter and cigarettes, but Temari slapped his hand away. He arched an eyebrow at her, offended.

“Consider it insurance,” she mused. “After what you’ve put me through today, it’s a safe bet.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Shikamaru stuck his hands in his pockets and headed to the front door. “Just don’t smoke ‘em all.”

Choji closed the door behind him and followed his best friend down the steps. “So…” he pried cautiously as they headed down the street. “You and her…?”

“No.” Shikamaru informed him.

“But you’d tell me, right?”

“Yeah.”

Choji smiled, happy that Shikamaru confirmed what he’d thought. As his best friend, he would have been hurt if he’d been left out of the loop. Evilly, he added, “Do you want to?”

“Go home, Choji.”

[awesome-legendarystudentcho-blog]

Motorcycle insurance for a 17 year old?

"Motorcycle insurance for a 17 year old?

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State Farm Insurance Rates From Fellow Users?

I will be added onto my parents policy. I got a 3.0GPA 16 Year old male, still in high school I will probably get a late 90's compact or 1/2 ton pickup. Any ideas, I herd that it will be around $300 a month. I also have taken driving classes if that helps.""

Insurance Agency Tax Help 1120S?

I own an insurance agency. I have a seperate checking account for insurance premium funds. When we collect a insurance premium payment from a customer, the funds are deposited into this account and then we send our agency check to the insurance company. How are these funds treated on form 1120S?""

How much do you pay for car insurance?

i pay $130 /month and i think its too much

Car Insurance????

I just turnt twenty..and I was wondering if anyone could tell me where to get cheap car insurance for young drivers as I hear its pretty expensive these days...I want to purchase a 1.7 Ford Puma 2000 or 2002..Thanks

Can I have Illinois Insurance if I live in Florida AND Illinois?

So my parents are divorced but have dual custody. I live with my mother in Florida but I frequently visit Illinois to see my father and I can whenever I want. I've been driving for 8 months now, registered and insured in Illinois because my mother also used to live in Illinois (they moved about a month ago). But I sold my car to move to Florida and buy one there. Now, I bought a car down here but I would like to register and insure the car with my father in Chicago. My license has my father's current address, so it would be a lot simpler and cheaper to have my car registered and insured in Chicago because I already have my plates, license and insurance policy set up. My question is, could I keep my car down here with Illinois plates and insurance legally? I will go back home to visit my father with it maybe twice a year""

How do auto insurance providers calculate your payments?

I just got off the phone with my auto insurance to change my address. They informed me that my rate is going to be $16 more now because I moved to a different zip code. The problem is, I had previously had my insurance changed because it skyrocketed after my previous move. Which is strange because I had moved from the same city before and it went down about $20. I have since moved BACK to the SAME city I was in before and it's going up again?? This makes NO SENSE! I thought it was based off of your location (zip code). But now I just think these insurance companies are making up their own numbers and rules and we're all getting screwed!! Can someone please explain this insanity to me? My zip code is now and was before, 95608. The zip code I just moved from is 95628. Yes, I have moved back and forth 4 times within the same 2 cities if you're confused.""

How can forcing people to have car insurance compare to forcing health insurance?

Actually this equates to Slavery by the government??? You do not have to buy car insurance if you do not own a car. Secondly, if your car is paid for then you only have to have liability insurance to protect others not for the repairs of your own car. Yet, forcing everyone to have health insurance would fall on every individual regardless of age, sex, race, income, ect. If you do not have enough after paying your monthly bills you will be fined and even serve prison time with a $25,000 fee. This essentially goes against Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness isn't it? Liberals want to say everyone should have, and the government should provide? Yet, this is not government providing it is government enslaving you to have?? Slippery slope they are weaving and the benefits will be far less than we have today with the government oppression on each individual.""

Why the heck is insurance so high?

So I'm 17 trying to get insured on any car from a 1-1.2L DIESEL. I've tried practically everything and it's so expensive. I get quoted 15,000 for a MINI COOPER S and 12,000 for a corsa. The area I live in insurance is low. I passed in july and I really need a car. Any suggestions for cars or insurance?""

Health Insurance for pregnant women?

I was laid off from my job and I have been unable to find a new job, my cobra insurance is about to run out and I am looking for affordable insurance for pregnant woman. I do not qualify for medicaid because my husband does work but insurance is not offered through his employer. Does anyone know of a company that has a plan that will cover pregnancy and after?""

What happens if im a day late on my car insurance?

i pay monthly with gieco.today my payment is due but i wont have the money untill tomorrow.will they cancel my insurance?will i have to pay some type of fee? will my car insurance go up? Plz help

Which car is the cheapest to buy and who are the cheapest to insurance with?

i thinking of taking my driving lesson!! i just wonder which car is cheap and who is cheap to get insurance with!

Recommended Auto Insurance Coverage?

I'm just about to have to buy auto insurance for myself for the first time, and I have no idea what all of the different terms and numbers mean. What is the most commonly recommended auto insurance coverage?""

How can i get insurance with penalty points?

My friend was caught driving without insurance (please no moral highground) and he has to get insurance before he can pick up his car. He is searching for insurance that will cover him but he cant find any as he now has 6 penalty points. Could you advize on which companies he could contact? He is in the UK.

Are there any insurance companies that insure Classic cars without them being garage kept?

Are there any insurance companies that insure Classic cars without them being garage kept?

Can i insure my UK car with ROI insurance?

Hi, I am looking to insure my UK registered car with ROI insurance. I travel to and from Ireland but spend the majority of my time in Ireland. I would like to know which ROI insurance companies will insure my UK registered car and if the insurance would be valid for driving in the UK, if so, for how long ?""

What effect does a minor ticket out of state have on insurance rates.?

A few months ago I got a ticket in Maryland, where I go to school, for going the wrong way down a one way street. The ticket was only a small fine and I don't think any point were given. Recently I just got another ticket for making a wrong left turn in New Jersey, where my permanent address is. Normally, my insurance company, geico , would let one ticket slide but I'm not sure if they would even know about the Maryland ticket. I would appreciate any information.""

I need to find cheap renters insurance in Michigan? Wheres the best place to go?

I need to find cheap renters insurance in Michigan? Wheres the best place to go?

Best ATV insurance for Washington state?

Ok so whats the cheapest insurance for ATV's. my zip is 99148, just name the insurance and estimate how much it will be a year month or how ever they do it, thanks""

My landlord requires that my dog be covered by insurance - Suggestions?

I'm renting for a year so I figure I should look into some sort of renters insurance that includes dog liability. My dog is a one year old golden retriever. There are so many ...show more

About NRMA Car Insurance?

My grandma was driving and she was insured with NRMA. But since the past few weeks she just stopped driving and started taking public transports since she wasn't travelling to far. And the insurance expiry date is due, which mean she has to pay to continue to be covered. I was just wondering if its possible for her to not making the payment and pause the insurance for a while? Or is it compulsory to have an insurance with the car all the time?""

Do any one know where to get a business vehicle insurance?

hey anyone i am try and look for a business vehicle insurance for me to have 4 car's and vans on the same insurance so all i do call up and add my staff to the insurance there than can Driver any vehicle on this one insurance. ? please help me out

Which is the cheapest and best ( best value) auto insurance in the US?

GEICO sux

How much is your car insurance? Do u have full coverage? What company do u have?

What state u live in? Do u also have Roadside assistance?

Car accident but driver isnt under my insurance?

Last month my boyfriend and I were driving and someone rear ended my car. I am insured under Mercury insurance and the car is owned under my moms name. My bf has his own insurance but not for my car. We were not at fault but I'm nervous about filing a claim with the insurance company cause he is not under my insurance and was driving my car.. A police report was filed.. But what will happen if I file a claim with Mercury insurance? Will I get charged or fined for letting someone that wasn't on my insurance drive my car? Or can I not file a claim to the other company cause he isn't insured under the car that was damaged ? and if I ask my representative from Mercury what will happen will she report me even if I don't file a claim for letting someone who isn't under our insurance drive the car?

Should we cancel our whole life insurance policy?

we bought a whole life policy for a couple of years ago b/c we liked the safety of not losing our money(the way u do w/ term)--anyway we have since learned that u don't make any money this way and it's better to take those premiums and put them in better returning investments. we already have a huge chunk of money in this whole life policy that will be down the toilet if we cancel. what should we do? can we convert it back to term?

Motorcycle insurance for a 17 year old?

i Live in Texas and I'm gonna get a yamaha and it's a cruiser and has a 942cc engine, would my insurance be crazy exspensive or reasonable?

How much should my car insurance be a month?

I am 19 and I drive a 2003 Jeep. I've been with Geico for 1.5 years & my policy price has went up two times! When I called to ask why it would go up they explained that it was nothing to do with me or my driving record (seeing how I've never had a wreck or a ticket) but that it depends on the claims from other people. I know this is how some things work, but I don't think I should be pentilized for someone else's claims. Is this how every car insurance works or is it just Geico? I'm going to start calling around to today to get quotes...but I wanted to hear from people other than a sales person.""

Will Ryan's plan force insurance companies to sell to 'granny? Will 'granny' be forced to buy insurance?

For customers at sixty five, health insurance companies will be inclined to not sell to that age group. Can they be forced to do so by the 'government'? Will health ...show more""

Can I get a car insurance in MA when I bought my car in Maryland?

Does the state limit? Do I have to buy a car insurance in the state where i bough my car?

What are some jobs/companies that offer insurance for part time employees?

I have a part time morning job working as a teacher's aide 8:30 to 11:30 a.m. that I love and don't want to give up but I will never have more hours or insurance. I need to get an afternoon job with insurance because my health insurance jumps to $600.00 per month in July!!! The copay is $45.00 and the deductable is $2000.00 which means it never pays for anything and I cannot even afford to go to the doctor! Do you work at a place with ins. for part time employees? Can you select a PPO? How long do you have to work there to get on the insurance? I live in Southern California.

How much is car insurance usually in UK?

I live in London and don't have a clue about this thing but I just passed my test at 29 and hope to get a decent looking car that has had a previous owner and don't under all this quote business. I've got about 2670 to spend. So half of that will be for a deposit. How much do most people spend on insurance a year and what would be a cheap price range for me to look for? How much should it be for a month?

Car insurance question....?

Is it possible to see how much the isurance will be before I get the insurance??? I am 18, had my license since december 07 and never had a ticket or accidents... How much average is a teen insurance from a coupe to a minivan... I know its not in the high $800, but maybe $120+. I might get a mustang or something... plus is there an insurance gap between forigen and domestic cars???""

Can a car insurance company make up points on your license?

So in early march my apartment was raided for pot, and a 1/2 gram was found. I was convicted of possession of marijuana and as part of Michigan's driving laws even if the incident did not occur in a car your license is restricted for 6 months. Yesterday my mother (the insurance for the whole family is in her name) received a notice that i had 8 points on my license and my insurance rates would be raised. Confused about this i went to Sec of State and in fact found out that i have no points. I called Memic and explained this to them, they informed me that they do not use actual points, they use their system of points. For example OUID is a 6 point offense but they count it as 8 points. Passing a stopped school bus (which as far as i can tell is no points) they view as 8 points. My question is, can they do this? We are switching insurances next month due to cheaper rates but this seems like a shady business practice to me. Thanks for ur time!!! -Pat""

Can you get 1 month insurance for an under 21 year old?

If you live in the UK? if not any ideas on how i can i get insured on a car for a month?

Will my insurance rates go up?

My daughter who is 16 yrs old tapped a car from behind at a stop sign. There was no damage done to either car and no injuries. The guy said he was not going to do anything about it since there was no damages. My daughter gave him her information (insurance etc). I called the guy to make sure everything was ok, he said nothing happened to his car or himself but he went ahead and opened a claim because he thought he had to do that. I know that if he decides to ask for damages the insurance will pay. My question to you is if he decides not to ask for damages, will my insurance still go up and will she get points in her driver's license. Also, I'd like to add that we live in California. I have not talked to my insurance (AAA) yet. Thank you""

What manufacturer is the cheapest scooter/moped/50cc to insure?

I am 16 and loking for a cheap insurance site for a scooter/moped/50cc Enduro bike, Does anybody know the cheapest manufacturer and insurance site? Thanks Anton""

What is a good insurance company?

i just bought a car sunday.would have to wait till monday to clear stuff with the dmv.can i get insurance meanwhile and if so which one is a good that is not pricey? i havent had any accidents in the past or dui's i'm 32.the last time i owned a car it was when i was 20 i believe.i'm going to add two cars to the insurance along with an extra driver.

How much is a car and insurance going to cost me when I turn 17?

I've got a few hundred pounds at the moment as I will turn seventeen in two months. I really want to start driving as soon as possible, but I'm clueless to how much it was cost me a year and what are good first cheap cars.. Also if anyone knows some good cheap car sites it would help, thanks :)""

""Primary Mortgage Insurance, California?""

I live in southern California. I recently called my bank about refinancing my mortgage. I was advised if I refinance, the PMI insurance I pay will go from $168 to about $340 or something. In other words, by lowering my rate, my PMI goes up. Is this true? I would assume the PMI would lower or stay the same since its now easier to make payments. Please advise...""

Commercial business insurance and homeowners insurance?

I am closing soon on a small commercial property. It is a smaller restaurant/bar and has an apartment in back where I will be living. I'm a little confused regarding insurance. Do I get commercial business insurance for the building, and then separate homeowners insurance for the small apartment in back? Though I feel that would be strange as it's one large building essentially. Just curious what others have done, it's too late to call now, yet I will in the morning.""

Age for car insurance?

I have heard that you cannot get your own car insurance policy untill you are 18. Is this true for new york state?

""Help! looking for affordable healthcare insurance in atlanta, ga?""

i am a single mom recently laid off from work. i have asthma and take a prescribed drug every day. i am running out and just to see my dr. for a new rx is $125 and then for a 30day supply is $150. too costly for me. i have tried research online for healthcare companies but keep getting redirected to other sites. i am looking for insurance around $100 a mnth that could give me a copay of $25-35 for visits and prescriptions. can anyone offer any advice. all this health care insurance is so confusing, with the detuctibiles etc.""

I scraped the bumper of a parked car. Is it cheaper to pay it off or send it to my insurance?

I have a clean driving record, but i accidentally scraped a car parked next to me. There was a dinnerplate sized scrape, and the guy sent me a estimate for $400. Will it be cheaper for me to send it to my insurance, or pay it out of pocket?""

Insurance on a car that you do not own yourself?

Im 17 years old. My grandma will buy me a car. But she doesn't want me on her insurance, so she said i had to wait til i was 18 til she would buy it. I was wondering if it's possible for my mom to put insurance on the car for me, if she's not that one that own's it. She can't on it for medicaid reasons. Thanks.""

Who can help me with car insurance?

I sold my car and canceled my car insurance direct debit in my bank and the insurance company sold my debit to a debit collectors. Now I want to buy another car and my question is: can I make a new car insurance without having problems?

Help with approximation on how much an 18yo would pay per month (or year) for motorcycle insurance?

Ok so I really want to get a motorcycle (I dont even have my drivers license yet just my permit and will get my license within a month or so). I may be getting a full time job and want to make sure I can afford the motorcycle. I have factored in everything except insurance. I plan to get a Standard (since sports would probably cost me more on insurance) bike with about 1000cc. Also I will be taking a safety course (AT LEAST beginners but ill probably take more than that). I live in California. The bike will be used. So about how much will insurance cost meA?

How do i get my commercial insurance license?

i am on the road becoming a insurance agent and i want all the insurance licenses possible, but i can't find any places that give commercial insurance license.""

Where can I purchase affordable dental insurance that is effective immediately?

I would like to get braces or Invisilgn=]

Approx insurance cost for group p6?

ford ka sport 1.6 2004

Website to talk to a car insurance agent?

Okay do you people know the site where you can like instant message a car insurance agent? I forgot wut the site was called. My parents need it.

Got my 1st speeding ticket under mom's insurance. Will her insurance go up?

I got my 1st speeding ticket ever and paid it off. I am under my mom's insurance as an additional driver. Will the rates go up? If so, is it too late to take defensive driving to take it off the record since I already paid it?""

Motorcycle insurance for a 17 year old?

i Live in Texas and I'm gonna get a yamaha and it's a cruiser and has a 942cc engine, would my insurance be crazy exspensive or reasonable?

How far in advance can you buy your car insurance?

I'm trying to avoid the increase that's happening in December but my premium runs out 2 weeks after the increase

Car Insurance Question?

Hi, im 16 and 17 in August living in Ireland, and i'm thinking of buying either a Honda Civic 1999-2001 or a Honda integra 1998-2001 aswell, i'm a guy and i'm wondering how much it'll cost to insure either one of them, and also what car is better""

What is the cheapest car insurance in Wisconsin?

It seems to me that every insurance company out there is claiming to have the lowest rates, etc. In your experience, who has had the cheapest prices? I'm referring to basic car insurance...no frills, just the minimum coverage that is now required in WI? Thanks (and please dont try to sell me something...I just want some ideas here)""

How much would car insurance cost for me?

I'm a 17 year old student that has been driving for a couple years and have never had any accidents/tickets... How much would insurance for a $2500 VW baja bug cost? Please tell me in a total amount for a year.... Thanks

Corvette insurance?

does any one own a corvette? How much is insurance??

Need supplemental insurance!?

I had a CAT scan done a few years ago and owe a good amount of money still because my insurance only covered a portion of it. Im a college student and make 8$ an hour and diagnosed with mental illness. Can i expect supplemental insurance to cover the rest of it? its about 1600. And can someone explain it for me? Do i pay for supplemental insurance to? My sister told me i can get emergency medicare or medical **** or something to pay for it.. Is this true...so confused. Thanks

How much would a Jeep Wrangler cost to insure compared to a Honda Civic?

How much would a 1990-1995 Jeep Wrangler cost to insure compared to a 2004 Honda Civic? It would only be liability insurance, and I live in South Jersey.""

Mistake on insurance- value of car?

recently i was involved in a car accident where another driver drove into the back of my car and since then it has been written off. the problem is i undervalued the car on my insurance by accident (as it was a present and was unsure of the true value) can i explain this to the insurance company and get the money paid for the car? or will i just get how much i said the car was worth? thanks

Is the company allowed to change my insurance price?

Is my company allowed to change the insurance price when i call them and change my occupation details? For example i have been put down as a student but now a couple weeks later i left college and right now i am working. Are they allowed to change the fees, etc? I have a tracking device from the company fitted in my car as well.""

Car Insurance for Teen Girl Estimate HELP PLZ?

How much would you estimate that insurance for a 16 year old brand new driver in a 2001 acura integra 2 door hatch back would cost with a good student driver discount? any idea? any one close to those guide lines that have an idea willing to share? Please help thanks

How will adding 40 million more people to the Health Insurance rolls improve Health Care?

But don't be misled. We know the status quo is unsustainable. If we do nothing, millions more Americans will be denied insurance because of pre-existing conditions, or see their coverage suddenly dropped if they become seriously ill. Out-of-pocket expenses will continue to soar, and more and more families and businesses will be forced to deal with health insurance costs they cant afford. David Axelrod Senior Advisor to the President Why suddenly focus on the insurance industry? If, as Axelrod says, the status quo is unsustainable .. How will adding 40 million more to the insurance rolls suddenly make it sustainable ? . How will adding to the costs of Insurance Companies decrease their costs? . How will doing nothing , and thereby sustaining the huge profits of the drug industry and the medical industry, reduce medical care costs to the average American?""

Do motorcycle riders have to have insurance?

I know car drivers have to but I'm a kid who doesn't have a lot of money and I'm looking for a low-cost way to get around, so I was just wondering.""

Can I get the tax for my partners car as insurance will be in my name but the car will be in her name?

Neither of us have a car at the minute but my partners mum wants to buy her a car. The car will obviously be put in her name as it is being bought for her but she can not drive at the minute so I will be taking out the insurance in my name as I will be the main driver but we will need to tax the car can I get the tax for the car even if the car is not in my name but the insurance is in my name?

Benefits of life insurance?

long term benefits of life insurance

""Is there a type of independant health insurance that is cheap, or semi cheap? And that is not a fraud?

I am a student and Im poor!

When will insurance total a car?

At what point will my insurance company total a car? My husband was in a car accident and the whole front end of the car is damaged - the estimate is $7800 to fix and the car is valued at $9100. The body shop has been waiting a 2 days, so far, for the insurance to decide what to do. I am hoping it can be fixed but I also need to know if I need to start car shopping.""

Car Insurance Question?

I am filling out paperwork for an insurance quote. I wanted to know if the lock/unlock/panicbutton key lock device considered an anti theft device? I would also appreciate if any one could recommend any car insurance agencies. Thank you.

Car insurance coverage question...?????

I have state farm. there's an expectation of a severe storm with softball size hail heading our metroplex. I'm in the middle of switching car insurance. The coverage will expire april 10, 2008. Will state farm covers me if I have hail damage on the same day it's expired?""

Where can i get cheap car insurance? (young drivers)?

Im 17 and need cheap car insurance, any companies anyone would recommend? Thanks! :)""

Health Insurance costs?

According to the National Coalition on Health Care, The average cost for employer based health insurance for a single person is $4,700.00 or $391.66 per month. A family of four costs $12,700.00 per year or $1,058.33 per month. Now to put that into perspective, you can lease a Mercedes Benz SLK 300 ( thats the sporty two seater ) for around $883.07 per month. Question is, does this sound like a fair deal?""

Motorcycle insurance cost?

thinking about getting a motorcycle and wanted to get an idea of how much the insurance would cost. thinking about either a 2000 rebel or an 06 ninja 250. just want an idea of what to expect.

Car insurance -- help!?

So im 19, dont know nothing about how car insurance works.... im trying to get an online quote to see how much id be paying roughly and i came across this question.... Collision Deductible Specific dollar amount your insurance company requires you to pay when you are involved in an accident. the options are $500, $1000, or decline what does that mean? and what would probably be the safest route to go..""

Car insurance under a company policy?

I've never owned a car in the UK and may be joining a company where I will need one. This company offers a car allowance and I'll probably use the car for business. Would I be covered under the company car insurance policy or would I still need to get a policy myself? I'm trying to avoid the massive bill given that I have no UK driving history :-)

Do any insurance companies for motorcycles....?

Do any insurance companies for motorcycles offer a month by month payment plan?

Best insurance companies for 17 year old passed my test!!?

ok ive pased my test a month on friday and i gettin a car this week and i need some insurance on the car obviiously lol, well basically whats the cheapest car insurance all you 17 year old have and who is it with, please :)""

Motorcycle insurance for a 17 year old?

i Live in Texas and I'm gonna get a yamaha and it's a cruiser and has a 942cc engine, would my insurance be crazy exspensive or reasonable?

Car Insurance Question?

Im Getting My First Car In A Few Weeks and Im Wondering About Car Insurance Is $225.55 alot? How much would I Have To Pay A Month/ Every 6 Months Thanks :)

Is it possible for me to obtain my own insurance?

I had insurance under my mother in law, she has had an accident and the car has been writen off. She wants to cancel the insurance. My question is , is it OK for me to purchase a car and get insurance in my own name or do I have to wait until the renewal date.""

California auto car insurance question?

I own three cars and I want to purchase auto insurance for all three of them. But my question is, if I plan on keeping two cars at my residence, and the third one garaged at another residence (at my father's address). Is that legal to do so or I must have all three cars parked at my residence? Will the third car be exempt from my insurance policy if I decide not to garage it at my address?""

Purchasing car insurance?

I need a step by step guide to adding another car and driver to my mom's policy. I have a 1995 Ford Contour. How long will it take for her to get coverage on my car? How do I get proff of insurance?

""I can't afford NJ car insurance, what should I do?""

I just turned 25 and I never drove a car before because of the high car insurance rates and the fact that my parents refuse to help me pay it. I have a job, but I'm also in college. I got my driver's permit this year, but no license yet. I got a quote on how much it would cost me to drive if I get the license, and it came out to roughly 5-6 thousand dollars a year, insanity! I don't plan to ever get a job that makes THAT type of money. Is there anything I could do, or did my parents screw me by not letting me drive all these years? I have to either walk or beg a friend for rides anywhere -- Granted all my friends are 'funded' by their parents, of course.""

What are the variables included in the cost of car insurance?

What are the BASIC variables that are included in any car insurance? i.e...car color, car make, type of car, horsepower, year, age of driver, ethnicity...? Which things do they look at car wise/and driver wise that affect how much insurance you end up paying in the end? and does the speed of the car effect the cost greatly?""

Will one violation make my insurance go up?

The other day I failed to see a no right turn on red sign posted above an intersection. My right turn on the red light was safe, no cars were coming, and the car in front of me did the same thing, which I copied. A police motorcycle was parked waiting down the road, expressly for watching this, and pulled over the car in front of me, myself, and the driver behind me, who did the same thing. I have a clean DMV record. The fine is $170. I could elect to go to traffic school for an additional $150 so the violation won't be on my DMV record, but with my schedule, it will be hard finding the time for this, and I think the $170 fine is bad enough. My auto insurance is my only concern. How likely is it they'll raise my premiums (2 vehicles) with only one violation on my record? Also, how long does the violation stay on my DMV record (California). Thanks!""

""I've just passed my driving test, anyone know any cheap insurance companies?""

I'm 17 and female, I own an 04 fiat punto. Does anyone know of some good insurance prices? Thanks""

Car insurance rates question plz help 10 pts?

I pay $187 a mth for car insurance & that's full coverage with $500 deduct. The reason I was told I'm paying that much was bc of a big wreck I had back in Aug 2010 and since it's coming up on 3 yrs and my premium expires in Aug I'm expecting my rates to go down a little. My insurance company jus told me that that's not why I'm paying that much it's bc of 2 speeding tickets I got back in 2010 Feb & April bt when my premium expires in Aug my rates will go down. My question is can you guys give me a estimate on how much you think I'll be paying in Aug when my rates go down??! I live in S.C. Btw Thanks so much in advance

How much would my car insurance go up for putting a little scratch on someone elses vehicle?

I'm with State Farm

Short-term car insurance?

Im looking for a company that will do short-term (preferably 3 weeks but a month is fine) car insurance for a 17 year old male with a provisional licence, can anyone recommend one?""

Do you have to get car insurance?

I live in England, i am not getting an car yet. I don't want to pay a lot of money & i am in my teens and i heard it is quite a bit of money for insurance, so i don't want to ...show more""

Can I qualify for medical insurance now?

I was non insurable as of last year due to pancreas problems. I went in the hospital 2 months ago and it turns out my problems were caused from my gallbladder. Had my gallbladder removed so now is it possible for me to be insured?

Whos the cheapest car insurance companys for first time drivers?

Whos the cheapest car insurance companys for first time drivers?

What types of insurance would a spin cycling instructor require?

exmaple public liability, and why would they need these types of insurance""

How much will insurance be for a MarkIV Supra TT?

I'm 19, I've never had any bad driving history that's recorded, I've been insured for two years. I'm single and have a job that can certainly afford the car. After looking around I've seen lot's of factors that affect the price but I'm just looking for a number for an answer. of course I'm not expecting it to be entirely accurate but I'm looking for anything close.""

Insurance for 18 year old girl?

My daughters just passed her test would i be as much money having her on my own car insurance as she would be if she had her own car and was the main driver thanks in advance for any answers

Is there anyone in california that helps people with claiming insurance from the other party's insurance compa?

My wife and I were crossing the street in San Francisco when we were run down by a cab. Police report says cab driver is at fault. Problem is we're about to head back to our country (we're tourists) and need help settling obligations with the hospital by claiming damages from the cab company's insurance company. While we're back in our own country. Is there an office that assists foreigners with claiming?

Red camoro or mustang or white effect car insurance (boy)?

Hello I am driving in a few months. I am getting a 2011 chevy camaro 2lt or a ford mustang gt. does the color of the car effect the price of the car insurance. I do know being a boy I will have to pay higher insurance. But red is my favorite color. If I get a red camaro or mustang will insurance be higher than getting a white or yellow mustang or camaor. And what is better for everyday driving and safety. and features. and what is best for the money the Camaro or mustang. and trim wise to. camaro 1LT or 2LT or Mustang GT or V6Premium???? help

Health insurance question?

i am 17, and will be 18 january 12th. i curently live in california, but will be going to arizona to start college in january. my parents have signa nationwide health insurance, and i was wondering if i would still be covered if i only wnet to school part time? i am considering going part time because is is about 2000 more dollars to take 4 classes rather than two, and i am still waiting for my financial aid which wont come until after january. any help would be appreciated, thanks.""

Is there an individual health insurance plan that has bariatric coverage? ?

I need to find insurance that has the following: 1. Bariatric Coverage 2. Out of Network Coverage 3. 60-100% Out of Network Coverage per day Does anyone out there know of one that has all of these features?

Is it common for homeowners insurance to up without notice?

I have only owned my home for a year. I got a letter from my mortgage company stating that my payment would go up because my taxes and home owners insurance has gone up. I contacted statefarm to find out why my insurance went up (i was not notified) and was told that the company increased my dwelling coverage. Is this common?

Best health insurance for a 63 year old male?

My dad retired at 62 and a half... to make a long story short, he was promised continuing health insurance from his employer but now they are saying they will only be secondary- meaning they only pay if he buys a primary. What would be a good option for health insurance for him? Unfortunately, he is a smoker and had a stroke... he is 63 and a half right now.""

Marine Insurance?

Why do the Underwriters enjoy an apparent freedom to give seven days notice and announce an area a war risk zone and, effectively, arbitrarily withdraw insurance cover? - like cases in the Straits of Malacca -""

Illegal Immigrants and Helth insurance?

Do Health insurances check social security numbers to see if they are real or fake?

Motorcycle insurance for a 17 year old?

i Live in Texas and I'm gonna get a yamaha and it's a cruiser and has a 942cc engine, would my insurance be crazy exspensive or reasonable?

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/does-anybody-know-good-affordable-life-insurance-charles-taylor/"