#*skin-crawling how they exploited those children

[lestappenforever]

I‘m so glad you have a reasonable view on the whole situation. It‘s beyond me how people defend this blatant exploitation of a child for pr.

Like, I adore children and yes, those videos and photos are cute and everything, but she‘s being pushed into the spotlight of an environment, that is very high-stakes. It‘s international, there‘s a whooole lot of money involved, politics, intrigue - it‘s absolutely cutthroat and volatile behind the glamorous facade. The public image for these brands (and the drivers as brands as well) is so incredibly important that collateral damage on the sides is brushed aside oftentimes.

And now imagine a little girl in this whole dynamic. It might be adorable now and she might even enjoy the buzz (as far as a child is able to understand it at that age) but what about in the future? No one can predict what could happen in the next few years, obviously, but it wouldn‘t be the first time that a child suffers from the public image of a relative/adult they‘re associated with.

I hope this makes sense? I‘m just a little emotional about this, my little brother is just a year or two younger and the thought of him being in a situation like this makes my skin crawl.

Thank you for speaking out about this. I‘m genuinely grateful to know this blog (which I adore very much) is safe from this

This is so well put, and goes great with what @tsarinablogs has said about the topic.

Everything about this makes me deeply uncomfortable, and I hope to hell that child won't suffer any lasting damage from being exploited at such a young age.

My blog will always continue to be a space free from this type of content, you can trust me on that. ❤️

[tseneipgam]

“Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species. Over time, we have seen the feminine instinctive nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt. For long periods it has been mismanaged like the wildlife and the wildlands. For several thousand years, as soon and as often as we turn our backs, it is relegated to the poorest land in the psyche. The spiritual lands of Wild Woman have, throughout history, been plundered or burnt, dens bulldozed, and natural cycles forced into unnatural rhythms to please others. It's not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild natures fades. It is not so difficult to comprehend why old forests and old women are viewed as not very important resources. It is not such a mystery. It is not so coincidental that wolves and coyotes, bears and wildish women have similar reputations. They all share related instinctual archetypes, and as such, both are erroneously reputed to be ingracious, wholly and innately dangerous, and ravenous.”

“Rather than chairs and tables, I preferred the ground, trees, and caves, for in those places I felt I could lean against the cheek of God. The river always called to be visited after dark, the fields needed to be walked in so they could make their rustle-talk. Fires needed to be built in the forest at night, and stories needed to be told outside the hearing of grown-ups. I was lucky to be brought up in Nature. There, lightning strikes taught me about sudden death and the evanescence of life. Mice lit- ters showed that death was softened by new life. When I unearthed "Indian beads," fossils from the loam, I understood that humans have been here a long, long time. I learned about the sacred art of self-decoration with monarch butterflies perched atop my head, light- ning bugs as my night jewelry, and emerald-green frogs as bracelets. A wolf mother killed one of her mortally injured pups; this taught a hard compassion and the necessity of allowing death to come to the dying. The fuzzy caterpillars which fell from their branches and crawled back up again taught single-mindedness. Their tickle-walking on my arm taught how skin can come alive. Climbing to the tops of trees taught what sex would someday feel like. My own post-World War Il generation grew up in a time when women were infantilized and treated as property. They were kept as fallow gardens ... but thankfully there was always wild seed which arrived on the wind. Though what they wrote was unauthorized, women blazed away anyway. Though what they painted went unrec- ognized, it fed the soul anyway. Women had to beg for the instru- ments and the spaces needed for their arts, and if none were forthcoming, they made space in trees, caves, woods, and closets. Dancing was barely tolerated, if at all, so they danced in the forest where no one could see them, or in the basement, or on the way out to empty the trash. Self-decoration caused suspicion. Joyful body or dress increased the danger of being harmed or sexually assaulted. The very clothes on one's shoulders could not be called one's own. It was a time when parents who abused their children were simply called "strict," when the spiritual lacerations of profoundly exploited women were referred to as "nervous breakdowns," when girls and women who were tightly girdled, tightly reined, and tightly muzzled were called "nice." and those other females who managed to slip the collar for a moment or two of life were branded "bad."

“The memory is of our absolute, undeniable, and irrevocable kinship with the wild feminine, a relationship which may have become ghosty from neglect, buried by over-domestication, out- lawed by the surrounding culture, or no longer understood anymore. We may have forgotten her names, we may not answer when she calls ours, but in our bones we know her, we yearn toward her: we know she belongs to us and we to her. It is into this fundamental, elemental, and essential relationship that we were born and that in our essence we are also derived from. The Wild Woman archetype sheaths the alpha matrilineal being. There are times when we experience her, even if only fleetingly, and it makes us mad with wanting to continue. For some women, this vi- talizing "taste of the wild" comes during pregnancy, during nursing their young, during the miracle of change in oneself as one raises a child, during attending to a love relationship as one would attend to a beloved garden. A sense of her also comes through the vision; through sights of great beauty. I have felt her when I see what we call in the woodlands a Jesus-God sunset. I have felt her move in me from seeing the fish- ermen come up from the lake at dusk with lanterns lit, and also from seeing my newborn baby's toes all lined up like a row of sweet corn. We see her where we see her, which is everywhere. She comes to us through sound as well; through music which vi- brates the sternum, excites the heart; it comes through the drum, the whistle, the call, and the cry. It comes through the written and the spoken word; sometimes a word, a sentence or a poem or a story, is so resonant, so right, it causes us to remember, at least for an instant, what substance we are really made from, and where is our true home. These transient "tastes of the wild" come during the mystique of inspiration--ah, there it is; oh, now it has gone. The longing for her comes when one happens across someone who has secured this wild- ish relationship. The longing comes when one realizes one has given scant time to the mystic cookfire or to the dreamtime, too little time to one's own creative life, one's life work or one's true loves. Yet it is these fleeting tastes which come both through beauty as well as loss, that cause us to become so bereft, so agitated, so longing that we eventually must pursue the wildish nature. Then we leap into the forest or into the desert or into the snow and run hard, our eyes scanning the ground, our hearing sharply tuned, searching under, searching over, searching for a clue, a remnant, a sign”

“when we lose touch with the instinctive Psyche, we live in a semi. developed state and images and powers that are natural to the feminine are not allowed full development. When a woman is cut away from her base source, she is sanitised, and her instincts and natural life  cycles are lost, subsumed by the culture, or by the intellect or the ego- one's own or those belonging to others. Wild woman is the health of all women. Without her, women's psychology makes no sense. This wilderwoman is the prototypical woman... no matter what culture, no matter what era, no matter what politic, she does not change. Her cycles change, her symbolic representations change, but in essence, she does not change. She is what she is and she is whole. She canalizes through women. If they are suppressed, she struggles upward. If women are free, she is free. Fortunately, no matter how many times she is pushed down, she bounds up again. No matter how many times she is forbidden, quelled, cut back, diluted, tortured. touted as unsafe, dangerous, mad, and other derogations, she ema- nates upward in women, so that even the most quiet, even the most restrained woman keeps a secret place for her. Even the most re- pressed woman has a secret life, with secret thoughts and secret feel- ings which are lush and wild, that is, natural. Even the most captured woman guards the place of the wildish self, for she knows intuitively that someday there will be a loophole, an aperture, a chance, and she will hightail it to escape. I believe that all women and men are born gifted. However, and truly, there has been little to describe the psychological lives and ways of gifted women, talented women, creative women. There is, on the other hand, much writ about the weakness and foibles of humans in general and women in particular. But in the case of the Wild Woman archetype, in order to fathom her, apprehend her, utilize her offerings, we must be more interested in the thoughts, feelings, and endeavor which strengthen women, and adequate count the interior and cultural factors which weaken women.”

“ So, in order to apply a good medicine to the hurt parts of the wild­ ish psyche, in order to aright relationship to the archetype of the Wild Woman, one has to name the disarrays of the psyche accurately. While in my clinical profession we do have a good diagnostic statis­tical manual and a goodly amount of differential diagnoses, as well as psychoanalytic parameters which define psychopathy through the or­ganization (or lack of it) in the objective psyche and the ego-Self axis, there are yet other defining behaviors and feelings which, from a woman’s frame of reference, powerfully describe what is the matter. What are some of the feeling-toned symptoms of a disrupted rela­ tionship with the wildish force in the psyche? To chronically feel, think, or act in any of the following ways is to have partially severed or lost entirely the relationship with the deep instinctual psyche. Us­ ing women’s language exclusively, these are: feeling extraordinarily dry, fatigued, frail, depressed, confused, gagged, muzzled, unaroused. Feeling frightened, halt or weak, without inspiration, without anima­ tion, without soulfulness, without meaning, shame-bearing, chroni­ cally fuming, volatile, stuck, uncreative, compressed, crazed. Feeling powerless, chronically doubtful, shaky, blocked, unable to follow through, giving one’s creative life over to others, life-sapping choices in mates, work or friendships, suffering to live outside one’s own cycles, overprotective of self, inert, uncertain, faltering, inability to pace oneself or set limits. Not insistent on one’s own tempo, to be self-conscious, to be away from one’s God or Gods, to be separated from one’s revivification, drawn far into domesticity, intellectualism, work, or inertia because that is the safest place for one who has lost her instincts. To fear to venture by oneself or to reveal oneself, fear to seek men­ tor, mother, father, fear to set out one’s imperfect work before it is an opus, fear to set out on a journey, fear of caring for another or oth­ ers, fear one will run on, run out, run down, cringing before author­ ity, loss of energy before creative projects, wincing, humiliation, angst, numbness, anxiety. Afraid to bite back when there is nothing else left to do, afraid to try the new, fear to stand up to, afraid to speak up, speak against”

“An old witch from Ranchos told me that La Que Sabe knew everything about women, that La Que Sabe had created women from a wrinkle on the sole of her divine foot: This is why women are knowing creatures; they are made, in essence, of the skin of the sole, which feels every­ thing. This idea that the skin of the foot is sentient had the ring of a truth, for an acculturated Kiche tribeswoman once told me that she’d worn her first pair of shoes when she was twenty years old and was still not used to walking con los ojos vendados, with blindfolds on her feet.”

“In a single human being there are many other beings, all with their own values, motives, and devices. Some psychological technologies suggest we arrest these beings, count them, name them, force them into harness till they shuffle along like vanquished slaves. But to do this would halt the dance of wildish lights in a woman's eyes; it would halt her heat lightning and arrest all throwing of sparks. Rather than corrupt her natural beauty, our work is to build for all these beings a wildish countryside wherein the artists among them can make, the lovers love, the healers heal. But what shall we do with those inner beings who are quite mad and those who carry out destruction without thought? Even these must be given a place, though one in which they can be contained. One entity in particular, the most deceitful and most powerful fugi- tive in the psyche, requires our immediate consciousness and containment--and that one is the natural predator.”

“Developing a relationship with the wildish nature is an essential part of women's individuation. In order to accomplish this, a woman mus go into the dark, but at the same time she must not be irreparably trapped, captured, or killed on her way there or back. The Bluebeard story is about that captor, the dark man who inhab its all women's psyches, the innate predator. He is a specific and it controvertible force which must be memorized and restrained. To restrain the natural predator? of the psyche it is necessary for women to remain in possession of all their instinctual powers. Some of these are insight, intuition, endurance, tenacious loving, keen sensing, tas vision, acute hearing, singing over the dead, intuitive healing, and tending to their own creative fires.”

“Like wolf pups, women need a similar initiation, one which teaches that the inner and outer worlds are not always happy-go-lucky places. Many women do not even have the basic teaching about pred- ators that a wolf mother gives her pups, such as: if it's threatening and bigger than you, flee; if it's weaker, see what you want to do; it it's sick, leave it alone; if it has quills, poison, fangs, or razor claws, back up and go in the other direction; if it smells nice but is wrapped around metal jaws, walk on by.”

“Learning even more mindfully to let go of the overly positive mother. Finding that being good, being sweet, being nice will not cause life to sing. (Vasalisa becomes a slave, but it does not help.)Experiencing directly one's own shadow nature, particularly the exclusionary, jealous, and exploitative aspects of self (the stepmother and stepsisters). Acknowledging these unequivocally. Making the best relationship one can with the worst parts of oneself. Letting the pres- sure build between who one is taught to be and who one really is. Ultimately working toward letting the old self die and the new intuitive self be born. The stepmother and stepsisters represent the undeveloped but pro- vocatively cruel elements of the psyche. They are shadow elements, meaning aspects of oneself which are considered by the ego to be un- desirable or not useful and are therefore relegated to the dark. On one hand, shadow material can be quite positive, for often a woman's gifts are pushed into the dark, hidden there and waiting to be discovered. On the other hand, negative shadow material--that which busily kills off or detains all new life-_ can also be turned to one's use, as we shall see. When it erupts, and we finally identify its aspects and sources, we are made all the stronger and wiser. In this stage of initiation, a woman is harassed by the petty demands of her psyche which exhort her to comply with whatever anyone wishes. Compliance causes a shocking realization that must be registered by all women. That is, to be ourselves causes us to be exiled by many others, and yet to comply with what others want causes us to be exiled from ourselves. It is a tormenting tension and it must be borne, but the choice is clear.”

“Whatever can happen to a garden can happen to soul and psyche—too much water, too little water, infestations, heat, storm, flood, invasion, miracles, dying back, coming back, boon, healing, blossoming, bounty, beauty. During the life of the garden, women keep a diary, recording the signs of life-giving and life-taking. Each entry cooks up a psychic soup. In the garden we practice letting thoughts, ideas, preferences, desires, even loves, both live and die. We plant, we pull, we bury. We dry seed, sow it, moisten it, support it, harvest. The garden is a meditation practice, that of seeing when it is time for something to die. In the garden one can see the time coming for both fruition and for dying back. In the garden one is moving with rather than against the inhalations and the exhalations of greater wild Nature. Through this meditation, we acknowledge that the Life/Death/Life cycle is a natural one. Both life-giving and death-dealing natures are waiting to be befriended, forever loved. In this process, we become like the cyclical wild. We have the ability to infuse energy and strengthen life, and to stand out of the way of what dies.”

“To amplify further, if you are presented with an opportunity to bur a bicyele, or an opportunity to travel to Egypt and see the Pyramit, you have to set the opportunity aside for the moment, enter into yourself, and ask, “What am I hungry for? What do I long for Maybe I'm hungry for a motorcycle instead of a bicycle. Maybe i'm hungry for a trip to see my grandmother, who's coming up in years" The decisions do not have to be so large. Sometimes the matter to be weighed is taking a walk versus making a poem.”

“"In the consensual reality, we all have access to little wild mothers in the flesh. These are women who, as soon as you see them, some- thing in you leaps, and something in you thinks, "MaMa." You take one look and think, "I am her progeny, I am her child, she is my mother, my grandmother." In the case of un hombre con pechos- figuratively, a man with breasts--you might think, "Oh grandfather" or "Oh my brother, my friend." You just know that this man is nur- turing. (Paradoxically they are strongly masculine and strongly femi- nine at the same time. They are like fairy godmother, like mentor, like the mother you never had, or did not have long enough; that is an un hombre con pechos.)31 All these human beings could be called little wild mothers. Usually everyone has at least one. If we are lucky, throughout a lifetime we will have several. You are usually grown or at least in your late ad- olescence by the time you meet them. They are vastly different from the too-good mother. The little wild mothers guide you, burst with pride over your accomplishments. They are critical of blockages and mistaken notions in and around your creative, sensual, spiritual, and intellectual life. Their purpose is to help you, to care about your art, and to reat- tach you to the wildish instincts, and to elicit your original best. They guide the restoration of the intuitive life. And they are thrilled when you make contact with the doll, proud when you find the Baba Yaga, and rejoicing when they see you coming back with the fiery skull held out before you.”

“The Koran wisely advises that we will be called upon to account for all the permitted pleasures in life we did not enjoy while on earth.”

“I don't want to be transformed without first knowing in ab- solute detail what I will look like/feel like afterward."

“There is a vast difference between the need for solitude and re- newal, and the desire to "take space" to avoid the inevitable inter- course with Skeleton Woman. But intercourse, meaning exchange with and acceptance of the Life/Death/Life nature, is the next step in order to strengthen one's ability to love. Those who enter into rela- tionship with her will gain an enduring skill for love. Those who won't, won't. There is no way around it.4 All the "not readies," all the "I need times," are understandable, but only for a short while. The truth is that there is never a "completely ready," there is never a really "right time." As with any de- scent to the unconscious, there comes a time when one simply hopes for the best, pinches one's nose, and jumps into the abyss.”

“What must I give more death to today, in order to generate more life? What do I know should die, but am hesitant to allow to do so? What must die in me in order for me to love? What not-beauty do I fear? Of what use is the power of the not-beautiful to me today? What should die today? What should live? What life am I afraid to give birth to? If not now, when? If we sing the song of consciousness till we feel the burn of truth, we throw a burst of fire into the darkness of psyche so we can see what we're doing ... what we're truly doing, not what we wish to think we're doing. This is the untangling of one's feelings and the be- ginning of understanding why love and life are to be lived by the bones”

“This state of wise innocence is entered by shedding cynicism and protectionism, and by reentering the state of wonder one sees in most humans who are very young and many who are very old. It is a prac- rice of looking through the eyes of a knowing and loving spirit, in- stead of through those of the whipped dog, the hounded creature, the mouth atop a stomach, the angry wounded human. Innocence is a state that is renewed as one sleeps. Unfortunately, many throw it aside with the coverlet as they arise each day. It would be better to take an alert innocence with us and draw it close for warmth. Though an initial return to this state may require scraping away years of jaded viewpoints, decades of callous and carefully con- structed bulwarking, once one has returned one never has to pry for it, dig for it, ever again. To return to an alert innocence is not so much an effort, like moving a pile of bricks from here to there, as it is standing still long enough to let the spirit find you. It is said that all that you are seeking is also seeking you, that if you lie still, sit still, it will find you. It has been waiting for you a long time. Once it is here, don't move away. Rest. See what happens next.”

“When a life is too controlled, there becomes less and less life to control.”

“Through their bodies, women live very close to the Life/Death/Life nature. When women are in their right instinctual minds, their ideas and impulses to love, to create, to believe, to desire are born, have their time, fade and die, and are reborn again. One might say that women consciously or unconsciously practice this knowledge every moon cycle of their lives. For some this moon that tells the cycles is up in the sky. For others it is a Skeleton Woman who lives in their own psyches. From her very flesh and blood and from the constant cycles of fill- ing and emptying the red vase in her belly, a woman understands physically, emotionally, and spiritually that zeniths fade and expire, and what is left is reborn in unexpected ways and by inspired means, only to fall back to nothing, and yet be reconceived again in full glory.”

“It is good to master the first stages of meeting with the Life/Death/Life nature and let the literal body-to-body experiences come after. I caution women, do not en- gage a lover who wants to go from accidental catching to giving body. Insist on all the phases. Then the last phase will take care of it- self, the time of body union will come in its own right time. When the union is begun in the body phase, the process of facing the Life/Death/Life nature can still be accomplished later ... but it takes much more resolve. It is harder work, for the pleasure-ego must be dragged away from its carnal interest so that the foundation work can be done. The little dog in the Manawee story points out just how hard it is to remember what path one is on when one's nerves are be- ing thrummed by delight.”

“While we can interpret the mother in the story as symbolic of one's external mother, most who are grown up now have as a legacy from their actual mother, an internal mother. This is an aspect of psyche that acts and responds in a manner identical to a woman's experience in childhood with her own mother. Further, this internal mother is made from not only the experience of the personal mother but also other mothering figures in our lives, as well as the images held out as the good mother and the bad mother in the culture at the time of our childhoods. For most adults, if there was trouble with the mother once but there is no more, there is still a duplicate mother in the psyche who sounds, acts, responds the same as in early childhood. Even though a woman's culture may have evolved into more conscious reasoning about the role of mothers, the internal mother will have the same val- us and ideas about what a mother should look like, act like, as those in one's childhood culture.  In depth psychology, this entire maze is called the mother complex. It is one of the core aspects of a woman's psyche, and it is important to recognize its condition, strengthening certain aspects, arighting some, dismantling others, and beginning over again if necessary.”

“In most parts of industrialized countries today, the young moth er broods, births, and attempts to benefit her offspring all by her- self. It is a tragedy of enormous proportions. Because many women were born to fragile mothers, child-mothers, and unmothered moth ers, they may themselves possess a similar internal style of "self- mothering." The woman who has a child-mother or unmothered mother construct in her psyche, or glorified in the culture and maintained at work and in the family, is likely to suffer from naive presentiments, lack of seasoning, and in particular a weakened instinctual ability to imagine what will happen one hour, one week, one month, one year, five years, ten years from now. A woman with a child-mother within takes on the aura of a child pretending to be a mother, Women in this state often have an undif- ferentiated «long live everything" attitude, a "do everything, be ev- erything to everyone" brand of hyper-momism. They are not able to guide and support their children, but like the farmer's children in «The Ugly Duckling" story who are so thrilled to have a creature in the house but do not know how to give it proper care, the child- mother winds up leaving the child battered and bedraggled. Without realizing it, the child-mother tortures her offspring with various forms of destructive attention and in some cases lack of useful attention. Sometimes the frail mother is herself a swan who has been raised by ducks. She has not been able to find her true identity soon enough to benefit her offspring. Then, as her daughter comes upon the great mystery of the wildish nature of the feminine in adolescence, the mother too finds herself having sympathy pangs and swan urges.”

“The remedy is in gaining mothering for one's young internal mother. This is gained from actual women in the outer world who are older and wiser and preferably who have been tempered like steel; they are fire-hardened for having gone through what they have gone through. Regardless of the cost even now, their eyes see, their ears hear, their tongues speak, and they are kind. Even if you had the most wonderful mother in the world, you may eventually have more than one. As I have often told my own daugh- ters, "You are born to one mother, but if you are lucky, you will have more than one. And among them all you will find most of what you need." Your relationships with todas las madres, the many mothers, will most likely be ongoing ones, for the need for guidance and advisory is never outgrown, nor from the point of view of women’s deep creative life, should it ever be”

“the uncombed cat and the crocs-eyed hen find the duckling's aspirations stupid and nonsensical. It gives just the right perspective on the Wuhinessand the values of others who denigrate those who are not He hemselves. Who would expect a cat to like the water? Who would expect a hen to go swimming? No one, of course. But too of. jus, from the exile's point of view, when people are not alike, it is the exile who is inferior, and the limitations and/or motives of the other are not properly weighed or evaluated. Well, in the spirit of not wanting to make one person less and an- other person more, or any more than we have to for the purposes of discussion, let us just say that here the duckling has the same experi- ence that thousands of exiled women have--that of a basic incompat- ibility with dissimilar persons, which is no one's fault, even though most women are too obliging and take it on as though it is their fault personally. When this happens, we see women who are ready to apologize for taking up space. We see women who are afraid to just say "No, thank you," and leave. We see women who listen to someone telling them they are wrongheaded over and over again without understand- ing that cats don't swim and hens don't dive under water. I must admit, I sometimes find it useful in my practice to delineate the various typologies of personality as cats and hens and ducks and swans and so forth. If warranted, I might ask my client to assume for a moment that she is, a swan who does not realize it. Assume also for a moment that she has been brought up by or is currently sur- rounded by ducks. There is nothing wrong with ducks, I assure them, or with swans. But ducks are ducks and swans are swans. Sometimes to make the point I have to move to other animal metaphors. What if you were raised by the mice people? But what if you're, say, a swan. Swans and mice hate each other's food for the most part. They each think the Other smells funny. They are not interested in spending time together, and if they did, one would be constantly harassing the other. But what if you, being a swan, had to pretend you were a mouse? What if you had to pretend to be gray and furry and tiny? What if you had no long snaky tail to carry in the air on tail-carrying day?”

“I worked with a woman who was near the last straw and thinking in circles; suicide. A spider making its web on her porch caught her eye. Pre- e ground, cisely what it was in that wee beastie's act that chopped the ice as if ther around her soul so she could go free and grow again, we will never g up all know. But I am convinced, both as psychoanalyst and as cantadora, the ait, that many times it is the things of nature that are the most healing, and at especially the very accessible and the very simple ones. The medicines rough of nature are powerful and straightforward: a ladybug on the green g uP rind of a watermelon, a robin with a string of yarn, a weed in perfect lace, flower, a shooting star, even a rainbow in a glass shard in the street can be the right medicine. Continuance is a strange thing: it puts out this tremendous energy, it can be fed for a month on five minutes of con- it, templating quiet water.”

“There is probably no better or more reliable measure of whether a woman has spent time in ugly duckling status at some point or all throughout her life than her inability to digest a sincere compliment. Although it could be a matter of modesty, or could be attributed to shyness--although too many serious wounds are carelessly written off as "nothing but shyness"14_-more often a compliment is stuttered around about because it sets up an automatic and unpleasant dia- logue in the woman's mind. If you say how lovely she is, or how beautiful her art is, or com- pliment anything else her soul took part in, inspired, or suffused, something in her mind says she is undeserving and you, the complimentor, are an idiot for thinking such a thing to begin with. Rather than understand that the beauty of her soul shines through When she is being herself, the woman changes the subject and effec- tively snatches nourishment away from the soul-self, which thrives on being acknowledged, on being seen.”

“I have been taken with the way wolves hit their bodies together when they run and play, the old wolves in their way, the young ones in theirs, the skinny ones, the fat ones, the long-legged, the lop-tailed, the floppy-eared, the ones whose broken limbs healed crookedly. They all have their own body configurations and strengths, their own beauty. They live and play according to what and who and how they are. They do not try to be what they are not. Up in the northlands, I watched one old wolf who had only three legs; she was the only one who could fit through a crevasse where blueberries were branching. I once saw a gray wolf crouch and leap in such a flash it left the image of a silver arc in the air for a second afterward. I remember a delicate one, a new mother, still fulsome in the belly, picking her way through the pool moss with the grace of a dancer. Yet, despite their beauty and ability to stay strong, wolves are sometimes talked about in this way: "Ah, you are too hungry, your teeth are too sharp, your appetites too interested." Like wolves, women are sometimes discussed as though only a certain temperament, only a certain restrained appetite, is acceptable. And too often added to that is an attribution of moral goodness or badness accord. ing to whether a woman's size, height, gait, and shape conform to a singular or exclusionary ideal. When women are relegated to moods, mannerisms, and contours that conform to a single ideal of beauty and behavior, they are captured in both body and soul, and are no longer free. In the instinctive psyche, the body is considered a sensor, an infor- mational network, a messenger with myriad communication sys- tems-cardiovascular, respiratory, skeletal, autonomic, as well as emotive and intuitive. In the imaginal world, the body is a powerful vehicle, a spirit who lives with us, a prayer of life in its own right. In fairy tales, as personified by magical objects that have superhuman qualities and abilities, the body is considered to have two sets of ears, one for hearing in the mundane world, the other for hearing the soul; two sets of eyes, one set for regular vision, another for far-seeing; two kinds of strength, the strength of the muscles and the invincible strength of soul. The list of twos about the body goes on. In systems of body work such as Feldenkrais method, Ayurveda, and others, the body is understood variously as having six senses, not five. The body uses its skin and deeper fascia and flesh to record all that goes on around it. Like the Rosetta stone, for those who know how to read it, the body is a living record of life given, life taken, life hoped for, life healed. It is valued for its articulate ability to register immediate reaction, to feel profoundly, to sense ahead. The body is a multilingual being. It speaks through its color and its temperature, the flush of recognition, the glow of love, the ash of pain, the heat of arousal, the coldness of nonconviction. It speaks through its constant tiny dance, sometimes swaying, sometimes a-jitter, sometimes trembling. It speaks through the leaping of the heart, the falling of the spirit, the pit at the center, and rising hope. The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, any- where the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream. To confine the beauty and value of the body to anything less than this magnificence is to force the body to live without its rightful spirit, its rightful form, its right to exultation. To be thought ugly or unac- ceptable because one's beauty is outside the current fashion is deeply wounding to the natural joy that belongs to the wild nature.”

“While compulsive and destructive eating disorders that distort body size and body image are real and tragic, they are not the norm for most women. Women who are big or small, wide or narrow, short or tall, are most likely to be so simply because they inherited the body configuration of their kin; if not their immediate kin, then those a generation or two back. To malign or judge a woman's inherited physicality is to make generation after generation of anxious and neu- rotic women. To make destructive and exclusionary judgments about a woman's inherited form, robs her of several critical and precious psychological and spiritual treasures. It robs her of pride in the body pipe that was given to her by her own ancestral lines. If she is taught To revile this body inheritance, she is immediately slashed away from her female body identity with the rest of the family. If she is taught to hate her own body, how can she love her moth- er's body that has the same configuration as hers?'-her grand- mother's body, the bodies of her daughters as well? How can she love the bodies of other women (and men) close to her who have inherited the body shapes and configurations of their ancestors? To attack a woman thusly destroys her rightful pride of affiliation with her own people and robs her of the natural lilt she feels in her body no matter what height, size, shape she is. In essence, the attack on women's bodies is a far-reaching attack on the ones who have gone before her as well as the ones who will come after her.6 Instead, harsh judgments about body acceptability create a nation of hunched-over tall girls, short women on stilts, women of size dressed as though in mourning, very slender women trying to puff themselves out like adders, and various other women in hiding. De- stroying a woman's instinctive affiliation with her natural body cheats her of confidence. It causes her to perseverate about whether she is a good person or not, and bases her self-worth on how she looks in- stead of who she is. It pressures her to use up her energy worrying about how much food she consumes or the readings on the scale and tape measure. It keeps her preoccupied, colors everything she does, plans, and anticipates. It is unthinkable in the instinctive world that a woman should live preoccupied by appearance this way. It makes utter sense to stay healthy and strong, to be as nourishing to the body as possible.? Yet I would have to agree, there is in many women a "hungry" one inside. But rather than hungry to be a certain size, shape, or height, rather than hungry to fit the stereotype; women are hungry for basic regard from the culture surrounding them. The "hungry» one inside is longing to be treated respectfully, to be ac- cepted,® and in the very least, to be met without stereotyping. If there really is a woman "screaming to get out" she is screaming for cessa- tion of the disrespectful projections of others onto her body, her face, her age.”

“Yet, suffice it to say that various practitioners of psychology con. tinue to hand down this bias against the natural body, encouraging women to turn their attentions to a constant monitoring of body, thereby robbing them of deeper and finer relationships with their given form. Angst about the body robs a woman in some large share of her creative life and her attention to other things. This encouragement to begin trying to carve her body is remarka- bly similar to the carving, burning, peeling off layers, stripping down to the bones the flesh of the earth itself. Where there is a wound on the psyches and bodies of women, there is a corresponding wound at the same site in the culture itself, and finally on Nature herself. In a true holistic psychology all worlds are understood as interdependent, not as separate entities. It is not amazing that in our culture there is an issue about carving up a woman's natural body, that there is a cor- responding issue about carving up the landscape, and yet another about carving up the culture into fashionable parts as well. Although a woman may not be able to stop the dissection of culture and lands overnight, she can stop doing so to her own body. The wild nature would never advocate the torture of the body, cul- ture, or land. The wild nature would never agree to flog the form in order to prove worth, prove "control," prove character, be more vi- sully pleasing, more financially valuable. A woman cannot make the culture more aware by saying "Change." But she can change her own attitude toward herself, thereby causing devaluing projections to glance off. She does this by taking back her body. By not forsaking the joy of her natural body, by not purchasing the popular illusion that happiness is only be- stowed on those of a certain configuration or age, by not waiting of holding back to do anything, and by taking back her real life, and liv- ing it full bore, all stops out. This dynamic self-acceptance and self- esteem are what begins to change attitudes in the culture.”

“We tend to think of body as this "other" that does its thing somewhat without us, and that if we "treat" it right, it will make us "feel good." Many people treat their bodies as if the body is a slave, or perhaps they even treat it well but demand it follow their wishes and whims as though it were a slave nonetheless. Some say the soul informs the body. But what if we were to imag- ine for a moment that the body informs the soul, helps it adapt to mundane life, parses, translates, gives the blank page, the ink, and the pen with which the soul can write upon our lives? Suppose, as in fairy tales of the shapechangers, the body is a God in its own right, a teacher, a mentor, a certified guide? Then what? Is it wise to spend a lifetime chastising this teacher who has so much to give and teach? Do we wish to spend a lifetime allowing others to detract from our bodies, judge them, find them wanting? Are we strong enough to re- fute the party line and listen deep, listen true to the body as a pow- erful and holy being?13 The idea in our culture of body solely as sculpture is wrong. Body is not marble. That is not its purpose. Its purpose it to protect, con- tain, support, and fire the spirit and soul within it, to be a repository for memory, to fill us with feeling-_that is the supreme psychic nour- ishment. It is to lift us and propel us, to fill us with feeling to prove that we exist, that we are here, to give us grounding, heft, weight. It is wrong to think of it as a place we leave in order to soar to the spirit. The body is the launcher of those experiences.”

“remember, at bottom is where the living roots of psy. che are. It is there that a woman's wild underpinnings are. At bottom is the best soil to sow and grow something new again. In that sense, hitting bottom, while extremely painful, is also the sowing ground. Though we would never wish the poisonous red shoes and the sub- sequent decrease of life onto ourselves or others, there is in its fiery and destructive center a something that fuses fierceness to wisdom in the woman who has danced the cursed dance, who has lost herself and her creative life, who has driven herself to hell”

“In this tale, the old woman is a symbol of the rigid keeper of col. lective tradition, an enforcer of the unquestioned status quo, the "be- have yourself; don't make waves; don't think too hard; don't get big ideas; just keep a low profile; be a carbon copy; be nice; say yes even though you don't like it, it doesn't fit, it's not the right size, and it hurts.' And so on. To follow such a lifeless value system causes loss of soul-linkage in the extreme. Regardless of collective affiliations or influences, our challenge in behalf of the wild soul and our creative spirit is to not merge with any collective, but to distinguish ourselves from those who surround us, building bridges back to them as we choose. We de- cide which bridges will become strong and well traveled, and which will remain sketchy and empty. And the collectives we favor with re- lationship will be those that offer the most support for our soul and creative life. If a woman works at a university, she is in an academic collective. She is not to merge with whatever this collective environ may put forth, but add her own special flavor to it. As an integral creature, un- less she has created other strong things in her life to offset this, she cannot afford to deteriorate into a one-sided, peevish, "I do my job, go home, come back ..." kind of person. If a woman attempts to be a part of an organization, association, or family that neglects to peer into her to see what she is made of, one that fails to ask "What makes this person run?" and one that does not put forth effort to challenge or encourage her in any positive manner ... then her ability to thrive and create is diminished. The more harsh the circumstances, the more she is exiled to a salted barrens where nothing is allowed to grow. The separation of a woman's life and mind from flattened-out col- lective thinking and the development of her unique talents are among the most important accomplishments a woman can fashion, for these acts prevent both soul and psyche from sliding into enslavement. A culture that authentically promotes individual development will never make a slave class of any group or gender.”

“Overkill through excesses, or excessive behaviors, is acted out by women who are famished for a life that has meaning and makes sense for them. When a woman has gone without her cycles or creative needs for long periods of time, she begins a rampage of-you name it-alcohol, drugs, anger, spirituality, oppression of others, promiscu- ity, pregnancy, study, creation, control, education, orderliness, body fitness, junk food, to name a few areas of common excess. When women do this, they are compensating for the loss of regular cycles of self-expression, soul-expression, soul-satiation. The starving woman endures famine after famine. She may plan her escape, yet believe that the cost of fleeing is too high, that it will cost her too much libido, too much energy. She may be ill-prepared in other ways too, such as educationally, economically, spiritually. Unfortunately, the loss of treasure and the deep memory of famine may cause us to rationalize that excesses are desirable. And it is, of course, such a relief and a pleasure to finally be able to enjoy sensa- tion . . . any sensation. A woman newly free from famine just wants to enjoy life for a change. Her dulled perceptions about the emotional, rational, physi- cal, spiritual, and financial boundaries required for survival endanger her instead. For her there is a pair of poisonous red shoes glowing out there somewhere. She will take them wherever she finds them. That is the trouble with famine. If something looks like it will fill the yearn- ing, a woman will seize it, no questions asked.”

“Through wildlife studies of various species of captive animals, it was found that no matter how lovingly their zoo plazas are con- structed, no matter how much their human keepers love them, as in- deed they do, the creatures often become unable to breed, their appetites for food and rest become skewed, their vital behaviors dwindle to lethargy, sullenness, or untoward aggressiveness. Zoolo- gists call this behavior in captives "animal depression." Any time a creature is caged, its natural cycles of sleep, mate selection, estrus, grooming, parenting, and so forth deteriorate. As the natural cycles are lost, emptiness follows. The emptiness is not full, like the Bud- dhist concept of sacred void, but rather empty like being inside a sealed box with no windows.”

“sudden anxiety states that are similar to the symptoms animals display when they have been stunned by capture and trauma. Too much domestication breeds out strong and basic impulses to play, re- late, cope, rove, commune, and so forth. When a woman agrees to be- come too "well-bred" her instincts for these impulses drop down into her darkest unconscious, outside her automatic reach. She is said then to be instinct-injured. What should come naturally comes not at all, or after too much tugging, pulling, rationalizing, fighting with herself. When I speak of overdomestication as capture, I do not refer to so- cialization, the process whereby children are taught to behave in more or less civilized ways. Social development is critical and impor- tant. Without it, a woman cannot make her way in the world. But too much domestication is like forbidding the vital essence to dance. In its proper and healthy state, the wild self is not docile or vacuous. It is alert and responsive to any given movement or mo- ment. It is not locked into an absolute and repetitive pattern for any and all circumstances. It has creative choice. The instinct-iniured woman has no choice. She just stays stuck. There are many ways to be stuck. The instinct-injured woman usu- ally gives herself away because she has a difficult time asking for help or recognizing her own needs. Her natural instincts to fight or flee are drastically slowed or extincted. Recognition of the sensations of sati- ation, off-taste, suspicion, caution, and the drive to love fully and freely are inhibited or exaggerated. As in the tale, one of the most insidious attacks on the wild self is to be directed to perform properly, implying a reward will follow (if ever). Though this method may (I emphasize "may") temporarily per- suade a two-year-old to clean her room (no playing with toys until the bed is made) it will never, never work in a vital woman's life. While consistency, follow-through, and organization are all essential to implementing creative life, the old woman's injunction to «be proper" kills off any opportunity to expand. It is play, not properness, that is the central artery, the core, the brain stem of creative life. The impulse to play is an instinct. No play, no creative life. Be good, no creative life. Sit still, no creative life.”

“Injury to instinct cannot be underestimated as the root of the issue when women are acting mad, are possessed by obsession, or when they are stuck in less malignant but nevertheless destructive patterns. The repair of injured instinct begins with acknowledging that a cap ture has taken place, that a soul-famine has followed, that usual boundaries of insight and protection have been disturbed. The pro- cess that caused a woman's capture and the ensuing famine has to be reversed.”

“It is said that in the matriarchal cultures of ancient India, Beyp, parts of Asia, and Turkey- which are believed to have influenced ou concept of the feminine soul for thousands of miles in all directions- the bequeathing of henna and other red pigments to young girls, so that they could stain their feet with it, was a central feature in thresh. old rites." One of the most important threshold rites regarded first menstruation. This rite celebrated the crossing from childhood into the profound ability to bring forth life from one's own belly, to carry the attendant sexual power and all peripheral womanly powers. The ceremony was concerned with red blood in all its stages: the uterine blood of menstruation, delivery of a child, miscarriage, all running downward toward the feet. As you can see, the original red shoes had many meanings.”

“Though the values may change from culture to culture, thereby positing different "negatives" and "positives" in the shadow, typical impulses that are considered negative and therefore relegated to the shadowlands are those that encourage a person to steal, cheat, mur- der, act excessively in various ways, and so forth in that vein. The negative shadow aspects tend to be oddly exciting and yet entropic in nature, stealing balance and equanimity of mood and life from indi- viduals, relationships, and larger groups. The shadow also, however, can contain the divine, the luscious, beautiful, and powerful aspects of personhood. For women especially, the shadow almost always contains very fine aspects of being that are forbidden or given little support by her culture. At the bottom of the well in the psyches of too many women lies the visionary creator, the astute truth-teller, the far-seer, the one who can speak well of herself without denigration, who can face herself without cringing, who works to perfect her craft. The positive impulses in shadow for women in our culture most often revolve around permission for the creation of a handmade life.”

“When a woman pretends to press her life down into a nice tidy lit- tle package, all she accomplishes is spring-loading all her vital enerey down into shadow. "Fine, I'm fine," such a woman says. We look at her across the room or in the mirror. We know she is not fine. Then one day, we hear she has taken up with a piccolo player and has run off to Tippicanoe to be a pool hall queen. And we wonder what hap- pened, because we know she hates piccolo players and always wanted to live on Orcas Island, not in Tippicanoe, and she never before men- tioned anything about pool halls. Like Hedda Gabler in Henrik Ibsen's play, the wildish woman can pretend to live "an ordinary life" while gritting her teeth, but there is always a price to pay. Hedda sneaks a passionate and dangerous life, playing games with an ex-lover and with Death. Outwardly, she pre- tends to be content wearing bonnets and listening to her dry husband cavil about his dusty life. A woman can be outwardly polite and even cynical, but inwardly hemorrhaging. Or, like Janis Joplin, a woman can try to comply until she can't stand it any longer, and then her creative nature, corroded and sick- ened by being forced into the shadow, erupts violently to rebel against the, tenets of "breeding" in reckless ways that disregard one's gifts and one's very life.”

“Captured and starved women sneak all kinds of things: they sneak unsanctioned books and music, they sneak friendships, sexual feeling, religious affiliation. They sneak furtive thinking, dreams of revolu- tion. They sneak time away from their mates and families. They sneak a treasure into the house. They sneak their writing time, their thinking time, their soul-time. They sneak a spirit into the bedroom, a poem before work, they sneak a skip or an embrace when no one's looking. To detour off this polarized path, a woman has to surrender the pretense. Sneaking a counterfeit soul-life never works. It always blows out the sidewall when you're least expecting it. Then it's misery all around. It's better to get up, stand up, no matter how homemade your platform, and live the most you can, the best you can, and forgo the sneaking of counterfeits. Hold out for what has real meaning and health for you.”

“You see, there is something in the wild soul that will not let us sub- st forever on piecemeal intake. Because in actuality, it is impossible for the woman who strives for consciousness to sneak little sniffs of good air and then be content with no more. Remember when you were a child and you found out that you couldn't do yourself in by holding your breath? Though you might try to get by on just a little air or no air at all, some big fist bellows takes over, something fierce and demanding that makes you eventually shovel the air in as fast as you can. You gulp it, bite it down until you are breathing fully again. Blessedly, there is something like that in the soul/psyche as well. It takes us over and forces us to take full breaths of good air. Truly, we know that we can not really subsist on sneaking little sips of life. The wild force in a woman's soul demands that she have access to it all. We can stay alert and take in the things that are right for us.”

“But the wild nature teaches that we meet challenges as they occur. When wolves are badgered, they don't say, "Oh, no! Not again!" They bound, pounce, run, dive, scramble, play dead, go for the throat, whatever needs to be done. So we cannot be shocked that there is entropy, deterioration, hard times. Let us understand that the issues that entrap women's joy will always shift and shape-change, but in our own essential natures we find the absolute stamina, the necessary libido for all necessary acts of heart.”

“Thing to be good, orderly, and compliant in the face of inner or outer perl or in order to hide a critical psychic or real-life situation Setous a woman. le cuts her from her knowing; it cuts her from her babity to act. Like the child in the tale, who does not object out loud, who ties to hide her starvarion, who tries to make it seem as though nothing is burning in her, modern women have the same disorder, normalizing the abnormal. This disorder is rampant across cultures. Normalizing the abnormal causes the spirit, which would normally leap to correct the situation, to instead sink into ennui, complacency, and eventually, like the old woman, into blindness. There's an important study that gives insight into women's loss of self protective instinct. In the early 1960s, scientistsl6 conducted ani- mal experiments to determine something about the "flight instinct" in humans. In one experiment they wired half the bottom of a large cage, so that a dog placed in the cage would receive a shock each time it set foot on the right side. The dog quickly learned to stay on the left side of the cage. Next, the left side of the cage was wired for the same purpose and the right side was safe from shocks. The dog reoriented quickly and learned to stay on the right side of the cage. Then, the entire floor of the cage was wired to give random shocks, so that no matter where the dog lay or stood it would eventually receive a shock. The dog acted confused at first, and then it panicked. Finally the dog "gave up" and lay down, taking the shocks as they came, no longer trying to escape them or outsmart them.”

“We can see from similar events that have occurred over our life- times that when women do not speak, when not enough people speak, the voice of the Wild Woman becomes silent, and therefore the world becomes silent of the natural and wild too. Silent, eventually, of wolf and bear and raptors. Silent of singings and dancings and cre- ations. Silent of loving, repairing, and holding. Bereft of clear air and water and the voices of consciousness. But back in those times, and too often today, even though women were infused with a yearning for a wild freedom, they continued out- wardly to rub SOS on porcelain, using caustic cleansers, staying, as Sylvia Plath put it, "tied to their Bendix washing machines." There they washed and rinsed their clothes in water too hot for human touch and dreamed of a different world.19 When the instincts are in- jured, humans will "normalize" assault after assault, acts of injustice and destruction toward themselves, their offspring, their loved ones, their land, and even their Gods.”

“Psychically, it is good to make a halfway place, a way station, a considered place in which to rest and mend after one escapes a fam- ine. It is not too much to take one year, two years, to assess one's wounds, seek guidance, apply the medicines, consider the future. A year or two is scant time. The feral woman is a woman making her way back. She is learning to wake up, pay attention, stop being naive, uninformed. She takes her life in her own hands. To re-learn the deep feminine instincts, it is vital to see how they were decommissioned to begin with. Whether the injuries be to your art, words, lifestyles, thoughts, or ideas, and if you have knitted yourself up into a many-sleeved sweater, cut through the tangle now and get on with it. Beyond desire and wishing, beyond the carefully reasoned methods we love to talk and scheme over, there is a simple door waiting for us to walk through. On the other side are new feet. Go there. Crawl there if need be. Stop talking and obsessing. Just do it. We cannot control who brings us into this world. We cannot influ- ence the fluency with which they raise us; we cannot force the culture in instantlv become hospitable. But the good news is that, even after injury, even in a feral state, even, for that matter, in an as yet cap. tured state, we can have our lives back. The psychological soul-plan for coming back into one's own is as follows: Take extra special caution and care to loose yourself into the wild gradually, setting up ethical and protective structures by which you gain tools to measure when something is too much. (You are usu- ally already very sensitive to when something is too little.) So the return to the wild and free psyche must be made with bold- ness, but also with consideration. In psychoanalysis we are fond of saying that to be trained as a healer/helper it is as important to learn what not to do as it is to learn what to do. To return to the wild from captivity carries the same caveats. Let us take a closer look. The pitfalls, traps, and poisoned baits laid out for the wildish woman are specific to her culture. Here I have listed those that are common to most cultures. Women from differing ethnic and religious backgrounds will have additional specific insights. In a symbolic sense, we are composing a map of the woods in which we live. We are delineating where the predators live and describing their modi operandi. It is said that a single wolf knows every creature in her ter- ritory for miles around. It is this knowledge that gives her the edge in living as freely as possible. Regaining lost instinct and healing injured instinct is truly within one's reach, for it returns when a woman pays close attention through listening, looking, and sensing the world around herself, and then by acting as she sees others act; efficiently, effectively, and soul fully. The opportunity to observe others who have instincts well in- tact is central to retrieval.”

“If you are striving to do something you value, it is so important to surround yourself with people who unequivocally support your work. It is both a trap and a poison to have so-called friends who have the same injuries but no real desire to heal them. These kinds of friends encourage you to act outrageously, outside of your natural cycles, out of sync with your soul-needs. A feral woman cannot afford to be naive. As she returns to her in- nate life, she must consider excesses with a skeptical eye and be aware of their costs to soul, psyche, and instinct. Like the wolf pups, we memorize the traps, how they are made, and how they are laid. That is the way we remain free. Even so, lost instincts do not recede without leaving echoes and trails of feeling, which we can follow to claim them again. Though a woman may be held in the velvet fist of propriety and stricture, whether she is one breath away from destruction through excesses or has just begun to dive into them, she can still hear whispers of the wild God in her blood. Even in these worst circumstances as por- trayed in "The Red Shoes," even the most injured instincts can be healed. To aright all this, we resurrect the wild nature, over and over again, each time the balance tips too far in one direction or another. We will know when there is reason for concern, for generally balance makes our lives larger and imbalance makes our lives smaller. One of the most important things we can do is to understand life, all life, as a living body in itself, one that has respiration, new cell turnover, sloughing off, and waste material. It would be silly if we ex- pected our bodies not to have waste material more than once every five years. It would be inane to think that just because we ate a day ago we shouldn't be hungry today. It is just as fatuous to think that once we solve an issue it stays resolved, that once we learn, we always remain conscious ever after. No, life is a great body that grows and diminishes in different areas, at different rates. When we are like the body, doing the work of new growth, wading through la mierda, the shit, just breathing or resting, we are very alive, we are within the cycles of the Wild Woman. If we could realize that the work is to keep doing the work, we would be much more fierce and much more peaceful. To hold to joy, we may sometimes have to fight for it, we may have to strengthen ourselves and go full-bore, doing battle in whichever ways we deem most shrewd. To prepare for siege, we may have to go without many comforts for the duration.”

“There is human time and there is wild time. When I was a child in the north woods, before I learned there were four seasons to a year, I thought there were dozens; the time of night-time thunderstorms, heat lightning time, bonfires-in-the-woods time, blood-on-the-snow time, the times of ice trees, bowing trees, crying trees, shimmering trees, breaded trees, waving-at-the-tops-only trees, and trees-drop- their-babies time. I loved the seasons of diamond snow, steaming snow, squeaking snow, and even dirty snow and stone snow, for these meant the time of flower blossoms on the river was coming. These seasons were like important and holy visitors and each sent its harbingers: pine cones open, pine cones closed, the smell of leaf rot, the smell of rain coming, crackling hair, lank hair, bushy hair, doors loose, doors tight, doors that won't shut at all, windowpanes covered with ice-hair, windowpanes covered with wet petals, win- dowpanes covered with yellow pollen, windowpanes pecked with sap gum. And our own skin had its cycles too: parched, sweaty, gritty, sunburned, soft. The psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying”

“One of the central and most potentially destructive issues women face is that of beginning various psychological initiation processes with initiators who have not completed the process themselves. They have no seasoned persons who know how to proceed. When initiators are incompletely initiated themselves, they omit important aspects of the process without realizing it, and sometimes visit great abuse on the initiate, for they are working with a fragmentary idea of initiation, one that is often tainted in one way or another.+ At the other end of the spectrum is the woman who has experienced theft, and who is striving for knowledge and mastery of the situation, but who has run out of directions and does not know there is more to practice in order to complete the learning, and so repeats the first stage, that of being stolen from, over and over again. Through whatever cir- cumstances, she has gotten tangled in the reins. Essentially, she is with- out instruction. Instead of discovering the requirements of a healthy wildish soul, she becomes a casualty of an uncompleted initiation. Because matrilineal lines of initiation-older women teaching younger women certain psychic facts and procedures of the wild teminine- have been fragmented and broken for so many women and Over so many years, it is a blessing to have the archeology of the fairy tale to learn from. What can be derived from those deep templates echoes the innate patterns of women's most integral psychological processes. In this sense, fairy tales and mythos are initiators; they are the wise ones who teach those who have come after.”

“We lose the soulskin by becoming too involved with ego, by being too exacting, perfectionistic," or unnecessarily martyred, or driven by a blind ambition, or by being dissatisfied--about self, family, commu- nity, culture, world--and not saying or doing anything about it, or by pretending we are an unending source for others, or by not doing all we can to help ourselves. Oh, there are as many ways to lose the soulskin as there are women in the world. The only way to hold on to this essential soulskin is to retain an exquisitely pristine consciousness about its value and uses. But, since no one can consistently maintain acute consciousness, no one can keep the soulskin absolutely every moment day and night. But we can keep the theft of it to a bare minimum. We can develop that ojo agudo, the shrewd eye that watches the conditions all around and guards our psychic territory accordingly. The "Sealskin, Soulskin" story, however, is about an instance of what we might call aggravated theft. This big theft can, with consciousness, be mediated in the fu- ture if we will pay attention to our cycles and the call to take leave and return home. Every creature on earth returns to home. It is ironic that we have made wildlife refuges for ibis, pelican, egret, wolf, crane, deer, mouse, moose, and bear, but not for ourselves in the places where we live day after day. We understand that the loss of habitat is the most disas- trous event that can occur to a free creature. We fervently point out how other creatures' natural territories have become surrounded by cities, ranches, highways, noise, and other dissonance, as though we are not surrounded by the same, as though we are not affected also. We know that for creatures to live on, they must at least from time to time have a home place, a place where they feel both protected and free.”

“In Jungian psychology, the ego is often described as a small island of consciousness that floats in a sea of unconsciousness. However, in folklore the ego is portrayed as a creature of appetite, often symbol- ized by a not very bright human or animal surrounded by forces very mystifying to it, and over which it attempts to gain control. Some- times the ego is able to gain control in a most brutish and destructive manner, but in the end, through the heroine's or hero's progress, it most often loses its bid to reign. In the beginning of one's life, the ego is curious about the soul- world, but more often it is concerned with fulfilling its own hungers. The ego is initially born into us as potential, and is shaped, devel- oped, and filled up with ideas, values, and duties by the world around us: our parents, our teachers, our culture. And this is as it should be, for it becomes our escort, our armor, and our scout in the outer world. However, if the wildish nature is not allowed to emanate up- ward through the ego, giving it color, juice, and instinctive respon- siveness, then although the culture may approve of what has been fashioned in this ego, the soul does not, cannot, will not approve such incompleteness of its work. The lonely man in the tale is attempting to participate in the life of the soul. But like the ego, he is not particularly built for it, and tries to grab at the soul rather than develop a relationship with it. Why does the ego steal the sealskin? Like all other lonely or hungry things, it loves the light. It sees light, and the possibility of being close to the soul, and it creeps up to it and steals one of its essential camouflages. Ego cannot help itself. It is what it is; attracted to the light. Even though it cannot live under the water, it has its own yearning for re lationship with the soul. The ego is crude in comparison to the soul. Its way of doing things is usually not evocative or sensitive. But it has a tiny and dimly understood longing for the beautiful light. And this, in some way and for some time, calms the ego.”

“They are dying for new life. They are panting for the sea. They are living just for next month, just till this semesters past, can't wait till winter is finally over so they can feel alive again, just waiting for a mystically  assigned date somewhere in the future when they will be free to do some wondrous thing. They think they will die if they don’t..... you fill in the blank. And there is a quality of mourning to it all.  There is angst. There is bereftness. There is wistfulness. There is a longing. There is plucking at threads in one's skirt and staring long from windows. And it is not a temporary discomfort. It stays, and grows more and more intense over time. Yet women continue in their day-to-day routines, looking shepist, acting guilty and smirky. "Yes, yes, yes, I know," they say. "I should, but, but, but . » It is the buts" in their sentences that are the dead giveaways that they have stayed too long. An incompletely initiated woman in this depleted state erroneously thinks she is deriving more spiritual credit by staying than she thinks she will gain by going. Others are caught up in, as they say in Mex- ico, dar a algo un tirón fuerte, always tugging at the sleeve of the Vir- gin, meaning they are working hard and ever harder to prove that they are acceptable, that they are good people. But there are other reasons for the divided woman. She is not used to letting others take the oars. She may be a practitioner of "kid lit which is a litany that goes like this: "But my kids need this, my kids need that, etcetera."12 She does not realize that by sacrificing her need for return, she teaches her children to make the very same sat- rifices of their own needs once they are grown. Some women are afraid that those around them will not under stand their need for return. And not all may. But the woman mut understand this herself: When a woman goes home according to het Own cycles, others around her are given their own individuaticn work, their own vital issues to deal with. Her return to home allows others growth and development too.”

“There are many ways to go home; many are mundane, some are di- vine. My clients tell me these mundane endeavors constitute a return to home for them . . . although I caution you, the exact placement of the aperture to home changes from time to time, so its location may be different this month than last. Rereading passages of books and single poems that have touched them. Spending even a few minutes near a river, a stream, a creek. Lying on the ground in dappled light. Being with a loved one without kids around. Sitting on the porch shelling something, knitting something, peeling something. Walking or driving for an hour, any direction, then returning. Boarding any bus, destination unknown. Making drums while listening to music. Greeting sunrise. Driving out to where the city lights do not interfere with the night sky. Praying. A special friend. Sitting on a bridge with legs dangling over. Holding an infant. Sitting by a window in a café and writing. Sitting in a circle of trees. Drying hair in the sun. Putting hands in a rain barrel. Potting plants, being sure to get hands very muddy. Beholding beauty, grace, the touching frailty of human beings. So, it is not necessarily an overland and arduous journey to go home, yet I do not want to make it seem that it is simplistic, for there Is much resistance to going home no matter if it be easy or hard.”

“The great healer archetype carries wisdom, goodness, knowing, caregiving, and all the other things associated with a healer. So, it is good to be generous and kind and helpful like the great healer arche- type. But only to a point. Beyond that, it exerts a hindering influence on our lives. Women's "heal everything, fix everything" compulsion is a major entrapment constructed by the requirements placed upon us by our own cultures, mainly pressures to prove that we are not just standing around taking up space and enjoying ourselves, but that we have redeemable value-_in some parts of the world, it is fair to say, to prove that we have value and therefore should be allowed to live. These pressures are introduced into our psyches when we are very young and unable to judge or resist them. They become law to us. unless or until we challenge them. But the cries of the suffering world cannot all be answered by a sin- gle person all the time. We can truly only choose to respond to those that allow us to go home on a regular basis, otherwise our heart- lights dim to almost nothing. What the heart wishes to help is some- times different from what the soul's resources be. If a woman values her soulskin, she will decide these matters according to how close she is to and how often she has been "home." While archetypes may emanate through us for short periods of time, in what we call numinous experience, no woman can emanate an archetype continuously. Only the archetype itself can be ever-able, all giving, eternally energetic. We may try to emulate these, but they are ideals, not achievable by humans, and not meant to be.”

“Women I've worked with who have not been home in twenty or more years always weep upon first setting foot on that psychic ground again. For various reasons, which seemed like good ones at the time, they spent years accepting permanent exile from the home- land; they forgot how immensely good it is for rain to fall on dry earth. For some, home is the taking up of an endeavor of some sort. Women begin to sing again after years of finding reason not to. They commit themselves to learn something they've been heartfelt about for a long time. They seek out the lost people and things in their lives. They take back their voices and write. They rest. They make some corner of the world their own. They execute immense or intense de- cisions. They do something that leaves footprints. For some, home is a forest, a desert, a sea. In truth, home is holo- graphic. It is carried at full power in even a single tree, a solitarv cactus in a plant shop window, a pool of still water.”

“For how long does one go home? As long as one can or until you have yourself back again. How often is it needed? Far more often if you are a “sensitive” and are very active in the outer world. Less so if you have thick skin and are not so “out there.” Each woman knows in her heart how often and how long is needed. It is a matter of assessing the condition of the shine in one’s eyes, the vibrancy of one’s mood, the vitality of one’s senses. How do we balance the need to go home with our daily lives? We pre-plan home into our lives. It is always amazing how easily women can “take time away” if there is illness, if a child needs them, if the car breaks down, if they have a toothache. Going home has to be given the same value, even stated in crisis proportions if necessary. For it is unequivocally true, if a woman doesn’t go when it’s her time to go, the hairline crack in her soul/psyche becomes a ravine, and the ravine becomes a roaring abyss. If a woman absolutely values her going-home cycles, those around her will also learn to value them. It is true that significant “home” can be reached by taking time away from the click-clack of daily rou­ tine, time that is inviolate and solely for ourselves. “Solely for our­ selves” means different things to different women. For some being in a room with the door closed, but still being accessible to others, is a fine return to home. For others though, the place from which to dive to home needs to be without even a tiny interruption. No “Mommy, Mommy, where are my shoes?” No “Honey, do we need anything from the grocery store?” For this woman, the inlet to her deep home is evoked by silence. No me molestes. Utter Silence, with a capital U and a capital S. For her, the sound of wind through a great loom of trees is silence. For her, the crash of a mountain stream is silence. For her, thunder is si­ lence. For her, the natural order of nature, which asks nothing in re­ turn, is her life-giving silence. Each woman chooses both as she can and as she must. Regardless of your home time, an hour or days, remember, other people can pet your cats even though your cats say only you can do it right. Your dog will try to make you think you are abandoning a child on the highway, but will forgive you. The grass will grow a little brown but it will revive.”

“In order to converse with the wild feminine, a woman must tempo rarily leave the world and inhabit a state of aloneness in the oldest sense of the word. Long ago the word alone was treated as two words, all one 20 To be all one meant to be wholly one, to be in one- ness, either essentially or temporarily. That is precisely the goal of sol. itude, to be all one. It is the cure for the frazzled state so common to modern women, the one that makes her, as the old saying goes, "leap onto her horse and ride off in all directions." Solitude is not an absence of energy or action, as some believe, but is rather a boon of wild provisions transmitted to us from the soul. In ancient times, as recorded by physician-healers, religious and mys- tics, purposeful solitude was both palliative and preventative. It was used to heal fatigue and to prevent weariness. It was also used as an oracle, as a way of listening to the inner self to solicit advice and guidance otherwise impossible to hear in the din of daily life. Women from ancient times as well as modern aboriginal women often set a sacred place aside for this communion and inquiry. Tradi- tionally it is said to have been set aside during women's menses, for during that time a woman lives much closer to self-knowing than usual; the membrane between the unconscious and the conscious minds thins considerably. Feelings, memories, sensations that are nor- mally blocked from consciousness pass over into cognizance without resistance: When a woman takes solitude during this time, she has more material to sift through.”

“For myself, solitude is rather like a folded-up forest that I carry with me everywhere and unfurl around myself when I have need. I sit at the feet of the great old trees of my childhood. From that vantage point, I ask my questions, receive my answers, then coalesce my woodland back down to the size of a love note till next time. The experience is immediate, brief, informative. Truly the only thing one needs for intentional solitude is the ability to tune out distractions. A woman can learn to detach from other people, noise, and chatter, no matter if she is in the midst of a con- tentious board meeting, no matter if she is being stalked by a house that needs to be cleaned by bulldozer, no matter if she is surrounded by eighty loquacious relatives, fighting, singing, and dancing their way through a three-day wake. If you have ever been a teenager, you definitely know how to tune out. If you have ever been the mother of an insomniac two-year-old, you know how to take intentional soli- tude. It is not hard to do, just hard to remember to do.”

“Because it is considered such an untoward thing, we have learned to camouflage this interval of soulful communication by naming it in very mundane terms. So, it has been named thusly: "talking to oneself," being "lost in thought," "staring off into space," or "day- dreaming." This euphemistic language is inculcated by many seg ments of our culture, for unfortunately, we are taught from childhood onward to feel embarrassment if found communing with soul, and es- pecially in pedestrian environments such as work or school. Somehow, the educational and business world has felt that such time spent at being "all one," is unproductive, when in fact it is the most fecund. It is the wild soul who channels ideas into our imagina- tion, whereupon we sort through these to find which we will imple- ment, which are most applicable and productive. It is commingling with soul that causes us to glow bright with spirit, willing to assert our talents, whatever they might be. It is that brief, even momentary, but intentional union that supports us to live out our inner lives so that instead of burying them in the self-inversion of shame, fear of re- prisal or attack, lethargy, complacency, or other limiting reasonings and excuses, we let our inner lives wave, flare, blaze on the outside for all to see.”

“Alternatively the voices may whisper, "Only if you have a doctor- ate degree will your work be decent, only if you are lauded by the Queen, only if you receive such and such award, only if you are pub- lished in such and such magazine, only if, if, if." This only-iffing is like stuffing the soul with junk food. It is one thing to be fed with any old thing; it is quite another to be truly nour- ished. Most often the logic of the complex is extremely faulty, even though it will try to convince you otherwise. One of the greatest problems of the creative complex is the accusa- tion that whatever you're doing won't work because you're not think- ing logically, you're not being logical, what you have done so far isn't logical and is therefore doomed to failure. First of all, the primary stages of creating are not logical--nor should they be. If the complex succeeds in stopping you with this, it has you. Tell it to sit down and be quiet or go away till you're done. Remember, if logic were all there really was to the world, then surely all men would ride sidesaddle. I've seen women work long, long hours at jobs they despise in or- der to buy very expensive items for their houses, mates, or children. They put their considerable talents on the back burner. I've seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write ... and you know it's a funny thing about house cleaning . . . it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman. A woman must be careful to not allow over-responsibility (or over- respectability) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she be- lieves she "should" be doing. Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only.”

“It may also be that a woman's creative process is misunderstood or disrespected by those around her. It is up to her to inform them that when she has "that look" in her eyes, it does not mean she is a vacant lot waiting to be filled. It means she is balancing a big cardhouse of ideas on a single fingertip, and she is carefully connecting all the cards using tiny crystalline bones and a little spit, and if she can just get it all to the table without it falling down or flying apart, she can bring an image from the unseen world into being. To speak to her in that moment is to create a Harpy wind that blows the entire structure to tatters. To speak to her in that moment is to break her heart. And yet, a woman may do this to herself by talking away her ideas until all the arousal is gone from them, or by not putting her foot down about people creeping off with her creative tools and materials, or by the simple oversight of not buying the right equipment to exe- cute the creative work properly, or by stopping and starting so many times, by allowing everyone and their cat to interrupt her at will, that the project falls into a shambles. If the culture in which a woman lives attacks the creative function of its members, if it splits or shatters any archetype or perverts its de- sign or meaning, these will be incorporated in their broken state into the psyches of its members in the same way; as a broken-winged force rather than a hale one filled with vitality and possibility.”

“Begin; this is how to clear the polluted river. If you're scared, seared to fail, I say begin already, fail if you must, pick yourself up, start again. If you fail again, you fail. So what? Begin again. It is not the failure that holds us back but the reluctance to begin over again that causes us to stagnate. If you're scared, so what? If you're afraid something's going to leap out and bite you, then for heaven's sake, get it over with already. Let your fear leap out and bite you so you can get it over with and go on. You will get over it. The fear will pass. In this case, it is better if you meet it head-on, feel it, and get it over with, than to keep using it to avoid cleaning up the river. Protect your time; this is how to banish pollutants. I know a fierce painter here in the Rockies who hangs this sign on the chain that closes off the road to her house when she is in a painting or thinking mode: "I am working today and am not receiving visitors. I know you think this doesn't mean you because you are my banker, agent, or best friend. But it does." Another sculptor I know hangs this sign on her gate: "Do not dis turb unless I've won the lottery or Jesus has been sighted on the Old Taos Highway." As you can see, the well-developed animus has excel- lent boundaries. Stay with it. How to further banish this pollution? By insisting nothing will stop us from exercising the well-integrated animus, by continuing our soul-spinning, wing-making ventures, our art, our Psychic mending and sewing, whether we feel strong or not, whether we feel ready or not. If necessary by tying ourselves to the mast, the chair, the desk, the tree, the cactus--wherever we create. It is essen- tial, even though often painful, to put in the necessary time, to not skirt the difficult tasks inherent in striving for mastery. A true creative life burns in more ways than one. Negative complexes that arise along the way are banished or transformed--your dreams will guide you the last part of the way-by putting your foot down, once and for all, and by saying, "I love my creative life more than I love cooperating with my own op pression." If we were to abuse our children, Social Services would show up at our doors. If we were to abuse our pets, the Humane So- city would come to take us away. But there is no Creativity Patrol”

“I saw how ladylikeness in the wrong situation actually throttled a woman rather than allowing her to breathe. To laugh you have to be able to exhale and take another breath in quick succession. We know from kinesiology and various other body therapies such as Hakomi, that to take a breath causes one to feel one’s emotions, that when we wish not to feel, we hold our breath instead. In laughter, a woman breathes fully, and when she does, she may begin to feel unsanctioned feelings. And what could these feelings be? Well, they turn out not to be feelings so much as relief and remedies for feelings, often causing the release of stopped-up tears or the rec­ lamation of forgotten memories, or the bursting of chains on the sen­ sual personality.”

“In Buddhism there is a questing action called nyübu, which means to go into the mountains in order to understand oneself and to re- make one's connections to the Great. It is a very old ritual related to the cycles of preparing the earth, sowing, and harvesting. While it might be good to go into the real mountains if possible, there are also mountains in the underworld, in one's own unconscious, and luckily, we all carry the entrance to the underworld right in our own psyches, so we can go into the mountains for renewal with dispatch. In mythos, a mountain is sometimes understood as a symbol de- scribing the levels of mastery one must attain before one can ascend to the next level. The lowest part of the mountain, the foothills, often represents the urge toward consciousness. All that occurs in the foot- hills is thought of in terms of maturing consciousness. The middle part of the mountain is often thought of as the steeping part of the process, the part that tests the knowledge learned at lower levels. The higher mountain represents intensified learning; the air is thin there, it takes endurance and determination to stay at the tasks. The peak of the mountain represents confrontation with the ultimate wisdom, such as that in mythos wherein the old woman lives atop the moun- tain, or as in this story, the wise old bruin. So, it is good to take to the mountain when we don't know what else to do. When we are drawn to quests we know little about, this makes life and develops soul. In climbing the unknown mountain we gain true knowledge of the instinctive psyche and the creative acts of which it is capable--that is our goal. Learning occurs differently for each person. But the instinctual viewpoint that emanates from the wild unconscious, and that is cyclical, begins to be the only one that makes sense of and gives meaning to life, our lives. It unerringly in- forms us about what to do next. Where can we find this process that will free us? On the mountain.”

“We can have all the knowledge in the universe, and it comes down to one thing: practice. It comes down to going home and step-by-step implementing what we know. As often as nec- essary, and for as long as possible, or forever, whichever comes first. It is very reassuring to know that when one is in a burgeoning rage one knows precisely and with the skill of a craftswoman what to do about it: wait it out, release illusions, take it for a climb on the moun- tain, speak with it, respect it as a teacher. We are given many markers in this story, many ideas about coming to balance: making patience, giving the enraged one kindness and time to get over his rage through introspection and questing. There is an old saying: Before Zen, mountains were mountains and trees were trees. During Zen, mountains were thrones of the spirits and trees were the voices of wisdom. After Zen. mountains were mountains and trees were trees. While the woman was on the mountain, learning, everything was magic. Now that she is off the mountain, the so-called magical hair has been burned in the fire that destroys illusion, and now it is time for "after Zen." Life is supposed to become mundane again. Yet she has the bounty of her experience on the mountain. She has knowing. The energy that was bound up in rage can be used for other things. Now a woman who has come to terms with rage returns to mun- dane life with new knowing, a new sense that she can more artfully live her life. Yet one day in the future, a something--a look, a word, a tone of voice, a feeling of being patronized, unappreciated, or ma- nipulated against one's will, one of these--will crop up again. Then her residue of pain will catch fire."

“Rage left over from old injuries can be compared to the trauma of a shrapnel wound. One can pick out almost all the pieces of shattered metal from the missile, but the tiniest shards remain. One would think that if most are out, that would be that. Not so. On some oc- casions, those tiniest shards twist and turn within and cause an ache that feels like the original wounding (rage rising up) all over again. But it is not the original and vast rage that causes this welling up, it is the very small particles of it, the irritants still left in the psyche that can never be fully excised. These cause a pain that is almost as intense as that of the original injury.”

“They are involved in drastic maneuvers on three fronts: one in trying to contain the outside event, one in attempting to contain the pain broadcasting from the old injury inside, and one trying to secure safety of position by running, head down in a psychological crouch. It is too much to ask a single individual to take on the equivalent of a gang of three and try to KO all of them at one time. That is why it is imperative to stop in the midst of it all, withdraw, and take sol- itude. It is too much to try to fight and handle feeling gut-shot at the same time. A woman who has climbed the mountain withdraws, deals with the older event first, then the more recent event, decides her position, shakes out her ruff, puts up her ears, and goes back out to act with dignity.”

“None of us can entirely escape our history. We can certainly put it in the background, but it is there nevertheless. However, if you will do these things for yourself, you will bridge the rage and eventually everything will calm down and be fine. Not perfect, but fine. You'll be able to move ahead. The time of the shrapnel rage will be over. You'll handle it better and better each time because you'll know when it is time to call in the healer again, to climb the mountain, release yourself from the illusions that the present is an exact and calculated replay of the past. A woman remembers that she can be both fierce and generous at the same time. Rage is not like a kidney stone-it you wait long enough, it will pass. No, no. You must take right ac- tion. Then it will pass, and more creation will come to your life.”

“But in the story, the mill is not milling. The psyche's miller is unemployed. This means nothing is being done with all the raw material that comes into our lives on a daily basis, and that no sense is being made of all the grains of knowing that blow into our faces from the world and from the underworld. If the miller has no work, the psy- che has stopped nourishing itself in critically important ways. The milling of grain has to do with the creative urge. For whatever reason, the creative life of a woman's psyche is at a standstill. A woman who feels thusly senses that she is no longer fragrant with ideas, that she is not fired with invention, that she is not grinding finely to find the pith of things. Her mill is silenced. There appears to be a natural slumber that comes upon humans at certain times in their lives. From raising my own, and from my work with the same group of gifted children over a period of years, I saw that this sleep seems to descend upon children at age eleven or there- abouts. That is when they begin to take acute measurements about how they compare with others. During this time their eyes go from clear to hooded, and though they are always in motion like Mexican jumping beans, they are often dying of terminal cool. Whether they are being too cool or too well-behaved, in neither state are they re- sponsive to what goes on deep inside, and a sleep gradually covers over their bright-eyed, responsive natures. Let us further imagine that during this time we are offered some- thing for nothing. That somehow we have twisted ourselves around to believe that if we will remain asleep something will accrue to us. Women know what this means. When a woman surrenders her instincts that tell her the right time to say yes and when to say no, when she gives up her insight, intui- ton, and other wildish traits, then she finds herself in situations that promised gold but ultimately give grief. Some women relinquish their art for a grotesque financial marriage, or give up their life's dream in order to be a "too-good" wife, daughter, or girl, or surrender their true calling in order to lead what they hope will be a more accept- able, fulfilling, and especially, more sanitary life. In these ways, and others, we lose our instincts.”

“However, back in misty time, it is a good bet that this sort of story originally presented the crone playing the part of the initiator/trouble causer, making things difficult for the sweet young heroine so embar. kation from the land of the living to the land of the dead could occur. Psychically, this is cohesive with concepts in Jungian psychology, the- ology, and the old night religions that the Self, or in our parlance, the Wild Woman, seeds the psyche with perils and challenges in order that the human in despair drives herself back down into her original nature looking for answers and strength, thereby reuniting with the great wild Self and, as much as possible thereafter, moving as one. In one way this distortion in the tale distorts our information about the ancient processes of a woman's return to the underworld. But ac- tally, this replacement of devil for crone is strikingly relevant to us today, for in order to discover the ancient ways of the unconscious, we often find ourselves fighting off the Devil in the form of cultural, familial, or intra-psychic injunctions that devalue the soul-life of the wild feminine. In this sense, the tale works either way, both by leav- ing enough bones of the old ritual so we can reconstruct it, and by showing us how the natural predator tries to cut us away from our rightful powers, how it tries to take our soulful work from us.”

“How does one live in the topside world and the underworld at the same time and on a day-to-day basis? What does one have to do to come down into the underworld on one's own? What circumstances in life help women with the descent? Do we have a choice about going or stay. ing? What spontaneous help have you received from the instinctive nature during such a time? When women (or men) are in this state of dual citizenship, they sometimes make the mistake of thinking that to go away from the world, to leave the mundane life, with its chores, its duties that not only beckon but irritate beyond reason, that this is a sterling idea. But this is not the best way, for the outer world at these times is the only rope left around the ankle of the woman who is wandering, working, hanging upside down in the underworld. It is an excruciatingly im- portant time, when the mundane must play its proper role in exert. ing an "otherworldly» tension and balance that helps lead to a good end.”

“let us consider that in Greek mythology, Persephone was not only a mother's daughter, but also the queen of the land of the dead. In lesser-known stories about her, she endures various torments such as hanging for three days upon the World Tree in order to re- deem the souls who have not enough suffering of their own to deepen their spirits.”

“To give birth is the psychic equivalent of becoming oneself, one self, meaning an undivided psyche. Before this birth of new life in the underworld, a woman is likely to think all parts and personalities within her are rather like a hodgepodge of vagrants who wander in and out of her life. In the underworld birth, a woman learns that any. thing that brushes by her is a part of her. Sometimes this differentia- tion of all the aspects of psyche is hard to do, especially with the tendencies and urges we find repulsive. The challenge of loving unap- pealing aspects of ourselves is as much of an endeavor as any heroine has ever undertaken. Sometimes we are afraid that to identify more than one self within the psyche might mean that we are psychotic. While it is true that people with a psychotic disorder also experience many selves, identi- fying with or against them quite vividly, a person with no psychotic disorder holds all the inner selves in an orderly and rational man- ner. They are put to good use; the person grows and thrives. For the majority of women, mothering and raising the internal selves 1s a creative work, a way of knowledge, not a reason for becoming unnerved. So, the handless maiden is waiting to have a child, a new little wild self. The body in pregnancy does what it wants and knows to do. The new life latches on, divides, swells. A woman at this stage of the psy chic process may enter another enantiodromia, the psychic state in which all that was once held valuable is now not so valuable any- more, and further, may be replaced by new and extreme cravings tor odd and unusual sights, experiences, endeavours.”

“Once we have been through the cycle, we can choose any or all tasks to renew our lives at any time and for any reason. Here are some: to leave the old parents of the psyche, descend to the psychic land unknown, while depending on the goodwill of whomever we meet along the way to bind the wounds inflicted by the poor bargain we made somewhere in our lives to wander psychically hungry and trust nature to feed us to find the Wild Mother and her succor to make contact with the sheltering animus of the underworld to converse with the psychopomp (the magician) to behold the ancient orchards (energic forms) of the feminine to incubate and give birth to the spiritual childSelf to bear being misunderstood, to be severed again and again from love to be made sooty, muddy, dirty to stay in the realm of the woodspeople for seven years till the child is the age of reason to wait to regenerate the inner sight, inner knowing, inner healing of the hands child in, to continue onward even though one has lost all, save the spirirual to retrace and grasp her childhood, girlhood, and womanhood fo re form her animus as a wild and native force; to love him; and Mother and the new childSelf her anasummate the wild marriage”

“To repair injured in- stinct, banish naïveté, and over time to learn the deepest aspects of psyche and soul, to hold on to what we have learned, to not turn away, to speak out for what we stand for ... all this takes a bound- less and mystical endurance. When we come up out of the under- world after one of our undertakings there, we may appear unchanged outwardly, but inwardly we have reclaimed a vast and womanly wild- ness. On the surface we are still friendly, but beneath the skin, we are most definitely no longer tame.”

“We began our search for the wild, whether as girlchildren or as adult women, because in the midst of some ardent endeavor we felt that a wild and supportive presence was near. Perhaps we found her tracks across fresh snow in a dream. Or psychically, we noticed a bent twig here and there, pebbles overturned so their wet sides faced upward ... and we knew that something blessed had passed our way. We sensed within our own psyches the sound of a familiar breath from afar, we felt tremors in the ground, and we innately knew that some thing powerful, someone important, some wild freedom within us was on the move. We could not turn from it, but rather followed, learning more and more how to leap, how to run, how to shadow all things that came across our psychic ground. We began to shadow the Wild Woman and she lovingly shadowed us in return. She howled and we tried to answer her, even before we remembered how to speak her language, and even before we exactly knew to whom we were speaking. And she waited for us, and encouraged us. This is the miracle of the wild and instinctual nature. Without full knowing, we knew.”

“GENERAL WOLF RULES FOR LIFE 1. Eat 2. Rest 3. Rove in between 4. Render loyalty 5. Love the children 6. Cavil in moonlight 7. Tune your ears 8. Attend to the bones 9. Make love 10. Howl often”

“In some ways, old emotion is like a mental set of piano strings in the psyche. A rumble from topside can cause a tremendous vibration of those strings in the mind. They can be made to sing out without ever being directly plucked. Events that carry similar overtones, words, visual features of the original events cause a person to "fight" to keep the old material from "singing out." In Jungian psychology, this eruption of great feeling tone is called constellation of a complex. Unlike Freud, who branded such behavior neurotic, Jung considered it ac- tually a cohesive response, similar to that made by animals who have been previously harassed, tortured, frightened, or injured. The animal tends to react to smells, mo- tons, instruments, sounds which are similar to the original injuring ones. Humans have the same recognition and response pattern. Many people control old complex material by staying away from persons or events that stir them. Sometimes this is rational and useful and sometimes not. So a man may avoid all women who have red hair similiar to that of his battering father. A woman may steer clear of all contentious argument for it brings up so much in her. However, we try to strengthen our ability to stay in all sorts of situations regardless of com- plexes because this staying power gives us a voice in the world. It is what gives us abil- ity to change things around us. If we are solely reactive to our complexes we will hide in a hole for the rest of our lives. If we can gain some tolerance of them, utilize them as our allies, for instance use old anger to put teeth into our proclamations, then, we can form and reform many things.”

[razzle-zazzle]

Whumptober Day 14: die a hero or live long enough to become a villain

Desperate Measures

2791 Words; Ouroboros AU

TW for exploitation, bloodsport, death, blood, violence

AO3 ver

Morning came, as it always did.

Dion pushed himself up into a sitting position, drowsiness lingering in the corners of his mind still.

His muscles thrummed with the ache of a good workout. Yesterday’s bruises throbbed, his cuts stung—

Ah.

Dion grimaced as the events of the night before returned to him, rising up his throat like bile. The image of The Beetle’s corpse flashed in his mind—

Next to him, Mirtala hummed, rolling onto her side. A unicorn stuffie that someone had given her was cradled in her arms, her chin pressed against the yarn of its mane.

Dion blinked the memory away. “You’ve got more important things to worry about.” He reminded himself, brushing back some of Mirtala’s hair. He kicked off the blanket and got up.

He went through his morning routine slowly, quietly, mechanically. There was no hair grease in the provisions they had been provided, so he settled for taming his hair as best he could with the brush before tying it back and out of the way.

Dion was halfway through a simple stretching routine when Mirtala stirred, blinking blearily as she sat up.

“Morning.” Dion greeted, voice still rough from sleep.

Mirtala blinked. Looked at Dion. Squeezed the unicorn plush against her chest. “Good morning.”

Dion smiled. Looked away when she changed into day clothes, brushed his teeth while she brushed hers. Helped her brush her hair.

“Was there anything you wanted to do today, Tala?” He wove the ribbon into her hair as he spoke. Normally, braiding Mirtala’s hair would be a gossip session, a back and forth chatter about the things that fascinated her or the tricks she wanted to do. Normally, braiding Mirtala’s hair was a time to socialize and bond with his little sister.

But there wasn’t exactly a lot to talk about, here in Ouroboros. There were no mishaps during practice or funny-looking bugs or gossip about Frazie’s love life here—just day after day of survival, the routine quickly becoming rote.

Mirtala still found a way to fill the silence, though, chattering about the Wolves most often assigned to babysit her when Dion was working, about how one of them said they had a daughter “just like her” and would bring her books to read and ribbons for her hair. Dion let her ramble to her heart’s content.

(There was a lot he could talk about, when it came down to it. A lot of little things that happened while he was away.

The memory of The Beetle’s corpse flashed through his mind.

He kept his mouth shut. None of what Dion could chatter about was child-friendly.)

There weren’t a lot of children in Ouroboros, and none of them were Mirtala’s age. She already knew their names and likes and dislikes, and chattered about the games they’d made up.

“I think I’ll have some free time later today.” Dion commented, securing the left braid into its normal hoop. “Maybe you could show me some of the games those other kids play.” He started on the other braid, weaving the ribbon into Mirtala’s hair as he did.

Mirtala hummed noncommittally, squeezing the plush tighter.

Dion’s smile faltered. His shoulders tensed.

He continued to braid his sister’s hair.

+=+=+=+=+

(Creed pulled Dion aside later that day. Complimented him on his performance in the Death Pit. Implied Dion would be put in the next one. Worded the praise so that it felt like a knife in Dion’s gut, sharp and nauseating.

Dion’s skin crawled the entire time. That wasn’t anything new.)

+=+=+=+=+

The first time Dion was called to Tammy’s office, he wasn’t sure why.

He didn’t know much about the woman beyond her position as Creed’s left hand; he knew she dealt with the Wolves and the Birds, but not what she did, exactly.

Creed was a tall and broad-shouldered man. Creed dominated the very room he was in by sheer presence alone. Creed oozed power and cruelty and calculation; he seemed more than a mere man, larger than life.

In contrast, Tammy felt much more human. Where Creed demanded subservience by existing, Tammy radiated the kind of authority that came from experience, that commanded earned respect. There was nothing cruel in her eyes, no harsh glint.

“Come in.” She didn’t look up as Dion entered, instead regarding the file in her hands. “Sit.”

Dion sat down in the chair facing her desk, his back straight.

The ticking of the clock and the rustling of papers was the only sound in the room. Dion’s eyes darted around nervously, taking in all of the little details.

Creed’s office—the one Dion had seen, at least—was predominantly designed to intimidate, to emphasize Creed’s power over whichever audience he was entertaining, his chair not unlike a throne, his desk massive, the decor expensive. Creed’s office was not a place worked in regularly; it was where deals were made and audiences were intimidated and personal commands were given. It was a room designed to make everyone who wasn’t Creed feel small.

Tammy’s office was smaller, full of personal effects. The desk was littered with files and pens. Cabinets flanked the walls. This was not a place designed around entertaining guests, for all that the chair Dion was seated in was much more comfortable than the bench in Creed’s.

There was a small model of a bird on Tammy’s desk, beady eyes peeking out from a crown of fake feathers. Dion didn’t recognize it—maybe it was a heron or crane, based on the long legs? But the beak was too short.

Dion’s eyes darted to the wall behind Tammy. A mask hung on the wall, matching the model of the bird on her desk, stylized with the same green and glitter. Below it, a coat with feathered shoulders.

It reminded Dion of his arena outfit, just more personalized, more expensive.

The silence stretched on. Dion tried not to fidget.

Eventually, Tammy set down the file and looked up, sharp gray eyes meeting Dion’s blue.

“Have you been in a fight before?” Where Creed’s voice was laced with hidden meanings, Tammy’s was direct and clear. Where Creed oozed poison and power, demanding compliance, Tammy’s voice was simple, unyielding.

Dion gripped the edge of his seat. “My parents taught me some self-defense.” He stated. He didn’t say anything else, the omission a silent challenge.

Tammy didn’t ask any clarifying questions. Her eyes narrowed, regarding Dion’s words carefully.

Dion had the distinct sense that she knew more than he had said.

Tammy stood up and walked around the desk, steps brisk. “Stand up and push the chair to the side.” Her voice brokered no room for argument, for all that Dion wasn’t sure he could trust where this was going. He followed her directions, though, and within moments, Dion and Tammy were standing across from each other in the small open space of her office, the desk to his right and her left.

Tammy urged him to step forwards. Walked around him in a slow circle, before stopping to his left. “Show me how you throw a punch.”

Dion regarded her carefully. His parents’ lessons rang through his head, the memory a distant sting.

He punched out at the air.

Tammy hmmed to herself. “Well, you’re not terrible.”

It felt like a weight had lifted from Dion’s shoulders, for all that the unfamiliarity of the situation still dug anxious little claws into his gut.

“Come along.” Tammy opened the door, motioning out towards the hall. “We’ll need a bigger space if I’m going to evaluate your form.” She stalked out into the hall with purpose.

Dion followed.

+=+=+=+=+

Two weeks passed, and Dion was back in the Death Pit.

He didn’t run away from his opponent quite as much this time. Struggled back against them as best he could, Tammy’s lessons in the back of his head.

The audience was deafening, jeering. The cage bars casted shadows across the arena. The scent of sweat and blood and dirt filled the space.

He still hesitated, when the chance to dole out the final blow came. Hesitated, and nearly lost his own life as a result. But it was either him or his opponent, and Dion had Mirtala to worry about—

He didn’t hesitate nearly as much when his opponent cornered him.

+=+=+=+=+

Mirtala clutched the fabric of his shirt when he returned, pressing her face against his chest. Their new room was bigger than the last—it looked like an actual room, now, rather than a large closet.

Dion wrapped his arms around her, and blinked away the image of a body in the dirt. Swallowed down the bitter taste in his throat. Willed the sensation of blood drying on his skin to go away.

(There was no blood on him—he’d cleaned himself thoroughly when he showered.

The sticky feeling still remained.)

+=+=+=+=+

The Death Pit only occurred every other week. Dion was given plenty of work to do in between those dreadful nights; plenty of floors to clean and crates to move, plenty of physical labor to keep him occupied and keep his strength up.

Creed assigned Dion to the regular ring after a few days. It was a brawl between four different combatants, the masks seeming garish under the arena lights.

Dion walked away from that night with fresh bruises on his knuckles. Walked away from that night with new aches in his limbs. Walked away with the knowledge that he was still outclassed pounded into his bones.

(His and Mirtala’s room remained the same, the only addition being a nightlight that Dion was half convinced a Wolf had brought in.

Dion hadn’t quite lost.

He hadn’t won, either.)

+=+=+=+=+

One of the Wolves pulled Dion aside, after his second foray into the regular fighting rings. “You didn’t do too badly, kid.” They’d grunted, hand on Dion’s shoulder. “You’re definitely getting better.”

Dion had shrunk in on himself at the praise. Had swallowed down uneasiness and nodded when the Wolf patted him on the back.

(The praise was infinitely more genuine than Creed’s backhanded compliments. Some small part of Dion sang in pride at that.)

+=+=+=+=+

Weeks passed.

Dion continued to be put in the Death Pit each time it came up. He half-suspected that Creed wanted him dead—but his opponents were just as expendable as him, it felt.

When it came down to the decisive moment in his third fight, Dion almost hesitated.

Almost.

(The sticky feeling remained.)

+=+=+=+=+

“Your form is off.”

Dion groaned internally as Tammy corrected his form, her touch never lingering past what was necessary. She didn’t have much time to spare for him—half of his lessons were conducted by a Bird in her place—so she did not waste a single second.

Her no-nonsense attitude reminded Dion of his mother, sometimes. But where Donatella was a demanding taskmaster, pushing her children to do better because she so firmly believed they were better, Tammy was stiff and humorless, pushing Dion to do better because it was her job.

(Dion could sort of see why she had so much power, for all that she was different from Creed and The Owl. It was hard not to respect her, hard to see the experience and practicality etched into her and not listen when she spoke.

Creed was many things. He was not a foolish man.)

Tammy knew how to fight, knew how to hold her own in a brawl and how to disable an opponent quickly and efficiently. She knew how to fight, and she knew how to teach that knowledge.

Dion knew how to fall. He knew how to balance and flip and soar across a trapeze, how to stack in a human pyramid and how to tumble.

(Tammy had regarded these skills as “Useful, if you can figure out how to apply them.” Had told Dion that resourcefulness was power in a fight.)

Tammy knew how to fight.

Dion was still learning.

+=+=+=+=+

Dion’s hands were shaking when he returned from his fourth Death Pit. Water still clung to him from his shower. His hand was bandaged, his knees bruised.

His and Mirtala’s room had a small table in it, now, with two matching chairs. Dion glanced at them with something that might have been satisfaction, something that might have been dread.

He wrapped his arms around Mirtala, and matched his breathing to hers.

(The sticky feeling remained.)

+=+=+=+=+

Just sitting in Creed’s office was suffocating.

The bench was cold. The lighting was designed not to illuminate the room so much as to contrast the shadows at the edges of it, making the space feel even bigger than it actually was.

(Making Dion feel smaller than he actually was.)

Creed steepled his fingers on the desk, leaning back in his seat. The silence stretched on, heavy and oppressive. Dark brown eyes regarded Dion cooly, silently picking him apart.

Dion tensed, his own eyes looking anywhere but at Creed. He glanced at the various serpent-themed art on the shelf to his left, flicked his gaze at the stupidly detailed and heavy grandfather clock to his right, squeezed the edge of the bench and examined the pattern on the rug—looked at anything but the man sitting across from him.

The steady tick of the clock was the only sound in the silence. It was just as oppressive as Creed’s stare, anxiety hammering Dion’s insides in time with the steady tick-tock-tick-tock.

Dion wondered if it was possible for his soul to crawl out of his skin. It certainly felt like that would happen, if he was made to sit here in silence for any longer.

The clock continued to tick.

Without preamble, Creed stood up, seeming to loom over the entire room with just that motion.

Dion’s shoulders hunched.

Creed walked around his desk, steps slow and purposeful. He circled around Dion like a shark, dread twisting Dion’s chest more and more with every step. He loomed at Dion’s right, just in front of the bench.

“You’ve been doing well, little lion.” Creed drawled, voice sticky with threat and praise. His hand landed on Dion’s shoulder, covering it entirely. “I’m pleasantly surprised at how long you’ve lasted.”

Pride and discomfort twisted Dion’s gut. His skin prickled, nausea and acid taking up residence in his throat.

His eyes stayed locked on the floor.

Creed chuckled. “There’s no need to be so modest.” He stepped closer. “You’ve got a will to live; be proud of that.” His hand never left Dion’s shoulder, a gentle weight firmly pinning him in place.

“You were raised in a circus, weren’t you?” Creed asked. “Taught by your parents how to perform for the crowds?”

Dion swallowed, every hair on the back of his neck straight up. Nodded, despite the dreadful feeling that he was walking into a trap.

“Then use it.” Creed snarled. “I get not wanting to take any chances, but the audience isn’t paying to see you win a fight in minutes.”

Dion wanted to sink into the floor. His soul was going to crawl out of his skin any second now.

“They’re here for carnage,” Creed continued, grip on Dion’s shoulder tightening. “For glory, and struggle. They’re here for a show.” He let go of Dion’s shoulder to curl his finger under Dion’s chin, forcing the teen to look up at him directly. “Surely you can understand that, right?”

Disgust sliced up Dion’s guts into thin slices. Hatred dug sticky claws into his chest. Dull panic at feeling cornered crawled lazily up and down his spine. Terror wrapped cold tendrils around his neck, keeping the need to fight at bay.

A neck that was starting to ache at the way Creed was forcing it to crane.

Creed regarded Dion carefully, disdainfully. Dion wanted to scream.

“Yeah.” Dion said instead, voice sounding a lot steadier than he felt. “I understand.”

Creed removed his hand, letting Dion’s face fall back to the floor. “Good boy.” He rumbled, Dion’s insides twisting at the sound. He patted him on the back, once, twice, the action making Dion’s skin prickle violently.

Slow, deliberate steps took Creed back to his seat. The old leather creaked as he settled down on it.

Dion kept staring at the floor.

A drawer was pulled open. Papers rustled.

“Dismissed.” Creed grabbed a pen.

Dion wasted no time in leaving the room.

+=+=+=+=+

The audience was roaring, cheering, voices merging into a single wordless cry for blood.

The cage bars casted shadows across both Dion and his opponent. Dion’s mask weighed against his face; light enough to ignore, heavy enough to be familiar.

When the opportunity came, Dion didn’t hesitate.

It would be kinder to kill his opponent in one blow. Kinder to make it quick.

But the audience wasn’t here for quick.

Dion won.

(Dion would learn to live with that sticky feeling.)

[bpd-shuichi-togo]

tfw the fucked up cult/human experiment facility claiming to be a school wasn't specifically a eugenicist cult/human experiment facility so they never actually taught you anything except how to kill other children

[absurdthirst]

I appreciate you calling out the fandom for crossing lines because I’ve genuinely never been in any other fandom that gets this extreme over someone’s personal life. Maybe I’m sheltered because this is my first celebrity fandom, but I’ve lost a lot of interest im being in it not just because of how fans cross lines with Pedro’s own person life and his friends’, but also how fans treat other fans.

I’ve watched this fandom chase fans off of social media, doxx their personal info in retaliation over the dumbest shit, and stalk and harass fans for simply existing in a way they think they shouldn’t exist as a fan. And that’s terrifies me. I’ve never been more afraid for myself and others in this fandom because of how far people go to get what they want or burn anything down when they don’t get their way.

I’ve never said this before, but I mean it when I say that a lot of people in the Pedro fandom need serious help. If your first reaction is to interrogate anyone who met him over who he’s with, where he was, how he was acting; and then doxx them and their info when they don’t give you what you want or you disagree with them, then you need serious mental help. I was already horrified by the examples I made before, but I was even more horrified that people would post the picture of underage fans with Pedro and interrogate CHILDREN over who he’s with. That’s exploitation and I don’t get how people don’t understand that.

I’m not religious but I’m praying that the people in this fandom who needs help, gets it. I think they’d benefit from just not touching the internet for awhile and establish boundaries of their own in order to respect others and their right to exist whether it’s Pedro and his friends or other fans. Boundaries exist for a reason and there are NO exceptions.

I have seen a lot of things that just make my skin crawl. I'm sure those people wouldn't want a horde of faceless people on the internet trying to track their every movement or interpret their interaction with every person they've come across.

I'm sure they would be screaming that they are being doxxed if stations were being reversed. It's what amazes me. It's not just here but everywhere, there has been a callous disregard for common decency in the past few years but people need to remember to be think before they act.

The underage fan, I truly felt bad for. I know they posted it on a public forum, but they were just excited to met one of their faves. For grown ass people to contact him and start interrogating them? Pathetic. Bet those same people wouldn't be happy if people were contacting their child. Doesn't matter if you think your questions are harmless. You are an adult....on the internet....contacting a child to try to get 'insider information'.

We all need to remember that under all of this, Pedro and everyone he interacts with is human. And it doesn't matter how big of a 'fan' you are, you are just a fan. So stop chasing other people away.

[jessikahathaway]

Crossing the Line - Part I

Pairing: Yoongi X Reader

Rating: 18+

Genre: Arranged Marriage, Demon AU!, Romance, Future Smut

Words: 7k

Warnings: Vulgar Language, Summoning of Yoongles the demon, super minor character death, mentions of a car accident. (If I forgot anything please let me know).

Summary: As the last daughter of a dying business empire, you decide to take matters into your own hands. Or, well... The hands of a demon.

Shame was such an aggravating emotion. One that you’d been familiar with your entire life.

You’d never been the smartest daughter. Never been the prettiest teen. Wasn’t polite enough to sit through political meetings and corporate galas.

You weren’t interested in boys, no you were much more concerned with staying afloat in your cutthroat family...

Your older sister had beauty, as well as the tact of interpersonal relations.

Your older brother had the brains and smarts to operate behind the scenes of the corporation. Heading to Yale in the fall he will be the pride of the family.

Mother, a graduate of New York University holding a Masters degree in Business Management. She is beauty and brains wrapped in a size 3 pencil skirt and a blouse that tempts the unmarried and teases those with the hallowed rings.

Father, a graduate of Harvard, working hard for his double major in accounting and statistics. He was the heir to a corporate boheimeth that his parents had started in their early teens.

And you were the last one.

The vicious businesswoman. The one who would risk it all to prove that you were worth it. Being the youngest meant you had the most to lose. You weren’t the smartest, but you were cunning. You weren’t the prettiest, but you had assets that did the same. You weren’t the perfect depiction of pedigree, but you had guts. You were the risk taker. The one who saw others flaws and exploited them. You were ruthless and weren’t afraid to fail because you wouldn’t let it happen.

Until it was all ripped away.

March 24th started as they all do. Earlier than you wanted and with a delicately crafted ponytail.

But when 10:30 am rolled around, instead of heading in for your quarterly meeting with the marketing team, you were pulled aside.

Your family had been killed early that morning in a drunk driving accident after the company dinner you weren’t allowed to go to.

Your sister and father were dead within moments of impact. Your mother hung on, but died around twenty minutes later. Your brother made it all the way to the hospital until he died before he could hit the operating table.

Soon, you were being rushed to the hospital. Having to sign away rights and things of that nature. Doing the paperwork made your wrist ache, and you knew it was far from over.

More stacks.

More questions.

It was a shit show.

The police came and so did lawyers.

And then there was the cherry on top of the whole fucking cake.

Your mother, she was a clever woman, had put an asterisk in her will as well as your fathers. That in order for any of their children to inherit their company. They had to be married.

No half way commitment, marriage or no cash cow. When the lawyers had read that note aloud you almost puked.

And until you were married, Mathias Kruinski would be in charge of the corporation.

That fucking, misogynistic shit heap. Knowing that you would be the heiress no doubt crawled under his skin. He’s always liked your sister better anyways.

You had no doubt that he would try to get you out of the company with any chance he could. But there was a rule in the foundation of the company that if one of the ancestors wasn’t running it, then it wasn’t to be run.

However, cows produce milk, and farmers are always thirsty.

So, while you were busy pushing papers and making a laughing stock of your family and yourself. The big fuckers just kept getting richer...

And like fuck you were going to stand for that.

So, you researched the most ridiculous sounding, miracle working, things you were embarrassed to even think about.

And that’s how you found yourself out here in the wilderness, in the middle of the night. Shivering your perfectly shaved legs off.

Standing there you were really on your last hope. You’d called all your ex boyfriends in hope of persuading them into being your husband's for a few years. However, they had all moved on, finding wives and even another husband in one case. But the problem still stood. You were left without a husband. And that meant, Mathias still stood at the top.

So here you were, standing at the crossroads waiting for what you hoped would be your miracle. It was cold, and your skirt was a little shorter than necessary. However, if your sister could do it then so could you. If your mother could win a new asset to the company with a button of her shirt, then you could get a husband doing the same.

Surely you could, right?

Doubt swirled in your mind as you thought of all the taunts that sunk into your surprisingly thin skin throughout the years.

‘No man wants a girl who looks like a horse!’

‘You’re just a pretty face to add to the company... Not even a pretty face, just a name.’

‘She’s not beauty, she’s certainly not grace, and she’ll punch you in the face!’

Shaking your head with an aggressive snarl, you crossed your arms over your chest. You were being stupid sitting out here in the cold.

A clap of thunder rolled through the sky and you felt a shiver go down your spine. Something very wrong happened. Or, something very wrong was going to happen. For some reason, you now felt the strong urge to run. To get the fuck out of dodge while you could. Just as you were about to do that very thing, you suddenly couldn’t move.

“It’s not very often I see someone around here,” a low and disinterested voice rang. Spinning around on your heel you found the owner.

He stood before you, dressed in a beautiful black suit that seemed expensive, and you were trained to find things of that nature. His gaze moved up and down your body, seeming to assess you. Subconsciously you rubbed your hands together.

You couldn’t fucking believe it... Had it actually worked? Had the stupid kids story been true all this time?

“A-Are you, uh... are you the crossroad dude?” You asked, dropping formalities.

His eyebrow went up and he smirked. “Depends, why do you want to know?”

You strutted forward, heels sinking in the dirt. “Listen, I’m not in the mood for games. So either you’re the guy I’m looking for, or you aren’t. Simple as that. I need to know,” you urged.

“Say I am, what do you need from me?”

You looked him up and down. He was handsome, definitely could make a move as old money. Something people couldn't deny.

“I need you to marry me,” you declared.

His eyebrows shot up, and then he glared at you. “Are you baiting me into a church? Do you honestly think me to be that dumb?”

You shook your head furiously. “I don’t want a ceremony. I just want you to be my husband. It doesn’t even need to be for long. Just enough time for me to take over the corporation. Oh, and you’ll need to get me pregnant.”

He scoffed and turned away. “You’re ridiculous.”

“I know you need souls, if you do this for me you’d get mine in return!”

He froze and you held your breath.

“Do you know what you’re asking for? Do you know the gravity of the price you are to pay?”

He didn’t move.

“I know,” you answered.

You blinked and the man appeared in front of you, glaring with bright red eyes on display. You bit your lip and swallowed hard. Fear ran rampant through your chest, but you couldn’t keep your eyes from staring into the crimson depths of his own. He didn’t look like a demon, he looked like a damn angel... Although, perhaps he didn’t look like either.

No.. You knew it now...

He was Sin embodied.

“You don’t know, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Let me fill you in, shall I? If we sign this contract, make this deal... your soul will be mine,” he began.

“I know, and that’s fine-“

“Like an insolent child you continue to blather on before your elder is finished. Silence yourself,” he growled. His hand closed around your throat and you couldn’t breathe well.

Terror gripped your heart.

“Now, let me see how much it’s worth...”

His hand didn’t stray from your neck, but his grip became ice cold, as if water from the Arctic was being pumped through your veins. The pain overwhelmed you as he furrowed his brow. “Mmm, cold but still so bright. You’ve been hurt before no doubt,” he grinned. “This would be a great addition...”

You writhed in his arms, agony stealing away your breath. Shuddering when he let go, you collapsed to the dirt underneath you. Gasping hard you felt as though you couldn’t catch your breath. That kind of pain was terrifying. Was that what you’d be feeling if you promised your soul to him? Would this all be worth it?

No, you couldn’t back out now. Mathias wouldn’t win, not if you had to sell your soul to make it happen.

The man raised a brow at your appearance. You were well dressed, groomed and clean. No doubt a wealthier individual. Why would you be coming to him? Marry him? What a load of shit.

“H-how much is it worth?” You huffed, struggling to stand up.

He mused for a few minutes. “I’ll give you fifteen years to live, then I’ll come and collect.”

Fifteen years. That was enough time.

“The question is, what do you want?” He asked.

“I told you, marry me!” You yelled.

His eyebrows raised. “No, are you insane?”

“Are you allowed to refuse people? Even with a soul like mine?” You tried.

He furrowed his brows at you. Lowering himself to your level, his eyes were still a startling red color. “Listen, I can give you a husband. But to ask for me isn’t an option,” he said.

“I don’t want a human, because then there’s too much time wasted trying to convince them to marry me! I don’t want to be cheated out of my time. For all I know that husband will come that day before you come to collect. I’m on a time limit, and not just yours,” you explained.

“Lady, I don’t have time for this. I’ve got plenty of other people to make deals with-“

“What can I do to change your mind? What do you want?”

You watched as the man's eyes narrowed. “Your soul is supposed to be what I want, but what you’re asking isn’t something I can give as a lower demon. I’m not a miracle worker,” he told you.

Your heart sank. Even a demon was telling you that your idea wasn’t going to come to fruition. Fuck, everything you’d been working to do... it wasn’t going to happen, because you weren’t good enough.

“Fuck,” you whispered, head dropping as tears burned in your eyes. “God damn it!” You screamed.

The man watched as your fists clenched in the dirt underneath your body. The sheer shame and agony radiating off of you was intense, so much so that he was startled. Never in his years of wandering this stupid fucking road, waiting for the day a stupid human came along to ask for his help, had he felt pain such as this. How had this happened? What caused your soul to twist into this agonized lump in your throat.

“Fucking worthless piece of shit,” you growled, struggling to stand on your feet.

“We have a deal,” he said.

You peaked his interest. This pain had to come from somewhere. And he wanted to know how you had been turned into this. Your soul wasn’t blackened, like some he’s seen. In fact, yours wasn’t too bad. Maybe a little tainted with pride and greed. But most humans were like that.

Your tear stained eyes looked up at him with shock. “R-really? You’ll marry me?” You asked.

“You have fifteen years, once the fifteen years are up, I will collect your soul and it will be mine for the rest of eternity. Do you accept these terms?” He asked, settling on his knees before you.

“Yes, I accept,” you breathed.

“Then our contract only needs the binding seal,” he whispered, leaning forward.

You blinked before you felt his lips against yours. You tried to keep yourself from fighting him off. He kissed you deeply and so hard that your back bent slightly. His mouth was cool against your heated flesh. It was like swallowing heroin. His kiss made you incredibly thirsty for more. Never wanting to relinquish his mouth.

Perhaps making a child with him wouldn’t be so bad...

He pulled back after a few moments to stare into your eyes. “And so, you belong to me.”

—-

The car ride home was silent. The man you coerced into marrying you being sat in your front seat, leaning back.

“So,” you breathed, turning onto your main road. “What’s your name?”

“You can call me Yoongi,” he said, eyes remaining shut.

“Alright, Yoongi... That’s, a, nice name,” you tried.

“For a business woman you’re really shit at this whole small talk stuff,” he commented. Again, not opening his eyes.

“I never told you I was a business woman,” you stated, keeping your eyes locked on the road.

Yoongi sighed and placed a beautifully manicured hand against the bridge of his nose. “Honestly, have you forgotten already that I’m a demon? I don’t need you to tell me those things,” he informed.

“Oh, well... I guess that should be implied then...”

The ride became silent once more. Yoongi seeming to fall asleep in the plush leather seat of your 2019 Cadillac CT8. At least now you could get a good look at him without him noticing...

Peering at him carefully through the corner of your eyes you examined your new spouse. His hair was soft platinum, almost white in color. It seemed smooth, but styled. You wondered if it was as nice to touch as it was to look at. His skin was pale, unmarred by any scars or blemishes that could make him seem human in any way. His suit was tailored, appearing to be an Armani or Tom Ford original. The beautiful satin material of his tie blended into the black of his suit with such cut precision it had to have been hand made. He really was a demon, wasn’t he? This wasn’t a joke, he was the real deal.

Your heart rate prattled in your chest dangerously. Fear began to take over as you realized you were damned to hell. Would this stupid company be worth your eternal damnation?

More importantly, would you even be remembered long enough for it to matter? And just because you managed to find a husband, didn’t guarantee that your company would succeed under your management. You had the guts and enough brains to make some deals that had turned out beneficial in the past... but that had always been your sister’s strong suit.

People liked her...

For fucksake, you had to go force a demon into being your husband.

Looking back at his sleeping for you saw red eyes that shone into yours-

Wait.

“You’re creepy, staring at me like that,” he said one eye peaked open a bit.

“I-I wasn’t-“

“If you have questions, ask them,” he demanded, shutting his eyes once more.

“I just...” You trailed off. What was there to say?

Honestly, now that you had what you originally thought you wanted... you were just scared. He was an honest to God Demon...

“Just? You humans are so fickle. Get what you want then don’t know what to do with it,” he sneered. “Whatever you decide, our contract is sealed.”

“I know, you still have my lipstick on you,” you laughed.

Yoongi rubbed his mouth, pouting a little as he saw some pink on his hand. You found his facial expressions oddly human, for a creature of pure evil.

“You don’t look like a demon,” you said, raising a brow.

“Cause I didn’t used to be one,” Yoongi said.

“What?” You said, turning to look at him. Your interest was thoroughly peaked.

“There’s a stop light,” he muttered.

“SHIT!”

You screamed as you slammed on your brakes and your car skidded to a stop just before a large semi barreled through the intersection. Your chest heaved at your near death experience. Is that how fast it happened for your family members? That heart shattering panic that floods into adrenaline.

“You okay?” Yoongi’s voice came through your thoughts as you stared ahead, mouth agape.

The fear and anxiety poured out of you in a delicious amount that Yoongi welcomed. Your emotions were already feeding him well. Being away from the crossroads wouldn’t be so bad if you provided this routinely. A small smile graced his face as he thought of all the peril he could put you in, only to save you at the last second... the energy you’d give off then might intoxicate him.

“Shut up,” you growled, driving off once the light turned green.

Yoongi just shrugged and leaned against the cool window yet again.

—

You opened the door to your apartment, dropping your keys in the bowl as you did every night. Exhaustion coursed through your veins and all you wanted was to go to sleep. You had a big corporate meeting in the morning that no doubt would be a pain in your ass fully rested. Now with merely three hours to sleep, you already hated it.

Just as you were going to turn into your bedroom, a cough caught your attention. Yoongi stood in your doorway, looking oddly appropriate with the chic interior you selected. He examined your face before raising an eyebrow.

“Where will I be staying for the next fifteen years, my wife?” He asked, a sinister gleam in his eyes.

You rolled your eyes and pointed to the couch. “Sleep there, or brood, whatever you do. Knock yourself out,” you said, almost teaching your bedroom once more. But he had to open that beautiful mouth again.

“Why can’t I sleep with you? I thought I was to be your husband?” he said, a mocking frown sat on his lips.

“You aren’t my husband yet, and I don’t need the company thinking I roped you into marry me because I was pregnant. No, we should be married a little while before we try for a baby,” you nodded.

“Do you even think I am capable of impregnating you?”

“I’m sure you can find a way,” you said looking down at his crotch before looking back up in his eyes.

Yoongi glared at you before walking over to the couch and sitting down with grace. His eyes trailed over your form. “I’m sure I will.”

“Goodnight, Yoongi,” you said, walking into your room.

—

“Mmm, so warm,” a voice murmured to your right.

A strong embrace surrounded you. Comfort suffused your entire being. When was the last time someone had held you in their arms? How long has it been since you felt the warmth of another body near yours?

“Warm, soft... fuck I forgot how soft human women are,” a deep voice grumbled.

Slowly, you opened your eyes and looked down at your waist. Pale arms were secured there.

“What the fuck?!” You screamed, kicking backwards.

A groan erupted from the demon behind you as he fell off the bed.

“Yoongi?!” You yelled.

“Fucking-fuck, we’re definitely not having a kid now!”

“What are you doing in my bed??” You screamed.

“Well I couldn’t sleep last night, and you started up a fuss in here so. I came in, you were thrashing around in your sleep, I walked over then you kinda man handled me and threw me in bed with you. Unfortunately we weren’t able to try for that baby you want. But, another day. Anyways, you forced me to cuddle you and eventually you fell back asleep. And now I think you’ve ruptured a testicle,” he groaned.

Your cheeks flooded with heat as you tried not to picture yourself throwing the attractive male into your bed. “I-I’m so sorry, uh. We have to go, you should propose in front of the office today. That way, there won’t be any doubt,” you coughed, heading for your shower quickly.

While the hot water rained down on you, you couldn’t help but have the phantom touches of Yoongi on your skin. His strong arms holding you flush against his body made you shiver, despite the scalding liquid hitting your flesh.

“Get a hold of yourself... he’s a deal and nothing more,” you whispered.

“Are you almost done? I gotta piss!”

“An annoying deal.”

—

The walk to the office felt like going to the gallows. You told Yoongi you needed to buy a ring first but he denied you, insisting he’d do one better.

The doorman bowed to you as he entered the door, eyeing Yoongi with curiosity.

“Miss, who is this man?” He asked, halting your movement.

“My boyfriend, Alfred, let him through please,” you sighed.

Alfred looked at you in shock. “M-Miss?”

“Yoongi have you never been to the office before?” You asked, lying through your teeth.

Yoongi could feel the sensation of how your lies affected you. Fuck it was intoxicating... how your heart sped up and your hands became clammy. But he’d play along, such was the deal.

“Don’t think so babe, you Guard this place like an angry shark,” he teased.

A scoff left your lips. “I do not, now come on. I don’t want to be late for my meeting,” you said ushering him inside passed your stunned doorman.

The two of you made it to the elevator and you looked at Yoongi, wrought with nerves.

“Do you think he bought it?” You asked, grabbing at your skirt anxiously.

“Hook, line and sinker my dear,” Yoongi soothed.

Your heart let up a smidge, letting you breathe a little easier now.

The elevator rose to the 17th floor and the pair of you got off. “Should we hold hands?” You asked.

“Will seemed forced, better not now,” he offered. A nod set the two of you ahead.

“So before the shareholders meeting, I’m going to act as if you’re dropping me off. Then-“

“Yeah drop to my knees and beg for you,” he growled. You swallowed hard before pushing him away.

“Shut up, grovel and then I’ll think about it,” you sneered.

Yoongi merely shrugged before you finally made it to your desk. You arranged all your paperwork as always, handing random objects to Yoongi as you did so.

“Okay, so my meeting is in about twenty so please make sure you go and drop off the prescription at 10:00, no later,” you demanded, making up some mundane errand to ease suspicion.

“Yes, yes babe, I got it,” Yoongi said, helping you gather your things.

“Walk with me?”

“Always.”

Yoongi followed you, gathering the attention of the whole floor while he was at it. You tried to hold your smirk until later. The fellow woman watched with keen interest as a new specimen came into their den.

Yoongi walked forward, wrapping his hand in your easily, locking his fingers into place as it seemed.

You let him hold your hand as you approached the meeting room. He was silent, brooding and examining everyone in the room. Having him made you feel exhilaratingly powerful.

“This is me, I’ll see you later, yes?” You said, turning to face him. Suddenly, Yoongi looked nervous.

“Hang on,” he said, holding your wrist.

“What’s wrong?” You asked, genuine.

“Excuse me, everyone! Can I have your attention?” Yoongi yelled. Everyone in the conference room and those in the office looked your way.

“What are you doing?”

“Shut up and follow me,” he whispered. “Four years ago, I met a woman. She was quick witted, sassy, stubborn and a genuine pain in my ass.”

The office murmured as he continued.

“But, she has a soft spot for cats and cheap wine. She likes to fall asleep while watching movies because it’s too quiet without the noise. She hates black coffee, but drinks it because her mom did. Her favorite food is Mac n cheese with extra cheese. All of these things I found out along the way... all of these things, are just a few examples of why I love her so much,” he said.

Your eyes widened. T-those were all true... how did he..?

“And, everyday I find something new that makes me love her just that little bit more. So, Y/N,” he said, getting down on one knee and bringing out a beautiful ring, “would you do me the honor of letting me find a new thing I love about you each day... for the rest of our lives?” He asked.

A collective gasp rang throughout the office. Yoongi waited patiently, looking nervous as hell. You felt a real smile grace your face as you nodded.

“Yes! Yes yes, I will Yoongi!” You cried. Tears formed in your eyes as Yoongi stood up, slipping the ring on your finger and wrapping his arms around you.

The building erupted in claps and cheers. You clung to Yoongi tightly. You smiled so wide your cheeks began to hurt. Because finally... finally you would have access to your birthright.

And no one would be able to stop you.

Yoongi let you go, placing a soft kiss on your forehead. A couple girls came up and started cooing at your ring, you simply giggled along with them.

A few men gathered around Yoongi patting him on the back and introducing themselves. He eased right in, conversing and making his impression.

Mathias came from the conference room, looking at you and Yoongi with an ice cold stare, and a viper like grin on his face. “My dear Miss Y/N, congratulations,” he stated.

People scattered as he approached, knowing a snake in the grass when they saw one. You stood firm, Yoongi coming over and wrapping his arm around your waist.

“Thank you Mathias,” you smiled. Yoongi leaned forward, shaking his hand with a strong grip.

“I’m Min Yoongi. My family runs and operates several vineyards in the West. I’m sure you’ve heard of Chateau de Fleur?” He said.

“Yes, lovely company. That was quite a speech about our young Miss Y/N. I'm sure you’re aware of her involvement in the company,” he stated.

“Mhmm, Y/N has told me much about her work and her family’s history. Incredible fundamentals this corporation is founded on,” he noted.

“Indeed. See, Miss Y/N... I had no idea you were in such a serious relationship. I’ve known you since you were a child, I thought I could read you better than that,” Mathias tutted.

“Perhaps you were too focused on the young girl I was instead of the woman I am becoming,” you warned.

Yoongi let an easy smile fall on his face. “Well babe, I’m sure this is an important meeting. Don’t want to keep your people waiting there. I’ll see you at home, yes?” He said, smiling brightly.

A soft flutter erupted in your stomach.

Someone would be waiting for you to get home. Someone was going to be anticipating you walking through those doors... not just dirty dishes and stale air. A... a person.

“Yeah, I’ll see you then,” you whispered.

“I love you,” Yoongi hummed, placing a soft kiss on your cheek, dangerously close to your lips before giving a short nod to Mathias. “It was a pleasure, I look forward to seeing you again.”

“Likewise, I’d love to hear more about Chateau de Fleur, Perhaps there is a deal in our future?” Mathis hunted.

Yoongi beamed widely. “I’d love to explore those options, we should talk about that babe. Bye!” He waved, heading towards the elevator.

“Interesting young man,” Mathias breathed.

“Yes, he is,” you grinned.

“Come, the shareholders meeting was already delayed because of you. Hurry up,” Mathias growled. You rolled your eyes and headed in, a weapon on your finger more deadly than a knife or a gun.

Marriage.

—

“Yoongi, are you going to help me pick out these napkin colors or are you letting me pick the ivory?” you tested. Yoongi grumbled from his place on the couch.

“Who cares? People are going to wipe their mouths with them anyways,” he sighed.

“I care,” you murmured, selecting the ivory color on your phone. “It’s ivory and there’s nothing you can do about it,” you smirked.

“You realize that I can change that order, right?”

You scoffed. “I thought you were just a lower demon.”

Suddenly, you were pinned against the wall in a painfully tight grip. Fear flushed your being as you stared into two bright red eyes. Pain flared in your throat as Yoongi’s grip grew tighter. Air flow was restricted and you seemed to get a little delirious from the lack of oxygen. A whimper escaped you as Yoongi leaned in close.

“I may be a lower demon, but that is still a demon, no? I have power, I can make you suffer.” To emphasize his point, his thumb nail drove into the soft flesh of your neck, tickling your jugular with fearful accuracy. “ Your clock is ticking, brat. Better make eternity in Hell worth it.”

Then, he was back on the couch. As if nothing had transpired between the two of you. Your heart hammered dangerously against your chest as you looked at him now. His demeanor completely different. You had underestimated him.

A mistake you wouldn’t make again.

Pushing yourself off the wall, you leveled your breathing. Checking the coffee pot you sighed, shaking as you spilled your caffeinated beverage all over the counter. Your voice, however, was eerily calm.

“So, ivory?”

--

You walked into work, knees a little wobbly. Yoongi’s attitude towards you hadn’t really changed. But it didn’t need to. The promise was there. The thought that if he really wanted to do something he could It wouldn’t take him long at all. Simple snap of his fingers and-

“Y/N? You okay?” A soft voice echoed in your ears.

“Mhm?” you said, lifting your head and finding Jungkook, your assistant, looking at you with concern.

“You’ve been staring off into space for a while. Everything okay?”

You cleared your throat and nodded your head. “Yes, I’m fine. But, thanks Jungkook. I mean it,” you smiled. Jungkook seemed to turn a shade pinker at your tone before focusing back on his paperwork in front of him.

Standing up you collected your own documents and headed towards your cubicle.

Work progressed the same as it always did. Slowly, but surprisingly without incident. It was normal for someone, mainly a member of the board to come by and harass you... At least a little snide comment. But there was nothing today. You leaned over to Jungkook and nudged his chair a little as you walked by. He turned to you with a confused expression.

“What?” he asked.

“Why hasn’t anyone come over here?” you asked.

“Don’t question it, I’m not,” he whispered.

“But don’t you think it’s weird? I mean... Usually I’d have been called a name by now,” you said, baffled by the lack of cutting vocabulary being thrown in your direction for the day.

“Probably because no one want to incur the wrath of your fiance,” Jungkook rebuked.

“What?” you asked, shock suffusing your being.

“Yeah, you didn’t see the way he looked at everyone. It was like they were all prey and he was a hunter with the prized doe on his arm,” Jungkook explained, turning back to his cold latte and even colder stats.

Your face turned an embarrassing shade of red at his statement. Did Yoongi really do that? Was he looking at you that way?

Shaking your head you scoffed. “Please, he’s just over protective,” you said, wanting the conversation to end already.

“You’re really lucky, he obviously cares a lot about you,” Jungkook announced.

You let yourself smile, heading back to work.

The day continued, you let yourself stand a little taller, walk with purpose around the building. Everyone noticed your boost in mood, some people even making mention in passing.

‘You’re in a good mood today?’

‘Looking chipper Miss Y/N!’

‘With a man like that I’d be happy too!’

Yoongi was a little shit. But if he fulfilled his promises, then maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.

“Hey babe,” a husky voice interrupted your thoughts. You froze as Yoongi stood before you.

Speak of the Devil and he appears.

“Hi,” you smiled softly, moving to hug him.

Yoongi and yourself had come to the conclusion that PDA was to be expected. There were rules that you weren’t to cross for your own sanity. No kissing on the mouth. No touching when at home, unless there was company over. No groping, fondling or anything of a sexual nature unless child making was involved.

Yoongi whined about that last one.

“We should practice before we try to make a baby for real. It’s important to practice those things,” he’d complain.

He wrapped his arms around you and kissed your head. “How’s my girl?” he asked.

“Good,” you whispered back. Eyes shining as you beheld the man you managed to snag as your husband, even if it was at the cost of your soul.

“Brought you some lunch,” he said, holding up a bag for you to see. A smile broke out across your face.

“Is it what I hope it is?” you announced, slightly bouncy on your feet.

“Mac n’ cheese with extra cheese,” he nodded. You squeaked in approval, gathering your stuff and heading to your desk. Yoongi followed close behind. Everyone looked up, as they always did. Yoongi practically demanded the attention of a room, without even trying.

Sitting down, Yoongi pulled up a chair. He watched you as you ate, enjoying every morsel.

Humans were such simple creatures in his mind. Things such as food and shelter are so important, so much so that it morphs into greed, gluttony and the seven deadly sins that he lives by.

But watching you now, enjoying something so mundane, made him chuckle lightly. You turned and looked at him, confusion on your face. As well as a bunch of mac n’ cheese. Yoongi shook his head, bringing a napkin up to wipe your mouth.

“You’re being messy, baby,” he tutted, making your heart flutter in your chest.

“S-sorry,” you whispered, eyes big at his proximity. His eyes flashed to your lips, then back to your eyes. Slowly, he leaned in. Without your knowing, you did too. You could feel his breath on your face. A minty scent hitting your nose.

Just as you closed your eyes to accept the coming contact, someone cleared their throat behind you. You jumped back, looking up as your cheeks flushed red. Mathias stood there, an unimpressed smirk on his face.

“Now, this is a professional environment Ms. Y/N, please try to contain yourself,” he scolded. You bit your lip and nodded lamely.

Yoongi practically basked in the sheer hatred and shame rolling off your body. It was exhilarating to feel your emotions. He absorbed it all, making you feel unusually drained. Gripping the table you felt yourself falling to the side slightly.

Yoongi jumped in to play his role dutifully.

“Baby, Y/N? Are you alright?” he asked, placing his hand on your back. You nodded, already having the sensation pass.

“Yeah, thank you, Yoongi,” you said, genuine.

“Perhaps you should go home for the day, rest up. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to the heiress of our company,” Mathias breathed, eyeing you with pity. But it wasn’t cause you weren’t feeling well. No, the pity was for himself. The fact that he had to be civil with you, that the company was yours and not his.

Yoongi stood in front of you before you had a chance to respond. “C’mon babygirl, I'll take you home,” Yoongi announced. Another pet name that made your heart hammer and lower stomach clench.

“I-Jungkook still needs-“ you started, but Mathias quickly shut you down.

“I’m sure the boy will survive without you for the next three hours. Head home Miss Y/N,” the snake smiled. “And feel better.”

—

The two of you made it out to the car, Yoongi’s grip still secure around your waist. You sighed and moved out of Yoongi’s grasp.

“There’s no one watching anymore, you don’t have to hang on like that,” you said, still a little wobbly on your feet.

“Don’t be an idiot. You’re no fun when you’re like this,” he stated, bringing you back into his arms.

“Yoongi,” you breathed.

“Wouldn’t want anything to happen to my bride,” he snickered. You shoved at his shoulder, causing him to stumble backwards.

“Yoongi!” you yelped, hanging on tighter before he collapsed backwards, you square on top of him.

“Fuck!”

“Yoongi! I’m so sorry!”

“Fucking fuck, Y/N, do you have a kink for permentantly damaging people that I don’t know about or what?”

“It was an accident, don’t be so over dramatic,” you said, standing up quickly.

Yoongi groaned and moaned on the floor, being his usual pain in the ass self. Without thinking much about it, you held your hand out for him. Looking at the offer, Yoongi accepted, having you help haul him to his feet without much fuss.

“Thanks,” he said, brushing off his shoulders and looking at you with mild interest.

“Sure,” you said, turning to go to your study.

“Wait a second,” he said, grabbing your wrist gently.

“What?” You asked, looking back at him.

“Don’t you want to finish your food?” he asked, holding out the bag to you again.

“No thanks, I’m kinda nauseous now,” you said, holding your stomach.

“Okay, whatever you want,” he said, putting the mac n’ cheese in the fridge. You smiled and started to go upstairs when he spoke again. “You look nice today, by the way,” he mentioned.

“Huh?” you asked, brows furrowing.

“I said you look nice, is it a crime to give you a compliment?” he said.

“No, it’s just, no ulterior motives? Is this just a ploy to get in my pants or-”

“All I did was say you look nice! Jeez, what’s up with you and your weird conclusion jumping. Maybe I did it just to be nice huh? Maybe just because I’m a demon doesn’t mean I’m not nice,” he said.

You felt shame roll off you again, good lord was it irritating. Why did a scolding from him make you feel so... disappointed?

“Sorry, guess I’m just a little-woah,” you said, wavering on your feet.

Yoongi could feel your light embarrassment, but before he could stop himself, he was absorbing the negative energy from you. And since he’d already fed on you once today, twice would be pushing it for your body.

“Hang on,” he said, walking up to you.

“What is it?” You asked, looking at him in confusion as he lifted you off your feet again.

“You can’t keep having negative emotions around me,” he said, carrying you up the stairs towards your room.

“What do you mean? I can do whatever I want with my emotions!” you yelled as he kept going on up the steps.

“Not around me you can’t,” Yoongi said softly.

“What are you talking about?” you asked as he brought you to your room.

“Negative emotions, it’s what demons feed off of. What we crave, shame, embarrassment, humiliation and disgrace. We love it, the degradation it gives to you humans. We absorb it into our bodies, and that’s what keeps us going. So, every time you have a negative emotion around me, I’ll absorb your energy and it’ll drain you. That’s why you almost fainted earlier, because of me,” Yoongi explained.

“So, no negative emotions around you?”

“Not unless you wanna keel over,” Yoongi stated.

“You think I’m a fragile little girl?” you asked.

“In the hands of a demon, anything is fragile,” he warned.

Setting you on the bed Yoongi began to head towards the door, when your hand shot out on its own accord. Betrayer. Just as you felt the cool of his skin you froze. You weren’t sure why you’d grabbed him, what purpose you had for doing so. But it felt nice to hold his hand, it was smooth against your own, hands that had been dirtied by years of greed. You weren’t sure what you were expecting from Yoongi. But he was always unpredictable.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, keeping his hand locked with yours.

“I-I don’t know why I did that,” you hastily told him. Moving to break your hands apart, Yoongi simply placed his other hand on top of your two combined ones.

“You humans are always so fascinating. Not knowing why you do things, when you are in full control of your actions. You wanted to touch someone, I’m here, so you touched me. And that’s okay,” he said, giving you a soft smile.

“It-It is?” you asked, wincing.

“Listen, Y/N, we need to get over whatever this weirdness in between is, we aren’t going to convince people we’re in love if everytime I touch you you shy away or if I can’t kiss you. There’s no way Mathias will believe our marriage is real,” he said.

With a sigh you confirmed your fears.

“I know,” you said, running your fingers through your hair.

“I’m your partner in this, not your enemy,” Yoongi said, sitting down next to you.

“You’re right. I’ve been way too restrictive for my own comfort. If I want to kick Mathias out of my company for good, I have to be stronger,” you said to yourself.

“That’s correct,” Yoongi smiled.

“I will be stronger,” you glared at the wall, “I will win.”

Yoongi nodded.

“You’re right, and with me at your side, you’ll be unstoppable,” he smirked.

“Yoongi,” you said, jumping up. “We’ve got some work to do.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Yoongi answered.

[transselkie]

I have spent a lot of time lately thinking about privilege. I don’t have anything very special to say about it, except that I’ve really been thinking about how it shapes your life. How many ways I did have it or didn’t have it, and how those things made me who I am today. It’s strange to think how every innocuous detail of you can change your fate.

I’ve been watching a lot of shows with child actors lately and remember how badly I once wanted to be one of them. I always loved performance and as a kid I was insanely good at absorbing lines of dialogue and regurgitating them. In kindergarten if you read the words out to me I could sit down and memorize a multiple paragraph monologue in a matter of minutes and would frequently sit in front of a VHS player rewinding scenes of my favourite tv shows and memorizing them. I would memorize and reenact scenes, putting on different voices and postures to differentiate characters, crying on demand. I have no memories of it but people talk all the time about the time in grade two when I played a lead in a two hour school play where I never left the stage. I lived in a small town in the middle of nowhere where everyone knew you with five siblings and a family with a bad reputation but up until the day I graduated high school the thing my town knew me as was the kid who was in every school, church, or town play available. My high school teachers and guidance councilors encouraged me to go on to pursue acting.

I don’t think I am anything special. I can absorb and regurgitate dialogue but I rarely get it word for word. My delivery is often awkward and abnormal sounding. I fail to match my vocal and facial expression to the correct emotion so often in casual conversation, I can not imagine I nail it while acting. I still never know what to do with my hands. I fall back on numerous crutches that would surely become stale to anyone paying attention. Now that I am no longer cripplingly depressed I struggle greatly to cry on command. Being wholly truthful I think everything I had going for me back them was the people around me finding the symptoms of my undiagnosed autism a novelty. I can not imagine a genuine casting director would ever take me seriously.

But sometimes I can’t help but wonder what if I wasn’t raised in the middle of nowhere? When my whole life, my whole life, every adult who saw me on stage would tell me that if I lived anywhere but here I’d be on tv, surely if I was born into an acting family that would be the case, right? As a kid I thought it was great. I loved acting, and was so honored that people enjoyed it with me. But by God am I glad that I grew up in nowhere with no resources. Everything about actually being known horrifies me. I live in the city now and over the last couple of years there have been a couple of times that a stranger in public has recognized me from some local thing I’ve done. It makes my skin crawl. 

I don’t know. This doesn’t have any actual purpose or point I’m building to, it’s just something I keep thinking about. Because I do believe that if my parents were someone important they would have capitalized on this hobby of mine, and I would have delighted in being capitalized on. And then it would have ruined my life, like it does most children that happens to. Whether or not I actually have talent is besides the point. Untalented people with famous parents have been granted much greater opportunity than I could ever dream of. The thought experiment isn’t about what inherent talent I actually have, it’s about how sometimes being in a place of privilege is really just being so vulnerable to exploitation. Because if my mom could of put me on tv she would have. And I don’t even think she would have been intentionally exploiting me, but the effect still would have been the same. I don’t know. 

[graffitiskies]

━♡ guess the 26 year old july baby just arrived to dallyeog! it makes sense, because jeon yooseul is just as wild as the month of july. wait, why do they remind me of bae suji? beyond that, they seemed audacious and impartial upon first glance. i heard someone say they’re sort of stormful and brusque though. i hope they get acquainted here in complex #3 / apartment #0722 / floor # 2 ; she seems to have a lot going on with her job as a rideshare driver.

tw: missing persons

hey everyone!!!! ;u; i’m so glad to be joining you at this ungodly hour (it’s literally after 4am here SMH!!) but hey when the muse hits you IT HITS YOU LIKE A CINDERBLOCK and i for one love when i get a weird burst of sudden muse for a new character hehe :> anyways, that character would be jeon yooseul, a somewhat asocial rideshare driver who’s been living at dallyeog for about a year now :0 pretty much all the info i have for her is below, but in case you’d rather not read a big stretch of text all together, here’s some individual page links: x, x & x :)

profile / stats basic

full name - jeon yooseul nickname/s - yoo, yoojwi ( from her aunt due to her quiet nature ) age - twenty six dob - 07/22/1994 gender identity - cis female orientation/s - pansexual / demiromantic blood type - o born - gyeonggi-do, south korea  grew up - pohang, south korea nationality - korean occupation: rideshare driver languages: korean, conversational japanese, very basic english

personality

label - the thunderstorm traits - audacious, stormful, impartial, brusque, enigmatic, aloof aesthetics - long drives with no destination, concealed crying fits, lonely shadow puppets on the wall in the waning sun, wind and raindrops in your hair, smudged lip balm, beat up messenger bags, the jingling of keys, continental drift, being left on read western horoscope - cancer chinese zodiac - dog alignment - chaotic neutral mbti - the logician ( intp-t ) enneagram - the philosopher ( 5w4 ) disc type - the architect ( Dc )

appearance

fc - bae su-ji ( bae suzy ) hair - deep brown and usually worn naturally, with little effort put in. eye color - black build - slender clothing style - simple, aimless - lots of blacks, earth tones and neutrals. owns a few leather jackets. piercings - both ears in multiple places tattoos - a small heart on her left ring finger, a heart topped with a cross on lower part of the back of her neck

familial ties

mother - jeon hyesun ( status unknown ) father - jeon soonil ( status unknown ) siblings - younger brother jeon yoohwan ( 20, currently in university ) aunt - im darae ( 49, living in pohang ) uncle - im jongho ( 52, living in pohang )

biography

yooseul was born in the muggy, oppressive heat of july to two very kind, yet very naive people. they were both young; barely 19 when they had yooseul, and were in no position to take care of a child. however, they still took on the challenge, as it was simply the kind of people they were.

while the pair meant well, they were always leaving yooseul with her aunt and uncle before traipsing off on another adventure. they loved traveling the world doing all kinds of thrilling, but reckless activities. climbing infamous mountain peaks, visiting the sites of active volcanos, boating down the amazon river with scarce supplies. the little girl would overhear pieces of arguments between her aunt & uncle and her parents. yooseul’s aunt and uncle tended to look out for her even more than her parents did, and were adamant that all the traveling was actively harming yooseul’s development. her mother and father remained steadfast that their daughter wouldn’t even remember this stretch of her life, due to how young she was.

when yooseul’s brother was born, everyone was a bit hopeful that yooseul’s parents would slow down with their jet-setting lifestyle, but if anything, it seemed to kick them into high gear. it was as though having a second child made them feel as though the clock were ticking on their lives, and off they were again on another adrenaline rush.

as yooseul grew enough to truly comprehend and lament her parents’ absence, it was only then that they seemed to finally understand the effect they were having. then again, anyone would probably start listening when their young child is on their knees, begging and crying with an intensity of someone’s whose heart was truly breaking. the trips slowed to a crawl and became every once in a while, rather than every other weekend. yooseul grew passive about them by age seven, as they were so infrequent, so when her parents told her they’d be going on a hiking trip to the south korean evergreen forests, she honestly didn’t think much of it.

she hadn’t seen her aunt and uncle in months, and she and her brother could fly kites in their spacious garden. it was a handful of positives, or so yooseul thought. ( tw begins here ) the days stretched on at their house, and it seemed to be taking a bit longer for her parents to return than she’d anticipated. she could tell something may have been wrong by the hushed conversations her aunt and uncle had, coupled with teary phone calls to people that yooseul couldn’t seem to make out.

she learned the truth while eavesdropping on a news story about her parents; apparently they had gone out hiking as planned, but they had never returned back to the hotel they were staying at. several searches had been conducted in the forest, but only scant, inconclusive traces of the couple were found.

as she was just a child, yooseul knew only hope. her parents would come back one day. why wouldn’t they? they’d been hiking before. they knew what they were doing. days turned into months, and optimism turned into doubt. the evergreen forests were so large and covered so much ground - and who knew if they were even still in there?

( end of tw ) her aunt and uncle did what they could for her and her brother, as the two had gained custody of the children due to their frequent care of them. while her brother was able to develop at a relatively normal pace, yooseul withdrew inside of herself for the most part. the hope she had once known had shifted into stinging pessimism. she loved the family she had left of course, but she was terrible at opening up about what she was feeling, and she was so reluctant for people to see any weakness in her. she had to be the strong one, and it was so much easier to be strong when you let emotions roll off your back entirely.

yooseul had difficult focusing on the things that went on around her, especially in school. she never really made socializing a priority, and her grades were abysmal. it was honestly a wonder that she graduated at all, but her aunt and uncle didn’t want her to be without a secondary diploma, so they refused to let her fall back irretrievably far.

trying to enter the workforce was even worse. she’d sworn off university, and all the small trade jobs she got never seemed to last more than a couple of months, mostly due to her lack of interest. she simply drifted from one meaningless wad of money to the next, either saving it up in a jar for goals she didn’t have or slipping it into her aunt’s purse when she’d refuse to take it directly.

having no prospects might have seemed like a downer of a life to live, but yooseul didn’t really think of things in those terms - she was solely focused on existing in whatever moment she was in and doing whatever she wanted to do. after her aunt and uncle surprised her with a fairly nice kia k8 (as they knew it was something she’d never buy for herself), she leaned into late night drives for comfort. there was something about being alone, feeling the wind ruffling through your hair, some mindless song on the radio recorded solely to push false emotions, watching the lines on the road come at you like knives when you push the limits of the car’s engine. it felt free.

after hearing word of a new rideshare app launching from her uncle, yooseul decided to apply to be a driver. she had nothing else going on at the moment, and those late night drives she enjoyed so much could actually make her some money.

she’s been doing it for a few years now and enjoys it as much as yooseul can enjoy something. the social aspect of it can be a bit awkward, so she loves nothing more than when her passenger keeps their face locked on their phone in silence. she’s since moved out of her aunt and uncle’s place and intro her own apartment at dallyeog. she figured it was finally time to move on, as her brother was now entering college and hadn’t really needed any help taking care of for some time now. maybe, deep down, she’d stuck around so long for sentimental reasons, but she’d never ever admit that.

wanted connections ( first come first serve )

anniversary of an uninteresting event ( open ) - yooseul never talks about it, but y/m saw the story about her parents on some exploitative talk show where they launched a ton of conspiracy theories about what happened. you want to set the record straight, but she doesn’t really wanna hear it.

be quiet and drive ( open ) - y/m orders a ride from yooseul with no set destination in mind. they’ve just had a really awful day and want to zoom through the city towards the sunset without looking back. lucky for them, that is just yooseul’s vibe.

needles and pins ( open ) - y/m and yooseul knew eachother before she moved into dallyeog, possibly even dating back to childhood. they actually know her better than most of the people she’s around now, which makes her mighty uncomfortable. she feels as if they hold some sort of key to a past she thought she’d locked away forever.

cherry waves ( open ) - nobody knows how y/m and yooseul came together, but every time they come into contact, they both immediately lose themselves. sitting on the beaches of busan with a bottle of whiskey, tiptoeing on the edge of dallyeog’s rooftop hand in hand, or ending up a tangled mess of flushed skin and kiss-swollen lips in the back of yooseul’s car; wherever they are, time doesn’t seem to exist.

battle axe ( open ) - yooseul can be a little abrasive when she’s irritated, and maybe that’s why y/m likes pushing her buttons so much. maybe they just like to challenge her attitude of not caring about anything. 

passenger ( open ) - somehow, every time y/m orders from the rideshare app, they end up with yooseul as their driver. it’s not that she doesn’t get them there safely and on time, but she can be...rather scary. maybe all it would take is a few conversations, and they’d see she’s not so bad, and maybe even bump up her rating to three stars?

hole in the earth ( open ) - yooseul did the unthinkable when she and y/m were together a few years ago: she actually opened up. she told them things she never thought she’d tell anyone, and y/m didn’t really understand the weight of that decision for her, betraying her trust. seeing y/m again now is just reopening old wounds and pouring on the salt.

digital bath ( open ) - for whatever reason, it is way easier for yooseul to have lengthier conversations over texts, snaps and other various digital means of communication. perhaps it’s not having to see the person’s reaction in real-time and therefor not having to process any of her own emotions. y/m is one of the only people who actually indulges her on this, and now they have become somewhat friendly as a result.

this is all i have for the moment, but i am v enthusiastic about brainstorming things based on chemistry and character traits or of course scooping up one of your open plots! 

[red-talisman]

guardian lion jc??? is the best thing i've seen in AGES???? pls may we have some more?

I hope one day I’ll have the executive functioning to write a proper fic which is half warding sorcery and half trauma recovery but IN THE MEANTIME SINCE I HAVE NO ACTUAL PLOT YET -

I’m assuming that Jiang Cheng’s ancestors have lived in or around the land that currently hosts Lotus Pier for at least a good chunk of time because that seems reasonable to me, and we knew he grew up there and was presumably born there (but WHY DOES THIS MATTER a hypothetical person asks).

Because all of those factors together means that Jiang Cheng is going to have a spiritual, emotional, and physical awareness of Lotus Pier and its environs that would lend itself to some extremely powerful (and efficient) warding possibilities in the post-Sunshot rebuilding, regardless of the extent to which we headcanon any special qi-related talents or whatever.

So IMAGINE being able to draw on the natural flows of qi running through Yunmeng’s lakes and rivers in particular (a renewable resource which means the....human borrower? doesn’t have to rely on their personal reserves as much).

In the months after the Sunshot campaign and before WWX takes off with the Wen Remnants, WWX and JC work together to develop talismans/arrays which allow senior disciples to tap into this reservoir - designs that can then be incorporated into architecture as ‘harmless aesthetic.’

Because humans are part of a landscape whether they mean to be or not, JC (and WWX and JYL while they’re still there) learn how to fit Lotus Pier into the spiritual ecosystem around them so that the land’s own natural defenses automatically cover a good chunk of Lotus Pier itself (I think that’s basically feng shui but I welcome correction orz), which has a lot of lovely benefits as a result.

JC would also be in a good position to be acquainted with the local spirits, who run the gamut from resentful cooperation to enthusiastic attempts at affection.

At least one of these spirits is a nonverbal guardian lion which only JC can see; the only thing the two of them can agree on beyond “protect home at all costs” is that Lanling Jin is ruining a perfectly good son nephew, damnit, and they communicate primarily through irritated stares and growls.

Jin Ling doesn’t find out until post-canon that the only reason he never killed himself as a toddler trying to put everything in his mouth was because of the guardian lion roaring its head off to make JC come running no matter how Important the political meeting. (”HOW DOES EACH GENERATION LIVE LONG ENOUGH TO BIRTH THE NEXT WHEN THESE BRATS ARE SO DETERMINED TO KILL THEMSELVES I FUCKING SWEAR.”)

JC rarely leaves Yunmeng’s borders if he can help it, exceptions being the occasional political meeting he can’t avoid himself without causing even more offense and to pick up/drop off Jin Ling at Koi Tower. The longer he’s away, the more his skin starts to crawl and the more he starts imagining all the various kinds of ruin he could return home to. If Lan Wangji earns the reputation of traveling “where the chaos is,” Jiang Cheng’s reputation includes commentary on his observed reluctance to leave Yunmeng.

Strangely enough, that part of his reputation has the accidental benefit of easing some of the political pressures from sect leaders - including Jin Guangshan himself - who see Yunmeng Jiang Sect’s impossible incredible recovery and seek to exploit the (painfully obvious) vulnerabilities of its teenaged leader with no family backing him up before the boy grows up some more and learns how to play politics better.

(Jiang Cheng does indeed learn better, in ways that make him miss his mother’s lessons. At least then he could usually see the hand or the whip coming before it landed. It takes way too long, but he also learns how to hide it when someone lands a hit and, sometimes, how to throw it right back three times harder so that the enemy never wants to try again.)

The first of JC’s attempted matchmaking dates actually started out well - he hosted the woman and her family in Lotus Pier, and the awkwardness was about as low as he could have hoped for something like this when he had zero desire to marry but felt too overwhelmed and politically clumsy to ignore the pressures of the older folks around him. Hell, she even got him to crack a smile at one point. The problem came when he was working in his office late that evening and got the sudden sense that something was wrong, and he slipped down the hallways toward Jin Ling’s nursery with a hand on Sandu, and he came across the woman speaking with one of her handmaidens about how to ensure Lanling Jin had full custody of Jin Rulan the moment she confirmed she was pregnant (”Sect Leader Jiang is not burdened by a heart,” she says bluntly, “and it should be a simple matter to remind him of his familial duty by the time his own heir is born in order to separate him from the Lanling Jin heir properly”). By dawn, she and her family have been dismissed from Lotus Pier, rumors are spreading of Jiang Cheng’s coldness even towards kind women willing to marry despite his temper, and Jiang Cheng has amended his list of not-actually-thought-through qualifications for a wife: she must be kind to Jin Ling. (In other words, she will not use children in games of power or punishment.)

[darylwillfightnatureforcarol]

(WARNING FOR MENTIONS OF THAT STUPID TEENY BOPPER BLONDE GIRL IN THIS POST)

Guys, please pray for my soul. I'm about to start on Season 4.

How the hell am I going to get through that damned cringey ass hug in 30 Days Without An Accident?

If I'm already stressing over that, how am I going to get through Alone and Still.

I can't even skip the damned episodes because I'm watching it with my mum 😏

Please send me ideas on how to look at this humorously.

Btw (and warning for b3thyl rant):

Just to say it for the millionth time: Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to write that stupid ass Daryl and B3th storyline in the first place?!

That hug is so uncomfortable to watch. Did they think we would think it was sweet because 'Aw, she's so cute, trying to make him feel better' I just watch it with the sense that the FBI should be busting into that prison. I thought the same in the scene where B3th kisses Rick on the cheek.

Was the writer or whoever proposed the storyline a closet pedo? Or a teenage girl? What the hell was the point of pairing them up for those episodes?

They say that they never intended for it to be perceived romantically, but come on, there's no way they couldn't know some people were going to interpret it that way. Especially teenage girls.

Im aware that EK is older than the character she played and that she briefly dated Norman (which is still kinda gross imo but they're adults. To each their own) but you can't just overlook the fact that she was playing a girl that was AT LEAST only 18.

How do you go about justifying that. As if Daryl would ever touch her when he is clearly so against exploiting children. The fact that she is 18 is hardly anything worth mentioning. She is BARELY 18 and still basically a child.

To ship that trash heap is to basically admit you have no idea who Daryl Dixon is. It's actually insulting to his character if you think about it.

Do those crazy people think the group or Maggie, for that matter, would have been okay with that shit? No freaking way! As much as Maggie cares about Daryl, you can bet she would have found something sharp and used it in unsavoury places.

God, I'm sorry for the rant guys. Just, this lead up to this abuse on my eyes is stressing me tf out.

I'd love to blame it on the shippers for making watching those episodes uncomfortable but it's not even that. Even I can feel that tension on screen and it makes my skin crawl.

It's Norman and EK that cause it, I know. It's their real life stuff coming through because honestly, they're both not the greatest of actors. No offense to them. It's just how I interpret their talents.

So, like I said, we're all pretty sure the two of them had something going on, which while creepy, was not illegal. That clearly translated into screen and that's why those episodes seem loaded with sexual tension that makes me want to barf.

Because I'm not watching it as Norman and EK, I'm watching it as Daryl and B3th, with all I know about their characters in my mind. And it's just wrong. It feels wrong. It looks wrong. It IS wrong.

The amount of disgusting b3thyl fanart I've been bombarded with on Pinterest lately has also not helped matters. What the fuck is wrong with their algorithm? I like a shit ton of Caryl fanart, so you punish me with that trash?

I need some postive vibes guys. I keep seeing the same damned D0nnie fanart on Instagram too.

[myrish-lace-love]

Fight/Flight/Freeze

Jonsa Halloween Day 3 - Tales or The Stranger

Summary:  Sansa Stark always looks forward to Halloween trips to the Wintertown pumpkin patch. This year, though, Joffrey Baratheon forces Sansa to go to the "Fright Fest" haunted house, a new addition to Wintertown's attractions. Sansa is stuck, until Jon Snow helps rescue her from danger. With Jon's help, Sansa remembers everything she loves about the Halloween season. For @jonsa-halloween

***

Sansa had grown up on Halloween tales of Samhain. The Gaelic holiday shared an evening with Halloween, and ushered in the darker half of the year. Her father had told them stories of how the barrier between the living and the dead thinned and shifted that night.

When Sansa’s mother passed away two years ago, Sansa’s father had tried to spin Samhain stories as a source of comfort, as a time when they all might feel closer to her. During the day, Sansa shared in the reminiscing about her mother, and could even bring herself to smile at some of her father’s stories.

Once night fell, that spell was broken, and a new spell descended. Sansa would keep the light on in her bedroom, startling each time the branches scraped against her window. When she closed her eyes, she'd seen her mother's ghost, red-eyed and terrible, shrieking for revenge. She'd woken up in tears each time.

She'd made the terrible mistake of calling Joffrey as she wept last Halloween. She'd imagined he'd be gallant, perhaps even come and rescue her.

Instead, Joffrey had been irritable, He’d hung up almost immediately. Sansa was mortified, but she's told herself at least it'd been quick - a phone call from a needy girlfriend that Joffrey would soon forget.

But the longer Sansa stayed with Joffrey, the more she understood that he coveted and collected moments of weakness. He derived a sick and twisted pleasure from exploiting those moments over and over.

Sansa had been raised to be a good and obedient girl, and for her that extended into being a good and obedient girlfriend, no matter the cost. Joffrey spent the rest of the year telling her grisly ghost stories and transforming movie night with his friends into horror fests.

Sansa had laughed, and tried to waive away her fears as part of just another game she and Joffrey played.

Joffrey's eyes would glint cruelly each time. He may not be able to tell when she was happy, or sad, or needed comforting, but he fed off her fear like a bloodsucking insect.

Sansa had tried to distract Joffrey this Halloween by offering up a trip to her favorite apple orchard, the Wintertown pumpkin patch. She'd expected to be turned down. She'd been excited, in fact, about taking Joffrey's inevitable cancellation and turning it into a trip with Margaery Tyrell. Margaery’s constant quest to get Sansa to break up with Joffrey would simply be a bonus.

Instead, to her surprise, he'd readily agreed.

Read more below or on AO3

Sansa had sighed, but taken it in stride. She'd been looking forward to the trip. The Wintertown pumpkin patch was full of her Halloween favorites - apple cider doughnuts, pumpkin picking, pony rides for the children who'd shout with joy.

Sansa had been one of those little girls once. Each year, until she was too old, she’d ridden a beautiful black pony she'd named Belle. She'd pretended she was an autumn queen and Belle was her loyal mare. Her father and her mother had smiled at her. The picture Robb had snapped of her patting Belle’s mane was tacked to her vanity mirror in her bedroom. Her mother and father had even indulged her in the gift shop, buying her a crown of fabric autumn leaves for her hair.

That was the Halloween Sansa loved - the changing of the seasons, the beauty of the leaves, the crisp fall air, the joy people took in being cozy and warm as the cold crept into town. Wintertown pumpkin patch meant all of those things to Sansa.

Wintertown pumpkin patch had changed with the times, however. The business needed to bring in more revenue, and now it was home to the "most terrifying" haunted house in the state, Fright Fest. Sansa had read the reviews of Fright Fest, hoping to see something like "it's got a few ghosts, but it's safe enough for the kids.”

Instead, patrons described it as "scarring" and "a bad idea for anyone under sixteen." More than one visitor gave the haunted house zero stars. Those reviews claimed that Fright Fest went too far, and "swept you up in the plot of a horror movie that you can't escape."

Joffrey, naturally, had been thrilled.

Now, as they pulled into the Wintertown parking lot, Joffrey was trying Sansa’s last nerve.

He argued with the parking attendant about being forced to park his Lexus in the mud. The apple orchard was in the middle of a field, and all of the spots were in the mud. Sansa fought to keep from rolling her eyes. She gazed up at the orchard’s trees and reveled in the movement of the leaves on the wind.

Joffrey grabbed her wrist, harder than he needed to. She stifled a whimper.

“Quit embarrassing me. Just....stop mooning over trees and let's get this over with.”

Get this over with . Sansa felt a flash of hope. She loved this apple orchard. She’d loved it since she was a child. If she could change Joffrey’s mind about what he wanted to do today...

"You're right about your father’s car, Joffrey," she said, giving him a bright smile. You shouldn’t have to endure getting mud all over the tires.”

She took a deep breath and pulled out another one of the strategies she used to appease him. “The staff here are rude, maybe they don’t deserve our business.” She winced inwardly as she said it. Her parents had brought her up to believe that everyone deserved to be approached with dignity and respect - especially people who weren’t in a position to object to bad treatment.

Joffrey's expression darkened, and Sansa knew she'd been too bold.

“This is my car, not my father's car.  He's practically given it to me, Joffrey snapped. “Besides we can't leave now, Sansa.” A sharp, predatory smile sprung to his lips, "We haven't been to the Fright Fest. And I know how much you've been looking forward to it.”

Sansa trembled. She hated haunted houses. She’d been frightened by them ever since she and her siblings had been children. Robb and Arya and Bran had tricked her into believing a ghost lived in the basement of the Winterfell mansion. They’d apologized, and Sansa had long since forgiven them, but the damage had been done.

Sansa did her best to calm the pounding of her heart as she and Joffrey paid their entry fee. Joffrey hustled her past the hayrides and pumpkin picking patch to the "main attraction" of the Fright Fest house. Sansa shrank back as the gloomy building loomed over her. The speakers blasted awful sounds - keening and wailing of lost souls. Worst of all, the speakers sometimes burst with a shrieking that stopped Sansa in her tracks.

That was it, the exact scream Sansa’s mother had made in Sansa's dream.

“Come on, stop stalling, let's go.” Joffrey practically shoved little kids out of the way to get to the entrance. The building was encrusted with gruesome rubber masks.  Snarling gargoyles covered the facade. Bloody handprints stained the ground, as if the victims had been crawling away after being slashed to pieces--

“Miss, are you all right?”

Sansa blinked, and slowly took in the young man staffing the door. She'd expected him to be dressed in full monster regalia.

Instead he wore farmer's overalls, and a worn blue shirt. He carried a plastic pumpkin full of candy, and his nametag read "Jon."

“Great, you got us stopped by the kiddie chaperone,” Joffrey snarled. He glared at Jon as he pushed Sansa towards the dark, cavernous entrance. “She's fine.”

Jon's eyes flashed. He put his hand on Joffrey's chest. Jon didn’t seem to push him, but Joffrey stopped dead in his tracks as if Jon's arm was made of granite.

“She's hyperventilating.” Jon was speaking to Joffrey, but Jon’s gaze was all for her.

Sansa flushed. “I'm - I'm fine, really l, he's right, I'm too scared for my own good, I'll, I won't cause trouble I promise--”

Jon was right, it was hard for her to breathe, and she trailed off.

Joffrey couldn't muscle his way past Jon. He stepped up the insults instead. “She's twenty two, not six.”

“We had someone faint in here earlier today,” Jon said firmly. “Big strong lad, built like a tank, passed out cold on the floor.”

Some of the cunning slipped back into Joffrey's voice. “Well too bad for that guy, sounds like a loser…”

Jon pulled the two of them aside, allowing other customers to enter. Sansa glanced over to her left and saw Jon's coworker, a slender man with the name Satin on his tag, taking tickets.

“Look mate, this place is designed to trigger the fight/flight/freeze reflex,” Jon said to Joffrey.

The gods had blessed Joffrey with an overabundance of wealth, but intelligence was another matter. "What?"

Jon sighed. “A ghost pops out, you punch someone, you run, or your feet get stuck to the floor.”

Joffrey grinned and tightened his grip on Sansa’s arm. “Oh she'll try to run, I'm sure, but I'll drag her through it. Doesn't she need to learn to face her fears?”

Joffrey might as well have said she's worthless, a child, she disgusts me, and I’ll scare her so badly she'll be ashamed to ever complain about this sort of thing again.

Jon looked Sansa up and down. Usually when guys gave her the once over her skin crawled, but the kindness in his eyes helped her relax.

Jon shook his head. "She doesn't need to face anything, not unless she wants to."

Sansa stood up straighter.

The corner of Jon's mouth quirked. “Besides, she's not going to run. She's a fighter."

“You've got to be kidding me,” Joffrey said.

Jon shrugged. “Had a martial arts instructor come through yesterday. Black belt. Teaches over at Citadel University. Helped me start out in judo."

Sansa gasped. "Brienne?" Brienne was an old friend of the family. Sansa’s father had invited Brienne over for dinner often. Sansa admired how steely Brienne’s demeanor could be, how well she carried herself. I’m nothing like her , Sansa thought.

Jon nodded. “That's her. Clocked Pyp right in the face. She came through during my break. Satin's new at this, he let her in. I never would have. Can’t have our staff getting hurt."

Joffrey scoffed. “You're telling me Sansa Stark, Ned Stark’s sweet eldest daughter, who cries when kittens get hurt on TV, is a fighter?"

“That's exactly what I'm telling you,” Jon said evenly.

He turned back to Sansa. “It's in the eyes,” he said softly. “That look. It's unmistakable.” Jon was speaking directly to her now. Everything else faded away as she got lost in his gaze.

“She's going to fight her way through this,” he murmured. Sansa wasn’t sure they were still talking about the haunted house. “She's going to break loose, the next time she's scared.”

Jon turned back to Joffrey.  “And if you're not careful, the person she punches could be you.” Sansa could have sworn Jon was growling.

When Joffrey spoke again he sounded shaken. "Whatever, just let us in.”

Jon stepped between Joffrey and Sansa. Sansa took a full, deep breath for the first time since she’d entered the park. "Go on, mate, feel free. But she isn't going with you."

“I'm going to find your manager and get you fired,” Joffrey sneered.

Jon smiled and pointed. “Go on ahead. He's over there, by the gift shop. Sandor Clegane. You might even know him.”

The color drained from Joffrey's face. Sandor Clegane had worked security for the  Baratheon family, until he stopped Joffrey from tormenting Tommen's cat. No one talked about it openly, but the small town had been buzzing with the news for weeks. Sandor stood by the door with his arms crossed. He wore a suit of armour that was far too well fitting to be a cheap costume.

“This is ridiculous,” Joffrey muttered. “I'm leaving.” He glared at Sansa. “Find your own way home with your new knight here.” He stormed off.

Sansa recovered shortly after. “I’m...not sure how to thank you,” she said softly to Jon unsteadily. “Thanks for fibbing for me, I really am too scared for my own good. I would have bolted or frozen or…."

The corner of Jon’s mouth twitched. “My gut tends to be right about these things. But now it’s up to you whether you go in or not.”

A portly man with glasses and the nametag "Sam" tapped Jon on the shoulder. "Shift's up Jon." Jon nodded absently at him.

With Joffrey gone, Sansa was at a loss. “Well, thank you again, for your help, I'll just…" She trailed off. She had enough money to get an Uber home - after a year of dating Joffrey she always brought enough money to get home on in case he caused a scene. Best to start calling for a car.

As she fumbled for her phone, her stomach growled.

Jon rubbed the back of his neck. “Hey, I don't mean to impose any more than I have already--”

“Oh no,” Sansa broke in. "You saved me there. I'm very grateful, Jon.” She smiled at him, and this time the smile came naturally.

Jon blushed. “Well, at any rate, would you like to get an apple cider doughnut? My parents used to bring me here as a kid--”

“So did mine.” Sansa could practically taste one now.

“And their doughnuts are the best,” Jon finished.

Jon walked her to the restaurant. They split three doughnuts between the two of them. Sansa licked the sugar off her fingers before she could remember to be ladylike. Jon laughed with her, not at her, and Wintertown pumpkin patch settled back in her mind as a place of comfort and refuge. Joffrey drifted further from her thoughts. Jon helped her pick out a pumpkin in the gift shop.

Jon walked her to her Uber. Before she could overthink things, she asked for his number. Jon flushed and mumbled through it.

**

Once Sansa arrived home, her Siberian husky Lady bounded up to her. Sansa laughed and showed her the brown paper sack with the pumpkin she and Jon had picked out.

After she’d lifted her small, round, perfectly orange pumpkin onto the kitchen table, she noticed another package at the bottom of the bag.

She pulled it out, turning it over in her hands. "Deluxe Pumpkin Carving Kit" was written in gaudy letters, and the plastic packaging was decorated with smiling cats and happy witches. An assortment of carving tools were inside. The kind that could slice through pumpkins, and leave children unscathed.

There was a handwritten note as well.

Dear Sansa,

For the next Halloween scuffle you're in. Or for carving pumpkins. I hope you feel comfortable coming back to Wintertown next season. I'll be manning the restaurant door in case you want to sample some more apple doughnuts. Thanks for making my day.

Have a great Halloween,

Jon

Sansa smiled. She got to work on her pumpkin, carving out a happy witch with a curly hat. She snapped a picture of her handiwork and texted it to Jon.

Jon texted back a pumpkin carved like a smiling cat. There's a big white Siberian husky in the photo with him, curled up on his couch.

Well now I have to send him a picture of Lady, she thought, if only to be polite.

***

Next year on Halloween, Jon made apple cider for the both of them. He didn’t use Wintertown pumpkin patch’s recipe, not exactly, since it was a secret. Sansa sighed in bliss when she took her first sip. She told Jon it was better than the cider at the pumpkin patch. When Jon ducked his head and tried to protest, Sansa kissed the corner of his mouth, and soon they forgot the cider entirely.

[andrewmoocow]

Steven Universe: The Fantastic Mutants chapter 3: Enter the Brotherhood (originally posted on July 11, 2020)

AN: Sorry this took so long to come out readers. Coronavirus,  online school and all that jazz just had me occupied for a good while.  Hopefully you've been keeping yourselves entertained in the midst of  this quarantine; I've gotten into Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Scooby-Doo  Mystery Incorporated, Cardcaptor Sakura, Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic  among others. Anyways, let's get back, at long last, to the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning of Gifted Youngsters (or just Xavier Institute or XIHLGY since that name might be a bit too long for some)  and see how the Crystal Gems and their new allies can get out of this one!

--

A few hours prior to their invasion of Professor Xavier's school, the Brotherhood of Mutants sat around a table examining the exploits of the  Crystal Gems to get a good idea of what they'll be getting into. "Don't  ya think we're in over our heads?" Juggernaut asked his fellow mutants  while watching video footage of Lapis stealing the ocean. "I mean, one of them can literally use 75% of the planet to kill us all!"

"The blue one may have the strongest power, but she is also rather emotionally fragile." Black Tom remarked. "In fact, all of them are pretty unstable once you think about it. Insecure, dependent, obsessed, haughty, cowardly, hotheaded..."

"Quit with the psychology stuff Tommy!" Pyro exclaimed out of boredom. "What I wanna know is how could they brainwash three world-destroying monarchs so easily? Could the same happen to us too?!"

"Well, the boss maybe." Sabretooth answered. "Speaking of which, where is he?"

However when Creed wasn't looking, the master of magnetism was standing behind him with Mystique at his side. "Lemme guess, he's standing right behind me."

"How could you guess? Do you have psychic abilities like  Xavier?" Mystique snarked as she sat down next to the clawed mutant. "I've been discussing plans with Erik for the past few minutes, plans on how to infiltrate these Gems. He chose the water-controller as the one I should masquerade as since it would require that I retain my usual skin color."

"He's got a good point, but why are we hunting these down in particular?" Avalanche wondered. "Is it because of how celebrated  they became for allying with the Avengers?"

"Not quite everyone." Magneto revealed. "Our current ally Doctor Doom wants the child's gemstone for the purpose of creating his own army of half-Gem warriors. And taking care of them will be so fulfilling for me after Rose had left me all those years ago."

--

In the present day, the Brotherhood had begun their assault on the Crystal Gems, with their archenemies the X-Men caught in the crossfire and the Fantastic Four as well. The mansion was left damaged in their arrival  and the Brotherhood now has the heroes surrounded.

"Now my friends, are we going to make peace by handing the child to me or must  we resort to drastic measures?" Magneto purred threateningly, holding out his hand and expecting someone to shake it.

"Like we'll ever let you have Steven!" Garnet stated. "Just a few weeks ago, he was nearly captured in a situation similar to this one, and we refuse to let it happen again."

"So when I want to do what's right, you try to fight back." Erik pointed out. "Yet when those three Diamonds plotted to destroy Earth, you let them off scot-free simply because they were mourning a bratty child that was no better than them? The hypocrisy is quite strong here!"

"Can we just cut the blabbing about our morality and fight already?!" Amethyst complained while wriggling free from Black Tom's vines and pouncing on Toad, tying his tongue around his eyes to blind him. "Why are you always targeting me?!"

With that, the battle properly began. The Crystal Gems charged at the Brotherhood of Mutants with the X-Men and Fantastic Four by their side, tearing up the mansion even more.

During the chaos, Morph snuck around the  battlefield in the guise of Garnet and tackled Sabretooth from behind, sitting on top of both his arms. "You little shit, get offa me!" Victor  exclaimed in agony while Morph then took the form of Groucho Marx. "I'd have you cry uncle, but you don't really have one as far as I know." He quipped while pretending to hold a big cigar.

Meanwhile Steven  & Connie had formed into Stevonnie to gain a better advantage over  Magneto, but he used psionic shields against their sword. "Gem fusion! I remember that quite well!" the master of magnetism recalled. "Garnet and Amethyst fused much like you to tear Auschwitz apart."

"Auschwitz?! You mean the Nazi concentration camp?" Stevonnie asked. "You must've been one of the Jews locked up there, right?"

"Indeed, me and my parents as well." Erik answered. "But alas, I wasn't one of the lucky ones."

--

It was October 7, 1944, towards the end of World War II when Erik's mutant powers awakened. When his mother was heartlessly shot dead by the  scientist Klaus Schmidt, Erik promptly went berserk with a loud cry of "NEIN!" followed by manipulating every metallic object in the room, even crushing a pair of army helmets and the heads of the Nazis wearing  them.

Klaus was excited at Erik's potential, but his joy turned to  fear when a loud crash was heard before a massive purple flail burst through the roof of his office. "Mein gott." The mutant ally of the  Third Reich muttered in awe of Sugilite. "Hey small fry!" the brutish fusion grinned while grabbing Schmidt by the collar with two large fingers. "Why don't you try picking on someone your own warped fascist  government?!"

"Please let me go!" Klaus begged for mercy. With a toothy smirk, Sugilite gave her word and dropped the man back through  the hole made in his roof, landing Klaus on his desk and making him too injured to get up. "Puny Nazi." Sugilite sneered before separating into Garnet and Amethyst.

"Bitte, hilf mir." The boy who would become Magneto croaked while crawling out from underneath the rubble, mildly injured but thankfully not comatose. "Bunte damen, hilf!"

Unfortunately, his voice was too hoarse for anyone around to hear. Not even the Nazis carrying away the bodies of his mother and Klaus were able to pay attention to the young mutant. "Is anyone else in here?" the voice of  Rose Quartz called out as she stepped into the ruined office. However, she was able to find a certain young man pinned under pieces of ceiling. "Are you okay young man?"

Still hoarse, Erik was unable to give  his name to the Gem. "Hallo, mein namen ist Rosenquartz." Rose introduced herself in some sloppy German. "Kannst du mich verstehen?"

"Rose!" the commanding tone of Captain America distracted her for a bit. "You have to come with me, they're bringing reinforcements from HYDRA!" he urged the Crystal Gem leader. With a small gasp, Rose turned back to Erik with some comforting words. "Don't worry little one." She assured him in English. "I'll be back for you soon."

But unfortunately for Erik, she never did.

--

"So you're hunting us down partially because Rose forgot about you?" Stevonnie asked. "Honestly, I'm not really surprised."

"I remember what happened that day!" Pearl exclaimed. "Rose couldn't come back for you because she was poofed during the battle and we had to retreat. I am truly sorry we were unable to make do on her promise."

"Sorry just won't cut it!" Magneto boomed, pinning Pearl to a wall with a steel beam using his powers."And no matter how much she tried to make  amends when we met again, I still never forgot."

--

Nearly twenty years later in 1963, the Crystal Gems were touring the city on a  sunny day when they found a large group of people gathered before a stage, where a man made a speech. "What are those guys doing?" Amethyst asked her fellow Crystal Gems. "I'm not sure, but I believe we should get a better look." Garnet answered.

As the Crystal Gems blended into the rather blasé crowd, the man continued speaking. "Despite the fact that you lauded such beings as the late Captain America, you also hypocritically look down upon mutants for possessing similar abilities."

"Uh actually sir," a young news reporter with a fake toothbrush mustache  spoke up. "There is a clear difference. Captain America was given his  powers by science to help win the war. Mutants on the other hand were  born with their powers that could go out of control if pushed too far."

"Did anyone ask for your opinion boy?" the man boomed as he glared at the  reporter. "Please don't take it out on me sir, I'm just a young reporter!" the newsboy nervously squeaked and then high-tailed it out of there. "But thanks for the story menace!"

"Hmph, children." The speaker rolled his eyes before returning to his speech, or he would've  had he not found a familiar face joining his audience. "Wait, I remember you!" he shouted. Using his magnetic abilities, he pushed the spectators away by forming a path straight to Rose using the steel fence that once separated them. "Rose Quartz. How have you been coping with the captain's demise?"

"I'm sorry, do I know you?" Rose asked the mutant. "Of course you'd forget about me." He replied. "I am known as  Magneto, the master of magnetism! But I'm sure you'd at least remember me calling myself Erik."

"Oh my goodness, Erik?!" Rose exclaimed. "I am so sorry I didn't come back to you like I promised! There was HYDRA coming for us at Auschwitz, I just didn't have time and-"

"I believe that's enough!" Magneto roared before he proceeded to use the  fences against Rose. "You have forgotten me at the camp, and now I shall  make sure everyone forgets you!" He tossed the fences at the Gem, but Garnet & Pearl quickly deflected them. "Stay away from her!" Pearl called. "Amethyst, get everyone out of here while we take this one on!"

Amethyst gave a comical salute before she rounded up all the human spectators with her whip and dragged them to safety. "I see how it is." Magneto  boomed. "You are just like all of them."

"No, you don't understand  Magneto!" Garnet stated. "We've actually met and fought alongside a few mutants before! There was this Canadian one during the war, and we even met En Sabah Nur as well! The Crystal Gems value all life on Earth, whether they be ordinary humans or otherwise!"

"You can try to rope yourself into my good graces all you want Gems!" Erik growled. "Because nothing can ever change the past!"

--

"That fateful battle was how we first met Xavier. He had an older team of  X-Men that saved us from him." Amethyst recalled. "Speaking of which, where could they be now?"

"Wrong time, wrong place!" Sunspot  exclaimed while he fired a blast of solar energy at Juggernaut, who was unfazed. "Could this get any worse today?!"

"As a matter of fact, it can." Mystique replied sharply, snapping her fingers to summon a pair  of massive blue and purple robots that towered over pretty much  everyone. "Pink gem detected, pink gem detected!" the machines noted in unison. "Bring boy to Doom immediately!"

"Sentinels?!" Jean exclaimed. "And it seems this time, they've been modified to hunt him down!" Emma replied as the Sentinels held out their hands to trap Steven in a forcefield. "Guys, a little help?" he called out from inside his prison. "I can't seem to get out!"

"STEVEN!" the Crystal Gems screamed while the Sentinels slowly took off into the sky with the boy in tow. "Don't worry Steven, I'll save you!" Kitty exclaimed. "Storm, give me a boost!"

"You got it!" Storm replied, grabbing the younger mutant by the waist and lifting her up high with her flight abilities. When she was let go, Kitty leaped at the Sentinels and used her phasing powers to pass through the forcefield to rescue Steven. "Don't worry little guy, I got you!"

"Thanks Kitty, but I think we might be too late." Steven thanked sorrowfully, making his new friend look up to discover that the Sentinels were headed for a large airship above them. "Aw crud." Kitty smacked her face in irritation. "Guess I walked into that one."

"Now they got Kitty too!" Scott shouted. "Yeah, I think we got the picture!" Lapis said. "Can't any of you fly up and save them?!" Morph suggested. "You seem to love ignoring obvious  solutions!"

Lapis rocketed into the air as she was joined by Angel, Storm, Firestar and Human Torch with intents to rescue Steven & Kitty, but unfortunately they were quickly shot down by the Sentinels, still slowly making their way inside the Brotherhood's vessel and leaving the other heroes behind.

"Let this be a lesson to all of you Crystal Gems." Magneto declared. "You may think just saying sorry will instantly make everything better, but time will never make people forget." He surrounded his Brotherhood in his forcefield and lifted them all up to his ship. When the villains got inside, the ship sped away from the destroyed mansion.

"I can't believe we lost him, just like that." Pearl muttered while on the verge of tears. However, Reed was there to put a comforting rubber hand on her shoulder. "Don't fret, I think I might know where they're heading." Mister Fantastic declared. "They're working with one of our greatest enemies  known as Doctor Doom, which means their next destination will be his kingdom of Latveria."

"Latveria? I've read about that place." Connie replied. "Very good that you know about this place Fraulein Connie." Colossus complimented her. "But still, the combined forces of Doom and Magneto might need more than just our three teams here."

"I think our first step would be calling the Avengers." Peridot suggested.  "But they agreed to let us solve our own problems unless it was absolutely necessary we needed their help." Garnet responded. "Maybe at least a few of their reserve members would be useful, but not the whole team."

"I do know someone who can help us, but I don't think a few  of us are going to like it." Colossus announced, much to Wolverine's irritation. "You don't mean?" Logan growled. "Da, exactly." Piotr replied with a nod and then he turned to Connie. "Connie, the X-Men now have a very special job for you."

"Whatever it is Mr. Colossus, the Crystal Temps will do what we can!" Connie said exuberantly as Peridot, Lapis, Bismuth and Nephrite assembled behind her with goofy grins on their faces.

"I admire your optimism malen'kiy. And  please, call me Piotr." Colossus continued. "I cannot believe I am  saying this, but we need you to find for us," he ordered her. "Deadpool!"

Wolverine giving a loud aggravated moan followed this up.

--

Well, this sure took a while, hasn't it?

Bitch, a while doesn't even cut it!

Wait, Deadpool?! How did you get here?

I came here to yell at you for prolonging my long-awaited proper debut  for months now! Well I've had it up to here with your lazy-as-shit behavior! Next chapter, you better let me help you out or I'm taking  that "ANDY ONLY" folder on your laptop for myself!

You monster, I worked hard to build up that collection! Okay fine, you can help in parts. Deal?

Deal! And what are you still doing here? Get the hell outta here until next chapter, The Deadpool and Peridot Show! Damn, that chapter title really rolls off the tongue.

[lunarxdaydream]

advent calendar rp meme

→  day four: a female character (of mine)

→ Satine 'Wisteria’ Moreau

     Satine is a character that I rarely go without any muse. Her growth over the years has been an absolute pleasure to experience in part to the amazing writing of my partner, @vacuitas​. From her relationship with Nolan to her enemies turned friends and such, Satine has continued to evolve into a woman that has found a new meaning life. 

     From an early age, Satine has long tasted the bitterness that is abandonment and rejection. Her origins begin with a prostitute who did not desire neither her or her half-brother Tristan let alone their fathers. Exposed to unsultry living arrangements and drugs, the children served no purpose other than to steal from distracted clients during their mother’s services. Despite their dedication to fulfill her requests, the motherly love Satine and her brother desired was never received. In fact, Satine cannot recall a moment where her mother had called her by her birth given name aside from one evening where she, along with Tristan, had been sold off to a strange man. A man that, soon enough, would became their ‘adoptive’ father and mentor to a world neither child would escape from. 

     Damien, Satine’s older adoptive brother, often joined them in each regiment of their training. From theft to murder, Satine was well groomed to adapt in a cruel world. Her need for survival far surpassing all emotions. Her mentality molded to simply defy the instinct of ‘flight-or-fight’ and act upon ‘fight’ alone. Through harrowing abuse, starvation, psychological and emotional trauma, Satine stood among the top of her rank. Childhood fears were numbed. Her emotions forcefully kept under lock and key where they would remain as unnecessary traits. After all, a creature of the underworld has no need for a heart. To feel is to be weak. To be weak meant death. 

     By her mid-teenage years, Satine’s ability to complete tasks had surpassed all expectations. Her dedication and loyalty to the ‘family’ who had adopted her proven by a death of a local politician. A death in which she had been more than willing to cause despite the long standing history of friendship among the two houses. Satine asked no questions nor did she display remorse. She felt nothing for ending the life of a man she had known for over a decade of her life. In the eyes of the Moreau family, she had passed her test and was prepared to leave their ‘care’.

     For years, Satine has served to take on assignments by the highest bidder. Men, women, child -- none of it matters in her eyes. If the client is willing to shell out a pretty penny then it will be completed. Satine has more than happily exploited the weaknesses of others. Some might even say she derived pleasure from watching her prey fall into her trap. Torture, while unnecessary in certain cases, is often a method she will use. A habit that has been well engrained into her from extensive training from the Moreau leader. It is only by the request of her adoptive brother that Satine has bothered to contract herself with a facility under the belief it will further enhance her abilities. After all, the world is filled with predators. If Satine desired to survive, she needed to sacrifice her humanity. 

     This mentality continued for a handful of years. During the process of entering this program, Satine had an unexpected encounter with a strange man named Nolan. It is through him that things soon began to change within Satine. Unfamiliar emotions began to grow. Anxieties she had long buried suddenly began to trickle. Her confidence wavered. Try as she might, Satine could not make sense of what was happening to her nor could she find the strength to stop it. The slew of emotions began to create instability in the once cold-hearted killer. Minor mistakes were committed and emotions began to override logical thinking. Somehow, after months, Nolan had managed to crawl under her skin and take hold of a piece within she did not know existed. 

     Unable to stop herself, Satine began to spend more time with him. Her humanity slowly returning as a relationship soon blossomed. Her empty-shell of a life suddenly felt as though it had purpose ... until his attack and disappearance. With Satine’s lack of coping mechanisms, she fell into a spiral of desperation, depression and rage. Emotions clouded all judgment once more. Through threats and pressure, the previous supervisor of the program was forced to increase the experimental serums on her. Satine utilized all resources possible to locate information with external assistance. And once names and data had reached her, Satine began her hunt. 

     Anger. Hate. Fear. It all fueled her in every torture she drew out on all the victims. Their cries for mercy music to her ears. Far as she was concerned, they were the reason her lover had left. They were the cause for his suffering and near death ... but she was wrong. Nolan’s return had shocked Satine back to her senses. And suddenly, for the first time in her life, she learned what it was like to feel remorse. Not only for the lives she had taken but the lies told to her lover. To this day, it is a habit that Satine has found difficult, if not impossible to break.

     Satine has learned to deal with her emotions but does continue to struggle in maintaining their stability. Her fears often have a way of leading Satine to making rash decisions such as planning behind Nolan’s back with Talon. There is no hiding the desperation in the hopes to find a cure for her lover. It is because of him that Satine has suddenly begun to desire a life that was thought to be lost. A simple, mundane life with someone at her side ... -- there is no other dream she hopes to achieve than this. 

     After Nolan proposed, Satine has worked tirelessly to find a clue to locating a cure. Her heart, once hidden behind a vault, allows itself to be open with Nolan. And it is only recently that she has sought advice and to talk out through her uncertainties with Vice, Sofia and Talon. No longer afraid to love, Satine gives everything to her fiancée. Every action and decision is based on her loyalty and affection for him. Even now, despite the existence of their relationship and how it stands against all her teachings, Satine is determined to cherish him. Nolan’s life has taken precedence over her own, a choice that Satine has never made in her life beforehand.

      The growth Satine has experienced through the years is immense. Satine has learned to love with all her being and is willing to put herself in harm’s way for others, especially Nolan. This drastic change goes against everything she has ever known. While there have been whispered concerns regarding this shift in her behavior, Satine maintains her stance. Her abilities continuously honed but no longer to serve a bidder. Instead, it is for the sole purpose of protecting those she loves. 

[laketaj24]

Bound II: The Spectator

Author’s Note: Here’s part two!!! I hope you enjoy!! Let me know what you think. Teaser of the next part after the story! Also, taglist is open!! Happy Reading Loves!! (The bold font in the fic is a Norse Proverb)

Bound I

Vikings Masterlist

There were days Aslaug did not need you in her court, those days had become cherished because training with the King had become your favorite part of the week. You stand in the practice square in the middle of the woods.

“Spread your legs.” The command itself awakes something carnal in you. Ragnar taps your knee caps with the wooden sword. Your legs don’t move from the position and he leans down gripping your legs and then tracing his finger up to your inner thighs. “I know you can open wider.” The cocky look on his face is teasing enough. “Your stance is unguarded. Weak. One swipe and you are on your ass. Is that what you want Y/N? Up.”

He starts lightly attempting to strike you and then whirling around you like it was nothing. You go back to your normal stance and he takes the opportunity to knock you flat on your ass onto the dampened ground. You can feel the mud seep through your trousers and hear the small chuckle of the King. He was one to make an example of you anytime you disobeyed, he called it training. If he didn’t have such a wonderful smile you would call it cruel.

Ragnar helps you from the ground dusting off your clothes and making sure you were okay. “Flat on your ass was a warning.” He smiled.

The past two weeks had been endearingly awkward. He had not mentioned the exploits of the cabin and neither had you. His decision to train you had not been affected though. You’d learned a great deal and appreciated the one on one time with the King.

You could hear the disturbance of the land nearby. You’d gained a spectator, the youngest most agile of the children, Ivar the Boneless. You were not sure if Ragnar knew of him watching you, he did not seem to be bothered by it either way. He wanted you prepped for the Spring. Ready to storm the shores of whenever the longboat landed.

“Pay him no mind.” Ragnar says acknowledging your awareness to the son. “He has always watched us, it’s how he learns.” He whispers before snapping his sword onto your shield. You were impressed yourself with your reflexes here of late. You might not could stand right but you knew how to guard yourself from him. “Good job.”

“Thank you.” The confident smile is plastered over your face as you mentally give yourself a pat on the back, not paying any attention to Ragnar, which proves to be a mistake.

He swings at you again and you stumble back dropping the sword and the shield and his blade rests on your neck. The small snicker from the woods means you have given the spectator a nice show of your foolery.  “He presses the blade almost knocking through your skin. “Get up.” He directs. “Be strong when you are weak, be brave when you are scared but most importantly be humble when you are victorious, for the next battle might be your last.”

“I wasn’t expecting that.” You huff the last of the breath knocked out of you.

“Of course, you weren’t.” He teases. “No one expects death, especially in battle. Shield at the ready. There is not time to rest.”

 The training lasts until the blue-sky fades to the pinks and yellows and you two head back into the walls of Kattegat. Your body was worn out and ragged but there was work to be done at your small cottage. The winter months were upon you and you lacked some of the simple provisions like firewood and furs. You had saved enough for a few furs for the market but the firewood you would have to chop yourself and you didn’t look forward to it.

You change from the sweaty clothes into the simple tunic and the pants then find comfort in carving the runes you’d planned to gift your mother, alone. Always alone. The small knock on the door comes from the bottom and it’s followed by your door opening and Boneless crawling in. His gloves muddied and face innocent. He slides the gloves off dips his hands into the water pale at your kitchen. The helps himself onto the stool tousling his short brown hair.

“I was not expecting any company, Prince Ivar.”

“Of course, you weren’t. I received no invite. I came here to understand the majesties of Y/N. Why she has taken the attentions of my father from my mother.” He loops the short blade around his finger and uses the hilt to scratch his head. “Hmm?”

“I believe you have requested an audience with the wrong woman, Prince Ivar. You should certainly speak to your father. I am sure he will give you all the information needed to answer your inquiries. Now, if you would.” You stand opening the door. “Leave.”

“But where is he going so soon?” Ragnar takes a step into your home, looking curiously around at the surroundings. “This is a nice place for you Y/N. It reminds me of my first home only it is better.” His eyes shift over to Ivar. “I see Ivar has finally revealed himself to you. The curious son is what I like to call him.” Ragnar takes two strides making it over to his annoyed son. He touches his head and then turns to you. “He claims he is here out of love for his mother but in truth I think it is a lie. Hmm Ivar?’

“I do not lie.”

“Oh, come on.” He smiles timidly sitting at your table adjacent from Ivar. He tosses up the pear and takes a bite into it. “Y/N close the door.”

You do as you’re told folding your arms over your chest standing before the two men. “King Ragnar.”

“Your name is mine.” He says to Ivar completely ignoring your call to him. “All mine, I chose to do with her what I please and you are upset with that because you liked her didn’t you Ivar?”

“Father.”

“No, it is fine. Beauties such as she are to be coveted. It is why I wish to offer you a chance to do what you do best, my son. Watch.”

Ivar moves in his chair and his eyes hook to you. He looked willingly intrigued. “And Y/N will agree?”

“Oh, well she is mine. She will do as I say, isn’t that right Y/N?”

“I am here to serve the King.” You answer sweetly.

“Exactly take off your clothes.” Ragnar doesn’t look at you but Ivar. He watches his reactions as you drop the clothes to the floor and await his next order. “Like you were, Ivar here has never lain with another. I don’t think his first time should be with someone who doesn’t belong to him. So, he is going to make you come with his fingers and then watch you come while riding my cock. I know you are still unexperienced, so I will help you with the latter. But walk towards him, let him look.” Ivar tugs at your hand and the remaining part of the apple is thrown at him. “I said look.”

Ivar was eager. His eyes danced with amusement as his lips parted and he inches forward on his stool towards you. You weren’t sure what to do but you do a full slow spin allowing him to see every inch of you and then you take his hand. His hand is heavy, stronger even than Ragnar’s. His finger drag down the front of your body to your mound. Ivar takes a handful of hair and tugs it playfully. Then he dips down between your pillowed lips spreading the small slit. He starts in slow circles rubbing your clit, like his father he teased. Slicking you with your own liquids making you squirm. Your knees buckle and you place your hand on the wooden table for balance only to be pulled back up. Ragnar takes your hands behind your back and your feel the course tracks of the rope as he starts to wind it around your wrists.

“A good shieldmaiden has good balance even if she is distracted.” His large hand claps down on your butt and Ivar continues with his assaults. Pumping his fingers in and out of you, stretching you to the perfect all while taking you right where you needed to be. “Make her cum son, what are you waiting for?” He appeared at your shoulder peering down at his son. “Curl your fingers, watch how her body responds.” Ragnar’s hands snake up to your breast, twisting until you arch into him. “She’s deprived, and you aren’t giving her what she needs.”

Ivar follows his directions thrusting his two fingers into you and then curling them tapping your g-spot and you explode with pleasure, whimpering as his thumb works your swollen clit and the cum trickles down your leg. His eyes widen, entertained by the way your body reacts. He retracts his glistening fingers and takes himself to the floor. You’re unsure of what he’s doing until you feel his tongue traveling up your legs licking up the trail of cum to your clit.

You can feel Ragnar’s smile before he stands and lifts you from Ivar’s indulgent behavior. “Now, you watch.” He turns you to face him kissing your jawline and then he makes it to your lips, one kiss and then another. You try to restrain yourself from getting carried away, but the lust overcomes you as you tug on his bottom lip with your teeth urging him for more. “Now that my eager son has got you warmed up… Ride me.” He whispers walking you back to the bed. He takes the both of you down to the furs and places you on him.

You had no idea where to start. Your eyes wonder over his lean body noticing things you didn’t notice before like the scar on his abdomen or the scratch on his left pectoral. He’s a masterpiece, worn and treasured by every Viking that ever lived and here you sat on top of him with no clue what to do. His thick cock rests on his stomach jumping as you move to adjust yourself over him. You lift him from his stomach, thick and long, ready to fuck and stroke him once and then twice watching the tiny bit of precum ooze from his tip. Parts of you wanted to taste it, but you settle with wetting him. You slide your clit over him a few times watching him smile at you and you hear Ivar stir behind you. He drags himself in front of you in the bed so that your eyes are on the both of them as you start.

You find your entrance, sinking down onto him inch by inch. Halting as the sting of his thickness sent a slight pain into you and then Ragnar’s hand take hold of your waist slamming you down on him fully. The gasp that escapes you rises Ivar to come closer, curiously watching as you bounce on him. You find a rhythm that fits the both of you perfectly as you mount yourself pressing your hands into Ragnar’s chest. Ragnar’s moans were erotic, pleading as his body clapped against him in feral pace. Ivar’s eyes watch your tits bounce at every stroke, your legs twitch when Ragnar rolls his hips to hit your clit and he all but growls once you start panting.

“Fuck her hard.” Ivar whispers.

Was it possible to go harder? Ragnar answered your thoughts thrusting up into you until you fall forward, and you are faced with the blue-eyed spectator face to face. You all but scream, muting yourself by biting your inner cheek. His strokes are wild, and you can’t help but clench around him shuttering but still watching Ivar. Ivar’s hands travel to your face and he smiles as he slips the fingers, he’d used to fuck you slip into your mouth you suck, tasting yourself and sliding your teeth over the ridges of his fingers.

Then you hear his son moan, and the sounds around you trigger your second orgasm of the night. Ragnar’ applauds slapping both his hands down on your ass allowing your cum to make you slicker, easier to fuck. He continues to fuck you while Ivar gets closer, touching your hair and shaking his head as you find another orgasm. He wanted you. That was for certain. You could feel Ragnar growing harder, twitching as his pace overtook him and he found his release. You clutch your eyes close as he finishes rolling you over, so that he is on top of you.

“Enjoying yourself?” He smiles peppering the lazy kisses down your chest.

You open your eyes when you hear the door close, he’d left. “I hope we have just started King.”

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Coming Next Week:

[alien-from-pluto-writer]

Temptation of Treason and Men

I should stop leaving these for last minute. @alexprompts

: : : : : : : : : :  : : :

“Those bastards won’t know what’s happening until it is too late,” the King sneered, wicked amusement shining in his green eyes, arms tense and corded with muscle as he lent forwards over the maps and plans. He sent his eyes around the room, burning at the skin of the War Generals and advisers.

The King’s voice echoed through the chamber, chandeliers flickering as if his anger had taken flight and brushed past with swooping wings. Ancient paintings stared back with apathy as death was laid down on innocent shoulders, declarations of war falling like swords towards shaking heads. An exquisite table and chairs, warmed by Generals and delivers of death, was varnished with gold stolen from children’s mouths, the centre piece of the room.

Randall, yet another General on the table, couldn’t sympathise with the King’s madness and wishes for blood to be drawn. He, unlike the King, had been taught of peaceful protest, of love, of rights that helped a kingdom prosper – it was one of the reasons why he had first joined the King’s forces, believing him to have the same values. It had been too late for him to quit, less he be called a coward or a shaking man who would sooner piss himself than face another man’s sword. Despite his crumbling pride and shame in continuing to stand by that madman, he wanted to pull the last string holding his life together and set it free in an act of his own rebellion.

Raids, attacks, ambushes. The King planned for the complete annihilation of the seemingly small rebel groups that had been hiding in the slums of the kingdom. Mercy was not a thing on the King’s mind and there was no trace of such a thing on any piece of paper laid out on the long table.

“It won’t be long until I have stamped out this pathetic rebellion like ants under my feet,” he laughed deeply as his lungs filled with insanity under the waves of his mind, and Randall felt more than saw several of the others flinch.

Even with hearts of malice and burning magma they too flinched under the stench of insanity.

“Ezra, tell me what you have learnt,” the King continued, glare trailing through tense air to a man standing at the opposite end of the table, mind briefly rising from the deep lake of insanity.

Ezra was yet another thing that tempted Randall, though the risk of going after those desires was as fatal as treason. With a white shirt tucked into black trousers shaping his slender frame and dark brown hair that hung to his shoulders, he looked more stable hand than spy. Among the Generals who wore gold like one would fabric, Ezra’s leather bracelets and hands flecked with scars looked completely and utterly out of place.

“The rebels whisper of raiding the Guild in a week’s time,” he said, voice deep and smooth, eyes glittering with barely hidden amusement, “however, it is unclear as to whether it would happen, many of them have opposed the idea, claiming it to be too dangerous to venture that far out of their territory.”

The King laughed. “Anyone not afraid to come near this castle is an idiot and deserves everything that comes their way.”

One of the men visibly swallowed and shifted in their seat and Ezra’s eyes flickered.

“Anything else?”

“No, your Majesty, they have spoken very little about their plans.”

The King lowered himself stiffly into his chair, and none dared to breathe too loudly. They all knew what happened to the last spy that couldn’t get enough information, he doubted anyone would forget his screams as he was dragged from the chamber.

Deathly quiet, the king said, “You have one week to gather information that is more than speculation and whispers, if not, you can be buried along with the other incompetent idiots of this court.”

The air pushed against his lungs and wrapped around his throat. He was in danger too - everyone was.

“I understand, your Majesty,” Ezra said with a dip of his head, eyes distant.

“You’re dismissed.”

The King scanned the papers set out in front of him, dismissing the existence of both the Generals and Ezra, who calmly walked from the room with shaking hands tucked in his pockets.

Ezra was a good liar when it came to deceiving those lost to the madness of their minds, but if Randall noticed it, others were bound to have as well. Having those kind of weaknesses and visible secrets could be painfully exploited and turned against him, especially with his already dangerous position. He doubted he would last much longer, no matter how much Randall liked him, not with the whispering of advisors in the King’s ears who stared like hawks at every passing face.

With the click of the closing door, the room returned to silence.

The King smiled as the air turned putrid, seconds ticking by like that of a bomb, each of them waiting for the fuse to run out and the explosion to hit. “The same goes for all of you,” his breath barely disturbed the air. “It would be so easy to just kill all of you, but then I would have to do everything myself – and that’s no fun.”

Any remaining loyalty to the King fell away like tattered string.

“Get out of my sight before I decide to take out your failure on your families.”

The room echoed with the screech of moving chairs and hurried footsteps, moving towards the door with barely constrained panic. Like sheep fleeing from a wolf, the only difference being they didn’t bleat out in panic. The gold features glowed under the slowly dimming candle light, darkened thoughts plaguing the air as magic crackled and spat like food over a fire, shivers running down their spines as dark eyes watched them leave.

Randall slipped out the door, shoulders brushing against someone as they carelessly hurried past, sending painful sparks down his skin and insects crawling underneath his shirt, struggling to contain his cringe. Scratching at his burning skin he strode down the stone-dead corridors of the palace, thinking of where Ezra would have most likely disappeared to, he tried to push it from his mind.

If he was right – and God did he want to be – and Ezra wasn’t as loyal to the King as he had been claiming, then Randall could have a way in to the rebel forces and he might finally be able to do something good for once instead of sitting at that damned table as people were sent to warm the ground.

Standing on the King’s side made his hands no cleaner than if he had held the sword himself. And he refused to do it any longer.

[hitsuhinalover]

Hitsuhina month 2018 & 30 days OTP challenge

Day 14: Sharing a meal

A/N: Day 14!!! I hope you like it :) Even though it’s AU once again...I swear, when the prompt “AU” comes around, I won’t have any ideas left ‘:D

Warning: Mild cursing and violence.

Disclaimer: If I was Tite Kubo, I would be drawing all the time :'D

A beginning

Toshiro Hitsugaya hadn't survived on the streets so long simply relying on his luck. White hair and teal eyes had once made him to be singled out by bullies, but now, with a tough enough attitude, most of people left him alone. If they didn't, they got to know he wasn't all bark and no bite.

Above all, Hitsugaya didn't fall into traps. And what he had in front of him, couldn't be anything else but a trap.

Judging by her looks, a girl wasn’t a small child anymore, but about his age. Either she hadn't spent a long time on the streets, or then she was just plain stupid. No one in their right mind would be giving their food away for free, being skin and bones and still beaming to the children whose greedy, tiny hands immediately grabbed everything she had in her hands.

Or then it was a trap. Organized by an evil mastermind, since even Hitsugaya couldn't figure out the motive behind it. Did she try to fatten up the little monsters, so she could eat them? Was she going to kidnap them and sell their blood and organs? Or were her victims guys who had gathered close to the alley, throwing glances into her direction and fiddling with their pen knifes? It couldn't end up well for her.

Maybe it was her happy smile, maybe it was the hit his head had received in a fight yesterday. Either way, Hitsugaya marched up to her and quickly dragged her farther away. One glare and the little monsters ran off, stomachs full. “What the hell do you think you're doing?” he hissed to the stunned looking girl.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” she finally said. Hitsugaya blinked, surprised. He hadn't expected an apology. “I gave all my food away already, but if you come tomorrow, or a day after, I can bring something.”

“Idiot! If you want to survive a day on the streets, you can't just give your food away,” Hitsugaya reprimanded. “You can't afford it.” He poked her ribs.

To his surprise, she didn't run away with her pride in tatters. Looking straight into his eyes, she countered, “What about those children? They're too small to get food on their own.”

Hitsugaya huffed. “Contrary to you, those little monsters are street-smart. They know how to exploit an idiot like you,” he fired. She opened her mouth to defense herself, but he didn't let her. “Moreover, children aren't only ones who want your food. If you share it in public, you'll meet people who want it all, no matter what it takes.”

As if on cue, they heard a shout. “Hey, girl! Give us your food!” Hitsugaya cursed at his mistake to allow the girl to capture all his attention and turned to face the three guys who had stared at her before. Closer, they looked even worse: a slight gleam in their eyes, smirking and showing their yellowish teeth with a hint of black in their gums. Each one of them held a knife.

Yep, the damn girl was going to get him killed.

“If you give it now, we may not hurt you very much,” one of them said. “Or we may.” A laugh.

Hitsugaya stepped in front of her. “Ooh, she's got a prince,” the one who looked like a leader hollered. “But I doubt–“

For some ridiculous reason, bad guys always expected their victims to have some decency and not to interrupt them. But why should Hitsugaya wait? He knew those guys wanted to hurt them, and didn't they say offense was the best defense? In addition to his small size, he managed to surprise them – and more often than not, surprising the enemy meant living for a little bit longer.

Hitsugaya tackled the leader and elbowed his head to the concrete, jumping to hit the next one before the leader had even crashed to the ground. While the third one was gaping at the sight of his mates being beaten up, Hitsugaya wrenched the knife from his hands, snatched two others from the ground and grabbed the girl's hand before sprinting away. Since he already had one knife for cutting food, he threw the knives he had taken into the closest bin. Despite his claims about being able to do anything to survive, there was a certain line he wasn't willing to cross.  

Several minutes later, Hitsugaya stopped in the middle of a remote alley. “You don't go blabbering to anyone about this place, got it?” he warned. After her nod, he pushed himself up on a bin, helped her there too and then jumped up on a tiny deck between two houses. He walked on it for awhile and then moved aside a couple of planks on the left wall before crawling in.

Having scrambled into his home, she looked around, brown eyes wide open and mouth agape. “It used to be an attic, but for some reason, it was separated from the rest of the house,” Hitsugaya explained as he walked to a corner where there was a stack of bundles, his voice echoing in a large room. “My guess is that someone was murdered here.”

“M-murdered?” To his amusement, she actually seemed to startle. Her look of wonder changed into one of fear, and she looked around as if a ghost could appear anytime. “Why do you live here then?”

He shrugged. “It could be smaller, but because it's well weatherstripped, I won't die of hypothermia in the winter if I wear enough clothes. It's in such a location that most of people don't easily find here.” A grin. “It took me embarrassingly long to get this wasn't a trap, but a dream come true.”

She stared at him, seeing his smile for the first time. Before she had time to process it though, a piece of bread hit her and fell to the floor. Quickly, she caught a chunk of cheese and a half of an apple. Having raised her gaze, she saw him grinning, this time to her. “Good reflexes,” he praised and bit his piece of fruit. Despite the cool air, she felt warm all over.

“I take my words back,” the boy soon said, rolling his eyes. “Anyone living on the streets would have wolfed a free meal down already.” At least he had.

 “I can't take your food!”

“Yes, you can,” he sighed. “You gave your food away.”

“Actually, I've got my own hiding place,” she said, still offering the food back to him. “And a small garden.”

“If you were clever, you would have thought about what you're going to eat in the winter and stored something instead of giving everything away,” he grunted.

Her smile didn't waver. “Guess I'm clever, then.”

After a moment's silence, he admitted, “Okay, you're smarter than what I thought.” She laughed happily. “But your idea of giving food for free in such a place was still a stupid idea.” He continued, “And what if I had been similar to those guys out there? I would have gotten the location of your hiding place out of you in a matter of seconds and taken all your food.”

“And I could blabber to everyone about your hiding place,” she replied. “Don't say the dead don’t tell tales, because you wouldn't have killed me. You didn't kill those guys even though they tried to kill both of us.”

“Toshiro Hitsugaya,” he said and offered her his hand to shake. She took it. “Momo Hinamori.”

Hitsugaya nodded to the food in her hands. “Eat.” Seeing her still hesitating, he sighed and said, “You can share your food with me next time.”